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.