A Fairytale of New Year

January 5, 2025

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A Fairytale of New Year

– an “In My View” article by NIGEL WARD – a fairytale – a work of PURE FICTION (if you wish).

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In another time, in another place, there was (or will be) another planet, not so very different from our own, with a variegated surface – partly continental and partly oceanic – in diverse and richly-populated balance.

There, the self-acclaimed ‘highest life form’ favours a hierarchical regulation of ‘society’ which could be described by us as PSEUDOCRACY. We inhabitants of planet EARTH would identify this as form of government as a PSEUDOCRACY – a mere facsimile of the form of government we like to call DEMOCRACY – which is to say, we would identify PSEUDOCRACY, rightly or wrongly, as a complete fake.

In a PSEUDOCRACY, instead of our pretense that The People designate Representatives (Councillors, to whom The People entrust custody of the Public Purse, the authority to enact Decisions – called Resolutions – and to employ Staff – Paid Public Servants, etc) and the Staff, in turn, misdirect the Representatives in accordance with an unknowable agenda, the hierarchy is completely up-ended and it really is The People who occupy the apex of the hierarchy. The People are sovereign – just as it says on the tin when we buy into DEMOCRACY. Only this is the real deal.

Yet the planet I describe really is “not so very different from our own” – planet EARTH.

In tribute to our greatest contemporary poet, whose lines from three generations ago (borrowed from the Christian Bible [Matthew 19:30]) are etched in memory, I choose to name this planet accordingly:

Thus, the planet HEART was forerunner to our planet EARTH.

Each year, the population of planet HEART celebrates the start of the New Year with a new aspiration. A fresh start, a new life, with higher standards and greater fairness. More openness and transparency. More empathy and respect for one another – and for the environment. We call these aspirations Resolutions.

Readers who find the following schematic diagram of DEMOCRACY true-to-life on EARTH are invited to abandon this tale right now. For them, there will be no happy ending.

Although divided by the immeasurable vastness of Space and the inconceivable immensity of Time, our two planets – EARTH and HEART – have become, in an infinite universe of possibilities, momentarily and instantaneously connected by what Kurt VONNEGUT Jr. called a “Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum”. Others have called it “coincidence”.

Our 2025 just happens to be, whatever “just happens” might mean (maybe the process of “the last one now will later be first“?) their 5202. In other words, we are contemplating a civilisation with 3,177 more years of experience than we have.

New Year

Just as we on EARTH surf the time-wave that each year propels us to midnight on 31st December – New Year’s Eve – so do our more mature neighbours on planet HEART.

But like us, they still awaken, on their New Year’s Day, to solemn promises of a new life, a better life, a cleaner life, a nicotine-free life, an alcohol-free life, a gambling-free life, a healthier life, a kinder life, a more honest life – a fairer life. And the name of those promises is (The People know it, your Representatives know it, their Staff know it) Resolutions. Solemn incorruptible promises to carry out specific actions in a specific way.

Readers will remember Resolutions – those decisions made, supposedly on our behalf and in the sanctity of our trust, by our chosen Representatives – the members of our local authorities – but, in reality, conceived and directed by the Staff – the Paid Public Servants.

All of us struggle with the temptations that woo us away from our New Year’s Resolutions. Often in vain. But Acts of Parliament do not grant our ‘authorities’ that latitude.

We expect better of our chosen Representatives; that is why we chose them – because we believed them to be more worthy than we The People could ever be. We are all human. We commit errors, we harbour grudges, we embody (sometimes-subconsciously) biases.

But our local ‘authorities’ are not individual humans each with any number of foibles. They are finely structured legal entities – ‘creatures of statute‘ – without emotion, without pride, without malice, without personal grudges, without personal self-interest. They exist only to provide services and amenities for The People.

Wiser, more knowlegable, of greater integrity (as they always claim to be) – we chose our Representatives for at least seeming to be trustworthy. If we were mistaken, we must carry our share of the blame for that.

But those we never chose, those who chose themselves – the ‘elected unopposed’, the ‘co-optees’, the ‘self-appointed’ – must carry the whole of that burden of GUILT.

Our neighbours on HEART have known this for millennia. They know it by experience. It has become gut instinct. They know it by practice and by policy.

For just a nanosecond, on the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, all channels were open. An afflatus occurred – a eureka moment of inexplicable origin.