The human condition is unique, paradoxical and ‘wicked’.
If you want to understand fallibility, human mortality and human personhood then read some of the following as be a helpful start. If you want to condemn fallibility as some kind of ‘curse’ or negative projection, then just continue to preach mythology about what you don’t know.
- The Human Condition
- Becoming Human
- Human Being @ Risk
- Human fallibility: the ambiguity of errors for work and learning
- Morality for Humans
- Ritual and religion in the Making of Humanity
- What is it to be Human?
- Fallible Man
- Fallibility and Risk
One thing is for sure, none of these are on any reading list across the globe in safety.
Fallibility is connected to the mythology of ‘the fall’ but simply means to make mistakes as the result of imperfection. Making mistakes is fundamental to understanding human personhood and any suggestion that humans can be perfect is a sign of a mental health disorder (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-as-zero-the-perfect-event/ ).
More so, fallibility is a blessing. Without fallibility humans would never experience ‘the human life’ and ‘being’ human. Neither would we know what it is like to love, learn and live.
The opposite of fallibility is stasis (zero) – perfection. So, to be fallible is to know movement and move in being.
The foundation for fallibility is understanding embodiment and mythology. These modules were offered recently in SPoR in Canberra.
The idea of humans as being dis-embodied is Cartesian mythology and drives nonsense ideas such as ‘machine learning’ and ‘brain-centrism’. There is no evidence for any of these. Machines don’t ‘learn’ because they have no bodies, e-motions or ‘being’. The repetition of algorithms and data is not learning. The brain is neither a computer nor the centre for human judgment and decision making. Both myths foster the delusion of safety as zero (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/zero-the-great-safety-delusion/).
A little research into Damasio, Fuchs or Johnson will quickly dispose of these myths.
The real problem about fallibility is those who want to reject it and who would rather embrace Transhumanism. This is the quest for zero. The fear of harm, injury and death is the fear of fallibility. This is the trajectory of the zero cult.
The key to being effectively human is to embrace fallibility and all of its blessings including the eventual reality of death and dying. And, if you deny such an ending, you really do have a problem.
Dr Rob Long
Latest posts by Dr Rob Long (see all)
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Simon Cassin says
Hi Rob
If may add a reflection about your article. Around 5 years ago I came across a muti-disciplinary discussion known as the ‘Great rationality debate’. Are you aware of it?
The essence of the debate focuses on a possible contradiction between the common normative opinion that people should act according to a process of rational decision making and descriptive assertions about how people actually make decisions.
I believe that this debate has significant implications for the discussion of fallibility. (NB. Notwithstanding issues you have raised regarding arrationality).
If we assume that people carryout behaviours following a decision making process then the rationality of decision-making would seem to be fundamental to a full discussion of fallibility.
I have attempted to discuss the ‘Great rationality debate’ and its implications for concepts of human error and fallibility with some of the wise and wonderful experts in the H&S world. But unfortunately my attempts have been unanimously been ignored.
Cheers Rob
If you ever fancy a philosophical perspective of rationality it would be lovely to catch up again.
All the best
Rob Long says
Thanks Simon, the academic circus that believes its own myths, fosters blindness to the assumptions of Kahneman as well as the myth of scientific method. I have no interest in a methodology based on behavioural economics that remains closed to Transdisciplinary thinking, including metaphysics. There are other scholars also who deconstruct Kahneman as well that I have noted in my books.
Any discussion if fallibility, personhood or decision-making ought to also contemplate non-rational dimensions in embodied thinking. Kahneman and other mythology in science do not entertain matters outside of their defined reality, so simply wander in circles around their own assumptions looking for proofs that do not consider ideas our thinking outside of their club. Similarly those who debate them. However, it is a debate of like for like, not a debate that countenances Transdisciplinary thinking.
As for Safety, it’s still trying to work out whether hindsight and confirmation bias are real. Similarly, how many angels can dance on a pin head or how to make money out of lies and deceit.