Since 2008 when I first started writing these blogs we’ve had a series of epoch changing events that have suggested ways the world is trending.
We started with “greed” in 2008 when the banks jostling to be the biggest and best, playing out Tom Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe” story precipitated the Global Financial Crisis. When we saw the employees from Lehman Brothers trooping out disconsolately with their cardboard boxes as their bank crashed we thought “is this the end?”
No. It was the beginning of an intense and growing period of greed and avarice, with sports- washing and events like the Goodwood Festival now called the Qatar Goodwood Festival and the Saudis even planning to invest heavily in cricket.
In 2012 the best ever Olympics held in London convinced us we were kings of the world led by that puppet master, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. It was an astonishing moment of hubris.
By 2015 the migrant crisis began to become big news across the world (remember Donald Trump’s “wall”?) and with just under a million refugees entering Europe in just one year the scale of this crisis began to emerge. The conflict of emotions – self-protection and charitable fellowship continues today.