Feb 28 2025 35 mins
If we accept that the 2020s is our turn at the expected global organizational shift, then we might benefit from considering what we would like to see emerge. While we as individuals have little effect on national outcomes and international order, we can foster support for those who may be in unique positions. At each cycle in history, notable figures emerged, individuals with a position, a place from which to pontificate on the possible. To offer to the generational shift a view on what the world could be, what the opportunities are and the necessary sacrifices to see them materialize. A vision, a call to action, a national mission to undertake, to build the society we see as desirable and within the constraints of the international environment.
We have not seen leadership, the decisive call to action from a charismatic figure in many decades. We have voted for and received successive governments who argued for incrementalism, often a version of aggressive incrementalism, but policy frameworks that would make a neo-classical economists smile. Across the political spectrum, from left to right and from top to bottom - yes, politics is a 4 quadrant entity, not a linear model, we’ve found voices that move the society in a direction we support, slightly, with moderate changes. Often announced with bellicose authority, quintessential catch phrases and a host of marketing slogans, but since the Bretton Woods agreement, even through the end of the Cold War and the short experiment with globalization, the voices were bold, the changes much less impactful.
This extends to not just the international order, but national, sub-national and municipal governments, to agencies and departments. Ministries of the Crown or Secretaries in Republics have all had a change to enact meaningful, structural change to create a different society. While each iteration intends to create a more prosperous civilization, they do so within their own ideology and as we regularly change the flavour of our governments, we often see a two steps forward, one step back, not really in any coordinated direction result. As my uncle would say, a discombobulation. That has been the totality of our outcomes in the past generational block, an incremental disorganized advancement towards a destination we have yet to codify, done so with the loudest of celebrations.
Can we do better? Have a listen
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