Private Optimism, Public Despair - What can we do?

It has been long known that there is a general perception gap between what people might think of their local hospital and what they think of the NHS in general.

Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA, writing in the New Statesman has talked about these difficulties but goes much further with an important and insightful article which looks to the future. He says:

"This perception gap is not restricted to public services, as a recent BBC poll on families confirms. Some 93 per cent of respondents described themselves as optimistic about their own family life, up 4 per cent from the previous time the survey was conducted, 40 years ago. Yet more people - 70 per cent, across race, class and gender - believe families are becoming less successful overall."

He also adds to the point by Polly Toynbee, that we have blogged, on the lack of advocates to tell good news in the public services when it happens:

"In the burgeoning industry of reputation management, it is generally argued that people are much more likely to tell others about bad experiences of services than good ones (5:1 is the usual ratio)."

He argues that trends such as the rise of individualism and the decline of some forms of collectivism combined with the rise of pretty much self-organising global capitalism moving at a rapid pace have created this private optimism and public despair, adding that:

"Globalisation is the gravity of modern society: an unstoppable force that will knock us over if we try to defy it."

Since the collapse of the cold war two systems in 1989 no single person or authority is in control even if some parts of the world are more powerful than others.

He points out that people still see the same broad problems as they did 100 years but now see rapid change as a challenge and seek greater comfort in those close to them.

However, he strikes an optimistic note saying that people are more affluent and healthy and yet there is a danger of some missing out on the celebration:

"Progressives want the world to be a better place. We bemoan its current inequities and oppression - yet if we fail to celebrate the progress that human beings have made, and if we sound as though the future is a fearful place, we belie our own philosophy. Instead, we need to address a deficit in social optimism that threatens the credibility of our core narrative."

Addressing social optimism is clearly a project for everyone. We have previously blogged about Richard Layard's case for increasing overall happiness and David Cameron has talked about the government having a mission to improve people's general wellbeing.

Matthew Taylor makes the case for a New Collectivism to tackle what he describes as the social optimism deficit:

"It is in working with others on a shared project of social advance that we can be reconnected to the sense of collective agency so missing from modern political discourse. It is the attitude of the spectator that induces pessimism, the experience of the participant that brings hope. The problem is not that change brings fear and disorientation (there's nothing new in this), it is that we lack the spaces and places where people can renew hope and develop solutions."

It was challenges like this that brought TCC into being and where we try to assist organisations. He then refers to the sort of change making we should all be attempting together:

"The institutions of the new collectivism must be devolved, pluralistic, egalitarian and, most of all, self-actualising."

This is the sort of approach that this blog argued for and it good to see the arguments so well set out here. He gives a number of examples of where this happening:

"Today, there are signs of a yearning for new ways of working together. There is the growing interest in social and co-operative enterprise and the emergence of new forms of online collaboration. Gordon Brown's citizens' juries are a tentative step in the right direction, albeit without much fun or risk-taking..."

and

"Tackling climate change offers a fascinating opportunity to interweave stories of action at the individual, community, national and international levels."

TCC is working in places like EC1 in London on increasing recycling whilst linking it firmly to the whole issue of climate change through initiatives that engage with young people.

He concludes by making a call for people to build the institutions of the new collectivism:

"Despite the huge impersonal forces of the modern world, people are prepared not only to believe in a better future, but to work together to build it......This potential will be fulfilled only when we provide spaces for collective decision-making and action that speak to the same vision of collaboration, creativity and human fulfilment that progressives claim to be our destiny."

Many of these new institutions of this new collectivism already exist: NHS Foundation Trusts, New Deal for the Communities (NDC's) aspiring to run community assets, social networking sites like Ning, Facebook and Myspace. These are a different set of institutions to perhaps those of the 1945 welfare settlement, but they are a potentially strong mixed economy of institutions nevertheless, and they and other new institutions need support to build a collaborative new collectivism for the future.

In addition there is also challenge for long established institutions, such as local government, to respond to this agenda and to ensure they can relate more effectively to the places where people are optimistic such as within the family unit, whatever size or shape it now comes in. That also means they have to make themselves more accommodating to the places that people are optimistic so they can engage within that space.

Institutions, in whatever form they come and new or old are the arguably finest piece of (social) technology we have created. The Saturn 5 may have put men on the moon, but it was the institutions of the state and their agencies and contractors that put that immense machine together, and educated and trained the men for that mission. Institutions or whatever age encourage collaborative and collective action so as Matthew Taylor has stated the more we strengthen them through peoples involvement in them the more likely we are to rebuild trust and social optimism.