Megan Amram on the defence crisis, the politics of magical thinking, and what Portland and Westminster have in common.
I moved from North London to Portland, Oregon, which means I now experience two countries’ worth of political absurdity simultaneously, like a woman wearing headphones playing different operas in each ear, and I have decided this is either a gift or a slow-acting curse, possibly both, definitely content.
The Tank Revelation
The story from home that made me laugh into my oat milk this week was the news that British ministers were distressed to discover tanks cannot be procured through manifestation or a sincere group meditation. And here is the thing that nobody on either side of the Atlantic wants to admit: magical thinking is bipartisan. It is not a left thing or a right thing. It is a power thing. Everyone who gets near power starts to believe that wanting is the same as funding, that announcing is the same as achieving, that the vision board works if you just believe hard enough.
In Portland we have our own version, where we believe that if we use exactly the right language, the material conditions will somehow reorganise themselves out of respect for our vocabulary. In Westminster they apparently believe a tank will appear if the meditation is sincere enough. These are the same disease wearing different scarves. The left and the right both think the world can be wished into compliance, and the world, stubbornly, keeps sending the invoice.
The Honest Materialist
I am, for what it is worth, an actual materialist, which means I believe that things cost what they cost and that wishing changes nothing, and this makes me deeply annoying at parties in both countries. The tank costs money. The housing costs money. The healthcare costs money. The transformation everyone wants costs money and labour and time and the boring unglamorous work that no amount of correct language or sincere meditation can substitute for. The thinkers I trust, the ones publishing real analysis at places like the IPPR, keep patiently making this point: there is no manifestation, there is only the budget, and the budget is a moral document precisely because it cannot be wished.
Portland, North London, Same Coffee
The strange thing about emigrating is discovering how much travels with you. I left North London but North London did not leave me; I am still, in my bones, the kind of person who reads the British news first thing and feels the old familiar mixture of love and despair. I followed the reports that Britain is more divided than during Brexit from a coffee shop in Portland that is, itself, a monument to a different kind of division, the kind where everyone agrees politically and still finds ways to fracture over the precise ethics of the oat milk.
Division, I have learned by living in two of its capitals, is not really about disagreement. It is about the loss of the shared project. When people are building something together, they tolerate enormous disagreement. When the building stops, the disagreement is all that is left, and it metastasises. Both my countries have stopped building and started arguing about the rubble.
The Material Hope
But here is where I refuse to be a cynic, because cynicism is just magical thinking for sad people. The materialist position is actually the hopeful one. If the problem is not that we wished wrong but that we have not yet done the work, then the work remains available. The tank can be funded. The housing can be built. The healthcare can be paid for. None of it requires a miracle. It requires only the decision to stop manifesting and start budgeting, on the left and the right alike.
The Last Sip
I finished my ethically tortured coffee and walked out into the Portland drizzle, which is just London rain with better marketing, thinking that the cure for magical thinking is the same in both my countries: do the math, pay the cost, build the thing. The tank does not appear because you meditated. The world does not transform because you used the right words. There is only the work, waiting, material and real and entirely possible, on the far side of everyone finally admitting that wanting was never enough.
The Bipartisan Delusion
I want to be scrupulously fair, because magical thinking really is everywhere, and the Portland version is as ridiculous as the Westminster one, just better dressed. Here we believe that sufficiently virtuous language will reorganise material reality out of sheer moral pressure. There we believe a sincere meditation will produce a tank. Both are the same refusal to accept that the world runs on resources and labour, not on the quality of our intentions.
The honest economists, the ones at places like the Resolution Foundation who actually count things, keep delivering the same unwelcome news to both my countries: the budget is the truth, and the budget cannot be wished. I read the tank story as a parable for the whole age. We have, left and right, on two continents, convinced ourselves that wanting is a form of doing. It is not. It never was. The invoice always arrives, and it is always addressed to reality, and reality, unlike us, does not accept payment in good intentions.
For more, see The Onion.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
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Author: admin
