For those of you who don’t read the Guardian, or the “Comment is Free” pages on the web, this piece from George Monbiot is his usual mix of utter depression with a spark of possible hope in the tail.
In a nutshell, we’ve been moving rightwards since the late 70s, away from collective responsibility, to a Thatcherite/Free Market mindset based on ‘see, want, have.’ and we would-be progressives, far from dragging us back from that, have joined in the rush to the precipice. His answer is to start charging in the opposite direction. I’m interested to know quite how that can be done…. Open to suggestions.
Excerpt here:
So here we are, forming an orderly queue at the slaughterhouse gate. The punishment of the poor for the errors of the rich, the abandonment of universalism, the dismantling of the shelter the state provides: apart from a few small protests, none of this has yet brought us out fighting.
The acceptance of policies which counteract our interests is the pervasive mystery of the 21st Century. In the United States, blue-collar workers angrily demand that they be left without healthcare, and insist that millionaires should pay less tax. In the UK we appear ready to abandon the social progress for which our ancestors risked their lives with barely a mutter of protest. What has happened to us?
The answer, I think, is provided by the most interesting report I have read this year. Common Cause, written by Tom Crompton of the environment group WWF, examines a series of fascinating recent advances in the field of psychology(1). It offers, I believe, a remedy to the blight which now afflicts every good cause from welfare to climate change.
and then
Common Cause proposes a simple remedy: that we stop seeking to bury our values and instead explain and champion them. Progressive campaigners, it suggests, should help to foster an understanding of the psychology which informs political change and show how it has been manipulated. They should also come together to challenge forces – particularly the advertising industry – which make us insecure and selfish.
