During the 1960s there used to be a saying:
‘We are the people our parents warned us against’.
Now we might just of turned this saying in to:-
We Are the People We Warned Our Parents Against.
Both of these sayings are warnings about both change for the
sake of change, and not having a fluidity of mind to change
things as they need to be changed.
The problem being that as a lot of people become older they
become more conservative.
Yet this is not so much a conservatism,
as a reaction to all of those new dangers that abound,
or it could just be a very human inability to adapt to the
changes in the world around one.
The other side of this equation being that much that is called
change is not more than just fashion changes,
or the natural evolution of technical improvements.
For instance:
In the fashion industry there has been a lot of changes over
the last 50 years as the result of new materials,
and new mass production techniques.
What is true of the fashion industry is also true of other
industries too.
Yet very few political or economic forecasters have any
really useful analysis of just how these changes are
effecting what has just taken place,
or what is about to take place,
within both the economy or society at large.
Now just add all that to our present social, economic,
ecological, political,
and what you get is some very unclear thinking indeed.
The natural instinct of people being to just focus in the
immediate crisis,
there is very little thinking upon just what we might need to do
in terms of any long term solutions.
This kind of short term thinking can result in protectionism,
immigration controls, or a failure to invest in ecologically
sound energy projects.
That is why we all need to rethink just what we are about,
and why I call myself a radical pragmatist.
Perhaps we all need to be warned about ourselves,
but lets not get carried away that way.