If you can't change the world, change yourself

"Hope is the fuel of progress and fear is the prison in which you put yourself"
- Tony Benn

If the election result on May 7th left you feeling disillusioned, downtrodden, defeated and any other word beginning with ‘D’ that you can think of then…don’t despair! There is hope. And hope is a word that doesn’t begin with ‘D’.

What struck me about the election campaign was that it was very much driven by a culture of fear. The Conservatives peddled a very effective fear mongering warning regarding Labour’s potential management of the economy and any likely deal they may have to do with the SNP to gain power. This fear drove moderate voters in key English marginals away from Labour and into the arms of the far right UKIP, in some cases, and the Tories themselves, in others, splitting their vote in the process. Additionally, the Liberal Democrats took a huge electoral bashing, seemingly punished disproportionately for daring to get in Bed with the Conservatives in a 2010 Coalition arrangement.

But this post isn’t about politics as such. We know the reasons for the election result very well by now. They have been discussed and dissected (there goes the ‘D’ words again!) at great length in the media. If anything is more clear, it is that a vast number of people vote with their own interests at heart. I was taught this in my A Level Politics course many years ago. The primary question they ask themselves is: “Do I feel better off now than I was 5 years ago?”. If the answer is yes, or even if they feel the same, they will be reluctant to vote to remove the incumbent government. If the answer is a fundamental no and they are in fact much worse off, then they are more likely to change their vote. But there are, of course, qualifying factors to this. It isn’t quite so simple as to boil everything down to one economic equation. The follow up question may be: “Do I believe the opposition party will help improve my standard of living?” In other words, can they be trusted with the economy and, can they be trusted full stop?

Herein, lies the problem. We are firmly immersed in a politics - and a society - of selfishness. We strive to hang on to our economic gains and get nervous about any threats to that sense of social and economic mobility. Fear of the abstract monsters of immigration, the EU and “benefit scroungers” are leapt on by political parties to both manage the status quo and attempt to disrupt it.

Why does fear and selfishness take such starring roles on the stage of our daily lives?

The answer is, they don’t have to. At all. When I refer to ‘We’ above, I am not naturally talking about everyone. I am referring to the silent middle class majority who are not necessarily politically active but choose to make their feelings clearly known when it matters most - at the ballot box.

We have a very real choice in this country and in other countries around the world. We can change this status quo. We can change ourselves, our attitudes and our goals. We can form communities of like minded people who actually care about each other, the environment and, gosh, being compassionate to each other. That would be pretty radical eh? Not really. Some might say it’s in line with our natural human values and how we should be behaving, it’s just that our technologically saturated and over privileged society has marginalised us into a disparate and fractured bunch, increasingly wary of our neighbours instead of genuinely concerned for their welfare.

In pockets of the UK, people are already beginning to choose another way that is against the grain and in line with ideas of compassion, cooperation and kindness. We have a choice as to how we vote and the things that matter to us. You may well be economically better off than you were 5 years ago and you might feel that the Tories help protect that wealth, but what if you got sick or became disabled and reliant on welfare? Would you feel safe and content knowing that your access to benefits could be affected by government austerity cuts?

I want to move towards a world where small, active community groups share knowledge, skills and resources. The more we work with each other the better off we are - our mental health and feeling of well being begins to expand and we gain that important sense of meaning that a lot of people seek in their lives.

A great man once said (Matt Johnson of The The): If you can’t change the world, change yourself. You alone have that power.