A person’s “worldview” is how they conceive reality to be - especially their conceptualisation of what is right and wrong, and how people should behave.
For more on that, see the links below.
A worldview that I would describe as bad (for instance, one that considers specific minority groups or people assigned to groups on the basis of unchangeable characteristics they were born with) is often the basis of the initiation and/or continuation of bigotry / bias / discrimination - especially the systemic forms of those abuses.
An example from my former day job are the senior water authority personnel who insisted that engineers should be the people to make basic operational decisions instead of operators.
The problems with that worldview include:
- the observations of operators - especially at times plants were not attended by others, and during operational upsets - were CRUCIAL pieces of information, which often could not possibly be covered by instrumentation;
- this is disparaging of operators skills and professionalism - and, in my experience, the overwhelming majority were excellent (there were bad ones, but those I could count on the finger of one hand after nearly half a century);
- it assumes engineers have a detailed familiarity with ALL treatment plants in ALL situations, whereas each plant is a unique combination of generic plant process, specific pant design, and specific operational circumstances - including historic;
- it has a classist bias that places a faith in tertiary qualifications that dangerously underplays the value of experience.
The net effect of that bad worldview was a workplace that was limiting, disempowering, and demotivating of workers, and one that cost rate payers money as it forced use of engineers to make decisions that were within the capabilities of operators - especially if someone spent a little time and effort to train them properly.
That unnecessary expenditure was particularly ironic given that many of those senior personnel prided themselves on their (self perceived) cost efficiency.
Fortunately, over the last quarter century of my career, many water authorities had woken up to this, and operators were being given due credit and proper respect, and empowered to do the tasks they could and properly should.
Related to that is another bad worldview, which is that engineers want to do everything in their field / save money (even if that involves wasting money by trials of unproven/unrealistic notions - which I found particularly egregious when the money was public money * ) / be enamoured of technological - rather than being focused on environment and social considerations first. Then again, I and others who were focused on environment and the community we were supposed to be serving were in the minority for much of my career. Again, this started to improve in the last decade or so.
I will give one more example of a bad worldview, which I came across in a YouTube video: a father, a soldier, who thought he could disrespect the privacy of his son whenever he wanted. As the now adult son pointed out in the video, that was psychological abuse. In the context of this post, it reflected the emotionally crippled worldview that pseudo-father had as a result of the combination of whatever psychological flaws he had plus the perversions imposed by the training implemented by a militaristic worldview.
Now, in all these instances, the people with those bad worldviews are victims. And that is entirely secondary to the fact that the very real harm they are doing MUST be contained so no other victims are created by their perverted mentality.
Including, above all else, those who are causing emotional damage rather than physical - and those who do not understand the importance of that are themselves probably exercising a bad worldview.
I am aware that I have been confrontational in this post. My experience is that such (and another example of this is pointing out to bigots that what they may consider a “harmless eccentricity” is actually killing people) is necessary to jolt those with the bad worldviews into the sort of fundamental doubt needed in order to change something as fundamental as one’s worldview.
One final point: some worldviews are GOOD, and result in lots of good work being done in this world.
Some links on worldview:
Some other links to consider:
- https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-evil-that-is-known-as-fascism.html
- https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2023/06/patriarchy.html
- https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/2023/08/post-no-2535-trauma-content-warning.html
* First and foremost, something a university graduate designs/builds/operates should reasonably be expected to actually operate under normal (“reasonably foreseeable”) circumstances ... and yet I had some whine, when their experimental design didn’t work, that they should be given credit for trying to save money - when they had actually increased the rates that ratepayers would be slugged with! The out-of-touch-cluelessness and arrogance of those people was appalling. But those problem were not confined to engineers. Examples of what I consider unethical decisions by water authorities include awarding contracts to companies on the basis of building something and conducting trials into how well a brand new and not-proven-at-scale process could be made to work despite the bid document requirements around proven performance being complied with by other bidders, or to companies that didn’t actually have a workforce (the amathiac argument was that they could hire people who would have worked for other companies on that job! ... despite the reality that very few people are able to chuck in a job and go chasing a specific project) when the bid documents had specifically requested details of the workforce. I haven’t included this in the main text as it is more professional incompetence, not only bad worldviews.
PS - subsequent to publishing this post, some additional information I came across led me to publish the following, which is about a worldview that is, in my opinion, genocidal:
- “The contempt of transphobes towards the human species [Content Warning: discussion of life-threatening hatred and bigotry]” https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-contempt-of-transphobes-towards.html
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