Why do people hate change?

For those readers who don't know, I spend decades of my life involved in politics in one form or another. Primarily, I filled the role of "crazy person with nutty ideas" who was trying to encourage people to see the world differently. To that end, I started the Green Party in Guelph and was a major instigator in reforming the constitutions of both the Green Party of Ontario and Canada. I ran repeatedly for office, and used the platform that this provided to talk to voters about the need to deal with climate change with a carbon tax, combat growing inequality with a Guaranteed Annual Income, and, the necessity of transitioning from an economy based on continued exponential growth to one that is in harmony with the limits that the environment places upon humanity. 

I knew going into this that I would never have a hope in Hell of getting elected while advocating for these sorts of things, but that wasn't the point. The only real way to get into office is by pandering to people's prejudices, which means that "realistic" politicians never try to get voters to embrace anything new, or even tell them truths that they don't want to hear. Indeed, former Prime Minister Kim Campbell pretty much summed this up in her infamous quote that 

Former Prime Minister
Kim Campbell. Photo
C/o Simon Fraser University

"An election is no time to discuss serious issues."

I wrote "infamous" because many naive people and some very cynical people were/acted outraged by it. But truth be told, I think that this is the opinion held by most "professional" politicians. The reason why is simple. A significant fraction---if not an outright majority---of the public will automatically oppose any proposal that they don't understand. And most of those folks won't bother to try to learn more about anything that they don't already "get". 

That's why I think that Canadian society benefits from having "ginger parties"---like the Greens and NDP. They generally suggest changes that Canadians totally reject, but decades later those policies usually end up getting accepted by the majority of voters. And years after that majority support crystalizes---generally in a crisis like the current one---one of the mainstream parties will grudgingly pass legislation that is similar to that original suggestion. At this point the new way of doing things usually becomes very popular and people wonder why we took so long to accept it. 

(If anyone questions the above statement, consider the following examples:  socialized medicine, gay rights, and, cannabis legalization. All were fought tooth and nail for very, very long times. But when they were passed and the public got used to them, almost everyone began asking themselves what all the fuss had been about.) 

This gets me to the point of this Op Ed. Why is it that so many people hate change? This being the age of "Professor Google", I simply asked it that very question. The only results I got were from business consultants who were talking about people's resistance to change at the workplace. This isn't exactly the same thing as people being against legalizing cannabis or allowing an apartment building in their neighbourhood, but I do think that the situations are similar enough that we can gain some insights from the research. 

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Yet one more thing that has changed is the way we get our news. I know people are resisting it, but we do need to see information as just one more thing that we need to pay for. If you can afford it, then why not subscribe? It's easy to do through Pay Pal or Patreon, and you'll get a warm glow knowing that you helped keep indie news going so everyone with access to the Web can be better informed. 

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From the Harvard Business Review I found Rosabeth Moss Kanter's Ten Reasons People Resist Change. From it, I got eight items that I think map onto the political reality. The first four are:

• Loss of control
• Excess uncertainty
• Surprise, surprise!
• Everything seems different

I can remember reading somewhere that people who are food insecure in poor countries are like folks who are standing in water up to their chins or nose. This means that even the slightest disturbance to the status quo can be deadly. Even in a place as prosperous as Guelph, a lot of people in feel like they are in the same state.

They may be locked into a mortgage that takes almost every penny they have. They might have big bills that they ran up either through foolish spending or because of a totally unexpected financial catastrophe---like an illness that forced them to quit their job. Some people are financially secure, but for various reasons are stressed to the absolute breaking point and simply cannot mentally afford anything much more than the slightest change in the way they live their lives. For all of these people any change in the way things are is profoundly difficult to deal with. It doesn't really matter if the change isn't a big deal, as just fretting about what it might be like is already too much for someone who is over-burdened by the life they are living.

• More work
• Ripple effects

Another part of this is that changes don't affect everyone equally. Beyond anxiety about whether or not something will further burden a person who is already at the end of their tether, there is the point that changes usually affect different people in different ways. To cite one simple example, I can remember when paper recycling was introduced where I used to work. The housekeeping staff refused to have anything to do with it because their job description only mentioned "garbage", not "recycling". As a result, my department---who's primary job responsibility was supposed to be security---ended up having to roll very heavy (several hundred pounds) large wheelie bins off a loading dock to pavement level once a week so the recycling truck could pick up the fine paper. People sometimes have a real reason to be afraid that a particular change in the way things are done will result in a significant amount of new work being dumped on their particular plate with no added compensation.

• Past resentments

"You never get a second chance to make a first impression." "Once bitten, twice shy." "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." These are popular sayings for a reason. Lots of folks have had experiences in their past that has soured them on government innovations. I can reel three big ones that affected me just off the top of my head:

1. the welfare "reform" that resulted in the downtown being crowed with beggars--almost overnight
2. the "relaxing" of closing hour rules for bars that turned the downtown into a combat zone on weekends
3. the "easing" of rules governing taxi companies that turned my front yard into a zoo between 2:00 and 4:00 am until the dispatch office moved somewhere else 

Government officials carry the history of their past decisions like rotting albatrosses around their necks. And they often don't even realize how much misery their decisions have caused some people. This means that they can often be genuinely surprised when an individual or small group expresses how angry they are with them for how their "great new idea" has affected their lives. Unfortunately---being real human beings who don't like negativity directed against them any more than anyone else---their response is often to just "tune out" this negative feedback as "only coming from a small number of flakes". 

• Sometimes the threat is real

Here's the rub. Sometimes a "positive change" is actually a bad thing and sometimes people can actually predict how it's going to be a bad thing. I remember the "free trade election" where the Liberals and Conservatives were arguing about whether or not a free trade deal with the USA would be a good idea. At the time---like a lot of other people---I believed that the sky was falling when Brian Mulroney won a majority and started the job of negotiating NAFTA. I now believe that free trade is generally a good idea. But that doesn't mean that I was "totally out to lunch" in my initial opposition. 

I've read that many economists arguing for free trade warned that it would be necessary for governments to enhance social programs to help the people who were personally affected by the freeing up of the market under neo-liberalism. Unfortunately, almost no government actually did this, which is why so many programs---like unemployment insurance---have "withered on the vine". This meant that far too much of the wealth that came from free trade agreements ended up in the hands of billionaires---some of whom seem to be approaching the status of characters from comic books. (Elon Musk is often called "the real Tony Stark". Should we start calling Jeff Bezos "the real Lexx Luthor"?)

Jeff Bezos, dept of defense
photo---public domain.

Lexx Luthor, DC comics.
Used under "fair dealing".

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The first stage of fixing a problem is admitting that it actually exists. Unfortunately, I don't think that a lot of bureaucrats and politicians want to admit that there are any problems with how they interact with the public. That's because the only real way to get the public "on board" with change is by investing a LOT OF TIME into working with them. And both bureaucrats and politicians tend to be tremendously strapped for it. 

In the case of bureaucrats, this is the result of both cost-cutting in the public service and the proliferation of regulations aimed at "preventing fraud" or "protecting the public". You and I experience this as forms that would require a Philadelphia lawyer to fill out, hours-long wait times on service calls, and, a huge emphasis on interacting through computer instead of face-to-face meetings.

For politicians, their time gets eaten up by ridiculous Parliamentary processes that require them to be able to drop what they are doing and run to the Commons so they can make a snap vote. This is a result of hyper-partisanship which has sabotaged the conventions that used to govern how parties work together. 

Local representatives' time is also eaten up by the decline in the civil service. Increasingly, constituency staff spend their time working as "Ombudsmen" who have to cut through red tape for constituents who's lives are suffering because the understaffed and over-burdened bureaucrats simply can't deal with the peculiarities of their personal situation. In addition, because of the growth of hyper-partisanship, members of Parliament increasingly find themselves having to spend more and more time campaigning and fundraising, which leaves less time for other things.

Both of these states of affairs came about because of changes that specifically weren't put in front of ordinary citizens to comment on. The civil service can have their budgets cut by administrative fiat and the money saved gets spent on tax cuts. Similarly, elected back bench MPs and MPPs have had their authority reduced over and over again as the power of party leaders and their appointed staff have expanded to take over Parliament. Changes that make filling out forms more difficult come under a wide variety of headings and include things like "the war on terror", "enhanced privacy rules", and so-on. Again, many of these come from administrative fiat---with a few more imposed by the courts.

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Ever heard of the term "feedback loop"? One example is that loud squeal you hear when someone puts a microphone in front of it's amplified speaker. 

That noise is the result of the microphone picking up a sound coming from the speaker, which is then amplified, played back through the speaker, which is then picked up again, amplified, and, then played back to the mike, and so-on until someone stops the cycle. 

This is a very well understood phenomenon in science. It's called "positive feedback". People have learned to recognize in a lot of different processes. For example, it also is involved in cattle stampedes. One cow running can raise concerns with other cows, who then start running. At that point more cows see others running, which gets them concerned so they start running. Before you know it, the whole herd is running and the cowboys are riding fast trying to head them off before they go over the cliff.  

Public Domain image c/o Wikimedia Commons.
Original drawing by Trevithj.

It seems to me that the people's fear of change is also a feedback loop. Community leaders propose some change and a small number of people come to a public consultation meeting to voice their concerns about it. Overworked bureaucrats go through the motions of listening to them, but eventually get sick of hearing the same complaints from the "usual suspects", so they stop listening. Increasingly things become more and more an exercise in "box ticking". This makes the "usual suspects" more upset, so they stop listening to the people proposing changes. That just reinforces the idea that these people are just flakes and shouldn't be listened to. 

As a result of this diminished consultation, more projects get through the "pipeline" that really should have been modified before being implemented. This creates more scandals and more people angry because of past resentment. This creates even more opposition, which in turn encourages more harried officials who just "tune out" the citizenry. This creates more bad projects----and so the cycle of feedback continues.

I think that I can increasingly hear the "loud squeal" of a feedback loop wailing through our government processes. I think that it has a lot to do with the policy logjams that have developed over things like the Climate Emergency, the cost of housing, and, the opioid overdose problem.  

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This feedback loop gets disrupted during periods of crisis---like wars, depressions, and, pandemics. I'm only speculating, but it seems to me that if people have really serious problems in their lives they tend to be less willing to expend energy complaining about hypotheticals. Moreover, bureaucrats and politicians who are dealing with objective crises are rewarded much more for innovating and punished much less for failed experiments than they would be during normal times. I suspect that that's why sitting Liberal MPs in Ottawa have recently identified creating a Guaranteed Annual Income system as their most important priority. 

My hope is that this means that this time next year we will have replaced our hodgepodge of failing social safety net programs with something much better, far less difficult to access, and, which will be transformative in much the same way that single-payer medical insurance was back in our grandparent's time. And I also hope that two years from now most people will love it just as much and are similarly wondering what all the fuss was about.   

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Moreover, I say unto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!