It’s very difficult, I find, to disagree with everything that a person says or does. Lying Boris Johnson comes close, but even with him, I still find it difficult to argue with his point about wanting to bring a ‘can-do’ attitude back in to the British mentality.
Maybe it’s living through three years of political nonsense that has helped create the ‘can’t-do’ mindset that seems to have crept in to most segments of society. A case in point was the reaction to the Conservative Government’s recent announcement to recruit 20,000 new police officers. Now, granted, the announcement created a certain inevitable backlash from many sectors of society, since all it was essentially doing was bringing back 20,000 police officers of the 21,000 that had been lost from the police service thanks to the last decade’s worth of Conservative Government austerity. It seemed okay to me that everyone should have a 30 second moan about that fact, make a mental note to not forgive the Conservatives at the next general election, and move on.
But then the media started interviewing senior officers in the various police forces around the UK and a bigger problem became apparent. All we heard from them was how difficult the whole recruitment exercise would be, and how it wouldn’t be possible to recruit, train and get 20,000 people on board in the timescales the Government were demanding. The can’t-do coup de grace came from one Chief Constable who’s main argument against the whole initiative centred around the apparently impossible difficulty of finding enough lockers for the new recruits. Lockers. How he kept a straight face I will never know. I certainly couldn’t keep mine.
How do we find ourselves in situations like this, where even simple stuff becomes too difficult? Its not – as far as I can tell – about a lack of ability. If it was about lack of talent, then having a can’t-do attitude might actually be a good thing. Something like this:
People with low ability and a can’t do attitude present society with much needed damping. Far better that they stay home, playing on their x-box and blobbing-out on their Just-Eat app than getting out and messing things up for the wider community… which is what the ’Danger’ people end up doing. The combination of low ability and a can-do attitude is in many ways – thanks, David Cameron, thanks Boris Liar Johnson – why we’re in this mess in the first place. Seen in that light, its difficult to put too much blame on the Chief Constable who decides it is far better for his or her career to demonstrate strong ability to Dodge difficult, no-win projects handed to them by dangerous low-ability, can-do politicians.
But, then again, what we end up with is a society with a sorry dearth of Doers.
In that regard, I point back to The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity of yesterday’s blog rant. Or maybe another person that I disagree with almost everything they say. Hello, right-wing, misogynist, muck-raker, Steve Bannon. What does he have to contribute to the story? Perhaps a recognition that the people in positions of power in the world are now so dominated by Dampers and Dodgers that the only way forward is to judiciously place a few Dangerous puppets in positions of extreme power to ensure enough dominoes get pushed over to create the global chaos that will in turn kill off all the societal dead-wood and then allow the Doers to finally do their thing and set society back on track. Although hopefully along a third-way track rather than the right-wing, misogynistic muck-raking track Bannon seems to prefer.
