I’ve spent years trying to understand why: 1. Right wingers hold the world view they do 2. Why poor people so frequently vote against their own self interest.
The answer, I conclude simplistically, lies in the aspiration that all (mostly) of us have: to be wealthy, and to stay that way. Even me. Probably you - to some degree at least.
Of course, it’s a values thing. My values are superior to those people who vote for market values over human values. I know the happiness of many is more desirable than the happiness of a few. I would go so far to say is that I cannot be truly deeply happy when there is untold suffering around me. I may not have money, or own my own home - but I am morally superior.
Here I am standing atop the Moral High Ground, with my chin held at a righteous angle and a halo blinding anyone within half a mile radius - locked in an ages-old battle with the people with all the money.
I am a bloody dreamer, and proud of it. In fact I had a dream last night that the Greens (my employers) got 20% in the General Elections on the 26th November. Which is a pipe dream given they got close to 7% 3 years ago.
I don’t dream that often, so I pay attention when I do. Of course, this is ‘just’ my subconscious putting on an epic production which plays into my hopes and deepest desires for how this chapter of humanity plays out. The dream went into the details of how we accomplished it, so I know what it will take.
1. They don’t teach you in school…to ask GOOD questions.
The quality of the questions we asks determines what kind of life we have.
If we are preoccupied with “does my ass look big in these pants”, we will not be asking - “what are the unique contributions that I can make with my life’s work?” Maybe you can do both, but I have personally found them to conflict a bit!
“How can i resource myself to produce great results?”
“What is the bigger opportunity here?”
“Am I asking the right questions” <— that’s the best question of all.
We’ve got One Precious Life and it goes really fast. So ask the good questions. Be really curious. We are just stupid humans after all. There is everything to learn, and many things to unlearn.
2. In our schools and universities we teach in ways that create categories and definitions - science, politics, arts, humanities, spirituality. Its our way of being able to take in a huge amount of complexity. But the world itself isn’t fragmented like that.
So the skill (they don’t teach) is putting it back together meaningfully.
Thats an art that you can spend the rest of your life perfecting.
I have traveled the length of the country several times by car, bus, train and boat. Now that I am used to the time frames that this mode of travel takes, I have found that I can sit back and relax. I have made sock monkeys, read books, met interesting people, seen parts of New Zealand that I would never have known existed. Because I invest so much in travelling to my destination, I tend to spend more time there. This means that when I went to Invercargill for a show I made sure that while I was down that end of the island I visited Bluff and Gore, whereas most of my fellow band members jumped on a plane after the gig and went home. Some of the band members stayed on, and we had wonderful little adventures together.
A dear friend recently commemorated the anniversary of losing her dad to Cancer. She told me about a dream she had with her dad in it which he gave her some very sound advice, giving her confidence to move ahead and make big changes in her life. Depending on how you see the world, you will interpret what dreams mean in a particular way. I would love to be ‘visited’ in my dreams by my parents once they shuffle off this mortal coil. Lucky for me, I can still get advice, love and support from both my parents by picking up the phone.
I have recently considered that if I am lucky my parents will die before me. I am becoming increasingly aware how difficult this transition will be and how little our culture prepares us for it.
My mother has had Multiple Sclerosis for the last 25 years, and so I have been emotionally prepared for her to die for a very long time.
Do you remember those last groaning days at the close of the first decade of the 21st century?
People were still thinking about themselves as separate, unrelated entities. Apple Corporation met the zeitgeist with their ‘i’Series devices. iPod > iPhone >iPad > iRing > iPatch were each points on a map, a road trip of technological progress towards more ‘Me, Me, Me’. Obsolete almost from the moment the packaging was opened, leaving a legacy of outmoded tech junk for the world to funeral since it couldn’t decompose it. These innovations drove us all the way to the brink’s doorstep - a precipice where we would eyeball the natural limits of the planet, squirming, but with nowhere left to run. A new understanding was finally born.
You’ve come a long way, haven’t you. Did you always know that you were going to be our Prime Minister? Looking back on you as a 25 year old, I can’t help think just how much the world has changed. I’m glad you got contact lenses. That was a smooth move.
There are some other smooth moves that you are being called to make now. What is holding you back from ‘Leading’ this country into the second decade of the 21st Century? It seems to me this Country is not leading anything at the moment, rather it is being led down an unsurvivable path by old-school economics.
I bet your assumption of new economic theories is that they all result in losses for you and your biz-mates. But the world of business is changing rapidly - whether we like it or not - and those who are positioning themselves now will be the ones to benefit most.
I am seeing the world over, progressive thinking business leaders seizing opportunities to collaborate with the third sector to create stunning outcomes - financially, socially, environmentally. If you believe in Little Government and BIG society then this is clearly a good way forward. I wonder if you are actually getting the best advice from the people close to you. Are they standing too close, or are they just too old and stuck in their thinking? Because it seems like you can’t see another future emerging. I think it is your responsibility as a leader to prepare us for it.
Consider this:
“The crisis of our time is not about financial or economic bankruptcy. The real crisis of our time is about an intellectual bankruptcy: the bankruptcy of mainstream economic thought. Just as the crumbling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of one fundamentalist approach to society and the economy—socialist state-centric fundamentalism—the toppling of the Wall Street house of cards marks the end of another—neoliberal market-centric fundamentalism.
But the public debate and crisis response continue to be framed by the same old categories and frames of economic thought that got us into the whole mess in the first place. To paraphrase Albert Einstein’s famous observation, “The significant problems we have cannot be solved by the same type of thinking that created them.” Yet that’s exactly what we are busy trying to do. “
It’s gonna take everything we’ve got to halt the devastating impacts of Climate Change. Including our ability to flirt. If you’ve got it, flaunt it - for a good cause!
I’m not sure if my husband agrees with this approach. But it seemed to work yesterday when I fulfilled one of the items on my Bucket List; “Make an Oral Submission to Council”.
This was reported by Tom Hunt in the Dominion Post Diary today: “It seems feminine wiles may still be an effective tool of persuasion - even in local body politics. Temperatures rose during a Wellington City Council committee meeting yesterday as councilors Rob Goulden and Brian Pepperell fell under the charm of a young [thanks Tom] Newtown woman.
