We don't live in an egalitarian world where all can prosper, not yet, but this is the future. It is simple in this respect.
When given an opportunity to prosper most people - if not all - will do so given time. The film Trading Places illustrates the point. A black, homeless bum becomes a city trader and a white city trader becomes a bum. The latter in the real world would be immoral but the former has already been put into pratice. In the 1980s street traders were recruited to the investment banking floor.
This is just a film of course but it is the ideal of the possibility which I like. Those who do best in life usually still come from very priviledged backgrounds and those who have the worst childhoods and poorest backgrounds still continue to have lives without opportunity or prosperity.
The egalitarian principle may seem like an ideal which is still ahead of its time but I don't believe this is true. Talent is talent regardless of disadvantage. There was a school friend of mine who went to the same expensive posh school I went to. He was different because he was from a poor background but his talent and potential was so exceptional the school offered him a free place. He was a misfit, and this meant he was excluded and isolated partly because of himself and partly because of the culture. He eventually dropped out in the first year which was a real shame.
I met him again a few years later when I ended up in a children's home. He'd spent a lot of time in state care. Care hadn't helped him realise his potential nor better his life opportunities but I would bet everything that his capability and talent were undiminished.
This potential is what the modern world values and thrives upon. Everyone has it if people and structures are willing to recognise it.
Those who have been through the standard - the priviledged - path of those who prosper well in the modern day are conditioned into a way of thinking and a mindset. They are 'in the box' and their imaginations are usually stymied through the process of behavioural and thought conditioning which comes with following the standard career path.
In health and social care this may ultimately be a disadvantage, at least in terms of progress and decision-making which reflects real world problems and solutions. A fettered imagination and a life without diversity of life experience are not the foundations necessary for delivering on the objective of health and social care. Too often those at the top live protected lives in ivory twoers away from the grass roots reality.
In the drive towards an equal society there is a lot of value in those who've been through the hard times in life, those who have struggled through the worse life, the inequality and the tyranny of evil of other people.
Equality is a national objective in the UK and beyond the simple principle there is a value to the modern constructs. It comes from the value of life experience versus book knowledge, from those who learn from the street rather than from the research and policy documents. It may be hard for those who went through the standard conditioning to be able to listen and value the words of those who've been through the hard path but this is a failing because it is a failing not to be able to listen and try to understand another human being. It is a failing I too often do.
If the objective is human equality then the voices of those who suffer disadvantage are as valuable as those who have lived a priviledged life. They prosper and it is about time the rest prosper too.
I do wonder what happened to my old school mate.
Sent from my smartphone
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