Predicting the future - only brave people or fools need apply

Only a brave person or a fool dares predict the future, or so the adage suggests.

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.

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.

 

To the conservatives such a future appears dystopian; to the brave, it is exciting, but our damaged climate, a product of the innovation of the type sought by our PM,  promises a future in which fresh thinking will be about understanding, adapting to changed circumstances, and to mitigating our carbon dioxide emissions, and so slowing climate change

Chane and circumstance opened the door

Chance and circumstance, rather desire and design, opened the door to journalism.

Confucius - "Find a job you
 love and you will never work
another day in you life."

Traditional academic endeavours had personally reached their pinnacle in Year 11 as they seemed irrelevant, but beyond, that and probably even more importantly, family finances wouldn’t have permitted anything beyond what was then matriculation.

In what was one of life’s random serendipitous moments, Echuca’s Riverine Herald newspaper advertised for a cadet journalist; I applied and won the job.

Journalism was, to me, and absolutely unknown beast, I had no particular interest in writing, reading had been foreign to me, but it seems I had the one vital ingredient for what makes for a journalist: an insatiable curiosity.

Despite a few sojourns into other industries, journalism has been at the core of my attention for more than 35 years.

Many people have, throughout those years and in a hierarchical sense, been superior to me and so afflicted some authority, but never have I had a boss, not at least as it is understood in contemporary terms.

My “boss” has always been personal, despite the fancies of those supposedly in charge. Control has been leveled at me by privately-held values, morals and intent along with sensitivity to the greater good of whatever community it was in which journalism was the focus.

That all sounds somewhat high-minded, but journalists who get the job done, need to stay in touch with the passions and interests of those they are writing about and for, rather than the somewhat brutal growth driven wants of the modern corporate world.

The idea of actually working for those you serve, your customers (readers in journalistic terms), rather than any individual superiors or a company, can be a difficult paradigm with which to align yourself, and even more troubling for those in a top-down authoritarian structured organization.

With the world becoming more economically fragile the truly liberal (note small “l”) organization is becoming rarer and many growth-based structures are despotic or totalitarian in outlook.

Many workplaces are pock-marked with strikingly difficult internal politics; an insistence on growth that might offend sensibilities both within and beyond the company, and to further enrich the drama, there is the criticality of abiding by company philosophies to ensure the security of income, in other words avoiding the sack.

Divided loyalties induce stress and personal wellbeing hinges on reaching an individual intellectual position in which individual wants and needs are in accord with the broad ambitions of your employer. That, of course, is easier said than done.

Work is not about your boss or your company; rather it is about you, social interaction, your community and your customers, and if we take the advice of Confucius:  “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work another day in your life”.

Addicted to the pleasurable rock of life

Work has always been, and still is, the rock to which my life is anchored, as is that of many others.

Bruce Springsteen

That, however, is a habit I don’t want to break as it pointedly enriches who and what I am. It makes me, in my view, a better person.

Naturally it is easy to be philosophically flippant about the pleasure work brings when not locked into seemingly endless and equally pointless and heartless sweat inducing toil, reminding me of the words from the Bruce Springsteen song “Factory”:

“End of the day, factory whistle cries,
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes.
And you just better believe, boy,
somebody's gonna’ get hurt tonight,
It's the working, the working, just the working life”.

Work, for me, however is not about that sort of drudgery (of course some jobs  have had that flavour), rather it has largely been an ongoing joy through which the human interaction brightens my being, makes me smile and brings satisfaction to every day.

Interestingly though, our addiction to contemporary understandings of work, sees us devote a hefty, and almost irrational portion of our lives to maintaining a structure that ultimately enriches only a few, while the many toiling endlessly, get little.

The “responsible men” who, by what they make appear default, but which is really intent, and call the shots in society repeatedly bleat about the need of the “many” to work harder and longer, for less, to ensure, they argue, the integrity of an economic system that ultimately serves only them.

The disparity between rewards to the worker and ever bulging bank balances of the few is what ignited the unrest that become known as “the occupy movement”.

The “occupiers” have my support and sympathy as I can sense the injustices they live with and the subsequent unfairness that assaults them every day as a system deemed to be as it should be favours only a few.

However, as understandable as their cause is, it seems somewhat ill-directed in that it seeks equity, or at least an increased sense of fairness, in a system that is in itself fundamentally flawed.

The literal meaning of work has been so distorted by capitalistic tub-thumpers that it equates more now with drudgery than a vocation or a soul-enriching contribution to the broader betterment of the human experiment.

Modern times have seen most people enslaved to an economic paradigm from which we need to urgently disengage, both individually and as a society.

Economics is invariably politics in disguise and is structured with the intent of the few to profit, control and provide substantial individual short-term comfort ignoring, to the long-term peril of all, the ecological significance of our finite world.

•Next: Considering the four-hour day.