Imagine an enormously expensive government project called Big Project. It doesn’t matter what the project is, we could say it is a project to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. Unrealistically sensible perhaps, but suppose we stick with it.
Because there is so much power, money and promotion behind Big Project, it automatically becomes a bandwagon. Because it is environmental, media outfits such as the BBC and the Guardian climb aboard at an early stage, as do the usual suspects.
Big Project has its critics of course, but their voices are small and their budgets even smaller. They are viewed with contempt. Of course sunbeams can be extracted from cucumbers, at least 97% of experts agree and there are hundreds of peer-reviewed papers to support what is effectively an undeniable fact. Says the bandwagon.
So far, so familiar, but suppose Big Project reaches a stage where one or two influential people begin to express guarded doubts. Even one or two bandwagon riders tone down their earlier enthusiasm. Big Project begins to feel, just possibly, all things considered a little too expensive. Just possibly the benefits may not quite as beneficial as the projections say.
These doubts appear to emerge from nowhere because critics don’t count. They appear to emerge from a social fog. Influential doubters have not immersed themselves in the technical and financial details of course, but their political antennae are twitching. They have caught the faintest vibrations of doubt from the clamorous fog that is the public arena.
A distant false note sounds. A hint of adverse possibilities, a hint that there are only a few lifeboats on the ship that is Big Project. To begin with, doubts are a kind of casual sidling towards the lifeboats. Just in case, well you never know, it does seem awfully expensive, it would have to work really well, some people will lose out but how many? Poor people of course - we must consider them.
Sceptics have to pound away at official foolishness with no indication at all that it has an effect, yet situations evolve and the butterfly’s wings could be anything. In other words it is possible to be too pessimistic. Yet at the same time, in order to make the critic’s point one has to be pessimistic merely to make the point.
I still think we are doomed though. Probably.
3 comments:
Pounding away at the foolishness sounds tiring, but it only happens when one has a blunt instrument. Satire and subversion are more effective, and more fun.
“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a butterfly — forever. ”
― George Orwell, 1984 (with apologies)
Sam - I agree and long may it continue.
DJ - that's good! Environmentalists won't like it though.
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