Humanising Safety and Embracing Real Risk
The Social Politics of Safety All organizing is social and political and seeks to create order (equivocality) through language, symbols and discourse. How we organize through systems economically and historically creates the politics of governance. One cannot talk about governance without understanding that association, order, systems and language are ethico-political. All social organizing is … [Continue reading...] about The Social Politics of Safety
Natural Born Learners and 10 Essentials to Human Learning The lack of critical thinking in the safety industry allows nonsense like the Bradley Curve, matrices and pyramids to thrive. All of the assumptions of these models are seriously flawed, none more so than the Bradley Curve . The Bradley Curve assumes that humans have a ‘natural instinct’ to harm. Of course, this is contradicted by all the e … [Continue reading...] about Natural Born Learners
Zero Vision but Purchase Insurance One of the realities of maturity in fallibility is understanding finiteness, vulnerability and risk. The profession of infallibility is a sign of a mental health problem. It’s because we don’t talk non-sense to ourselves that we purchase insurance. It’s because we know human life is random and not in our control that it is sense-able to buy insurance. It is simp … [Continue reading...] about Zero Vision but Purchase Insurance
Safety’s Garden of Eden Complex One of the enduring myths of the risk and safety industry is the naive belief in paradise. Paradise is that mythical place where no-ne will be harmed. We see this nonsense yearning for utopia demonstrated in the Bradley Curve and the ideological nonsense of zero harm. The yearning for a place of no harm (u-topia mean ‘no place’) is known as the Garden of Eden Effec … [Continue reading...] about Safety’s Garden of Eden Complex
The Keystone Science by Bernard Corden Since the early 1970s the holy trinity of democracy with its fundamental tenets of liberty, equality and fraternity has been progressively eroded and usurped by a new world order with a repressive focus on deregulation, diminution and privatisation. In more recent years this emasculation has been expedited via big data, artificial intelligence, machine … [Continue reading...] about The Keystone Science
How Groupthink Works In light of the binary discourse that is floating about my last blog, Like A Collective Brain Snap, this may serve as a follow up. People often scratch their heads wondering why people do things and in exasperation and dismissal come up with the traditional stupidity/idiot causation scenario. This kind of binary […]
Until Nothing Changes in Safety The industry of safety becomes more and more fixed in its current trajectory through its linguistic practices, semiotic meanings and social reproduction. What does this mean? Humans are the sum of their social relationships and the language that is used to communicate identity. Safety articulates itself through a discourse of […]
The Paradox of Positivism for Safety Most people in safety would be unaware that the common philosophy driving the safety worldview is known as Positivism. You can get some background on positivism here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism. Positivism privileges information interpreted through reason and logic and is the most common worldview in the Discipline of General Science. Positivism […]
safeTALK Suicide Alertness Program What do you say when you feel someone may be having thoughts of suicide? If you ask a person about suicide does this increase the chance that they may think about it, even if they weren’t in the first place? If a person is thinking of suicide, do you have to […]
Sticks and Stones and the Nonsense of Zero Harm When we were kids we were taught the rhyme ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticks_and_Stones ). This mantra is such a silly childish semiotic that totally ignores the nature of how language affects the mind. The truth is, […]
Making the World fit the Safety Worldview One of the drivers of the work of Martin Heidegger was his reaction to the determinist and reductionist view of Rene Descartes . The Cartesian worldview understands the world in an atomistic way, reducing certainty down to first causes. This is the view that dominates the archetype of […]
