What Trump and Brexit showed us about how we handle fear

There is no ‘i’ in team (but there is in America and Britain)

Across America and the UK, one of the key drivers that made people vote for Donald Trump and Brexit was a sense of fear. Specifically, a fear of immigrants and meddling foreigners. Both of these United Nations members decided that they would be better off being less United with their allies and more National in their outlook.

How we got here

Fear is our primal response to a clear and present danger, triggering the impulsive ‘fight or flight’ response that deliberately impairs our dangerously time-consuming ability to properly assess a threat. We need look no further than the respective ancestries of the US and the UK to see just how irrational a ‘threat’ xenophobia is. For example:

• 10,000 years ago, the UK was empty. Nada, zero, nil people. So all Brits are immigrants, descendants of the likes of the French, Germans, and Scandinavians – all of whom are of course members of the Union that the UK has decided to leave.
• other than Native Americans (the clue is in the title), every other US citizen is by definition an immigrant, or a descendant of an immigrant, or a descendant of those forcibly expatriated to the US as slaves.
• language is one of the pillars of any culture, and the English language that is (nearly) common to both countries was actually developed by Germans who settled in England after the Romans had headed back to Italy.

Programmed to be negative

There is no doubt that immigrants bring change to the community. The question is whether they will enhance their host’s culture and economy or damage them? As we are primitively designed for self-protection and therefore default to assuming what can go wrong will go wrong, anything new tends to be automatically viewed as a threat i.e. shoot from the hip first, ask questions later – which is what the voters did.

Time to blow the Trumpit?

Had all those millions of dollars and pounds been spent campaigning instead on a more wide-ranging, rational, fact-based debate, the outcomes of those trans-Atlantic votes might have been different. Indeed, in the aftermath of Brexit, polls – the latest being from the UK’s Independent newspaper, published last month – are indicating that more Brits now wish to remain that to leave the EU. And on the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration as US President, his approval ratings within the US, which started low, have sunk to being the lowest in the modern era. And if the trend continues, it could even trigger calls for ‘Trumpit’. (Last month Ladbrokes cut its odds of Trump being replaced in 2018 to 9-4).

I think, therefore I am in control

Politicians seeking votes have always preyed on people’s fears, because fear is such a powerful emotion – it’s right up there with love, and once aroused, just as difficult to control. But control it we must, because although fight or flight has done such a stellar job of protecting us for thousands of years, it now threatens to rail-road our ability to think in a world that needs us to think more than ever before. Our environment is increasingly complex and uncertain, bringing with it the potential for even more fear.

One way to overcome our fear is to act counter-intuitively i.e. run towards it; embrace it; find out all we can about the root cause of that fear, so we can act out of knowledge rather than ignorance. Then we can rationally decide whether to downgrade the threat, or poke it in the eye with a sharp stick, or run for cover. In the modern world – one that is blissfully free of sabre-toothed tigers – we no longer need to be as afraid as we are neurologically designed to be. What we instinctively fear is almost always less of an actual threat than our perception.

To develop a quote from another US President – Roosevelt – we have nothing to fear from each other except those who would use it to keep us from each other.

Here’s the key takeaway:

Whether voting for Trump or Brexit was ultimately right or wrong is not the point here. The point is that both campaigns were underpinned by fear. And with the change challenges we all face as we stand here at the foot of 2018 and beyond, only those who learn to control their fear will have any chance of controlling their future.