I've been ruminating on making mistakes and owning up to them over the past week or so - perhaps it's a New Year thing: After all, Janus was the god of two faces, and it's always good (occasionally) to look back and reflect.
I was looking at mistakes in an educational context over on my teaching blog, but was also thinking about it in a wider social context. In particular, the UK government's seeming inability to 'fess up to anything whatsoever. Brexit is not exactly going well, as per EVERYBODY'S predictions; And 100,000+ deaths from Covid are not something to crow about. One things does appear to be going right, however, and that is the NHS rollout of the vaccine programme. Who would have thought that an organisation that was specifically designed to provide mass health care in precisely this sort of scenario would have coped so well?
Not, apparently, the Conservative government, who are more than ready to take the credit for the vaccination programme, but not the blame for the billions upon billions of pounds of tax payers' money squandered in contracts in what can only be described as an orgy of nepotism.
In a way, you can't blame them - they are wedded to the ideology that the Private Sector - in particular, a commercial sector that is restricted only by the bare minimum of regulation, legislation, accountability and responsibility - always knows best, and is best placed to solve large scale social issues.
Well, that worked well at Grenfell, didn't it? And the limitations of an unfettered free market have been glaringly exposed by the global catastrophe of Covid. Sometimes, it turns out, you need a strongly centralised system of governance and control in order to deal with things.
So, you might think that at some stage, ministers in this government might admit to getting things wrong, yes? After all, Boris Johnson has promised an enquiry - once all the dust has settled. Presumably the dust from his sprinting footsteps as he hightails it out of Westminster.
The trouble is, they aren't going to do it - and why? Because they aren't equipped to.
I think in this country, there is a deep reluctance to admit to mistakes, because it's seen somehow as a moral and/or personal failing, and this is especially so in the culture of Public Schools. These foster a notion of elitism and exceptionalism that is a dangerous and damaging fallacy. It's not so much teaching children to lie, but rather a system inculcating in people that either mistakes are a weakness & therefore should not be admitted, or giving them such a sense of their own exceptionalism that it's IMPOSSIBLE to make mistakes.
The outcome is that we end up with people who are pathologically incapable of telling the truth - or even discerning what truth is, because they simply aren't mature enough to admit to even the possibility of making mistakes. And we end up with a ruling class who become enslaved to ideologies that are, when analysed, a reductio ad absurdem - for example, the ridiculous notion that everything works better in a free market, when this is patently not the case. We end up with, let's face it, Boris Johnson - a demonstrably proven philandering liar, oaf, and bully, backed up by the most disastrously incompetent Cabinet seen since at least the mid-nineteenth century.
And because this is a government that will not - can not- admit to its own failings, it remains a performative administration - one that is shallow, reductive and incapable of producing anything of substance. All it can do is totter on, dragging us all into a disastrous mire.
Wouldn't it be nice to live in a country where politicians (and managers, and CEOs, and adults in general) were actually mature enough to hold their hand up, say, 'I've made a mistake', and then say 'Right, how do we fix this?' Unfortunately, it would appear that sorry really is the hardest word.
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