Regrettably, the way that culture and society work today with the messages, narratives and programming that it provides, has left or is encouraging everyone not only to believe that they know and understand everything, but that armed with this seemingly ubiquitous knowledge they are being told that they have, they can then do or be whatever they want, without fear of consequence and without any kind of cost.
Thinking is not ‘joined up’. There is no recognition of the relationship between work, effort, commitment and integrity, with the journey or process from start to finish or with obtaining the end result.
The ease with which things appear at the click of a link or push of a button compounds this lack of awareness into the failure to appreciate the complexity of the systems and the procedures that make everything work around us and just how many different roles or contributions can and are being made in order that what seem to be the most basic of products or services are accessible to us or reach us on what we have learned to regard as throw away terms.
Public Policy and the system of governance that we have is no different.
In fact, what we fail to realise and appreciate far beyond the complexity of the relationship between input and reward and ease of accessibility of all things, is everything that seems to be so easy has come to be taken for granted in these ways because decision makers are either blind to or are deliberately ignoring the real costs of living life unsustainably.
The self interest and greed that has influenced the decision makers is allowed to permeate the whole public narrative, because our decision makers believe that they will benefit even more if they acquiesce with an approach that apparently comes without any cost to them, but with every benefit too.
Few of us will willingly recognise or accept the costs of unsustainable living, until such time as those costs reach us directly or have an effect on us in some way where we accept that the perceived disadvantages outweigh the perceived benefits in a meaningful way.
There are consequences to every decision made in the Public Realm.
Each Public Policy affects other Public Policies, is or will be affected by other Public Polices in some way.
Public Policies that govern the way that businesses and organisations behave and conduct their business, as well as how each of us as individuals think, have the power to have either positive or very negative implications for us all.
Everything our Politicians do has a cost, implication or consequence in some way. Especially when they surrender the power that the Electorate or that Voters have given them, to people, to ideas or to 3rd party organisations that are or have their own agenda, and therefore subjectively influence them.
Our Politicians are making a mockery of the democratic system. Many of them are willfully blind to the consequences of their actions. But whether their actions are deliberate or borne of ignorance, the fact is that they have taken roles that require awareness of everything that Public Policy does and that it touches, and that when they fail one of us, they fail all of us just the same.
This Blog is part of the e-book ‘The Way of Awakened Politics for Good Government’. Please do download a copy for your Kindle from Amazon, or alternatively, read the whole book FREE online once it is available at www.awakenedpolitics.com
Adam Tugwell 