Wifi, NHS, Social Care. We need all of this…
Margaret Thatcher, the bastion of caring governance that she exemplified, once said: “There’s no such thing as society”. Only to be proved very wrong by the circumstances that befall the world right now.
People are starting to value many things we have spent the last 50 years being indoctrinated against. Even as recently as the last general election in the UK in December 2019 we were being told that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour manifesto was a danger to us all. That ideas such as a fully-funded health service along with universal access to broadband in the home were cast as coming straight from the Communist Manifesto. Yet, here we are in a moment of need that outlines how much we rely on these elements in our modern society.
In his book Rebel Ideas, Matthew Syed outlines the results of a research experiment by Richard E Nisbett and Takahiko Masuda, social psychologists from the University of Michigan. In their experiment, they found a profound difference in how a Japanese test group perceived the world in comparison to an American test group. The Japanese group held a contextual view, seeing the surroundings or the big picture, whereas the American group held an object view or individual view. This went against the researchers understanding of Universalism or the idea that humans tend to fundamentally view the world in a similar way.
Having seen the chart that shows country by country the rate of incidences of CV19, it seems that South Korea and Japan are heading for a doubling of cases every week and seem to be flattening the rate significantly. In contrast, the USA and UK are doubling every 2–3 days. Could this be why we are seeing incidences of selfishness in the Western world exacerbating the crisis? Could this be due to our difference in perception of the world? Could that perception mean we look at achievement in different ways?
If we look at success as being an individual accomplishment we are likely to reward the individual. If we instead look at success as being within the context of the society it occurs in then we are likely to reward society. In her book The Value of Everything, Mariana Mazzucato sets out the case that our current brew of capitalism rewards those that extract value rather than create it for the whole of society via the public sector. This is symptomatic of our individualist perception.
The pressure is on now to find a way we can reshape our thinking to allow us to think contextually and consider the value to society of any particular action rather than the individual. If we can do this then we are less likely to see some of the selfish actions of individuals during the 2020 Coronavirus crisis.
I hope you all felt the intention to imply sarcasm in the opening paragraph.
