It’s been said that in a democracy, people elect the government they deserve. For the last 20 years or so, there has been a trend towards major political parties, typically described in polar opposite terms such as conservative and progressive, capitalist or socialist, or along some other similarly binary language, becoming increasingly focussed on more extreme left and right wing views.
The COVD-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc across the globe. For many countries, there is not a single activity that we took for granted that hasn’t been changed – perhaps permanently. But one of the features of western society is the political obsession with ‘the economy’. The problem is, politicians have trained us to be so focussed on the health of the economy that we’re missing its true purpose. It’s not society’s role to support the economy. The economy needs to serve society. And the pandemic is a once in a generation opportunity to correct that imbalance.
History has a habit of repeating itself. Or, perhaps more accurately, revolving in cycles. Which is writer and philosopher George Santayana was motivated to say the saying “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
Over the last decade or so, there’s been a marked shift in western politics. And while it’s easy to assign the blame for this shift in behaviour on the politicians it’s really pandering to what they have seen in society. By tapping into the politics of fear and self-interest, political parties in many democracies have been able to gain and retain power. And they are taking advantage of a broken world to further fracture and divide in an almost Orwellian way.