Action?

I have a few activist friends. I thought of activism my self at one point - "I want to help the world and make it a better place" I used to think as a child. But before that a much more important question - "Does the world need any help?".

We are taught to think of the standard images of poverty, hunger, disease, war: so much for the fortunate in the West to do. So much to add to our lives to make them more worthwhile. But isn't that a little onesides - as opponents to the war in Iraq point out, wouldn't that money be better spent at home - as if we don't have our own problems.

"Problematising" is the problem here I am beginning to think! People in need of a life's purpose, in need of something to do in a Western world so swamped with wealth that there are almost no more jobs to do.

Are there any real problems? Is there anything really to do?

We know there is difficulty in life and in a sense there are things to do to attend to that difficulty, but such things are quite normal and natural. They do not need a task force or any great revolution to attend to.

Sometimes there are disasters, sudden changes of equilibrium, which require a sudden change in peoples attitudes. Here would be an example of difficulties that require some organised mobilisation.

What I am questioning is not these sudden changes. I am challenging the idea that within the established organic world there are "hidden" illnesses that suddenly today need to be solved.

The news that 80% of the world lives on less than a dollar amongst a host of "moral panic" statistics regarding a world that we otherwise live in without comment.

People are always trying to distinguish the world between acceptable and problematic, and then allign themselves against the problematic, when actually they only need to align because they decided that something was problematic.

The War in Iraq the cause celebre of such people, and the chaos that has followed an illustration of the non-existence of problems until you engineer them, and then make them worse by responding to them as problems.

There are simple things that make us human: care and love being the most important. That people need to engineer organisations who professionally "care and love" is rather overlooking the already existing nature of the human world. That humans can hate and neglect is also part of the human outlook. The belief that organisations will contain qualities other than these is rather overlooking the commonality which humans have, and just propagating the greatest feature of humans: the ability to segregate and divide one another.