The Hidden Dissuaders: Preamble
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity…”
Hello! Yeats’ brand of poetic pessimism is characteristically harder on ‘the best’ than ‘the worst’; but for our own times he is most definitely right about the greater ‘passionate intensity’ of those we have allowed to diminish our social and individual propensities for good in the name of the heartless ideologies of neo-liberalism and the market. We are overdue for more ‘passionate intensity’ among the too-quiescent ‘best’.
Since the 1980s, and my long (still continuing) Bertie Ramsbottom verse satires on the quirks of the International Business Scene, unusual angles on social comment have been the key element in any creative calls on your time and attention. It was always our view that it takes only a relatively small step to the side to change our whole angle of perception on a tired, too-familiar, world.
More recently, since August 2014, we’ve focussed mainly on the Arts Social Action project – our attempt to stimulate/provoke those of us with a foot in the arts world to get more pro-actively involved in the issues around us such as climate change and widening social and economic inequalities. These blogs live on and will continue along-side the other listed categories on the blog menu.
From today, however, we introduce a new blog category which, anchored in the sequence of market changes originated by the publication in 1957 of Vance Packard’s ‘The Hidden Persuaders’, will build towards what we now know to be the dominant paradox of our current times – how, in a world of notionally expanding ‘democracies’, are our governing establishments able to avoid serious threats to their powers from the ballot box.
The new sequence starts here and, as its title unusually suggests, will attempt some fresher insights into how we are dissuaded from action and the fuller potentials of our democracies so often subverted…
Welcome!