Welcome

Using science & reason to understand human nature & society.

“Humanity is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your life unravelling it, don’t say you’ve wasted your time.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Most of humanity’s problems, such as war, poverty, and climate change, are self-inflicted. Sustainable, long-term solutions can only be found by unravelling Dostoevsky’s mystery of humanity. But this can only be done through an honest, rational, objective, and scientific understanding of human nature. I will post one article a week on a Wednesday morning (GMT). These articles will discuss human nature from the ground floor up. They include, therefore, articles on evolution and systems science. The topics that I have covered to date, and will cover in the future, are listed on the Index page. I would recommend reading them in the order listed, as each article builds on those previously published. You can also see the articles in my Quora space at rational-understanding.quora.com.  If you would like to receive articles by email, please click the subscribe button. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, I will be pleased to hear from you. My email address is email@johnachalloner.com.

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Most Recent Posts

The Evolution of Knowledge

Introduction In this article, I describe the evolutionary stages in the development of human knowledge. Many of these stages took place in our ancestor species. The first almost certainly began in relatively simple animals, and subsequent stages followed on as complexity increased. At each stage, an increase in the sophistication of the ancestor’s brain would…

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Leadership Competence

Competence to lead an organisation requires certain skills. There are hundreds of lists of such skills on the internet, usually prepared by management consultants. We could even pick and choose between them to find the closest fit to ourselves. If I were to compile a complete list of the recommended skills, then their number would…

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Self-interest vs. Collective Interest

It is human nature to balance self-interest with community interest. So, all leaders will, to some extent, act in their own self-interest. However, if the balance swings too far in that direction, then the leader will usurp the function of the organisation to the detriment of other stakeholders, such as employees or customers, and it…

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Here are five simple questions for you to meditate upon:

  1. How confident are you that you know the problems of humanity?
  2. To what extent do you care about those problems?
  3. How confident are you that you understand why these problems exist?
  4. How confident are you that you know the solutions to these problems?
  5. How empowered do you feel to make a difference?

If you would like to reply to these questions (and only these questions) in a 90 second, anonymous questionnaire, click here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/S2CQBGL.

When sufficient people have responded I will publish the results here.