I used to joke that hope-based thinking stops at Arsenal. So to celebrate us finally winning the title after 22 years, here is a half-serious post about disappointed hope.
Like activists, Arsenal fans spend their lives emotionally preparing for events that haven’t happened yet.
When the Arsenal win a match, I enjoy it for a few minutes. Then I start checking the fixture list for the next match. It’s surprisingly hard to just tune out football news between matches.
Football fans constantly search for news that helps us predict how the team will perform in future: check the fixture list, when injured players come back, what the opposition are doing. And between seasons: transfer news.
This is a symptom of our brain’s addiction to future information. It shows how deeply humans crave certainty about the future.
If you saw people whispering “this could be the year” in a corner this year, it was probably Arsenal fans (or Hungarian activists).
Twenty-two years of failure have only reinforced my tendency to lower expectations. Within every season and every game, I must always expect it to go wrong. Being top of the league or 2-0 up is dangerous because, what if we lose? It’s the one area of life where I continue to insist on “not getting my hopes up”.
This attitude still creeps into other areas of life, making me less likely to reach out for opportunities: don’t apply for things, you will probably be rejected.
So in football it’s harmless, in activism it means we lower our chances of making change before we have even begun.
Having said that, there is a form of hope that I am suspicious of. Even when 3-0 down, I still harbour some belief that we can come back. My desperate hope that the populist will not win the election can cloud my judgement when predicting elections. But I would say this is more optimism than the kind of organised hope I espouse in hope-based communication.
How do you tell the difference? Hope informs how we act today in a constructive way: if it’s goal-directed, it’s hope.
Two groups of people who struggle to enjoy success: Arsenal fans and activists.
Arsenal were somehow top of the league all year while playing terrible football. Being the best was never so horrible.
As for activists, hands up who has issued a statement when something goes right that goes along these lines:
“This is a good step, but there is much more to be done.”
But failure to internalise our collective power to make change makes us less motivated and ambitious for future work.
As part of a new set of mindset tools for activists I am developing, I plan to create a tool for naming success in advance, so that when it happens, we can actually recognise it and feel good about it. It’s too easy to shrug off the progress once its happened.
After all, Arsenal just won the league, and I somehow feel a mix of numbness, exhaustion and relief!
What happens if we achieve change but it doesn’t make things better? This is a challenge after revolutions (like Tunisia post-2011), where the narrative is growing that “things were better before”. This helps authoritarians who promise a return to stability, and makes us less likely to resist in future.
Revolutions and other big wins create high expectations. But change is slow, hard work. Often, a progressive candidate is swept to power by a wave of enthusiasm, but then momentum ebbs away once they are in power. We are quick to criticise the politicians who disappoint us, but often activists themselves could do more to build public support for change.
Activists need to tell a more balanced story of change, recognising the small steps that are taken, and accounting for barriers that will naturally occur along the way.
This might be where activists can learn from sports fans and their incredible capacity to bounce back after setbacks. Fans are good at focusing on process goals, not just outcome goals. They know that loss is part of the process. And they make wins taste all the sweeter.
Crucially, the shared experience of losing together builds bonds that last forever. And it is experience, not logic, that drives belonging and support. Lucky the political movement that matches the solidarity and loyalty football clubs enjoy. I dream of a world where people care as much about human rights as they do their football club. Find me people who look at the UDHR the way Arsenal fans look at Sir Ian Wright.
Ernst Bloch does not treat disappointment as failure of hope.
“The most important thing is learning hope.”
“Hope is educated by disappointment.”
“Even when expectations are disappointed, the anticipatory consciousness remains.” (in other words, there is always next season).
I am always fascinated by my own bias when watching football. You feel pure conviction that your team are morally righteous; our rivals are the dark side. The referee is against us. The foul on our player is clearly a penalty. The opposition goal was never onside. I genuinely can’t see it any other way. And I cannot understand how anyone would see it differently.
But this identity-protective cognition is there in our politics too. The more certain we feel, the more we should question ourselves. Because our brains crave certainty more than truth: the brain uses new information to confirm our intuition, not test it.
Recognising when our brain is working like a fan’s can help us train our ability to change our minds and think differently. This can make us better at perspective taking and recognising difference, key traits of empathy that we need to mutual understanding.
We know how quickly in/out group identities can form. Being a football fan might strengthen that ideological thinking as above. But it could also teach us to recognise group think so that we spot it in our politics as well.
“The path of wisdom on identity politics is to be mindful of which of our identities are being activated, so that we can become intentional about which identities we work to activate. Like a muscle or a neural pathway, the identities we use most grow strongest, the ones that lie fallow weaken.” - Ezra Klein
The question for the human rights movement is how we can create multiple overlapping identities (here football can help, as Arsenal’s diverse global fanbase shows) and if we can create a shared human identity that does not require an “other”.
For the latter, we could test whether there are symbols that can take on this universal human family significance. You can connect to an Arsenal fan anywhere in the world just by seeing the crest or jersey.
Could simple symbols of shared humanity prompt us to recognise our shared humanity when we encounter other people in our lives?
Here is a note of hope. We form close in-group identity to clubs and out-group rivalry with other clubs. But researchers also see a wider connection among football fans, who recognise each other as part of a shared culture. So maybe there is hope for humanity yet, and not just those who support the Arsenal!
Thanks for indulging this post. Normal service will resume next week!
Report from IRIS: New tech, new rules. I particularly like the place-based audio walks case study of our friends Alharaca: a glimpse of what comms focused on micro-audiences might look like.
Monarch butterflies on the move. And a UN migration exhibition they inspired.
“Some solutions are radical, most are hiding in plain sight” - new book highlighting policy solutions from around the world.
Isn’t it obvious?
“In experimental studies, I found again that your cognitive rigidity is correlated with your endorsement of ideological violence against an outgroup. The more inflexible you are, the more willing you are to harm others in the name of your group. Our cognitive tendencies are stitched with our ideological proclivities.”
In The Ideological Brain, Leor Zmigrod says that far-left are as cognitively inflexible as far-right:
“Both extremes struggled to adapt, to invent, to change mental schemas, even in neutral and nonpolitical situations…the most flexible individuals are nonpartisans who lean to the left.”
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