Advocates for advancement

Focus groups are the new must have assurance benchmark. Taken from a representative selection of economic, political, racial, sexual, or whatever background to accurately reflect our whole society. Their responses being the final arbiter on what is deemed acceptable. Trouble is the populace at large is conservative, looking within itself for reassurance of what might be agreeable. all very self-referential. A classic recipe for mediocrity, dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, do nothing which stands out, adventurous or pushes out the established and comfortable boundaries.

There are two generalisations which my experiences have found to be true. That fifty five percent of the population will resist any change from what they are familiar with. It matters not how agreeable and beneficial the changes might turn out to be. Any change is to be resisted and grumbled over. The other thirty five percent of the population are willing to consider change and will weigh up the pros and cons for the effects on them. The last ten percent are the adventurous creative individuals who look out and beyond for new ideas and initiatives and have a personal energy to pursue and promote these distant aspirations. Secondly it takes about fifty years for a novel idea to permeate society, becoming a norm for the generations after the next, by which time, it is the acceptable norm for new change to be compared back to it.

If our society is to escape from this path to mediocrity, this dumbing down so only a small handful can find anything to complain about, to find a path to progress keeping abreast of technological developments, we are going to need a new class of leaders. We just cannot afford to wait for the masses to catch up before any new change is implemented. We need inspirational charismatic leaders but not just TV presentable smoothies with the glib sound bites that say next to nothing. We need what we had in the past, raw-edged, passionate, even verbose spokespersons but, most of all, with a vision for a future. A vision they can wrap up in words that resonate. Maybe not their own vision, may be a vision they have adopted but at least the expression of a vision of a new future. Able to offer words and images that will inspire and stir. A person able to lift the spirit to see a new attainable Eden. Not the rhetoric to be found surviving the cutting and dicing of the focus groups.

To shake off our feet of clay, the media we have now become reliant on, has to find the courage to seek out those visionaries that can see beyond to a future we may aspire too. Bold hopes. We need to be led and we need leaders able to see ahead with the stamina to get us there, overcoming all the doubting thomas's on the way.