Book Launch – Free Download
“Zero, The Great Safety Delusion”
This book comes just in time for the Zero Conference of Global Safety in November to be held in Sydney.
You can get your free download HERE>>>>>
Zero remains the greatest plague on the Safety industry. It dominates everything but must not be spoken about or uttered in relation to Ethics, Moral Philosophy or Brutalism. The semiotic, ideology and mantra of Zero continues to stand as nonsense for an industry that has no idea what to do about fallibility.
This book documents the way Zero has evolved in the last 20 years to become the behemoth, monster and global safety mantra invoked and sustained after 2017.
This is the twelfth book offered for free by Dr Long. You can download all his other books here: https://www.humandymensions.com/shop/
The next book due out in early 2024 is on Semiotics and Risk, The Great Silence of Safety.
Zero remains the greatest threat to safety and a balanced approach to tackling risk.
This is a book about the toxicity of zero ideology and follows previous publications: The Love of Zero, Human Fallibility and Risk and, Fallibility and Risk, Living With Uncertainty.
This book explores the ideology of zero as it continues to morph into a great monster and burden for the risk and safety industry. The book takes a Semiotic and Poetic exploration of the many ways zero is used in the safety industry. It uses a concept map to guide thinking and explores the many ways that zero is used and abused as an instrument of power in organisations.
The concept map follows zero identified as: an Ideology, Linguistic construct, Psychological dynamic, Numeric, Unconscious force, Political tool, Ethical negatives and Religious Archetype.
In its very short history zero has morphed from just a target and goal to all of these things listed above. As organisations set their identity to zero things began to change. Zero began to become much more than just a number, this is because it carries an unconscious force embedded in its Archetypical power.
Over the 30 years of its use in Safety and never achieving it, has now become ‘a journey to zero’, ‘toward zero, ‘beyond zero’ and a host of meaningless gobbledygook driven by this phenomenon, that is both nothing and infinity.
In 2017 Zero was made the mantra for the global safety industry and from here it just grew in its power, framing, priming and anchoring to whatever Safety wanted it to be. Then in no time Zero became a shibboleth of religious-like identity and benchmark of club membership. If one didn’t believe in zero, then one must be anti-safety.
In 2021 the global safety industry brought out a video on Zero called ‘In the Blink of an Eye’, the ‘Spirit of Zero’ and this was a clear move into ideological territory. The video is nothing less than a religious apocalyptic seeking miracles and the impossible. Zero moved from being just a goal to becoming an all-commanding ideology for an industry that moved into ‘saving lives’ and religious discourse, all promoted by engineers, behaviourists and safety organisations with no idea of Religion.
The dynamic of Zero as a persona now has astounding command over an industry that identifies its purpose as counting injury rates, controlling hazards and policing regulation. This is the by-product of setting identity in numerics and then using the absence of a numeric as a definition of safety. Then once anchored to Zero, all kinds of delusions result, disconnected from anything to do with social connectedness, tackling risk and enabling the development of persons.
Once anchored to Zero as Safety it then becomes nearly impossible to jettison the ideology and any hope of tackling risk in a humanising way. Zero is absolute and rules absolutely.
The book finishes by offering an escape from Zero to a Methodology and Method in SPoR, that enables a realistic, positive, constructive and practical approach to tackling risk.
Joseph D Zinobile says
Kind of a harsh treatment of Zeroism, but interesting statements there.
I’ve always explained that Zeroism (zero injuries, or illnesses, or incidents, whatever) is a noble philosophy, but not qualified to be a “goal” since it’s unrealistic, and so I pretty much ignored like I do most philosophies.
I wasn’t aware of these alleged counter-productive consequences of Zeroism adherents’ activities … I’ll check it out. Thanks for the free book.
Rob Long says
Joseph, glad to see you recognize it as a philosophy. However, not noble and very unethical.
The trouble is the industry is in complete ignorance about the operation of semiotics in the unconscious, and doesn’t want to know. Marketers know, advertisers know and psychologists know how ideologies, philosophies, methodologies, semiotics and images influence and shape decision making, just not amateur safety.
The book is free of course, I don’t make any money out of any of this, because the message is so important. and so, there is no motivation here except the desperate need for education for a sector that is profoundly mis-educated.
Of course, the foundational question should be very simple: how can one expect perfection from a fallible person in a fallible world operating in fallible systems? Such expectations can only create brutalism and un-ethical conduct.
Y.B.V. SATYA PRASAD says
How to download the E books?
Admin says
Click on either of the links or the image to be taken to the download page
Stuart Sharp says
Thank you for once again providing thought provoking and insightful reading material, for free as well. I look forward to get stuck into it, particularly to support my position when leadership ask “why don’t we have a zero harm policy”. To use an expression I think the youth still say, FML.
Admin says
FML – I just learned something