There is the argument that ordinary people enjoy life. They enjoy ordinary things. But odd people find ordinary life painful. How much ordinariness is being inflicted by education and business on contemporary life is an important concern. To Know seems rooted in oddness. Especially Socratic knowledge. And does ordinariness in learning affect ‘good knowledge’? Especially if ‘good knowledge’ has lost its humanity.

How much does ‘speaking into’ the world as a ‘stakeholder’ effect change? The image of us as stakeholders with a voice is often undifferentiated. This podcast discusses this and other issues. Including the relationship between myth and reality, and the problems of privileging unquestioned rationalism.

The Grenfell tragedy reveals another possible horror and that is the absence of individual actors to bear, in a very modern moral sense, the culpability that our notions of ‘leadership’ require. We place great store on leaders as agents who have power to change our world, but when failure strikes it seems contemporary society is unable to idenfity the same power that we once placed so much hope in. Pic: Hannah Arendt