I’ve just been for a Shiatsu treatment. There’s nothing wrong with me, in fact the practitioner, Anne, told me I was very healthy which is always a good thing to hear. The reason for my going was a couple of dilemmas that I have been wrangling with and wanting a new perspective on them.

I got a new perspective, which is useful, but I also saw how this world of ours is changing. Giving a Shiatsu massage to someone is a service and the recipient is the beneficiary of that service. Here in England we are acutely aware of the post industrial society. This place is where the Industrial Revolution began and was also the first place to see it depart. 

It is one where few things are manufactured and where services are provided as the mainstay of the economy. The main service economy is the financial one and some people have made millions, even billions from dealing in derivatives. The boom is about to end, the sub prime lending crisis in the US will have a knock on effect throughout the world’s economy and those of us who’ve seen a few more summers have been here before. Life will go on, belts may be tightened but the reality of our lives will not change. The sun will rise and set, the procession of the seasons will continue, babies will be born and at the other end people will depart.

It made me realise that the industrial society is a thing of the past. The Chinese have picked up the baton, turning their country into an industrial wonderland in their pursuit of the riches enjoyed by the industrial barons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Great Britain and the United States. Even there the bubble has burst to some extent as the new promised land is Cambodia, devastated by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge and desperate to get back in the loop.

Unscrupulous Chinese industrialists have moved into Cambodia and set up factories there in order to beat the wage demands of Chinese workers (as if that were possible). Of course it is possible, but the way it happens will sadden you as you might imagine.

Country folk, unwise to the ways of the world are approached by Chinese businessmen (although I cannot really consider them as such) who offer to take their children off their hands for a few hundred dollars and provide them with work. The few hundred dollars represents the equivalent of a lottery win to the Cambodian villagers and country people. The children then become slave labour and are trained up and then physically chained to the machines in the factory. They receive no pay, no education, no healthcare and in effect cease to exist as human beings, just as the jews in the Nazi concentration camps they become non people, they’ve fallen through the net. As long as Cambodia is in turmoil - remember its administrators, academics, management classes and educators were all exterminated by Pol Pot’s regime - that country lost an entire generation of people whose experience can never be called upon,  the soil is fertile for these kinds of abhorrent schemes to spring up.

There is a deviant strain in the human race motivated by greed that seems capable of immunising itself from responsibility. All you can do is know it, ensure that your own integrity remains impeccable and count your blessings that you are not one of those children. This is where the United Nations should really earn its corn and demonstrate that it is more than just a gravy train.

So it seems to me that the way forward is to provide good services to one another, to be oneself above reproach and be an exemplar of what is good in the human race and what is progressive. It can be no co-incidence that the moment a society elevates to a certain level it is quite happy to hand over the industrial stuff to someone else. The idiom is ‘market forces’, ’supply and demand’, and ‘distribution of labour’, the reality is that people simply do not want to spend their lives engaged with never ending mind numbing tasks. As technology advances the need for human labour will be satisfied and replaced by ever more refined automated systems and we will be left with the issue of how to occupy ourselves efficiently.

The hedonists will rush to the bars, drug dealers and pick up joints but there is only limited appeal in such earthly delights. I’m no puritan, but there has to be something with greater depth and integrity to play for. The prize has to be more resonant than teenage kicks.