Our Social Scrap Heap Challenge!

The older one gets, especially when you’ve taken any notice of the issues around you (outside of your own self-interested microcosm that is), and posses some reasonable grasp upon history the more you notice; many of the social and financial problems we endure today are born out of the way in which we attempt to manage them. You see very little is truly new or innovative, despite what the go-getter Dilberts would have you believe.

We spend our time trying to reinvent the wheel, think of some fancy title for that ‘new’ wheel, then dress it up with some clever marketing. Media and PR campaigns abound to hail our ‘strategic visions’ or ‘proactive initiatives’ across all business sectors, public and private.

We may well be ‘excited about working with new partners’ and it will be better this time because ‘lessons have been learned’ but in reality, most of this tosh is simply hot air and fancy hype for the same ol’ same ol’ business as usual. The only difference is that this time around; leaders and managers are attempting to turn their particular ‘new’ wheel faster with less force, with little cognisance or application of all those previous lessons!

We need some financial Untouchables: The central irony of financial crisis is that while it is caused by too much confidence, too much borrowing and lending and too much spending, it can only be resolved with more confidence, more borrowing and lending, and more spending…This circularity is clearly barking. (Read more)

Our current financial climate is obviously having profoundly negative impacts upon society but is this the continued turn of another wheel? Earlier this year John Gray, a British philosopher notable for being one of the only public intellectuals to anticipate the economic collapse of 2008, told The Big Think that “boom times are deceptive because history is cyclical.”

Is History Cyclical? – History has never been steadily cumulative or if it has, it has been for periods or 5 or 10 or 15 or at most 20 years, and then some kind of great punctuation occurs and a lot of the wealth you thought you had vanishes up in smoke before your eyes…(Read more)

Which brings me nicely to that other great cyclic catastrophe – our Criminal Justice System. Although not the prefered blog brew of many, particularly those whose failures are being exposed ad torn apart, the author of the Police Inspector Blog usually has an informed and descriptive explanation on the failings.

Metal Theft – the real story SHOCK! …This is usually how it goes; guilty plea, defendant in a borrowed suit looking all contrite with a new haircut and an even newer story about disabled mothers, sick children and drug dependency. A community sentence, or such a small sentence that by the time ‘time spent on remand’ and all the various discounts are applied it’s no time at all. The defendant will be out within a few months and back to stealing metal again…(Read more)

We need some serious and real ‘new’ thinking… Without all the usual self-interest, self-importance and self-promotion that usually accompanies current political and business leadership. If it doesn’t materialise soon, many of us are destined for the social scrap heap of life!