It's all downhill - really!

The road to hell... No matter how experienced, old or how widely I read nothing prepares me for the person who will not accept simple explanations of intent. Experience, age and wisdom have however, taught me that it’s their issue and not mine. A simple action undertaken is misunderstood by a person and is taken to an almost surrealist complexity in attack as the simple explanation is denied while their cognitive fictions flourish. Brief rationalisations are followed by screeds of aggressive countermoralism on the perceived offence and other, suddenly considered relevant, factors. The way we behave is the indexicality (bound to the context in which it occurs) of our learning how to be, define, feel and act, in the world we have created together. It is interesting is when the pattern is repeated. We don’t have to look far to find reference that behaviour is learned by operant conditioning (Pavlov’s dogs), and that some benefit is found. Most interesting is figur...

Moral Hazard – strictly speaking is an economic term of one party getting involved in a risky event knowing it is protected against the risk the other party will wear. It’s such a juicy gorgeous term and I’m going to massage its meaning, because I can and it best describes where I dwell.  It is totally different from this other place where many claim to dwell. Moral high ground – All encompassing terms such as ‘environment’, ‘organic’, ‘third of NZ children live in poverty’, ‘holistic’... etc., all easily dispelled with a little rationality – but at one’s peril. Susan’s meaning of moral hazard – Taking the moral high ground knowing anyone (ie. Me) who dares to argue, against whichever moral high ground, will be labelled *peel & stick*, climate change denier, racist, Tory, selfish, heartless, greedy... Label away. I’ll stick to my beliefs. My favourite behavioural economists Thaler & Sunstein (Nudge 2009 p.62), extrapolate on Solomon Asch’s experiments tes...