Perspective

Whatever we do, wherever we go, whatever we think we carry our past with us. All of our thoughts and actions carry tendrils that reach back into the past. Most tendrils may only go back into recent living memory, a large number may go back a few generations, a few may go back a long way to medieval times, such as the times of the plague, and one or two may stretch way back into the mist of time, the stone age or even beyond. We are inescapably tied to our past. It shapes and determines how we think for the future.

Today we are plagued by short-termism. This country in particular has no long-term investment view. What is the least input required to be able take out the grosses benefit, that is the ruling mantra. Our ancestors took pride in what they produced, mostly, they put all their skills into making something to hand on to the next generation. What they produced was their measure of worth, their public mark of where they stood in their community. Not for them the quick cheap fix, stuff it in nobody will notice or care. We have inherited those quality products and now routinely trash them with contempt. Today the labour cost is king whilst thousands are idle or employed in lowgrade drudgery work. But hey technology is changing so fast there is no point in making things to last anymore and robots do a much more consistent and faster job than any human. What do I care, nothing to do with me, I will just buy the next model upgrade and see if that works any better.

Sitting on top of this economic model that drives our culture are the Supermarkets, exploiting to the very limits, promoting and using every psychological trick to encourage us to revel in this throw away society. Buy more, buy cheaper, buy because its not going to be there tomorrow, buy, buy. To placate the institutional shareholdings who only look for the percentage gain this minute to the next minute and most certainly have no stake in a week, month or even a years strategy let alone any long term goal. The Supermarkets need to keeping increasing the amount they sell day by day. Squeezing their suppliers and manufacturers to cut corners, to cut standards, to cut quality, anything to reduce costs by that pence here or there. Cutting until just before the point of customer drift. Maintaining high standards and expectations, promoting a strive to improve quality and experience just are not their agenda. Lulled as we are into this false security of trusting our run-of-the-mill supplier, the Supermarket outlet. They are doing what is best for us. Ha. In our name they are corrupting the quality of life we depend on. They do not have a balance sheet on the numbers of people kept in production employment, the plunder of raw resources, the wanton accumulation of discard's to be tipped, they are just exploiting the economic model. The model which states labour is an key expense and throwaway is cheaper then longevity. 

Just remember there is nothing intrinsic about labour being a dominate cost factor, just as there nothing intrinsic about cheap throwaway technology. We are bright enough and creative enough to devise alternative economic models, if we choose to. Models, just for example, that reward local production, that reward least use of raw materials, that have long shelf life's, that have upgradeable platforms or reusable core components. There are lots of other options to consider, if we had the will. If we chose not to treat our Earth as infinite landfill site and face the reality of diminishing natural resources. We could if only we cared. We might then rediscover a pride in what we passed on to our children.

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.