In this episode of Ordinary People walking an extra-ordinary path podcast, Life Itself co-founder Sylvie Barbier is joined by Dr Simon Longstaff who shares his journey from working as a cleaner to becoming the Director of the Ethics Centre.

# About Simon Dr Simon Longstaff is the Executive Director of The Ethics Centre, co-founder of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, and has been named one of the True Leaders of the 21st century by Australian Financial Review BOSS magazine. He shares with us his journey into ethics, from the choice of his mother between the life of her child and her own, his path of working as a cleaner, to studying the law, to the influence the aboriginal people had on his life to his work of strengthening Australia’s ethical infrastructure.

About Sylvie

Sylvie Barbier is a French-Taiwanese performance artist, entrepreneur and educator. She co-founded Life Itself to build a wiser future through culture, space and community.

Ordinary People is a podcast series that delves into the lives of individuals who have defied societal expectations and embarked on extra-ordinary paths despite their seemingly ordinary backgrounds. Join us as we dive deep into their lives, uncovering their motivations, beliefs, practices, and moments of transformation. We demystify hero worship and share accessible narratives of real individuals who have transcended societal expectations and norms. Each guest delicately navigates the balance between introspection and worldly engagement. Listeners are offered empowerment, kinship and inspiration for embarking on their own extra-ordinary journey.

Transcript

 So hello and welcome to Ordinary People Walking an Extraordinary Path, a podcast series delving into the lives of individuals who have defied societal expectations and embarked on an extraordinary path, despite their seemingly ordinary background. I'm your host, Sylvie Barbier, and today I have the privilege to be with our guest, Simon Longstaff.

And so Simon is the executive director of the Ethics Center, the co-founder of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, and has been named as one of the true leader of the twenty-first century by the Australian Financial Review Boss Magazine. So thank you and welcome Simon. I'm really excited to have you. Thank you, Sylvie.

And so I'd love you to start by telling us a little bit what you're currently working on, what you have your nose into at the moment.  Well, I probably have the most interesting job in the world, so I get to poke my nose into an extraordinarily diverse range of issues, and I tend to become fascinated by them all.

So one moment I can be looking at things arising in government and their response to  sometimes quite scandalous behaviour that takes place in and around parts of Australia. The next time I can be looking at the launch of things in military ethics and then writing about Israel Hamas. So it's really, really diverse.

But the major thing I've been working on for the past three years now is a program to try and establish. In Australia, what I think will be the first thing of its kind in the World, which is a National Institute for Applied Ethics that will be both a source of guidance to government and others on the major ethical questions facing our nation, but also embarked on building, perhaps strengthening, what we call the ethical infrastructure of Australian society. 

So every society has physical infrastructure, like road and rail, and it has technical infrastructure, like internet, things of that kind. It often has though a neglected ethical infrastructure based around key institutions and practices. And when they fail to be as strong as they can be, it has really adverse impacts on society because it causes a degradation in trust,  and when trust levels become very low, all of the things you would like to do as a society, particularly the brave and interesting things become impossible.

Because even if people know that it could be to their benefit, ultimately they don't trust that it will be done in a way which ensures that the burdens are equitably distributed along with the benefits. So that's been the big focus. It's a big strategic thing. And the rest of it sort of comes and goes during the course of the day and all those other areas where issues pop up. 

Yes. And so when did you first notice that missing in society that maybe that we had, we have the technical infrastructure, the roads, and et cetera. When did you start really noticing, hey, we're maybe really missing this kind of, the software in a way, the ethic dimension?  Like do you have a,  Yeah.  

Well, what happened was, at least in Australia. There were a series of institutional failures. Some of them were global. For example, the response by the Christian churches to allegations to do with the sexual abuse of children and other vulnerable people by clergy. So that happened here as it did in a number of other countries.  But you also had scandals in the banking industry where they were found to have been doing pretty outrageous things like charging fees to dead people just to boost their profits. 

You saw the professions in various areas starting to be called into question as to whether or not their espoused commitment to act in a spirit of public service was being enacted in a genuine, authentic way.

And then you saw in politics cases of corruption. Or the misuse of public power and public money for private purposes, for example, just to advance a political party's own attempts to secure power. And the thing about it that, that struck me was that all of these things were happening pretty much at the same time as if  a deck of houses made of cards were all collapsing. And I began to wonder how this could be the case.

If you imagine almost like buildings that the foundations had been ignored and people have become absolutely entranced in the superstructure. If it's a building, you imagine with its flying buttresses and stained glass and all sorts of arches and things that may magnificent, but if the foundations wither away because no one cares for them,  then the structure, no matter how magnificent it might appear, is liable to collapse.

What I sensed was that our society was starting to change with such rapidity. It was like the ground was shaking. And when there wasn't much instability, then these, these structures of a university or a church or a parliament or whatever, they could stand up. They'd be fine. But when you start to shake that ground with lots of change,  deep change, rapid change, then the absence of strong foundations.

Causes them to totter and then fall over. And that for me was terrifying and exciting. It was terrifying to see what could happen when that ethical infrastructure was ignored. But it was also incredibly exciting because it meant that there was a possibility to rethink these foundations.  To to go back and after a long age of forgetting to say, well, why do we have a university?

What is its purpose? Or a church, or a parliament or a corporation? And even if we were to come up with answers, which were identical, perhaps to those of an earlier generation or many generations before, the difference would be that this, for the first time, perhaps in hundreds of years, would be our belief.

It would be invested with life rather than just being the dead hand of something that had been inherited and ignored. And so for me,  out of these terrible moments there came an inspiration to start  trying to encourage people to think deeply about what we have, why we do things, to, to challenge the unthinking custom and practice, which had been embedded sometimes over centuries. 

I love what you say in the sense that with this crisis, you see this opportunity because in the Chinese word, crisis is formed with the word danger and opportunity. And I'd love to understand like, 'cause you're talking about here like, okay, we need to go to the foundation, things are shaking and we need to go to the foundations and actually.

I use that metaphor too, actually, in regards to views and values. And I'd love to understand why for you, ethics is something foundational and why, for example, you know the, the infrastructure of the roads and etc. Is not as foundation, is not a foundation compared to maybe ethics.  Well, it comes from a really obvious point. 

If you think about the world. Your own world. My world,  we are surrounded by buildings and institutions and practices,  and we find them so frequently common and familiar to us that we, we don't realize that they could be so very different.  So to take a physical example, something as extraordinary as a pyramid in the deserts of Egypt. 

It could have been just as magnificent, just as precisely oriented, but it might have been a cube.  And there could have been a pyramid on the top of the Acropolis in Greece rather than the Parthenon. And so it's true for everything that it could be different, but for the choices that someone or some group of people made,  and to my mind, the most powerful force on this planet  is therefore human choice. 

What we know from millennia of philosophical thinking is that human choice itself can be explained by a deep universal structure, which is consistently present in all cultures, and in all times the structure remains the same. It's a structure which drives choice,  and it has two basic components that are always fixed even though the content within these components varies. 

The first element is the answer to the question What is good? Because what we do is we choose things which we are good. So if we just take a very simple experiment, imagine,  uh, you and I are sitting in a room and there is in that room an apple and an orange,  and someone comes into the room and we know that they have four choices.

They can have an apple, they can have an orange. They can have both or they can have none. That exhausts completely the range of choices. So we watch this person  and they go over and they pick up the apple. Now the moment they do that, we know that for that person. Of the four choices, the apple is the good or better choice.

We don't know why, but we do know that they have chosen that something has structured their choice. It might be a belief about the health benefits of apples. Could be the colour, could be the taste. It may even be an emotional connection because they remember eating apples with their grandma or grandpa on a verandah in the sun,  and once you know that, then the question about what is good.

Become central because that will structure choice  and that is free choice. That which isn't bound by someone putting a gun at your head or forcing you to do something.  And from that is the first part of the structure, which are values, the things which people say are good, the things which will structure their choice.

It's not enough to know that because how you get the things that are good can be problematic in itself. Someone might say, oh, one of my values is harmony. How will I achieve harmony? I'll kill everybody who disagrees with me.  I will lock them up or something like that, and someone else will say, well, okay, I kind of get it.

That harmony could be a good, but that's just not right.  And from that, well then what's right? What regulates how you get the things that are good are principles.  And so these foundations have got values and principles. Now, the values and principles from place to place and time to time can change, but there will always be.

Values and principles and connecting them together, there'll be a third element, which is purpose.  What is the purpose of this thing that you're seeking to do? And this, it goes back to an old syllogism, which is common, commonly ascribed to the Greeks, but it would be in every culture where it says, what is the purpose of a knife?

The purpose of a knife is to cut. What is a good knife? A good knife is a knife that cuts well. So that starts to say, well, it's entailed in this. It must have a blade that's sharp enough to do its work. But that's not all. It must also have a handle that fits the, the user. If it's too big, if it's too small, it's just a blade.

It's, it's no good. Well.  Or a hospital will differ and there'll be certain values and principles which are entailed by that purpose, which start to bind it together. So what ethics does,  it says,  well, those components are there,  uh, and you could just pick them up because you inherit them from your family or your community.

And perhaps you could be as a matter of habit.  Kind. Or generous. Or harmonious or maybe as a matter of habit, you could only do those things. You would be pre proud to see in the full light of day one of the principles, or treating everybody as you'd like to be treated. Another principle.  But if you only do it as a matter of habit, then you are just living a moral life. 

A life, which,  yes, it's got failure. In principle, what ethics says is there's something more,  there's an examined life.  The life that Socrates most famously encouraged when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living.  And it's that component,  the willingness in the face of radical uncertainty  to think afresh.

About your values and your principles and purpose and how they apply to your circumstances, rather than just following a path that's been beaten by others  to to own these decisions, to live. That examined life. That life which is distinctive of the human form of being, where we're not simply limited by instinct or desire, that we can actually go beyond those things.

That that's what I think is the foundation because out of that.  Everything else emerges, all the things which are touched by or produced by human choice. Sorry. Very long answer to a simple question. That's amazing. I tried to wrap a few things together. No, it's incredible. Like I now have like so many more questions from what you shared.

 I guess  yeah, I, I'm gonna go for.  Because you also created the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Mm-Hmm. I'd like to understand what initiated you to create this festival Again? Maybe what did you saw missing that had you create this, this festival? So. My co-creator of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas was a man called Richard Evans.

He'd been formerly the head of the Australian Ballet, which is our national ballet company, and he'd then just taken up a role as the chief executive of the Sydney Opera House. Which of course is recognized the world over,  and he and I had always wanted to do something together. So we sat down one day and we began to start planning this idea.

And eventually what emerged was the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. And it had a very serious purpose, an ethical purpose.  And that was even though  the degree of constraint, which is now.  Expressed by those who are proponents of either political correctness or conservative correctness or one form of correctness or cancel culture or whatever. 

That hadn't started, not, not to any degree, but we could sense how  there was a constriction starting to appear where certain ideas could not be discussed or without there being outrage and  people wanting to shut things down, or politicians saying it's inappropriate, whatever. So what we wanted to do was to create a festival. 

Which took dangerous ideas, the kind of things that when you hear them, you'll almost go ouch as if you've just been pinched or pricked by them  and explore them so that we could push at the boundaries, right at the boundaries of what can be discussed  in order to hold as larger middle space as possible  for all of the other conversations that need to take place. 

And by dangerous ideas, we didn't mean crazy things. I.  Defensible ideas. They had to be things which were argued by reasonable people who were able to put their case forward.  And so there had to be an element of plausibility to them, but they didn't have to be, in any sense, popular. And in fact they would often cause outrage just to be mentioned.

And so that was the origin and, and we think if anything,  it's become even more important.  Me.  Create spaces where people feel safe from the things that they might encounter, but also places where it's safe to engage with difficult issues.  Yes.  Amazing. Thank you for, for creating that context. I now would like to go a little bit what you said about  the dimension of choice that in, in ethics and. 

I, I have a, like you once told me the, the story of the biggest choice your mother had to make. Mm-Hmm. How maybe that choice she did. And maybe we'll maybe tell a bit the story if that's okay for you, because that will give context for our audience. But how that choice influenced how you approach choices in your life.

So. The truth is that this is still something of a mystery to me,  but I'll tell you what happens and, and you and the audience can,  can think about it too.  So my mother came from a very devout Roman Catholic family. It had produced as a number of families had throughout history  priests and nuns.  And she was a, a firm believer in, in the. 

I was her first-born child,  and that first pregnancy proceeded without any complications.  Then she got a bit sicker with the second and with the third,  but she was told by a very eminent doctor  that if she was to proceed and have a fourth pregnancy,  then she would die  and the child would probably die,  most likely die. 

And of course she had fallen pregnant  with a fourth child,  and so she wrote a letter after coming back from the doctor where she'd been told this to her sister  and said to her sister, I have this terrible dilemma. On the one hand,  I have a husband whom I love, and three children,  and if I proceed with this pregnancy,  then I'll be choosing to leave them.

I.  But at the same time, I'm pregnant with a child, which in her faith,  she believed must be born so it could be baptized. And in those days,  it was still a time when there was a belief in this state called limbo in which an unbaptized child would go into this kind of nether region  for whatever period of time. 

They might be kept there.  And she says there's no one I.  There's no one I can have this conversation with, so I'm writing to you about this.  At the end of the letter, she then refers to me who I would've been probably a five-year-old child, a little boy  standing next to her and I was colouring in or something like that, as she wrote this anguished letter to her sister. 

And  then the letter is sealed and it's posted,  and I see it  around about thirty-five.  My first encounter with this letter,  by which time  I am running an Ethics Centre, and one of the first things I created was a counselling service. It's called Ethical. It still goes. It's the world's only free national service for any person, irrespective of their means, who has an ethical issue, a challenge, a dilemma they need to discuss with someone. 

And I realized that  I.  Followed this path. After starting my working life as a cleaner in a Manganese mine up in the northern Territory of Australia,  I'd ended up fire Cambridge  a philosopher working in the field of ethics who had created a service that my mother could have used.  And I did all of that without ever knowing that this letter existed.

So the question Sylvie,  did she say something to that five-year-old boy  as she wrote?  Did that five-year-old boy have this bond, this  unspoken  insight or whatever, with this mother  wrestling with this question such that the course of my life then took me to a point where I could have helped her if she had only lived and she did not.

Sure enough, as the doctor had predicted, a year and a day after giving birth,  she died.  And fortunately the child she gave.  He survived and  is based,  he's based, lived most of his life in France,  uh, and is currently  in England, where he got locked away during Covid and tried to find his way back to France 

and.  Thank you for sharing that story. 'cause it seems like consciously or unconsciously that it had such an impact into how you led your life. And I'd, I'd love to 

like, yeah, maybe also understand, 'cause you,  you said also a couple of things that ethic is also to examine your life and that that's the difference between maybe moral and ethics is the element of the self-examination.  And I'd love to ask you like maybe once your earliest memory. Of self-examination, like in your child?

Like was there a moment where for ex where, because I believe that self-examination is a muscle, it's a practice. We might see it in others and we take it on. Yes. Maybe if there's where you start practicing it or somewhere in someone in your, someone in your life where you felt like that they influenced you in this way to kind of encourage that showed you the practice of self-examination. 

Or it may be a book or  I think it was, it's very hard to put my finger on a particular instance. I can give you more a general context.  So  there's the death of my mother. That's the first thing, which makes you wonder, why do things like this happen and what's my role in it?  Then there was a, a rather Dickensian period where,  my father who had to travel a lot, had housekeepers came, come in and,  uh, I remember being punished sometimes on a weekend for things I hadn't yet done  that. This particular individual thought that he'd given me a,  a whack with the belt downstairs under the house just in case I'd done something wrong. 

And so you start to reflect on why is that happening? What is it about me that might be  generating that?  The other factor was that I was promoted through school. I skipped a year,  and so I was two years younger than everybody else in my year group.  And when they were all becoming these sort of big hulking men,  I was still a squeaky little boy. 

And so you have to think about who you are and how you survive.  In that world when you are fundamentally, and I mean noticeably physically different  yet expect to keep up and to compete.  So there was that strain of things that was just general context of life. Then I encountered some really great teachers who,  who, just  a few people who stand out when they, they present to you a view of how to exist, which is not so much about. 

Always winning against a person, but being curious about an idea or an argument, and then you turn it in  upon yourself. And there's a whole range of things. I, I think for me though, that, that the biggest change  for me was when I finally  when I got my doctorate at Cambridge, I was a member of Magdalen College there  physically.

ADEPT person. I, I'll never win a gold medal, for example, in the Olympic games or anything like that. Not even anywhere close.  But for me, that was an achievement, which was of sufficient weight. And this is a bit probably not a great thing about me, but I felt  no longer did I have anything to prove. That little boy, he had always been a bit smaller and slower and all the rest didn't have to prove anything to anyone ever more.

And so then I could be developed.  This, this tension between two things, which I think are so important.  One, is to be really centered  and,  and  sufficient in oneself  because I think a lot of people and this is particularly so these days.  Depend on external affirmation in order to find their self-worth, which means it's a very brittle state. 

Whereas if you have a strong center,  you, you don't depend on others so much to do that. So that's part one, part of it. But it has to be balanced with another part,  which mean, which is not to be arrogant,  such that you don't listen anymore to the views of others. You've gotta do those two things. You've gotta be  centered. 

And, and, and have that kind of stillness that you can rely upon and open at the same time.  And I think when I  reached that point,  which was possibly quite late in my development,  I felt from that point onwards,  really, I began to understand the depth of what Socrates had really been trying to get  condition. 

Lots of things unpacked for me. A lot of the philosophy I'd read, I, I understood in a completely different way, the Platonic dialogues where I'd always been entranced by.  The idea of Socrates being the smarty-pants so he could win the argument. Suddenly I realized actually he wasn't trying to do that. He was really trying to understand,  um, there was this, there was a genuine humility, I think in, in that quest to understand and, and, and when he said he didn't know anything, he wasn't just a throwaway tagline to accord with the Delphic Oracles view that he was the wisest man in Greece of the day.

It was a, a genuinely really this, I've gotta be curious, I've gotta be open. Yet he had this remarkable capacity of his own. When I, I'm never not gonna say I would any way approximate that level of depth and brilliance and courage, but there was something of that that I found, and that's where I think I began to really understand the ethical life. 

Mm,  amazing. Thank you.  And can you give me maybe a little bit more background about your childhood? Like, so you grew up in Australia?  Yep. So if you asked me where  Yes. Like your, also your father's, then there with four kids. Like Yeah. Just understanding a little bit how  like there was also something, like you said you just skipped you were two years younger.

Yeah. But just to kind of maybe have a bit more of a timeline in terms of like, okay.  What? Yeah. And the, the context in which you grew up. Also the social for maybe the values of your family, like Yeah. The social context in which you grew up.  So uh, I was born in Melbourne in a suburb called Caulfield.

In Victoria.  And first five or so years I lived in that wonderful, loving household. My, my father.  Had not been to university on his side of the family. I was the first person to go to university.  My mother's side, she was the daughter of a lawyer, so they'd been far more educated.  He had been born in England of an Australian father and a British mother, and he'd lived there up until they were  the family. 

The mother and the four boys were sent to Australia for safety during the Second World War, during the Blitz, while his father had remained.  So it was this kind of international  kind of Anglo-Australian kind of mix.  Not, not wealthy, but I'd suppose sort of middle class. But with a love of fine things and a, and a great.

Appetite for argument and conversation and ideas.  Well after my mother died we had this period of housekeepers and then my father remarried a, a much younger person who  had one other child. So I'm the oldest of five children in total, four from  my mother. And then. 

And there were some tensions as often happened. So I ended up going to boarding school to a private school,  and that's where I  was enabled in many ways to have resilience because  it wasn't as if you could go home at the end of the day and escape some of those disparities in size and things. I, I needed to find how you survive in this world, a communal environment where.

You're, the runt of the litter.  I spent my summers for the most part in Outback, Queensland riding horses, cutting burs, working in wool sheds learning to plow. Defence, all sorts of really hands-on practical skills. I was taught to ride by a wonderful Aboriginal stockman.  I learnt to ride without stirrups and one stirrup and how to hunt pigs with a stirrup iron and things.

So it was like something out of a  another world. Part of the time I was, there was no electricity. And so everything was done with kerosene refrigerators and generators and wood fires and wood-fired stoves and things from a another. Era until the electricity was put on. And then there's the excitement of electric lighting and washing machines and  Irons that were running on electricity.

So I, I, I spanned a number of different worlds,  and then I left school, as I mentioned, at age 16 and had no money, so I needed to get work. So I went up to Groote Island, which is up in the Gulf of Carpentaria in the far north of Australia,  which in the mid-nineteen seventies. It was an extremely remote part of the world.

And I started my working life as a cleaner. I had no skills. I mean, I could fence and I could plow and I could press wool bales, but there's not much use for that when you've got no money. So I was a cleaner and I cleaned toilets, I emptied bins, and I moved furniture. And then I used to have to spray  fog with chemicals in it to get away from mosquitoes and keep them down because it was a malaria area.

And eventually I trained as a paramedic.  And was a ambulance driver, fireman.  Emergency services on this little island. I, I still don't have a car license. I did my driving less test in a fire truck, big red fire truck with a split axle.  I had my first hands-on experience of death where a man I was trying to save because we didn't have a doctor, nurses and die were there and he died.

And I still remember having to pack his body up and put him in a body bag over my shoulder and then put him into a, a freezer room or a cool room overnight and then take the body out. I almost had to deliver a baby. I had to put out fires and there was cyclones and I went out in the middle of a cyclone.

And so I lived this adventurous life that  as a 17-year-old, no 17-year-old  would be allowed to do today. But it was a, a world of adventure. And most importantly, I was adopted by a local indigenous community that the Lalara clan within the Ndaliakwa people who took me in because this is a young man and I've maintained these kinship ties with them. 

Now for decades and decades, and I still have an association to this day with a wholly different world view. I'll just finished with it. And then I went to TAs, started to study law, decided I didn't have a lot to do. Justice, went to Tasmania. And then after teaching for a while, I went to Cambridge and that's where I did my master's and my doctorate.

And I've been back doing philosophy ever since. So sorry I went on. But that's gives you  a really different life,  a very, very full and rich life.  I'd love to know. Oh, there's so many things I'd love to know,  but  well first is like so you just said you were adopted by an indigenous tribe. Yes. How did maybe their views and values have influenced you? 

Hugely. So I was given, sorry, I have an indigenous name. I have my own totem and stories and song lines and things like that. But the most important thing they taught me was at the end of a wharf. One day they, they took me down. So this was a manganese mine, and it used to load the manganese ore onto ships and they'd sail off around the. 

One day, one night they took me down to where the ShipLoader was. So it's more found a thing and they, they said, oh,  have a look down there. Can you see the dolphins?  I said, no. I said, well, look down there. There are dolphins. Can you see the dolphins? And I said, no, I can't.  And then they laughed and they said, ah, well you know what the problem is.

You are looking for the dolphins.  I said, what? What? What do you mean? If you'd asked me to look for the dolphins? I said, but that's not how you see dolphins. And then they taught me how to see because they realized I didn't know how to see properly.  So I'd grown up like most people do in the western world,  being taught to see things as discrete objects, like a glass on a table or a  car on a road, or aeroplane in the air or whatever.

That's not how these people see.  What they see are patterns.  There's a pattern that the sea makes  without any dolphins. There's a pattern that it makes with dolphins in it,  and you have to, you have to learn to see things holistically.  There's patterns that the bush makes without a kangaroo, and there's a pattern that it makes when the kangaroo is present, things like that. 

And so I had to completely relearn.  How to see the world away from discrete objects in relationship to each other, to whole things where these things are all connected.  And this, of course, captures what is essentially a. A whole and very deep worldview that, for example, for this, I won't speak for every indigenous person in the world.

I would never do that. I wouldn't even do it for Australians, but at least for the Anindaliaka people where I can speak with a measure of confidence,  they are not living on the land. They are of the land, they are of country. They, they sustain it through their songs, through their ceremonies.  Have everything in the world is divided into two moieties here at Sure.

And do the white cockatoo in the black cockatoo, animals, plants, people, everything is connected. All of these patterns. And so what happens when I eventually left and read off,  you know, back into what they call the b under world, the white person world,  and I had to become proficient in it.  What?  Really strong ability to see things in patterns, and I've used it ever since.

It, it's such a powerful part of my practice that,  uh.  My work takes me into every aspect of human life, from life and death. At one end, it's preparing soldiers to go to war. At the end of it, it's end of life decisions in hospitals and other circumstances, I deal with sport, with government, with  Professions, everybody, and what what's so marvelous is that I see patterns all the time that I can relate from one place to another and join them together and all of that. 

Is a of being inducted into that way of being and seeing that emerged from the Anandaliakwa people on Groote Island. Wow. Thank you. Thank you.  Yeah,  it's fascinating to see how these different key elements  uh, to the richness. Of your life and how then you use those to, to navigate and influence your work today.

 And I have another question. You also mentioned that you went to law school, so like what had you decided to quit? Law school?  And this is probably a bit unfair, but  for me,  I  believe that law was about justice.  That's the animating driver for me,  and it turned out a lot of the time, it's not  a lot of the time, it's about the application of rules or precedents  that actually do not deliver substantive justice  or the upholding of laws which might actually perpetuate injustice. 

So that was not for me. It could be, it could be more. And when it's at, its very best. It is more. And I've, I've been in  the most, the highest court in our land in Australia, the high court. And I've seen them do substantive justice because they can  at that level.  And I've,  I have a sense that in the heart of the law uh, certainly in the tradition that I studied the common countries emanating out of the United Kingdom. 

There are quite ancient precepts that seek to attain substantive justice,  but to have been a practicing lawyer for me, would not have given me the scope to  explore  the more fundamental questions  of what makes for a good life or a good society, which other things I've tried to dedicate my life to  outside of the university.

So the most important thing for.  The decision I made was that although I, I think I demonstrated a, a reasonably good capacity to live and, you know, do well in the academic setting.  I was entranced by  that great hero, by Socrates that his work was all done in the Agora  in a public space. It's one of the first things I did when I came back to Australia  was I got 10. 

Put them in a circle in the most public place in the city of Sydney. And I had a couple of little cardboard signs,  literally a bit of cardboard, saying, if you want to talk to a philosopher about ideas, take a seat.  And I would just sit there in the public square  and talk to people, anyone who wanted to sit down, talk about any particular issue. 

And that's because to tie it back to my earlier life when I'd been a cleaner.  I'd had some of the best conversations of my life about ideas, not with university professors from Cambridge  or the other places I would go.  The people who were truck drivers or fitters and turners, they hadn't ever been to uni, but they, they, they, they were really interested.

And so the skill for me, the great,  the greatest skill in philosophy is to take complex ideas and make them accessible to everybody. So.  The work I do is about bringing ethics, that bit of philosophy, at least that I deal with mostly to the center of everyday life. Not out on the fringes, not inside the academic, but all those things are important.

I'm, I'm not wanting to,  in any way suggest that  the work done in universities and the, the great wrestling with questions and all the technicalities aren't important.  But I think some point they've got, have a bearing on the life of the.  That's what I try to do. So it's almost a bit like a, an interpreter in some way.

Bringing these things there and, and working with people.  And so I heard from like your  encounter in the early stage of law saying that it might be end up being more about applying the law versus the heart of the law, which is to, for justice, what was.  And, and I link it back to you just spoke of an incident with this na, the, this nanny in which she was quite unjust with you.

Well, it was her husband actually.  That's good. Who wheeled the strap? Yeah.  Got it.  And was  it, it is just like an, like, I have a sense that your passion also around ethic is related to, so a sense of justice when that. Like, I, I would love to understand what they ignited in you and how you continue to pursue that path. 

Well, there's, there's also a very trivial reason too.  I was born on the twenty-third of December, 19 fifty-eight. Right. So  two days before Christmas. And people used to try and give me one present,  one for my birthday, one for Christmas. And it used to really, really annoy me that, that people would, in a sense. 

Engaging an unjust act because everybody else was gonna get a birthday present at a Christmas present. So I, so I'm sure that there were kind of these trivial concerns that probably got inside me somewhere as well. And they, they probably turned into much more noble things over time. But I have to own that as being an element to my past as well.

But it does mean that I care a lot about justice, but  in a substantive sense.  I don't believe in the justice of the mob. For example, I, I do believe in a principled approach and when precedent or rules  depart from principle, when they simply become  something done out of a vengeance or,  uh, to secure popularity.

Within a Democratic context or because it's the fashion of the day or because of Hypocrisy or any of those things, they,  they all push my buttons. And I think their best Anticipated and addressed  by a reflective public, a public, that itself can be alive to  its own values and principles, individually or collectively, that examines what's done.

That doesn't.  Do things because it's just on there. You see, what I've found is that  nearly all of the terrible things that happen in the world are not perpetrated by wicked individuals who seek deliberately to cause harm.  Far more often when you find out who has brought misery into the world, it turns out to be  pretty nice people  who. 

Why did you do it? Well, how did you get in that situation where you did this thing, which now is so clearly wrong? And firstly, they say to you, almost always say to you,  well,  I, I just didn't see it at the time.  Why? Why did you not see it? And the most common response is  because everyone was doing,  it's just the way things were done. 

The two things that are the great enemies of ethics in the world are firstly hypocrisy  where you say one thing and you do something else because that creates the breakdown in trust and the cynicism.  And the second is,  and by far the greater, I think is unthinking, custom and practice  the fact that so often people for good or for Ill do things without much thought at all, but because that's just what's done. 

That is not, that is in fact antithetical to the ethical life. The examined life.  Yes. And what you just said, I think, really touched to the essence of the intention of Dead podcast, which is to live an extra ordinary life, you need to be in inquiry. You cannot be out of the ordinary.  If you don't inquire, and it's the practice of inquiring that can allow you to step into something that is extra ordinary in a sense of out, out of the ordinary.

And in that.  Our life gets an energy of life gets fulfilled and I, I chose this title of ordinary people  walking an Extraordinary Path because we are ordinary. There is no some superhero. And the same as there is, there is no big villain, which, you know that's right. Like it's made of like ordinary people.

Who either choose to take on  their life and really being in, in this inquiry about it. And I, the intention for me of that podcast was also, I think there's many people out there and especially young people who are hesitant maybe of taking a different path than the one that is by default given to them from society or their family. 

Well,  you're absolutely right. And there are two things that have to be taken into account,  I think at least  First,  some people  look at the world  and they're, they say the problems are so huge,  I will be overwhelmed by them. Why should I even bother? Because I'll be destroyed by the scale of these things.

So what I will do is I'll focus just on the things I can. Control myself, my friendship groups, my, so they, they have quite a narrow compass, which is understandable, but it's also, I think  based on a false assumption about what it's required of us to respond ethically to the the life we live.  Because I think people think often, oh, well, I've gotta be like a Nelson Mandela or  Mahatma Gandhi, or whoever you pick, pick whoever it is, when in fact you don't. 

What, what the examined life requires is a very modest kind of heroism  where you don't have to shift the whole of the world. You just have to fall ever so slightly  on the right side of each question as you discern it.  And if enough people  just fall a little,  just make a  on right side of. 

Shifts whole mountains. It changes the world.  So yeah, that's the first thing.  And the second thing is not to be afraid  of the uncertainty that comes with examining a life, which will often throw up impossible choices. I'll give you a a domestic example. So imagine.  Your mom or someone you love or whatever, someone comes home, right?

And they've just new hair card, new clothes, whatever it is,  and they present themselves to you. And they say, well, what do you think? How do I look?  And you look at them and you think, oh no.  Oh no,  it's terrible.  Now you might be a person who believes in truth,  and you might believe in compassion as well. And here you are where you know if you tell the truth, you will hurt them. 

The force pulling you towards truth might have 10 units of force, and that pulling you towards compassion might be 10 units towards compassion and they're in an equal and opposite direction, and you do the maths and it all nets out to zero. In other words, it turns out  that the question is in principle undecidable.

Now, God, no philosopher, no scientist can decide, and yet you must still decide.  Well, the wonderful thing about being human is that firstly. You don't have to be terrified by that because it's great. It's quite a liberating thing actually, to know that ethical perfection is impossible,  even for a God. It is impossible, means we can be released from the burden of thinking that we must be that kind of entity. 

And the second thing we can do is sometimes we just walk up and give them a hug.  We don't say anything, we just hug them.  So there were all sorts of creative.  Different types of response. So if you know that all you are required to do is just fall a little bit on the right side of the question and that you don't have to aim for perfection because there is no perfection to be attained in this particular dimension of existence,  then you are free. 

You are free to  take up whatever opportunity you have and not to be paralyzed by the scale or scope of the challenge you face.  This is a thank you so much for fleshing that out because it's exactly for me the intention of that podcast because I, for me, those narrative of like a superhero or a supervillain  can use us to be quite paralyzed in action because we always think someone else another time or this is too much and actually.

Well, in a way or so, great leaders of change can only appear in the listening  of a, of a collective, and so  like the ordinary people choosing. To step into their greatness is what is gonna really lead to the snowball effect, to a greater societal change. And I think in the moment that we're living, which is quite turbulent with a lot of uncertainty and, and therefore human being do not like uncertainty, and it gives us a real sense of threat and danger. 

It even more requires us to be brave and courageous to step and inquire about what is possible for us as human being  and taking everyday step into really.  I guess my question is, like, for me, the thing that I, it's like impossible Dream is like a world that works for everybody.  Like, not just for the few, but that works for everybody.

And, and it's an in part, like it's almost the impossible dream, but that does not mean it's not worth walking and making it  closest to reality.  So I, I agree with almost everything you said. The one thing I would challenge is this notion of stepping into your greatness  because that again, makes it something. 

Massive and  heroic in that kind of superhero way.  I think there's a kind of stepping into your,  the real, the reality of it to your humanity. Stepping into your humanity. That's what it is to be fully human, is to,  is to go beyond this habit. Fear and to allow yourself to examine even in conditions of uncertainty.

And of course, humans are terrified of uncertainty, which is why we invent religions and political doctrines. That's why fundamentalists flourish. They say to people in an uncertain world, well, of course it's terribly uncertain. You don't have to worry about it anymore. Just come and do what I tell you to do. 

Simply subordinate yourself to my will, to my instruction, and you'll be relieved. All of the pressure to decide in an uncertain will some of course go the other way. They say, oh, let's all get drunk. You.  Intoxicated one way, and maybe someone else can sort it out when we sober up so they disengage. 

Whereas I think, as I said before, this modestly heroic stance is to say, I will step into my humanity  and I will live with that. I'll accept the uncertainty, not as a terrible burden, but as a liberation from this require for requirement, for perfection.  And then do that. Now, can you then do something for benefit of everybody?

Yes, because I.  If you then allow your moral imagination to be.  So that you start to take seriously what others might want by putting yourself into their shoes. The old notions of sympathy and reciprocity, and that's been expressed so many times in different cultures, different philosophers, different traditions.

Then, but the key to it is moral imagination. What would it be like to be in that person's shoes with seeing things through their eyes?  Then I think you can start to do.  Not so much embarking upon a quest where you try to make the world  see the way you see,  which is a very futile thing to do. Mm-Hmm. I mean, whenever you try and convince someone to change their mind,  they almost invariably put up their shutters, their defenses.

You are not gonna tell me what to think about what happens though. If you take another person very seriously  and try to understand their view to the point where they would say, yes, you've got it. Yes, yes. You've.  Then both you are  enriched by that, but also they have permission to start to explore where the boundary conditions exist for them, where they would not go.

And that starts to tell something new and important to the ensuing conversation.  And that's where I think you start to see people moderating towards a position where they may not be complete unanimity, but there's enough then to flourish together.  Yes. Thank you for offering that at the end. And also thank you for catching  me in how I,  how I use the words because words are very powerful and  it's true that in the way I phrase it, of like stepping into the greatness and implies that we're not great already as we are in a sense that this, this life that we live or I live is not. 

There's something else that needs to happen in a way. Yeah, I think, I think, can I just, yeah. See, I think  a lot of people become addicted to striving,  striving for improvement, for wisdom, for  enlightenment. There's a lot of people who  absolutely need to strive every day for these things.  And I think that by doing so, they often  miss the point that much of what they needed, they already had, if only they stopped to find it. 

It's a bit like a person who feels they have to work, walk a certain number of steps or whatever it is, you know, every day. That,  and they become addicted to the, the pattern of the journey rather than realizing that the destination was where they started. 

I see this so often and it's almost cruel to point it out to people. 'cause people love the striving, you know, they get real sense of satisfaction or meaning from doing it, but I also see them,  you know, sweating up the hill of life or whatever it is. And so you do realize that it was there.  You, you could have found it by that moment of stillness and just look around.

In the ordinariness of the moment and something will extraordinary will be there.  So that's, that's an important thing too, I think for people to perhaps realise that maybe the effort  isn't the most productive thing they could be doing. That there's other ways.  Thank you for,  singing the song back to me.

And I, I notice in myself that there's such a culture around progress in the era we are, and this kind of self-development is also some can be Len in this context of like, you know, striving to be something, striving to become something and versus  just letting, accepting that you're.  That you are. Yes.

And letting the beauty of right here right now. Hmm.  Well, thank you so much Simon, for everything you have shared today. I feel deeply enriched  with this dialogue. And is there anything, any last thing you'd like to share for our audience?  Well, I. 

So uh, I think I've gone on to my answers for too long, but anyway, you can, hopefully there's something in there that people can respond to.  There's plenty in there. It was extremely rich and well gonna wish you a good evening back there in Australia. And good morning to you  and good morning to, to us, and thank you for the people who've been listening to this podcast and have a wonderful day.**