Image Credit: via 3dman_eu at Pixabay.com, licenced as CC0 Public Domain

“Lessons From The West Wing” is a series of occasional articles inspired by the Television Series. I have several of these tucked away in development, and every now and then, prompted by watching the series for the umpteenth time or by relevant world events, I will dust one off and put it out there.

I doubt that the title of this article will mean anything to most readers at first glance, but once you’ve read it, I hope that it is a sufficiently memorable phrase that you will never forget it!

Let’s start, as usual, with some context. Bear with me, it’s relevant.

There’s been a major debate over energy policy taking place in Australia recently. I won’t bore you with the ins-and-outs, but the ideological stance being taken by the party in government, based on something called the Finkel Report, included the statement that electricity should be as cheap as possible for business, so that they can remain competitive, protecting the jobs that already exist as well as increasing the prospects for future expansion. Oh, and “by the way,” the recommended policies would also reduce electricity prices for ordinary consumers – if the report is truly the holy grail of energy policies that it claims to be.

And that got me to thinking, and to playing Devil’s Advocate. Why?

One of the problems that we face is that despite everything looking relatively rosy and prosperous, economically, wages growth and employment growth have stagnated, retail confidence remains poor, and standards of living are actually starting to fall. In such a climate, protecting the status quo is the defensive move of a government paranoid about the winds of economic fortune, a government that knows that it is in trouble, electorally.

They are right to be concerned. Their popularity is at an all-time low, the level of trust in the government similarly catastrophic, and the only thing offering hope right now is that the opposition party have, of late, fallen into the trap of playing partisan politics, of being an opposition first and true to their ideology second. Nevertheless, were an election to be held tomorrow, polling (usually pretty right in this country) says there would be a massive swing and a profound change of government – to an opposition that is looking less and less ready to function in that capacity.

So, what’s the alternative? What would happen if, as a former Prime Minister from the same party (and equally as unpopular as the current leadership, politically) has advocated, the primary focus should be about making domestic electricity prices as low as possible?

Well, consumers would have more money in their pockets, and a lot of that would then get spent, stimulating the retail economy. But higher electricity prices for industry would mean that products that are energy-dependent, especially manufactured goods, would rise in price, and some industries might even become unable to compete with overseas sources. Overall, though, wages would go up, and then – right after people got used to having more money to spend – prices would go up by the same amount. Cash flow through the economy would tick up, though, and that would enable wages growth claims to have some justification. On the whole, every area of the economy that is currently in trouble would be given a kick-start, with the big picture changing not all that much – the amount of money going into the energy providers would remain about the same, but instead of dividing the cash flow up into two separate strands – industrial and domestic consumption – the result is a longer but economically stronger single strand in which money flows to consumers, from consumers to retail, from retail to industry, and from industry to power supplier.

Our much-reviled former prime minister might just be right, this time – for all the wrong reasons, as usual – but because he’s the one espousing this position, no-one is listening seriously enough.

The problem is that everyone’s position has become ideologically entrenched – provided that you accept the notion that opposing the government, no matter what they do, is an acceptable opposition ideology.

The Bigger Picture

This is by no means a problem confined to the Australian shores. From the time of the rise of the Tea Party in the US, Republicans increasingly adopted that ideological premise, no matter how hard the Democrats tried to negotiate an acceptable compromise. Increasingly, they opposed and blocked almost everything simply because it was coming from a Democrat-held White House. I was quite astonished to read, during coverage of the recent budgetary discussion over HR 5235, how long it had been since the US had passed an actual budget instead of a continuing resolution.

Some readers might not know or understand the difference. In a nutshell, a budget spells out exactly how much the government can actually spend in the coming year, subdivided by purpose into different government departments. A continuing resolution is a watered down temporary emergency budget, with various departments often funded at a fraction of what they would expect to receive in a full budget. It provides money for a quarter, three short months. I understand (but don’t quote me) that most government departments got about 92 or 94% of their estimates from the last continuing resolution, the bill (HR5235) mentioned above. Continuing Resolutions are a political stopgap intended to keep the government functioning until a full budget can be passed – so there is an inherent assumption in the very concept that a budget will be passed.

The last budget that was fully passed by a US Government, so far as I can tell from this Wikipedia Page, was either in 2011 or 2013!

You actually see the hardening of ideological entrenchment in country after country as you become aware of their politics. I saw it in the Greek Government Debt Crisis, in the positioning over Brexit, and on and on.

In RPGs

I’ve seen something similar happen in RPGs when it comes to politics, as well. The PCs are confronted with a problem, but the politics are simplified to the point of being monochromatic black-and-white.

There’s an evil half-brother to the King, plotting to seize the throne, for example. Half-brother bad, King Good, end of story.

Real life is never so black and white.

If you’ve read and followed the advice from this blog (and others) over the years, you may have nuanced a little smudge of gray here and there – for example, making the King in question less able in some critical policy area or areas than the half-brother. This not only makes the half-brother more credible as a possible ruler, it provides an area of distinction that justifies his belief that he would make a better ruler than the incumbent. This leads into a deeper exploration of the limitations of the monarchist system and hereditary nobility, creating additional interest for the players, and enabling the NPCs to be involved in adventures in more than one way – the half-brother, usually an enemy of the PCs, who align with the King, can show up in one of the other four iconic roles of the AERO structure, making him more an element of the world at large, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but never something to be ignored, and enlarging the storytelling tapestry no end.

But even then, it’s easy for GMs to fall into the same trap of ideological entrenchment projected onto a situation or character within the game.

No Easy Answers

In politics, both in-game as in real life, there should be no black-and-white, no 100% right answers. That’s too easy, and makes things to simple – and too simplistic. Whether or not a given policy, response, position, or opinion is right or not should depend on how it impacts the individual voicing the opinion, the nation they govern or wish to govern, and the citizens that they represent. Every point of view should have at least a crumb of credibility, no matter how deeply buried.

But achieving that is often not easy, because the GM will always have his own personal opinions, and doing this properly inherently challenges the GM to justify those opinions to the themselves, and potentially to others.

I make no pretense about my personal inclination toward socially-progressive politics and policies, for example, though you would be reasonably hard-put-to-it to be able to determine that from most of my articles, which are as politically-agnostic as I can make them. In the US, I would probably vote Democrat 90% of the time or more.

You achieve that political agnosticism by continually asking, “what’s the price?,” “what’s the downside?,” “what are the assumptions?,” “how can they be tested?,” and “what’s the kernel of truth in positions in opposition?”

Every political position or policy espoused by a character in an RPG should have to run this gamut. These always represent a choice, from which some will benefit and others suffer. The question is always how to reconcile these divergent opinions.

It’s easy to suggest, for example, that free speech should be absolute. But with that position come a number of thorny questions that aren’t so easy to resolve. Religious opinions expressed in classrooms. Texts that promote violence, prejudice, and intolerance. The social media “echo chamber”. “Fake News” and the ability of commentators and editors to manipulate public opinion in the guise of reporting facts.

It’s also easy to suggest that as a defensive mechanism against such manipulation, one should operate from the perspective that every news report lies, or is (at best) slanted in this direction or that. Sometimes, there is such distortion – Fox News is notoriously perceived as pro-conservative, for example – but that doesn’t mean that they are .always right or always wrong. In Australia, we have Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones, and Steve Price, and our own version of Fox News. It’s rare for me to agree with Bolt, slightly less rare for me to agree with Jones, and more frequent for me to be forced to concede that Price has a good point to make on an issue. My opinions more frequently align with, or are shaped by, Waleed Aly, who represents the other side of the political debate. (If you haven’t seen his “What ISIS Wants”, I can’t urge you strongly enough to . It reshaped and developed many of my opinions on Terrorism and how we should respond to it, and in the world that we continue to live in, the insight it offers is something we can all use.

Each of these broadcasters has their ardent admirers, and for many, the balance of credibility falls in the other direction.

Lessons From The West Wing

As GM, you have an omniscient and omnipotent position with respect to your game world. You should not cheapen that power and authority by demonizing one perspective universally.

This is a lesson that I learned from watching The West Wing (Wikipedia Page, Complete Series on Amazon. Although the overall slant of the series was Progressive, the only Conservatives (and Democrats, for that matter) who were actually demonized within the series were those who ideologically entrenched themselves or placed themselves ahead of their offices in importance.

As one Republican notably said when reviewing the series, “I hate the politics but I love the show!” (or words to that effect).

No political faction held a monopoly on the truth. No political party was all bad, or all pristine. What mattered more was the individual – were they ethical, were the honest, were they trustworthy, were they honest representatives of their constituency, did they make an effort to see the big picture, were they willing to listen and give a fair hearing to opposition positions?

Issue-By-Issue Decisions

And it wasn’t just person-by-person. Everybody had their blind spots, everybody had their ideological foundations, everybody had positions on which they were right and positions on which they were wrong – and couldn’t necessarily see it.

That’s the sort of mindset that the GM needs to hold with respect to every NPC in a game when it comes to their politics.

But that is easier said than done.

The Real Challenge

It’s not really all that difficult to get this far. There may be a stretching of your mental muscles, a certain opening of your own political awareness that comes from deliberately exploring for the validity of the opposing position, but it’s not that big a step from what you are (hopefully) already doing.

The real challenge is creating this diversity of perspectives within a character while still keeping that character internally consistent as a character.

Characterization is the Key

My secret to doing so is to have the perspectives on an issue derive from the characterization of the character.

A character who is a strong believer in military preparedness and preemptive force – a ‘hawk,’ to use the 1970s vernacular – will be Conservative in orientation on military issues. If the rest of that character is more progressive in attitude, then that’s enough for him to stand out; if he is principally a conservative already, then this needs to go further to achieve the same distinctiveness, which opens the character up to having a blind spot on the issue, an inherent belief that the military can do no wrong and if an intervention fails or misfires it’s the fault of excessive restriction placed on them by a civilian authority.

In effect, consistency of characterization is an emergent property that results from viewing the character from a metagame perspective that incorporates more than is shown in any single appearance in the course of play.

Another Example

Here’s another example from just the last couple of days. One of the most divisive and populist Members of Parliament in Australian Politics is Pauline Hanson. Yesterday, while announcing that her party had done a deal to pass a divisive school funding bill, she called for Autistic Children to be removed from mainstream school classes, suggesting that teachers spend too much time caring for such children when they should be teaching at a pace the majority could cope with, while the children themselves should be classed seperately and given special attention.

As you can see from the randomly-selected page of twitter comments in response below, this did not go over well with a lot people.

Today, she commented that people were misinterpreting her statements because of biased newspaper headlines which employed selective quotation to distort her views. This prompted a further series of attacks, pointing out that most people got their information from television news, which showed her actual statements, and that others had obtained the full press release of her statements to form the basis of their opinions and that those opinions did not differ from those who had not. So this defense doesn’t stack up, and only damages her already tarnished credibility.

But that’s beside the point. Let’s look at this policy suggestion critically, as you need to do if you want an NPC to pronounce something similar, or even to have a government contraversially enact it within your game.

Do autistic children require additional attention? Yes, undoubtedly. Does this additional attention impact on the teacher’s ability to educate the other children? In terms of a curriculum, it has to – a teacher has only so much time to go around. A regular debate in politics in Australia (and elsewhere, I’m sure) is “what is an acceptable classroom size?” based on the premise that a teacher has only so much time for one-on-one attention to students. So there is some rational basis for the position, no matter how loathsome anyone might find it.

Pesumably, then, those opposing the proposal (and, for the record, I’m one of them) see some other educational value to integration. Like tolerance and social experience – and that totally ignores reports that I think I remember showing that such children learn more effectively and more quickly in such an environment, while placing them in “specia classes” slows their education to that of the least able student in that classroom. Nor are there any studies of which I’m aware proving significant reductions in educational breadth and quality from the inclusion of such students.

Anyone with an informed opinion on the subject is therefore prioritizing one outcome over another as “more desirable.” My personal opinion does so, too. Understanding that validity permits me to attack more robustly and to defend my position more effectively. It certainly enables me to GM an an NPC who advocates such views in spite of any contrary opinions I might personally have. Remember, too, that the NPC’s reasons don’t have to be sound ones; they might be misinformed, bigoted, corrupt, loathsome, or simply employing flawed reasoning or poor sources of information. But my presentation of such an NPC is more effective even if that’s the case if I’m aware of the nuggets of underlying truth.

Bilateral Political Incorrectness

Which brings me back to the title of this article, and my hopes that it will encapsulate these principles in a single mnemonic.

Bilateral – applies to both/all sides when it comes to any single issue or policy or political party or organization…

Political Incorrectness – …are equally capable of being right or wrong, depending on the circumstances, and from the point of view of someone who is personally affected, one way or the other.

An infusion of Bilateral Political Incorrectness into a campaign embellishes it with richness, depth, complexity, nuance, sensitivity, logic, issue awareness, and personal growth. It can be difficult at times when a character adopts a position that you personally have a fundamental disagreement with, but when that happens you have to “dig” until you discover the underlying truth, the kernel of “rightness” that makes that position rational, given the character’s experiences and how they have shaped him or her. But those rewards are worth a bit of effort.

Sorry to everyone for the delay in posting – I got so caught up in writing another article that this one completely slipped my mind!