"Hey Johnnie, what are you selling against?"

"Whaddaya got?"

Down went most things. Which is only fitting really, because we live in an age with absolutely no intellectual foundations, and while most people don't care to notice, once those go, everything else follows.

Look around you and see that our beliefs in how we should manage everything, from ourselves as individuals, to our family relations, to our local communities, to our political economy, to our borders, to our highest international architecture is all in flux. What guiding principles are we living by now individually and collectively? What internally-consistent, morally-justified, popularly-supported philosophy underpins how we should do things? What "-ism" are we looking to as a template that ticks all three of those boxes? We don't have one. Hence, in an age of *very* big developments, we are ironically bereft of any matching big ideas. Can you name a genuine public intellectual who has original thought, rather than repeating older wisdom? Or a musician or band who will blaze a trail for the ages? Or an author, or even a recent book? Or a play-write? Or a film director? Or an artist?