PM Malcolm Turnbull's legendary indecisiveness has been on display yet again this week. His response to the dual citizenship crisis has been wishy-washy. His failure to do anything about the Manus Island horror helps confirm that he is a lank and weedy leader.
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No wonder recent insightful pieces in unimpeachable Fairfax publications have had headlines thundering "Malcolm Turnbull is Australia's weakest and most indecisive prime minister since Billy McMahon" and "Malcolm Turnbull is drowning in a sea of indecision and ambivalence."
All of this newsy indecisiveness enables your columnist to mention a lovely, new(ish), poetic-sounding but scientifically-supported theory of why people procrastinate. I've put off writing about it for far too long.
It is a theory that applies to all procrastinators, everywhere, not just to do-nothing prime ministers and to MPs who dilly dally in checking their nationality status.
I am grateful to the brain-tickling online magazine Nautilus for its precis of this theory.
The theory is that when we think of our future selves, even our near-future selves, we think of that person as a stranger. And so we don't feel confident about making decisions for him or her. Perhaps today's hesitant Malcolm doesn't know who tomorrow's Malcolm will be and what that mystery Malcolm will believe.
The notion begins with British philosopher Derek Parfit. He says that we humans are not just one person moving through time, but a chain of successive selves, each one quite distinct from the previous and subsequent ones.
So for example the schoolboy begins to smoke despite being told he will one day suffer from the habit. "This boy does not identify with his future self," Parfit writes. "His attitude towards this future self is in some ways like his attitude to other people."
Nautilus reports that some research psychologists now fancy that Parfit may be right about our decision-making, that we see our future selves as strangers. Though we will inevitably share their fates, the people we will become … are unknown to us.
Nautilus deduces that "This impedes our ability to make good choices on their - which of course is our own - behalf. That bright, shiny New Year's resolution? If you feel perfectly justified in breaking it, it may be because it feels like it was a promise someone else made."
Nautilus describes some wondrous scholarly experiments done by psychologists with human guinea pigs, based on this big idea and appearing to endorse it. You can read all about them online in the Nautilus piece Why We Procrastinate.
This nifty essay concludes that "The disconnect between our present and time-shifted selves has real implications for how we make decisions. We might choose to procrastinate, and let some other version of our self deal with problems. Or, as in the case of Parfit's smoking boy, we can focus on that version of our self that derives pleasure, and ignore the [future] self that pays the price."
Yes, instead of being so scathing about our hesitating PM let us imagine him as just a confused schoolboy. There he is, readers, skulking behind the cycle shed with his cigarettes, unsure which of his successive selves he is this week and might be next week.
By contrast with our PM the US's Special Counsel investigating Trump's Russian skulduggeries seems a decisive man. But we should still give him all the help we can.
"Almighty God," I find myself praying, paraphrasing the prayer with which our heathen politicians open federal parliament's proceedings, "we humbly beseech Thee to vouchsafe thy special blessing on Special Counsel Robert Mueller."
"Direct and prosper his work as he searches for grounds to impeach Donald Trump, thus delivering all of mankind from evil. Amen."
I am an atheist, usually, but the horror of the Trump presidency is so horrific that it can do no harm to appeal to God (just in case He does exist) to smite this presidency.
There is great urgency about this. The dynamic D.R. Tucker captures that urgency this week in his anxious piece The Case For Pre-emptive Impeachment (a ripper read, catch it online).
"It is inevitable that the Mueller investigation will discover the smoking gun of unprecedented illegality in the Trump administration. It is inevitable that Trump will stoop to any depth to retain his ill-gotten power in the wake of such a revelation. It is inevitable that the path Trump chooses to retain power will be catastrophic in its scope.
"Why not move to avoid the worst possible outcome? Why not move to impeach and remove Trump from the White House as quickly as politically possible?
"Does anyone doubt that as Mueller gets closer to the truth, the 45th President will try to trump up the case for another military misadventure in an effort to prevent the ouster of a sitting President in wartime? Does anyone doubt that he's crazy enough to plough headlong into nuclear war with North Korea? The remedy of impeachment is to remove the officeholder. Get the worm out of the apple. It's a prophylactic remedy."
Yes, there's no time to waste. No wonder some of the best-selling items of Mueller merchandise (you can buy them online) are T-shirts that plead "Hurry up, Mueller!" and "Dear Bob Mueller, Please hurry, [signed] The World."
