A summary of the speech delivered by Richard Eckersley – Fellow, National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University, to the Communities in Control conference 2004.
Shifting how we think about individualism, world views and democracy are among the keys to "changing our situation", according to Richard Eckersley – Fellow, National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University.
Mr Eckersley's address to the Communities in Control conference concentrated not so much on the internal dynamics and properties of communities, but those external influences that shape what happens in communities – issues to do with world views, cultures, values and, as he put it, "the things that mess around with our heads".
Drawing on evidence teased out through a number of Australian studies and polls, Mr Eckersley asserted that Australians, by a margin of two-to-one, now felt the quality of life was getting worse rather than better. This was, as Mr Eckersley said, "despite the fact that over this period the economic indicators are very good".
He said recent studies had shown many Australians were concerned over too much greed and consumerism, the breakdown of community life, too much pressure on families, falling living standards, employers demanding too much, having less time for family and friends and not enough caring for the community – all this despite people thinking we have more money now to buy things.
Mr Eckersley said studies had shown these feelings had seen Australians turn their backs on "big international and national issues" to focus on "family, home and their children". He also argued that individualism – putting the individual self at the centre of a framework of values, norms and beliefs – is delivering a "double whammy to our wellbeing" in the sense it reduces social support and personal control.
Mr Eckersley also made a couple of points about values – that they are essentially abstract principals to guide our lives that don't necessarily highly prescribe or proscribe behaviour; and, because they are abstract, that they are generic and they are flexible and they're internalised, they are a much better way for providing rules for our lives than highly specified, detailed laws and regulations.
"Likewise if you look at what the sages have said about happiness over the centuries a number of important themes emerge. One is that happiness is not a goal but a consequence, a result of how we live our lives; it's not found by focusing narrowly on our own personal desires but by bringing others into the equation of our concerns and goals as well. It comes from balancing wants and needs, in other words being content with what we have," he said.
He asserted that these factors were having a noticeable effect on society – with studies indicating higher rates of major depression in this generation (Generation Y) than previous ones, and that Generation Y is also experiencing an "increased experience of malaise". According to Mr Eckersley, these factors meant there was less chance of people participating in the community.
He also criticised the view of Australian governments – both present and past - that "economic growth is paramount".
"Materialism and individualism are deeply embedded in this view of progress as a pipeline. In other words you pump more wealth and more wellbeing or welfare flows out the other. According to that view of the world economic growth is … fundamental. Because not only does it increase our personal choices, our ability to consume what we want and so on, it creates the wealth to reach social and environmental goals as they both indicated," he said.
"It's really a quite outdated view of the world and we really need to move away from this industrial metaphor of progress as a pipeline to instead replace the world view with one around the notion of sustainable development."
However, despite these problems, Mr Eckersley said there are indications of positive changes – agreeing with Hugh Mackay that the upside of this disengagement that he described was that "people are using this retreat time to explore the kind of moral and ethical basis of their life in order to try and eliminate this sense of unease about the gap between the values they espouse and the lives they lead".
In summing up, Mr Eckersley described our present culture as one that celebrates a self-centred, competitive individualism and a world view framed around material progress - something which had to change: "What we need to see … is an altruistic or co-operative individualism framed around notions of sustainable development which is reflected in a deep democracy and by deep democracy I mean a form of citizenship that I reflected in the whole way we live our entire life not just something we do once every four years when we vote. That obviously will deliver communities that are really in charge or control of their destiny and improved wellbeing," he said.