From my Substack diary no.178, Tuesday, 9th. June 2026

I found myself reading a newspaper article referencing an interview with Nick Clegg on The Rest Is Money podcast, and I find my mind wandering this morning from the metaverse to psychology!

For five years Nick Clegg was the Deputy Prime Minister in the Tory/LibDem coalition government. He once described his party – the Liberal Democrats – as ‘radical centrist’ which, as an aside, is a term used in recent weeks by Tony Blair.

He had a senior role at a company called Facebook Inc. in 2018. You may have heard of it, although it changed its name to Meta in 2021. He left over a year ago, apparently fearful of the Magafication of Silicon Valley.

Anyway, I digress! My interest was piqued by a phrase he used in that podcast. In his opinion Silicon Valley Executives had shifted politically from more-or-less neutral to the right, and that their products “…changed utterly; from being human-centric to being much more about content, often synthetic content, algorithmically recommended to you..”.

The phrase ‘human-centric’ instantly brought back memories of my post-graduate degree studies in 2004 and in particular to a Psychology module where we learned of a test to determine if an individual might, in relation to their ‘worldview’ (a coherent system of beliefs), be egocentric, homocentric or biocentric. I subsequently used the test many times on work colleagues and friends, with interesting results and, more importantly, it always got a very engrossing and stimulating debate going that made people think about their most fundamental beliefs.

In so doing it dawned on me that it was not so much the psychology theory that underpinned the thinking, or the attachment of labels to individuals that was important, but the discussion and debate that was generated by it. Most of my friends and colleagues wanted to be, or thought of themselves as being ‘biocentric’, and were sometimes horrified to learn that they were ‘homocentric’, although in my book nothing is worse than engaging with someone with an ‘egocentric’ worldview. I looked back at my university notes to remind myself; now then, who does this remind you of:

Egocentric refers to an ethical value that prioritises self-interest above all other concerns. Living according to this ethic would imply taking actions for personal gain that have negative implications for the environment and, perhaps, for other people.