Magical thinking

Sri Lanka is moving, time to keep moving. Time to shed “magical thinking” and commit to economic growth, and recommit to social development, and trust that what has kept this pathogen at bay in so much of this region, is more resilient and represents more native wisdom than all our control fetishism – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

“Magical thinking” is one of the most pernicious “thought viruses” and “decision making viruses” to afflict humans, it is wreaking havoc as we seek to move past the pandemic, it has riddled us with disaster for decades.

Definition first: “The belief that if there is a recurring problem: a) ignore it and it will go away or b) postpone dealing with it until truly unavoidable and then scramble around in panic or c) while everything collapses around you pretend there is “no problem” and things “are not really so bad.” 

 The third, especially when covered up by oil or mineral wealth or being a willing pawn in the geopolitics of rich countries for aid and preferment, is what keeps the “third” world, resolutely where and what it is. The second, is the essence of our developed world maladies, insofar as vast inequality, access to health care, bankrupt entitlement programs, the “casino” of our financial markets, climate issues, and in developing countries as well, say here in Sri Lanka, where we are currently dealing with economic downgrades and human rights issues with more bellicosity than balance, or in Pakistan where civil society has been blithely put through a shredder for decades until a real bonfire of the vanities beckons.

The first defining feature of “magical thinking” has led to historical disaster. Speaking of Pakistan, it cuts both ways. The US made a pact with military strongman Zia ul Haq who deposed his predecessor and oversaw his execution, to help run a proxy war against the Russians in Afghanistan. It was an extraordinary amalgam of collaborators that enabled this, but Pakistan was centre stage, and a clear pipeline by which to “endow” the Afghanis with what they needed to fight back and fight off the Russians. And then, as journalist Thomas Friedman suggested, the US dropped Pakistan like a “used hanky.” Winning the war, they lost the peace, and allowed the guns and drugs and the lack of development and lack of schools in Afghanistan to provide the perfect breeding ground for a “freedom fighter” called Osama bin Laden and the corrosive terror he would embody, preach and export with such devastating results. 

The “magical thinking” was thinking we didn’t have to follow through, somehow fairy dust and slogans would metamorphose a tribal culture into a greenhouse for a modern culture and economy.

Economic magical thinking 

Dubai thought it could “will” itself and “spend” itself into becoming another Singapore, and commentators blinded by bling, overdid each other in genuflecting to the “modernity” of the Desert Sheikhdom. Singapore, we may recall, went from malarial swamp and afterthought adjunct to Malaysia, to a first world country, with GDP greater than the UK, and becoming a world class service and banking hub in several decades of inspired, if top down, concerted leadership from Lee Kuan Yew and his team.

Dubai provided a Western “gloss” to a culturally and socially moribund region (in evident contrast to the vitality and competitive growth of East Asia and Southeast Asia), becoming a tourist hub, safe haven for dollars and dictators of all stripes, a playpen for voluptuaries, trading off the oil wealth of the UAE, and providing an oasis in the tempestuous Middle East. It was a smart play, somewhat akin to Nevada’s insofar as making legal what was illegal all around it. However, all the magical thinking in the world couldn’t bridge the differences with Singapore. 

First, that Singapore was first among nations in a highly successful region, that competed far more on productivity, IT, human capital, with a focus on leveraging and adding to any national resources present. Second, that Singapore welcomed talent, you could move there, and become a proud Singaporean, and therefore were committed to your new home. 

In Dubai, everyone was a mercenary, no migration, you are there at the indulgence of your sponsor or “local partner” and your visa could be cancelled at their discretion. Then, Singapore is run by Singaporeans, competitively able and extremely well educated. Dubai is run by expats who operate on behalf of over-indulged rentier bosses, whose incompetence or outright lack of qualifications they were compensating for. 

Dubai has lots of assets and could indeed grow towards a Singaporean model, but it would take addressing such fundamentals, not asserting victory by having an impressive skyline. Education, more women’s rights, a more reliable rule of law, these would become inescapable focus areas. 

Similarly, continually rising property prices and rents in London and New York, detached from value, so much so that an empty building was often more viable than a sanely rented one, was already eroding the vitality and entrepreneurial relevance of both of these world capitals, even before COVID lit the prepared fuse. It was sheer “magical thinking” and short term “bubble economics” with no thinking of sustainability or whether a city increasingly geared for oligarchs and hedge funders is really how New York and London could possibly stay relevant and world-leading in the 21st century. None of this was ever allowed into public discussion.

For months, over our pointlessly extended curfew in Lanka, before we had learned to “doctor” death certificates such that every comorbidity riddled cause of death with a positive PCR test became a “COVID death” (and so our death stats were even more nominal in percentage terms than they are today) I argued we could not stay shut, and that economic suicide isn’t a medical strategy. But “magical thinking” held sway and voodoo economics of rebound prevailed. 

Now facing rather stark economic trade-offs and choices, we realise debts cannot be indefinitely deferred, that competitive parts of the economy need runway space to perform, and non-competitive parts of the economy cannot be kept on life support. So, finally, back to focusing on GDP we go. Again, “magical thinking” allows for potent sloganeering, but reality reasserts itself.

Re economic “magical thinking” globally in summary, not being allowed to earn your livelihood by being locked up in a “masquerade” of public health and told instead to subsist on a woefully inadequate “subsidy” by Government instead is madness. It never has ended well historically, it never will.

Corporate magical thinking

Leading companies are realising things the hard way now. They need a real strategy for the “new normal.” Going mindlessly for digitisation isn’t going to do it, when everybody else claims to be doing the same thing. 

For Lanka to become a service and IT hub, will require top notch education, not consistent with repeatedly shutting schools over a virus that is of least risk to the young and where the young have been repeatedly demonstrated to be at most nominal vectors of transmission. And teachers working with students, seem to have better health stats than virtually anyone else in the global workplace. As a leading commentator said recently in the US, “For those States that have kept schools open, it’s clear, the safest place to be, for adults and children, is in school.” 

But companies have to deliver, they have to compete, they have to grow leaders to replace some of the venerable ones that perhaps are ready to relinquish the reins. But they cannot, as their replacements are nowhere near being ready, the poor quality of succession planning is a corporate epidemic on these shores, due to an overdeveloped control fixation. And when you blend over-control with hierarchical decision making, you get too frequent paralysis.

Often as a consultant I get told, “We have to coach and grow leaders.” I agree, because they are right. You can’t after a shock like the pandemic, expect people to just transform from “locked down” and shell shocked, inhibited, to enterprising, original, daring, leaders who decisively and creatively deliver. And you cannot use “fear” or “panic” much less “depression” or “resignation” as ongoing fossil fuel, much less an energy source for sustained growth. 

But then, having declared this intention, they keep saying “we have been busy,” or “we don’t have the time,” or “there’s too much work,” or “I need another Board review.” And this is not to launch a space shuttle, but to simply authorise say coaching for four critical leaders who are needed for the company to move meaningfully in the direction of their vision, strategy and plan. 

Realising this may mean accountability, not being able to obliviously “micromanage” and having to live with the potentially unruly (to their ego) growth of direct reports and realising many of those direct reports may prefer life in a bunker rather than being called to step into the leadership limelight, they keep haggling, tap dancing, getting people to “vote”, asking for just one more proposal so another month or so can go by. And if this is the turmoil experienced to just get a few high visibility people delivering with suitable support and challenge, you can imagine what any real sea change in performance culture might require.

Yet these same companies will blissfully dash to authorise another rebranding exercise, a new slogan, yet another pithy catch phrase, anything that doesn’t require that most prosaic but necessary of activities, breaking the chains of the past, and daring to build the capabilities to create the future. We have only to see how few global brands have emerged from Asia, despite the pool of overall talent and capability of individual Asian leaders, who readily demonstrate their potential when operating in other companies or countries, to see where this has gotten us.

Pandemic magical thinking

COVID is rife with “magical thinking.” Look at the death rate versus population of Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, and ask why their borders are shut, and why they are cowering in fear, and when they intend to call off the craziness. Did we do this for polio, TB, malaria, HIV, Ebola, SARS, terrorism, anything of this ilk? Of course not. Hence regions flourished and moved forward. Now, for a hyped-up cold, even if with more “bite” than most, we are willing to abridge life as we know it indefinitely.

Vaccine “magical thinking” follows suit. These are vaccines not fully tested for efficacy, no one is sure if you can be reinfected after receiving them, no one is sure if you can still transmit after taking them, none of the test trials were done on those over 75 (though the median age of death for this otherwise middling viral strain is above 80), so we don’t know they are safe or that they will save those who really need them. Yet this is the alleged “saviour.” And it may yet get the credit as vaccination coincides with natural immunity. However, the current plummeting C-19 numbers, set in well before vaccination could have been the catalyst for them, particularly given the low number of those vaccinated in the US and Europe.

But beyond that, Asia has 370,000 “COVID ascribed” deaths (unsure if all are “from” or “with” given no common agreement on how death certificates are filled out) among 2.2 million deaths asserted worldwide! No one in their rational right mind, looking at Asia’s population could proclaim “Pandemic!” Much less, “Beware, life as we know it is threatened.” No, that dubious achievement, of unravelling life as we know it, belongs to us, and our politically mandated cringing, data-free fear, fomented by WHO witch doctors. 

Africa has even lower numbers. And forget claims that we’re not documenting assiduously. If we’re off by 100,000, it wouldn’t materially change the assessment, and there clearly aren’t millions of corpses secretly being stockpiled all over Africa and Asia to throw “Worldometers” off. This region, and Africa, don’t need a vaccine saviour for COVID. It’s uncertain anywhere does, except “possibly” if they are shown safe for the most vulnerable.

And whenever there is another spike, showing the utter inability of “lockdown and mask” to achieve much of anything other than yet another wave, the “magical thinking” orthodoxy is “should have locked down faster and harder”. And no one asks, why keep repeating what clearly keeps failing, ever more strenuously?

Nor does anyone ask, “Why does one death matter more than another?” Who decided this one source of mortality, which hasn’t even tipped global mortality appreciably, despite lumping all kinds of deaths together, despite the strange “disappearance” of the flu and influenza (any suspicion they are embedded in C-19 stats along with many other respiratory illnesses given the perverse imprecision of PCR testing?), and the shocking destruction of livelihood and education, is what all of our life and focus has to revolve around? 

And magical thinking leads to “magical counting.” In the UK, despite bloviating about “worst year since 1940,” if you look at real data, adjust for age and population, the mortality figures were worse in 2008 than 2020. As commentator James Delingpole pointed out: “The age-standardised mortality rate in 2020 of 1,043.5 deaths per 100,000 of the population was surpassed not only in 2008 (1,091.9 deaths per 100,000), but also in 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001 and 2000 (on the same basis).

And here’s the “magical thinking” no one seems to want to confront. How and who will deal with the collateral damage of “not considering” cost-benefits? This is the very essence of magical thinking derangement. Here is a smattering of headlines around the world which will never get discussed as having been “avoidable” ills not from the pandemic, but our magical thinking fuelled pandemic response:

“Over 70% of youth seeking psych care amid COVID report suicidal thoughts.”

“Pandemic raises Japan suicide rate after decade of decline.”

“New study shows every week of lockdown increases binge drinking.” 

“Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer.”

“Canada-wide survey of women’s shelters shows abuse more severe during pandemic.”

“COVID-driven recession likely to push 2 m UK families into poverty.”

“Half of Europe’s smaller businesses risk bankruptcy within year.”

“Lockdown fuels child labour in Zimbabwe.”

“Parents warned of ‘sharp rise’ in eating disorders.”

“Record hunger in the Philippines as COVID-19 restrictions bite.”

“World Food Program to assist largest number of hungry people ever, as coronavirus devastates poor nations.” 

(Those poor nations are not being devastated by viral respiratory deaths, but our fevered, frenzied, all-or-nothing over-reaction clearly)

“The cost of inaction: C-19 related service disruptions cause hundreds of thousands of extra deaths from HIV.” (That projected number based on WHO and UNAIDS is 500,000!)

To sum up, as a commentator said in horror and shock, “It’s pretty incredible to consider that right now governments are saying, “in order to keep you safe, we need to impoverish you, imprison you, force mask and vaccinate you, plus separate you from your family” and there are millions of people out there just saying “okay.” 

We can thank Providence, that Lanka has turned the corner away from this anti-human nonsense, and our freedom is expanding, and the “expand human freedom” hecklers globally could stand reminding that “human rights” include the right to be free from all of the above as well.

The magical thinking absurdity we must finally transcend

“Zero COVID” is the silliest assertion, the final outbreak of magical thinking. It is what it says, we never let up, until there is no COVID. There is a lexicon of things wrong with this aspiration:

• There is no precedent, only smallpox has been eliminated in our constellation of pandemic foes completely.
• Showing Australia which enforces police states over a few cases and New Zealand which is small and isolated and already needing Chinese economic resuscitation and has converted COVID into mass psychosis as “case studies.” No rational person on the numbers globally, much less in Asia Pacific, much less in Oceania, would on any cost-benefit basis, cheer for this.
• On this basis, what do you do when the next coronavirus or other contagious pathogen lands? No one ever, in magical thinking land, will even address this. Do this all over again? Who with a straight face and half a mind would propose that? People in Lanka who increasingly tell me, with the wisdom of sages, “It’s a virus, we have to live with this,” are stating what billions of years of natural history testify to.
• Why ever then open your borders? You’d have to wait for the planetary eradication of C-19. If you’re a country that can survive for several years like this, and hope mutations don’t outpace vaccinations, “possibly.” But I don’t know such a country. This is a promise you can’t fulfil; it IS magical thinking incarnate.
• And inside this fortress? Remember this is a totalitarian aim for a totalitarian regime. Period.

Sri Lanka is moving, time to keep moving. Time to shed “magical thinking” and commit to economic growth, and recommit to social development, and trust that what has kept this pathogen at bay in so much of this region, is more resilient and represents more native wisdom than all our control fetishism.

When you use “real” thinking, you can then truly create magic. We did it in the Industrial Revolution, we did it in civil rights legislation in the US, Japan went from Hiroshima to Sony and beyond, scientifically we went “quantum” and reinvented possibility via the microchip. Medicine and life expectancy grew in leaps and bounds. Women helped us outgrow stultifying roles that held their potential in check…progress there, however imperfect. Sri Lanka did it in growing through challenges and disasters, repeatedly.

Let’s do more of that. Real thinking and real action flowing from that. Real magic.