Besides, the more favoured a man is by Fortune, the more fastidiously sensitive is he; and, unless all things answer to his whim, he is overwhelmed by the most trifling misfortunes, because utterly unschooled in adversity. So petty are the trifles which rob the most fortunate of perfect happiness!
Boethius - The Consolation of Philosophy (around 524 AD)
It is easy enough to see this problem in our political and media elites. The comfortable charlatans and bungling rectifiers of petty trifles who tell us how to live our lives. Utterly unschooled in adversity, they still claim the right to guide the lives of others.
There is a soft, soggy futility about it all, a futility which pervades the public arena. It has become a place of mendacious silliness like a vast frenetic meeting room of whispers, waving hands and raised voices where comfortable people mill around waiting and pointing and waiting again for something which never arrives as they said it would. Until...
Until something, but who knows? Whatever we do, the fatuity seems destined to go on and on until we finally reach a certain critical level of feckless absurdity, that tipping point we've been promised for so long.
4 comments:
When it will occur and what shape it will take no one knows; only that it is likely to come.
Tammly - I agree, something big is the only thing likely to bring a halt to it all.
When the massive breakdown or reckoning occurs, I wonder whether all those who currently act in the pantomime will be like those Germans in the late 1940s who were definitely, definitely not ever Nazis. They knew about it, and were privately appalled, of course, but were unable to speak out at the time. Will they try to get positions in whatever more realistic system replaces the old system, or will they be completely swept away because we will have different needs.
In France, they've got proper fascists involved in government because they faffed around for so long pretending everything was fine. The UK could get much worse than that. Let's hope people see sense before they see bloodshed.
Sam - I think most of the pantomime actors will sidle over to whatever replaces it, but the obvious problem is that official and political ineptitude are fostering deep divisions which may make things impossible to put right without extreme measures. Labour is not the party to put that right.
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