2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY

5196 NEW ROLE OF THE COMMUNITY

The new right would claim that growing individualism has removed the need for public provision; the market should, and will, provide all - privatisation is the only solution. Margaret Thatcher memorably summarised this view when she claimed that there was 'no such thing as society'! The result is that, in the crisis decades at the end of the 20th century, much of the role of the community has been dismantled. Some would go so far as to say that the social infra-structure has been more gratuitously vandalised by disoriented governments themselves than by the under-classes which they have created, and which they so fear.

The paradox is that the new individual is in greater need of the community! Left alone, with only the market to mediate his or her aspirations, the result would be anarchy. Chaos would ensue as the billions of individuals demanded their own rights, regardless of those of others. This is, despite the free-market rhetoric of politicians, already recognised by the ever growing number of regulations which seek to constrain the activities of all parts of society. The definitive mark of our age is the degree to which it is governed, in the minutest details, by laws set by governments which - in defence of such constraints - proudly declaim, however, that the freedom of the individual is paramount. Our research shows that even the management establishment, which - in a free-market economy - should be leading future developments, looks above all to government regulation to determine its future. In this way, whilst declaiming the virtues of forward-looking entrepreneurs, it still sub-contracts its own future to the politicians who the rest of the population is coming to despise!

The reality is that a new relationship - a compact if not a contract - needs to be developed between the community and the individuals which it contains. Clearly chaos would result if the community chose to have no role. Equally, though, the model of previous generations - whereby the community arbitrarily imposed the views of majority groups on everyone - no longer meets the needs of the individuals involved. What the new relationship will be is not yet clear to see. It will need to be much more sophisticated than that in the past. It will no longer be sufficient to dogmatically provide just one solution to any problem. With the growing complexity of the needs of individuals, there will often need to be almost as many solutions as there are individuals involved. Before the information society this would have been impossible, but the new technology now offers the possibility of a viable outcome. Each individual can now, at least in theory - and soon in practice, have a unique relationship with the community to which he or she belong

15 May 2003

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