A divided world

 

Subject: A divided world.




Our world is divided into many parts. Religious, national, cultural, and of course people with wealth and people without. The factions that have arisen and divided the world are largely artificial. Gender and race are the natural genetic outcome and over many millennium of  breeding and cross breading, a slow assimilation has allowed some cooperation but still perceived differences in nationality and man made differentials, such as culture and religious values divide us. The most recent, ‘inequality and wealth‘ brought into focus through the antics of modern capitalism, the manipulation of markets and most recently, the market in essentials where, because the  trade is in essentials there is no real market.
Todays mayhem is that the status quo is threatened by an assumption that we are out of balance economically, that the proceeds of economic activity is being wasted on a underclass and only the wealthy can fix it.
Now one ideological reason for economic endeavour  is that a successful economy is one which provides for the needs of everyone, the other is that winners win and the crumbs which fall off their table can then be distributed to the losers.  Ronald Regens famous(infamous)Trickle down economics was based on this premise. His avid  pupil Margaret Thatcher who equally famously debunked the value of society over the  individual argued that ‘what god given right’ have the majority, (inevitably the poor), to the profits of successful money making combinations since winning is inevitably the whole point of the exercise. As individuals we isolate ourselves and our families in so many ways. We live in homes that segregate us from the neighbour, we drive our car through the rain rarely if ever offering a drenched person a lift, we squirrel our money away and rarely think to go next door to see if poor old Daisy has food on the table, and yet we are asked daily to contribute to help the poor and the sick thousands of miles away on the other side of the world. This latent call to help comes with our compassion for the weak and frail by recognising that our relative strength and prosperity could be shared as an act of humanitarian concern.

 Donkeys, elephants, cheetahs, emaciated children, all draw a quid or two from our wallet but not the down on their luck individual living a mile or so away who desperate, as winter approaches is at their wits end on how they will manage. Our compassion then evaporates when we see our own likeness brought low, perhaps we are scared that we will go the same way and prefer to bury our heads in the sand, perhaps we worry about the profligate use of limited resources and the  a poor choices people make preferring a subscription to Sky to insulating their home. The choice to have children when knowing you can’t really afford them, acknowledging that the children will be disadvantaged but ignoring this for the subliminal need to bear a child as of your right. The out of control social contract between state and citizen has broken down as mothers are forced to to go to work to pay the rent and put food on the table only by paying for childcare which amounts to virtually half of their earnings.

This dystopian ‘Brave New World’ where ‘values’ are subordinated by needs and outcomes are seen in the dysfunctional children and feral gangs roaming our streets. The balance between what we want and what we need to have, to fulfil what we want is driven by the market and consumerism, the indulgence of the credit card, and that we are influenced to think we are owed it.