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| Ben McLeish. |
Bravery as commonly
understood has not been a noted personal quality and as foolishness is
subjective, that decision rests with you.
Goulburn Valley voters opted on July 2 for what they saw as
security ahead of bravery and eschewed foolishness preferring imagined good
sense and predictability.
Any useful attempt to address the future demands bravery and a targeted foolishness, both being the antithesis of the nostalgia and ache for the
warmth of what is known and familiar as was illustrated by electors in the seat
of Murray.
The Goulburn Valley has
clearly profited from its adherence to conservative values, but no longer can
we shield ourselves from the future by grasping at what was.
Our shift to the future will
not be easy as it requires what Ben McLeish says is a “mass cognitive shift.”
McLeish, a primary organizer
of Britain’s Zeitgeist Movement and a student of English, Literary and Cultural
Theory who graduated from the University of Warick, said, writing in
“Anticipating 2025”: “Without a basic recognition of our fundamental
misalignment with nature, we cannot begin to harvest the great benefits that a decentralized,
truly participatory organizational model can afford; what has been termed as a
Natural-law/Resource-based economy.”
The same book quoted the late
economist John Meynard Keynes who said: “The idea of the future being different
from the present is so repugnant to our conventional modes of thought and behaviour
that we, most of us, offer a great resistance to acting on it in practice.”
So considering what McLeish and Meynard Keynes say and to
free ourselves of the conservatism that appears
to have opened the door to a Canberra office for Damian Drum and condemns us to
what once worked, but which will be wholly inappropriate as a decidedly different
tomorrow rolls around, we need to resculpt our values and behaviours.
Little, beyond the laws of
physics, will be the same as the decades roll by; our education system is busy
training people for jobs that soon won’t exist; the “Internet of Everything”
will impact our daily lives from health to energy consumption and shopping to
life expectancy, and give us artificial intelligence.
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| Australia's PM, Malcolm Turnbull - his plan for 'jobs and growth' could be innovated our of existence. |
This is not your colloquial “cross-roads”;
rather, this is a blind canyon from which the only escape hinges on innovation,
but not of the sort espoused in recent weeks by Malcolm Turnbull who focussed
on only “jobs and growth”.
Most everything with which we
are familiar – human movement (transport), health, insurance, manufacturing,
education, work, agriculture, currencies, shopping, leisure, and property –
will be subject to and changed by innovation.
And, in fact, the jobs and
growth envisaged by our PM will be largely innovated out of existence.
