My daughter (17) said to me the other evening ‘the problem is, dad, Trump has all the power’. I thought about this – it’s certainly how it can feel, but how can one man have such power? I responded ‘he only has the power if we let him have it’. And that is what has been happening, isn’t it? The controls and checks have not been cranked up, the self-interested and/or spineless have held their nose, and it is getting increasingly smelly.
But at Davos Mark Carney spoke for us. He put it far better than I did to my daughter. He said:
“In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel wrote an essay called ‘The Power of the Powerless’. In it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?
His answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world, unite!” He does not believe it. No one believes it. But he places the sign anyway — to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists.
Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.
Havel called this “living within a lie.” The system’s power comes not from its truth but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source: when even one person stops performing — when the greengrocer removes his sign — the illusion begins to crack.
It is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.”
Bravo and thank you Mark Carney – please may you have knocked over the first domino.
In ‘The Orange Man’, Tom Bone adopts the slogan ‘Make America Real Again’. It is, of course, a satire of the MAGA mantra and, in true doublespeak style, points to the opposite of what he intends as he mangles truth and facts. But ‘The Orange Man’ is much more than a satire on Trump and his administration. By the end, its hero Gus is starting to piece together how to get back to truth and facts… It’s something we need to be urgently and seriously thinking about.
To order your copy, follow this link https://amzn.eu/d/3m2cchK
Join the Melior Movement! Have your say.