B A R B I C A N L I F E
representative democracy has been incremental and insidious. As we continue to blame our politicians for economic failure, it is slowly dawning on us that central bankers are making increasingly ‘political’ decisions, and fewer and fewer people now trust them, after the lies of the Greeks were caught out. Here in the UK, our bankers have printed money happily, for the treasury to ‘borrow’ - they have made sure that Britain’s debt to GDP ratio is something like 600%. SDK mentions this misplaced power. He is right. I got back to the flat which was
strewn with my possessions, as we prepared to move out to be nearer the school to which my son will now go. We seem to have chosen another concrete block, with a lift… no surprise there, then. We are all creatures of habit. As I packed slowly, I told myself
that we need to wake up now, and remember what is important to us, and whose opinion matters – if we lose our children’s respect by allowing ourselves to be understood as selfish, corrupt, cynical or simply stupid, then we have lost a treasure the value of which computers cannot count; we are storing up the pain of alienation for our own futures, which neither quantification nor medication can ever hope to ease. How have we allowed ourselves to
become like this? Praise for the wrong things. The baby checked for approval before he shuffled his way into a new place – it was fleeting, but nevertheless, there. We have developed and tolerated a public praise system, the broadcast media, which magnifies winning, which hangs on every word of each politician, and pulls him short (so he is forced to ritually obfuscate) and it openly tracks the rich, praising the aggressive in business; pictures of private balconies in exotic locations are set up for our praise (and envy perhaps?), as ‘reality TV’. We measure and praise instant wins in everything, and openly subject to ridicule the personal failure of others (and call it ‘entertainment’); in our economic life we measure short term performance, and reward it almost instantly. Sadly, the Chinese did not come here and make this mess, we did.
Following Imperial successes, the West has tried to standardise everything, make rules for everything, to measure everything in the same way – as if we were running someone else’s country, and might at any moment be faced with mutiny if we were not SEEN to be even handed. The very rational basis of our approach, which Ibrahim so commended has become unleashed upon our society as a curse. True discretion, personal input, and the exercise of that delicate balance between trust and control, which is the basis of any true value added, is thereby made into a ‘safe, standard unit’ of ‘measured deliverable’ and rewarded uniformly, using a set of formulae – in education, in banks, in all the public services, in charities. ‘De-personalise it, and then we can create a monitoring industry’, says an increasingly large and powerful Civil Service. Enough. You cannot govern a country in the long term, (nor can you run effective institutions) without trusting its people. They will notice. The TV stations offer more of the
programmes which are watched, so just to blame them is to ignore our own behaviour. Why is watching the instant winners so seductive? We seem to be fixated with stories of winning, because it makes us feel instantly good, and more, according to the neuroscientist and psychologist, Ian Robertson – see his book called the Winner Effect. In it he argues that the effect of ‘winning’ and the resulting praise operates on us like a drug – and it is addictive. Most telling is the story of the fish in an African lake which changes shape, increases in size, and brightens in colour as he gains a territory, sometimes within the space of a week! Are our brains changing too as we witness ‘instant accolade for instant wins’ even if it is vicariously? What are we changing into? Today’s fastest computer, the IBM
Sequoia is running at 16.32 thousand trillion operations per second, I am told by my newspaper. What is the use of all this information, if individually all we do is learn to ‘massage the truth’ - lie to ourselves and each other? What is the point of ‘being media-savvy’, and thereby create the ideal conditions for being
21
mistrusted by our own children? No, this is not original - it was said much more elegantly, ironically, by an early twentieth century civil servant who turned to poetry. Here is T.S. Eliot, in The Rock, written in 1934
‘Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’
Our only hope is simple
communication, good old fashioned story-telling, I thought, watering the geraniums on my Barbican balcony. We need to tell our children the story of why we have been getting it wrong, now – we may explain that there were extenuating circumstances. SDK has really tried, and I commend his book to you. One of his proposed remedies is non-standard discretionary regulation of banks by setting individual levels of capital requirement for each bank! Bravo, let’s do it, I say. Most importantly, we need to
document our efforts at trying to get it right. We need to just forget what we look like on any media, adjust our egos, and give it a try. I eased myself into my chair, and switched on my computer. At the blink of the cursor lies a possible expiation.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68