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"It's only a conversation..."

PERSONAL OPINION - Lynn Massey-Davis


I’ve been thinking a lot lately about  the offer of a £1m bribe a year, stress balls, pens, bags, and claims it’s just a "no obligation” conversation.  The statement that we in South Holderness GDF action are “over-reacting” to the investigation of our home as a location  for a nuclear dump, appears OK to some. With power and gifts come obligations and that has a basis in science, sales technique, and some of the worst horrors of the 20th century. 


Sometimes we do things in our lives which we regret. Buy something we can’t afford, make the wrong choices or hurt another human being. When these things are “out of character” for a person or group, psychologists have tried to  explain why they behave that way. In the 1950’s and early 60’s there was a rush to discover why ordinary people could do awful things with the focus being on The Holocaust. The inhuman treatment of people was done by ordinary people, just like you and me but it didn’t start that way. 


Now,  I’m not saying that our situation is in anyway like The Holocaust, but the methods used to “bring people round” is embedded in our culture. It relies on gifts, obligations, conversations and generally sources of authority grinding us down. So when people say “we just need to give you more information” or “at the end you can still vote no” this is all part of the script and a well-worn, dangerous path. 


A famous psychologist called Stanley Milgram, conducted an experiment with a shock generator where selected people were told by an authority figure to give shocks to others not seen, but in another room, for getting questions wrong in a test. The shocks were graded from small prickles to lethal doses (you might have seen Derren Brown recreate it in TV). The problem was that large numbers of people were persuaded to do bad things by a person in power because it started off small “it’s only a small shock.”

 


The way this works is called GRADUATED COMMITMENT, and it is almost impossible to resist especially over the long-term. People buy into ideas over time. I was sad to see last Friday, the people at Theddlethorpe after two and a half years of being subject to graduated commitment are being ground down. The expectation of largesse, the £1m a year, boreholes and offers of jollies to officers of the council and selected community reps has become normalised. The power of the NWS might well be like the man in the Milgram’s experiment, turn it just up one notch…


There’s no such thing as a conversation when power is unequal, and there’s certainly no such thing as a free lunch. 


It’s never just a conversation and it needs to be stopped on the 21st February. 


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