A new 4-box model to explain Trump and Brexit

Four-box models are everywhere if you look for them. This week I think I discovered a new one. I’m rather proud of it. It seems to explain many things in life.

It concerns deals, or transactions, or any human interactions, really. For any interaction, the bottom axis plots its value to you, the vertical axis the value to the other party. So you can call the top right corner win-win, the bottom right win-lose, top left lose-win and bottom left lose-lose.

For negotiations, the concepts of win-win and win-lose are well established. We are taught to look for win-win outcomes, for many good reasons. They create the most value and progress overall, and they are sustainable, in that two happy partners are more likely to do business with each other again and to provide testimonials to other parties. There is also a more cynical reason to understand win-win. By looking at things from the point of view of the other party, trying to get into their shoes, you can get a better deal for yourself. That is because you know what the deal is worth to them and how willing they should be to negotiate, and you can also work to concede items that matter a lot to them and not much to you, and vice versa.

Most everyday transactions between people who are not emotionally connected are win-win. If you buy something in a shop, you get what you want and the shopkeeper makes some profit, so both parties are happy. Most transactions are rather trivial, but some can create huge value, such as major trade deals. That way comes development for humanity.

Win-lose is common enough too, and we all practise it from time to time. In some situations there is no value to create so one party must lose, and in others, perhaps where we don’t like our counter-party much and expect never to see them again, we will drive a hard bargain. But extreme win-lose as a strategy is common enough too. Think of Bernie Madoff. And of course we have a classic example in Donald Trump. The idea of doing a deal with a contractor, then failing to pay what is owed for the last 20% once the work is completed, and then lawyering up and bullying, is classic win-lose. War is usually win-lose, with the perpetrators a narrow group of decision makers with vested interests (who usually lose as well once the dust has settled).

Then we have the other boxes. I would contend that for most of us the box we employ most often in life is lose-win. We use lose-win every time we give a tip or a donation or a gift. You see lose-win every time two couples go to a restaurant and argue over which will pay. Parenthood is all about lose-win. It is the box of love, generosity and charity. Whereas proponents of win-lose tend not to end up terribly happy, those who can learn to be generous receive their reward in seeing the success of others and in the joy of giving. Giving is even seen as one of the six key indicators driving national happiness.

Lose-win does not have to be touchy-feely either; it can drive progress. Look at the Gates foundation. Here we have a couple with so much money that the “lose” involved in giving it away feels trivial, but where the benefits to recipients can be transformative. Any interaction north east of a line from 10.30 to 4.30 on my box creates overall value. That includes all win-wins, and many win-loses and lose-wins too. The lose-wins are typically more sustainable and more prevalent. After all, a lot of us are parents.

That leaves lose-lose, which always destroys value overall and therefore does not make logical sense. But for one party, that is almost the point. There are many situations where the motivation of one party has little to do with their own benefit, but is all about creating losses for the other side. Think about protests or vandalism, or about disruptive children in a school class. A few years ago I had to undertake a direct negotiation with an addict, someone who had lost hope and with impaired intelligence, not concerned with avoiding further self-harm but only of obstructing me. Such a process, especially with someone I loved, was almost impossible. Agreements were reneged on, process disrupted and delayed, new disputes opened up at will. That is the classic lose-lose situation.

This brings us to current politics. The Bagehot column in the Economist has improved recently, since top writer Adrian Wooldridge started authoring it. In February, he focused on a book from 1957 by a writer called Michael Young, an influential socialist of the time. Young made an immensely prescient claim about the future of politics, dividing society into the elite and the rest. At the time grammar schools were a political discussion point, and there was growth in an educated class Young termed meritocratic. He argued that inevitably this group would contrive to tilt the rules in its favour. They would become intolerably smug, while the rest would become dangerously embittered.

It can be argued that this is precisely how the next sixty years have turned out. After a burst of altruism immediately after 1945, and despite occasional well-intentioned attempts and lots of contrived argument, the educated elite has consolidated its advantages. After 1980 it became more blatant, reducing progressive taxation, giving more power to corporations and lobbyists, increasing the premium for education and ensuring such gains could be passed between generations. And indeed, this group has become smug and the rest have become bitter.

We see the results in Brexit and the rise of populists. To the bitter, this has become a lose-lose. Most Trump voters don’t like him but they can see that the smug elite will like him less. They are not aggressively racist or anti-immigrant, but resent being condescended to by people undermining norms. They may respect gay people, but not those demanding ever more initials behind LGBT. They probably know Brexit will cost a bit of money, but agree with Michael Gove that we have heard more than enough from so-called experts. As Bagehot notes, this also explains why few Brexiteers or Trump voters have since changed their mind despite mounting evidence: they can’t possibly admit that the other side was right. This is lose-lose in action. It is destructive, ugly, and hard to escape from.

Escape will be hard, short of war. It requires rebuilding trust and respect. It will help that Trump will be exposed for what he is. It will help if more Trudeau’s and Obama’s appear. It will help if the policy pendulum moves back towards progressive causes. But in the end when you have little tangible to lose and even your self-respect is taken away, your own lose in the lose-lose becomes ever more irrelevant while the lure of giving the elite another bloody nose only gets stronger.

The Economist has started to argue for stronger public services and other policies to counter elites, such as seriously addressing cross-border fraud. That is to its credit, but ultimately it is hard to see the Economist as anything but smug, and Mr. Wooldridge as its epitome (he would readily accept this, I believe). Macron is unbearably smug, so I predict he will last but one term in office. It is hard to become un-smug. In 2016 I wrote a blog “a speech for Hillary”: it conclusively demonstrated both my own smugness and my uncanny ability for missing the point. That horrible lose-lose negotiation cast a similar uncomfortable self-reflection.

In my smug way, I fancy this new four-box model might have legs. You can even personalise the quadrants. Gates, Obama (and Jesus) in the top left, Buffett or Jobs top right, Trump or Putin bottom right and Farage or Le Pen bottom left. I think it helps to explain our motivations in many situations, as well as offering some ways to be better people.   

The Crown and other Faction

History is a wonderful subject to study. It has almost endless scope and massive capacity for generating both interest and insight. We can all benefit from a greater exposure to it. I have an ambition to devote more of the next phase of my life to studying history, and I fully expect to enjoyment and learning to result. Luckily, there are many and growing ways to pursue this goal, though there are also some pitfalls.

I remember school history rather vaguely. I think in the early years history was dominated by appealing stories such as the Pharaohs or Aztecs, with more focus on providing visual images than anything else. I can hardly remember any history from middle school, apart from lots of maps of the world with countries coloured pink to show the rapidly diminishing British Empire.

I have greater recollection from High School. In early grades there was some depth of focus into various eras of British history, including the Tudors. Then my GSCE history course covered European history from 1970-1945, encompassing revolution in Russia and two world wars. There was even a module of British domestic history of the same era, looking at things like the battle for universal suffrage, labour power and the general strike and the immediate post-war era with Beveridge and Butler reforms of welfare and education and the creation of the NHS. But 1951 was the far limit of study. At sixteen I dropped history for a focus on just maths and economics.

School history taught me a lot of facts (all the English monarchs from 1066 and their dates, for example), and, more usefully, served to offer some context for current affairs. I think my history teachers were quite good and even took a few risks – I remember one class discussion about the merits of capital punishment, which usefully served to challenge prejudices.

I think I was fairly lucky. My syllabus was more relevant by being fairly modern. My teachers were good and took some risks. And in Britain at the time history was taught with less dogma than in other countries or in earlier times. I can be grateful that my study did enough to ignite an interest much later in life.

But it still missed many opportunities. A curriculum with history retained up to age eighteen would have been better. The focus on facts was limiting. And there was still too much dogma and prejudice and even propaganda involved. This manifested itself in gross oversimplification. Lenin had some good ideas but turned bad. Hitler was the devil incarnate, so any discussion about how Germans came to support him or whether any policies had merit had to be stifled.

A great example of subtle propaganda was the Munich agreement and the portrayal of poor old Neville Chamberlain. Hitler had to be only bad, and Churchill all good, so Chamberlain must have been weak. Appeasement became a bad word on the back of it, which very much suited the military establishment and politicians trying to sell a MAD policy against the Russians. Of course, the reality of Chamberlain and Munich was much more complex, and I’m delighted that Robert Harris will soon be publishing a novel about that moment in time. Harris is always entertaining and well researched – I love all his writing. I still recall the first article I ever read of his, in the Observer, which introduced me to the concept of the elephant in the room with such elegance that I became an instant lifelong fan.

Harris often uses a technique that some have called faction. His novels are neither fiction nor documentary but some sort of blend. Usually some minor characters are elevated to the centre of the story, and their role embellished creatively to make an entertaining backdrop to real historical events. The major characters are portrayed rather accurately, at least as Harris perceives them.

This is a fresh way to look at history, and others have used the same technique. Perhaps the most masterful of all so far has been Hillary Mantel with Wolf Hall and Bring out the Bodies, in which the events are seen through the lens of a middling character, Thomas Cromwell. I am delighted that PBS has just started repeats of the TV series based on those great books – I could watch it again and again.

Another example is the Netflix series The Crown. A common factor is the wonderful Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn and Queen Elizabeth, two queens of England five hundred years apart, one reigning barely a year and the other at sixty-five not out.

The Crown is inherently more risky and more edgy, dealing as it does with events and characters still alive and fresh in the mind and suffused with images laden with dogma and propaganda. My Tudor history studies may have been rather superficial, but at least no one was trying to use them for propaganda purposes. Wolf Hall makes neat points about the benefits of trade and research, but The Crown careers headlong into all manner of minefields.

And the writers do it brilliantly. As faction, they choose to focus only on events that are both entertaining and revealing, and it has to embellish known fact with some supposition. But it all feels very believable, and we get to understand the main characters in some depth, sharing their dilemmas. My mum would have hated it. To her, each royal had a character described by one or two words provided by the Daily Mail. She was part of the fawning crowd in the rain at the 1953 coronation, and the royal family formed a crucial part of her unthinking patriotism.

The Crown offered entertainment, knowledge and food for thought. I did not know that MacMillan was knowingly cuckolded through his professional life, that Anthony Armstrong-Jones swung both ways, that Edward VIII actively betrayed the war effort, that Wallis Simpson was probably sleeping with the Russian ambassador, and many other pieces of gossip catnip. Worthy of deeper thought are the portrayal of three successive transfers between prime minister with no democratic content whatsoever, the hypocrisy surrounding the treatment of women just two generations ago, or the enduring power of shady crown advisors.

Best of all, Foy portrays the contradictions at the heart of the role wonderfully. To succeed, a part of her has to accept the nonsense that her authority comes from God, while another part accepts that she must refrain from expressing an opinion in almost all circumstances. And we also observe the contradictions in the lives of close family, born to be entitled yet fatally caged. I found it great TV, and a better course of history than any I received at school or in books.

But that resounding success leaves a few concerns about the genre. The makers of these new faction series have a lot of power. They need to balance entertainment, knowledge and opinion, but what will regulate which knowledge and which opinion prevails? Are we replacing schoolbook propaganda with another sort? Because progressives tend to make these series, I find myself drawn to them, but am I really just feeding my own biases, creating yet another echo chamber? Will this field become the next political battlefield, with Fox sponsoring all sorts of other series with rival subliminal messages?

Of course, faction is not a new invention. Shakespeare's histories set the tone. The power and risks of the genre were apparent even then. Richard III is portrayed very negatively by Shakespeare, but my history teacher contended that England's two finest monarchs squared of in 1485 at Bosworth Field.

The age of mass communication has wonderful opportunities. Faction series are just one example of many. The next generation has a chance to embrace history in ways that were tough for me given the media and material available at the time. But it is yet one more fraught field, ripe for abuse and polarisation.  

Progress begins at Home

Recently, I was thinking about my family history, specifically regarding mental health and addictions. It was quite a sobering process.

My dad died at 66. That was probably partly because of a lifetime addiction of smoking, and another one for alcohol that he held in check for his last twenty years. I suspect he was also a problem gambler. His sister was a lifetime alcoholic. She had a dysfunctional relationship with her husband that might have been abusive, and they did not have kids. Dad's earlier marriages ended in divorce, with at least one child suffering from multiple addictions for most of his life.

My dad’s parents did not have addictions that I know about. However, my grandfather had an affair with his secretary that led to a child. Everyone knew about it, including his wife, and hushed it up.

My mum did not have addictions, unless you count an addiction towards money. But I believe she was abused as a child by her mother, and that her mother also abused her father. It is possible that my grandmother was abused by her own parents too. My mother’s sister did not suffer addictions nor abuse, as far as I know, but she seemed to me to live a rather unfulfilled life, short of money and drive.

My ex-wife suffered from an addiction for more than half of her life, her behaviour masking depression and self-loathing. I am pretty sure that she was abused by her own father a a child. Her father left her mother, and in the thirty years that she lived after that her mum refused to acknowledge his existence.

None of these marriages appear to offer conducive situations for bringing up well-balanced children. My own parents certainly loved each other, but their affection was rather platonic; I understand that my mother had a fear of sex as well as a puritan attitude towards its enjoyment, and that she chose to live a celibate life for over 75 of her 82 years. 

Then there are childhood influences at school to consider. I attended various private schools. From one, one teacher ended in jail for abusing boys, a least one other demonstrated unhealthy affection towards young boys, one other was alcoholic, one took an unhealthy interest in corporal punishment, another committed suicide and various others had sexual hang-ups, in some cases due to closet homosexuality. These are just the examples obvious enough to be noticed by an adolescent.

Despite all this, somehow my sister and I, and all our children, seem to have forged a path avoiding addiction or other mental trauma.

I relate this history not in order to seek sympathy or to be sensationalist. In fact, my intent is rather the reverse. I believe I have had a very privileged life. I was born male into a rich, peaceful country, with relatively wealthy parents who prioritized my education. I have never had to cope with the trauma of losing a loved one long before their natural time, or of serious illness. Perhaps most serendipitous of all, the barking of my mother led me to a decision forty years ago to eschew alcohol during lent, something which I have kept to ever since as a check against any alcoholism risk. Mum was convinced such things were hereditary, in which case I would have been almost doomed.

There are three pieces of context behind this tale. The first is the new book by the marvellous Steven Pinker. I have so far only read reviews, but I will surely read the full volume, and probably blog about it as well. His theme is one of my favourites, of rapid and relentless human progress, obscured by the drumbeat of the news cycle. If we think in terms of days, or months or even decades, we tend to see problems and setbacks, but the reality is that humanity continues to march forwards. This thought is a great antidote.

The second context is a simple quotation from a PBS Newshour report, one that I have not been able to substantiate but feels correct. The reporter stated that the strongest indicative factor for addictions, by far, is having had parents or other close influencers with addictions. So mum was right after all!

This insight might go a long way as a root cause of Pinker’s progress. We tend to think of things like technology and medicine and human mingling and emancipation as drivers of progress. These are all important, but perhaps it all starts at home. The more of us that are comfortable in our own skin, the more we have an ability to drive progress. Living in addictive and abusive families, or families with secrets or out-dated dogmas, people are less likely to develop to their potential. If each generation can address these inhibitors better than the one that came before, humanity will progress more quickly.

This is where my own family history comes in. Even in a privileged setting, few of the people in my back story could have felt fully comfortable in their own skin, though each generation may have found it easier than the one before. Then I look at my children, and at the kids I interact with in choirs, and I see relaxation and respect, people equipped to drive human progress. All of them will have something in their background that might hold them back. But reducing abuse, reducing addiction, reducing prejudice, and learning to talk openly about such things have removed some of the burdens. Progress begins at home.

Then the third context came to me as a gift while composing this blog, when I attended a mass yesterday. The gospel was about the two summary commandments, loving God and loving our neighbour as we do ourselves. I have recently taken to turning the second half of this around. For some of us, we have to learn to love ourselves as we love our neighbours.

In his homily, the priest, God bless him, followed this theme. He stated that when he was growing up he was ordered to devote all his love to God, to use any love left over to look after his neighbours, and be to careful about loving himself. He had learned to turn this hierarchy upside down. Only by loving himself, by taking care of his health and his habits, would he become effective in loving his neighbours. And loving himself and extending this to his neighbours is how he can show love to God.

I can’t imagine any priest offering such a homily even fifty years ago. I could have stood up in my seat and cheered. It shows how we have progressed, even in religion, and also how we can continue to progress. Imagine successive generations, each with humans better equipped to love themselves, each progressively more free from abuse and addiction and mental illness. That is precisely what is happening right now, if we look beyond the crassness of some people in power. Further enabling this should be our prime personal and policy goal.