Hear us politicians and spin doctors – we are better than you…

Modern politicians love talking about aspirational people and families, but offer only the narrowest and most poisonous view of human aspiration and vision when doing so.

The people who the establishment love to caricature as ‘aspirational’ have only thing on their mind – themselves.

Be it a house with a garden, a foreign holiday, a fitted kitchen, a private school for the kids or just plain naked greed –  these things are all called by the morally ambiguous term ‘aspirational’.

Outline a bigger vision for the sum total of your life’s work than material acquisition and your aspiration is not only ignored – its derided and sneered at.

Some people might call such a narrow and ego-centric set of goals by their proper name – selfish, but it suits the modern politico to hawk the view that we are selfish – just blind consumers happy to trample over others to grab what we can.

There are many reasons why every other aspect of human aspiration bar material gain is excluded from the joyless landscape of the corporate media and the sound bites of the usual suspects:

1. This is how they are, so they assume everyone else is too.

2. It suits the prevailing ideologies of modern times namely neoliberalism and neo-classical economics, in which, we are all merely selfish actors maximising our utility.

3.  Like a manufacturer of burgers or generic pop music – the modern politician wants to sell you a product,  – the only one they have the wit to dream up. They then want to brow beat you into believing its the only one available and indeed the only one you should want.

If McDonalds could rebrand food to just mean burgers and happiness to just mean fries – they would.

(I thought they already had! I'm Lovin it. Ed.)

4. Selfish people are easy to trick and manipulate – people with moral integrity have a way of seeing through the hollow blather of political spin.

This last election has been the most parochial and trivial in living memory with the terms of debate narrowed to the point of tragic absurdity.

Where were the debates about Climate Change? Overpopulation? Soil Loss? Resource Depletion? The loss of bio-diversity? Inequality? Fracking? Foreign Policy? Russia? TTIP? Europe? The Mediterranean migrant crisis? The monetary system? 

and a hundred other things that could and should have informed our debates about the future. 

Instead we got to figure out whether Ed Milliband could eat a bacon sandwich and if the Tories would put more cash in your pocket than Labour.

How did we reach such a sorry state of affairs? What can we do about it?

Well we can start by giving ourselves permission to aspire to something beyond greed.

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I want to bequeath a clean planet and a healthy future for my son, his children and grandchildren.

I want an end to inequality and for no-one to be left hungry, homeless or frightened that their basic needs will go unmet.

I want to live with a greater sense of community and compassion – so no-one at any age is ever left feeling alone and isolated.

I want a sustainable future for humanity that lives alongside and respects all life on the planet we share.

If a politician wants to tell me he can’t deliver these things then that’s fine – I can choose not to vote for them, but when the overwhelming majority of the worlds media and politicians tell me I should desist from even aspiring to these things and settle instead for their joyless GDP statistics – then they can get stuffed.

They can get stuffed not least because their mantras invoking infinite economic growth on a finite planet are delusional fantasises that risk an ecological apocalypse for future generations.

But most of all they can get stuffed because we are better than this – we are better than them.

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What are your dreams and aspirations? What dreams do you have for yourself and all humankind?

Do leave us a comment or just share this article if you agree that we can do so much better as rounded human beings than our cowardly politicians are prepared to admit.