Susie Orbach’s book Towards Emotional Literacy is ‘a conversation with those interested in the relationship between emotional issues and public and private life’. Some musings on public life are: Emotions and Political Literacy, Hysteria Politics, When Truth is Not Enough and Dependency Culture. At budget time she looks at political bullying and its malaise effects, especially dullness in citizen thinking. What are the emotional costs of fiscal policies given our emotional relationship to money? she asks. How do we challenge the received ideas about growth? This was the at the heart of the Commissioner for Sustainability Kate Auty’s annual oration ‘Be Green, Stay Black’, highlighting a ‘value-seeking imagination’. It touched the emotion of inspiration in change, the excitement of economic and human development that includes green buildings and practices, well run enterprises, and elimination of unnecessary waste. Emotions in public life are bound to come to the fore with the introduction of the carbon price. Susie Orbach and Kate Auty both look at minimising the emotional and economic costs of this kind of change.
Emotions in public life. The cost of change
