The latest report
from Breakthrough concludes in
discussing “Ideas leadership” in which it says:
The reasons for not doing
what is obviously in our collective best interest have been widely canvassed, but
one striking element is the lack of public ideas leadership. How many figures
of public standing in Australia are prepared to consistently canvas the main issues
discussed here, even if we disagree about some of the details? You could count
them on the fingers of one hand. In fact, how many are prepared to talk about
these issues in the public arena at all?
Timidness and a relentless
bright-siding infuse the public conversation, as if people cannot bear to hear the
truth.
But what if public is more
prepared for the conversation than are our public ideas leaders?
Recent work by Melanie
Randle and Richard Eckersley investigated the perceived probability of threats
to humanity and different responses to them (nihilism, fundamentalism and
activism) in the US, UK, Canada and Australia:
So here is the great irony:
people have got a fair, intuitive sense of what might be coming, but our ideas leaders
can’t talk about it.
Now is the time to press
those who aspire to leadership on climate issues and action to ask the questions
that prompted the writing of this discussion paper. If the propositions are
contentious, let’s debate them rather than keeping them hidden under a cone of
silence. Repressing troubling thoughts does not resolve them, but means only
they will come back to haunt us in an increasingly intense manner.
Read the whole report here.
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