The best way to not engage in Transdisciplinarity and to maintain one’s philosophical cocoon, and to seek comfort of like-for-like, and emotively reject what one doesn’t understand. This is common in risk and safety. This is because the safety industry is dominated by Deontology and compliance, so that any criticism of safety is defined as anti-safety. In this way, safety doesn’t have to engage with what it doesn’t know, it can keep everything ‘safe’ in what it knows. In this way, you either join the safety club, speak the safety club slogans or get branded as some kind of safety pariah. How safe!

This disposition is a very convenient Colonial idea that was responsible for the genocide of millions in the East, Africa and Australia in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. This Eurocentric-Western approach to philosophy remains and dominates thinking in risk and safety (https://safetyrisk.net/the-philosophies-that-guide-safety/ ). Such a philosophy enables a sense of superiority, order, linear reality and the ideology of Scientism. Much of this attitude is maintained by the myths of Safety embodied in its semiotics. Eg. the curves, swiss-cheese, dominoes, pyramids and Bow-tie etc are all premised on the logic of Western philosophy.

There is however another view, whether this emerges out of Quantum Mechanics, Africa (eg. Lansana Keita), First Nations Peoples or Eastern philosophies. In these philosophies, messiness, chaos, ambiguity and wickedity is accepted. In such views, the idea that the universe is linear, ordered and controllable is Western myth.

When we examine dominant European philosophies in the 18^th and 19^th centuries we see how they enabled Colonial dominance and power. Philosophers like Hume, Kant and Hegel were profoundly racist. Such philosophies in time made reason their new god (eg. do the right thing) and relegated metaphysics to the trash basket of these foreign cultures. This enabled the most profound exploitation and dehumanisation of persons in other lands, spurred on by the Protestant Work Ethic.

However, there are at least 5 billion people who don’t see the world this way.

In Eastern philosophies, the world doesn’t exist to be exploited and metaphysics is enmeshed in cultural and physical existence. In Eastern philosophies rationalism is not god, nor is the philosophy of Empiricism/Scientism a way of thinking. These are all a significant challenge for an industry that continues to hold a Euro-Centric Western notion of order and control.

The more Safety continues to keep to its club, close its doors to Transdisciplinarity and demonise what it doesn’t understand, it will not change nor learn. This idea that the safety highway is the only road. ignores the wisdom of the ‘otherness’ it rejects.

If you are interested in learning about philosophy and risk then you can register for the free workshops in May with Prof Long (https://safetyrisk.net/philosophy-for-risk-and-safety-free-workshops/ ). Beginners welcome but beware, it won’t be a place of comfort.