This article and accompanying Bertoon appear in today’s edition of the Malta Independent on Sunday.
I type this article to the noises and sounds of the Carrer de Blai in the Poble Sec district of Barcelona as it wakes up to a new day. I’m renting an apartment for a few days in this bubbly multicultural city where paellas are served by Vietnamese waiters and blaugrana t-shirts are sold by persistent Indian shopkeepers. Thanks to one of Luxembourg’s rare national holidays I get a long weekend in a lovely Mediterranean environment with familiar sounds and smells (and mouth watering tastes). I may not have a deep enough pocket to visit El Bulli – the world’s best restaurant according to many – but I am determined to appease my taste buds with a few culinary expeditions… next stop the Mercat.
Of Familiarity and Contempt
The psychologist John Jost once noted that “many people who lived under feudalism, the Crusades, slavery, communism, apartheid, and the Taliban believed that their systems were imperfect but morally defensible and [even sometimes] better than the alternatives they could envision.” Psychologically we are much more likely to choose the familiar than the new unknown. This might be an adaptive trait we have received from our ancestors where creatures with a preference for the well known may have had more offspring than those with a fancy for the new. More than a case of “if it works then it ain’t needing fixing” this is more of a case of “if it’s in place then it must be working”.
Interestingly, conservative systems are best preserved when the individuals within that system possess a heightened need to manage uncertainty and threat. Individuals within that kind of system are more likely to opt for the known than the unknown, for the familiar than the potential change. Boy do some people know this. My brother has joined me on this Barcelona visit and so I got a rare chance to see the paid up adverts political parties have placed in our national newspapers. I was particularly humoured by the PN ad (yes it is a PN ad even though the maduma [marble] logo is hidden away in the bottom corner) that kicks off with the words “Oh,look. Here come Jason’s people”.
When I first saw those words I thought they reminded me of a particular style. Then it clicked. The nationalists have taken to copying Daphne’s style. Here I was being confronted by another example of cutting and pasting Stamperija style. It’s not just the introductory snipe at Jason Micallef though. It’s the wording of the whole ad. It’s a political ad mind you – as in an ad taken out by a political party that’s almost shy of its own logo – but it is about as politically engaging as a gossip magazine.
