Empathy

The ability to understand and share the feelings of others

As a young pre-school boy, some of my earliest memories were of time spent fossicking within the ‘benign’ fenced in paradise that was our back garden. The possibilities for fun and entertainment seemed endless. The Friend family had just become grateful recipients of a brand new, purpose built, affordable state house owing to a massive government effort to rebuild and re-house low income families as Britain emerged from a shattered post war landscape. To quote Freddy Mercury 'those were the days of our lives, the bad things in life were so few'. Looking back, it was a brief window in our collective consciousness where, having clawed our way through the maelstrom of war, the idea of a fairgo for all was embraced and made real by the Labour government of Clement Attlee with the introduction of a comprehensive welfare state.
Our back yard was a blank slate that George, the patriach, was marking out to create vegetable and flower beds, a concreted patio area, sand pit and an eventual greenhouse. The paraphernalia of garden construction lay all around inviting an inquisitive and eager child to explore. Each tool, brick, piece of wood, mound of dirt or sand were the landscape for dreams imagined and real. My elder sister Sue, (real name Rosemary, but that's another story) who would possibly only have been seven at the time, was Sandra, Barry, and my surrogate child minder. We traipsed around the garden following her, eager to join in with whatever fantasy story she might masterfully create. But benign the garden certainly wasn't. As we were called in for lunch I was knocked out cold by the garden fork! Whilst running to the kitchen I had inadvertently stepped on the upturned tines and the wooded handle was catapulted onto my forehead. As I came to, not understanding what or who had hit me, I was hysterical, and standing in the kitchen doorway collapsed in breathless howls of despair.
Hoping to be swept up, soothed, and reassured that everything was alright it came as an equally massive shock to be coldly told to pull myself together and stop screaming! I'm unsure how my recovery went. My mind has since wiped that part clean.
In that moment the realisation that both my parents, at my greatest time of need appeared to show a complete lack of empathy for my plight seemed the most devastating realisation to grasp and has to large degree, shaped the man I became.
I am a life long and unashamed socialist. I believe in the value of a welfare state and of a collective responsibility for those of us with means to support others less fortunate.
Collective and individual displays of empathy are the mark of a well balanced society. A demonstration that however well one has done as an individual or collectively as a society, we should be mindful to share with, or give succor to, those less fortunate. 'Paying it forward' or 'random acts of kindness' are simple methods by which we can all demonstrate our concern for others.
The single greatest betrayal of a modern Labour movement in Britain was the removal by Tony Blair of clause 4 of the Labour Manifesto.
'To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each ...'
This single act of treachery murdered forever the ideal of collective ownership of industries where the profits gained thereof would be redistributed for the good of everyone. In that single act centrist politics made a quantum shift to the right. A move that has forever branded attempts to restore a balanced more egalitarian collective welfare for all as left wing socialist bunkum to be derided mercilessly.
In the United Nations 'Universal declaration of human rights'

articles 23 through 27 are simple unambiguous statements that should be the corner stone of any modern government. Yet post WW2 and within the context of a Eurocentric/Westminster style democracy [they] have been largely spurned first by Reagan in America and simultaneously Thatcher in Britain. More recently in New Zealand Roger Douglas in a Lange lead Labour government followed by Ruth Richardson in a National government lead by Bolger has steered New Zealand along the same pathway.
The core beliefs of Milton Friedman

monetarist policies is that the market dictates everything. At the apex of this system is the mantra of deregulation. Government has no business in business and private enterprise is the cure-all for stable economic direction.
In order to smooth this transition deunionisation and casualisation of work forces has been an essential foundational cornerstone. In New Zealand Bill Birch was largely responsible for this with his anti union contracts act and the abolishing of national awards . Margaret Thatcher lead the charge in Britain, deliberately demonising the NUM and Arther Scargill. There is real irony that prior to emmigrating to New Zealand in 1986 I had spent two years delivering food parcels to striking miners in a midlands coal town of Ripley only to arrive in NZ to find a Labour government had closed all the west coast mines whilst the country didnt bat an eyelid!
Secondary picketing was made illegal and union funds were seized by court order for those recalcitrants who broke this law. The reorganisation and rebuilding of infrastructure surrounding distribution of essential goods from rail to haulage firms has been a deliberate ploy both here and in Britain ensuring unionism or collectivisation cannot halt the movement of essential goods by strike action when attempts to bargain for improved wages or conditions of service were ignored.
Marshall McLuhan's prophetic statement of the 60's in claiming 'the medium is the message' became a central truth in the control of public oppinion, taste and eventual political manipulation. 'Turn on, tune in, drop out' far from being a hippyesque nirvana to live one's life by, as promoted by the likes of Timothy O'Leary, instead became the ultimate means of mind control by capturing the narrative and massaging opinion to suit an increasingly smaller, and ultimately selfish interest group. The crushing of the printworkers unions spectacularly achieved by Rupert Murdoch in Britain’s fleet street ensured that ultimate control of the narrative allowed a public, whose real interests lay in attacking or at least holding the selfish few to account, to be utterly brainwashed into blaming each other for their lack of agency. Division rather than unity has proved an extraordinarily effective method to blind us from the theft of wealth and opportunity from the many to the few. Black against white, women against men, worker against beneficiary, indigenous against immigrant, unionist against individual freedom etc.
This blueprint has played out with different emphasis across western democracies but the pattern is essentially the same.
The current coalition under Luxon, far from wanting to distance themselves from the excesses of David Seymour's attempts to rewrite Te Tiriti, are actually quite content to allow this divisiveness to foment because it's the classic dead cat thrown on the table to distract the public. Meanwhile Peters has been exacting at least as great an amputation of Maori representation by the removal of Reo across all government agencies.
Division, distraction, and obfuscation has allowed western style governments of both the left and right to pursue privatisation as a means to deliver the myth of a more efficient service, arguing that [it] provides competion that leads to cheaper products or greater access therefore is better than the old ‘inefficient’ state owned models. This reality continues to be a monstrous lie that is difficult to know where to begin in an attempt to refute such a ridiculous thesis.
The most immediate obvious observation is that privatisation leads to job losses, lower wages and worsening conditions of service, and most egregious of all the massive movement of wealth via profit away from servicing a collective good and into the pockets of the few.
By way of explanation a demonstrator is required.

Cleaning services
• Every school across Aotearoa requires cleaning EVERY DAY
• When I first arrived in NZ in 1986 this job was often carried out by senior school students under supervision by schools cleaners who were part of a caretakers set of duties
• Enter bulk funding, introducing a system where instead of the Ministry of Education footing the bill for these non teaching duties the school was allocated a sum of money for the year to cover EVERYTHING! including teachers salaries
• In other words schools were to be run on a business model and whilst they weren't required to return a dividend (YET!!!!!) All funding came from that one 'bucket'
• Savings had to be made because although those school who originally opted in got sweetener deals to ensure the workability of the status quo, once the experiment became a national directive the money allocated, from the outset, was never enough to meet existing requirements. There were always shortfalls because that's the nature of how a model based on the devolution of fiscal responsibility operates.
• First on the chopping block were cleaners salaries. The outcome being reduced staff expected to do the same work in the same time
• Run the story forward a couple of years and the school I worked at out-sourced all cleaning to a private company on a fixed contract because it was cheaper to do so
• The result? Every cleaner was dismissed by the new company and then some were rehired, to do more duties on a reduced wage!
And so it went on. Privatisation at the expense of jobs and conditions of service.
If we look to a larger financial demonstrator of this lie one need look no further than the power generation and supply industry
• All major infrastructure in NZ has been built using workers tax dollars
• If you care to re-read clause 4, to paraphrase, you’ll find it states that those who built and paid for an industry deserve the full fruits of such labour! (Cue for a Tui ad)
• Under a neoliberal Labour Party this national asset was broken up and made to return a profit to the government. Fair enough you might think, given that such fruits may be redistributed into, say, health care or education, but that wasn't what happened
• Enter Max Bradford and a National Party on neoliberal steroids and suddenly these profits went into private not public purses, and mostly off shore!
Almost every industry that serves a public good has been treated in the same way. It became known as selling off the family silver, but in reality it opened the floodgates for corporate/private profit at the expense of higher costs to the consumer often with worse outcomes regarding access or product. Put your hand up if Max Bradford delivered you cheaper electricity bills! It most certainly lead to unemployment, reduction in wages and fewer conditions of service.
Elizabeth Warren, the American senator (one of the few individuals in my memory who has moved from right in politics to the left!) puts the case for all private companies to pay their part in creating a more equitable society
"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for."
This appeal to a sense of decency or empathy from corporations, business owners etc to 'pay it forward' has become an increasingly scarce comodity with a contrary view prevailing that says workers should be pleased with whatever wages or conditions of service are offered AND if you don't like it there's another unemployed person standing behind you ready to do your job for less!
We have completely lost sight of the most basic element of all economic progress is the worker! Those at the coal face. Whether it is the actual miner, car assembly, agricultural, drivers, forestry, nurse, supermarket shelf filler, fishing worker et al nothing happens without their contribution. As the native American quote states "Only when the last tree has died, and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money"
Abraham Lincoln in the first of his anual addresses to congress stated.
"labour is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labour, and could never have existed if labour had not first existed. Labour is the superior to capital and deserves much the higher consideration". These words have fallen on deaf ears, not just in America but across all western democracies, as the likes of Amazon, Walmart, McDonalds, Starbucks, Target, and Burger King pay their work force some of the lowest wages possible whilst amassing obscene personal wealth for the owners.

The lack of a collective empathy between homo sapiens is a disease that is tearing apart the very meaning of what it is to be human. We could not have made it this far without individual evolutionary acts of altruism that served no benefit to the one, but was essential to the continued survival of the many. How has this been flipped? It seems altogether inconceivable that we run our economies on models that deprive or exclude most people of the very rights guaranteed under the United Nations charter. Why is it that there so few leaders prepared to stand up and defend, not just secular but, interests the well being and dignity of us all?
This first year in the life of a new government in Aotearoa New Zealand has shown a complete and utter contempt for any responsibility to improve the lot of all Kiwis. It has willingly fanned the flames of division to deliberately distract each and every one of us as they transfer wealth and opportunity from the many to the few. I cannot imagine one person in this country who having one ounce of empathy, no matter what their personal financial status may be, could not agree that our public health service is in dire need of an immediate and massive injection of financial aid. Nor that something as basic as a robust, sustainable interisland connection service should still be in unchartered territory. Equally I cannot believe or imagine one person in Aotearoa who truly believes that a way to prosperity for all is to continue to increase unemployment, or to redirect one more dollar of public money into the pockets of private enterprise.