Humanising Safety and Embracing Real Risk
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 […]
