We suffer from a lack of real feedback
Learning equals trial and (most importantly) error. The error part of the equation is critical because it represents the feedback mechanism. If we are ever to progress, to learn, to get better we have to listen to the feedback. The trouble is we have stopped listening.
The polity worldwide is gripped in a crisis of inertia. Democracies are engaged in a grim trench warfare, where political generals lack the advantage of numbers, and their wafer thin majorities are often shored up by varyingly holy coalitions. It is like the world has turned into Italy without the benefits of the food, wine, culture and climate. You need to turn to the dictatorships to see any clear direction. Indeed retailer Gerry Harvey openly mused that perhaps we’d be better off under a benign dictatorship.
Perhaps the battlefield is too grand a description for politics, maybe the farms where battlefields are found offer better insights. Politics is in silo mode. There are separate silos of supporters representing an ever increasingly narrow set of concerns, micro, one-issue parties often with incoherent, incomplete political agendas. Silos are self-contained and with all of the moist hot air produced in these political silos they offer nothing more than silage and the corrosive effluent of silo. These silos do not interact with each other. They are closed systems producing self-reinforcing crap. In the silo, attending to the sounds outside serves only to ferment more self-righteousness. Nobody is really listening.
There are many reasons why we have stopped listening but some that I’d suggest are responsible are technology, wealth inequality and post-modernism. Technology firms have done a wonderful con job on us all. One of the great attractions of technology is that it offers labour-saving assistance. Factory and farm workers have long seen machines and robots replace their work colleagues. Now the machines not only assist in manual labour, they can ‘‘help’’ us by making choices for us. Content curation – the automatic collection and presentation of information based on our previous choices and behaviour is widespread. The effect of this is to force us into silos where we are bombarded with information likely to reinforce our views and prejudices. We no longer have to think or make decisions about what we listen to, which route we take, or the news we read.
Increasingly those living online are spoon-fed information and advertising that reinforces a closed mind. The danger is we become vulnerable to manipulation. Messages that speak to our prejudices essentially flatter our intellects, and never challenge us to think critically. There is no real feedback. We forget how to listen appreciatively to diverse views. It creates the perfect environment for nefarious people to manipulate us into buying more stuff than we need and buying political lies.
Wealth inequality has been been shown throughout history to be related to civil unrest, crime, and extremism. Wealth inequality creates silos – the wealthy and the poor. This disconnect is tangible and reflected in the gated communities of the wealthy and the ghettoes. In effect two closed systems that do not interact with each other, and where feedback is non-existent or one-way – from the rich lecturing the poor. It is hardly surprising that this reflects in political organisations promoting the interests of one group or another. It leads to the intolerant politics of race and migration, both essentially premised on protecting a privileged silo.
The postmodern turn that has it that reality is in the eye of the beholder, places the individual at the centre of their world. The only reality is what they think and feel.
One of the many problems with this is that it is hard to be mistaken when one’s own thoughts and feelings are more important than anyone else’s (assuming we can establish any reality beyond the wonderful ‘‘self’’). The trouble is, in a world where we are being increasingly manipulated by sophisticated algorithms feeding us only what we want to hear, we are being revved up into self-righteous indignation, and intolerance. Add to that an intrusive all seeing, privacy-free world courtesy of this technology, the views and works of others can be summarily dismissed based on prejudices about some irrelevant aspect of the person we disagree with.
Try making a career decision against this backdrop. Good luck.
Jim Bright is Professor of Career Education and Development at ACU and owns Bright and Associates, a career management consultancy.