Government by Scratch Card

Instant gratification.

It has crept up upon us, though we have no excuse for not noticing because its effects are visible across our whole society. And its easy to see why it has gotten such a hold. On the one hand human nature is not very good at resisting the lure of instant gratification. We are hooked on it. And alongside that, there are so many areas of life where high speed instant results can be beneficial. The Internet is a good example. Some of the things it makes possible to happen quickly are clearly helpful. Others decidedly the opposite. Speed in some things can be good, but it does not follow that instant gratification is actually good in everything.

Yet that is the assumption which sways public feeling, is it not? That may not matter much when we are thinking of ordering goods online or pulling in to a specialist place to have new tyres fitted, expecting them to be available on demand, to be paid for by instant credit transfer. But when the same cast of mind invades the area of credit itself, allowing us to have things we decide we 'want', at once, and regardless of the consequences for our future debt, then something more sinister is at work. When the same cast of mind starts to invade politics and demand instant results, something disastrous is on the way.

Our very system of democracy depends on time, in a way we have forgotten. We elect people to make decisions on our behalf, and trust them to get on with the job. Whether we like the way they go about it or not, we do it knowing that their period of office is actually limited, so there will come a time when, if we have liked what they did, we may choose to elect them again, if we didn't , we will be free to discard them. The system doesn't work if we constantly want to interfere. I do not mean that government should ignore public opinion, or seek to be responsive to it... but there is a difference between being responsive to opinion as it was known in the past, and an expectation that government should somehow be able to respond to the sort of constant battering by which today's media expose them incessantly to expectations of instant gratification.

No one can actually govern under those sort of conditions. No one, that is, except the kind of politicians whose first desire might be to remove the democratic rights we take so easily for granted. We have no right to expect from government what we desire from Lottery scratch cards. If we go on trying to behave as if we have, the cost to us all will be much more than ther price of a lottery ticket.