by FRED PAWLE – AUSTRALIANS who are alarmed by the fuel crisis don’t know half of it. Closed petrol stations are merely a symptom of the country’s bigger, more terminal problems.
The word “paradigm” comes from Ancient Greek, meaning a detectable pattern or example.
- It feels like we are living in a parallel universe run by lunatics.
- People have been set adrift from reality.
- Politicians play a partisan game in which winning power is everything.
It remained virtually unused until it was revived by scientist Thomas Kuhns in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which identified the moments in history when a widespread “paradigm shift” changed how humanity perceived the world.
It didn’t take long for this idea to be applied to the personal. We live, after all, in a narcissistic age.
BENEFITS
By the 1980s, liberal arts lecturers and journalists were advocating the benefits of trading in your old paradigm of dowdy traditions for a shiny new set complete with exciting social, sexual and spiritual opportunities.
It helped create tenure for liberal lecturers and sold newspapers for journalists. The paradigm shifters themselves, however, got the raw end of the deal.
Rather than open themselves to previously unimaginable opportunities, they were set adrift from reality.
The new “paradigms” turned out to be less like the “patterns” and “examples” the Greeks identified than randomly generated sets of fashionable ideas that mostly eschewed 2000 years of intellectual development.
So you can’t embrace multiculturalism without abandoning Western Civilisation, you can’t adopt a fashionable sexual proclivity without forgoing the satisfaction of raising a family, and you can’t sign up to a pagan religion like environmentalism without selling your soul. Who knew?
Well, people like you and I did, obviously, but a disturbing number of people didn’t, and it’s my contention, having considered the direction all this is going in, they probably never will.
The inheritors of what’s left of Western Civilisation are now broadly divided into two groups: those who don’t realise their new paradigms are increasingly devoid of critical and logical skills (another two Ancient Greek concepts), and those who feel like they are living in a parallel universe run by lunatics.
To the latter, the evidence is difficult to avoid. Gays for Palestine. Men playing women’s sports and living in women’s jails.
Not to mention the elites flying private jets to climate conferences. Land rights being granted to the descendants of nomads. Universities full of students who can barely speak English, let alone write it. Doctors enforcing the rollout of a harmful vaccine. People who bang on endlessly about historical slave trades sticking solar panels on their roof made by, you guessed it, Uyghur slaves in China. Politicians consorting with invaders. Oh, and more urgently, the absence of fuel at petrol stations not signifying a fuel crisis.
The Stoic philosophers of 2000 years ago were the first, as far as I know, to articulate the benefits of choosing compassion for the “culprits” of evil.
The smartest response to evil is to work with it in an effort to change it.
Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations: “Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.
MEANNESS
“But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me… Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together.”
Jesus Christ said much the same. Christians know that such compassion, apart from pleasing God, can in some circumstances also have practical outcomes.
Donald Trump gets it. After kidnapping the tyrannical President Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela in January, Trump endorsed Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, to take his place.
Rodríguez has since proved Trump right.
“Delcy Rodríguez who is the President of Venezuela, is doing a great job, and working with US representatives very well,” Trump said last month.
“The oil is beginning to flow, and the professionalism and dedication between both countries is a very nice thing to see.”
Remarkably, the same result might occur in Iran. Former US Ambassador to the UN Mark Wallace told the CPAC conference in Dallas last weekend that the next leader of Iran “could be a regime person”.
But Trump is the exception to the rule. Almost all other politicians these days instead play a partisan game in which winning power and vanquishing opponents is everything.
If their decisions ever bestow benefits upon their constituents, it is merely because the constituents’ interests momentarily coincide with theirs. Compassion is for losers.
And this is where the paradigm shift really comes into its own.
IRREVERSIBLE
Not only has politics become a winner-take-all blood sport, but the ideas being fought over are deadset insane, detached from both tradition and reality, and more often than not contribute to widespread, irreversible social, political and economic decline.
The prospect for Australia is now seriously grim.
I’m in Texas at the moment, and have been struck by how overwhelmingly hospitable this place is.
Here, it is rude to not engage in banter with a shop assistant or waitress, or strike up a conversation with strangers in a lift.
It might sound trivial, but it contributes to a general feeling of camaraderie that simply doesn’t exist in Australia any more.
But even this friendly culture is in trouble, according to conservative American journalist Rod Dreher.
“We in America have arrived at a state of widespread social atomization without having had our world smashed by war and economic catastrophe.
“We have arrived at a very similar place in a slower, far more comfortable way: through the accumulation of wealth, and the dissolution of social bonds through social liberalisation and individualism.”
This is the Bowling Alone phenomenon that Robert Putnam first observed. This is Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, which caused Lasch to conclude in the 1990s, when he published the book, that Americans were losing the habits of mind and heart necessary for democracy to work.
Australia lost those habits long ago.PC
– Fred Pawle
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