What's Stopping Us?

When things aren’t going well, and people are dissatisfied, the most popular calls are usually for things to be stopped.

“This is bad, and it should be banned.”

“This is unfair, and it shouldn’t be allowed.”

“That is dangerous, and people should be stopped from doing it.”

The odd thing is that much the same happens when people are very comfortable. It becomes very important to stop anything that disturbs that comfort. So any time when people have got used to comfort and are then faced with uncertainty or problems, the calls for intervention to stop things will rise to a crescendo, drowning everything else out. What needs stopping will vary, and may be heavily polarised, but making things stop is what it all has in common.

This may be about what psychologists call loss aversion, where people have been shown to care much more about losing something they have, than about gaining something new. Another aspect seems to be that it’s far easier to point at something and have a lot of people agree they don’t like it, than it is to get as many to agree they like something that doesn’t yet exist. They’re more likely to argue over what that thing should be in that case.

Anyway, it’s natural, and understandable, and kind of an iron law of human nature, particularly humans in large numbers, as far as I can tell, for ”stop the bad things” to dominate the top of the agenda.

The problem with this is what then happens.

If “stop the bad things” is allowed to dominate, then that will become the focus. As with proving a negative, there are usually limits to how far this can go. Practically, reduction is achievable, elimination rare. So the loudest complainers won’t be satisfied, and will demand more.

And because stopping things is hard, whatever the actual demand, policy tends to bend towards something plausibly related but easier to achieve, which everybody involved tells themselves is essentially the same thing, but isn’t.

When my work revolved around the specification of building components, I could see this happen. I still remember my frustration at the way the goal of stopping big chunks being torn off tall buildings in high winds degenerated into technical arguments about how to repeatably test forces between certain materials in ways that got further and further from reality. Nobody wants to pull every possible large composite panel off every type of steel using every possible fixing method, so we end up requiring specific force values for specific interactions, glossing over the fact that they all behave differently put together so guarantee nothing. And ironically disallow new ideas in doing so.

And people have very different ideas about what is most important. The trade-offs between them become very obvious when positive action is planned, and hard choices need to be made. For example, it’s clearly impossible to build more houses as well as preserve more countryside. Beyond a certain point, you need countryside to build the houses on. But it’s less obvious when clamping down on things – you can ban chopping down trees as well as remove the ability to make frivolous objections to development. Both can be done by decree, whatever the later results in practice.

So the natural tendency, as policy-makers try to respond to popular demand, is to swing between different interest groups, adding curbs on whatever is getting attention.

… and at some point, everybody realises that nothing, anywhere, is working. It can’t, because so much has been stopped. All for good reasons, but it has become impossible to do something because whatever you want to do runs into one of these curbs.

Once that’s happened, you can see the difficulty a positive vision has in getting traction. The very process that causes the logjam is intensified by the results. People feel frustrated and unsafe, and dissatisfied people start looking for what else they can stop, that might make them feel better. Some want to stop people moving to places they shouldn’t. Others to stop people getting more money than they should.

Try to do both, why not? Keep everybody happy.

Except they won’t be, and everything gets more stagnant.

At what point do we stop stopping things, and realise that we can enable instead? That actual improvement comes from making new things happen? Do we have to have stopped everything first? Or argue about stopping others stopping their pet bugbears while still calling for our own? Am I part of it for wishing it would all stop?