We chatted about this today in our Tuesday meeting (at least I chatted about it to the team; this happens every 2 weeks).
I forgot where I found out about this concept; it’s very well established in a well-trodden path. It's often used to describe issues in healthcare or society as a whole, or the welfare state or the government or various other things or places or situations.
In essence, my understanding or my take on this is that basically society works in a contract with the individual.
The examples I gave to the team when we were talking about it today were as follows:
Number one,
The people who put themselves forward to fight in the world wars voluntarily.
They understood the sacrifice that they may end up making, but they were prepared to put themselves forward for that sacrifice to try and protect the society that raised them and looked after them.
Number two,
The NHS dental contract, in effect, you look after yours, and we'll look after it too. The issue we have with all of healthcare in the United Kingdom is that most people stopped looking after it but still expect it to be looked after.
The third option, for example, was that of the travelling community who, a couple of years ago, decided to camp on our land and in our car park.
The effects were devastating both psychologically and physically: the vandalism, the utilisation of one of the building's bike stores as a toilet, the rubbish, the intimidation, the general change in atmosphere of the whole site as things were destroyed and vandalised before they left.
So yesterday the travellers were trying to get onto our site again (there's a large horse show for the travelling community at this time every year). We've increased our security, had to pay for a security guard overnight, had to lock car parks and make sure that it was not possible to enter our land.
I would have the utmost respect for the travelling community and the way of life they want to protect if they weren't using parts of my site as an open toilet or whacking my cars with crowbars and smashing the windows or stealing things from my waiting room.
This is a social contract, as everything else is a social contract; what it means is that if you do your bit to make it right, I'll do my bit to make it right, and then things will be right.
We lost the whole idea of the social contract in favour of the rights of the individual.
Where we live now is that the individual is entitled to smoke or to drink or to put on an extraordinary amount of weight or to do anything which compromises their health because they will be fixed, no matter what, and regardless.
Individuals can shout as loud as they want, and society has to buckle.
What will be interesting, and it does appear that we're getting closer to this point, is what will happen when society completely unravels, and all we have left are individuals.
What we talked about today is how to achieve meaning through purpose, how to have a goal, a life goal or something similar to move towards, to make things better.
All we can ever do is ‘be it the change we want to see in the world’. We might never get there, but it's a much better journey than the alternative.
Blog Post Number - 4628