Roadmap to Paradise
Corey White has some bright ideas
What was the idea behind this show?
One thing that’s bothered me about a lot of political commentary is how people are happy to just critique without ever offering any solutions and I think there’s something dispiriting and depressing in always talking about the negatives on how things are messed up or not working properly without offering real concrete solutions.
I’m big on trying to provide optimism and hope for people. So we picked these 10 issues, which I believe are pretty fundamental power problems in liberal Western democracies.
How did you decide what you were going to cover?
It’s 10 completely separate issues. I guess the criteria I was using when I selected those issues is to think of something that really affects and determines and shapes a large part of our society and creates problems, creates a lot of happiness or unhappiness.
And so domestic violence is a big one, capitalism, environmentalism, terrorism, foster care, drugs and gambling.
There are also some really cool scenes and very funny stuff that happens in episodes and sometimes I picked an issue because I could see that it would make an amazing scene. It is a comedy show and I think it’s exciting and I think people are going to enjoy it.
You’ve clearly done your research on all of these topics, when did you start?
I think my whole life I’ve been interested in the problem of how society can go wrong, having grown up in foster care and I guess interacting with a lot of these issues in some way – drugs and all kind of things.
It’s just ingrained in me to try to get to the heart of things and I’ve always been interested in economics and politics and social issues and philosophy, and I guess I’ve always tried to read widely and consume a lot of media about all these big human problems.
Are you hopeful that some of these solutions might actually be implemented in some way?
Certainly. With some of the issues there’s a lot of wrongheaded thinking.
But I think more than these solutions I’m hoping people begin to think in this way and try to either accept that some of the problems in the world that we try to solve will never go away and to just content themselves with minimisation of harm, and then on other topics to seek really radical solutions.
Corey White’s Roadmap to Paradise, Wednesday, 10.05pm on ABC and ABC iview