Burn a banker
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
There is a lot of negativity around at the moment. The media, blogs, politicians, people in everyday conversations – we’ve all been beating ourselves up about the economic crisis, global warming, the death of Jade Goody, bad mannered children, fat people, knife crime, housing slumps, binge drinking, the sectarian versus the secular, the end of civilisation as we know it. If you think too much about it, you feel like throwing yourself off a cliff, or at the very least going and watching a few hours of I love Lucy repeats.
I often wonder if things are really that bad. Human life has always been miserable, there has long been a divide between rich and poor, the people in power have always abused it, lazy and selfish people are not a new phenomenon. There was no golden age. Yes, industrialisation and late capitalism have changed our society, but has human nature itself really changed? Probably not.
What has definitely changed us though is communication. We have access to more information than we could ever possibly want and that I for one, could ever possibly process. It might well be this information saturation that is making us so much unhappier than we think we were in the past. The more instant information channels that there are, the more black and white the world grows – there is no room for nuance on quick and easy current affairs programmes, news sites that are designed to maximise comments and eyeballs, and 24 hour rolling news. Sometimes I suspect that it is this that feeds our seemingly innate desire for black and white, for wrong and right, for easy solutions.
We have just been warned about expected protests across the City next week where I work (see here). I’ve spent the morning re-arranging our planned events. And quite frankly, it all scares me.
There is a difference between pathetic shouting at the TV about Germaine Greer working for the man and wanting to ‘burn a banker’. The global economy is in crisis (again – we have been here before) but deliberately targeting someone because they’re wearing a suit jacket isn’t going to ease the situation. It’s just a black and white animal response that in the end is going to make us even more depressed about the state of our society and what we’ve become.
What might have helped would have been us all taking an interest in the economy and its current excesses five years ago. But the times were good then, weren’t they, and we couldn’t be bothered.
