Sitting here in New Zealand, I’m watching the financial chaos unfold in the US. We are a long way away, but the effects will be felt everywhere. We seem to have entered a new financial world order. Aspirations for continuously increasing economic growth have been shown to be naive at best.
When the US taxpayer has to bail out the smartest, most sophisticated banking system the world has ever known, something’s wrong with the free-market competitive ideology. The real problem with the competitive model is that people end up focusing on their relative performance – ‘how did i perform compared with the competition?’. When this happens, values, ethics, and intelligence can take a back seat. In the pursuit of ‘winning’ and ’succeeding’. We see it in sports (eg drug cheats on the Tour de France) in business (eg the Enron collapse) and now we see it on Wall Street. Growth, as we’ve known it, is about to grind to halt. If we’re lucky! These were the smartest people in the room, and they’ve lost $700 billion! By lending to people who couldn’t afford to pay but hoped rising property prices would fix it. Duh! But we can’t get too smug – we’ll all end up paying and most of us would have to confess to our own moments of stupidity also.
When commentators compare this financial crisis with the Great Depression, I know that the ffects will be more than financial. I didn’t experience the GD, but I’ve met people who did. Their whole world view and values changed in the 1930’s and stayed that way for the rest of their lives. Our values are usually in place by the time we’re 20 and don’t change without a significant and emotionally traumatic event. The world could be having such an event right now. How would it effect our values and world view?
Well I think that two changes were already underway and the unfolding financial crisis will reinforce them.
- A return to fundamentals. Growing emphasis on spiritualism, family, financial fundamentals (eg ‘living within means’), sustainability, humanity, etc
- Moving from separatism to an integrated view of life. Small changes somewhere can have large effects everywhere.
How should our communication change to reflect this new world order? For instance, how should environmental communication change to reflect a new world. It seems to me that carbon emissions trading is dead in the water. People won’t pay today for a problem in 30 years, when they can’t afford the groceries and the bank’s foreclosing on their mortgage. When times were good, maybe?
Every change has a threat and an opportunity. How should our communication change to seize that opportunity? I think we should be focusing our communication on the fundamentals and an integrated view of our world, and delivering messages that make sense from that perspective. Good luck.
