‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers’ thus spake Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire. The phrase carries certain connotations within the play, none of them good and the given irony that it is those who are not strangers but family who are her undoing, but let us consider the validity of the phrase.
We lead our lives within bubbles. The majority of people with whom we interact are well known to us by sight, name or personally. In one day one may talk to ten, for example, people whom they know and will report it thusly, ‘today I spoke to ten people’. However, if we expand the bubble, or, as we shall call it, frame, we see that one has not spoken to ten people, rather one may have spoken to 15, or 20, of even 100 people. But who?
We live in a service culture where everyone seems to work in a manner to serve others. I don’t mean service as in waiters or taxi drivers, I mean service in the wider sense, both direct and indirect. What do I mean by that? Well, Martha, I mean that someone hitting a nail on the other side of the world can effect/affect what happens on this side of the world (see what I did there?). Someone may be building a train or sealing an envelope (sending an email) which affects my daily living and e/affects my being. The amount of complexity which goes into ‘just having a banana’ is beyond our comprehension for one must a) plant the tree, b) water the tree … h) check the fruit…y)pick the fruit…aa) put it in a van, bb) drive it to the docks/airport and so on and so forth until the x number of x’s. Yes, everyone is (hopefully) working for pay and given how the ‘developed’ world is all capitalist (it is) it is what one needs to do to survive (in many cases barely survive). However, all systems are built upon one thing, and that is people. I am well aware that if Marx or a Marxist et al went up to a ‘worker’ and said ‘brother, we are all in it together’ (ahem) they would receive either a resounding punch or violent indifference simply because this is theory and not reality, but when I say ‘people’ I mean flesh and blood. Not an ideology or class or any of that other nonsense people call important but actual people for all systems depend upon human behaviour. It is all well and good saying ‘here is my system’ but unless one asks, ‘ok, here is the system (theory) how is it used? (practice)’ one cannot get a clear understanding of how the system actually works and thusly one may not understand that the smallest thing can effect/affect the smallest thing, even on a sub-atomic level, which in turn can affect the overall project.
There are many theories as to what makes a worker/ a work good and in spite of every theory, it seems clear that the key to success is the people using the system as the best work is done by people who are happy (beware the apathy of contentedness) for when people are happy they work harder and their mood is better and, in many cases, without any problems to blame the world for, they are kinder, thusly, I think it is fair to say that, for the success of our daily lives, we all depend upon the kindness of strangers.
‘till next time
thegreaterfool2016 