And the dumb shall inherit the Earth (what’s left of it)

A couple of days ago the JEP did an editorial about the “falling” standard of election candidates and the already existing elected members of the States.

Here’s a flavour:

“After years of steady decline, Jersey is on the brink of a crisis in the overall quality of the States. The sad fact is that too few current Members have consistently displayed the combination of intellect, integrity and good will required to represent Islanders effectively in what, for a whole complex range of reasons, are extraordinarily challenging times.”

Basically, they wrote that things are bad and getting worse. At the Durrell sustainability breakfast the other day (separate blog post to follow) I heard a new term – industrialised individualism – which refers to what I have loosely referred to as the “yuppie” zeitgeist, that has been cultured and promoted since the “greed is good” days of the late 70’s to 80’s. I am not going to go too deeply into this at the moment but I believe an awful lot of the roots of our current problems gain their sustenance from the “ideas” of that social development. More to follow on this.

As we increasingly see so many leaders, aided and abetted by their expensive advisers, speaking from positions of wilful ignorance, and getting (and staying) elected there must clearly be a democratic demand for it. As is often the case, it has fallen to the Americans to take the next step and finally come up with the ideal candidate who’s proud to admit his qualities and is not ashamed to trumpet that he is completely free of rationality, intelligence, knowledge, ethics, consequential analysis, morals or any of the rest of that Age of Enlightenment malarkey, that seems to be thought of by too many as sooo last millennium.

Laugh at this comedy clip whilst uncomfortably feeling the hairs go up on the back of your neck at the underlying reality.

 

 

Original here: http://www.babelgum.com/6003213/elect-the-willfully-ignorant.html