When we discuss things like compassion, we say how better society would be if there more of them. Kindness, the abilities to listen, coax, understand and empathise … the facility of negotiation, of just being and holding.
All are usually termed soft skills, as if they were somehow inferior in their delivery.
Not like their ever-so-countable hard cousins.
Not like the ones which make the world go round.
And so the results-getters get all the glory, too; all the glory and most of the dosh. As if the lovers and makers of the soft skillsets were never delivering anything worth remembering.
But we forget one key fact: soft delivers not through its ending but through its very continuing. Hard, meanwhile, delivers when it results. And only when it results.
And when it doesn’t, the results-getters then blame the soft guys for fucking up. For fucking up on process.
As if process were a kind of result.
As if process were the poor cousin of result.
Frankly, it’s all wrong: soft is the closest thing we have to life, and we better believe it. Human beings are perishable goods, waiting – when rankly disadvantaged – for their horrible rotting away on unloadable dock.
And it’s the hard skillsets that justify such rotting, that devise economic systems and social frameworks whose sole purpose is to validate the destruction of life as a process – as the process, as the journey, it inarguably has to be seen as.
When the hard skillsets design a socioeconomic space where results are more important than journey … where journey is no longer the thing we should aspire to … this, quite precisely this, is when life itself is subverted!
And a man, generally a man, who posits an existence of such structures turns the wonderful mathematics of nature into the dreadful machinations of the casually brutal.
We have an obligation to promote journey and a right to expect process. This is my position today, and I see now that it always has been.
Let us connect Steve Jobs’ famous dots back through the past five political, social, technological and deficiently democratic decades – and, in so doing, recover our ability to see the main purpose of Western liberal society and its fabulous instincts: existing, I gently suggest, primarily to protect, empower, release and liberate the natural being of all genders and ages, in harmony with a natural world that our education now demands we properly comprehend.
And let us start by doing it as soon as the video has run its course.
Which, I guess you’ll have to agree, has to be #RightNow.
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