I watched Dear England last night, having previously been a big fan of the play
One of the central themes is that when Gareth Southgate took over as England manager, his team could not win because they were too frightened of losing.
On the surface, that is a comment about football. In reality, it is about something much more than that. What Gareth Southgate appeared to understand, with some encouragement from team psychologist Pippa Grange, was that England's problem was not a lack of talent. The country has produced world-class players for generations. The issue was psychological.
Players carried the burden of expectation.
They feared failure. They feared making mistakes.
They feared being blamed.
As a consequence, they became trapped by the possibility of losing, and that fear made winning much less likely.
The reason this idea resonates so strongly in the play, in a way that is, I hope, going to be replicated in the TV series, is that this seems to describe much of modern society. The neoliberal project has, in many ways, been built on the promise of perfection.
We are told that success is available to anyone who works hard enough.
We are told that every aspect of our lives can be optimised as if it were a social media post
We are encouraged to believe that there is a right career path, a right educational route, a right investment strategy, a right lifestyle, and a right way to live.
The implication is obvious. If perfection is available, then failure must be our fault. If we do not succeed, we have only ourselves to blame. And this is deliberate. The neoliberal economy exploits and seeks to blame those being exploited for the fact that they are.
The consequence is a culture of anxiety. People become frightened of making mistakes. They become frightened of taking risks. They become frightened of appearing inadequate. They become frightened of failing.
In a world where perfection is the benchmark, ordinary human experience becomes a source of constant self-criticism.
Instead of being encouraged to explore possibilities, people are encouraged to avoid error. Instead of being liberated to discover who they are, they become trapped by fear of who they might be judged to be.
I was reminded of this by something Monty Don said last week when offering closing thoughts on the Chelsea Flower Show. In an implicit criticism of this neoliberal view, he suggested that nothing and no one that appears perfect is interesting. I think he is right.
Perfect gardens are dull. Perfect people are unbearable. Perfect stories are impossible.
What interests us in life is the flaws that reveal character, growth, vulnerability, discovery, and surprise. What interests us most of all is the evidence that something is really alive, and life is interesting precisely because it is imperfect.
A garden that develops in unexpected ways is more interesting than one controlled to within an inch of its life. The same is true of people and societies.
The neoliberal obsession with perfection denies this reality. It assumes that with sufficient effort, sufficient information, sufficient expertise, and sufficient control, uncertainty can be eliminated. But that is not true. Uncertainty is the condition in which all human beings live.
We do not know what tomorrow will bring. We cannot know whether our plans will succeed. We cannot know how other people will respond to us. We cannot know what opportunities or crises may arise. Life is lived amidst uncertainty, and any philosophy that promises otherwise is offering a fantasy.
That matters because I think we often misunderstand what is required to deal with uncertainty. That's because the opposite of fear is not courage. The opposite of fear is curiosity. Fear closes possibilities down. That is the challenge Southgate faced. Curiosity opens them up.
Fear demands certainty. Curiosity accepts uncertainty.
Fear asks what might go wrong. Curiosity asks what might be learned.
Fear narrows the horizons of our lives. Curiosity expands them.
Southgate's achievement was not simply to create a better football team. It was to create a culture in which players could become curious about their possibilities instead of being obsessed with their potential failures.
There is another contrast worth considering in this context. That is, the opposite of chaos is not control. The opposite of chaos is coherence.
Control is what neoliberalism claims to offer. Targets, measurements, audits, rankings, performance indicators, league tables, incentives, penalties, and endless monitoring are all intended to create order. Yet the result is often the opposite. People become overwhelmed by competing demands. Institutions lose sight of their purpose. Organisations become obsessed with processes rather than outcomes. Individuals struggle to make sense of the pressures imposed upon them. The result is confusion, fragmentation, and anxiety. In other words, chaos.
Coherence is something very different. Coherence comes from understanding who we are, what we value, and what we are trying to achieve. It comes from having a story that makes sense of our lives and our relationships with other people.
Control seeks to eliminate uncertainty. Coherence seeks to live with it.
Control attempts to impose order from outside. Coherence emerges when our values, actions, and aspirations align.
One is inherently fragile because reality will always disrupt it. The other is resilient because it accepts reality as it is.
What Dear England recognised is that success does not emerge from perfection. Success emerges when people accept that perfection is impossible. England began to perform better when its players accepted that a missed penalty was not a moral failing.
They began to perform better when they accepted that mistakes were part of the game. In other words, they stopped being defined by fear. The lesson extends far beyond football.
Our politics is trapped by fear.
Our economics is trapped by fear.
Our public services are trapped by fear.
Too many people are trapped by fear.
They are frightened of getting things wrong. They are frightened of failing.
They are frightened of being judged. As a result, they often become incapable of achieving what matters most.
What we need instead are curiosity and coherence. Curiosity allows us to engage with uncertainty rather than deny it. Coherence allows us to make sense of our lives without pretending that everything can be controlled. Both require us to reject the fantasy of perfection. The paradox is that once we stop trying to be perfect, we often perform much better. England's footballers discovered that. Perhaps the rest of us need to discover it as well.
I recommend watching the series.
It is entirely appropriate that I note that this piece developed out of conversations with Jacqueline, both before and after watching Dear England, based more on the play than on the television programme, just because the play is the one we have seen to the end, so far.
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Neoliberalism promises wealth to those that work hard, but not everyone can rise to the top of the corporate pyramid, so there are winners and losers.
As Naomi Klein wrote in her book: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism:
“Everywhere the [neoliberal capitalist] Chicago School crusade has triumphed, it has created a permanent underclass of between 25 and 60 percent of the population.”
Source: https://amzn.eu/d/fAmspcx
Interesting. I agree that the idea of perfection is usually unattainable. In most things in life we work through things – sometimes getting things right, sometimes wrong. But we get a result and usually learn from experiences. In the environmental world perfection is often the enemy of biodiversity – having a perfect lawn for example which is in reality a green desert. I have tried over the years to grow wildflowers to improve biodiversity. When you look at the examples on screen you see perfect displays of flowers. Yet when I have tried it I have found it rather more difficult! I have asked myself whether I did not prepare things properly but have concluded that that is what it is like in real life! Very often it takes time for plants to survive grow and spread. Its a metaphor for life in general!
Agreed
T. A. R. A./Thanks all round again!
Might it be that Neoliberal theory/propaganda has to include and demand personal responsiblity for the socio-economic context of each indivdual as a/the way of evading/disguising the reality that society/societal socio-economic practices and theory/propaganda also have profound responsibility for each persons’s socio-economic context?
Thus any socio-economic problems are not the result/responsibility of Neoliberalism and its agents and main stream advertisers!
Might the practice of domestic debt forgiveness, as used in Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece and early Mosaic religions etc. demonstrate that the recognition that realistic, ..humane debt theory and practices benefit societies as whole entities?
Neoliberalism is all about blame shifting.
Your comment “Targets, measurements, audits, rankings, performance indicators, league tables, incentives, penalties, and endless monitoring are all intended to create order. Yet the result is often the opposite.” made me think of a perfect example of this, experienced by a family member who was chair of a hospital trust in the north of England when Tony Blair introduced performance measurements or the NHS.
One local GP practice had a KPI to provide appointments for all their patients within 48 hours, but were not specifically required to report on patients who rang for an appointment and were not given one. So if they were unable to meet the KPI they told the patient to go to the hospital A&E dept instead. Most patients would have probably preferred to wait an extra day or 3 to see their usual GP but were apparently not given that option. Obviously the hospital had not planned for this unexpected increase in demand and their own performance fell short of their own targets. The GP practice got their gold star and the hospital management got hauled over the coals.
I don’t remember if it was ever explained to me how the truth came out, but I was told this story by the chairperson herself.
Hello Richard.
Entirely agree. Never a truer word was written.
I laughed out loud at the comment that organisations become obsessed with processes. That’s straight out of Sir Keir Starmer’s playbook. If he is the apogee of neoliberalism in this country and the housing, energy and opportunity crises are being tackled by planning liberalisation then the 12 remaining neoliberals here should be delighted.
Superb post – and although I have derived a lot of pleasure from seeing England lose at football over the years to be honest (sorry). That is in reaction to the hype and the WWII imagery that goes with it (magnanimous in defeat/unbearable in victory – that sort of thing). I’d like to see us win a world cup when we deserve it because we are decently managed country.
You need a lot of money to buy certainty these days. Look at the private money going into politics for example – buying certainty there. The money put up to buy out under valued public services, the weak regulation thereof, the regulators bought out and turned into poachers, privatisations in the name of breaking monopolies creating…….private monopolies through mergers and acquisitions – less competition and more certainty for owners.
And for the certainty afforded capital, the rest of us must all it seems live with less of it even though as you say we are exhorted to strive in what is a rich man’s environment and compete with each other for less and less each year and even then we are insulted and expected to worship highly paid footballers playing a simple game in sports washed tournaments held in lands who are not very tolerant of human rights. This world cup sounds to me to be Neo-liberal Nirvana to be honest and I will not be partaking.
Interesting interpretation.
England did win a World Cup! It’s the only football match I have ever watched from beginning to end.
Thank you. This resonates with me.
Thank you.
At the risk of being boring, I have several times posted how fear will cause many people problems which bring them to counselling-fear of being judged not good enough ( as above), of seeing oneself realistically , of being too clever and not being clever enough, of offending by being truthful, of not following the herd or being like the others and so on. To cope they act to cover it -narcissism, putting themselves down, frantic activity and apathy (nothing I can do) blaming others, accepting a script written by others ( e.g. the good wife ) etc.
There are other reasons but I saw a lot times fear was at the heart of things. My aim was to get clients to examine themselves from a compassionate standpoint and once untangled, people can be the self they really are and have life more abundantly.
Neoliberalism great achievement is the growth in fear. It is designed to keep us in place.
Agreed but these problems existed before and will continue after the end of neo-liberalism, just not as much.
Why?
we must be thinking of different things
Fear is a basic emotion -not just for people
Richard, these are truly words of wisdom – a quality our would-be leaders appear to have abandoned over the last few decades.
Great post.
Just finished reading philosopher Carissa Veliz’s “Prophecy: Prediction, Power and the Future” which tackles the concept of prophecy or prediction of AI (but equally applies to the supposed ability of prediction of the financial industry).
In the final chapter, she writes about the humanity and beauty of uncertainty in our world, and that the response to it should be curiosity – which makes us brave, keeps us in the present and human, and is comfortable living with that uncertainty.
These ideas appear in my forthcoming series on pedagogy.
I have posted this before but I think it fits here:
A story of Ancient Greece.
Once upon a time there were Plato and Socrates. Socrates commissioned artists to make perfectly proportioned statues of great beauty which astonished everyone in their perfect ugliness, for they were not human, not of the local and therefore not of nature – unnatural. Plato, on the other hand. commissioned artists to make perfectly proportioned statues of great beauty but which were then broken so that arms here, legs there, were missing – beauty in ruins.
Plato, of course, was the smarter, for when they were seen everyone had to imagine them perfect, which whilst reminding them of their own human characteristics – their “imperfections” – would condition them to always look beyond the existing ruin, which is reality, to the perfect model. Unfortunately it came to pass that Plato’s statues were placed all over the country whilst those of Socrates were completely destroyed; and thus began the decline of Western civilisation.
Today we still live with perfectly executed ruins, still dreaming of perfection, which blind us to the terroristic power of absolute beauty which goes about its work of creating “actual” ruins.
https://artinruins.net/debt-trap-kunst-praxis/some-debt/how-to-explain-civilisation-to-a-dead-hare/
[…] consequence of that conversation appeared yesterday, here. Another is a three-part series on pedagogy that I began on Substack this morning, because that […]
I’ve been thinking about the Makerfield by-election in the light of your blog post. If I had a vote, how would I use it?
LINO have already told me they don’t want me because I don’t like their direction of travel, so presumably they don’t want my vote either, but why might I nevertheless vote for Burnham?
Vote for nurse, for FEAR of something worse? Why? One more Reform MP won’t do us any more harm. It’s only a by-by-election.
Only Burnham can save Labour? Why would I want to save Labour? There is nothing worth saving. If they couldn’t use their majority to change things since July 2024, what is the point in a new PM?
Only Burnham can make Labour tack left? So why is he already tacking right? Why would I trust a PM who owed his position to Josh Simons and Labour Together Rebranded? Someone else already owns him.
Only Burnham will give us PR? He’s just backtracked on that too.
If the Cabinet and 400+ Labour MPs want real change, then they already have a stonking majority. Call a PLP meeting and scream at Starmer the way they did to Corbyn. Demand PR, demand public ownership, demand a rethink of macro-economics, spend where people are suffering most. Start NOW.
If Burnham becomes PM, LINO MPs will think they have a chance of winning/not being obliterated in 2029. That will produce CAUTION, conservatism, and prevent the necessary urgent radical change. The public will not be fooled, and we will have wasted three more years of LINO fiddling while the planet burns and people suffer.
Superb post! “Coherence emerges when our values, actions, and aspirations align.” That’s why humans are tribal. Curiosity is built upon the self-confidence that grows from dependable social frameworks that allow us to survive our mistakes. That’s why we feel overwhelmed, alienated and fearful in an internet-linked world of instant communication between eight thousand million strangers. We are never going to be the best of the best against that level of competition and attempting to do so makes us feel like inadequate failures – as if we were imposters in our own worlds. Its not ‘neoliberalism’ that is the problem. Its any globalised system of top-down, one-size-fits-all government that sees each individual person as an interchangeable instance of a single class of ‘human object’.
Thank you