#10 - #10

I wondered what I would write about this year - what I will write about is apparently the collapse of our civilisation - an eyewitness account. 

Yesterday I was thinking about government and was appalled that I could not think of a single successful one. They all ranged in varying degrees of failure. My measure of failure? No preparing your future - not one single government has managed to future proof their population despite over 60 years of warning. The warning I place is the publication of Rachael Carson's Silent Spring. It was the firing gun on the failure of the so called Green Revolution and the growing call by SCIENTISTS to wake up to the unsustainability of this growth and development trajectory. That was followed by Greenpeace and then other environmental groups. Movements like the CND and other anti-war protests. However, mesmerised by GDP, hypotised, I don't know made stupid even, government ignored this. Instead of doing the right thing they did the lazy thing.

Sixty years on we are now in this phenomenal mess. Not only do we face environmental collapse, but we have Peak oil (an energy crisis), a food crisis, we have phenomenal income inequality and despite having the most educated (ha!) population of all time, despite having sent all their administrators to Harvard, Yale and Oxford to learn public policy admin, governance is even worse today than it has ever been before. Where does one begin?

It lies in corruption - you can tell how useless a government is by the scale and degrees of corruption and how corrupt a government is can be measured by how self serving individuals are. The more self-serving, the more corrupt it is. The more corrupt it is the more useless it becomes. 

Another tell tale sign of a useless government is the rhetoric it delivers. There is literally no situation in the entire planet which justifies a hysterical response from a government. Even if it a DEFCON 5 emergency, you need to be the voice of reason and calm not the person that whips up the crazy. You do not shout FIRE in a crowded theatre. You provide calm and reassurance. You still the waters. If you look at any spiritual leaders, and figure in mythology or history whose has anything sensible to say about the human condition you will find that even if they say very sad things they are saying it with a degree of measured clarity.

Finally, you do not pretend you can escape the human condition. That is a total load of bollocks. Instead you lead as a human being. You don't kid people into thinking that they can escape death - no one escapes death. You help them to face death by having a good life. However since people have not had good lives in general, since you have been self serving and corrupt, the natural response is to terrify or give into terror. When these responses they are indications that leadership has failed.

The chief culprit has been the linking of everything to GDP. Even the inventor of GDP said you could not use it as the sole measure of success in governance. It had to be balanced out with other indicators. However, this is the conclusion I have come to, like the inventor of the GDP - people in general are simplistic. They are reductionist. Even if they did it on purpose to bamboozle the population they should have been able to see that you could not do this in the long-run. At some stage, apparently the start of the 21st century is when, you will paint yourself in a corner where you will no longer be able to make capital out of nothing. Then all the low hanging fruit will either have disappeared (like natural resources) or caused untold misery and destablisation (like war). and we will now be here. 

It is a terrible indictment no? That there are currently no successful governments in the world? Maybe Russia. I don't know. Democracy is in free fall... Africa is a mess, Asia is a mess, South America is a mess... and the solution which governments have come up with? Yes, what is their solution - monitoring and coercion. We are now heading into the world of Black Mirror. Ain't that something? Wonderful. Their analysis of the problem is not it is not us, it is you. You are the problem and we will solve this problem by.... controlling you even more. It is BEYOND depressing.

And the LEFT - I will have to leave it there for today. But they have been a monumental disappointment. Sneering, snide, self satisfied, intellectually lazy - just a long laundry list of human failings. Well what is the solution? The solution I found in the Christian Community yesterday. It was connection through the heart in grace which brings about healing or as Ben said, salvation. There is no techno fix. No facts that will solve the situation. No amount of intellectual acumen will bring you this connection. And of course connection is the last thing that they want. 

I must leave it now. But that was what I was thinking about - the abject failure of all governments in the world. Perhaps if they did collapse we would all be better off...