From Our Brains to Yours
On first principles
Fair warning: this is a bit off topic – I’m not going to talk about communications or advocacy or strategy.
Like everyone else, I’ve been watching the imploding economy with a mixture of horror, dread, and morbid curiosity: what on earth can we do? What can governments do? What can individuals do? Corporations?
It’s occurred to me that I’ve been fixated on the wrong questions. The right questions all begin with what should we do, not just what can we do. The right questions address something much bigger than a bailout bill or whether CEOs were profligate or how much punishment wanton consumerism really deserves.
The right questions are about “first principles.”
Whether we like it or not, the fundamental social constructs under which we’ve been laboring for at least the last fifty years are being re-written. The relationship of money to governments to people will be changed – has already changed, thanks to TARP. The basic structure of risk and reward is being re-written. The rules about work and how it should be valued and rewarded, our responsibilities to the least among us, and our responsibilities to each other are being reworked.
Do we want to be a nation built on public risk and private reward (the de facto result of bailouts as opposed to “nationalization”)? Do we want to be a nation where health care is a privilege reserved for the wealthy? Do we truly believe that governments have zero responsibility to ensure our nation’s children are fed, clothed, housed, and educated – and if we do, what does that say about us as people, since our government is of and by all of us? And on and on…
I have a clear answer for myself to all of the questions above. But even more important than the answers is that we have the conversation; that we deliberately determine how this major re-writing of the very foundations of our society turns out. This is too big to just let happen to us. We’re much less likely to be OK with the outcome.
-Shayna