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  14. Golden Rule: Be Real

  All rules are subordinate to the golden rule: make an honest human connection.

  Back in the room, and it’s time for round two. Same case, same suspect. Only this time, Frank Barnet would be a different kind of character. I’d asked Laurence and Lloyd to give me a taste of the range of challenges a police interviewer can face.

  When Barnet sat down opposite me this time, he didn’t stare suspiciously, and he didn’t put his feet on the table. He looked at the floor, as if he didn’t want to make eye contact. When he spoke, it was in a soft, hesitant voice. I asked him what he had been doing on the day in question. He started to answer before tailing off. He asked, ‘Is the girl all right?’

  I gave a cursory answer before returning to my questions on the events of his day. After a long pause, he said, in a small voice, ‘I want to help, but I’m just confused. I wouldn’t do something like this. They arrested me in front of the school, when I was with my kids.’ I said that must have difficult for him, then continued my enquiry.

  Laurence paused the interview and asked me how it was going. I said I felt more confident this time, more in control. Laurence frowned. ‘I thought you were strangely un-empathetic. Your tone was almost exactly the same as the first interview, albeit a bit less nervous. There was no modulation.’

  I realised he was right. I was so concerned with sounding like Detective Inspector Leslie – authoritative, in charge – that I had forgotten the need to adapt my tone to the person in front of me. Lloyd joined in. ‘If you’re going to say, “That must be very difficult for you,” and it hasn’t got the right emotion behind it, it’s not worth saying,’ he told me.

  This was a crucial lesson: sympathy without feeling is worse than no sympathy at all. ‘Unless you sound like you actually care about what happened to me, I just feel like I’m part of a process, and you’re just moving me along.’

  It was important, continued Lloyd, to appear persuadable. ‘If a police officer seems open-minded and non-judgemental there’s more chance I’m going to talk. Maybe it’s just because I think I can con you. Either way, if you give the impression you’ve already made up your mind, there’s no reason for me to talk.’

  So the best interviewers have an ability to come across as if they have an open mind? ‘It’s not so much an ability,’ said Laurence, ‘as being genuinely interested in finding out the truth.’

  * * *

  British police officer Jake Rollnick (whose father Stephen was the co-founder of Motivational Interviewing whom we met earlier) told me about how he patiently builds rapport with people in crisis, before getting down to the action that needs taking – whether that’s an arrest or, just as often, getting them to a safe place. But as we wrapped up our conversation, Jake had one more point to make:

  Rapport is important, but there are different ways to get there. My sergeant is a big bloke, rugby player, real Cardiff man. He always goes in confrontational, and it always works. I remember this suicidal lad who had slit his wrists and taken an overdose. I sat with him for ages, gently persuading him to let me take him to the hospital. Then Sarge walks in and starts shouting:

  ‘WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO? DO YOU WANT ME TO TAKE YOU TO THE HOSPITAL OR WHAT? I CAN’T SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS FOR YOU. I’VE GOT WORK TO DO. IF YOU WANT TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL, I’LL TAKE YOU – OR YOU CAN SIT HERE AND DIE.’

  ‘It was all wrong,’ said Jake. ‘I sat there thinking to myself, he’s messed up all my good work. But the lad went with us to the hospital. And I’ve seen the sergeant do that again and again. Somehow he always ends up making a connection. There are no rules.’

  It might seem odd, in a book of rules, to say this, but Jake is right: there are no hard and fast rules. Well, almost none. There is a golden thread running through all the conversations I had with people in the course of researching and writing this book, and it’s this: you can’t handle disagreement and conflict successfully if you don’t make a truthful human connection. If you have one, then all rules are moot. If you don’t have one, then the techniques and tactics you use are likely to do more harm than good.

  * * *

  During the stand-off with the Davidians, the FBI tried a series of persuasion tactics that were clumsy and counter-productive, as persuasion tactics tend to be when divorced from genuine empathy and curiosity. One of the techniques taught in negotiation textbooks is to identify common ground in order to develop rapport. It’s a fine principle – one that I have advanced here – but done clumsily it can sound insincere and cynical. For instance, one of the negotiators, proposing a plan to Koresh, told him that it had been sanctioned by his superior only after his boss, ‘a very devout Christian’ had prayed to God, ‘as we all do’. Koresh was unimpressed. Another of the FBI’s persuasion tactics was to send photos and videos of the released children, and messages written by the children, into the compound, so that the children’s parents would be motivated to come out and be reunited with them. Unsurprisingly, the Davidians were angered by this blatant attempt at manipulation.

  Even the people you believe to be less intelligent than you (always a risky bet) may have a finely honed sense of the relationship signals you’re sending. Polis trainer Don Gulla emphasised that officers should never feign compassion and should always assume others are smart enough to see through any tricks, no matter who they are. ‘Mentally ill people are intelligent. They’re just ill. They know when you’re lying to them. Don’t try and be someone you’re not. Be real.’

  One of Laurence Alison’s refrains is, ‘You’ve got to mean it.’ An interrogator’s curiosity should never be faked; it must be authentic. Laurence warned repeatedly against relying on ‘tricks’: techniques of manipulation that make the interrogator feel clever but are often seen through by interviewees. Tricks are attractive because they make us feel smart and in control, but they’re rarely as effective as promised, and can backfire. Niël Barnard, a former head of South African intelligence and one of the figures involved in brokering Mandela’s release from prison, had a rule of thumb for negotiation: ‘cleverness is stupidity’.

  When Alfred Wilson decided to ask the truck driver about his life, he wasn’t deploying a trick; he really was interested. Charlan Nemeth found that the devil’s advocate game only works if the advocate really believes in her view. The hostage negotiators who spoke to Miriam Oostinga emphasised that an apology only works if it’s genuine. Viljoen knew that Mandela was for real when Mandela told him how much Afrikaners had hurt him.

  * * *

  Polis founder Jonathan Wender told me that when he was a cop, the thing he found hardest about the job was what he calls ‘the bureaucratic paradox’. It is only as a police officer, a wearer of the uniform, that he had licence to intrude upon people’s lives. But at the same time, it was only when he transcended his official role that he was able to influence them. ‘If my job as an officer is to build a sense of trust, I can’t do that by acting as a rigid bureaucrat. As long as I saw things through the technical lens of the law I could not influence people in a lasting way. I must be humanly authentic myself.’

  Wender grew up in New Jersey, in a household full of books and ideas. ‘I was an intellectually inclined child.’ His parents owned an independent bookstore, his grandfather was a history professor. He studied philosophy and Middle Eastern languages at university, before joining a police department near Seattle. Six years into his police career, Wender began studying for a PhD that applied the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to law enforcement. His thesis later became a book, entitled Policing and the Poetics of Everyday Life.

  Talking to Wender is like listening to a continental philosopher who happens to know the most efficient way to execute an arm-lock. I asked him what it was about police work that he found so stimulating. ‘The world thinks about policing in terms of aggression, but for me, police work is intimate. You are interacting with people, over and again, at their moments of greatest vulnerability. You see people being bo
rn and you see them die. You talk to them about why their marriage is broken or why they tried to kill themselves. It is human nature in the raw.’

  He returned, as he often does, to philosophy. ‘A human is not like a tree or a rock. We make meaning. A jet moving across a sky leaves a contrail of smoke, a boat moving through water leaves a wake; there’s no other way they can move. The same is true of a person moving through the world. When you walk into a room, you radiate meaning like a star gives off light.’ He paused. ‘So if that’s true, then good interaction with others means having a good purpose. Never objectify someone. Understand that they have a soul, and you have a soul.’

  Part Three

  Staying in the Room

  15. The Infinite Game

  Productive disagreement is not the same as good manners, but some minimal form of civility is required to keep our disagreements going.

  ‘Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing.’ John Milton

  In 1962, the philosopher and advocate for liberal causes Bertrand Russell received a series of letters from Oswald Mosley, former leader of the British Union of Fascists. Mosley wanted Russell to engage in a debate about the morality of fascism. Finally, Russell, then almost ninety, replied. In a short letter, he explained why he would not engage with Mosley:

  It is always difficult to respond to people whose ethos is so alien, and in fact, repellent, to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.

  I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.

  If I was to disagree with myself about the premise of this book, here’s where I’d start: productive disagreement is all very well, but the truth is that some people don’t deserve it. Yes, we can learn from our opponents, but not all of them have something to teach us. Of course we should try to engage our antagonists, but not those who hold views that make them unworthy of our attention. Some opponents must either be ignored or defeated. Fight or flight are sometimes the only good options, and it’s dangerously naive to think otherwise.

  Maybe. But it’s difficult to identify who those people are in advance. Very few people are separated from each other by an impassable gulf of belief. Liberals and white supremacists? What, so Mandela shouldn’t have negotiated with Viljoen – or, come to that, the South African government? You might argue he only did so because he had to – because he needed something from them. But that’s the point. We often need something from people whose views we find repugnant, even if it’s only fair treatment or peaceful cohabitation. Diplomats have successfully negotiated or mediated disputes with some of the most terrible people on earth. Interrogators, too, talk to people who have committed awful crimes and hold vile beliefs, and still manage to develop productive conversations. Russell didn’t need to engage with Mosley, because Mosley was a spent force by then, an irrelevance, and Russell’s own time was pressingly short.

  I don’t think we can say that some people are impossible to engage with on the basis of the views they hold. What I do believe, though, is that some people are impossible to engage with because of the way they disagree. There are those who are relentlessly closed-minded, aggressive and mean-spirited, who always assume bad faith, who always grandstand and never listen. This is a sensibility or attitude, not an ideology, and it can be found anywhere, not just in politics. Within relationships, families and workplaces, you will always find people who fundamentally do not want to play anybody’s game but their own: people who might pretend to disagree productively, only to suck you into futile battles. Note that Russell refers to Mosley’s ‘emotional universe’ being very different to his own.

  Having said that, we have a persistent, habitual tendency to over-estimate the size of this group. Especially when we haven’t had much sleep. By which I mean, our brains are always looking for ways to conserve energy, and one way to do that is to shrink the number of people and views that we deem worthy of our attention. So we reach for labels – racists, deplorables, idiots – that give us an out. That surge of certainty you feel when you dismiss someone isn’t a signal that you’re right, it’s the satisfaction of getting out of some work. Many of those we quickly judge to be a waste of our time are worth engaging with, either because they might teach us something or because they are more ambivalent than they appear at first. Alfred Wilson could have dismissed the guy with a Confederate flag as not worthy of his effort. He’s glad he didn’t.

  * * *

  Still, this is all very reasonable, isn’t it? This is an eminently reasonable book, with its emphasis on hearing each other out, on listening attentively, on seeing each other’s perspective. It’s so . . . polite.

  I value politeness. But then, I live a comfortable life, relatively free from fear. People who are desperate, who are afraid, who feel they’ve been screwed over, might wish for something other than polite discourse. The very notion of productive disagreement can seem, from where they’re standing, like an item of luxury furniture. What use is it when the roof is falling in? Besides, some things are worth getting angry over – even unreasonably angry. Politeness can get in the way of honesty. Even I don’t want to live in a world where everyone has to be respectful of everyone’s feelings all the time. Some people’s views – and some people – are just irredeemably awful. There can be a bracing truthfulness to fuck you.

  Injunctions to be polite can be a way of preserving the status quo. What did genteel Southern whites say about civil rights protesters in the 1960s? That they were uncouth, and not worth listening to, let alone disagreeing with. In his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, Martin Luther King expressed impatience with white Americans who said they supported his cause but could not support direct action. The white moderate, said King, ‘is more devoted to “order” than to justice’.

  Change is uncomfortable and even painful for those who stand to lose from it, and placing a high importance on good manners can be a way of putting it off. In corporate boardrooms, people are only taken seriously if they conform to certain rules of self-presentation, especially in formal, high-context organisational cultures. It becomes practically impossible to stand up and shout: UNLESS WE CHANGE AND CHANGE FAST WE ARE TOTALLY SCREWED – even though many bankruptcies and disastrous decisions might have been averted had somebody felt able to do so.

  Politeness can also be a means of controlling the conversation – a power move. It can ramify into a complex code that, like any code, hands an advantage to those who know it. The British class system is still full of fine distinctions about allowable ways to speak, which has helped to keep the whole dusty edifice in place. In its extreme form, political correctness gets used like this – as a linguistic technology used to distinguish insiders from outsiders, enabling educated elites to hoard authority. People who have something discomforting to tell us are kept out of the conversation: ‘He’s just offensive. She’s too emotional.’

  Disagreement shouldn’t be a blood sport, but it shouldn’t be a bloodless one either. If all public discourse was conducted like a dinner party, we wouldn’t hear cries of pain and shouts of rage. Sometimes we must throw ourselves into argument without thinking too hard about which rules we’re breaking or whose sensibilities we might offend. But this raises a hard question. What’s the difference between being righteous and being rude, between speaking truth in someone’s face and humiliating them?

  * * *

  Anyone who thinks that online political disagreements are uniquely vituperative should take a look at religious arguments from 500 years ago. Here is Martin Luther giving his opinion on popes:

  You are desperate, thorough arch-rascals, the very scum of all the most evil people on earth. You are full of
all the worst devils in hell – full, full, and so full that you can do nothing but vomit, throw and blow out devils!

  Luther’s rudeness (he also once wrote about the ‘dear little ass- pope’ who licks the devil’s anus) was strategic. He didn’t think it was possible to call out the pervasive and grotesque corruption of the Roman Catholic Church politely – to do so would be to neuter the potency of his anger. To protest effectively, he and his followers would have to disrupt how the establishment spoke as well as what it said. They had a moral duty to offend delicate sensibilities.

  Teresa Bejan, a political philosopher at Oxford University, has studied how the modern idea of ‘civility’ was formed in the religious and political controversies that raged in the long wake of Luther’s Reformation, as people in Europe and the New World struggled with the new problem of ‘tolerance’ – whether and how it was possible for people to live alongside those whose beliefs they despised. Bejan noticed something that the debates of colonial America had in common with those of the present: handwringing about a decline in civility. Anglicans would lecture atheists on how offensive their views were, without addressing their arguments. Quakers were shunned for not doffing hats and for their disgusting habit of shaking hands – if they couldn’t even be civil, didn’t they deserve to be persecuted?

  Bejan set out to write a book arguing that ‘civility’ is a tool fashioned by the powerful with the aim of suppressing dissent and disagreement. But in the course of her research, she changed her mind. Someone persuaded her that the true purpose of civility is to create space for uncomfortable and even angry disagreements. That person was an Englishman, born in 1603.