Originally posted on Making New Zealand. You will remember the Rwandan genocide, where over a million Africans were butchered over 100 days. We all looked at the incident with revulsion and knew that it was tragic, but did we lose any sleep over it? The answer is of course, No - myself included.
This is not because we are heartless or evil. It's simply because we in New Zealand have virtually no group-identification with the people of Africa. They are (or were) to us an alien people living far away in another world, and it's not natural to empathically care about others that are so distant from ourselves. And that's a good thing because we would all be emotional wrecks if we did.
You can see where I'm going with this example. There is a difference between principled caring and empathetic caring. Principled caring means being dedicated towards doing what you believe is right, which is respectable in itself of course. But it's not true caring in the empathetic sense. I would argue that empathetic caring requires social identification.
Now your national government will be made up of a few tribal political parties. They will have some empathetic link towards each other, but I would say a very weak link to the people they represent. Again it's that 'other world' thing - the more they become isolated to their bubble, the more the wider New Zealand society becomes (emotionally) irrelevant to them. Hence they govern us on the basis of principled caring - not empathetic caring.
Is there a material difference? Hell yes. The weakness of mere 'principled' caring is that it's heavily open to rationalisation. When it's all in your head, not your heart, you can too easily believe in what's expedient as opposed to what's real, and especially if those rationalisations are group-reinforced by those that you are attached to. (This is not to say that empathetic caring doesn't have its weakness. It does. Excessive attachment to isolated cases can drive bad macro-scale policy. Sometimes emotion needs to be kept in check).
Now....on to the property market.
We have this non-psychopathic National party guy, John Key, saying some bizarre things. He tells us that he's sticking up for the poor by not letting property prices fall, so those who have a mortgage don't have to watch their capital gain evaporate [to update, and now Jacinda Arden has done the exact same thing].
I would say this is a good example of principled caring at its worst. John Key shows us a politically expedient rationalisation coming from a detachment from the real poor. The real poor are the people who can't even dream of getting a mortgage and owning their own home in the first place.
If New Zealand was John Key's "tribe" (and not just the National party) then the silliness of his rationalisation would not have to be spelled out. His empathy alone would have told him to double-check his thinking. And in turn, he would have most likely declared the affordability problem a national emergency years ago.
But let's not beat-up too much on John Key. He's still only doing what most of us would do, which is what I was trying to show in the first half of my article. The real problem is ultimately systemic.
If you want to see a government that cares and responds to the will of the people, and effectively, then I would argue that you need to radically decentralise political power to small autonomous units. It will always be dangerous to have an empathetically detached elite exercising so much control over our lives, no matter their high-sounding principles which can too easily blow away in the wind.
And we see the truth of this today, so explicitly, with a property market so out of control that the poorer half of our society can barely even afford to have children. And a prime minister seemingly blind to the fact of it.
For interest: I made a 6 minute video relating to political decentralisation (here).
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