– English Lyrics

Lyrics & Translation

[English]

Things don't go smoothly when you're around people like this,

they shake things up.

So you need to ask yourself, what is it you want from your society?

Are you happy being... Are things good enough?

Is the status quo satisfactory enough

that you can all sit back and privilege agreeableness,

and say, "let's just all abide by the rules of civility,

and everything will be fine"?

Or do you think, actually,

there's much to be gained, as a society,

if we do change up the status quo,

and introduce an element of friction into the way we all behave.

What can we do as a society

that allows people to express their disagreeableness?

Are there ways in which we could make dissents, deviation, disagreement

just more palatable, more easier to do?

In the workplace, what do we think of as the role of a manager?

Is the role of a manager to tolerate dissent?

Or find a safe place for dissent?

Or to obliterate dissent?

A lot of managers actually try very, very hard to obliterate dissent.

They think that that's how their success ought to be measured.

Whereas this would suggest actually no,

maybe what we want from managers

is that people who ought to be managers

ought to be the people who have the thickest skins.

Ones who are just more...

Who are the most comfortable with some degree of friction

in those who are under their control.

And I think that's about how do you structure education

so that children are taught that it's OK sometimes to be rebellious

or questioning or sceptical?

Or that our willingness to tolerate disruptive behaviour

in people of our own kind,

is far greater than our willingness to tolerate in minorities.

In those who are powerless.

And what that leads to

is not just higher levels of punitive action

towards people in disadvantaged groups,

but also disadvantaged groups themselves

changing their behaviour to meet those different norms.

So you see among, for example,

in this country, African-American parents,

who privilege good behaviour in their own children as the most...

As kind of the primary end-point of childhood,

Whereas you see parents who are in the majority,

who will privilege achievements, good performance,

as the primary end-point.

You're going to privilege performance over behaviour,

if you're in the group that is allowed to behave

in unusual, disruptive, disagreeable ways.

And I think that is an unacknowledged source

of a great deal of inequity in modern life.

That we just have these different standards

for people on the inside and people on the outside.