< PreviousSPRING 2024 esquir eme.com 100 P H OTO ESS A Y GREEN AGAIN • Ref 001 0Z6A2917 • The sun rises over the Oasis of Fint. Fint, a secluded oasis of just 1,200 people in central Morocco, enjoys water all year long thanks to a river that cuts right across it. Despite being just a few hundreds kilometres away, its lush green fields are a world apart from the windswept, cracked parcels in the oases of the Draa valley. With its crystalline pools, waterfalls and creeks Fint looks like a paradise on Earth, a sort of preserved replica of how oases used to be. SPRING 2024 esquir eme.com 101 P H OTO ESS A Y PROSPERITY • Ref 031 0Z6A3984 • Fruit and vegetables sold at the souk in the oasis of Rissani, in the Ziz valley. “Only ten years ago, oases were full of crops and greenery,” denounces Jamaal Akchbab, an environmental activist from the city of Zagora. “Eighty percent of the people in the area are small-scale farmers who depend on the date trade, and this place now is just a graveyard of palms. It’s heartbreaking.” Droughts have also brought wildfires, which in the past years destroyed tens of thousands of palm trees in various regions. Frequents droughts have forced countless families to progressively abandon their orchards, parcels and palm trees. PROSPERITY • Ref 006 0Z6A2938 • A woman from Fint washes clothes in a nearby river. For millennia, oases were a living symbol of human ingenuity and sustainable development. Their inhabitants were able to thrive in a completely man-made environment - and amid some of the world’s most hostile climates - by using their limited resources to their full potential. Oases were isolated ecosystems”, explains Abdelkarim Bouarif, the agronomist from Skoura. “People were forced to produce everything they needed, and they did so thanks to a know-how acquired in millennia of experimentations”. SPRING 2024 esquir eme.com 10 2 FEA TURE In the 21st century saying ‘no’ is so often considered ungracious, selfish or short-sighted. Indeed, self-help culture and the positivity movement ceaselessly tells us to say ‘yes’— to opportunity! To potential! To overcome our FOMO! So as to not upset others of a different opinion! But now psychologists are trying to wrestle back the good in declining— in standing firm and say ‘no’—and explaining why it’s both necessary for society and good for us. Here’s a short history of saying ‘no thanks’—why it’s done, and how to do it B Y JO SH SIM S In the 21st century saying ‘no’ is so often considered ungracious, selfish or short-sighted. t THE ART OF NO S AY INGSPRING 2024 esquir eme.com 10 3 FEA TURE T The phone rang at the home of John Galbraith, the influential American economist of the post-war period. His housekeeper answered. “He’s taking a nap,” she told the caller, “and left strict instructions not to be disturbed”. The caller remonstrated, “Well, I’m the President,” he said - it was the then US President Lyndon Johnson. “Wake him up”. “I’m sorry, Mr President, but no. I work for Mr Galbraith, not for you”. And she hangs up. When Lyndon Johnson finally made contact with Galbraith he asked who it was who had answered the phone. Galbraith explained, expecting some kind of admonishment. “I want her to work for me,” Johnson told him. In her he had recognised a rare quality: the ability, simply and directly, to say ‘no’. Indeed, following his predecessor John Kennedy’s idea, Johnson included in his cabinet a ‘devil’s advocate’, someone whose job it was to say ‘no’ when everybody was saying ‘yes’. We live, as Svend Brinkmann, professor of psychology at Aalborg University in Sweden, puts in, in a ‘yes society’. “The current culture is all about expressing the affirmative,” he argues. “Saying ‘yes’ requires no justification, though it seems that if you say ‘no’ you must always give reasons for doing so. The balance isn’t right. Just look at the workplace— it’s still shaped by ideas about self-development, growth, positivity. Someone who raises their hand to say ‘that’s not a good idea’ isn’t often welcomed. ‘No’ is conceived of as reactionary or conservative. And people who say ‘no’ are judged as being disruptive to the flow”. This is something that shouldn’t be surprising given that we are essentially animals that need the support of the pack to survive, creatures that tend to find a sense of affiliation through those ties most deeply felt—tribe or race over more abstract nation, for example. “Saying ‘no’ has always been tough because no matter the culture of origin, we’re always taught that helping others is positive, and focusing on the self to the exclusion of others is selfish,” explains Patrick King, social interaction consultant and author of How to Say No. “That’s the nasty keyword that has been ingrained in all of us since childhood. Don’t be selfish! But it is a complete platitude: what about prioritizing yourself and yet still being kind? That’s what gets lost”. It’s so self-help to say it but every ‘no’ is a ‘yes’ to something else. Nonetheless we’ve all felt the awkwardness of situations when we have been forced to say ‘no’, to a social engagement or piece of work perhaps. No, after all, is a word which, through usage, carries a load of what’s called emotional valance: just saying it or hearing it is a downer. Recent FMRI studies show that it prompts different neural activity: our sensitivity to the word is part of the developmental processes of our childhood experiences with caregivers. No’s use means paying the price of what Nicola Ulibarri, associate professor of environmental planning at the University of California Irvine, calls “emotional labour”. Although not a peer- reviewed experiment, in 2022 she and three colleagues set themselves the challenge of denying 100 work related requests over a 12 month period between them and recording how the process made them feel. “I thought that scaling up of saying no would be impossible for me, though actually the experiment gave me a kind of permission to say ‘no’. And I didn’t regret any time I said it,” says Ulibarri, who is now re-running the experiment with each of the participants now having to say ‘no’ 100 times by the end of this year. “I had always thought of myself as a team player and so would almost always say ‘yes’ to what was asked of me. After all, it’s human nature to protect the collective, to want to try to keep people happy—and one easy way to do that is to comply with their requests. We look to external validation (what other people think of us) rather than what’s right for us. Employers especially take advantage of this difficulty in saying ‘no’”. Don’t fall for it. A study, published last year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that the negative ramifications of saying no—to social invitations at least—are far less severe than we imagine them to be. Such is our fear of ‘no’, we assume everyone else is equally perturbed by it. Sorry to say, whether you’re at that party or not probably doesn’t matter much. And yet, Ulibarri adds, it seems to be human nature too to castigate those who do say no, even when the effect of doing so isn’t felt personally at all and resonates only in the abstract. It’s as if, she suggests, saying ‘no’ is as perceived as expressing a lack of gratitude. Take, for example, the inevitably negative media response to an individual’s decision to decline some honour. In the UK honours system, for instance, many have turned down the monarch’s offer of a knighthood or similar high recognition—among them T.E. Lawrence, Stephen Hawking, Pete Townshend and David Bowie (twice). Not that you know this until the rejection is leaked. As John Lennon once noted, “[Of course] before you get [your award] the Palace writes to ask if you’re going to accept it, because you’re not supposed to reject it publicly”. Public rejection invites especial ire, regardless of the motivation. When Marlon Brando declined his SPRING 2024 esquir eme.com 104 FEA TURE ‘Best Actor’ Oscar in 1973—because of the way Hollywood portrayed Native Americans—the crowed booed. When Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper was exemplary of the reaction. “It was an ineffectual and stupid gesture,” it wrote, “only an act of pretension to deny that [the award] has meaning and [to] not have the humility to accept this fact”. “That tells us something about the nature of our response to people who say no,” says Brinkmann, “because why should such a refusal cause such a stir? What is it to anyone except that individual? It’s as though they have not only turned down the honour but the institution behind it”. Yet saying ‘no’ matters. It matters for the individual. Dr. Sarah Caddy is a medical practitioner and director of Chimp Management, a consultancy that explores the potential of the so-called chimp model of human psychology—in essence, that the emotional ‘chimpanzee’ part of the brain acts first and fast to (among other things) prioritise acceptance within the troop, regardless of consequences, while the more rational ‘computer’ part of the brain may, given the chance to look for some evidence, reach a different conclusion. The chimp is louder and ever-ready to say yes to any salient stimulus even when, in fact, saying no would be more to our advantage. Caddy notes how much trouble a habitual inability to say no causes for many of her more chimp-minded patients, especially those who see some kind of outward, universe-embracing yes-ness as integral to their self-image. “They burn out because they [fall prey] to societal pressures that makes us feel we should be everything to everyone, because they can’t find a way of saying ‘no’ in a way that fits into the way they see themselves and their place in the world,” she says. Saying ‘no’ matters for society at large too. The ability to say ‘no’ can be seen as an expression of power: of course the likes of David Bowie—and other financially secure individuals—can say ‘no’, because they have what Humphrey Bogart is said to have referred to as his “f***-you money”. He would keep a US$100 bill in his dresser drawer— a month’s wages for most people back then— as a reminder that, as he saw it, the only good reason for making money was “so you can tell any son-of-a-b**** in the world to go to hell”. But for many the courage to say ‘no’ comes at a real cost, even for the rich or high status. When Muhammad Ali—then just 25—said he would not submit to the US Army draft to serve in Vietnam, his five-year-jail sentence may have been suspended, but his suspension by the boxing authorities effectively cost him what would have been the best years of his career. Again the public response was far from positive: “The tragedy is [that] Cassius has made millions of dollars off of the American public, and now he’s not willing to show his appreciation,” as the baseball legend Jackie Robinson had it. Ali at least had a safety net. What of whistleblower Frances Kelsey? She was the US Food and Drug Administration pharmacologist who, despite immense pressure from the makers of thalidomide, in 1960 risked her career in refusing to authorise the cancer drug’s use, owing to a lack of evidence for its safety. It was later found to cause birth defects. Or of Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers NFL team who refused to stand for the playing of the US national anthem before every American football game. He instead chose to kneel in protest as a symbolic gesture of the police brutality and racial inequality he believed was rife in the United States. His gestures were met by torrents of public abuse and death threats. “While [naysaying] is sometimes seen as stubborn or obdurate—and sometimes it is—I think people actually respect it when someone takes a position and sticks to it,” reckons William Kaplan, author of Why Dissent Matters: Because Some People See Things The Rest of Us Miss. “One of the things I have Marlon Brando boycotted the Oscars in protest of Hollywood treatment of Native Amercans, in 1973, when he was the winner for Best Actor category for his role as Vitto Corleone in The GodfatherSPRING 2024 esquir eme.com 105 FEA TURE And therein lies a challenge in the 21st century. Consumerism may have co-opted dissent since the 1960s, the counter-culture mainstreaming saying ‘no’ into a kind of ‘radical chic’, as Tom Wolfe called it; one that would, from that moment, be endlessly packaged and sold, our folk hero archetype today still that of anyone who stands alone on principle to stick it to ‘the man’. Now, Brinkmann argues, we have the influence of digital technology too. Algorithms are endlessly finessed to get us to say ‘yes’. Social media may be a forum for naysayers in the first place, but it thrives on vapid ‘likes’, lures with clickbait and soundbites, encourages that unsettling sense of FOMO, its bubbles and echo chambers affirming certain accepted behaviours and ways of thinking as the norm, its online communities afforded the tool by which they can shut down anything that deviates from it. This climate has also made it challenging to know what is and isn’t authentic dissent, as Andrew Potter, associate professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy in Montreal, has argued: in the social media age it’s not clear who has the power and who doesn’t; who is dissenting and who is being dissenting against; or even what dissent is. Are Edward Snowden and Julian Assange defiant of the system or corrupting of society? Hot button topics like climate change, immigration and identity quickly find their champions entirely dependent on which side you stand. Does, for example, Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, ever feel marginalised for his work on these often touchy topics? “Oh yeah, I’ve been a pariah amongst 50 percent of the social sciences people who are aware of what I’ve written,” he laughs. “It’s not a tolerant environment. There’s that awkwardness [in academia] that people know that other people are after you—cancel campaigns, internal investigations and so on— so there’s definitely pressure and attempts to censor [the wrong kind of nos]”. So we’re bothered by the naysayers while also recognising our need for them. No wonder we find saying ‘no’ and hearing it so challenging. Yet, as Potter notes, we continue to value the idea of saying ‘no’ to conformist thinking even if we’re unclear as to what shape it takes or whether it’s content is actually true. When, back in 2017, Pepsi aired a commercial in which Kendall Jenner diffuses a street protest by breaking off from a modelling shoot to give a cop a cola, this mocking of dissent in order to sell fizzy drinks saw the corporate giant soon forced to issue an apology. And quite right too: in these times of nos being such a rare commodity, we should not waste them so lightly. noticed over the years—I’m a professional neutral and work as a mediator in multi-party high conflict, high value disputes—is that the greatest ideas to resolve issues often come from an unexpected corner of the room”. Indeed, for all that such lone wolves crying out that the Emperor has no clothes may often be dismissed as cranks or irritants —only to sometimes be later vindicated— their challenges to the orthodoxy that most others have unthinkingly fallen into line with are critical to society’s thriving. Providing, that is, that their dissent is authentic. President Johnson may have installed Bill Myers specifically to argue against the administration’s position on Vietnam, but his cabinet soon started to mockingly refer to him as ‘Mr. Stop-The- Bomb’, sidelining his message because it was seen as a matter of convenience rather than of conscience. October 2, 2016, Eli Harold (#58), Colin Kaepernick (#7) and Eric Reid (#35 ) of the San Francisco 49ers take a knee, prior to the game in the NFL IMA GE : P ARAMOUNT PIC TURE S , MICHAEL ZA GARIS / GET T Y IMA GE S “SAYING NO MATTERS FOR SOCIETY AT LARGE TOO. THE ABILITY TO SAY NO CAN BE SEEN AS AN EXPRESSION OF POWER”XXXXXX 1. 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