The Goulburn Valley urgently needs optimists; optimists, however who are in context

Optimists are urgently needed in the Goulburn Valley.

Herman Daly - his sound advice
has been ignored by most.

However, optimism alone is not enough for what we need are positive thinkers who understand the context of the world within which they seek their utopia.

Many careful thinkers around the world have declared this to be the decade in which we, and that is you and me, must make some fundamental and critical decisions about our behaviour and so how we use and apply earth’s limited resources.

Being half-way through this vital decade our options are becoming fewer and so this is the year we must decide.

Yes, we either waste it pondering the past or apply our intuition, inventiveness and imagination and go somewhere we have never been before, the future.

And so what will we do?

With a country lead by people with values rooted in 20th Century and seemingly afraid of addressing tomorrow, it is likely we will continue to look at life through the prism of what was.

It is misplaced optimism that has brought us to where we are now; optimism that has diverted our attention elevating the economy to God-like status, blinding us to other possibilities, other ways of living, of being a healthy compassionate and considerate community; a community that understands that infinite growth on a finite planet is not only problematic, but impossible.

Embarking on the second week of 2015 and surrounded by what are generally narcissistic New Year resolutions, it seems we need to lift our gaze and consider the views University of New South Wales lecturer, Dr Ted Trainer.

Dr Trainer, who writes about sustainability and justice, has said on The Conversation (a joint universities website): “It is also now clear that increasing the GDP in a rich country does not improve the quality of life!”

“This is what the ‘limits to growth’ literature has been telling us for decades, but most economists, politicians and ordinary people still fail to grasp the point,” he writes.

Conscious of that we need to consider and act on what a senior economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank, Herman Daly, said in the early 70s about the need for a Steady State Economy.

Daly, like many others since, pointed to the weaknesses of our existing economic system, noting that it favoured only a few, marginalized most and left the bulk of humanity limping toward extinction.

Yes, we need optimists; people who can see beyond what exists, understand there is another way and stand up and holler in support of American linguist and  philosopher, Noam Chomsky, who has repeatedly argued that we should put people before profit.

Arguments that without profit we can do nought are fallacious – optimism and educative, innovative and ecologically responsible ideas are unstoppable.

A life of discontinuities and risk - certainly a strange affair

A promotional brochure
 for Al Gore's newest
book, "The Future".

Life is a strange affair, full of weird happenings and discontinuities and as a friend once said, “It’s so risky we’ll not get out of it alive”.

Much of it can be, and is, so intellectually dishevelled that it gives pause to wonder “why”, but then equally, many moments burst upon you leaving a beautiful sense of hope and an enrichment of purpose.

Recently while walking with my brother, two young boys approached on their bicycles and a step off the footpath to allow them to pass resulted in a rather clumsy fall.

Hurting all over, my spirits were repaired somewhat and for a moment made me forget the pain, when the two young boys who could have easily sped on laughing about the “old bloke” who fell over, stopped and enquired about my welfare.

The pain was momentarily gone and a few seconds, I was not feeling as glum about humanity as is often the case.

Just a few days ago while travelling on and standing in a crowded tram in central Melbourne, a young Indian fellow offered me his seat – again, for a moment, the world seemed like reasonable place.

However, those moments of personal encouragement seem irrelevant and trivial in consequence when by chance of birth, your country prefers to be governed by a group of people whose passions are driven by short-term objectives and beliefs that the good life is to be found in materialism and the momentary joy of acquisition.

Promises in the lead-up to Australia’s recent federal election were many, but rarely did anyone illustrate concern for, a suggest anything that might enable you and me to endure the unfolding decades that will be clearly, and unquestionably, decidedly different from which we have just emerged.

It seems our leaders are devoid of the robust and bold thinking that enables them to imagine equality, decency, collaboration and fairness; things not fundamental to the economy rather behaviours that evolve from sharing, friendship, caring and empathy.

Should you consider that utopian thinking then, for a moment, consider the alternative to which humanity has adhered to for three centuries and upon any reasonable measure, what we have is a distressing dystopia in which the world economy is vacuumed up by just a few and billions are left either in or teeter on poverty.

Complicating that is the fragility of world governance with our much fêted democracy being sold to the highest bidder leaving it obligated to corporatism.

Writing in “The Future”, Al Gore said: “The extreme concentration of wealth is destructive to economic vitality and to the health of democracy”.

Yes, it’s a weird world in which a few have plenty, billions are in poverty, democracy is almost a memory and uplifting moments are disappointingly rare.

We need thinking that will break ranks

Human imagination is faltering.

Albert Einstein became
famous for his curiousity.

Such an observation will undoubtedly draw criticism from many quarters, but in nearly every case that censure would come from those who are among the few, the measured minority, who enjoy the benefits of man’s imaginative innovations.
Many of the billions that tread the earth live each day on what most Australians consider small change and some live in countries of which they know not and nor do they have any idea what exists beyond a day’s walk.
Humankind has travelled on the back of imagination for millennia and sometimes that has been good and at other times, not so good. 
The 20^th century was alive with imaginative developments and that 100 years of innovative momentum has continued into the 21^st century with something new appearing on the human landscape nearly every other day.
What we have seen, though, has been somewhat linear, an almost expected, development of what already existed.
What we haven’t seen, a further example of the paucity of imagination, are ideas that have truly broken ranks; ideas that have sent humanity hurtling off on a refreshingly new journey.
Technologically the advances have been many, especially in the world of electronics, and while they have made much about life easier and more convenient, whether or not they have made life better is an open question and so any answer is subjective.
Danger lurks everywhere for even commonly used and understood terms such as “better” are subject to corruption and misunderstanding as one fellow’s better paradise is another’s hell.
Let’s agree that better is qualitative covering contentment and happiness rather than the quantitative measure of the accumulative life upon which success in the modern life is computed.
Abiding by that agreement we face our first challenge in stepping beyond contemporary understandings of success and launch ourselves into a whole new paradigm in which a better life is about kindness, sharing and collaboration; a way of living that, despite the protestations of our pedagogical politicians and corporations, is the antithesis of what exists.
Having freed ourselves from the straight jacket of existing thinking, we need to unleash our imaginations to consider iconoclastic utopias as opposed to their blueprint counterparts that are intimately, and generally, restrictive in every sense – they are totalitarianism by another name.
The stereotypical understanding is that most utopias are the foundation of tyranny or despotism, but we should note that none of the anger, violence and distrust the soak these ideologies are evident, in any way, in the qualities of genuine utopian thinking.
Nor will you find evidence of the manners that prevail in a civilized society in any form of government that has tyrannical traits and subsequently is devoid of kindliness, honesty and equality.