Meditation: On The Cost of Dreaming Crisis

Modern history is resplendent with tales of recession and financial failure and crisis. However, that last word isn’t one that history uses much.

The Great Depression was, of course, a crisis but the term we employ is depression. Even though, at the time they called it the contraction. Both terms refer to movement within the economy.

At the close of the 19th century, an event known as The Panic of 1873 triggered a two-decade economic downturn commonly referred to as The Long Depression.

Even the word panic is preferable to crisis. Panic sounds short-lived and something which exists purely in the moment. Crisis suggests an ongoing, existential problem that will continue to grow to a catastrophic conclusion.

The danger today is not just the hyperbole but the frequency with which we encounter the chosen term.

News channels run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week whilst social media regurgitates an infinite feed. People with seemingly little financial concern use the phrase to attack people apparently wasting money. The backlash to Joe Lycett’s recent stunt serves as a good example.

We are hammering some square pegs into round holes as we convince an entire nation that they are all in the grip of the crisis. Fear-mongering media targets the widest audience possible and, as we all wrestle to stand under the same umbrella, the communities most at risk are lost in the deluge of despair.

My concern with such a bombardment of rhetoric around crisis is the sense of scarcity that it instils.

To keep profit margins high, companies are laying off staff by the tens of thousands.

The culture sector is experiencing 100% cutbacks in funding.

Suzy is having to go without her second flat white each day.

All terrifying. All true. With each story that gets told, it becomes harder to see a (renewable-energy powered) light at the end of the tunnel.

But nothing changes if nothing changes and, as Rita Mae Brown wrote in her novel Sudden Death, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”.

So, we need ideas. New ideas. We need visionaries and dreamers but we are facing a new crisis. A cost-of-dreaming crisis. We need great minds to strike out in search of metaphorical foreign shores but we are framing the world as one of lack and want. We tell the next generation that the quarries are empty and the wells are dry. Take this safe path and pat yourself on your hunched back as you toil in the traditional way, we say.

Visionaries and dreamers, regardless of their industry, are artists.

Artists will always create. Sometimes to their detriment. It is no secret that art prevails in times of hardship. History has proven the invincibility of art. The government knows this. It is precisely why the arts sector is the first to receive budget cuts during a financial crisis.

The new danger is arts education cuts. Spending is being diverted to subjects that can be objectively assessed and tested. Subjects like maths that we can directly link to productivity. Art is subjective and the value exists in the individual’s vision. Can we create more artists once we remove all access?

Aristotle believed that the three pillars of a good society were knowledge and productivity; leisure and entertainment; and, finally, contemplation.

Contemplation and dreaming are mutual synonyms… semantically related…. the same thing. So, dreaming is essential if society is to flourish.