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I was happy to read that the UN World Happiness Report has been released. I was not so happy to see that Australia was ranked 10th! I was not happy that Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden and Canada were happier than Australia, but a I was a little more happy to know Australia is well ahead of the USA (17th) and the UK (22nd). Read more
People are full of fear. Everywhere a sense of fear sleeps under the hubris of western affluence, religious fundamentalism, and grinding poverty. This fear is not merely individual (like a fear of snakes) it is psycho-social, institutionalised into the very fabric of society. It is a national and international psychosis in the western world. Read more
There is indeed one thing the British got right in their several million terrace houses across Greater London built in the 1930s. They put the toilet in the right place – out the back where it belongs. Read more
As Vaclav Havel in The Power of the Powerless, (originally published in Czechoslovakia in October 1978) argued: power often stifles creativity and ideas, and generally it is only those on the margins that have the space, sometimes the eccentricity, to think radically. Read more
While the original focus of Paulo Friere’s educational philosophy in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, written some thirty-seven years ago, was the underclass within the two-thirds world, much of his approach is acutely relevant to what appears to be a new underclass in the affluent West in 2013. Read more