“Informed” Debate

Hi

In Hit theBuffers (Tues. 20 Sept. 2011) I promised to return to “Informed.debate.”

“What is Truth?”  said jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer.  Francis Bacon posed that great question in the sixteenth century and exposed the hole that is now at our centre in the twenty first century.

It is our now problem.  Few of us have time to stay for an answer.  There is so much to do.  Pour the whisky, watch football, glance at CNN News, go to bed, numbers are boring and difficult.  Tomorrow is another day.

You can fool some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time; but you can’t fool all the people all the time. (attributed to Abraham Lincoln.)

Today political parties, the political class, the bureaukratura, jointly and severally, have found the Achilles heel of democracy.  They have rewritten Abe Lincoln:

You can fool enough of the people enough of the time.

Promise everyone everything forever without effort. 

Demand the highest standards of competence, training, sobriety, drug tests and behaviour from athletes. 

Fine, suspend, prosecute footballers who break the rules. 

Excuse the rest of us and especially excuse politicians and their paymasters in business and the unions.

What is truth?  Don’t ask.  Avoid Informed Debate.  Do not stay for an answer.

Minister, grab a couple of clever sound bites and scrape through three minutes on TV.  Interviewer, let him off the hook; the producer is signalling to move to the next item; the ratings are good; the Minister will be happy to do another slot another day.

So who is to blame?  Minister?  Spin Doctor?  Couch Potato?  TV Anchor?  Football Fan?  You?   Me?

I hold up my paw; I did not bark early enough or loud enough.

Paws4Now

Jock

P.S.

The 20^th was the century of a dying imperialism, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, even Russia, the young USA and an atavistic European project.  An explosion of knowledge increased absolute and relative wealth and entrenched ever-rising expectations for over a billion people.  

The new knowledge was not only the technology of how to make things and then make even more and better and cheaper things – motorcars and missiles, penicillin and poison gas.   Systems engineering was born.  Design systems, finance systems, marketing systems, logistics systems, governance systems, information and communication systems produced abundance, choice, wealth:

– Toyota, Ford, Coca Cola, National Health Services, concentration camps, global travel, global trade, Fanny and Freddie,  Building Societies, credit default swaps and obligations, National Savings, War/Euro/Corporate/Junk/ Bonds, Windows, Google, Facebook, Twitter.-

Two World Wars, although awful, fuelled that explosion of knowledge, wealth and confidence. 

After 1945 people – tired, frightened, busy, ambitious - believed in their newly won democratic structures.  People trusted their politicians.  That trust is now being betrayed.

You, the frightened mid-life folk who now hold the levers of responsibility and power can choose to be wise and prudent.  You can choose to sit down and talk with the young, who have everything to lose and so are fearless, and with the old, who have nothing to lose and are also fearless.

Yes, I know it is difficult.  Do not be afraid.  It will be OK.

Give Informed Debate a chance.  Give it time.  Stay for an answer.

J