Unintended consequences

Reading the famous article “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action” by Robert K Merton, you would learn that the first two sources he identified of unanticipated consequences are “ignorance” and “error,” followed by “imperious immediacy of interest,” ie, when one wilfully ignores possible drawbacks because the desire for the intended outcome is so strong.

“Basic values” is the next reason that things do not turn out as intended. So, for example, if we believe that a negative outcome of the modus operandi is inevitable, such as the planet running out of food because of population explosion, we change our value system, and our actions then pervert the original anticipated consequence.

Therefore, Malthusian warnings eventually led to the practice of birth control and technology that averted mass famine globally.

Most of us who were turned off by US President Donald Trump’s bullying, unsympathetic nature when on the campaign trail and then floored by his unexpected win are being buoyed up by that very phenomenon of him having the opposite effect of what he intended.

In the last week we have seen Mr Trump inadvertently galvanize international opinion on the thorny issue of global warming and unleash a new and unimagined collective determination to save the planet. Extricating the US from the hard-won Paris accord on climate change has created a backlash even at home for Mr Trump.

Many states and big businesses have promised to continue their work on reducing their country’s enormous carbon footprint and looking for the economic advantage in developing new, cleaner energy technology, abandoning federal government to its backward policies.

We have also seen Europe close ranks, and an unexpected assertion of the alliance between China and Europe leap into the gap created by the US’s new isolationist policies.

The US in the person of its incumbent President definitely does not want to be unpopular.

Mr Trump is desperate to be popular, but like the playground bully he does not know how to make true friends or understand that personal power is not everything.

His reaction to being laughed at is mean, as in the unfolding political debacle in the Gulf region.

He realises the world is not laughing at the US but at its President and his close advisers who seem to be informed by an extremely narrow and erroneous view of the world and of people.

President Trump’s actions are good illustrations of another idea in sociology of “antagonistic identity formation” in which people identify themselves “in opposition to,” rather than “because of.” Good role models are believed to be key in shaping character and identity but deciding that you do not wish to be like this or that person is as powerful a shaping agent.

Are we seeing, therefore, an international loss of US power in the eyes of ordinary men and women everywhere who see the values represented by the White House incumbent as anathema to the sense of a common good? Interestingly, we may have another victim of unintended consequences in British Prime Minister Theresa May, who called a snap election in order to acquire a strong mandate to negotiate Brexit but her own penny-pinching socio-economic policies mean that in today’s race to 10 Downing Street she will probably not secure what she sought but rather elevated the leader of the opposition Labour Party and its lacklustre leader Jeremy Corbyn.

And as for TT, why does the Law Association really want Chief Justice Ivor Archie’s head? The attorneys would do better to put all their cards on the table.

Or do they want to mash up the place?