Today I watched two stories unfolding on television that, at first, seemed unrelated. One was about Middlesbrough, where two police officers had recently been killed in a horrific collision connected to suspected organised criminal activity. The other was political: arguments about immigration, religion, national identity, churches becoming mosques, flags and the national anthem. Yet after reading Hobbes’s chapter on reason and absurdity, I began to see a connection between them. It was not simply a connection between crime and politics, but between reality and the language through which we are persuaded to understand it.

Cleveland’s Chief Constable, Victoria Fuller, described communities facing serious crime, drug addiction, organised gangs and fear. Her force polices an area with the highest recorded crime rate in England and Wales, yet she says it has suffered the country’s largest reduction in police officers since 2010. She spoke of deprivation, unemployment, school absence, mental-health problems and young people with so little confidence in the state that criminal organisations can offer them the belonging and aspiration they cannot find elsewhere. These are not abstract problems. They enter streets, homes and families. Cars have been used to ram properties. Firearms have been recovered. People live with consequences that political language cannot wish away.

At almost the same time, the political conversation seemed to be somewhere else. Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf attracted controversy after drawing attention to the Somali birthplace of Labour politician Sagal Abdi-Wali and asking his followers, “Do you understand what’s happening?” The remark was condemned as racist by Labour politicians and criticised by some figures within Reform itself. Suella Braverman, meanwhile, was proposing that schools should regularly sing the national anthem, recite hymns, fly the Union flag and teach what she calls a patriotic curriculum.

Immigration, integration, religion and national identity are legitimate political questions. A democracy must be able to discuss them. But I found myself asking a different question: when does political language stop helping us understand a problem and begin deciding where we should direct our anger?

Hobbes suddenly became relevant.

In Chapter V of Leviathan, Hobbes describes reason as a kind of reckoning. We begin with names, establish what they mean, connect propositions and follow their consequences towards a conclusion. But he also warns us about absurdity. If the words at the beginning are confused, ambiguous or improperly understood, reason does not necessarily rescue us. We may simply become better at travelling towards the wrong conclusion.

Politics gives this problem extraordinary power because political language rarely enters an empty mind. It enters minds already carrying fear, disappointment and resentment.

Imagine someone living in a neighbourhood where crime has increased, drugs are visible, public services feel weaker and the police appear unable to maintain control. Their fear is not imaginary. Their anger may be entirely understandable. They know something has gone wrong because they live among its consequences.

But knowing that something is wrong is different from knowing why.

That gap between experience and explanation is where political language becomes powerful.

A deprived community is difficult to explain. Its condition may contain decades of unemployment, education, policing, housing, addiction, family breakdown, public spending, organised crime and political decisions made by successive governments. No single cause explains everything. Serious explanation therefore requires patience, evidence and an uncomfortable willingness to admit uncertainty.

Anger does not have the same patience.

Anger wants a name.

Give a complicated problem a visible enemy and suddenly the world becomes easier to understand. You are struggling. They have arrived. Therefore they are the reason you are struggling. The first statement may be true. The second may also be true. Yet the conclusion does not automatically follow from either of them.

This is precisely where Hobbes’s idea of reason matters. A conclusion must follow from what came before it. Otherwise we have not discovered a consequence; we have merely placed statements beside one another and allowed emotion to complete the argument.

This is why Yusuf’s question interested me more than an ordinary political statement would have: Do you understand what’s happening? The power of such a question lies partly in what it does not say. It does not need to provide the conclusion. The reader is invited to provide it. A birthplace is presented, suspicion is introduced, and the mind completes what has been left unfinished.

Sometimes suggestion is more powerful than argument because an argument must expose itself. It gives us premises that can be examined and a conclusion that can be challenged. Suggestion can leave the most important proposition inside the mind of the listener.

There is another uncomfortable side to this. While Reform was directing public attention towards questions of nationality, religion and patriotism, the party itself was facing an undercover investigation concerning political donations. Channel 4’s investigation alleged that senior figures discussed ways around restrictions on foreign political funding. Two aides stepped down pending Reform’s investigation; Nigel Farage has denied that the party accepted foreign money unlawfully, and the matter is being assessed by police. The allegations therefore remain allegations, not established guilt.

But the contrast made me think about attention itself as a political resource. A politician cannot make every problem disappear, but they can influence which problem occupies the public mind. If people are discussing flags, religion, ethnicity and national identity, they are not discussing something else. Political power therefore operates not only through the answers politicians give us, but through the questions they persuade us to keep asking.

This temptation is not confined to the political right. The left can reduce complicated economic problems to “the rich”; governments can blame international forces for failures created partly at home; opposition parties can describe every social problem as evidence of government incompetence. Every political movement is tempted by the same shortcut: take a complicated chain of causes, find the part that most excites your supporters, and make that part appear to explain the whole.

Perhaps Hobbes gives us a defence against this.

Before accepting the conclusion, return to the names. What exactly is meant by immigration, patriotism, crime, British values, deprivation or integration? Then examine the consequence. Does the conclusion actually follow from the evidence, or have fear and repetition created a connection that reason has never established?

This requires more effort than outrage. It is much easier to become angry than to trace causes. It is easier to share a sentence than investigate the assumptions hidden inside it. And perhaps this is why absurd political language can be so effective. It does not always defeat reason. Sometimes it simply reaches us before reason has begun.

The people living in frightened communities deserve better than that. Their problems are real enough to demand real explanations. If policing is inadequate, ask why. If organised crime recruits young people, ask what makes recruitment possible. If immigration creates particular pressures, identify them and demonstrate the consequences. If integration is failing, define what successful integration would mean. Difficult questions should not be avoided because they are politically uncomfortable, but neither should easy enemies be offered in place of difficult answers.

Hobbes taught me something unexpectedly useful this week. The danger is not only that politicians may lie to us. The greater danger is that they may give our anger a name and allow us to finish the argument ourselves.

Perhaps our responsibility as citizens is therefore not merely to ask whether a political statement sounds true, patriotic, compassionate or outrageous. We should ask something colder and more difficult:

What conclusion am I being led towards?

What are the premises?

Does one actually follow from the other?

Because once anger has supplied the conclusion, reason often arrives too late.

Before choosing a side, return to the argument.

Before accepting the enemy, examine the cause.

And before allowing someone else to name your anger, reason.