I don’t like to sound gloomy. But, is the current self-centrism an epidemic of colossal proportions? Or, another way to put it, is navel-gazing the tsunami coming to all our shores?
Individually, we are in a massive selfie/toxic epidemic. Millions of homo sapiens take pictures of themselves as if running out of time before any Second Coming of the Lord, or at least The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse drop by.
Companies look 90% at themselves and 10% at the market. And when they use the 10%, 90% of that 10%, it is looking at competitors, not the real buyers, not society.
Big Countries. Well, that one wants to be Great Again, meaning close the borders, look inside, close the windows, look at us.
Big Global Brands have such a high regard for themselves that they keep telling us about their attributes, and their greatness, and their passions – which they have dissected into millions of PowerPoints and multi million pound contract consultants – so that the rest of us mortals recognise a greatness that we don’t care much about, and pay for that greatness that is not that great.
The Me Inc. is very strong and, dangerously, we believe that we are communal and resource-sharing loving people. Wow!
Across the world, self-centred-born organizations have become so sophisticated at navel-gazing that you wonder if they have inherited some sort of optical macular degeneration, aka blindness, in the process. Conservatives are hyper-conservatives because they want to conserve what they see in their navel-gazing exercises. Left-leaning organizations have lost the equilibrium, due to so much navel-gazing, they are falling instead of just leaning, and becoming irredeemably self-centred. Nationalist movements thrive because telling people to look after oneself and forget the rest, sells very well. Add in the salt and pepper of ‘the others are screwing you up’, and, bingo, we all want independence in a Massive Interdependent World.
We need a counter-epidemic. It reads like this. People, can you open the windows? Actually you’ll be amazed what you can see. You are not that important, we all are. Calm down. Your horse is getting a bit tired. Bosses, employees, politicians, journalists (that excludes the UK Daily Mail), Decent Men, we are here In Transit. Stop looking in. We are in this together. The answers are outside us, most of the time.
I know that my Unsexy Manifesto won’t go too far but, come on, let’s be serious. There is a thing called society, despite Mrs Thatcher denial. Most of the things that look like ‘I’ or ‘me’ don’t have a life within the ‘us’.
ps. I propose a Narcissus Tax. For every selfie, a 10% of your phone battery is gone. (Mr Crook? Mr Croooook? Tim? Are you there?)