It's A Paradigm Shift - Enjoy The Ride
I believe the Paradigm is shifting.
By this I mean the societal Paradigm is shifting, dragging the political paradigm along with it. This may be all wishful thinking on my part, but I think I might be at least partially right about this.
The last shift of this size culminated with Thatcher. I believe her period of governance issued the end of the Community and the rise of the Individual.
Collectively, as a society, we began a period of celebration of the individuals, the entrepreneurs, the idea that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and make a success in life.
The pinnacle of success was seen through the veil of money. The more you had, the more you showed.
Hedonism and excess were the watch-words of the late 80s/early 90s.
Now, I believe we are shifting back from Individual to Community. By community, I don’t mean that we’ll all be living in communes, wafting patchouli and dancing naked around fires.
I mean that we have gone as far as we can with this idea that all you have to do is decide to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you can create a successful life.
More and more we are becoming aware of the various inequalities.
We know that if you are a child living in certain parts of our country (especially in the north) the odds are prohibitively stacked against you. The education system has been manipulated to the point where schools have ceased to prepare young people for the demands of life, because they are drowning in paperwork, OFSTED visits and desperate to do well in league tables.
Education should not be a competitive sport!
Education should be a co-operative process with schools sharing best practice and experiences.
Life has become increasingly unequal or the inequalities are now more pronounced.
More austere.
People are finding it harder and harder to step over homeless people on the streets. Finding it harder to ignore the increase in poverty or the rise of the food banks. We all know that this shouldn’t be happening, not in the 21st Century, not in Britain.
It times of hardship, people want to pull together a little bit more. We are seeing the rise of community groups, because public funding is being cut and it’s the only way to keep things going.
We can all feel that there’s something not right with the world, there’s so much sadness, so much despondency and helplessness everywhere we look.
The simplest way possible to explain how a paradigm shift works is this.
Society is a bell curve
Most people are in the middle portion of the bell curve.
Paradigm shifts start with the OUTLIERS, people lying outside of the middle norm. Usually, ideas start being discussed among the outliers and then trickle slowly into the public consciousness until they become ‘normal’.
We see this most frequently in fashion.
A dress starts in the mind of a designer (an outlier), it gets shown to the magazine editors, who then disseminate the ideas to their readers, who then start to discuss the dress and then start to ask for the dress, and not long after, a version of that dress is available on the high street for mass consumption. Sometimes a dress can completely change the industry, until the next outlier comes up with the next dress.
Shifts in society take much longer.
How long it takes depends on how easily/quickly the ideas are disseminated or can be disseminated.
No-one can predict who/what the catalyst will be for a paradigm shift.
That thing that propels a few outlying ideas/outlying people to the centre of the debate.
But it starts with a general mood,
a feeling that things must change.
A few OUTLIERS speak this view out loud
They are considered by the general population to be ‘crazy’ people, but I will describe them as VISIONARIES, because they have a different vision of the future.
As soon as thoughts are vocalised, people then listen.
Some people hear and dismiss the view as crazy talk,
Some people listen and think, “so I’m not alone”, and they then seek out the outlier and begin communicating with them.
These are the COMMUNICATORS, because emboldened by the knowledge that they are not alone, they go off and tell their friends/family about the visionary and at the same time, they start to communicate their views.
This process continues, some people will condemn the visionary as crazy, others will seek them out.
Those who seek them out, then become communicators until enough people are talking about this different vision of the future, that it ceases to be an outlying opinion. It becomes the accepted view.
Those who have maintained the original vision of the future, then become OUTLIERS.
Now consider this:
If you are someone benefiting hugely from the current way a society runs, if you are making huge profits through the different political choices made by successive governments, how hard would you fight to keep this gravy train rolling?
If you can see the beginnings of a paradigm shift, and you can control the media, you can effectively stop the dissemination of these ideas. Simpler said, all you have to do to maintain the status quo is ensure that the outlying ideas do not get filtered into the mass consciousness.
How do you do that?
You discredit the ideas
You discredit the person speaking the ideas (VISIONARY)
You discredit anyone listening to or repeating the ideas (COMMUNICATORS).
Do this enough times, people stop hearing the message, they laugh at the visionary.
This is easy to achieve if the majority of people get their information from a small number of sources.
The problem is that more and more people now get their information from a multitude of sources. People are now communicating with each other, passing ideas and information around like marbles in the playground.
Corbyn was nominated to present an alternative voice in the first leadership campaign – by very definition an OUTLIER.
The only hope is to portray the man as a joke and the supporters as thugs and monsters.
The Media have been grooming the general public for many years. gaining trust and loyalty by entertaining them, by giving them something to look forward to and smile about. An entire industry has been created to distract/divert /entertain – the Rise of the Celebrity.
Like a chocolate bar, wonderful to have, but quite bad for you and ultimately not very filling.
They’ve used this loyalty and trust to subtly influence opinions until they have them docile enough to simply spoon feed the opinions to them
Without challenge.
Without question.
In fact, the paradigm shift of WORDS has already succeeded.
At first Corbyn was a crazy loony lefty SOCIALIST. The very use of the word was a condemnation, it reminded those who can remember, of the 80s and the militant trots (how scary they were!).
We have already seen a decline in the amount of pundits saying that he is unpopular, now they are focussing on
“a few hundred people at a rally doesn’t translate into election success”
Maybe not.
But a few hundred people, enthused and motivated, has already turned into thousands of people, enthused and motivated.
With enough communicators, these thousands can be turned into millions.
It is now becoming harder and harder for the media to present Corbyn as a crazy person.
People see the misrepresentation on the news.
People are asking themselves:
“Why are the media so against this guy? He seems alright to me”
This leads to curiosity…
So if you share a new vision of the future, go out and be communicators.
But remember, you are communicators, not aggressors.
People who cling on to the old paradigm are not doing it for fun, it is a form of self-preservation.
It’s easy to accept the sky is green, if you never to look up to check.
If you have completely bought into the old paradigm, anything else is unthinkable, they will fight tooth and nail to avoid/ignore the new paradigm as it completely destroys their world view.
Be conscious of this and be kind.
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