Mike Lowe
I like reading aloud. So during this time when much of Australia’s population is in lockdown I thought it would be a nice offering to record myself reading a book that has inspired me and will hopefully inspire others. I’ve already uploaded a few chapters on my private Facebook profile, but here I’m making them available to everyone. I’ll keep adding a couple of chapters each day until the book is complete.
We mostly make our choices based on emotions… and then, after we’ve decided, we find a way to justify those decisions rationally.
It’s a secret that marketers and politicians have long known.
We like to think we are making rational decisions. We like to believe we are making our own choices without being emotionally manipulated. But it’s seldom true.
That is why, when it comes to debates around vaccination, appeals to reason are seldom effective.
Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.
Arthur Schopenhauer
We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully, nor for much longer, unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.
Buckminster Fuller
We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.
John M. Culkin (provenance unclear – see here)
The genius of capitalism is also its fatal flaw – and that thing is specialisation. In simplest terms it means that the baker can just focus on baking, the cobbler can just focus on making shoes, the builder can just focus on building and at the end of the day each person gets everything they need – food, clothing and shelter … and much more.
Violence is often a form of communication born of desperation.
When we don’t or won’t or can’t listen to each other and respond to what we have heard at a human level, there are consequences.
The wisest commentary I ever heard on the Middle East was from a young Palestinian who observed that in her home country there are two peoples crying out in deep pain, desperate for their pain to be heard and acknowledged by the other – and yet each unable to hear and acknowledge the other’s pain. The rocks and rockets, bullets and bombs have their roots in a desperate cry to be heard and seen and acknowledged as fellow suffering humans.
I’ve just had a beautiful and somewhat surreal experience.
I was listening to Bach’s sublime masterpiece the St Matthew’s Passion on a beautiful and sunny Good Friday morning, and through the open windows I noticed a young wallaby listening along with me.
I’m pretty sure that he/she was listening because normally when I see the wallabies they are either passing through, or grazing or sometimes taking a siesta (they usually lie down for this). This wallaby wasn’t doing any of those things – it was sitting still facing my open window and listening. It stayed there for at least an hour and a half, through two CD changes and only moved on when it got spooked by the sounds of a rubbish collection truck reversing at the end of the road nearby.
There’s been a lot of articles published recently about the astonishing results people are getting using psychadelics to treat difficult psychological conditions like depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and anxiety/depression around end of life/terminal illness. The mind-altering substances being used for these studies are mostly psyllocibin (as found in “magic mushrooms”), MDMA (ecstasy) and LSD. A recent book exploring this is by Michael Pollan: How to Change Your Mind.
Facebook and other social media companies make their money by selling advertising. In that respect they are like the old-style media companies – newspapers, radio, television. The difference is that Facebook, Google etc don’t pay for the content that is essential to getting people engaged on the platform so that they can keep serving up ads.
I am Mike Lowe and welcome to my personal blog where I explore topics that are interesting to me and, hopefully to you too. These are thoughts on psychology, spirituality, politics and how we repair a broken culture. They arise from the curious mind of someone who has always loved learning (even though I didn’t love school) and new experiences.
I believe that we are in a time of transition. Old systems, old ways of doing the economy, politics, health, food production, culture and spirituality are failing and breaking down and we don’t yet agree on what should replace them. Part of the problem is that just as a goldfish can’t see the water it swims in, we are so immersed in our culture that we don’t see how its assumptions are deeply embedded in our thinking, our behaviour and even the kinds of questions we ask ourselves.
What we get from the mainstream media and education tends to either ignore the deeper problems, or offer simplistic explanations which don’t go deep enough. Much of the “alternative” movements (alt-right/alt-left politics, alternative health, New-Age spirituality) is also too simplistic and lacks depth and appreciation of the complexities involved. I’m no expert on anything, but I do try to make sense of complex issues without dumbing down, and I share my thoughts in the hope it will stimulate deep thinking and questioning in you, the reader. I don’t expect you to agree with me on every point, but if you go away stimulated and questioning then I am satisfied.
Finally I want to stake my claim as an optimistic realist. That can sound contradictory – and often seems that way to me as well. To be a “realist” given the multiple, vast challenges facing us as a species and a culture, would seem to point to a dark future. But I hold out hope that we can change course rapidly, that there is a core of human nature which is capable of love, self-sacrifice, generosity and kindness – even if these virtues are often dormant and un-rewarded in our mainstream capitalist society. I hold out hope that as our dysfunctional economic and political structures collapse, we will replace them with a generative, generous and co-operative culture which better reflects who we are and can be as a species.
One of the things I love about the film-maker Adam Curtis’s work is that he doesn’t just accept the way things are. He keeps inviting us to look deeper and question the assumed truths of our culture.
One of those assumptions is that revolutions don’t work because the people who come into power always turn out to be just as bad as old lot.
If you want to educate your kids (or yourself) about how money works at this point in time, I suggest a simple experiment. Get a bunch of friends around (where Covid-safe) and start a game of Monopoly, but you and your kids aren’t allowed to join at the start. If you are born before 1980 you get to join when about half the properties on the board have been bought by the other players. if you were born between 1980 and 2000 you join when 75% of the properties have been bought, and if you were born after 2000 you get to join when there is only 1 property left for sale.