71. The age old fight between emotions and rationality
A
petition was started, a few days ago, to see Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s
closest advisor in the UK government, fired for flouting lockdown rules. It
reached nearly a million signatures in 3 days. This is staggering for something
not that important, particularly when you consider that petitions relating to
much more globally important issues such as climate change action languish on
much lower numbers. The secret to the success of the Cummings petition is that
it is driven by anger and hate, the two strongest emotions driving human decisions,
as the Brexit vote and the elections of Trump and Bolsonaro taught us. Cummings
is easy to hate, arrogant, aloof and weird looking. And so the petition rides
on. We need to change focus from these basic feelings to hope, aspiration and
rational self preservation, to devote energy to important issues. An eventual
Cummings sacking would satisfy petitioners, but would make no real difference,
not even to his influence over the Prime Minister
Length: 999 characters
Update: this petition is now running at 1.15Mn signatories. The petition, should you be interested, can be found here: https://www.change.org/p/dominic-cummings-must-be-sacked?recruiter=false&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial&utm_term=psf_combo_share_abi&recruited_by_id=04471b00-9de2-11ea-abf8-c38a84a60c32&utm_content=fht-22346505-en-gb%3Av2
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