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Just over a month ago, I helped out at a people’s assembly in Brixton, a neighbourhood of the inner south London at the end of an Underground line, to act as the facilitator of a group discussion. I have been late posting on this, as this post stalled as I struggled to figure out several…
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The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony is an excellent guide to humans’ powerful group instincts, written by psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Dominic J. Packer. Our group instincts drive us to work together in groups and have underpinned all of our greatest achievements, from…
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Steven Pinker has written some cracking books on how the human mind works, as well as in defence of liberal democratic and progressive values. The most recent is titled Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (2021). What is rationality? Pinker defines it as “the ability to use knowledge to attain…
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In an earlier post, I reviewed a book about Independents for Frome (IfF), who in 2011 took control of the Somerset town’s parish council and showed that a lot more can be done at this often neglected level of government. I’ve rather liked the story, because it challenges people’s assumptions about how politics should work.…
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Western England is often associated with rural life and retirement, but it also has a number of quirky towns with a bohemian, independent atmosphere, such as Glastonbury, Totnes and Stroud. And then there’s Frome (read: “froom”), an attractive medium-sized town in Somerset. During a brief stopover there last year, I was struck by how friendly…
Assembly Project 