Card tables and raptuous applause, not paddlocks and memory sticks

Never seen before security and other restrictive arrangements around Brisbane’s recent G20 forum where the reverse of how it should have been.

Where the G20 Summit should have been
held - card tables and rapturous applause.

Rose petals and red carpets should have been thrown down before the leaders of the world’s 20 richest economies, rather than barricades and bomb searches.

Money has always perverted human values and ideals, that’s a generalization, but accurate and timely, and so rather than meeting in secretive and secluded places those same leaders should have gathered around a few card tables at the city’s King George Square.

An appreciative audience should have looked on, cheering as the leaders agreed to liberalize the world economy, making certain that the less than one percent that control most of it, agree to share their spoils with the rest of the world.

The cheering and applause would not have slowed when those G20 “men in suits” voted unanimously to instigate sweeping changes around the world to ensure everyone would not only have something to eat, but that their homes would be secure and the political intrigue with which the world is riddled, would vanish to be replaced by hitherto unseen transparency, friendship, compassion and collaboration.

Amid the continuing rapturous applause, the delegates would commit as one, vowing to act in unison with neighbouring and distant countries as they worked to build a world community in which contemporary Western lifestyles would be softened to allow less developed countries to prosper and edge ahead.

With the world fed, housed and thirsts quenched, and the economy broken to become a servant of man, rather than the reverse, the G20 leaders would have packed up their papers, folded their tables, acknowledged the crowd and taken an economy flight home.

Utopian flights of fancy always stumble and fall when reality intervenes, especially when it is the hard-edged, brutal and unforgiving economic convictions to which the contemporary world has willingly surrendered its kindness, fairness and decency.

Collusion and conspiracy breeds behind closed doors and the transparency allowed by the bright light of day is quickly obscured by darkened windows, cloistered and secreted away in brief cases and on memory sticks, hidden from public gaze by locks and impenetrable codes.

Endless arguments justify the G20 retreat from public gaze, but surely if what is discussed and decided upon is in the broad and best interests of ordinary folk, from the bloke baking your bread to the woman in charge of this newspaper, then why can’t it be laid out for all to see, and consider?

It can’t, not because of the aforementioned arguments, rather because it is simply not fair and despite the swagger and fist-pumping of G20 leaders it is about further entrenching an economic inequality that favours a few and disadvantages most.

Understanding how much is enough and imagining the solution

Robert and Edward
 Skidlesky's book.

Considerations about what is and what isn’t the good life are as common as opinions: everyone has one.

However growth ideologues have, in contemporary times, hijacked and distorted the human sense of what is worthy and marketed their contorted interpretation of the good life.

The modern rich, developed world is populated by people who equate the good life with accumulation of all it produces, along with the imagined enjoyment of the pleasures that stash of “stuff” brings.

Others have quite a different view and so liken the good life to one of privation and for some the higher life, or good life, only arrives after an ascetic life.

The debate about what is the good life and how you access it is as old as man, but rather than closing in on the answer, it is becoming more remote.

Many equate the good life and happiness with growth and wealth, but extensive and world-wide research point to weaknesses in that argument illustrating that once fundamental needs are answered, the good life and happiness rests on other immeasurable “goods”.

Writing in their 2012 book “How much is enough?: Money andthe Good Life” Robert and Edward Skidlesky said: “The basic goods are qualities, not quantities, objects of discernment, not measurement”.

Those “goods”, according to the Skileskys are health, security, respect, personality, harmony with nature, friendship and leisure.

Personality is about one being able to frame and execute a plan of life that reflects their tastes, temperament and conception of the good, while leisure must be accompanied by the term “purposeful”.

Interestingly, most men live much longer than they ever did, but that cannot be attributed to growth and nor can growth claim those other basic “goods” mentioned earlier.

The United Kingdom has doubled its per capita income since 1974, but residents have not tightened their grip on those basic goods, and in some respects they now have fewer of them.

“We have chased after superfluities and neglected necessities,” the Skidleskys wrote.

The good not mentioned by the Skidleskys is “imagination”, probably the most powerful, and underused, attribute of the human repertoire.

People of all stripes are obedient to the growth mandate and through a lack of imagination seem unable to conceive of a world in which they could easily and regularly access those basic goods through the abandonment ego boosting consumption.

That consumption, clearly indicated by a host of respected reports, has the world on a perilous path and so until we can imagine the good life without the need to exploit finite resources we will stumble blindly toward the abyss.

The good life waits, but our inability to forego present delights and embrace that new actuality is what darkens its dawn.

Security on our streets begins when we flick a switch

Finding security on Shepparton’s streets seems pretty straightforward – it begins with the flicking of a switch.

It is unlikely your
 television has a
  switch anything like
 this one, but if it had,
 then moving it to the
 off position initiates
 security on our streets.

However, that is reductionism taken to its extreme as the sought after security arises from a social paradigm of such complexity that it makes brain surgery look artless.
Safety on Shepparton’s streets, as is the case for any town or city, begins when we reach for the remote, turn off our televisions and effectively remove from our lives the programmed violence and its daily assault on human values.
We are born as empty vessels and as our lives take shape we are filled by the influences of those around us, the way of life of those who raise us and the philosophies and values of the institutions that impact on our lives, from our schools, the government, laws, the media and finally, and critically, our entertainment.
Television is unchallenged as the one form of media that has almost unimpeded access to our lives, influencing our values from the seemingly impossible cheery morning shows and attention grabbing frivolities throughout the day, to the early evening news and current affairs shows that pander to the corporatism of the world, and the endless blood, gore and drama of evening viewing that ignites and excites our emotions.
Television simply fills up all the emotional holes in life to make the road smooth, but in a strange contradiction it is also hardening our values making us less conscious of community and consequently less willing to step away from our addiction to support our fellows.
And so while the road is smooth it leads to nowhere, at least not to a place where our streets are secure.
Television seeps almost unknowingly into our consciousness, while newspapers, books and magazines demand a more active participation and leads readers into a line by line contemplation and judgement that encourages reflection.

Neil Postman

Being aware of our ever-reducing attention span, television doesn’t allow for such luxuries, hurrying from scenes of war, death and destruction to heart-warming images of a team of rescuers hauling a helpless horse from a bog.
This seamless shift from tragedy and scenes of human deviousness to images of human goodness confuses the intellect and as discussed by Neil Postman in “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, we become desensitized to death and other human difficulties.
That, aligned with a violent computer games and movies in which violence is celebrated, tells the viewers/participants that whatever troubles them can be resolved by bellicose behaviour and so as night follows day, aggression, in its many forms, stalks our streets.
Modern life has conspired with the liberty afforded by our streets to rob them of the what it is those public places allow, a social life that has the wonderful addendum of security.