Maybe it is the kids we need in charge, rather than the adults

Daniel Innerarity's
is worth reading.

Kids love socializing, getting into groups and sometimes even gangs, and making up the rules as they go along, as they play.

Maturity brings marked changes in that their innocence vanishes and much of their sociability to become frequently dogmatic, insular, individualistic, hubristic and seemingly unable to take the advice of another.

The outcome for you and me, Australia and the world generally is toxic.

Now adults, our decision makers understand the concept of winning and losing, they are richer, more powerful and influential with measureable behaviour and yet, fundamentally, they still play games and make up the rules as they go.

Spend a week critically observing the news and in watching the behaviour of those at the top of the human food chain, it becomes obvious, even though we have been told, repeatedly, that the “adults are now on charge”, that we continually resort to rules that are politically convenient, ignore externalities such as the environment and rule to benefit a minority. Decency is dead.

Maturity is more than chronological status.

The accumulation of years does not magically open the door to wisdom for it is a status only arrived at, or achieved through earnest and endless endeavour to grasp and understand the human experience and the culture from which that experience arises.

Kids find the lure of the present irresistible and for many, age brings few changes and it was Daniel Innerarity writing in “The Future and its Enemies” who said people often repress their awareness of the future.

“Thinking about it (the future) distorts the comfort of the now, which tends to be more powerful than the future because it is present and because it is certain”, he wrote.

Prof Kate Auty.

Considering how the past and the present will congeal to become the future demands more than simple adulthood, rather it insists on a wisdom that understands that life is not linear – what was is not necessarily what will be.

Today we make the error of colonizing the future; a colonization that Innerarity says consists of us living at its expense in an imperialism of the present that absorbs the future and feeds off it parasitically.

Many are entranced by what was and long for those comforting times, but we can’t go back, rather we have to negotiate with tomorrow and in being somewhat like a kid, make up the rules as we go and avoid acting like an adult where we persist with ideas and beliefs that are dogmatic and remote from wisdom.

Warnings from Victoria’s Sustainability Commissioner, Prof Kate Auty, of endemic social wrongs fail to stir the adults and so maybe we need the kids to make up a few rules as they go – our future depends upon it.

The wisdom of crowds is sometimes absent

Crowds have a rather special wisdom.

Surowiecki's book.

In fact the idea that crowds do have a cumulative knowledge that exceeds the individual prompted a staff writer at The New Yorker, James Surowiecki, to write a book about that very topic.

Writing in “The Wisdom of Crowds” Surowiecki explored how and why it is that many seem to instinctively know more than one.

In considering why it is the crowd is wise, he investigated many things and stripped the idea of its finery by reminding readers that on a busy footpath when hundreds are walking toward each other, collisions are almost unseen.

The crowd moving to a fro on the footpath, according to Surowiecki, instinctively avoid each other without uttering a word or making any sign.

That, he argues, is the wisdom of crowds at its most basic.

Democracy is the epitome of that wisdom to which will all unknowingly contribute, but despite the richness of that knowledge we do sometimes get it wrong.

An example of the demos failing to understand its fallibility can be seen in the outcome of the recent City of Greater Shepparton Council elections – 26 people offered themselves for one of seven positions and from that rich bounty we had the chance to assemble a group with the skills and vision to guide the city, but we didn’t.

The Goulburn Valley revolves around Greater Shepparton and so the city needs innovative leaders able to identify our strength and weaknesses, able to escape from the rigidity of repetitive behaviour and ease our communities into a new way of living; a process that will see us prosper primarily socially to give our communities an ecological and subsequently an economic advantage.

We live in world burdened by the idea that economic success is the key to social and environment matters when it is in fact a palatable life arises from exactly the opposite, for once we bring order to social and environmental matters, the economy falls into lockstep.

For too long economic concerns have driven council and although that maybe how it needs to be given the over-riding attitude of society, there comes a time when communities such as ours need to step back from the commercial rush of life and turn our attention to the broader wellbeing of people who live here.

A common, but ultimately destructive, business adage of “what gets measured, gets done” reflects the relatively simple activity of measuring monetary activity, when what we need is a council prepared to address the complex and difficult understand concepts of wellbeing, contentment and happiness.

The contemporary adversarial role of councilors needs to be collaborative, positive and friendly establishing a benchmark from which all other groups and individuals throughout the city would gauge and so adjust their contribution.

 

Misunderstanding our reason, if we ever had one

Humanity has misunderstood its reason, if it ever had one.

We emerged from primordial slime and
then benefitted from near ideal
"Goldilocks-like" conditions.

We are a problem solving species and that is something at which we have been wonderfully effective, but interestingly some of the resultant solutions have produced seemingly unresolvable unintended consequences.

In solving problems we have, it appears, frequently asked the wrong question.

The questions were driven, and still are, by survivalist instincts and base human emotions from which we have never truly escaped.

Humanity, generally, is still somewhat childlike, grabbing selfishly at most anything that goes by, but with little thought for others, always seeking immediate gratification and within that caring little about what tomorrow will bring.

The idea that is maturity has been distorted in being applied to trivialities, rather than being used to honour the steadfastness and wisdom of some, particularly experienced and older people.

That however, is in itself contradictory, as wisdom, experience and age do not necessarily equate, but it is where wisdom, something which is short supply, is most commonly found and so we should not be uncomfortable or embarrassed about turning there for help or advice.

Humanity has scrambled for, and fought among itself, for earth’s resources, whether land, oil, people or whales, but in expanding its understanding of how to exploit those assets, it is locked technologically into an apocalyptic way of living.

With scant regard for tomorrow, justified by hollow and shallow rationalisations, we have battered the other into submission, plundered earth’s finite resources, privatized the profits and socialized the costs, while leaving behind the mounting residue of our less than honourable behaviour to accumulate in and so have filled up the earth’s environmental sinks.

Being simply the fortunate bonding a few elements in the primordial slime that benefitted from ideal conditions, we did not really evolve for a purpose nor was there any real planned reason, rather driven by species survival we simply capitalized on whatever came our way.

That was fine until we evolved to exceed nature’s capacity to cope and so now we must voluntarily moderate our behaviour and live within our environment’s finite bounds.

For millennia, the entire Holocene, we have been favoured by near ideal circumstances – Goldilocks-like temperatures of not too hot or too cold – but undeniable science illustrates that what is a massive human experiment is going wrong.

Never before has mankind been so close to the precipice and rather than compete in a search for endless growth in a finite world, we should step back, think about, understand and benefit from the social warmth, trust, co-operation and help between fellows that appeared to be the locus of the recent floods and fortified by that comforting reassurance, build and shape our reason.

Considering that, we have much to do.