I have to admit I'm an outsider. Mainstream politics and culture simply don't reflect my values. Partly, I don't see a lot of courage around. How many times do we hear of the huge life changes made by people who have suffered a 'near-death experience'? Going through divorce can also lead to a reassessment and changes in priorities. But why does it take experiences like these that at the time offer such a threat to one's well-being?
Fear is a great motivator. It lies behind our inhumane treatment of asylum seekers. It also leads people to contest climate science and to oppose measures to ameliorate climate change. It's easy to say that we don't want to risk losing the comforts of our relatively high standard of living but how come Scandinavian countries with equally high SOLs can embrace alternative technologies with greater gusto? Whatever the complexities of Germany's use of fossil fuels and exchange of energy with neighbours, they've taken a bold step in deciding to phase out nuclear energy. (If ever defenders embrace costs of erection and de-commissioning, waste disposal, cradle to grave CO2 production, uranium reserves, and nuclear proliferation, I'll be surprised).
Maybe we haven't been devastated by war like the Germans. True, the Japanese bombed across the north as far as 23 deg. S and entered Sydney Harbour but most of us were unaffected by these events and heard little of them. The dark side of our much vaunted egalitarianism, may be an anti-intellectualism - what many have called the "tall poppy syndrome". unless these flowers are champion sportsmen (women have a much harder time getting ink space and money). Inevitably, analysis of this problem of conservativism has to be multivariate and acknowledge the interaction between phenomena. Contemporary capitalism favours the money-changers, speculators, marketers and salesmen, not people who invent and produce ideas of benefit to the whole society. It constitutes us more and more as individual consumers, severing our links with community. Students inevitably enroll in subjects promising easier and more immediate access to employment Courses such as philosophy, history, physics, maths and languages, ones that demand a generally harder slog, look less attractive and their enrolments fall.. Taking the easy path encourages people to fall back on simplistic faiths and simple explanations for the observed world. One study showed that a significant proportion of Sydney University students did not accept evolutionary science. Back hoe operators perhaps but not people being trained to observe, analyse and question and simply read widely.
Enough! Each of these points is nothing more than a headline but writing for others along with joining others in campaigns can relieve the gloom. Gardening is also a useful distraction.
