Restraint

April 18, 2015

images-4.jpeg An odd sort of a day today. I spent most of it working on my laptop in the Hyatt at Dallas Airport and then moved on to the Lounge in the airport before I head for Bogota this evening. I’ve got a lot done, including catching up on blog post, but there informed that I had Type 2 Diabetes by email the day before while walking around Auschwitz/Birkenau. I’ve told the story of that elsewhere and maintained my reversal/arrest requires continued restraint on my part. Accepting some pretty draconian restraints on my own life enabled a radical change in my life for the better.

Now I have been watching Fox News out of a sense of duty trying to avoid pity alternating with despair. Within that I have seen news items on States that want to legitimate the open wearing of guns and the constraint on welfare recipients for spending any money on going to the swimming pool or cinema. Here we have constraints being imposed without restraint in what seems an unbridled exercise of prejudice enabled by power. What we seem to have is an absence of the type of restraint which held back both left and right from excess a few years ago. We have it to a (slightly) lesser extent in the UK with the naked commercialisation of aspects of the health service and a range of measure that show similar contempt for those out of work or in low paid work. Screen Shot 2015-04-18 at 21.43.19.png There was a good image on Facebook today which mocks the tone of moral self righteousness that pervades many statements around these particular retrogressive and uncivilised steps.

It’s depressing in many ways, not least because the general assumption over the early decades of my life were that things were getting better. We saw pupils from state schools taking over government from the private schools in the UK in the 60s and onto the end of the Century. Generally living standards increased. But now it seems we are going backwards. Income inequality and attitudes between the wealthy and the poor are returning to Victorian levels and it can only be a matter of time before the more extreme US states bring back the workhouse.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

About the Cynefin Company

The Cynefin Company (formerly known as Cognitive Edge) was founded in 2005 by Dave Snowden. We believe in praxis and focus on building methods, tools and capability that apply the wisdom from Complex Adaptive Systems theory and other scientific disciplines in social systems. We are the world leader in developing management approaches (in society, government and industry) that empower organisations to absorb uncertainty, detect weak signals to enable sense-making in complex systems, act on the rich data, create resilience and, ultimately, thrive in a complex world.
ABOUT USSUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER

Cognitive Edge Ltd. & Cognitive Edge Pte. trading as The Cynefin Company and The Cynefin Centre.

© COPYRIGHT 2024

< Prev

A day in Dallas

The event was an interesting one as the focus was on Cynefin in the context ...

More posts

Next >

When to relax constraints?

One runway was out at Bogota when we flew in late last night so ...

More posts

linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram