Principles and pragmatism

I recently read this interesting article by a friend of mine and it had me thinking about a pretty big question: in what situations do we stick with our principles and when do we be pragmatic and take a win when one is on the table?

I'd like to think that everybody has a code, their own set of principles by which we choose to live. They all might be wildly different, but the idea that we all have a system like this seems pretty plausible to me. These beliefs can come from any number of sources: your upbringing, your economic circumstances or the mass media. In politics, these systems are called ideologies. When we talk about people, we refer to these things as values. Whatever you might call them, they are the guide for our actions, decisions and judgements.

The thing that I've found most interesting when thinking about these concepts at both the group and individual level is that belief systems generally have a lot of big things in common and that it is often just the way they want to achieve these things that differs. Few things are more boring to me than watching two partisans arguing about something ton which they fundamentally disagree. Very few of the arguments that take place in the public sphere today are about simple issues, but advocates often treat them as such. Progress is very rarely made when they use their points of view as starting points and make no effort to try to reach nuanced conclusions on complex situations.

What is more interesting to me is starting from a place where two opposing viewpoints overlap and working outward from there. These starting points may need to be reasonably broad in order to establish common ground, but this method could be far more useful than yelling from different sides of the street.

I'd argue that the idea of fairness is one that could be easily claimed as a fundamental principle of almost all significant political ideologies today. The idea of fairness might seem pretty abstract, but ask an ideological person what fairness means to them I'm prepared to bet they will be able to give you a pretty strong answer. Progressives might say that fairness is about every person being treated equally in all aspects of life, whether it be the home, the workplace, the bedroom or the hospital ward. Conservatives might say that fairness means that a person has the ability to make their choices and to not be burdened with the impact of the choices of others. Both are two different characterisations of the concept of fairness and depending on your point of view you might more closely agree with one or the other. A debate that begins on this framework already appears more interesting and productive to me than a lot of today's public discourse.

The fact is that on some issues, traditional opponents can end up agreeing with one another. But dealing with the sensation of finding common ground with someone whom you usually disagree with is hard. You want them to be wrong. You are suspicious of their motives. You want to know what it is they are hiding, why they are being duplicitous. Sometimes you start to question why it is you believe that thing in the first place. They are normally seem so backward and so consistently wrong that you might question why it is that you believe that thing. But this needn't be the case.

In any debate, personal or political, we must first come to terms with what we want to achieve from the situation. Are we arguing for arguing's sake or are we trying to do something positive for ourselves and other people? Should we reject an opportunity to do something constructive just because the our enemies have come to similar conclusions by a different route? Train tracks headed in different directions sometimes intersect; something good that is achieved is infinitely better than something good that is not.

A win may not be a win in every single circumstance, but sometimes our principles can act as agents of restriction rather than as forms of guidance. Having a strong will and principles are great characteristics, but are not necessarily greater than insight, flexibility and restraint. We should always give ourselves the freedom to change our own minds whilst being able to grant our adversaries the same right. Humility can be just as an important a trait when proven correct than it is when you are proven wrong.

Money back

When you hear someone tell a bad customer service story, you can often learn a lot about the person talking. In a lot of these cases indignation, entitlement and self-centredness abound. In fact, I find myself having a lot of sympathy for the people serving customers in these stories. So often front-line staff are saddled with processes that seem completely absurd but made perfect sense when the decision was made at a different level when driven by grander organisational objectives. I hope the following story doesn’t come across as a whinge, because I don’t intended it to be that way. Looking back on it now I actually find the whole story pretty hilarious.

A work colleague and I flew up to Sydney to watch the Socceroos final World Cup qualifying match against Iraq. We had bought general admission tickets months in advance, but in the week leading up to the match as the game approached a sell-out the stadium had switched to fully ticketed. According to a call we received the day before the game, this meant we would now have to pick up new tickets for freshly reserved seats. No big deal.

After waiting in a queue outside our gate for an improbably long time, we made our way through the turnstiles and began to look for our seats. After poking around for a few minutes, one of the stadium staff members saw our blank faces and came over to help us. It then became pretty clear why we couldn’t find them: we weren’t expecting to be seated in the wheelchair row.

For those not familiar with wheelchair rows, they are set up in pairs - one space for a wheelchair-bound person and one seat for the guardian that often accompanies them. My friend’s new ticket got him a seat next to a particularly cantankerous woman with emphysema. My seat, number 46, was the space for the wheelchair. If you hadn’t already guessed, I didn’t have one. My seat was a concrete space with a wheelchair logo painted on it and a soggy cardboard box.

The game had already started. While I was completely baffled by the whole situation, I just wanted to watch the match. I sat with my legs crossed on a damp piece of cardboard for the first thirty minutes of the match. Eventually I decided to go back over to the member of stadium staff to see if he could do anything for me.

I’d say I was firm but polite with him. Basically I explained my situation and asked if there was anything that he could do to help me. He said that he was aware what had happened but there wasn’t really much he could do. He hadn’t been able to get in contact with his manager and therefore hadn’t been able to arrange a move for us. I asked him to justget me a plastic chair from somewhere instead. I actually thought I was being accommodating. He said he couldn’t because it was a potential projectile.

Those soccer fans, you know.

I felt for him a little bit there in spite of all the ridiculousness. I think I offered to promise not to throw it like a seven year old might promise not to tell anyone a secret. Sadly, he still wouldn’t. If he had got me the chair and I had ended up throwing it at someone, he would be facing a serious kick in the arse, if not dismissal. So I went back to my seat and decided to go to the complainer’s best friend: Twitter.

The thing with complaining at organisations on Twitter is that the social media teams who deal with these complaints have way more decision-making power and flexibility than the front-line staff in banks, insurance companies or sports stadiums do. They can take action outside normal processes and they can do it way faster. They must be both completely paranoid at the potential negative public relations impact that tweets can have and enticed by the idea of a direct line to their customers. Whatever the reason, I tweeted and had a response in about five minutes.

In the meantime, the stadium staff member I had spoken to earlier approached me with a pair of seats up in the top stand that we could relocate to. I refused, mostly on account of the fact that my friend had a really sore foot and I didn’t want to drag him up flights of stairs to a significantly worse seat than both the original ones we bought and the ones we were reallocated. I told it to the poor bloke straight up, it was a crap solution. Part of me knew I could do this because I knew the Twitter folk were coming shortly, so I told him not to worry. I’d gone over his head anyway, and even if the social media team wasn’t coming to my rescue, I’d have rather stayed on the concrete.

Just on half time, two young women with iPhones came past asking who it was that was tweeting about their seat. I put my hand up and explained the situation. They looked at the space, saw my injured friend and decided they’d go figure out what they could do.

And just in time for the second half, one of the girls spun around the corner with a white plastic Coca-Cola chair. That chair, my friends, was proof that social media teams don’t play by the same rules as everyone else. She politely requested that I restrain myself from throwing the chair if the game didn’t go our way and that we also wait a few minutes after the match so she could come and collect it safely. I happily agreed to both of those terms.

Thankfully for us the only drama taking place in the second half was on the field. It was a tense battle with young Iraqi side defending gallantly and counter-attacking with intent. It stayed nil-nil for what felt like an eternity with a few goals having been disallowed. The crowd really begun to feel the clocking winding down on our chances of immediate qualification to the World Cup. Osieck preceded to roll the dice, removing Cahill for Josh Kennedy.

It paid off. Mark Bresciano delivered a glorious cross from just outside the penalty area onto the forehead of Kennedy, who did exactly what was required.

The goal was scored at our end, right in front of our very eyes. The celebration went on for what felt like five minutes. I stopped high fiving and fist pumping for a minute to turn around and look at the scene, to try and take it all in. Almost all of the 80,523 people in attendance were going ballistic. The noise, colour and energy was amazing. It felt significant. It felt joyous. It felt like relief as well.

Once the match ended, we stayed behind to watch the players walk around the ground and celebrate like they’d won the 2014 World Cup instead of just qualifying for it. I suppose it did make for good TV highlights. We were supposed to wait for our friend from the social media team to come and pick up my plastic chair as well, but we stayed maybe fifteen or twenty minutes after the last whistle and she didn’t arrive. Maybe she came thirty seconds after we left, maybe no-one came and picked it up at all, I don’t know.

About a week or so after the game, I got a message from my colleague who had spent some time on the phone to stadium management talking about our experience with the reallocation and eventually managed to get us our money back. I got the fourty bucks back for my troubles. Good deal, I reckon. I saw the match for free and got a funny story out of it.

Slowing down

Can you remember much from your time at primary school? You might be able to recall a few things. Maybe you can remember your old friends or the classrooms you sat in. I have a lot of those sorts of memories. They are important signposts of lives we used to live.

But how often can you connect memories from that time to your current life in order to explain the way you do certain things? This has happened to me a couple of times. Occasionally I'll have a realisation about myself or the way that I do something and realise that people have been warning me about it for a long time.

I can clearly remember a primary school teacher telling me as early as grade one not to rush through work I was doing. At that stage of your education, work often amounts to copying words from the blackboard onto lined paper, but I can remember wanting to finish this sort of exercise first whenever we did anything like that. I'm not sure how I well I processed this advice as a seven year old, but I'm sure now that not only was this feedback entirely correct, I feel like it was prescient.

The way I do so many things today are directly connected to that observation. I hurry, rush, force, throw, jam and slam things. I want to be finished with things yesterday. I want to carry everything at once, even if that leaves me no free hand to grab the door handle with. Too often I leave somewhere and have to turn around because I've left something important behind, which wouldn't have occurred if I'd taken two seconds to gather my thoughts before I left.

My typing is quicker than average but is horribly inaccurate. During primary school typing classes I rushed through lessons without developing proper touch-typing technique just to keep up with another child in the class. He ended up finishing miles ahead of me anyway. Handwriting? Readable, but rough. My guitar playing can pretty quick but is a little sloppy as well I feel like I pushed through these learning processes too fast because I felt I was capable enough to progress past each level, but this may have been because I had found unconventional ways to move through without actually being disciplined enough to learn foundation techniques properly.

What's clear to me is that some of these behaviours are very deeply ingrained in the way we are wired up. Upon reflection, I can draw a straight line through my life that joins the way I learnt handwriting and guitar to the way I do so many different things today.

The first step towards changing this behaviour is realising that it is actually occurring and that it is a problem. It took my teacher a matter of months to identify this; it has taken me almost twenty-five years. As ridiculous as that sounds, there is surely some limit to how mindful of these sorts of things you can be when you are seven or fifteen. It's easy to beat yourself up about the flaws we perceive in ourselves, but I feel like a lot of the time we are just too close to notice some of these habits. Depending on how deeply we think about these things, we either choose to ignore them consciously or subconsciously. Either way, we are always busy ignoring our faults right up until the time that we aren't. Only then can we begin to take steps to fix ourselves