ADRIAN GORE: SA is the most irrationally pessimistic country in the world
Looking at the full picture, not just the negative aspect, evokes both an awareness of risk and the optimism we need to solve SA’s problems
Dear Tony, I am writing in response to your open letter, "Challenge to Adrian Gore", in the FM of November 22. To clarify, the issues you raise in your letter formed the foundation of my argument. My call to arms at the Discovery Leadership Summit was not in spite of our problems as a country — like service delivery, which you rightly mention — but rather because of them. In addition, the plea to focus on positive signals was not to the exclusion of negative signals, which would be naive, but to focus on positive signals as well as the negative ones. Allow me to explain. Global research shows that we universally suffer from "declinism" — the belief that our country and public life are on an irreversible downhill trajectory and that the future will undoubtedly be worse than the past and present (see Ipsos Mori’s "Perils of Perception" global study).
The same research shows that we believe this in spite of facts to the contrary, driven largely by our stubborn ignorance about the...
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