THE ASPIRATION-ACTUALITY GAP

The perpetual round of 'jobs promises' is the most telling example of the aspiration-actuality gap. The manner of asserting that public projects will go forward 'soon' is another. The often heard note that 'an application will be made' indicates an aspiration, with no concrete expectation of becoming actual.

A query on this gap leads to the charge of cynicism, of lacking positivity, even. An attempt to pin down targets and time-tables is rebuffed as whingeing and unsupportive.

Closing the aspiration-actuality gap is desirable. Efforts to achieve such closing flounder on spin and political survival. The gap is in sharp focus in a pre-election season, when the tradition of making promises exaggerates the aspiration side of the gap, thus greatly distancing itself from the farther shore of actuality. Some bridging, even closing, may be achieved by public pressure in the pre-election season. However, it is not unusual for the gap to return, post-voting, to the preset, default position of 'wide'.

The citizen wonders what it means when another says 'they're going to sort it out' in reference to train services or 'they're bringing 50 new jobs' without any detail of where and when and on what terms. 

The gap is a daily occurrence. Aspiration drives everything. There is always a promise. It is a form of degraded hope. It is not false in the sense of being a lie. It is worse than that. It is a confusion and a blind, a sedative and an anti-dote to righteous anger. It is the way things are.

And citizens who timorously question this are labelled criers, fellow travellers of terrorists, cranks and pessimists.

Ulysses tells Agamemnon he recognises the man coming towards them.

'Tis he, I ken the manner of his gait;

He rises on the toe: that spirit of his

In aspiration lifts him from the earth.

The spirit in aspiration lends a false lift that presages a fall. It is a breath intake, no more that wind, a thin zephyr from the palaces on far away hills that have no intention of delivering a meaningful draught of air, simply wheezing enough to keep the heart-strings fluttering.

It will not blow you away.

How did those long shut out of modern medicine come to have the same aspirations – to be cared for when sick, to be protected from financial ruin – dismissed as unsustainable?

Troilus and Cressida; William Shakespeare; stage-play; IV, 5; London; 1601

Paul Farmer; essay; London Review of Books; February 2015, London

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n03/paul-farmer/who-lives-and-who-dies

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