Walking, and the Moral Logic of British Public Life

Brits love to walk. It is one of the real pleasures of living here, and something we would never trade for a car-centred life. We walk everywhere—errands, visits, the pub—and a decent walk often doubles as exercise and casual community building. Some people take this further and become ramblers, which tells you something in itself.

And yet, while there is a deep affection for walking in the UK, they have far less enthusiasm for walking in an orderly way.

 

I have spent an unreasonable number of years trying to work out the rules for walking here. I have long suspected that doing so might offer a window into British social life. It might. It is also possible that I am simply a grumpy middle-aged man who struggles to enjoy a walk without becoming annoyed.

One clarification before going further. Queuing and walking are not the same thing. Brits queue impeccably.

Walking—whether on a crowded city pavement or a quiet country path—follows a different and much less obvious logic. This has little to do with how much space there is to walk, or where you are in the country. I have watched two people collide on an empty rural path.

The logic of walking in the UK is cultural. A way of moving through shared space that relies less on explicit rules and more on quiet self-regulation—asking people to work it out for themselves, without making a fuss.

So, what follows is an attempt to see whether that impression holds up—or whether I am simply overthinking a perfectly ordinary walk.

 

Rule 1: When it comes to walking in the UK, there is no explicit, stable rule… until suddenly there is one.

 

Most people in the UK move through shared space with little visible concern for collective flow. There is no equivalent of ‘keep left,’ nor a stable expectation that pedestrians will organise themselves in advance. People walk, drift, pause, and change direction as they please, even in places where the layout seems to suggest otherwise.

 

Until, abruptly, a rule appears.

 

For people from countries with clearer pedestrian or traffic norms, this is infuriating. Elsewhere, movement assumes a certain kind of attention: you scan for flow, adjust early, and treat motion as a shared coordination problem. When Brits don’t do this, it is easy to read the behaviour as selfish, incompetent, or rude.

 

But that reading misses the point.

 

Under Rule 1, people are not expected to manage the system in advance. They are expected to move as they wish, avoid asserting priority, and respond only once a social signal appears. In that context, scanning for flow is unnecessary, pre-emptive coordination looks pushy, and confidently anticipating others’ behaviour can feel intrusive. People appear ‘oblivious’ because nothing yet requires their attention.

 

Until it does.

 

The rule becomes visible only through disruption. A look. A tone. A comment. A sudden tightening of the atmosphere. But, this is key, all done indirectly!!! The rule was apparently there all along, but it existed only as an expectation, not an instruction. Its purpose is not to organise movement smoothly, but to correct disruption after the fact. 

 

This is better read not as dysfunction but as reactive moral governance.

 

This same logic explains why resistance escalates so quickly when someone explicitly asserts a rule while walking. For example, a pedestrian continues straight ahead on a narrow pavement, expecting others to fall into single file. Or someone holds their line in a crowded station corridor (staying to the left, as indicated by the signs), assuming there is an obvious direction of flow. In both cases, the expectation may be widely shared—but it is not meant to be stated, enforced, or insisted upon.

 

In those moments, the problem is not simply disagreement about priority. It is that the deeper rule has been violated: do not make the rule explicit; do not force recognition; do not turn tacit negotiation into open confrontation.  

To outsiders, this feels perverse. They are trying to prevent friction, reduce risk, and keep things moving efficiently. Brits, by contrast, are trying to avoid overt assertion, avoid policing others, and avoid ‘making a thing of it.’ These goals are fundamentally incompatible.

 

The result is the same behaviour being read in two very different ways: as polite restraint from the inside, and as staggering obliviousness—or even aggression—from the outside. Rule 1 explains that mismatch.

 

Rule 2: When a collision occurs, responsibility is managed through repair or deflection—not clarification.

 

Rule 1 explains how coordination is deferred until disruption. Rule 2 explains why that disruption so rarely leads to improvement.

When people collide while walking—or otherwise negotiating shared space—the moment is not treated as information. There is no pause to recalibrate, no attempt to clarify what should happen next time. Instead, the overriding aim is to contain the disturbance and restore social calm as quickly and quietly as possible.

 

This is why collisions feel both frequent and unresolved. The system is not designed to learn from disruption. It is designed to absorb it.

 

In practice, three moves are available.

 

The first is to ignore the collision even took place. People carry on as if nothing happened, even when it clearly did. No eye contact. No acknowledgement. No recalibration of behaviour. The moment passes, unresolved. This is not rudeness so much as an attempt to prevent the situation from becoming socially real.

 

The second option is to apologise, often reflexively and sometimes regardless of fault. The British ‘Sorry’ functions less as an admission of responsibility than as a social lubricant. It smooths over the disruption without requiring anyone to explain themselves or renegotiate how the space should be shared. The apology ends the interaction rather than clarifying it.

 

The third option is to blame the most vulnerable e.g., immigrants, women, people with disabilities, working class. Who is the most vulnerable is situation-dependent, but the entrenched hierarchy (the key phrase here) is familiar. A posh couple may expect a male labourer to step into the road to make space; he, in turn, expects a minority woman to yield on the same pavement.

In these situations, what is striking is what does not happen. People rarely stop to articulate what the rule should have been. There is no collective pause to clarify priority, direction, or right of way. The interaction closes, but the ambiguity remains intact.

In pedestrian systems built around explicit rules, disruption is informative. It reveals a failure of coordination that can be corrected through clearer norms or enforcement. Here, disruption is treated as noise—something to be dampened rather than analysed. Order is restored moment by moment but never consolidated, but at the cost of cumulative learning. 

Rule 3: Do Not Be a Disturber of the Peace

 

Taken together, the first two rules point to a third, more powerful one. Walking in the UK is governed not by clear coordination but by a shared commitment to avoiding overt disturbance. The deeper rule is simple: do not make a scene. Those who do risk immediate social sanction.

 

This commitment to 'keeping the peace' explains why ambiguity is tolerated, why coordination is left implicit, and why disruption is absorbed rather than learned from.  Clear rules invite assertion, assertion risks conflict. It is better, from this perspective, to allow people to adjust quietly, even if the result is inefficient or mildly chaotic. Social calm is preserved not through explicit coordination, but through restraint.

This logic becomes especially visible when someone makes judgement explicit rather than quietly absorbing the system’s inefficiencies. Recently, I was walking along a narrow pavement with some colleagues where people were repeatedly bunching, stopping, and colliding. After several near-misses, my colleague (who is not from the UK) said somewhat loudly, ‘It might work better if we all keep to one side.’

 The effect was immediate and icy. No one responded to the suggestion. Instead, we were met with tight smiles, sharp looks, and a palpable shift in atmosphere, as if a social offence had been committed. My colleague was left visibly confused — it had sounded like an ordinary, practical suggestion — yet the response carried a quiet severity that would likely have gone unnoticed by anyone not attuned to these norms. 

What was being resisted by my statement was not the substance of the suggestion. It was the act of making explicit what people were already negotiating silently—and what most preferred to keep unspoken in order to avoid disruption. The problem is not whether a rule exists, but whether it is named. Coordination is expected to emerge quietly, through mutual adjustment, not through articulation. Saying the rule out loud alters the social situation by forcing recognition, judgement, and response—precisely the things the tacit system is designed to avoid.

That is not traffic reasoning. It is moral panic about explicit judgement.

 

What This All Produces: Stability, and Its Costs

Seen at a wider angle, the moral logic visible in everyday walking does not stop at the pavement — nor did it originate there. These three rules operate across major parts of British life, reflecting a deeper moral orientation.

Taken together, they produce real strengths: stability, restraint, and social ease. But they also generate persistent blind spots and entrenched difficulties and ineqauities that are harder to confront precisely because they remain unspoken. The rules of walking (and here one thinks of Erving Goffman) are analytically useful for this reason: they make both sides of that pattern visible at once — first on the pavement, and then across public life in the UK.

 

Here are some examples:

 

On the positive side, one consequence of this moral arrangement is a remarkable capacity for settlement. When big collective decisions land in Britain, society often absorbs them and gets on with the work of living—even when bitter disagreements hold – and without endlessly re-fighting the basic settlement. Brexit is one example. Whatever one thinks of the decision, and despite widespread dissatisfaction and quiet policy recalibration, the vote itself has been treated as settled. Parts of it are being softened, adjusted, or worked around, but the decision has not been directly undone. The country has adapted around it rather than reopening it. 

 

The same pattern can be seen with same-sex marriage and abortion: once legislated, they both became part of the moral landscape, and with support now overwhelmingly high. Even the NHS—despite record dissatisfaction with how it is currently run—still commands striking loyalty to its founding principles. Public life benefits from this capacity to settle, adapt, and carry on. It is one of the reasons living here can feel stable, workable, and—at its best—quietly humane.

 

But the same logic has real costs: once peace is prioritised over clarity, power does not distribute evenly. What emerges is a structural asymmetry. In a culture where most people are socialised to avoid making a fuss, those willing to ignore conventions, push boundaries, or escalate gain leverage. This can be seen in contemporary politics, where movements such as Reform (amongst others) have learned to exploit the fact that provocation and confrontation travel further than restraint in a system slow to push back. 

 

 It is also visible in long-standing patterns of social hierarchy and elite insulation –remember our point about reversing blame to the most vulnerable? Those with secure status—political, institutional, cultural —act with an easy presumption of entitlement, taking space, bending rules, and reacting with indignation when challenged, confident that others will step aside rather than disrupt the peace. 

 

In turn, the burden of accommodation, meanwhile, falls disproportionately on those with the least capacity to escalate: women, disabled people, ethnic minorities, and others already navigating vulnerability in public space. They adjust, apologise, reroute, or stay silent not because they agree, but because restraint is the safer option. And, over time, the system bends around those least invested in peace. The North–South divide offers a clear illustration: the North is repeatedly expected to absorb economic shock, austerity, and policy retreat, while investment decisions favour the South through opaque adjustment rather than explicit prioritisation, leaving those most affected to adapt quietly rather than contest the terms.

 

CONCLUSION

It seems we may have wandered a bit from our walk. So let’s return to it. What walking in the UK offers, in the end, is not a theory of British society but a rehearsal space. It is a small, repeatable situation in which strangers briefly share space, negotiate movement, and part again without ceremony. The stakes are low, the encounters fleeting, and the consequences minimal—which is precisely why the patterns are easier to see, if you are paying attention.

 

There is a Jungian intuition hovering behind all of this: that the points where irritations arise are rarely incidental. They are often where unconscious expectations collide with a system that does not quite organise itself the way you assumed it would. Frustration, in that sense, is diagnostic.

 

Seen this way, the awkward moments of walking—the hesitations, collisions, and forced reroutings—are not failures but clues. Almost Derridean ones: small disturbances that mark constitutive tensions in the system itself, tensions that are necessary to how it functions but never fully resolved. The pavement does not explain the culture, but it does let you feel, quite literally, where it rubs.

AI Doesn't Prove God Exists — But It Does Break Some Arguments Against the Possibility

Does AI prove the possibility of a personal God?  Probably not.  But it does undercut several of the mechanical arguments long used to dismiss the idea.

 

AI AND THE MECHANICAL CHALLENGES OF A PERSON GOD 

Most Christians do not think of God as an abstract force. They mean a personal God: present, listening, responsive, involved—someone you can address, trust, blame, thank, and plead with. There is a standard list of arguments made against the idea of a personal God. Most are moral; why so many people suffer; why God so often seems silent; why some lives are helped while others are abandoned; and why the innocent so often bear the cost. Others are mechanical; could anyone actually hear everyone at once; could anyone respond continuously without breaking down; and could conflicting requests be handled at scale. Of the two, the focus here is on the mechanical ones.

I am not religious in the sense that I do not practise Christianity. Still, I was raised within the Christian tradition—my father was a minister—and I have lived long enough with its language, stories, and assumptions for them to remain intellectually consequential for me. Despite my non-belief, one question that never quite went away was a question of plausibility:

How could a personal God, if such a thing existed, actually do the things people routinely claim? How could such a being listen to millions of people, respond to them, guide them, remain present, and do so continuously, without fatigue or limitation?

For a long time, the standard objections felt decisive. Not because they were morally persuasive—though many are—but because they seemed to rule out a personal God on purely practical grounds.

Then along came AI.

I remember watching the email scene in Bruce Almighty and finding it funny precisely because it felt so obviously true. Bruce, who God has given its power to, opens his inbox and is instantly buried under millions of incoming prayers—emails piling up faster than he can read them, the system locking up, pop-ups everywhere, total overload. The joke only works because it leans on a shared assumption: no single agent could possibly handle that volume of requests without collapsing.

Or at least that is how it landed for me. I was working with ChatGPT a few months back when it dawned on me that the joke behind Bruce Almighty no longer works. Or rather, it would have to be rewritten—less about a human temporarily becoming God, more about someone suddenly realising they embody ChatGPT.

Once that sinks in, the next step followed almost immediately in my brain. Many of the mechanical arguments against a personal God rest on those same assumptions—and those assumptions are challenged by the current age of AI.

Systems like ChatGPT are not divine. They are still crude, limited, and deeply imperfect. But they already demonstrate something that matters. A single system can receive and process millions of simultaneous inputs, respond continuously without fatigue, and handle incompatible requests without collapsing. Whatever one thinks about religion, this changes the standing of a particular class of objections.

Here is the core claim. For a long time, certain arguments against a personal God sounded decisive not because they were logically airtight, but because the capacities they ruled out had no real-world analogue. That situation has changed. Not because technology proves anything theological, but because it exposes how historically contingent our impossibility claims are—and how scientific and technical developments condition what we take to be conceivable in the first place.

And if systems like this can already do this much in their infancy, the imagination strains to keep up with what may follow. Large language models are only one part of a broader landscape that includes autonomous systems, real-time surveillance infrastructures, algorithmic decision-making, robotics, and large-scale human–machine coordination. Taken together, these technologies are reshaping our intuitions about agency, attention, presence, and scale—things we once assumed even a personal God could not do or sustain.

This does not rescue belief. It does not solve the moral problems. It does not tell us whether a personal God exists. It does something narrower and more unsettling. It removes a set of arguments that many people—including sceptics—have relied on without noticing how historically fragile they were.

Some arguments do not collapse because they are refuted. They collapse because the world that made them feel obvious is gone. This is one of them.

 

 

Using Chomsky's Writings to Read His Disappointing Engagement with Epstein

Undated photo of Jeffrey Epstein, right, speaking to academic and linguist Noam Chomsky. 

Photograph: House Oversight Democrats/AFP/Getty Images

On 3 February 2026, Ramon Antonio Vargas reported in The Guardian in an article titled 'Newly released files shed new light on Chomsky and Epstein relationship' that a tranche of U.S. Justice Department records released under a congressional transparency law documents an extensive and friendly relationship between Noam Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein. The emails show sustained social contact, financial coordination, casual familiarity, and private advice offered by Chomsky to Epstein after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor. The records also include Chomsky reaching out to Steve Bannon, using contact details supplied by Epstein, to request a meeting. Collectively, the material challenges earlier characterisations of Chomsky’s relationship with Epstein as primarily financial and limited in scope.

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For those of us who came of age intellectually reading Chomsky—his work on linguistics, media, and the structural analysis of political power—these disclosures are difficult to reconcile with the intellectual project he advanced. 

Chomsky taught generations of scholars to recognise how elite networks normalise impunity and reproduce power through informal social and financial ties. Seen in that light, the newly released material is not merely surprising; it is destabilising. It forces a confrontation between a structural critique of power that many of us learned from Chomsky and evidence of personal conduct that appears to sit uneasily within the very networks that critique sought to expose. 

What makes the recent release of evidence so unsettling is that Chomsky’s own work taught us to treat such relationships as structural mechanisms of power, not as morally neutral personal ties.

With Epstein, the ethical problem deepens. This was not abstract engagement undertaken to understand power, but sustained social familiarity and private counsel that minimised public concern about sexual abuse. What it reveals, using Chomsky's own work to make sense of his behaviour, is how deep and ordinary elite power networks (particularly male power networks) can be—even among their most formidable critics—and how easily structural critique can coexist with personal participation in those networks. 

By his own standards, the problem is not that Chomsky spoke to people he opposed, but that he normalised and privately assisted figures whose power he taught generations of students to analyse as corrosive. 

The sadness here is not scandal; it is the dissonance between an intellectually rigorous structural critique and personal conduct that quietly reproduces the very arrangements it sought to expose.

 

 

 

Are Our Global Commitments Collapsing Because of Social Psychological Strain? Yes—and America Is Just One Example

Across countries and at the global level, the social fabric is fraying, and our standard explanations are missing the root of the problem. We keep pointing to leaders, polarisation, or failing institutions, but those accounts stay on the surface. The deeper issue is one of social psychology.

I apply a social psychological lens—grounded in a rereading of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and informed by complexity thinking—to argue that what is breaking down is our capacity to sustain demanding forms of commitment. A ‘social psychology of commitment,’ then, is about the patterned ways individuals and groups experience, tolerate, resist, or withdraw from civil society obligations under strain.

This current breakdown is driven, in large measure, by a deeply interdependent globalised world marked by globalisation’s unequal impacts and failed promises. The consequences for civil society are no longer quietly accumulating; they are spilling out across societies in ways that mark a historically significant crisis. We have seen before how difficult it is to rebuild civil society once it fractures. If we misread this breakdown as merely an ideological or institutional problem, we will fail to confront the underlying psychological crisis now shaping our politics and public life.

For this post I will do the following:

o   I begin by briefly revisiting my 2019 book, The Defiance of Global Commitment, written well before the current moment but directly concerned with the dynamics now coming into view.

o   I then draw selectively on that framework to apply its central diagnosis to what is unfolding in the United States, both domestically and in its global commitments.

Still, the post is not just about the United States. The States certainly holds headline news presently, but the fraying of our social psychology of civil commitment is happening across the globe. As such my focus on the States is just one case study – albeit a very dramatic one – with the hope that others will test this framework’s utility for other parts of the world. In short, the value of the framework I outline here lies in its portability: it does not explain events by reference to national traits or political cultures, but by tracing how commitment strain is organised and negotiated under specific structural conditions.

 

THE DEFIANCE OF GLOBAL COMMITMENT – SELECTED SUMMARY

The Defiance of Global Commitment is a sustained argument that the central crisis of the contemporary global order is not best understood as a failure of policy, governance, or institutional coordination, but as a failure rooted in the social psychology of commitment itself. The book advances the claim that globalization has outpaced the social psychological capacities through which humans historically manage obligation, restraint, and shared responsibility. As a result, the very commitments required to sustain global civil society—ethical, ecological, political, economic and social—are increasingly experienced not as collective necessities, but as intrusive demands that threaten individual and group-based pursuits of security, status, and wellbeing. The outcome is not withdrawal alone, but patterned resistance, backlash, and, in many cases, open defiance and its normalisation.

Working through a critical rereading of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, the book reframes discontent as a structurally unavoidable social psychological feature of social life, rather than a moral defect or ideological error. Civilization, Freud argued, advances by restricting instinctual freedom, and this restriction generates resentment, aggression, and resistance.

The present study extends this insight into the global era, arguing that globalization intensifies this psychic tension in two key ways. First is the deep global interdependence it produces, binding economic, political, and social processes across distance and scale. Decisions made far from everyday life increasingly shape local conditions, demanding commitments to distant others, abstract systems, and long-term collective goods under conditions of inequality, uncertainty, and perceived loss of control. What changes is not the basic drama of commitment and resistance, but its scale, speed, and stakes.

Second are globalisation’s unequal impacts and failed promises. Globalisation operated as a promise of shared benefit that required sacrifice in advance, yet it distributed rewards unevenly while making the costs of adjustment immediate and tangible. For many—particularly those lower on the socioeconomic ladder—the promised gains never materialised. In this context, global obligations were experienced less as reciprocal commitments than as external demands tied to a fragile and uneven bargain. The resistance that followed was not a moral failure or misunderstanding, but a predictable response to a persistent gap between promise and lived experience.

Across its early chapters, the book develops a diagnostic vocabulary for understanding how individuals and groups respond to these pressures. It identifies recurring orientations—nostalgic retreat, global aggression, affluent resentment, and forms of defensive in-group and out-group consolidation—not as ideological positions to be debated, but as patterned social psychological responses to perceived threats to agency, identity, and recognition. These orientations cut across political divides, but they do not carry equal consequences. On the far right, fear of loss is readily transformed into exclusionary politics, moralised aggression, and the normalisation of violence, directed both at targeted groups and at the institutions of civil society themselves. Under these conditions, commitment to pluralism, restraint, and democratic process is reframed as weakness or betrayal, and aggression becomes a legitimate means of restoring order. A different-but-similar dynamic appears in liberal contexts, where symbolic struggles over identity politics, language, and moral standing offer a lower-cost substitute for confronting material inequality, structural disadvantage, and steep social gradients—often from positions of relative privilege. What unites these responses is not moral equivalence, but a shared function: reducing social psychological strain by narrowing responsibility, simplifying conflict, and deflecting the deeper demands of genuinely global commitment.

The analytic core of the book is its distinction between therapeutic and non-therapeutic power, and between healthy resistance and unhealthy defiance. Power, the book insists, always provokes resistance; the critical issue is what kind of resistance emerges, under what conditions, and in response to which forms of power. Therapeutic power aims to cultivate insight, responsibility, and collective capacity, even when it enforces limits. Non-therapeutic power operates through coercion, humiliation, deception, or moralisation, often while claiming ethical legitimacy. When global commitments are advanced primarily through non-therapeutic means—especially under conditions of inequality and loss of voice—resistance predictably shifts from defensive and corrective forms toward denial, scapegoating, and aggression.

By treating these reactions to global commitments as intelligible rather than inexplicable, the book provides a framework for understanding why global civil society remains both necessary and perpetually unstable, and why efforts to sustain it repeatedly collide with the limits of human psychology under conditions of unequal globalization.

So let’s see if this framework can hold up to what is happening in the States, again as only one case study.

 

APPLYING THIS FRAMEWORK TO WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE STATES

Civil society is perpetually unstable because it presses against the limits of human social psychological capacity in a globalised world of deep interdependence and unequal impacts. Participation in global civil society requires restraint, tolerance of ambiguity, and commitment to distant others under conditions where benefits and burdens are unevenly distributed. Some individuals, groups, and institutions can manage this strain, at least intermittently. Others cannot.

What distinguishes our present globalised and highly interdependent moment is not that this limit has suddenly appeared. It is that those who experience global commitment as intolerable are increasingly able to shape political agendas, institutional trajectories, and public narratives.

This capacity does not reside in leaders and elites alone – who often benefit massively from globalisation. In most of the global West, political authority operates through negotiated ordering: what leaders can do, sustain, or get away with is constrained by what those they govern will tolerate, endorse, ignore, or quietly accept.

Everyday social psychological thresholds therefore matter.

Civil society weakens not only when leaders undermine institutions, but when large numbers of people withdraw their willingness to sustain demanding commitments in daily life—through indifference, compliance, selective outrage, or active support for narrowing obligation.

Seen this way, current conflicts around civil society are not well captured by simple stories of democracy versus authoritarianism. What we are witnessing instead is a struggle over how much commitment can reasonably be demanded, and who gets to decide when that demand has gone too far. This struggle plays out unevenly, often within the same societies and institutions, producing patterns that appear contradictory only if we assume civil society is a single, shared object rather than a social psychologically uneven demand.

In the United States, the Trump administration’s 2025–2026 challenges to NATO and the United Nations, alongside proposals treating Greenland’s sovereignty as negotiable, have been widely contested. But they have also found significant pockets of tolerance—and occasional enthusiasm—because they resonate with an already present scepticism toward multilateral obligation and alliance commitments. For those citizens in support, the United States’ responsibilities within global civil society have come to be experienced as onerous obligations imposed in the name of others’ interests: a system of restraint perceived as serving a distant transnational elite rather than the national in-group. Under these conditions, pushing back against multilateral institutions does not register as destabilising global order so much as resisting repression.

What matters analytically is not the accuracy of this picture, but its social psychological plausibility. Europe is not a unified liberal bloc, nor are its states interchangeable. The United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union, Denmark’s initial hesitations over military support for Ukraine, and persistent domestic conflicts over immigration, welfare, and sovereignty all point to internal fractures that sit uneasily with any image of a coherent ‘transnational elite.’ Yet these complexities do little to disrupt the underlying resentment narrative. From a social-psychological perspective, such narratives function not to describe reality, but to simplify it—to compress heterogeneous actors and institutions into a single external force against which resistance feels justified.

In this context, challenges to NATO, scepticism toward the United Nations, and gestures that treated territorial norms as flexible operated as outward-facing expressions of a deeper social psychological withdrawal from global commitment. They signal a refusal of restraint framed as self-defence: a reclaiming of agency against obligations that now felt excessive, moralising, and asymmetrically distributed. That these moves risk undermining institutions from which the United States also benefits did not weaken their appeal. On the contrary, it reinforces their symbolic power as acts of release from a global order increasingly experienced as psychologically oppressive. As Freud long noted, such contradictions are not incidental: under conditions of perceived constraint, individuals and groups will often accept—even embrace—self-damage if it promises release from an order experienced as asymmetrically benefiting others.

This logic also applies domestically. One prominent example in 2025–2026 lies in domestic practices associated with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which relies heavily on in-group/out-group distinctions to normalise harsh enforcement, detention, and sanctioned force. Policies that inflict harm on refugees, minorities, or marginalised groups are rarely defended as cruelty. They are justified as realism, protection, or necessity. Once participation in civil society is experienced as an unreasonable psychological burden, limiting compassion and narrowing responsibility can feel not like moral failure but like common sense. Support for such measures is sustained not only through coercion, but through widespread accommodation.

Domestically, what is at stake is not immigration alone. For those drawn toward nostalgic retreat, nationalism, or similar defensive orientations, civil society itself comes to be experienced as an intolerable social psychological burden—an overextended demand for restraint, pluralism, and global obligation. In response, civil society is rewritten not as a shared space of negotiation and restraint, but as a legitimate source of coercive power: a means of enforcing order against those who insist on maintaining commitments that now feel unbearable. In this context, the rights of immigrants, refugees, and citizens engaging in nonviolent protest are no longer recognised as upholding civil society but are recast as obstacles to order. Sanctioned force is thus redirected inward, not as an aberration, but as a social psychologically intelligible attempt to resolve the strain of global and civic commitment by narrowing who and what civil society is for.

This helps explain why undermining civil society can focus on empowering a defiant social psychology. Commitment can be narrowed without being disavowed. Obligations can be reinterpreted rather than rejected. Restraint can be recast as naivety, care as overreach, and solidarity as self-harm. These shifts matter not because they are rhetorically clever, but because they align with what many people can psychologically carry. Leaders articulate these framings, but their durability depends on whether they resonate with everyday experiences of strain, loss, and resentment.

Crucially, these dynamics do not produce uniform retreat. Survey evidence across the United States and Europe consistently shows divided publics: support for humanitarian values and democratic norms often coexists with endorsement of restrictive or coercive domestic policies, particularly around migration, protest, and security. The point is not moral inconsistency, but psychological management. Commitment strain is negotiated across domains, narrowed where tolerance is exceeded, and maintained where demands remain bearable. However, many people experience the erosion of restraint itself as intolerable. As defiance bleeds out across society, in this case the States, resistance reappears in the form of protest, institutional defence, and demands for civility and humanity to be restored. These responses emerge from the same negotiated order. They signal that withdrawal has gone too far, that the social costs of undermining now exceed the psychological relief it provides.

 

COMING FULL CIRCLE TO WHY THIS ARGUMENT MATTERS GLOBALLY 

What this perspective ultimately clarifies is why the present moment in the States (and more globally, across a lot of the world) feels both volatile and unresolved. Civil society is not collapsing in a single direction, nor stabilising through consensus. It is being stretched, resisted, defended, and narrowed all at once as individuals and institutions confront the psychological limits of global commitment. Even under more equitable forms of globalization, the demands of global interdependence and global civil society would remain psychologically taxing; the issue is not whether strain exists, but whether it becomes corrosive or manageable. Those who find these limits intolerable now have greater capacity to drive agendas that reduce obligation and legitimise withdrawal—because enough people, in everyday life, are prepared to live with the consequences. 

The task, then, is not to imagine a world without resistance to civil society, but to recognise that its instability is structural, negotiated, and ongoing—and that how societies manage these limits will determine whether commitment is contained, distorted, or progressively undone. 

 

CONCLUSION 

In summary, this analysis shows how social-psychological limits on commitment can be traced across countries and regions—not by attributing outcomes to national character, ideology, or leadership, but by examining how obligations are experienced, negotiated, resisted, and narrowed under specific structural conditions. Offered as a starting point, the United States case examined here warrants careful comparative extension to other national and regional contexts where global commitments are being renegotiated under different institutional, cultural, and historical conditions.

 

 

Working for Health 2030 2025 – 2026 WHO and NHS Seminar Series: Embracing Complexity: Systems Thinking for Health Workforce Strengthening

I would like to thank the WHO and NHS for the opportunity to be part of this panel and to present on the value of the complexity sciences for healthcare workforce strengthening.

 

I would like to specifically thank Cris Scotter, (Unit of Health Workforce and Health Services) and Danielle Mason and team in Global Health Partnerships, NHS England for the opportunity to present.

 

I would also like to thank my colleagues who presented, for an excellent discussion: Leila Reid, Malixole Percy Mahlathi, Naja Hulvej Rod with Wendy Reid.

 

 

OVERVIEW OF MY KEYNOTE

My  WHO–NHS session introduction to the complexity sciences was based on The Atlas of Social Complexity. It rested on a claim that still meets resistance in workforce policy circles: many of the most persistent failures in health workforce planning are not technical problems waiting for better optimisation, but systemic mis-specifications that optimisation cannot fix.

 

Health workforce systems are complex socio-ecological systems. They are case-based rather than law-like; adaptive rather than stable; shaped by power, inequality, governance, and psychology as much as by headcounts and demand curves. They evolve, self-organise, and operate within nested structures—from teams and organisations to national policy regimes and global labour markets.

 

When these conditions are treated as noise rather than structure, linear causality, average effects, and single “best” projections do not merely simplify reality—they mislead.

 

The value of the complexity sciences, as I argued, is not that they replace existing methods or offer panaceas—they do neither—but that they provide a grammar for working with systems as they actually behave.

 

Case-based complexity foregrounds configurational causality (equifinality, multifinality, causal asymmetry), trajectory thinking, and cross-scale analysis, making visible why similar pressures produce divergent outcomes, or why very different contexts converge on the same failures. It also destabilises categories that workforce models routinely naturalise—roles, professions, demand assumptions—showing how these shift under political, institutional, and ecological strain.

 

For workforce planning, this means abandoning the fiction of a single correct forecast. Health systems are better understood as ensembles of situated cases, where responses must be assembled rather than imposed. Complexity, in this sense, is not an analytic complication to be managed away; it is a place-based, contextual truth that policy must learn to work with or continue reproducing the problems it seeks to solve.

 

 

 LINKS

 

Here is a link to my PowerPoint Presentation

 

Here is a link to the paperback version of The Atlas of Social Complexity

Here is a discount code until the end of 20255

The code is TASC15, and it offers a 15% discount.

Here is a link to the map of the complexity sciences

Here is a link to PRSM (Online Participatory Systems Mapping) Platform

Here is a link to Barbrook-Johnson and Penn’s Open-Access Systems Mapping Book

Here is a link to COMPLEX-IT, the online R-Studio platform allowing non-experts in computational modelling access to these tools, all through a social complexity framework.