The human famine
If you read the article you learn that for several weeks in 2004 the small town in Kailak on the southern slopes of Darfur's Jebel Marra was the scene of a massacre by starvation where troops and militiamen torched the surrounding villages, forcing some 17,000 people to flee to the town. The armed men then surrounded the makeshift camp, preventing anyone from leaving. Then they robbed families of their possessions and then beat or shot them if they foraged for food or remains in their homes or sought out leaves and berries in the surrounding forests and woodlands. An age old siege tactic was used against the defenceless civilians.
The situation in Kailak, though extreme, was not unique. Fighting and counter-insurgency at another famine camp in Korem, Ethiopia was captured by BBC footage and this is what in 1984 inspired Bob Geldof to launch BandAid.
These are not the only issues with famines and military action. One of the worst famines in the 21st century has been taking place since 2016 in the Yemeni civil war, which has killed 85,000 children and God knows how many adults. This civil war is further complicated by the intervention of Saudi forces who have been armed by... Western governments. Then you have the situation in Afghanistan, which has been occupied by a Western coalition of forces since 2001, supposedly to fight the Taliban. Yet today 95% of the Afghan population face starvation or food insecurity and may only seek asylum in the West if they are allowed to leave by... the Taliban.
And school's out early and soon we'll be learning
The Boomtown Rats 'I don't like Mondays'
And the lesson today is how to die
And then the bullhorn crackles and the captain tackles
With the problems of the how's and why's
And he can see no reasons 'cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to die?
Let's talk social capital & social bankruptcy
So what do I mean by social capital? I'm referring to 'sloppy' or soft human skills- empathy, compassion, humanity (supposedly our primary defining characteristic as human beings, imagine that), feelings, emotions, kindness, generosity, humility, friendship, a sense of community, the stuff that motivates us to get up and do stuff for other people.
So what do I mean by social bankruptcy? I'm referring to a famine, but not of grain, or food, or crops, but of social capital, so such things as compassion, empathy, humanity, and so on. Let's take compassion, as an example, where you are motivated to alleviate or lessen someone else's struggles or suffering motivated only by the desire to help them and make life easier for them. Compassion is different from sympathy, where you simply accept and feel something for someone, compassion differs in that it is more proactive and involves either taking direct action or creating an opportunity for someone else.
Both compassion and sympathy are part of the whole empathy skillset. This is not just a human thing. This is scientific. Empathy is the central characteristic of biological evolution, and is that important to life and existence it counterbalances climate change. You see climate change and biological evolution go hand in hand. The statement I'm making here has the backing of 3.8 billion years of successful partnership between a living planet and its environment. Empathy is fundamental to biological evolution, because empathy is a connection to both environment and to other.
Collectively we're becoming far too self-focussed and nowhere near enough other-focussed. "What's in it for me?" is the question of these times and it's an increasingly common question which underlies most social interactions. Let's take another look at that Tom Stoddart image again.
Before I ask you to examine the above image, I want you to imagine being out on a city street somewhere and encountering a flock of pigeons on the pavement. If you get too close to one pigeon all the pigeons will immediately take flight and fly away to a safe enough distance from you. This is empathy. It's something natural and innate and all living organisms have it within them. You can say the same for compassion, because taking flight is an action, is it not? When you get too close to pigeons on the street, pigeons don't fight and squabble among themselves over whether you're too close or not, do they? They just take flight, instinctively, as if they all make up a single living organism.
For whatever reason we humans just don't have that natural ability. If we did we would not be so abusive to our natural environment, other species and in many cases each other.
Let's take another look at that Tom Stoddart image above. I want you to take a very good look at this image, simply because if any image defines the sum total of human social and cultural values on this planet it is this image. I don't want to get into the reasons, or labels, or examine why simply because I have been talking about this issue for decades - since the middle of the 1990's - and trying to find different ways of developing social capital between people. I've spent close to 15 years trying to develop the Qultura community as a way of developing social capital between individual people. This is even the focus of this website and this blog. I'm not getting anywhere.
The Tom Stoddart image isn't just about what went on in some feeding centre in some famine in the east of Africa decades ago. This single photo is a statement of truth, the truth about human social and cultural values in the 21st century. Collectively we do not value social capital anywhere near as much as we should. We value successes, achievements, we value material and financial values, such as getting an education, having qualifications, being in gainful employment, having a job, making money, and earning money. This is not just about "What's in it for me?". This is also about "Where is the money going to come from?" These two questions are the defining questions of our society, our culture, of our so-called civilization. I'm in London, in the UK but I guess it doesn't matter where you are. Society is no longer all about give and take, and is far more about take, take, take and take again. Get what you can out of other people and fuck everybody else.
But there's also an important point I'd like to make and this is something I have learned from my own experience. You might not feel this way or think this way. You might be just like me, or many other people out there who are aware that we are lacking in social capital collectively as a society or even in the community. I'm not making any kind of assumptions in what I'm writing here. But the sad reality is that some people, and enough of them, do not value social capital or empathy or compassion as an important enough social and cultural value. So we end up with the socio-economic system which we have right now and which we all have to deal with and try to find a way of surviving and paying the bills. So even if we think differently and feel differently we often have to put aside our humanity, our empathy and our compassion just to be able to survive and get our needs met in the socio-economic system.
The famine of social capital
Let me throw out some examples of how this famine of social capital, or social bankruptcy plays out in the reality of our lives. I make no apologies for mny use of the word famine hhere, because we are all in some way being starved of social capital, we are being cheated out of opportunities to develop social capital, and all too often we are being gaslit and lied to about other people through powerful means, e.g. the media, social media and alternative media, to create fear and distrust between people to prevent us from developing social capital. Given the fact that we can only really understand society through our individual experiences of society and our social relationships, I'm going to have to throw out some examples here.The workplace
One of the main environments of social bankruptcy is in the workplace. Primarily our social and cultural values emphasize material and financial values at the expense of other social and cultural values therefore all too often business culture and work culture is a socially bankrupt experience where productivity, efficiency, the bottom line and profitability take precedence over everything else.
Emphasizing such things as productivity, efficiency, profitability, at the expense of, or even disregarding social capital and its development completely has created a culture of work which is neither sustainable or healthy because it means that you have to spend anywhere of up to sixty or more years with a working week of between 35 and 60 flat hours - not counting lunch breaks, coffee breaks, or the time you spend commuting and travelling between your home and your workplace.
Let's not forget how all too often in this focus on productivity, efficiency and profitability pits human beings against digital technology and also, far more importantly, how it has also shifted the goalposts of our social experiences. Half a century ago work was something you did to give yourself social security. It didn't really matter what you did, because if you got a job back in the 1970's and 1980's usually you could afford to support yourself comfortably, you could pay the rent, even buy your own home, pay the bills, afford food and even have enough money left over to be called disposable income. What's more if something happened in your life you could quit your job, spend a bit of time on social security, unemployment, and then when you recovered find another job and get back to working again. Some younger people might think I'm writing science fiction here, but back in the day for most people there was a balance between productivity and social capital.
This is no longer the case. No longer is social security (part of social capital) possible. For too many people it's becoming a thing of the past. Work is no longer a guaranteed means of achieving social security for everyone. For some people it still is, but for an increasing number of people it isn't. All too often you can be struggling to survive on some level of relative poverty, then you get a job of some sort, and you're still struggling to survive on some level of relative poverty. Only now you have a job and the focus of your life is jumping through hoops on a daily basis for your employer. This is primarily how the gap between those who have and those who don't have is widening into an almighty chasm.
Public healthcare
This social bankruptcy and famine of social capital is beyond a doubt the most urgent and pressing unfulfilled need of our time. It's - in my mind at least - the single most important environmental issue out there. This is not me denying the existence of climate change, even though I don't see climate change in itself as 'The Issue', simply because climate change is a fundamental part of our environmental reality. Yes we have a natural habitat but see, we're not guaranteed that natural habitat. 96% of the species that ever existed on this planet are extinct. Human beings can become extinct at any time. You see unlike trees, fish, plankton, bees, ants, earthworms and other species we're not essential to this planet's ecosystem.
If earthworms become extinct then the soil will no longer support plants and trees and all living will end on this planet within a couple of years. If bees and other pollenating insects become extinct then all life will die out because trees and planets won't have the means to reproduce through the distribution of seeds and fruit. Yet if all human beings on this planet died out this planet would flourish and do even better without us. Not only are we not essential to this planet. We're not even a major player in this planet's ecosystem.You see? Even if we think through the environmental issues of climate change and think through to the root cause we come back to social bankruptcy and this famine of social capital.
This is what is impacting public healthcare more than anything else. This is not overpopulation. It's not necessarily a lack of funding. Primarily it's social bankruptcy and the same famine of social capital. This is what is generating a social care crisis and also a lack of accessibility to primary healthcare and a mental healthcare crisis. Instances of mental health issues, depression, anxiety disorders and other mental health issues are sky rocketing, especially among younger generations. Social stigma, loneliness and social exclusion is becoming more and more widespread. People working in healthcare are becoming more and more stressed, overworked, burned out, and the sad reality is that we don't have enough doctors, nurses, clinicians, psychiatrists, therapists and other healthcare workers to keep up with the demand.
As a result premature mortality - instances where people die other than naturally - is rising despite the fact that homicide rates haven't risen by all that much. Even though suicide rates are at a peak, with close to 5.500 people committing suicide in the UK every year, it still does not explain why around 1.6 million people die prematurely in the United Kingdom every year.
Welfare benefits systems & pensions (social security)
I've got to put social security in brackets here because even in this culture of social bankruptcy and famine of social capital, of which social security is an essential part, there are some people out there in society who believe that there needs to be even less social security. I'm not sure about you. I find this premise and mindset staggering. It simply blows my mind that anyone can think that way. Let me also make it clear where I am coming from. Social security for me is the point of equilibrium when it comes to social capital.
Everyone, and I really do mean everyone, should have access to social security on the basis of nothing other than being born. There should not be a for or against. This is something that should be beyond all discussion. Social security is the foundation of human civilization and the fact that this is not common knowledge or part of our everyday social awareness goes to show just how lacking we are as a society in terms of social capital.
One of the greatest achievements of the 20th century was the Beveridge Report published in the UK by economist William Beveridge which inspired the concept of modern social security and which led to the creation of the National Health Service (NHS) and the DHSS (the Department of Health and Social Security). This is what led to the creation of the welfare state which on the one hand guaranteed social security to everyone and also on the other hand free at the point of access healthcare also to everyone. This is arguably one of the greatest achievements to come out of the Second World War and was an inspiration for other social security systems and universal healthcare systems elsewhere in the world.
However the concept of social security for everyone, which was once the achievement of the 1942 Beveridge Report and it's implementation at the end of the 1940's through the foundation of the NHS and social security system, is now history. The welfare benefits system is now based on conditionality and the exact same values of the workplace - productivity, efficiency, and profitability. Even if you are too sick or too disabled for work, you can only access welfare benefits based on your potential and willingness to work. Everything has become 'work-focussed', with no relationship whasoever to social capital, accessing it or developing it. If that potential or willingness isn't there or cannot be perceived then it's a case of tough shit. You fall through the widening cracks in whatever social safety net that remains and end up destitute. Go find some cardboard, a sleeping bag or a tent and also find yourself a place on some street to sleep.
Understanding the issue of willful blindness
This is where I'm going to try and do something differently. Please keep in mind that I'm writing from my own personal perspective and what I'm doing and have been doing. As a rough timeline, I first got interested in this around 1993 and 1994. I started getting seriously interested in this between 1993 and 1996. Around 1998 and 1999 I developed The Omega Principle. In 2009 I developed Qultura methodology and first started to develop the Qultura community out of Creative Law. This sounds like a list of successes and achievements, but it isn't. I'm giving you an idea of how long I've been working on this, but most of that time has not been successful, but a long sequence of failure, mistakes, learning curves and lessons.
The biggest single issue I find myself coming up against is willful blindness. Willful blindness is something other than ignorance. We are all fundamentally ignorant and that's because life, society, and environment involves a reality that we cannot ever fully understand or know about. Willful blindness is something completely different. It's a legal concept. If there is information that you could know, and should know, but you somehow manage not to know, then in terms of the law you are willfully blind and to some degree culpable. Willful blindness is not a legitimate defense strategy in a court of law.
I can give you examples of willful blindness. There was the willful blindness in the banking system when people were selling mortgages to people who couldn't afford them. You see it in the banking system when interest rates are being manipulated but everyone knows what is going on but many chose to not pay any attention to it. Then there's the decades of willful blindness in the Catholic Church when decades of child abuse went ignored. The run up to the Iraq War is another example of willful blindness. Willful blindness exists throughout our political systems, Willful blindness exists on a spectrum of scale and dimension and it exists in schools, in families, in workplaces and in communities.
It also exists throughout institutions, organizations and other collectivities such as government departments and local authorities. You could ask a question such as "Is there an issue in your workplace that you are afraid to raise?" I put good money on a vast majority of people in any such an environment raising their hand to say "Yes, there is." I think there was some study done somewhere in the United States where 85% of people said yes. Think about that. This means that the vast majority of people are aware that there is in issue in their environment but they're not willing to speak up or say anything about it.
I'm not wishing to pick on the United States here but I could, given the fact that already in 2023 there have been 95 mass shootings with 141 people dead, 365 people injured, and people are still arguing back and forth about gun control. We could do a survey asking the same question "Is there an issue in your workplace that you are afraid to raise?" elsewhere and achieve the same numbers from anywhere else in the world. That's a lot of fear. That's a lot of willful blindness. That is a lot of silence.
What I want to point out here is that this is, fundamentally, a very human problem. This the fundamental truth about willful blindness. We are all to some degree and in certain circumstances willfully blind.
Now we may be willfully blind out of fear, whether we fear retaliation, reprisal, social stigma or losing whatever little social security we have managed to scrape together and enjoy. Sometimes we are willfully blind because we see the futility of the situation and think to ourselves that nothing's ever going to change. Over a million people in the UK protested the Iraq War, but it still went ahead. Hundreds of thousands of people marched against austerity. I was there. I was one of them. Yet today we have what I can only describe as perpetual austerity.
But then you have the issue regarding whistleblowing and people who stick their heads above the parapet and speak out. So now we have to consider the mythology around whistleblowers which claims that they are crazy, or conspiracy theorists. However generally people who take on the whistleblower role are loyal, caring and often rather conservative people. I'm not referring to politically conservative here, obviously. Quite often the reason why they speak up is because they are making some attempt to create or build social capital.
Another thing which is often said against whistleblowers is that they create problems and offer no solutions. I have been accused of this time and time again. It's even more frequent than being accused of taking a discussion off topic or 'being political' - whatever that means. But see there are no solutions. People are not problems to be solved, neither are communities, neither is society. I also want to point out that there was once a Final Solution to the Jews back in the 1940's, just to emphasize my point a little further. There's far too many people sitting back and waiting for someone else to come up with a ready made solution. This is also a part of willful blindness. You see the issue, you could be doing something about it, but you don't because you expect someone else to come up with a ready made solution.
What this often comes down to is pride and either speaking up or taking action so as not to cross a line. The queer trans women of colour who stood up to police outside a nightclub in New York to start off the LGBT community and advance the civil rights movement for lesbians, homosexuals and other sexual minorities as well as the trans community. Rosa Parks getting on a bus and disregarding racial segregation. My point here is that developing social capital is a necessary part of developing culture and developing social progress. There are no solutions because society and the human species is never ever going to be perfect. There will always be social issues and social problems and no differently from life often in order to solve one problem you have to create anther problem or find a problem which matters.
This is why I have spoken out on civil rights, black civil rights, disability rights, I've spoken out against austerity, against the death penalty, I've spoken up for women's rights, and so on. This is not because I see myself as any kind of spiritual or civil rights leader. This is never really about me. What I'm doing, and have been doing throughout is trying to find ways of developing social capital and developing empathy. I've gone to marches and participated in events even though I get nothing out of it. You see there's a certain kind of power that comes from just being somewhere with someone, another human being, and simply through being there, and asking questions, and talking and listening, you can make a powerful enough statement to someone else to say "Your struggle matters enough to me to make me want to do something to validate what you are doing."
You see this is the whole point of freedom and civil liberty. Freedom and civil liberty is just a word, a concept, and it will remain just a concept and just a word if you aren't making the effort to use it. It's the exact same principle with other so called freedoms and powers that we all possess, such as the power of choice and having a voice or a say. All these things - freedom, civil liberty, having a voice, having a choice, even having democracy - don't exist if you're not using them and all too often we waste or throw away our freedoms and civil liberties, our voices and our ability to make choices simply because we're not using them or we betray them for following an ideology or established belief system.
The sheer importance of developing social capital
The other thing I want to point out here is that, the way things stand, we are teetering on the edge of socio-economic collapse, or a crash. On the one hand we have our socio-economic system built up over centuries of capitalism and a kind of social class system based on competitiveness and a certain structural class system. On the other hand we have easier access to the internet and digital technology. At first glance both capitalism and digital technology seem rather compatible, but appearances can be deceptive. Access to the internet and digital technology gives us all access to information. Information is consciousness. Human beings are the one species of primate who are adept at processing consciousness. So while both capitalism and digital technology are striving for efficiency and productivity when you think about this and dig deeper capitalism and digital technology are really not that compatible at all.
You see the whole point of capitalism is to find a product or service of value to people and sell it through an activity known as business to make money. You need stability, you need a market, you need to be able to make plans, to forecast, and you need to be able to do things over and over again to sell your products and services. You also need workers and access to human labour or human resources. But see the whole point of technology is to make doing things easier and to reduce the amount of work we all need to do. Development of technology, which has now reached the point of machine learning, AI (artificial intelligence) where software can develop algorithms and program itself is bringing automation, and automation is rendering entire industries, not just specific professions and jobs, obsolete.
This is where we come to the crux of the whole issue. Capitalism, however which way you define it, in its current form, rooted in tradition, is proving to be too inflexible for our modern society. One example of this inflexibility relates to single use plastic. This was once widespread throughout businesses, but we now know that fossil fuels are bad and the amount of plastic we are using is likely to trigger a marine extinction event if we're not too careful about how we get rid of it. The recent COVID global pandemic was a disaster for capitalism. COVID is just one pandemic, there will be others, but nobody knows when, where or how they will affect people and societies. These are just two examples, there are many others. Suffice to say, modern human society is much too unpredictable for a global socio-economic system based primarily on capitalism. The only way it could be is to scale back technology, but that's unlikely to happen.
But do you know what gets us through each and every single time? Social capital. The best example of this is of course the COVID pandemic and lockdowns when despite massive restrictions and incursions into our lives, forcing many of us into social isolation, people wore masks, observed social distancing, and went over and above for nothing more than other people. Then you have the teachers in schools up and down the country who set aside the curriculum to sit down with the struggling kid, get to know them, and talk to them so they have that penny dropping moment and learn something profound. I can think of many more examples.
My point here is that much of this productivity, efficiency, hiring experts, forecasting and planning actually undermines our ability to change and adapt to an increasingly unpredictable environment. It's important to understand that much of the reality of life, of culture and society is unpredictable and subject to change, often without warning. This is especially true today when everything is dominated either by digital technology or organizations. This is where ideology becomes even more unhelpful because the truth of the matter is that society for most people, myself included, is just a concept. Ideology, and capitalism is largely an ideology no matter how you slice and dice it is what makes concepts such as society and culture rigid and inflexible. Time and time again it is social capital and its development which gets us through the changes.
We're still recovering from a global COVID pandemic even though the lockdowns are becoming a distant memory and COVID vaccines have become as normal as flu vaccines. But the way we are recovering and the trajectory we're taking post-COVID is horrifyingly dystopian. It's almost like we're going back to business as usual and refusing to face up to and deal with the social issues exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, the poverty, the inequality, the social stigma and the social exclusion, all of which have become much worse post-COVID. Please keep in mind that, despite the social capital created which got us through from preexisting social bonds and connections, we failed as a society to reach a consensus and further divisions were created, even over something trivial as wearing face masks. This reveals a truth about who we really are as a society and the truth is that in many cases collectively we are socially bankrupt and going through a famine of social capital.
This is a situation that's not going to go away. In fact I'm fairly confident that this is going to get worse before it starts to get any better. This is simply because many people just don't 'get it' and are simply not open-minded enough to consider the necessary changes we need to address a growing number of social, economic and environmental issues. Without minds that are open to possibilities, no change is possible.
The key component of developing social capital
Let us not deceive ourselves here. Social capital is a concept and we all need to dig deeper than this concept and other concepts to get to the reality of our direct experiences of life, our perspectives, and our relationships with the environment. We need to get past the ideologies, the technology, the labels and the concepts to arrive at some fundamental truth. Developing social capital is not efficient, it's time-consuming, not always easy, but it's necessary because it's all we have left to be able to survive on this planet. Ideology is bankrupt, toxic and divisive. Technology can only help us out so much. It's important to understand that we are where we are right now because we have been asset stripping social capital and destroying it and we've reached the point where we don't have that much left.
But what I'm referring to through the term social capital are things which are natural, innate, and often defy definition - humanity, empathy, individual creativity, insight, social acceptance, compassion, kindness, community, intelligence, courage, open-mindedness, and so on. We all have access to these things because we all have equal access to the same consciousness in the environment. Out of this consciousness we can draw energy, and from this we can draw various sources of resilience and strength. These things are usually not efficient, very rarely are they productive in any significant or tangible way, but they create space which allows for adaptation, invention and a capacity to be able to deal with change.
The less we know about the future and our environment (including our social environment) the more we're going to need social capital. Please keep in mind that for change to work out it's never enough to have an idea, a feeling, a thought or even a desire, you also need support, collaboration, and a connection with other people. Nothing can exist without being in a relationship with someone or something else. You need connections with other people and you need the space that comes with having an open mind.
Let us also be very clear where I am coming from here. Technology and ideology both negate social capital. At some point the internet and access to information technology might have been such a powerful resource to connect different individual people, but all too often it's being used to either create social and ideological divisions, or as a tool of capitalism to sell us lots of shit we don't need. Social media has never really lived up to its potential of developing social capital. All it does is to create echo chambers and fragmented communities of people who share similar ideologies and beliefs and all think the same way. You cannot develop or create social capital in an echo chamber and all too often all you get is a delusional perception of social reality. The social reality of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and TikTok is nothing like the social reality on the other side of your front door.
See every time we use information technology to get us through a social issue, to interpret a conversation, a social connection or relationship, or to understand someone else's lived experience or reality we outsource to a machine and an algorithm what we can just as easily do ourselves. This is a massively expensive trade off. The more we let machines think for us, the less we can think for ourselves. The more time a doctor spends looking at digital medical records, the less time they get to spend in direct face to face conversation with their patients. The more parents use parenting apps, the less they know their kids. The more people use dating apps, the less time they spend getting to know one another and actually developing a relationship. It also follows that the more employers and applicants use recruiting websites and apps, the less each gets to know each other and the more machines get to fill vacancies.
The more time we spend in our social media echo chambers socially programmed to like and connect to people who are similar to us, the less we are able to connect to people who are different from us and the less we understand our social environment. This is especially important simply because out there your social environment is not made up of people similar to you. Your actual social environment is made up primarily of people who are radically different to you and who have completely different experiences of life and vastly different perspectives on life. I live in social housing in a small block of nine flats. Counting children close to 20 others also live in my block. Outside our apartments none of us share the same life experience or perspective on life. I live in a densely populated area of inner London on a social housing estate. All the other surrounding blocks of flats are much bigger. This is the reality of human diversity. Like it or not, human diversity and individuality is what underpins our social environment and social reality.
Human society cannot be standardized in any way
Yes I know. It's that photo again. But my point here is that both technology and capitalism seek to force fit a standardized model of human society and a predictable reality onto a social reality and an environment that is far more mysterious and also far more surprising than many of us are prepared to accept. Nobody is ever going to agree on what standardized model is best. But in all the discussions and arguments invariably what gets left out and excluded is everything that cannot be measured. Everything that cannot be measured is pretty much everything that matters.
Our growing dependence on technology, together with our persistent dependence on capitalism, is what is making us less skilled, less aware and less able to deal with the growing complexity of our natural and social environments. The mainstream political approach to the issues we are facing, particularly in the West, which is to emphasize competitiveness, economic growth, work and jobs is not only seriously outdated and woefully inadequate, it is also environmentally destructive not only to the planet but also to the entire human species. It is also socially irresponsible because all too often the outcome for many people is constant struggle, hardships, suffering, misery, a lack of opportunity, a lack of possibility, constant poverty, constant inequality, mental health issues, social stigma, social divisionism, social exclusion, and premature death.
I'm not being partisan here. Our political culture, particularly mainstream political culture, is a culture of political, social and moral failure. Sure we can all wax lyrical about economic growth, renewable energy, tackling climate change, negotiating trade agreements and creating jobs, but when the outcome is social division, poverty, zero social mobility, destitution and social insecurity for many people all political talk amounts to is ideological nonsense and political baloney. We are surrounded by so much money, so much technology, so many difference resources, but if we cannot guarantee social security to everyone in society then nothing else is politically possible. Politics all comes down to developing social security and good governance, and if politics isn't about that then to be brutally honest there is nothing left worth voting for. I'm not ignoring the role of the media in all this. If there is nothing to vote for, then there's not really much to write about, is there? Much of what is published and put out there by the media and broadcasters achieves nothing more than to perpetuate the delusions of a failed political culture.
At some point we all have to face up to the reality of our lives, our life experiences, and take stock of what our lives are really all about. At some point there needs to be a realization that our lives are not about ideology, about work or the jobs we have, our social position and perceived social class, but about what we can actually do for other people and what we bring to the lives of the other people we are connected to. At some point we need to dig much deeper than our superficial Ego and perceived self-image, and get to grips with our individual life experiences, our stories and our humanity. This is something I want you to think about. Just how many real friends do you actually have? By real friends I mean the people in your life you can turn to and talk about really difficult and uncomfortable stuff. These are the people you need to be able to develop any kind of social capital. I'm lucky because I have maybe three or four. All too often some people just don't have any such people in their lives.
To finish off this blog post - because it's much longer than I anticipated when I first started writing it - I want to give you something else to think about. What I want you to think about is the other side of social capital. Please don't allow yourself to buy into the illusions of self-sufficiency because all too often this is an illusion we are all socially and mentally conditioned to believe is reality. It's not. While it's significant and very important, your individual experiences of life, your journey, your individual perspective of life, all these things matter, but life is really all about how well you can connect to other people and what kind of social relationships you are capable of. This is where the connections and social relationships of social capital really matter. Who you are as an individual is just an outcome of who the other people are or were in your life. Who you are always has potential to influence who someone else is. We all need emotional and psychological support from other people. We all need inspiration. We all need a certain amount of disagreement and differences of opinion and perspective from other people delivered to us with tact, and humility or empathy, because it is our conscious awareness of how we are different from other people which is part of who we are as individual human beings.
The issue of boundaries and space
This is the take away from this blog post. I feel I need to write about the issue of boundaries and space, because when it comes to developing social capital this is one of the key or central issues. When you're developing social capital you constantly have to make a choice or determine where sharing your individual perspective and your experience is important and matters, and where it does not. Where do you need to put your experience and perspective to one side and let someone else's experience and perspective make up the space? You see you cannot go through life constantly seeking opportuntiies to develop your life experience and promote your perspective and opinions. At some point you have to keep your mouth shut and devote time to listening, reading and asking questions to get a deeper insight or more information. Otherwise you're not going to develop any social awareness outside of your own conceptual awareness of society and a social environment.
In my journey of developing Qultura as a community I was very steadfast and stubborn about creating the space for other people to get involved. There was even a ritual where when people were not connecting I would change the form, change the websites, and come up with a new form or new identity for the community. I was also adamant that Qultura is not specifically about anything, there was no agenda, no centralized or organized belief system, ideology, hierarchy or organization. It was just about individual people coming together and sharing, perspectives, experience, interests, whatever. I've lost count the number of times I've had this conversation with different people and invariably, someone would overlay what I said with some sort of agenda or claim that Qultura is about something which it isn't about. Close to 15 years later I still haven't managed to find any reliable way round this.
The reason why I'm sharing this is that we all need to be able to determine exactly where the boundaries and lines are being drawn and where we need to create space. Existence comes with non-existence. You cannot create anything without space. You cannot even exist without space to be who you are. Anyone who is trying to tell you that they know what's going on or what lies in the future is just trying to own it. These people are creating boundaries and divisions out of the space and where there are boundaries and divisions there cannot be any space with which to create anything. Creating boundaries and divisions always reduces the space necessary for significant or meaningful change. It's creating a false destiny or fate out of an uncertain and unpredictable future. This is not how this planet or the universe works. Environmental reality works according to a set of mystical principles, but the guiding principle is always that it is the space and chaos, or disorder which creates the form.
This is something I want to leave you with. The key to developing social capital is to embrace the chaos, the disorder and the confusion of our current social reality, to sit back and let it all fall apart, and to create the space to let it all fall apart. Why are you so concerned that the socio-economic system is collapsing and falling apart? This is not your socio-economic system. It doesn't belong to you, or anyone else. Let it collapse, let go, sit back and pay attention to what's going on around you. Focus on creating the space between you and others which allows for the possibilities and opportunities for something new. Yes I know this means that we embrace the trauma, but see, trauma is what teaches us something new. Western civilization is not the first civilization on this planet to collapse. Nor is it going to be the last. But see we are all here, 8 billion of us. We have survived whatever shit was thrown at us, and if you care to examine the course of human history you will find that always, always, always it's the development of social capital which has got us through.
So what part do you have to play in this? I'm not going to tell you. You're going to have to figure that out for yourself. I'm not you. I'm not the one living your life. I don't experience your reality. I don't have a clue what goes through your mind. But what you need to do is find some example of trauma somewhere, experienced by someone else if not yourself, and find a way of supporting someone else through that trauma. Please keep in mind that primarily the main motivation for you getting out of bed in the morning is the thought that you can do something or say something which is going to make a difference in someone else's life, or even for the lives of more than one person.
Find something that's going to make you get out of bed differently in the morning. Let's leave it at that. Seek out the opportunities in what's going on around you and use your experience and your humanity to somehow develop and build social capital. Doesn't matter who you are or what you do. You're capable of developing social capital, because these are skills you were born with. You just need to find a way of emphasizing those skills.