The Palestine Dilemma

On 7 October 2023, Hamas terrorists emerged from Gaza to commit an horrendous atrocity against Israeli civilians. This deadly incursion has been well documented so I won’t elaborate on the gruesome details. Inevitably Israel responded with deadly force in order to deter further aggression and to rescue the civilian hostages that Hamas had kidnapped during […]

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The Downside of a University Education

At the age of eighteen, I left my family home in Charters Towers to start an engineering degree at James Cook University (JCU) in Townsville. In those days it was quite an extraordinary thing to do! In my high school years I can only remember two students in the cohort that I knew ahead of […]

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The Perfidy of God

Well, after this essay my soul is likely to be sentenced to eternal damnation in Hell, but I can’t but help share with you some of my reservations about conventional religious beliefs. Traditional monotheistic religions have been largely constructed by those who have claimed to have had particular, personal access to God. In ancient times […]

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The Manufacturing of Muhammad

Some years ago I wrote an essay which I titled The Most Famous Man who never Lived which critiqued the mythology that had been created to support the notion that an extraordinary man, who purported to be the Son of God lived on this earth some two millennia ago who held the keys to eternal […]

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The Human Dilemma


I celebrate myself, and I sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you. Walt Whitman, (American poet and humanist.)   In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe. David Bohm, […]

December 31, 2017

In The Beginning


The Universe is both mysterious and awesome (and I use “awesome” with its classical meaning and not in the debased way it is used colloquially today). As we have seen in past essays humankind has two principal instruments with which it attempts to fathom the Universe, viz. Logos which relies on our faculty of reason, […]

December 16, 2017

Lessons from High School and University


When I was a teenager in a State High School in a regional town, I only knew one person in the classes that preceded mine that had gone to University. I knew quite a few who had gone to be trained as teachers at Teachers Training College. In those days Universities did not train teachers. […]

December 1, 2017

Why Evolution Has Made It Difficult for Us to Wait for Our Marshmallows


In my last essay I tried to make the case that delaying gratification was essentially good for us. Foregoing an immediate pleasure helped build our moral fibre, improving our resilience and ultimately our satisfaction with life. [Psychologists call our ability to delay gratification in this way our intertemporal utility function. I have often wondered whether […]

November 18, 2017

Waiting for Our Marshmallows


I seldom watch TV, but whenever I have recently, it seems I get bombarded with ads cajoling me to take out short term loans. The ads usually portray someone, seemingly not very well-off, who just must have something (appliance, laptop, building renovation or repair) immediately. No doubt the targeted customers have little economic literacy and […]

November 4, 2017

Why Do People Come to Work?


The title of this essay provides a useful question for leaders to ask. Knowing what employees want out of work encourages leaders to either help employees be fulfilled or filter out those employees whose expectations are unrealistic or are counter to the ambitions of the organisation. Let us start with the assumption that all human […]

October 14, 2017

The Dangers of Appeasing the Victims


We know from our studies of human beings that behaviour is fashioned by the consequences that follow from the behaviour. If the consequences are negative we are less likely to repeat the behaviour but if the consequences are positive the behaviour is reinforced and more likely to be repeated. In their great little book Declare Yourself: […]

October 7, 2017

Coming to Grips with that Voice in Our Heads


Understanding the nature of our humanity is a useful step in securing our sense of well-being. As we have seen on many occasions before, the defining characteristic of our humanity is our consciousness. Our consciousness not only makes us aware but aware of our awareness. It creates for us a “theatre of mind” which gives […]

September 30, 2017

The Resurgence of Tribes


Evolutionary processes have always created a tension between the welfare of the individual and the welfare of the tribe. To be a dominant individual in the tribe is to advance your welfare and that of your progeny and is no doubt a great advantage. But if your tribe is of little significance even being a […]

September 23, 2017

Living with Our History


What a messy business history seems to have become. History is such a subjective study that it is amenable to the self-serving interpretation of many stakeholders. We have had recent news reports of some disgruntled people wanting to defile the statue of Captain Cook in Hyde Park in Sydney who claim Cook is a symbolic […]

September 16, 2017