A Financial and Economic Journalist’s Nightmare
Is this a nightmare, or a hollow feeling, not a resignation to the reality that your views have limited real impact on the world and that your readership tends to be those that flock to the same opinion each time, a bit like those needing an emotional stroking.
Both of these situations result in little progressive change. You write to established sympathetic ears, and you build affirmations of your world view against those of others. In fact, some step so low that they term those with other views idiots and the like. This builds a situation of one dogma against another. The two dogmas become hardened against each other, and each draws out their battlelines accordingly. So it is that the Communists are on one side and the Capitalists on the other, or the ANC here and the DA there, or the ANC and DA here and the MK and EFF there.
It is a reality that the liberation struggle drew people to one side and the nationalists drew people to the other side. It required a personality of real stature to bring an ingredient of forgiveness into the mix so that something new could unfold from these hardened conceptual positions. The ANC and its undercover supporters are really proud to have been part of the liberation struggle, but it was really Nelson Mandela who was the fresh ingredient. He had the ears of a similarly inclined person on the other side in FW de Klerk. Together they could facilitate something very dear to us all.
Today we are in the situation where we are being led by people who are once again pursuing their dogma over that of others. The financial and economic press on the capitalistic side is part of this battle of dogmas. Why have they taken up this position, and is there another position that they could take up, a new ingredient that they could introduce so that their role becomes more constructive?
What is at play when people wish to defeat each other’s dogma?
We should today all have it clear in our consciousness that what lives in us, either consciously or unconsciously, manifests in our societal structure.
We know this because,
- we educate with a desired outcome,
- we make laws with a desired outcome,
- and we plan economic activity with a desired outcome.
We get what we want in this way.
The problem is that we don’t all want the same thing. This is either through ignorance or by design. Much of what we want is not by design but rather by culture which is a nebulous kind of thing that relates to language, colour, gender, religious orientation and so on.
It comes out of our past.
Progressing anything on these bases produces more of the same.
The alternative is conscious choice that should not be nebulous. The question here is how does one move humanity, your readers, to be capable of conscious choice?
The financial and economic press are people that know that the numbers and statistics that they report reflect past concepts and policies, not those of the future. Financial Statements and statistics are historical. Failures reflect the thinking and consciousness of the leaders. Nokia, Kodak, Steinhoff and Blackberry shareholders know this well.
If financial and economic journalists started emphasising this, that which they already know, that results come from what lives in people, they would be pushing education and the pivotal role of people behind the results and statistics of the future, not only the past.
The problem is that journalists today are themselves blind to what people really are and can be. This is not a criticism but a fact. How can one say this you may ask? Well, one has to say it just as the liberation struggle people had to say what they did. It was not popular amongst the status quo at the time. Saying this about the current status of financial and economic journalism is not going to be popular either. I am not attempting to introduce these thoughts as a dogma. I am trying to introduce them in a pure and clear logic accessible to all people of reasonable objectivity, openness and self-awareness capacity.
We don’t need dogmas.
We need a refreshing ingredient.
Let’s be clear, the core thought here is that we need to recognise that a dogma will produce more of the same and will always end up in conflict with another dogma. There is no solution here.
The solution comes in making it clear that we have choices about what lives in us and that what lives in us appears around us. How do we access that in the human being that is capable of being more open to new thoughts?
The body of knowledge that makes this available to humanity is definitely out there but is being ignored, also by the financial press. If it were not ignored and rather taken into account and spoken about, because it would make better businesses and economies of the future, then we would be adding this new ingredient.
The new journalistic ingredient would look like this in practice.
- It would be completely correct and objective, as it currently is, without attacking anyone.
- It would be able to point out the inevitable consequences of policies and thoughts because they know in themselves that the human being is an enabler of these through what lives in them. It is just how life works.
- Comment on the thought and link this thought to what it will lead to. This is safe commentary and not dogma if it is thought about in this way.
- They would address the need to invest in human capacity development so that people became aware that change can only come about if we allow what we hold in us to evolve from dogma into something real and truthful that will slowly change individuals for the better and and then as a consequence, the social functioning of society.
The current reality of journalistic reporting is as described above. It is a dogma to others. It does not address the nature of the human being, themselves also, as being the very source of that dogma.
The added ingredient, the liberation struggle for reform, has its source in self-knowledge. Please consider opening this body of knowledge up in what you report on. You have huge possibilities for more constructive and meaningful influence in addition to what you cover already.
Bravo David, very much to the point! I am all for many “fresh ingredients”, they might come from unexpected sources…like “waking up the artist within”….