Why Vision
I am busy. What is the point of me, or anyone, spending time developing or even just becoming familiar with a vision….for economy, or anything else?
Economic vision provides inspiration. Without knowing where we want to go or feeling that our destination is worthy, we cannot be inspired or inspire others to travel. If we only reject, we cannot seek. If we are only negative, we will not be positive. If we don’t have hope fueled by reasoned anticipation, we will have little passion for change. Without passion for change, we won’t attain change. Social vision is therefore a prerequisite for the mindsets enabling social victory.
Stated in reverse, the widespread belief that there exists no alternative to current social relations obstructs seeking an alternative to current social relations. Vision of a viable and worthy alternative is the way to remove that obstruction.
We need vision to be positive. We need vision to be inspired and to inspire. We need vision for passion. Without vision, we have none of that.
Visionless, we go no where.
I feel a little like Zach de Rocha when he talks about ignoring injustice – about ignoring vision:
“Silence, something about silence makes me sick, ’cause silence can be violence, sorta like a slit wrist…”
Economic and for that matter any other social vision also provides orientation and guidance. Lacking vision we cannot orient our actions concerning present relations because we have nothing better to compare present relations too. We cannot orient our actions to diminish differences between what we endure and what we seek. We cannot ensure that our actions lead where we wish to go.
Strategy rooted only in rejecting the present but not in attaining the future is not strategy but flailing about. It breeds only despair. Only a fool goes to an airport without a destination, yet expects to arrive someplace desirable. Only a much bigger fool, a suicidal fool, rejects existing institutions, seeking their elimination, but without a clear vision of viable alternatives and an approach to reaching those alternatives.
Strategy depends on vision. Even short term analysis depends on vision. How is the present inadequate? Hope, positivity, and passion depend on vision. To not see that success depends on vision requires an incredible resistance to the obvious.
We have to go much further than Bertrand Russell in the brief quuote below, but he does set the stage nicely with this little piece of advice, I think…
“All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can be refuted by science: Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.”
