Birth of an Idea

About ten years ago, I fought a court case against a former client who owed me a life-changing amount of money. Two years later, the side-effects of a medicine nearly killed my wife and left her severely disabled. It is still bizarre to think of this gentle person being ‘removed’ from society by the negligence of a drug company.

Rather than dwell on these incidents, I determined to make something positive of them and started writing. About ethics. Not as an idea, but how it translates into real decisions that affect every aspect of our lives.

Gradually it became crystal clear: we’re all in this together. We feel it in every community that we belong to, whether it’s a village, sports team or workplace. Failure to honour this bond results in tension, unhappiness, poor communication and inefficiency. Organizations that deny or ignore this truth are destined to fail, because they neglect the one thing on which they depend: interdependent human beings. Us.

By 2015 it was already obvious that democratically elected leaders, to whom we look for wise decisions, were struggling to fulfil their contract to serve the people.

More writing followed, and the first fruit of this is ‘espresso’, which examines the world through the prism of secular ethics applied in five domains: our relationship to ourself (‘Self’), one-to-another (our ‘Culture’), one-to-many (both ‘Work’ and ‘Society’), and many-to-many (‘Politics’).

I believe that if we want to live as a healthy, contented people on a thriving planet, we’re going to have to meet the call, both individually and collectively, of caring for one and all. The global aftershocks of 2008, the damage wrought by our response to CoViD, and climate change make that challenge even more urgent.