I tried diligently to find any information about the author of this book (and its publisher) S. A. Odunsi. The closest I came to success was this sentence on his website, www.humanrethink.com:
“S.A. Odunsi resides in Texas U.S.A. and is a private business person not affiliated with any public or private academic institution or think tank.”
I note that an interview with Odunsi appears on the web also, in which he reveals that he was not born in the United States and that he wrote this book (the first volume in a
three-volume series) because no one else had yet written on this subject, a subject that he considers of paramount importance: rethinking and then re-ordering priorities in order to truly help solve the worldwide problem of poverty.
I would go out on a limb and say that S.A.Odunsi might agree with the famous statement by Albert Einstein: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." Much of what he posits in this volume (4 chapters) makes it clear that academia cannot solve problems precisely because it insists on using the sorts of problem-solving methods that have bogged us down. Social (soft) scientists, Odunsi insists, are presumed to practice their craft to the same standard of factual data collection as natural (hard) scientists. As social sciences, once the ugly step-brother of hard sciences, have gained ground in academia, less stringent tests have been applied to their credibility as “science.”
It is to social scientists that everyone turns to attempt to understand the data and the reality of world poverty. Yet these academic serfs are completely out of touch with that reality. They navigate through their field of knowledge in comfortable armchairs with tenure as the ultimate goal, not the salvation of the planet. As Odunsi so eloquently puts it, “the academics are stuck, and have demanded, by their actions, that the world remain equally stuck.” The “South” of the world (Latin America, Africa) is being held back because the “West” (or the so-called civilized regions of the earth) has based its thinking about the South on academic paradigms that have no “functionality.”
Doubtless Mr. Odunsi is a brilliant man, albeit a man whose accomplishments apart from Volume I of Deep Thinking the Human Condition are shrouded in mystery. The book suffers only from being too “deep” and provoking so much “thinking” that people like myself who languish in the ordinary “human condition” must read it very slowly indeed. Having done so, I would pronounce to be well worth the effort, and I look forward to subsequent volumes.