Andrew Craig-Bennett channels a former paramount leader of China in reminding readers to seek truth from facts.
People like to feel that they are right. It is far easier to get someone to agree with something by flattering them, and telling them that you agree with them than it is to try to tell them that they don’t know something, or that what they think they know is mistaken. In business, we call this ‘The Boss’s Good Idea’:
You: “Boss, I’ve been thinking about that idea you had last Thursday!”
Boss:” What idea?” (Boss never had the Idea)
You: “Your idea about (insert what you want done, here). I’ve been thinking about it and it’s brilliant…”
In navigation, there is relatively little room for cajoling people into agreeing with something. Either we are about here, and we are going towards somewhere there, or not. It isn’t quite binary; there are still opportunities for shades of opinion about the course to be taken, although the days when STS Lecky could write, in his masterwork, Wrinkles in Practical Navigation that “The navigator knows of no sensation more disagreeable than that of running ashore – unless perhaps it be accompanied by a doubt as to which continent the shore belongs to,” are more or less over – with the proviso that the GPS can only tell you something about your position if you look at the display. There are still cases of people who really should know better not looking where they are going, but it’s nothing like it used to be in the days when I earned my living from Lloyds’ Form of Salvage Agreement.
Running a political programme by telling people who don’t know as much as they think they do that they are wonderfully wise and that you agree with them is called populism. If ships were navigated by populism with machinery maintained by populism, world trade would stop rather quickly, and billions would starve.
This is why the populists like to take all political discussion away from ascertainable facts and onto the safer ground, for them, of stuff that people like to think are facts, but which are no such thing.
Deng Xiaopeng wisely said, “Seek truth from facts.”
With a world that, thanks to the beautiful mathematics that underlie the social media, runs, politically, on far too few facts, and with almost nobody seeking truth from them, a lot of nonsense gets sprayed around, and some of it is truly dangerous – not least to our business.
Nowhere near enough attention is paid to what is going on off Yemen, because although all the political grownups – including the secretary-general of the IMO, the president of the European Commission and the secretary-general of the UN and, really just about everyone else – except the populists and the journalists on whom they depend – understand it and the huge dangers it presents, the issue gets no traction in the mass media. It’s just seen as blowing things up.
But that is just the start. We have now got a climate of opinion in far too many countries which feels that globalisation is a bad thing. Soon, the idiots will be saying that because containerships gave rise to globalisation, containerships are a bad thing, and once the gurus tell the idiots what they think bulk carriers do, they will be a bad thing also. Reducing barriers to trade – be they reduced by more efficient movement of goods by sea, by the reduction of tariffs or by the harmonisation of standards and regulations – is a good thing. It does not have to involve global elites or harm to the planet that we all share, although it may involve food miles.
As Voltaire said, “Ecrasez l’infame!” Squash this dangerous nonsense.
