[ad_1]
I slept until well after eight this morning. As regular readers will be aware, this is an unusual event in my life. I am usually scanning the morning’s news for ideas on posts to write by soon after six. I enjoy the early morning. I will happily sacrifice late evenings to partake of them. But today I slept in.
I feel slightly dazed and even disorientated by doing so. Maybe that’s why I had to ask myself what day of the week this was. However, I suspect I am not alone in doing that. This, for me, was that glorious day in a holiday when you realise you have slightly lost track of time, and it does not really matter, most especially when in our case Covid has cancelled all immediate engagements.
That, though, led me to think about forgetfulness. Most of the time it is something we struggle with, and I do not think that has much to do with age. We all have annoying blind spots for things we have difficulty recalling.
That said, I now recognise that I may well have forgotten more than I can ever now learn in the time left to me.
But I also realise that this does not worry me. A lot of what has gone was stuff I no longer need. On subjects that interest me I seem to have almost no problem with recalling things I learned many years ago.
What is apparent in that case is that forgetfulness is selective. Without thinking about it, unless we are afflicted with a cognitive impairment what we forget is largely a choice.
This is unsurprising. To survive life we need to forget the worst bits and recall the best.
To retain useful information we need to work out what we do not need, and discard it (despite which I still remember the registration numbers of my father’s early cars).
And, perhaps most importantly, we need to forget what was wrong, and those things that were just prejudice, or which were based on deliberate misinformation.
These last points are vital in politics. So much of what politics is still supposedly about is made up of those three things: that which is now wrong even if once it was not, prejudice or misinformation.
It is wrong to talk of left, right and centre politics now as if there is still a struggle between entrepreneurs and the labouring classes, when what we actually have is a fight between quasi-feudal monopolistic power and the human race on the issue of survival. Unless we categorise politics correctly we are stuck in a battle from which we need to move because the issues have totally changed.
It is wrong to use economics designed for an era when money was supposedly (albeit, artificially) in short supply, as was the case in the gold standard era, when we now know that money is never a constraint on our actions and that the capacity to achieve things is.
It is prejudice for those in countries like the UK to think of migrants as invaders of our space when for centuries people from this country claimed those migrant’s space – and in too many cases, their ancestors – as our own, when that was simply untrue.
And we need to forget the claim that wealth indicates the ability to lead, when too often it just indicates the (literal) fortune of being born to those already privileged.
Unless we forget those three things – what is wrong, what is prejudice and that which is misinformation – we do not let ourselves think about what is, what is fair, and what is right.
Forgetfulness is supposedly a curse of older age. Actually, it’s the precondition for building the future.
[ad_2]
Source link
