Tag: Impractical Idealism

Out of sight, out of mind

So, as the Left have steadily driven us to become obsessive about rights that go way beyond anything that benefits anyone or any industry or sector at all, the real problems facing workers that they had successfully dealt with here in the UK long ago, were simply shipped abroad or even recreated for very poor people abroad, so that the money orientated could just keep on making their money at an increasing cost to us all.

All the time, the growing problems have been out of sight and out of mind.

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Passing the point of balance means doing harm in a different way

The good achieved by what we now know as the Labour Party and the Left that surrounds it came to its natural zenith decades ago, when businesses and organisations accepted the duty of care that they have to all staff, their safety and welfare at work.

But like most things political, when that point was reached, the practicality that had driven meaningful change was replaced by impractical idealism. Probably for no better reason that the movement needed to find reasons that justified it continuing to hold the position it had and gave it a legitimate reason to exist.

Whilst there should always be a system of checks and balances to ensure that benchmarks for acceptable management practices exist, what few have realised is just how damaging it was when the Left adopted a new path which was the pursuit of rights.

Rights of any kind, but employment rights in particular have always been a popular cause.

It is after all pretty normal to be happy if you feel you are being given something for nothing, no matter that at a very different level, no such equation for employers and their bottom lines exists.

To work effectively, rights must be the same and result in exactly the same for all

The damage that the Left have inflicted on the UK has developed around their obsession with rights and how they operate.

The left creates, pursues and implements policy based on the idea that those who appear to be ahead or in a position of advantage must be restricted or held back so that others can succeed.

It is a wholly naïve view of the way that the world works.

Instead of succeeding by bringing everyone up to a better level of existence as they suggest, their philosophy has only ever succeeded in levelling down. Culminating in a process which can only be described as putting the lowest common denominator first.

The process doesn’t stop there. In fact, the process has become so very skewed that the policies that the Left pursue actually defy practical reality.

The Labour Party and the left-wing today display and live by a lack of understanding not only of how people think, but how businesses and operations must operate not only to exist, so that they can succeed in achieving just the basic aims or purposes that they exist for.

Levelling Down – Rights, Equalities, Educational same-ism and how the UK is hamstrung by the impractical idealism of the Left

The words that the Tories don’t use to describe what they mean about change tell us that they believe that they can simply drag everyone up to a better life by changing the environment around them.

It’s as if politicians believe they have the power to dictate and then control how we think by changing only some of the things we can see.

They don’t.

Whilst both the Left and the Right share the same ridiculous idea that lack of, or absence of money in life are the only problems people face that any government need to fix, the Left are also blissfully unaware of how many problems the policies they have implemented and pursued over recent decades have actually created, made worse and continue to create for us each and every day.

The woke have an impractical and idealistic view of the world based on idealism and inexperience. Treat them as enemies now and they won’t learn empathy or understanding, but they will believe it is right to hate

Trying desperately hard to make headlines that will distract from the self-inflicted Partygate chaos that the Prime Minister has created, each day, the Conservative Party Chairman announced yesterday that the Tories now have the woke and woke culture, well and truly within their sights.

Instead of defining themselves as the thinkers, the leaders, the pioneers of our times; those who understand how the changing world and its ability to influence thinking works, our Politicians have also become victims of the way we are all being influenced.

Their solution is not to start thinking. They just want to tackle the problem they perceive head-on. And do so without any thought for the very subtle processes and nuances of reality that are actually involved.

Our perception is everything, until we decide that it is not

By focusing upon and defining our problems and fears, we make them worse. Some might say that this is how we actually make them real and that the devil really lies in the detail of it all.

The focus may not be voluntary. In fact, as we have allowed all forms of media and information technology to enter just about every part of life, we have unwittingly made ourselves highly vulnerable to every form of external influence from which problems with the way we think – and yes, issues with our mental health, are made.

We have so much information coming at us from these different streams, that the messages we are receiving take on their own reality, just as if we are being exposed to them in real life.

Issues that are very small – if indeed they are real at all – seem very BIG. And the life story, experience or events surrounding just one person easily translate to being something that is either happening or could happen to us all.

To many of us, this is reality. Its how reality works, and when we find ourselves experiencing fears or ways of thinking that have come to us this way, we don’t begin to question its relevance or relativity to us. We just accept that this is the way it is.

We are what we think. Our thoughts become things.

So, when you have enough people accepting what arrives in their heads as read, we find ourselves in a rather strange place where the thinking or the views of just a few are not only accepted as real, it also becomes the collective truth – no matter how wrong, flawed or misplaced that initial thinking might actually be.

The problem for society – and by that, I mean everyone – is when decision makers, people with real-life influence and power, and those whose roles have implications for the general public, don’t possess the understanding of how the world has changed around them. They fall into the trap of seeing what is in front of them on a screen not only as their own truth, but the truth of us all.

Wokery, close relative of the social justice movement and political correctness that still exist and came before, are the problem that they are and are as dangerous as they are today, not because they have any real value. But because of the way that their voices are heard and then perceived and accepted by the unthinking as the majority view.

Oddly enough, the people who we should be able expect to understand the myth and mechanics of how wokery works and influences us, then take appropriate and considered steps to show us all how unreal and unrealistic it actually all is, are our politicians.

Yet they don’t.

Wokery is at best is just a phase in life based on youthful inexperience and idealism.

At its worst, wokery is the voice of the angry. Of life’s victims who don’t deal with the issues they face and instead look to project the blame for everything that happens away from where it should actually lie. Pushing it outwards to anyone and anything they can find fault with and make guilty, therefore highlighting the innocence they see within themselves.

The reason we don’t ignore or dismiss this kind of thinking and the way the people experiencing it behave – as we would do if we were to be touched by it ‘in normal life’, is because its voice has become multiplied many times over by our media culture. It has as such taken on the false appearance of being ridiculously strong.

Until we see wokery as the foolishness that it really is and stop giving oxygen to the dangers it both poses and has already posed to real people going about their real lives, it will continue to grow. It will have very perverse influences on life for us all.

Politicians should literally be putting up a hand to say stop to anyone who wants to make emotion without experience real. They should be telling them to get a grip. They should be working to create an environment that values the experience of all others above academia, think tanks and media messaging – prioritising the real world and real life above all miscreated thoughts that nothing more than perception is allowing to become things

As examples of people who were once very woke or social justice warriors show, most of the young people who are led by this idealism begin to wake up as the depth and understanding that only comes from life experience deals its inevitable blows.

They deal with them and move on, and in time learn to respect the reality that we all see and experience life differently, and that there is nothing right about having alternative ways of thinking about life imposed.

The danger is that in their desire to knee jerk their way out of trouble today, our feckless politicians are about to make the reality that the woke believe in even stronger. All at a time when the last thing we need from the voices that have a stranglehold on influence is for them to believe the establishment has now legitimised their hate.

Politics & Wokeism now run on the same pretence: Not how things really are, but how things should be

The term Woke feels new and as confusing as it is overpowering. It is presented by those with an agenda to push it as being the unescapable zeitgeist.

It is not. But that isn’t to say it doesn’t feel that way. Especially as there is so much going on across society and politics in particular, which is aligned with arguably the same thinking, ending up with impacts and consequences for us all in a surprising number of very similar ways.

If you took the time to ask everyone how they would like their lives to be and how they would like to experience the world, you would get as many answers back as the number of people that you ask.

In the majority of cases however, what they would have in common would be that they are based on idealism, rather than using life experience as the basis of making an informed choice.

This is how society increasingly thinks about everything today. If you were able to jump into a time machine and talk to people of the same ages and from the same kinds of backgrounds in the years that followed the end of the Second World War, answers would reflect a very different kind of choice. It would be informed from the experience that life can really be dark and terrifyingly hard. Many would have been very practical in their reflections, and the common message would simply be ‘it is great to be alive’.

Hardship is a reliable teacher for those who think they have nothing to learn. And as we approach nearly 8 decades passed since the end of that horrific war, it is a regrettable reality that many from within our younger generations are now obsessed not with what they have, but with how they believe their lives should be – without any respect for the rather large gap that sits between.

To be fair, idealism is a very powerful and passionate motivator, and the real reason why so many of the younger generations are left leaning or more socialist in their outlook. People become more right-wing or conservative in their ideas as they gain more experienced of the real world and adult life.

Today, things have gone much further than that. Many simply do not reflect upon what they have already got, overlooking a vital part of the process that helps us to become self-aware, instead focusing ever outwards for the answers to the questions about life that they have, whilst failing to understand how other people think, because they don’t even look at themselves.

People literally don’t live in the present, but have their thoughts focused in a semi-permanent state of anticipation about where things could be or should be, then falling into the trap of thinking that the desired state or experience is something that can simply be ‘imposed’ either by telling, or coercing people to live or behave this certain way, using rules or peer pressure to see the desired result imposed.

As time has passed since the 1940’s, the mindset that is the approach of dealing with life how it is with practical appreciation and understanding of how it works has been left behind and replaced with the approach of everything can be as it should be, simply because we say that it is – and what happened before doesn’t matter, because this is how its going to be right now.

The switch between the two was for a long time very subtle. It quickly began to affect decision making right at the top, but it wasn’t until the practical realities of decades of public policy being based on impractical idealism rather than practical reality was going to bite back, especially as we reach a point where those pushing this thinking hardest are literally punishing people with a different outlook for simply being who they are.

Even today, some 5 years since the European Referendum where ‘Brexit’ was ‘won’, even the political class itself cannot recognise that the whole European Union ‘project’ was based on a collective of ideas aimed at creating the ideal model of a European Superstate, with systems, procedures and governance not built upon the foundations of how life is for the communities, cultures and whole different Countries that the Bloc is made up of, but literally wiping that all away under the premise of how life should be with the only concession being a slow process of deliberate mission creep that hides the practical reality that imposing impractical reality was the strategy all along.

Brexit was won by the votes of people who have a clear understanding and experience of how life really is, as opposed to the alternative, which was always about endorsing a process which was always going to have serious consequences for the unnamed and unrecognised majority, because you cannot run an entire continent on the basis of how things should be.

At a time when the Government response to the Covid Pandemic is speeding up the arrival of a perfect storm of problems that have been in the making for decades, we are being forced into a culture war between what is and what should be, with seemingly no room left in-between.

Somewhat ironically, it is because we have had so many decades of everything being so good, that the impractical idealists championing woke thinking are able to behave as dangerously as they are doing so. The problem is that without respect for the practical realities of life and how the world really works, we are being set up for a massive fall, just as soon as the bubble bursts, and young people and those who are not appreciative of a more practical way of thinking are going to find the impact of the drop and the changes that it will require particularly hard.

There is nothing wrong with wanting life to be good, fair and the same for all. But the idea that this can be achieved by erasing history and anything distasteful, then making every part of life exactly the same for everyone is a recipe for disaster being cooked up and sent into a hurricane on a ship of fools.

We cannot escape the reality that we are living and experiencing – no matter how hard we might pretend otherwise. Changing it all for the better can only be achieved by looking at it, interpreting it and approaching it all differently. We will not do this by looking outwards and by hiding behind what should be. We have to look at ourselves, our history and the lives that we all live and move forward accordingly. It is we that must be the change.

The EU’s stranglehold over the UK: How impractical idealism created a real-life straightjacket

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The attraction to Membership of the EU is not something that can or should be easily dismissed. It is highly deceptive.

We have been continually sold solutions to gatekeeper issues that sound very simple, are usually highly appealing and play to the idea that being part of the EU is a one-way street to improved quality of life for everyone involved.
The problem is that behind those gatekeeper issues, such as the Working Time Directive of the Social Chapter, sit many knock-on effects and consequences that are not talked about but will almost certainly impact many areas of life and business that actually make lives for many if not most much harder to live.
Again, it’s a case of idealism hurting the many whilst glorifying the ideas of the untouched few.
The nature of the relationship with the EU and its forerunners that the UK was obliged to sign up to when it became a Member means that the many rules that follow as the result of opening the door to one of these ‘big ideas’ simply get created in Brussels and then rubber stamped by our own Government and our Civil Servants.
The reality of Law and Rule Making in Brussels is that we and our Parliament get no say. Rules and Laws created in the EU are simply sent across the Channel and then imposed.
So in the case of something like the Working Time Directive and the Employment Laws that surround it, the impact on our businesses of rules made by bureaucrats that have no understanding of running or managing businesses is to restrict working practices very tightly. The result is that businesses can becomes less profitable, less productive and for employees it might well mean less opportunity in every sense possible – that’s it they don’t actually lose their jobs.
This nanny-state management is actually representative of undemocratic coercion at best.
It is probably already a lot worse and would get increasingly so, if for any reason we were to end up having to Remain.
We should never hesitate to dream about creating a world which is better and works fairly and without prejudice for all.
But this is itself a dream with many steps to get there and there is the practical reality of how the real world works standing in the way before any journey can be planned to get there, or the downside of forcing this idyllic upside will hurt a lot more people than it will ever help along the way.
The EU and its direction for the future is based solely on impractical idealism.
Yes, the UK needs powerful aspiration for something better for all.
But the journey to our future must at every step be based on practical reality and understanding of how the world and human behaviour actually works. Nothing more.