Week 11: Pride and Purpose
The antidote to DARVO Man may be national service, encouraging hospitality, and building far more houses
This week I published a piece that tied together my work on domestic abuse and foreign policy titled – From Davos To DARVO. I love a conceptual framework, so there was an alliterative opportunity to move from Davos Man to DARVO Man so I ran with it. The piece is an expansion on a previous essay I wrote called Our Reckoning With Machismo.
The piece was also designed to highlight that if we truly want to understand the era that we are in we need to start thinking about the psychology of abuse. My work on the family court is not some sidetrack from my day job in Australian foreign policy, it is the same thing. These issues aren’t siloed because we have entered into a far more personalised world of foreign policy. Where the behaviour of states is less tied to institutionalise conceptions of national interests and more tied to the individual resentments and entitlements of certain key actors.
So we need to understand the psychological drivers of this behaviour. Jennifer Freyd’s concept of DARVO – Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender – gets to the heart of the world we are now in. But it also enhances our understanding of the permanent problem of both domestic and international politics – the vainglory described by Thomas Hobbes.
Anyone who has taken a course in political science or philosophy will have most likely started with Hobbes. And our objective is to move beyond a “Hobbesian world”. But now Hobbes is back front and centre. Waiting for us within whatever issue du jour we find ourselves facing.
The biggest task is not just identifying our problem with vainglory, it is how we seek to subdue it. How do we cultivate character, modesty and humility instead? Last year I wrote an article following the Helsinki Security Forum on Finland’s doctrine of “total defence”, where I highlighted the Finns mandatory military service for men and the personal attribute this builds:
Finland also has mandatory military service for all men at age 18. This includes a minimum of six months of basic training – more depending on the designated role for each individual. Following this training, each man is placed in a reserve unit until they are 50 years old, or 60 for those of a higher rank. Throughout these years, men are obligated to undertake refresher exercises of at least 40 days to maintain their skills. National service is voluntary for women, but a record number are participating since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In total, close to one-third of Finland's population can be called upon at short notice.
Alongside manpower, Finland’s national service also instils a strong public sense of duty and responsibility, built on individual recognition of the stakes. It has developed a culture where personal integrity is important, good faith is intrinsic, and service is not scoffed at. The country’s national character – embodied by the term sisu – is one of stoic determination and an action-oriented mindset. It is no coincidence that the Finns consistently rank as the world’s happiest people.
This would currently be deemed a political non-starter in Australia, and also viewed with deep cynicism within progressive circles. But I’m starting to think that some form of national service is increasingly essential – especially for young men. How else would the country build the civic virtues that progressive politics claims to stand for? These things don’t just happen via furrowed brows and pointing fingers. There needs to be institutionalised arrangements.
Both the Finns and the Swedes have been the innovators in what they call “psychological defence” – which involves the ability to withstand crises and be resistant to malign information. But it’s also about building a sense of responsibility and outward thinking within individuals. To overcome the toxic mix of narcissism and encouraged insecurity that dominates our modern cultures. One that is proving deeply destabilising.
In my newsletter from a couple of weeks ago I wrote that over the past few years I’d become the welcoming committee for Swedish students studying in Melbourne. This has combined with the current housing crisis in Australia to lead me to take in a couple of students struggling to find a place to live.
There are some big ideas here about Australian foreign policy, so I thought I’d flesh them out a bit more for the Lowy Institute’s publication, The Interpreter – in a piece called Betting the house on Australia’s soft diplomacy.
Australia has made the concept of “whole-of-nation” a central pillar of its foreign policy approach. For this to be more than just a slogan, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade needs to think seriously about issues that it may not consider its traditional purview. Of course, state governments and local councils bear heavy responsibility here too. As do the universities themselves – with some student accommodation seemingly designed to extract more money from international students rather than provide them with the housing they need to pursue their studies.
Yet within this failure of responsibility from governments and institutions lies an opportunity. An opportunity for ordinary citizens to pick up the slack and see themselves as active foreign policy actors. As capping student numbers is a self-defeating policy, there’s a chance instead to see your spare room or granny flat as a tool of Australia’s influence in the world. To give the government’s “whole-of-nation” concept some real substance – to give each of us a role in its application.
However, as well as foreign policy, this also leads back to our problem with vainglory. Our objective should be to measure our success as human beings by our usefulness to others. It’s important to use our capabilities in an outward-facing manner. And this is what actually gives us a sense of contentment – rather than an inward-facing obsession with the self.
This personal sense of purpose obviously scales up to broader civic gains. Especially when we’re thinking about how we counteract our current wave of destabilisation. This is something I wrote about recently for The Diplomat in regards to Australia’s new International Gender Equality Strategy. Men need a tighter leash, but one that works to harness their prideful instincts. This could be through something like national service, or something a simple as being hospitable.
However, although we should encourage the best in people, I do worry about the worst. Reports from the UK in recent years of predatory men abusing a scheme designed to house Ukrainian refugees is sickening. The housing crisis in Australia does create conditions ripe to be exploited by scumbags. So there’s caveats here. But a culture of civic virtues can over time weaken the worst instincts within masculinity.
While we can connect these personal attributes to foreign policy goals, the missing middle here is how our domestic polities create the adverse conditions that require extraordinary measures.
A recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show highlights just how difficult and expensive it has become to build in certain areas of the United States. With the same phenomenon occurring in similar countries like Australia. Because of this, people are priced out of the most opportunity-laden areas of these countries. Opportunity is being hoarded by those who already live fabulously comfortable lives – and I don’t just mean the ultra-wealthy here.
The success of our societies is measured by how accessible opportunity is to the least well-off. This success requires a far greater ease of building things like housing and train lines. As well as making it far cheaper to do so. The opposite is occurring.
There’s a bigger new theory of governance required here – one that reassesses what it is that government should be doing, and what it shouldn’t be doing. But it’s worth watching this episode to get a sense of how backwards governance has become on the essential things we need.