Let us be reasonable

YES

It was a no-brainer – a gut thing. Small is beautiful and subsidiarity makes sense. I will be ticking the Yes box in the Scottish Independence referendum.

The decision was heartfelt, emotional and independent of what passes for the cold, hard facts. It was an unreasoned decision.

This particular cold, hard fact made me wonder about what else is tucked away in my unconscious. What else motivates me to create and direct my intentions?

To find out, I sat quietly and listed the thoughts and feelings that appeared in the attention centre in this time and place. The results are noted in what follows.

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There is a lot of chat about the need to regulate and control the iniquity and inequity of the globalizing world where the rich get richer and very little trickles down to the poorest.  There is need for change – for evolution - for revolution.

Rich people cocoon themselves behind physical and psychological walls and gates. They develop a biased world view. They see the world in terms of:

US – the rich and powerful folk – the wise, reasonable and deserving leaders and bosses; and

THEM – the simple minded poor and powerless folk – the non-deserving workers, consumers and cannon fodder.

As a well-to-do expatriate I have lived in gated houses and communities in the Sudan, Belize, Lesotho and Tanzania. This makes it easy to keep the impoverished peasants out of site, sight and mind.

There is a small herd of hardnosed individuals masterminding the contemporary global agenda. They are associated with, amongst other things,

• the military industrial complex
• the oil, gas and renewable energy sector
• Big Pharma
• the financial services – especially banking
• ICT, and the media
• Laundering the profits from drug and human trafficking
• The UN system
• World Bank, IMF
• Davos, G8, OECD

In my earlier working days I was a humble school teacher and did not fraternise with key decision makers. In my later working days I was a Technical Cooperation Officer (TCO). As such I was occasionally invited to socialize with the development divas. I quickly learned that politicians, bureaucrats and business people have a linguistic code that is other than the scientific one (aka rational and empirical) – they seek to be convincing rather than truthful. Many of them are charming but few are to be trusted.

The military/industrial complex is particularly pernicious. It helps to wage wars and to keep them going so the high tech and expensive weapons have to be replaced.

Amongst my souvenirs is a foot long piece of cold, grey shrapnel that is still razor sharp. It came from a South African mortar which was one of several that landed in my school. The South Africans did not intend to damage the school, they were calibrating on a Zambian army emplacement on the hill behind the school. During the preceding night the Zambian squaddies had lobbed some mortars into the SA army camp by way of giving unofficial support to a SWAPO attack. Fortunately it was a school holiday so no students were killed; but a direct hit on a bomb trench decimated a group of school workers and their children.

How much does a mortar shell cost? What difference would that sum of money make to a primary school (say in Sesheke).

If the UK was to scrap the anathema that is Trident (pause to remember Hiroshima) then how much common wealth would be released to use in more valuable and honorable ways?

The class struggle has not gone way. Power, status and riches corrupt and the tighter the relationships between members of the rich group the worse the corruption gets.

In the early 1980s Barry and me were employed by the British Council to help set up a model day secondary school in the S Sudan. The project was a later add on to a World Bank primary school support programme whose goal was to erect over 200 classrooms in various parts of the country. A Portuguese company was contracted to build the classrooms made from prefabricated metal panels from Portugal. The furniture was from Greece. Our secondary school had 10 buildings, the Teacher Training College had 2 buildings and 6 were constructed in the compounds of government Ministers. None of the others were built and when the furniture arrived from Greece it was left out in the rain and rotted. The World Bank produced a glowing report. Barry and me tried to blow the whistle but no one would listen. Not even the British Council.

So what is to be done?

We can use the ubiquitous ICT to unite and mobilise ordinary people to unwrap and expose the parcels of rogues in our erstwhile and new nations (eg the South Sudan and Scotland).

I like to think that our Scottish culture has moved on from the mean spirited, authoritarian and God fearing excesses of the Protestant reformation that were channelled through John Knox (1514-1572) and marked our break with the papacy in 1560. Pleasure may no longer be a mortal sin.

I also like to think that our culture has good humouredly and reasonably embraced the humanist, empiricist and rationalist thrusts of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment as espoused by world leading gurus David Hume (1711-1776) - philosophy , Adam Smith (1723-1790) - economics, Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) – sociology, and Robert Burns (1759-1796) - poetry.

Let stakeholders meet over a cup of tea (or a wee dram) and be even tempered, reasonable, and up to speed with the evidence.