Rehumanize ourselves: what is the threshold of materiality for society?

I was at city hall this morning with the Deputy Mayor for Crime and Policing and a number of other MAT CEOs and Chairs to discuss knife crime. The event was in part to discuss issues and in part to raise awareness of the Mayor's 'London Needs You Alive" initiative for schools.

I may have mused in this blog before about Hannah Arendt's theories on the dehumanising effects of bureaucracy which are a precursor to totalitarianism. But it wasn't until this morning that I made the connection with the rise of the internet.

Freud said, "Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness". Arendt in the 'Human Condition', took issue with Karl Marx over the difference between 'labour' and 'work' and explored the impact of automation removing the sense of purpose from work. Both were addressing the very essence of what it is to be 'human'.

The difficulty when applying complex philosophical ideas to the messy construct of reality is that they often don't fit.

People want to matter. But it is increasingly clear that many, indeed perhaps most, feel that they don't. This sense of disenfranchisement is behind Brexit, Trump and the rise in knife crime. If you feel that you don't matter, you are going to struggle to create an identity.

I have railed in these pages before about the depressing and negative impact of bureaucracy upon people and society. As Arendt explains if you reduce a person to a statistic, it is much easier to do terrible things to them.

But the parallel dehumanising process is our move via our devices into alternative unreal spaces that are very different from the alternative realities of books and films. New spaces in which we can kill and violate others under the pretext that trolling, hate-speech and violent gaming are somehow only metaphorical they do not have very real consequences. In doing this we normalise the abnormal.

It is therefore easy to see how an inner-city minority ethnic youth or indeed your child may be so convinced of their own worthlessness that they cannot be expected to value the lives of others.

I have said for years that communities are built at the gates of primary schools. But we cannot leave Primary headteachers to carry this burden alone. We need to show them that their children, staff and schools matter to us. As how else will they create this construct in our young people? This is as important if not more important than teaching children how to read and write. Because if children do not feel safe or valued they will learn very little.

As we head into the accounting year end for academies, conversations will be held with auditors about the 'threshold of materiality'. How can we as a society have a broader conversation with those people who are completely convinced that they don't matter?

If you do anything today, make someone else believe they matter to you and to others.

P.S. Apologies to the Police for the mangling of their song title.