Ten years of planning the future. Three weeks—and counting—to put one afternoon on the record. Following Minna Hellström’s criticism on Ålands Radio, a little protokoll bingo opens onto a larger question about power, institutional comfort and what happens to criticism after everyone has been thanked for contributing. The paperwork has done its ten thousand steps. Power has not left its chair. What, precisely, is being sustained?
I may be the only person on Åland untroubled by the missing job advertisement. Why make strangers audition for an occupied chair? What interests me is the resources attached to it, the council assembled to bless it, and the difference between being allowed to do something and exercising good judgment. The recruitment theatre was cancelled. The coronation appears to have gone ahead.
The story behind the newspaper clippings: five short video clips about my writing, Åland’s government, UN-Habitat, and what happened when I expected to be credited.
Philosophy finds a place at the kitchen table, alongside somebody’s strongly held views about loading the dishwasher. It should feel quite at home. Most households are already conducting ongoing research into fairness, freedom and the limits of human knowledge, particularly concerning the whereabouts of the scissors. We manage to take these questions seriously without demanding that justice present itself in a measuring jug. Why, then, do we become so suspicious of abstract thought when the household gets larger? A small defence of ideas, before somebody clears them away to make room for something useful.
Micke Larsson welcomes discussion. Fredrika Fellman would like an answer. His latest interview and his summer talk raise a question about ambition, power and social sustainability: what changes when a leader’s account of himself meets somebody else’s experience? It is possible to leave Wimbledon without leaving the VIP section. Everyone can speak. But power must answer for what it does.
