Writing about innovation and entrepreneurship has always excited me because of the positivity that it creates. Although, as we know, not all ideas prove to be winners, nevertheless, the desire to try and solve problems is inspirational.
Recently I have found it increasingly difficult to find those creative ideas and subjects that have fuelled my blogs and I have tried to understand why. Reading the papers over the last few weeks and months I think I have discovered a pattern that may be causing this.
These days we are bombarded with a variety of issues that have become increasingly extreme and which serve, not to inform, but to paralyse our thoughts and actions.
Yesterday I discovered the term ‘ethical wool’ and upon researching it I discovered a raft of information and disinformation including the idea that there should one day be a law that arrested people for eating meat of any kind! Bad enough if this was some berry eating hermit on a mountainside, but this was a senior lawyer.
Sadly, instead of looking at solutions to create better animal husbandry, the solution appears to be not to wear or eat anything that comes from an animal, and not to wear synthetic items that create plastic in the sea. I am not sure what we are supposed to wear!
We see the same thing when it comes to climate change. I have no doubt that there is a pressing need to head the scientists and to do something to stop this damage to the planet.
Equally, sensationalist protests by children does nothing to advance the agenda. However much the environmental lobby wants a figurehead for their cause, having someone travel across the Atlantic on a boat, thereby creating four cross-Atlantic flights for the crew instead of two by her in a boat that cost millions and which had a diesel back-up engine can only be seen as using her for a PR stunt.
Furthermore, children playing truant in order to miss school on Friday would have been more effective if they had given up a Saturday like most protesters do. However, that would doubtless have meant giving up shopping for those very items that pollute our planet or using all of those energy sapping electronic gadgets.
I have the same problem with politicians. Of late we have been inundated with political arguments based around what we should not be doing regardless of what we want to do.
In short, the real problems that we seem to face at the moment are twofold. Firstly, we are becoming an increasingly polarised society where the choices are now binary rather than nuanced. Choice is now limited to whether you are for us or against us. Failure to agree makes you an outcast rather than a free thinker. Personal choice is no longer an option.
But in each of these scenarios, whether eating habits, dressing habits, climate change, government or many other areas, there are two inherent weaknesses in their arguments.
I am sure that all of the protesters in all areas are sincere in their beliefs but what they refuse to consider is the right of others to hold a different view. No longer is debate considered a viable alternative to persecution.
But the more important weakness of the protesters’ arguments is the sad lack of solutions to the problems they espouse. All of the arguments would be significantly enhanced if they were to offer reasoned solutions rather than rage and PR campaigns!
No one pretends that there are not important problems to be solved. However, I believe that the polarisation that is taking place is diverting people away from finding solutions.
Mass protests is a great way of virtue signalling, but the real show of concern will be when the same people stop jumping on band-waggons and start showing us how to solve the problems. Unless we get back that innovative, entrepreneurial spirit, we are destined to a life of protests and blaming others, and that really will destroy the planet.
