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| The late Ann Rand who said culture cannot exist without a constant stream of ideas. |
And that sliver of integrity between good and evil has, for the want of ideas, obviously failed in parts of Great Britain.
That scarcity of ideas has been equalled on two recent occasions here in the Goulburn Valley, although with a distinctively different outcome, thanks to restraint of those who felt the sharp end of that dearth of ideas.
Little protects us from what we have witnessed in England with the levee that stands between us and that angry anarchy being nothing more than one good life-affirming idea upon another.
A poverty of ideas, or a life built around muscle, brutality and a disregard for others, brings upon those in that life, the chaos seen in Britain or to a lesser degree what has happened here – the closure by Heinz of its Girgarre plant and the sacking of 150 people from SPC Ardmona.
Interestingly it is not so much simply an absence of ideas that creates the vacuum, as it is also a failure to even consider that there might be a different, and better, way to do things.
The late author and philosopher Ann Rand said that a culture cannot exist without a constant stream of ideas and the alert, independent minds who originate them.
Sadly the freewheeling values of our commercial world are the reverse of what their proponents believe them to be as they are contrastingly quite narrow, being primarily about growth and profit for a few at the expense of many.
What began in Britain as something of a pillory of those values was quickly seen by others as an opportunity to promote different values and so it exploded socially, resulting in death, injury and theft, and property damage.
Ideas are the oxygen of anything and everything – it was little more than an idea that first saw the Girgarre plant opened; an idea closed it; and an idea will hopefully see it reborn.
Today’s commercial world is nomadic and responsive only to profit and growth, but that will change as our access to abundant energy ends, within a decade or so, and businesses that understand and are able to operate in a steady state economy, will finally be putting down roots.
When that happens, what we know and understand as civilization will be given a significant boost for following the death of globalization, international trade and travel, we will see the re-birth of the true local community; a tight-knit social structure that hinges on the well-being of people, not things.
Civilization, just like nature on which it depends, is fragile and should we treat either badly, they will change, sometimes beyond recognition.
