The success of our modern consumerist world hinges on our raging desire for novelty, a concept that underpins the new models of widgets each year paradigm, although the changes may only be cosmetic.
Our drive for novelty is helped along by our insatiable need for new, whether that be a new widget or, as the case in Victoria just recently, a new government.
This conversation is not about our displaced government being good or bad, or whether that which replaced is better or worse, rather it is about entropy, the fact that everything we know and understand is subject to depreciation and, ultimately, death.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics explains entropy, but here is not the time or place to discuss it, rather simply consider the decay of all around you, including yourself, and in accepting the reality of entropy, live with it rather than attempt to forestall it.
Governments that have reached the end of their “cycle”, assuming they are still operating relatively successfully, have simply not refreshed their image sufficiently to underpin their novelty.
It is a sad state of affairs when the future wellbeing of our communities hinges on our distorted, and often perverse, need for novelty, something fresh and so something new, not necessarily better, rather just fresh and new.
Also, it is worth noting that the word “new” is considered to be the most powerful word in advertising lexicon, followed closely today after decades of mass produced foods by the term “fresh”.
New and fresh appear to be antidotes to entropy, a concept most might not think about too much, but which are instinctively reassuring to people who are presently wrestling with the possibility of their demise brought about by human induced changes to our climate.
