Wednesday, 22 May 2024
The man of purpose
The man of purpose does not understand, and goes on, full of contempt. He never loses his way. He knows where he is going and what he wants. Travelling on, he achieves great length without any breadth, and battered, besmirched, and weary, he touches the goal at last; he grasps the reward of his perseverance, of his virtue, of his healthy optimism: an untruthful tombstone over a dark and soon forgotten grave.
Joseph Conrad – An Outcast of the Islands (1896)
Who is the man of purpose today, the one destined to achieve little more than an untruthful tombstone over a dark and soon forgotten grave? Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Ed Davey or one of a thousand others? The men of purpose perhaps we should say, and women. A multitude.
It’s a reminder of what the Nudge Unit does for political men and women of purpose. It diverts the desire to understand what they are up to by promoting paths of least resistance for ordinary folk. Not a new political strategy of course, this game has been going on since the death of Socrates and probably long before that.
There is always, throughout history, a persistent official campaign against ordinary folk freely understanding whatever they wish to understand. A campaign which is especially virulent today when it comes to understanding what went wrong with our culture. Especially virulent when it comes to officially suppressed matters of fact. Virulently absurd when it comes to the free expression of common sense such as...
…well it’s quite a list.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
If democracy was effective against what has gone wrong with our Government (of various stripes) it wouldn't be allowed. Unless, of course, it could be 'nudged' to provide cover for the corrupt and inadequate.
DJ - that seems to be what is happening in the US, voting for Trump isn't allowed.
Their view seems to be that they have struggled to understand it, so that we don't have to. I mean, we've got jobs and families and other commitments, and many of us didn't do too well at school. We can't be expected to work all that stuff out for ourselves, like they did. Being nudged into compliance is so much easier, and what does it matter, given that the outcome is exactly the same?
And then, of course, when they back-track, we don't have to unlearn anything. We'll have given up our cars and gas boilers without knowing why, so we can hardly complain, can we?
Sam - that's it, all the eco-enthusiasts can't really complain when it finally becomes obvious that they have been backing a dead horse to win at a canter. It makes for an odd situation where little effort is required to understand that, but the eco-enthusiasts seem to think something will turn up.
Maybe there is some hope in that the green game will have to be wound down furtively.
Post a Comment