Jun 09
7
My Country, Right Or Left
This week marks the 60th anniversary of the first publication of George Orwell’s “1984”.
Pretty much everyone knows of that book and Orwell’s other masterpiece, “Animal Farm”.
He was also a great essayist and a new compilation of some of his writings has been released to coincide with the anniversary. I am looking forward to reading it – particularly pieces like, “My Country, Right Or Left”. This is a man with an enormous amount of intellectual bandwidth and the ability to capture the essence of social and political structures and relationships.
I wonder what Orwell would have made of the present, with the technology that we have, with the incredible amount of double-speak in public life, with blogging, with media generally…
I wonder what he would make of the way that fiction and fact are so incredibly intertwined nowadays: Published sci-fi and fantasy books seem to consistently predict the near future. The goings on in government (currently the UK), if included in a play, would create a great back-story for a story by Oscar Wilde – or indeed for Orwell himself.
Of course it was Orwell who invented the word “double-speak” along with a lot of other words that are now in our linguistic vocabulary.
What he was getting at then, and what is even more relevant now, is that very little is as it seems. In fact, I would go so far as to say that whatever you are being told by the authorities, particularly when the story pushes all the emotional buttons, believe that there is a different truth that needs to be found.
What we need are “actionable insights”. These are the pieces of information that really can help us understand how to plan. All of us are capable of planning. That is one of the things that differentiates humans from other animals. Unfortunately most people seem to forget that information has momentum. It doesn’t just sit there, static. And in order to garner actionable insights we need to be able to look at what the vectors of a meme are.
Global warming is a meme that is out there. So is peak oil. As is P2P. For the most part though people seem to be totally passive about these really important concepts. How many people do you know who are actually doing something, anything about a future where oil is rare, and therefore expensive, where some parts of the planet are uninhabitable, and where communications are transformed totally?
Most people want to leave the doing stuff and the planning stuff to “They”. (They need to do something about that!)
The reality is that we are making the future. “They” know we are. As a result “They” want to give us the kind of information that will ensure that we do what “They” want with the minimum of fuss.
At one point in my life, for my sins, I decided that I would become a country squire, and bought a property which I turned into a deer farm. I employed a guy by the name of Terry as the manager. He knew a lot about working with deer. We had to build yards so that we could manage the herds, and Terry designed and built yards with what seemed like a maze of high fences and corners. He reckoned that deer are very inquisitive and that it was easier to get them mustered if you could get them to go round corners where they couldn’t see what lay beyond. That way you could move them into a yard, sort them into different groups, by using strategically placed gates, etc.
That concept is roughly what is used in human life by business and by government. Advertising and editorial tell us what to do. Events push us into movement. So we react and go round the blind corner to discover what is ahead. Doublespeak is one of the valuable tools to get us into movement, or indeed, to calm us down so that we don’t panic at some issue of major importance.
So when the GFC comes down to bite us, we are distracted by a cut in interest rates and told that everything will be fine. Do you notice that everyone in the media is now focused on the failure of General Motors, not on the fact that petrol guzzling vehicles are not going to be viable as methods of transportation, and that we had better change the way we live?
In the world of media, companies are trying to build a new model where all their content sits behind a walled garden. In other words we will all have to pay for content. They can see the inevitability of the impact of P2P and they want to try to get everyone to buy in (no pun intended) to the concept that content needs to be paid for (even though the whole advertising model has been working fine for years). It is just that when it comes to margin, there never is enough!
We are all part of the flat world of global business. Some of us are going to be victims along the way, and some are going to be winners. In order to win through we have to deconstruct the messages that come from companies and industries with strong vested interests in making us think a certain way. We need to understand that things are not always what they seem, and we need to all be prepared to stand for what is right. Otherwise we will find that at the end of the day there won’t be much left.