Thoughts arising

It seems that people still have trouble understanding why other people don't think the same way they do, by which I mean the original people who are doing the understanding, or rather not doing it.

I've just read dglenn's quote of the day, in which the quotee is "astonished" that people want to be ruled, even in a democratic society. They should want "elected representatives who answer to [their] authority." His previous quotee bemoans the fact that people want to be told what's right and what's wrong, instead of deciding for themselves and using their Free Will. (Standard disclaimer: "people" does not necessarily mean you, or you, or you. It may or may not mean me. Mostly it refers, here and hereafter, as in the original quotations, to the observed behaviour of an unspecified mass of humanity. Sh'boom.)

I've also been reading Tescopoly, by Andrew Simms, a book about how the supermarkets are driving small shops out of business and being nasty to their suppliers and cheating the tax man and probably kicking little puppies when we aren't looking, and how we should all go to farmers' markets instead and encourage diversity. To be fair, I haven't read to the end, so he may cover this, but at the moment he seems to be striking the same faintly desperate note of "come along, chaps" that comes through in the aforementioned quotes. Besides, the new Pratchett has arrived, so if I want to comment on this while it's fresh in my mind, now's the time.

People are, on the whole, fairly decent sorts and don't kick puppies, and it's perfectly possible to get them all fired up about democracy and freedom and sustainable development and biodiversity and the community and so on, and with some it will stick, because they were minded that way to begin with and just needed some facts to start them on the path.

But people are also lazy. Heinlein said, among other things, that progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things, and this is absolutely true and has led to all the good as well as all the bad things inherent in what we call "progress." The democracy we have is a lazy person's compromise, in which we elect someone who then becomes to all intents and purposes king, because nobody wants to spend their time exercising authority and telling the government what to do. The morality we have is a lazy person's compromise, in which we use the rules made up by a nomadic people two thousand years ago because it's easier than considering every moral question on its merits, working out when you meet someone whether it would be all right to murder him or her or simply covet his or her ass, and so on. And the shops we have are a lazy person's compromise, because despite the fact that we all know Tesco is underpaying its suppliers, employing slave labour to pick its fruit, annexing by shady deals all the spare land it can get its hands on for future superstores and maintaining a myth of unrealistically cheap food, we still want the time we save buying everything under one roof, rather than wandering from stall to stall comparing cabbages, and we want the convenience, and we want the cheap food.

We may not admit it, if questioned, and we may cheer and yell slogans for a while when some fiery zealot rouses us, but for most of us it doesn't last. We actually do have the world we have deserved, unfortunately. And without a new conception of progress, one which focuses on making things more difficult in order to make them better, it isn't about to change.

(no subject)

This was going to be an edit, but it was getting longer than the original post...

Apologies once again to the rugged individualists, libertarians and eco-warriors who, despite the disclaimer, felt lumped in with the rest of us in the previous post, but as stevieannie says, what we have is the world the majority have deserved, and who among us has never been part of the majority, or taken the easy path? From a distance, as that bitter little song says, we all look alike, and what we look like is the majority, and where we are going is where the majority will take us. Which is not to say it's not worth trying to do the right thing: every individual who stands out makes the majority smaller by one, and if enough do it then possibly a change of direction can happen...but it will need more than individuals leading by example, because the majority can always find excuses and justifications and it's-all-very-well-for-yous to stave off the unpleasant truths.

What it will need is a new idea. As I said, a new conception. When the dinosaurs died out, it wasn't the cue for a grand resurgence of trilobites. Something as yet undiscovered has to compete with the lazy compromises, offer something more immediately attractive than convenience and cheapness, and the alternatives that appeal to my intelligent and perceptive friends manifestly don't cut any ice with the people who throng the aisles of the supermarkets every day, who think putting an X on a piece of paper is all they should have to do about governing their collective destiny, and who are too busy using (or wasting) the increased leisure time our technological progress has given us, and the seemingly unlimited energy that flows out of the sockets as long as they pay the bills, to wonder what would happen if it all stopped.

I hope someone is working on discovering those new somethings, because the dinosaurs have got awfully big, and the meteorite is still coming.