Embrace Change

We are travelling at speed through the German countryside in a vehicle that holds us in comfort and makes almost no sound.

This is Deutsche Bahn, the German railway

Not particularly different to most in Europe except maybe Britain's, or that of Albania I suspect, though I've never travelled there.

I'm contemplating change and being gently ribbed about my own lack of progress. My working life is about bringing change yet, like the busy mechanic whose car is neglected, I appear to be stuck to the spot. But I have a plan.

Enough of me.

"Embrace Change" we are told, and we are asked to repeat this mantra to others. For the benefit of those who might not "understand". "Change is good." "Arbeite Macht Frei." Excuse my German.

I once learned a smidgen, the tip of the iceberg, about ontology versus the methodology. Perhaps it was epistemology - no matter. What is missing from the mantra that "Change is Good" is the ontological argument. We are told that we have to change and that is enough. The ontological argument about whether a particular change is right is not ours to engage in because it has already been settled - by those who assume the right to settle it.

Journeying around Europe, I would beg to differ with the view that the big arguments are settled and l challenge the validity of the right of those who believe they have settled them. It isn't that those people don't believe in something called quality of life - they manifestly do. But they wish to keep it for themselves.

For a country that once governed one fifth of the world's surface, Britain does not produce people who are given to travel - or at least ones who mix with the locals when they do. Nor do they take in the culture and way of life of the countries they do visit. If they did, they might spot this thing called quality of life.

And they might realise that it need not be exclusive.

Quality of life requires something called time. Time away from the shop or the desk or the steering wheel or the factory. And in Europe quality of life is something that the majority of people are entitled to enjoy. Time with family, time to socialise, time to reflect, time to travel.

In the Anglo-American model, this is regarded as a sin, as laziness, as sloth, unless you have "earned" it as a reward.

In Britain, we are serving an outmoded idea where a person who has inherited incredible wealth sits at the top of the pile as justification for the virtue of the model. All beneath her aspire to that position. Only briefly, after the return of millions of ordinary people from the horrors of World War II, did the people of Britain view themselves as citizens with an equal right to answer the ontological question. The had an opportunity to change the model. Sadly, they blew that opportunity in their rush to gentrify.

The British press, with the under-subscribed exception of one or two titles, constantly ridicule the "lazy" cultures of Europe.

These are simply the mouthpiece of a group who have fashioned themselves into an elite that believes itself to be the natural owner of the ontological debate. Those who believe that the model of exclusive reward and elite privilege works for them. They will achieve quality of life on the backs of those they trample.

"Embrace Change!"

Change to what? For what reason?

"Don't worry. It's not for you to worry about. Embrace it or be managed out into hardship."

The catch, of course, is that their "Change" will achieve that anyway.