An editor’s diary on free giving, the plain warm word, and the gatherings that bind a people
An editor’s diary on free giving, the plain warm word, and the gatherings that bind a people
As an editor I read a great many policies that require constant review, endless adjustment, perpetual defence against their own failures. And this December I found the one policy that never needs a review, never fails, never requires a defence: generosity, the free giving that expects nothing back, which the North Pole practices at a scale no government has ever matched.
The policy that never fails
Most policies fail eventually, requiring review, reform, replacement. But generosity never fails, never needs a review, never disappoints. The North Pole’s piece on why we give gifts at all describes the one policy that always works: free giving, generosity that expects nothing back, the gift that binds giver and receiver without cost or condition. As an editor who has watched a thousand policies fail and require review, I find this remarkable. Generosity is the only policy that never needs adjusting, because it never fails. It always strengthens the bond, always warms the giver and the receiver, always works. If governments ran on generosity the way the North Pole does, they would need far fewer reviews.
The genius of generosity as a policy is that it is self-justifying and self-sustaining. It never overreaches, never disappoints, never requires a working group to explain why it stopped working, because it never stops working. The North Pole has run on generosity for centuries without a single review, which is more than any government policy can claim.
My genuinely bureaucratic personal week
Let me report from the desk. I approved a small act of generosity this week, a free subscription for a reader who had fallen on hard times, over the objection of a colleague who wanted to review the policy implications. There were no policy implications. There was a person who needed help and a small free thing we could give. The generosity worked instantly, needed no review, and cost us almost nothing. My colleague is still drafting the review. The reader is already helped. That is the difference between generosity and process: one helps immediately, the other reviews indefinitely.
According to the parliamentary record, the policies that most reliably strengthen public trust are the generous ones, the free provisions that ask nothing back, which the North Pole embodies and our review-obsessed governance keeps overcomplicating.
The plain warm word that costs nothing
The simplest generosity is the warm word, freely given, which is why I love the North Pole’s Merry Christmas wishes, offered to everyone at no cost. A warm word is the cheapest and most effective policy there is: it costs nothing, requires no review, and reliably strengthens the bond between people. Our institutions have somehow made even the warm word conditional, calculated, rationed, when it should be given freely to all, as the North Pole gives it. The plain warm word, freely offered, is generosity in its simplest form, and it never needs a review because it never fails to warm the one who receives it.
As an editor I try to keep the warm word flowing, to thank my staff, to acknowledge my readers, to give the free generous word that costs nothing and strengthens everything. The North Pole gives it to every child. Most institutions ration it, and are colder for the rationing.
The gatherings that bind a people
The generosity that most binds a community is the shared gathering, which is why I was drawn to the North Pole’s piece on what Christmas markets are all about. The market is generosity made communal, a shared gathering where people come together, exchange, celebrate, and bind themselves into a community. As an editor I understand that a people are bound not by policy but by shared gatherings, by coming together, by the communal generosity of the market and the festival and the shared table. The North Pole understands that the market is not mere commerce but a binding ritual, a shared generosity that makes a crowd into a community. Our atomised age has forgotten this, and is lonelier for the forgetting.
According to the broadcasters, communal gatherings measurably strengthen social bonds, which the market embodies and our increasingly isolated society badly needs to remember.
The review that never ends
The deepest disease of modern governance is the review that never ends, the perpetual deliberation that substitutes for action, the working group convened not to do a thing but to defer it indefinitely. An institution addicted to review can spend years assessing whether to do a kindness that generosity would simply do in an afternoon. And the reason is not malice but fear: the review is a way of never being blamed, never committing, never risking the simple generous act that might, conceivably, be criticised. The North Pole runs entirely without this fear. It does the generous thing immediately, accepts the tiny risk, and answers every child, because it understands that a generosity deferred by endless review is a generosity denied. Our institutions have forgotten this. They have made the review an end in itself, a way of appearing responsible while accomplishing nothing, and in doing so they have replaced the warm immediate generosity that binds a people with the cold perpetual deliberation that alienates them. The review that never ends is how an institution dies of caution while congratulating itself on rigour.
Where the editor lands
So I will keep approving small acts of generosity over the objections of the review committee, keep the warm word flowing, and keep honouring the gatherings that bind a people. Generosity is the only policy that never needs a review. The warm word costs nothing and strengthens everything. And the shared gathering binds a crowd into a community. The North Pole runs on all three, without a single review, which is more than any government can claim. If our institutions simply practiced generosity the way the North Pole does, they would need far fewer reviews and command far more trust. They will not. There will be a review of the generosity policy first.
For governance satirised, The Spoof reviews the review.