I spent the evening with a friend after happily watching a Rugby match on Saturday. As we had a pint or two at the Village Pub afterwards and his wife joined us for a while, he listened on incredulously as we talked about the growing number of empty shelves in the local supermarkets, and we then began to talk about the global supply chain issues that are blocking up ports around the World.
As you may well imagine, the topic of conversation didn’t end there and we were soon covering fuel prices, farm production issues and plenty more.
The conversation that the three of us had was just a reflection of a much wider debate that is underway daily on social media and to a lesser degree the mainstream media. It had plenty in common with that wider conversation or debate in terms of what is causing the problems and what will happen next.
Some people really don’t care – yet. Others are just looking for ways to make whatever they hate like Brexit take the responsibility. And those who are laying all of this at the door of the Covid Pandemic really are just doing exactly the same.
If you take the time to read the different comments and do so by looking at what is being said by pundits and commentators that include the ones you don’t really like, you might begin to see the emergence of a theme.
Everyone with a public voice, audience and echo chamber is banging on about the issues for sure. But they are doing so through the lens of their own experience, whatever they are passionate about or whatever they believe to be their cause.
For a long time, this way of doing news and latterly social media hasn’t really seemed to matter. But what’s most interesting about this commonality, which is based upon different views, is the myopic thinking involved means that very few of them are even attempting to begin joining up all the dots.
It is rather like a default setting of the human condition, coupled with the way that we are culturally conditioned to think now, that someone, somewhere is always to blame for everything and that everything we experience in the world has some kind of reasoned or logical cause.
The events that we are now experiencing look easy to blame on whatever seems to be most convenient or most obvious – depending on your experience or world view. But if you start to look further and think about the way events are unfolding, you might see that there is no longer any pattern to any of the things that are happening. They really are very random, and this means that these crises that are unfolding as a perfect storm around us really do have no logic at their centre or as a direct cause.
Brexit isn’t to blame. Covid isn’t to blame. But both have played their part.
Brexit was a symptom. Covid initiated a response that has just made all that was already bad, significantly worse.
We are here because of those same default settings of the human condition that I mentioned above. Another of which is the lack of self-awareness in people with power and influence that encourages and propagates self-interest and greed.
It is an obsession with self and profit that has led to all of this. We have been taught to value monetary and material wealth above all things. But those things are equal to the few in a very different kind of way. And when you are one of that few and so absorbed and so obsessed with the accumulation of profit, wealth and advancement in the way that they all are, your decisions are all made within the confines of that very self-absorbed bubble, where your decisions continually benefit you but have horrifically dire consequences for us all.
Such thinking is dangerously myopic, short sighted and made without thought for the impact upon the next person, let along those who are 6, 7 or 8 times removed.
This is decision making which is made only with the logic of self interest and so in terms of the impact on the world itself there is no logic to any of it, it is random, and the consequences are random endings for us all.
There is such a thing as The Law of Consequence. The Rule of Cause and Effect. It is a way of restoring balance to any system that is skewed and working unfairly. No matter how long it takes, a system running on and being led by greed in the way that it has been, will find its way back to a point of dynamic balance, or the whole thing will end up being destroyed.
Put simply, you can’t keep rising prices, lowering wages and taking good jobs and the ability to be self-sustaining for the many, to the point where what is left can be bought or accumulated by some other nefarious means by the few, without the whole thing coming unstuck. That is the point we have reached now.
Some will call what’s happening an act of God. Others already view it as part of a worldwide conspiracy. It’s not.
The reality is that we are now in the age of consequence. Decades of greed and selfishness and the pain it has caused on the part of decision makers and those with undue influence will soon be over.
A series of unforeseen events that went against the script have led decision makers to go too far and over the top by continuing to stick like glue to a tried and tested formula and the approaches they have been taking.
Random decision making is literally about to lead the system that has been enriching the few to implode under the cloud of a vast succession of crises and seemingly random events.
The opportunity for great change and a very different way of being about to present itself for us all.
Adam Tugwell 