Horace Camp: Escape from the echo chamber

My name is Horace Camp. I’m a contrarian – not recovering, not ashamed, just unrepentantly so.

In a world where nodding along has become a survival strategy, I still find value in shaking my head. It’s not that I enjoy being difficult (well, maybe just a little), but I’ve lived long enough to know that the crowd is often wrong – and that someone has to speak up when the emperor strolls by naked.

I have been a contrarian from a very young age – in fact, from the first moment my tiny little feet in their sandals and socks crossed the portal of Amherst Infant School. It was clear to me that my teacher had a completely different perspective on colouring pencils than I did. And not only colouring pencils, but also rainbows.

Without fully realising the gift that colour blindness had presented to me, I was already well on my way to becoming who I am today. Even someone in such a powerful position over me as my reception teacher did not always see the world as I did. And neither of us was wrong about the colour of an individual colouring pencil – I could respect her position, but she seemed to have a real problem with mine.

I did compromise on rainbows and drew them with equal bands of several colours, even though I knew full well that that was not how I saw them. There was no right or wrong – just our different perspectives.

But it wasn’t just colours. A little further along my educational journey – still in infant school – I realised that my teachers’ infallibility didn’t stop at colour perception. It was important to fact-check everything they told you. And here’s how I found that out.

For some unknown reason, the class was asked in which country we would find the Statue of Liberty. Precocious Horace – I was born middle-aged – asked for clarification: was she asking about the original one? Of course, she said, and so I answered, ‘France’.

Crushed by her insistence that I was wrong – that it was in fact in the United States of America – and silenced in my defence, I was determined to prove her wrong. The next day, armed with a heavy volume from the encyclopaedia stored under my bed, I marched off for my first engagement with an authority figure.

She was somewhat perplexed, but before she could gather her thoughts, I opened to the appropriate page where it clearly stated that the first iteration of the Statue of Liberty – a much smaller version – was in Paris, and had inspired the great gift to the United States.

I learnt an important lesson that day, one that has served me well. Now that I was aware of my superpower, I had to learn how to control it and use it responsibly.

I once tried to explain to someone how I took in information.

I said I worked like Asdic – and was met with a certain amount of teenage-boy humour, forgetting most people call it Sonar. When I meet someone with more knowledge in a subject than I have, I like to counter what they say by sending out a ‘beep’. That beep strikes them, and their response is carried back to me with a ‘pong’. More teenage amusement followed. But by challenging the other, I could learn so much more, as they defended their position more fully than if they assumed we agreed.

This approach wasn’t received too badly back in the day, when the world was a sensible place and everyone was entitled to an opinion. But today, it’s a more difficult method to employ – when everyone expects total agreement. Especially from the successful, educated elite who really ought to know better.

Which is why, on a well-known and popular Facebook group, I tried a little experiment. As you probably already know, I’m not only a contrarian but also someone who enjoys taking the losing side in an argument and trying to turn it around. I am a supporter of the underdog.

Right now, I’m doing my best to put the Guernsey underdog firmly in the Overton window to catch the eye of candidates who may be able to help them out. Of course, in Guernsey, the underdog is anyone born here – or who arrived young and was educated here.

But as always, I endeavoured to be as balanced as possible and blamed only the poor decision-making of the political wing of the States of Guernsey. I never once pointed the finger at the good people who make up 47% of our population and were born somewhere else.

Because of the feedback I was getting – about being a Nazi – I decided to ask, in a poll with two options, whether group members thought I was racist and xenophobic or simply arguing the case for Sarnians. I was relieved when over 80% of the vote thought I wasn’t racist or xenophobic.

But how on earth could nearly 20% think I was? Come on, people. Do you know what those words actually mean? Do you really, in your heart of hearts, believe that I’m akin to a member of the Ku Klux Klan marching down the High Street with a flaming torch in one hand and a noose in the other?

And what was worse – it was the successful, educated elite who were most likely to denounce me. You know, the sort of people who say they’re most qualified to run Guernsey.

When you finally get your 400-page manifesto book with more than 100 candidates, use a bit of Guernsey common sense. When you read about all their qualifications and how successful they’ve been in business, ask yourself: is the way they see the world the way you want it seen?

Qualifications and success matter, of course. But you must look deeper – into their hearts, into their souls – and ask yourself: are they the sort of person who would think that Horace Camp, who believes in the people of Guernsey, is racist or xenophobic?

As for me, I’ll continue to speak up when the crowd goes silent. I’m a contrarian – and this is one Sarnian who will never bend the knee to the liberal elite who think they know best.