That aspect of the modern crisis which is bemoaned as a “wave of materialism’ is related to what is called the “crisis of authority.” If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer “leading” but only “dominant,” exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from […]
…fraught with moral peril Read More »
In yesterday’s post, I was concerned about both the abuse of power, and the effectiveness of confessional use of language. The desire to compel people to put into words (generally the words of power in the facilitator’s culture and/or ideology) learning is problematic to say the least. And the excuse of no one is compelled to
A word or two about words … (2/2) Read More »
In some ways this post is a follow up to a point I made yesterday about the dangers of creating a coat of rhinestones on something rotten at the heart and by way or warning it is polemical in nature. I want to talk about the role of words and I am returning to an
A word or two about words … Read More »
Having All Fools Day as your birthday means that you rapidly become hyper-cautious until midday or simply avoid communication. The British have a long tradition of this with the famous BBC Panorama’s 1957 Spaghetti Harvest hoax. Then there was the Guardian’s 1977 special travel supplement on the island of San Serif is one I remember
I grew up in and around the hills of North Wales, walking most weekends when were were not dinghy sailing. Rather than a birthday party when I was young I managed to persuade my parents to book a caravan in Snowdonia and took a couple of friends. The mountains are, to use the language of
I will lift up my eyes … Read More »
I first used the illustration to the left last November when I was updating the whole Flexuous Curves Framework (FCF). I don’t intend to repeat the material of that earlier post or to be completely consistent with it, but I recommend a quick skim before proceeding. This used to be known as the Apex Predator
In recent times I’ve been engaged in a series of interesting exchanges with Dr Mike Jackson OBE, hereinafter referred to as Mike. I have a visiting chair at Hull University where he is Emeritus Professor and as well as a fair number of mutual friends including Yasmin Merali and Gerald Midgley. I have been provisionally
Naturalising narrated Read More »
Picking up right where we left things, let’s dive straight into more of the patterns. It is a commonly-accepted stereotype that those of us with access to social media distractions spent most of the pandemic doomscrolling. There might be an element of truth to that (I know that I downloaded two new social media platforms
Looking back at the Acorn Study; Part 8.2: And then COVID happened Read More »
The Acorn Study began in the autumn of 2019. As often happens, most stories were collected in its early days in the flurry of sharing that followed its release. As the initial flood stopped, stories kept coming in, slowly but steadily, until the collection was closed down at the end of 2020. In between those
Looking back at the Acorn Study; Part 8.1: And then COVID happened Read More »
In 2018, Jem Bendell, a sustainability leadership professor, wrote a paper that took the possibility of near-term societal collapse due to climate change extremely seriously (you can read the whole thing here). I would like to spend a little bit of time on this paper because it was the theoretical basis for one of the multiple-choice
Looking back at the Acorn Study; Part 7: Hope, loss, and sacrifice Read More »
