Brexit Exposes Profound Political Naivety

As you can imagine, many of our clients have been disturbed by the political chaos we're all immersed in. As ever, counsellors have been more or less silent on the matter and where there has been very limited discussion the ability to address politics has quickly degenerated into name calling and brutal judgements. To respect professional identities I won't link to those discussion but if you search for something like 'Brexit counselling', and plough your way through counsellors telling clients how to manage their feelings, you might come across one or two short threads.

Like the rest of the nation counsellors as a population tend to be naive at best about politics, at worst absolutely uncomplicated in their opinions. This is a bad failing. Politics is woven into our day to day experience from the way we speak to our life expectancy, we are so immersed in it that we do not even recognise it. When it comes to politics most of us live in an echo chamber: we talk with people who agree with us, dismiss those who don't and don't seek to hear and try out values and opinions that differ from ours, which further distorts our belief that we are right and everyone else is stupid.

Jeremy Corbyn and the Press from Chris Lincé on Vimeo.

This vimeo demonstrates research to show that

Corbyn was thoroughly delegitimised as a political actor from the moment he became a prominent candidate and even more so after he was elected as party leader, with a strong mandate. This process of delegitimisation occurred in several ways: 1) through lack of or distortion of voice; 2) through ridicule, scorn and personal attacks; and 3) through association, mainly with terrorism.
All this raises, in our view, a number of pressing ethical questions regarding the role of the media in a democracy.

You can read the whole report here.

The research is done by the LSE.

Has part of you thought, "The LSE has a left wing bias"?

If it has, then you are likely to have experienced cognitive distortion.

If it hasn't and you are based in the UK then you have just become aware of political naivety.