How do we think about something that we can’t yet think about? The pressure is intense, likely to lead to bashing one’s head against something hard – this something that we can’t yet think about and yet it is very hard and causes endless amounts of pain. How fundamental is the shift going to be? Could I, for instance, carry on my life much as I am at the moment? It would be convenient. But what if I am going to have to understand everything in a fundamentally different way? And what would startle me out of my dreaming state, my constant attempts to rebuild what I know and what is familiar?
Here’s something I saw in adbusters magazine:
‘So, students. Decision time. You live in what many believe is a bifurcation point in human history. You’ve seen all the graphs with lines curving up like a ski jump. Human population. Gross domestic product. Species extinction. Carbon emissions. Inequality. Resource shortages. You know that something has to give. You’ve got an idea that the price isn’t right. Maybe you’re even suspicious that if the world economy does turn out to be a Ponzi scheme, you or your children are a little bit late to the game. You therefore stand at a fork in the road. You can take the orthodox route – and risk ending up with a qualification as impressive as a degree in Marxist ideology right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Or you can take a chance on regime shift by speaking up, questioning your teachers, being open to disruptive ideas, and generally acting as an agent of change. You can insist that the economy is a complex, dynamic, networked system – and demand the tools to understand it. You can point out that the economy is unfair, unstable and unsustainable – and demand the tools to heal it. You can tell the oracles that they have failed. You can go in and break the machine. And then you can do something new.’ Adbusters took this from David Orrell’s Economyths.
I suppose we are all students really, or at least sort-of-students – puzzling and studying and puzzling – possibly offering our own thoughts into the never-ending task of interpretation.
Here’s the uber-interpreter Walter Benjamin, quoting Goethe:
‘What one wishes for in one’s youth, one has in abundance in old age.’ Benjamin adds: ‘The earlier in life one makes a wish, the greater one’s chances that it will be fulfilled. The further a wish reaches out in time, the greater the hopes for its fulfilment. But it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time. Thus a wish fulfilled is the crowning of experience.’
What, I ask myself did I wish for? Does wishing require some sort of courage or confidence or merely desperation? With millions of celebrities shouting out for what they wish or want or demand, with the help of their personal Max Clifford and the tabloid press screaming in adulation or pouring filth on them, wishing has developed an unattractive aspect. Perhaps it was better when we cut our birthday cakes and made a secret wish. These days, secrets are only here to give some passing friend the chance to betray.