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.

The book is called Original Wisdom – Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing by Robert Wolff, a psychologist who spent some time living with and getting to know the Sng’oi – the indigenous people of Malaysia’s rainforest.

From the blurb on the back of the book:”Psychologist Robert Wolff, who has spent a lifetime with indigenous people from many parts of the world, lived with the Sng’oi during the years he spent in Malaysia. He learned their language, shared their food, slept in their shelters, and came to love and admire these people who respect silence, trust time to reveal and heal, and live entirely in the present with a sense of joy. Even more, he came to recognise the depth of our alienation from these ways of living.

“Much more than a collective document of a disappearing people, these stories hold a mirror to our own existence, allowing us to see how far we have wandered from the ways of the Sng’oi. And ultimately they challenge us, in our fragmented world, to rediscover within ourselves the Sng’oi’s humanity, trust, and sense of connection to all creation.”

I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed reading it.

i) Introduction by Thom Hartmann, author of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

ii) Foreword

Chapter 1. Assumptions

Chapter 2. Draw Something, Anything

Chapter 3. Bali and the Barong

Chapter 4. Different Realities

Chapter 5. Succession

Chapter 6. Dimensions of Healing

The post Bedtime Stories with Mike appeared first on Mike Lowe.

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.

We are living in a time of massive loss, disruption, fear and anxiety. There is so much to grieve – and yet how many people are grieving consciously?

I see a lot of unconscious grief being projected instead of owned: anger being projected as blaming and shaming and looking for scapegoats; others in denial about the reality of the pandemic, wanting to stick their heads in the sand and carry on as it didn’t exist. All of this against a backdrop of fear of death or chronic illness that people also don’t want to feel – and so the unconscious mind attempts to control the situation so that we don’t have to feel the fear – and this comes out as attempts to control the behaviour of other people.

All of these unacknowledged and un-owned emotions make us prone to poor decision-making and make us prone to manipulation – and if you think that the only people with an agenda of manipulation are the people who you disagree with – think again.

No matter how much evidence you have looked at, how many scientific reports you’ve read or scientists you’ve listened to, it comes down to this question: Who do you trust? What narrative “feels” right?

Governments and scientists who are wanting people to get vaccinated would find their job much easier if they had a track record of acting with integrity and transparency so that people trusted them. Instead there has been a steady decline over many years in people’s trust in governments and big business and even scientists. This is where the battle needs to be fought, instead of hokey TV ads.

If we want to make good decisions ourselves, and help others make better decisions, it would really help if we could acknowledge the emotions that are present.

Imagine if people with different views to our own said things to us like: “I understand your fear and concern about getting sick or dying (either from being vaccinated or from not being vaccinated) and your fear is valid because there is a real risk. I also have a fear of getting sick or dying!” If our fears were not dismissed we might be more open to listening to each other about what the relative risks are.

Imagine if we could say to ourselves and each other things like “I understand how painful this disruption, uncertainty and loss is. I understand the anger that this is happening to us and I understand how much we wish it was not happening. All of these feelings are valid and welcome to be expressed as we come to terms with a changed world.”

For me, none of this came naturally as I was raised not to acknowledge or pay attention to emotions. But the more I’ve learned to feel, acknowledge and express emotions, the less I get hijacked by them in myself or in others.

The post Acknowledging Emotions in a Pandemic appeared first on Mike Lowe.

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.

Early humans did not have that luxury. Although there was probably some specialisation in tribal groups, most people had to know how to find or grow food, use animal skins to keep warm and if shelters were built they would have been built by the community in whatever time was left over after finding and preparing food.

As societies got bigger and more complex there would have been increasing specialisation, but the tool which made very high levels of specialisation possible was the invention of money.

The world before money

Exchange existed long before money, but it was based on relationships. In fact relationships were the most important thing and being able to give things to others would have strengthened those relationships. This is an important point to grasp. As David Graeber points out in Debt, the first 5000 years: cultures that don’t have money operate a kind of gifting economy where giving is not just a virtue but a social obligation, especially when someone asks for something or has a need for something. In these cultures, exchange doesn’t happen as barter (I’ll trade my pig for your yams) but as social glue binding the tribe together in bonds of mutual indebtedness. If Jesse has given Jo some eggs, then Jo is indebted to Jesse and that’s a good thing because if a time comes where Jesse needs something from Jo, Jo is obligated to give it.

Before money, exchange and gifting existed to serve relational capital. That was the focus. People understood that their survival and wellbeing depended on the tribe or village and the worst thing that could happen would be for the village to reject someone or see them as of no value. Therefore the most important thing a person could be is a person who is known and highly valued by the whole community.

If success was measured in terms of happiness, these would be very successful societies. But they can’t scale bigger than around 150 people (the average number of people a human is able to keep tabs on through personal connection and via gossip). That is not a big enough economy to support the level of specialisation required to produce steel, copper wiring, semi-conductors, computer programmers etc. To scale beyond the village/tribe required a new tool – money.

Although money has been around for a long time, it wasn’t the main medium of exchange until the industrial revolution. It was first minted by rulers (and only rulers were allowed to do this) to pay armies and administrative servants of the state, mainly in the cities where they lived alongside merchants trading between cities and continents using gold and silver coin. In other words money was the main medium of exchange among the non-productive classes and in the cities. In rural areas where the food was actually grown (along with timber and mining) most people were either slaves or feudal serfs and did not have access to money. Here in the villages, social capital and gifting exchange was still the main local economy and money may even have been seen as bad because of it’s association with soldiers and, probably alcoholic ex-soldiers suffering from PTSD, rootless and wandering the land causing trouble (see Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale “The love of money is the root of all evil”)

With the Industrial Revolution, money shifted to becoming the main focus. Where previously exchange and gifting had served the higher purpose of relationship, that became inverted: Now relationship became secondary to exchange and earning money. Instead of being secure and valued members of a community, people began to see themselves as free (rootless) merchants selling their labour, and talents to whoever was willing to pay regardless of whether that person respected or cared for them.

We take this for granted now, but at the time it was questioned and resisted. The artist and poet William Blake (1757-1827) warned of the “dark satanic mills” which destroyed nature and community. He and some of his contemporaries rebelled against the soul-less, heart-less machinery of the capitalist state that they saw gradually taking over.

The Rev. Adam Smith (1723-90) who was the first to describe what we now call capitalism in his book The Wealth of Nations was better known in his lifetime for his book A Theory of Moral Sentiments which argues that sympathy/empathy for our fellow human-beings is the basis of all morality and is essential for society. In other words he argued for a relational view of society. Smith himself regarded this as a more important work than The Wealth of Nations and a necessary restraint on the impulses of greed and manipulation that capitalism would unleash.

As a tool for creating material wealth, money has been wildly successful. The wealthiest rulers of a few centuries ago could not imagine the kinds of luxurious prosperity that is the lifestyle of the average Australian – running hot water available 24/7, foods from distant parts of the globe in any season, chariots to take us in comfort and at high speed wherever we want to go, and a choice of the world’s greatest story-tellers appearing in our own homes every evening.

But there is a cost to this. All tools become an extension of ourselves – tool and human become merged, and in doing so tools change us. They change how we see ourselves and how we see the world.

Before money, we saw ourselves and the world in terms of relationships. That was our lens and our focus. And it extended beyond just human relationships to the cosmos and the natural world. We saw ourselves as a part of something bigger than our individual selves – as part of community, tribe, place, landscape, the plant and animal worlds, and as spiritual beings in relationship with other spiritual beings – human, non-human and trans-human.

Thinking relationally means we can also think in terms of systems – which is essential if we are to avoid the various systemic collapses that potentially await us.

Money and capitalism leads us to see ourselves and the world through the lens of money and specialisation. In the classical model, the baker doesn’t have to care about the big picture and he doesn’t have to care about the struggles and lives of other people – he just has to care about making bread and by doing so he gets paid and everyone gets fed. Whether he is cruel or compassionate makes no difference – so long as he’s doing his job and getting paid the system will take care of his and everyone else’s needs. If he is compassionate he may feel less bad about paying taxes to take care of people who are elderly or cannot work – he may even give some of his own money to help them, or to help protect some endangered species or a heritage building. But he thinks of this compassionate giving as something optional – it is not a necessity for his own survival or for the survival of the system. And when it comes time to vote, he will tend to vote for the leaders who he thinks will let him earn and keep the most money.

In our schools and colleges we are encouraged to specialise, and to choose specialisations that will give us the best earning potential. Similarly businesses are encouraged to find and exploit niche markets. If they can “dominate” that market by eliminating competition they can charge higher prices and pressure suppliers to deliver at lower prices – anything to maximise profits. They don’t need to worry about the economic, social, psychological or environmental health of the place they are doing business in – that’s not their responsibility.

Under capitalism we are not encouraged to form strong connections to a particular place because we might have to move to another place to get a job (or a better job), so we don’t notice the long-term changes, the flowers that bloom earlier, the drop in insect numbers, the birds that no longer visit, the trees that are struggling or being chopped down.

What is important, we are told, is the economy. Yes, we hear the environmental scientists talking about species loss and environmental collapse, but fixing that costs money so it will have to wait until the economy is better. Meanwhile, we are told, things are looking up! Share prices are rising and the stock market has never looked better, so we don’t need to worry.

Our inability to think in terms of systems and relationships will be our downfall. We have become blind to our own inter-connectedness and the ways that our own wellbeing depends on healthy human and non-human ecosystems. We have forgotten that money and the economy are human constructs that we can change, and instead think of them as forces of nature that we and everything else has to bow down to.

Is there an answer?

Nobody truly knows if there’s an answer because we haven’t been in this situation before. But if there is an answer it has to be along the lines that Adam Smith foresaw – we need a focus on relational thinking (what Smith called “moral sentiment”) to counter-balance the effects of money on our psyche. In the past “moral sentiment” was the domain of religion. But religion (for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this blog post) has not done too well in this regard.

Perhaps education? It would certainly be great if schools made systems thinking central, with constant linking of each academic discipline to the wider whole and to relationships. But schools are a reflection of the values and culture they operate within. It would be unfair to place all the burden of cultural change upon schools.

The same applies to politics. We can wish for better leadership (I certainly do!) but what chance would a systems thinking, ecologically aware, truth-telling compassionate candidate have of being elected? Virtually nil!

No, my friends, if there is an answer it is going to lie with us – change starting with ourselves and rippling out from there as we practice relational thinking, systems thinking and empathy for all.

The post The genius and curse of specialisation appeared first on Mike Lowe.

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.

And it’s not just in the Middle East. I see it everywhere – and frequently in couples who are going through difficulties and triggering each other.

What makes it doubly difficult to break out of this cycle is trauma.

Unhealed trauma often leads to a kind of myopic tunnel vision fueled by fear and focussed on ME getting MY NEEDS met. In this space, anyone who gets in MY WAY is an enemy to be feared, avoided, fought against. It is very hard to see the humanity and the legitimate needs of the other when we are in this trauma space.

And the tragedy is that when people are acting from this trauma space, they often pass on trauma, and so the cycle continues and the pain and separation and “othering” grows.

As outsiders looking on, it is easy to get drawn into taking sides in the conflict. Like a black hole, a conflict has a gravitational pull. The people inside the conflict are desperate for allies. “Look at my pain! Look at what the other side is doing to me/us! Be my ally and treat my enemy as your enemy!”

But picking one side over another would be a mistake, and doesn’t help defuse or heal the conflict. What is needed is to listen to BOTH sides with compassion and humanity and gradually to help heal the underlying traumas.

This doesn’t mean that we are blind to power imbalances or that we equate the suffering of one side with the suffering of the other. The moment we do that we cease to listen. The language of pain and suffering cannot be quantified. Each individual’s pain is a universe unto itself and deserves our complete and un-analytical attention.

What that means is that we don’t say things like: “Yes, but” or “But if you had done this, they wouldn’t have done that”. To truly listen we have to suspend our ego – that part of us that is always trying to compute and calculate what is going on. To truly listen means parking (for a while) our own perspectives and opening up to what it really is like to be in the other person’s shoes.

Something miraculous happens when people really, deeply, fully listen: The person who feels heard starts to come out of their tunnel vision. They feel they are not alone! And because they are not alone, because there is at least ONE PERSON who truly understands, suddenly the universe is not quite such a scary place. Suddenly, they feel “getting what I NEED” is not quite so urgent, and a little space starts to open to see the needs of others.

To my friends in Israel and Palestine, my heart goes out to you. I see and hear how much you are hurting, how devastating this conflict is for you, how you fear for your lives and how you mourn your friends and compatriots, women and children who are killed, maimed, homes lives and livelihoods destroyed. None of you deserve this. You all deserve to live in peace and with security.

And to my friends closer to home who are in conflict and feeling un-heard, I also say: “I see and hear your pain. You deserve to be understood and I know how painful it is to be misunderstood or ignored and your needs discounted.”

And I’m here for you if you want to talk.

The post When we don’t listen appeared first on Mike Lowe.

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 an only moved on when it got spooked by the sounds of a rubbish collection truck reversing at the end of the road nearby.

As we shared this spiritual experience together, I was contemplating the suffering of Jesus on the cross and I wondered what the wallaby’s experience was – and I imagined it contemplating the millions of animals who died in the fires last year and, more recently, the floods. And in my imagination wallaby and human were sharing a sacred ritual time of grieving for all who suffer and all who have passed, united across species in our shared love and compassion.

Suffering is hard!

Suffering is hard!

It’s hard to make sense of. It’s hard to be present to our own suffering and it’s hard to be present to suffering in other people.

In our relatively affluent Western culture it may be even harder because we are raised almost to believe that we have a right to not suffer. We are cut off, insulated from suffering. If, as children, we got sick we were taken to the doctor with an unshakeable faith that we could be cured with some medicines or, in the worst case, an operation. If we experience pain we are given pain-killers and for emotional pain there are anti-depressants and counsellors.

Culturally we avoid being present to the reality of suffering, just as we avoid being present to the reality of death.

So when we do experience suffering – the incurable disease; the times of poverty; the pain that won’t go away; the heartache of betrayal, separation and loss – it comes as a bit of a shock!

And to make things even worse we have the widespread belief that “we get what we deserve”.

We get what we deserve

This modern heresy comes in various forms. It is the Law of Attraction: the prosperity gurus teaching that wealth or poverty is all about our mindset. It is the New Age distortion of Quantum Theory, teaching us that we manifest whatever we hold in our consciousness. It is the Prosperity Theology that is sweeping through many churches, particularly in America (but now increasingly in Australia as well), which says that if we do the right thing by God – following the 10 commandments, giving a 10^th of our money to the church – then God will bless us with prosperity as a reward (and therefore if we are not being blessed by God then we can’t be doing the right thing).

These beliefs persist even outside spirituality. When the average Australian thinks of poor people, most likely they think of “dole-bludgers”, welfare scroungers, people who drink too much or do drugs. Or they might think of refugees who are terrifyingly different from us – uncivilised people from uncivilised countries who we fear might bring their problems with them to our civilised and prosperous nation.

Again the underlying message is that these poor people who suffer are somehow responsible for their own suffering.

It is a core belief of the dominant neo-liberal economic and political paradigm. And it is obvious to anyone who cares to look, that this belief is designed to benefit the wealthy and privileged and to justify not showing compassion, not sharing wealth and power to lift people out of poverty.

And none of this is a new phenomenon!

The old, old story

Jesus confronted the same attitudes in relation to leprosy. The prevailing religious view of his time was that leprosy was a disease that afflicted people who had displeased God in some way. Their “uncleanness” and untouchability was not based on a fear of catching the disease by touching a leper (in fact it is very hard to catch it from touching a leper), but based on a fear of them being morally and spiritually unclean.

Of course, Jesus would have none of this, and he touched and healed the lepers he encountered.

Long before Jesus we have the Old Testament story of Job – a man who was “blameless and upright, fearing God and turning away from evil” – who experienced calamity after calamity, losing everything, and then having to put up with his so-called “comforters” who thought he must be in some way responsible for his own plight. The story of Job is an important counterpoint to the endemic belief that we get what we deserve.

Riding trains in India

In India, a continent of ancient and diverse spirituality, a continent of vast contrasts of wealth and poverty, we have the concepts of Karma and Caste, and I gained some insights into these when travelling in India in my 20s. Before then, I hadn’t seen myself as wealthy. But in the face of constant poverty and begging from people who clearly had much less than I did, I was torn between my instinct for compassion and desire to help and on the other side my fear of giving away everything I own to what was clearly an inexhaustible ocean of need. With relief I latched onto the story I’d be told that most of them were working for gangs and wouldn’t even get to keep the money I gave them. It was the excuse I needed (and wanted) to not give money, and so instead I carried a bunch of bananas and gave them away whenever a beggar asked.

I remember one overnight train ride. Normally I’d been able to book tickets in carriages with bunks, but this time they were all booked out and all I could get was a reserved seat. Unlike the sleeping carriages these were open to anyone with a ticket to travel, and at each station more people would pile into the carriage. While I was reflexively using my elbows to protect the seat space that I had paid for and felt entitled to, I noticed that the poor people sitting at my feet would act completely differently – squeezing themselves even smaller to make room for other people. I felt ashamed of my reactions and decided to instead surrender to the experience – a decision that was soon challenged when one of the small children sitting above me in the luggage rack needed to pee, and some of the pee landed on my head.

I share these experiences to illustrate just how hard the encounter with poverty and suffering can be if we really open ourselves to the experience.

On that trip I was often angered by what I saw as the indifference and hard-heartedness of the Indian middle classes who seemed not to care about the suffering around them. By the time I came to leave, several months later, I was relieved to be going. I understood that if I was to stay there there were only two possible paths for me – either I could keep surrendering as I had on that train, and end up like Mother Teresa (who I met in Calcutta) in service to love and compassion; or I could try to hold onto whatever wealth, possessions and status I had, and end up like the middle classes I had judged so harshly.

In those moments of moral confrontation I had to decide: – this person in front of me, who needs my money more than I need it – is he my brother, my equal as one of God’s children? Or is he lesser than me, less deserving than I, and therefore someone who in some way deserves to have less wealth than I do?

The undeserving poor

This question, I believe, goes right to the heart of the economic inequality in the world today.

Those who have wealth, in a world where people suffer because of poverty, can only justify holding onto their wealth by believing that they are better than the others – that they deserve their wealth and others deserve their poverty. And to maintain that belief, the rich go to great lengths to make sure that they don’t ever have to really encounter in any meaningful way people who are poor and who suffer. And the richer people become, the more cut off they become from the realities of the majority of the world.

In India, these dynamics manifest in the Caste system: people are born into a particular caste and status because of their Karma – the consequences of their actions in previous lives. So everyone gets what they deserves!

Of course there is a layer of truth to this – but there is a real danger when we import a superficial belief in Karma into a hyper-individualised Western culture where it sits alongside half-baked notions of the Law of Attraction, neo-liberal economics, trauma and widespread addictions to consumerism, status-anxiety and other ills.

Buddhist detachment

India also gave rise to Buddhism, another important response to the problem of suffering. For the Buddha, suffering is part and parcel of the world we inhabit, and our attempts to avoid suffering just make things worse. Suffering comes through attachment to what we desire, and the way to lessen suffering is to let go of attachment and embrace and accept the transient nature of what is.

Authentic Buddhism has much depth and subtlety to it. But when the idea of “detachment” is detached from the breadth and richness of Buddhist culture and imported into Western thought, it often becomes “spiritual by-passing”. In the name of detachment, Western spiritual by-passers avoid the emotions that are essential to processing pain and loss – the emotions of grief, anger and despair. Just as Jesus’ contemporaries avoided contact with lepers, today’s spiritual by-passers avoid engaging with the emotions of pain because these are “low vibration” emotions and they don’t want to lower their “vibrational state” by having to feel them. Buddhist detachment often gets translated in the West to psychological avoidance with meditation as the mode of avoidance.

Again: Suffering is hard!

Why me?

There’s a part of the thinking mind, sometimes called the egoic mind, that sees its job as keeping us safe by working out what is going on. In the face of suffering, this egoic mind goes into overdrive asking the question “Why?”:

“Why me?”

“Why is this happening to me?”

“What have I done to deserve this?”

This last question may seem strange. It often seems incomprehensible to us that children who have been abused routinely believe that the abuse was their fault. And yet …. could it be that the alternative is even more terrifying?

If I can work out what I did wrong, then I can avoid doing it and the suffering will stop.

But if my suffering is not because of anything I have done, then there is nothing I can do to prevent it. At any time, and for no reason, I can be thrown into the experience of suffering and there is not a goddam thing I can do about it.

Terrifying!

The suffering of the innocent is often used as the conclusive logical proof that God, as an all-powerful and loving supreme-being cannot exist. The argument goes like this: If God is all-powerful and can prevent suffering but chooses not to, then he cannot be all good. If God wishes to relieve suffering but cannot, then he is not all-powerful. These themes are brilliantly explored by Dostoevsky in his novel The Bothers Karamazov in the section called The Grand Inquisitor (well worth a read – in fact essential reading IMHO).

Spiritual paradoxes

Returning to Good Friday – the day in the Christian calendar when we remember the torture and execution of Jesus (God incarnate; Human embodying the Divine) – what can Christianity offer us when contemplating suffering?

A wise Archbishop once said that “heresy is the refusal to embrace both sides of a paradox”. Spiritual truths are often paradoxical – ie they hold two or more apparently contradictory truths alongside each other.

Going back to Karma, it expresses a truth that our universe has a law of cause and effect. In such a universe, my every action and every thought has consequences which ripple out (often consequences which are unseen) affecting my own life and the lives of others and I have to take responsibility for those consequences .

In paradoxical tension with that is another truth which says that the universe is full of many other beings whose actions and intentions are rippling out and combining with each other in unpredictable ways. The little boat of my life is often tossed about by those combined ripples which sometimes come at me as huge waves and even storms which threaten to sink me.

Taking a step further, we can say that my actions (which flow from my thoughts) have the potential to cause either joy or suffering (and all points in between) for myself and for others. And other’s actions have the potential to cause joy or suffering to me. Here we get into the territory of “sin” (in English the word comes from a Saxon archery word which means “to miss the target”) and the relationship between “sin” and suffering.

In Christianity there is a relationship between sin and suffering, but it is not a clear and direct relationship. We learn that sin gets passed on “to the seventh generation” (inter-generational trauma). And we learn that the “price” (in terms of painful consequences) can be paid by someone who is themselves without sin – ie they were in no way, shape or form responsible for causing that suffering. And sometimes suffering simply falls on undeserving people without any discernable cause, without rhyme or reason.

Beyond that, we learn that God her/himself knows what it is like to suffer, to be betrayed and abandoned by even the closest friends, to lose everything – even faith itself (Jesus’s words on the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”). Orthodox traditions even say that Jesus descended into the depths of hell itself. The message here is: whatever suffering we can experience, God knows from direct experience what it is like and is able to walk alongside us, to accompany us in our suffering. And Christians are invited to walk alongside and accompany those who suffer, embodying as much as we are capable the example of Jesus.

Impermanence

The timing of Easter in the Christian calendar (at least in the Northern hemisphere) also points to an ancient truth – the law of change and cycles. This is the truth we see expressed in indigenous traditions as the Medicine Wheel and the Four Directions. Easter marks the point in the calendar between Winter and Spring. Winter is the time of darkness, the time of unknowing, the time of death. It is followed by Spring, the time of fresh green shoots emerging from the dead earth, the season of lambs being born and bunny rabbits emerging from their burrows, chicks emerging from their eggs as the shells crack open (a reminder that we may need to crack open if we are to give birth to something new). So Christianity can also teach us that all things pass and change, nothing is stuck and permanent, and that death and rebirth, times of abundance and times of scarcity, times of light and times of darkness, are all part of the natural cycles of the universe.

I’m offering these perspectives – not from a place of believing Christianity superior to other religions, but because this is the tradition I grew up in and know best and continue to deepen in. I also recognise that much of what goes by the label Christianity lacks depth and compassion and is infected by the errors and delusions of the wider culture. The same can be said of all religions – but those are subjects for other blog posts.

Coming back to our theme of suffering on this Good Friday 2021, I think the wisest note to end on is silence. There comes a point when witnessing, or accompanying, or experiencing suffering, where words fail us. There is nothing useful to be said, no sense to be made, no words that can ease the pain. That egoic voice that is desperately trying to understand, trying to make sense, trying to find someone to blame … that voice has to fall silent in the face of the great mystery. All that remains is to stay present – not so much in our minds but in our bodies, hearts and emotions. To stay present and heart-open as long as it takes … until at last … by a mysterious alchemy … we are transformed … deepened … purified … cracked open … into something new and mysterious.

The post Suffering – and why most modern spirituality sucks appeared first on Mike Lowe.

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.

The healers of traditional cultures (what Western anthropologists came to call ‘shamans’) have long known about the benefits of specific altered states of consciousness for healing and for gaining special knowledge and insights. Still today, many shamans routinely enter such states, and help others to enter these states, as part of their healing work. Some shamans use natural psychoactive ‘plant medicine’ for this, but many others use methods which don’t involve ingesting anything.

Different ways to enter altered states

There are many ways to enter into altered states of consciousness. When I did some training with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies we were taught to use drumming to enter the ‘shamanic state of consciousness’. The hypnotic steady beat of the ‘medicine’ drum at the right frequency entrains the brain into a theta brainwave state – a state usually associated with sleep or deep meditation. Some recent research suggests that the theta state may help the brain processing some kinds of non propositional knowledge – ie the more embodied knowledge we can’t learn in books or as information (such as riding a bike). In this ‘shamanic state’ the experience can be like a journey which may involve flying – the origins of terms like ‘getting high’ or ‘taking a trip’ or ‘tripping’.

Another way of entering an altered state is through particular controlled breathing techniques. Stanislav Grof was one of the leading psychiatrists researching LSD for healing back in the 1960s. When LSD was banned he and his wife Christine developed Holotropic Breathwork as an alternative. Grof was friends with Michael Harner, the anthropologist-turned-shaman who started the Foundation for Shamanic Studies as a way to bring the insights of core shamanism to Western culture. My sense from reading and personal experience is that there is much in common between these two approaches.

There are also parallels with some forms of meditation, including meditation that is enhanced by binaural technologies (such as binaural beats, Hemi-Sync and Holosync). There are further parallels with a psycho-therapeutic technique developed by Carl Jung called Active Imagination where we enter a deeply relaxed state on the border between sleep and wakefulness, and in that state we take a dream or an image that has some potency for us and allow it to play out or unfold driven by the unconscious and observed by the conscious mind.

Personally I’ve never taken psychadelics but I have spoken to people who have experienced both ‘plant medicine’ and drumming journeys, and they report that essentially there is no difference. The differences are that some people may, for various reasons, have trouble dropping into a deep drum journey whereas the psychadelics take you straight there. Once you are in a drumming journey it is possible to snap right out of that state if needed, or if something disturbing is experienced. With a psychadelic experience that isn’t possible. In other words, the conscious mind is a bit more present in the drumming journey than in the psychadelic journey.

What happens in altered states?

What is happening in the mind in these altered states? The evidence suggests different parts of the brain that don’t usually communicate suddenly start talking to each other, particularly across the two hemispheres of the brain. The effect is that our default ways of seeing and understanding gets shaken up. There’s a loosening of previously rigid beliefs, assumptions and thought-forms. There’s an opening of possibilities, of different perspectives, a seeing of patterns and things that were previously unseen. This can be confronting or liberating. It can be life-changing in the sense that these new perspectives persist even after the altered state has worn off. It can also be a source of great creativity as we metaphorically ‘step outside the box’.

There seems to be a need for humans to experience altered states, and shamanism has been practiced for tens of thousands of years. Modern Western culture may be the first in human history that doesn’t put a cultural value on these states – to the point of making psychadelics illegal and (until recently) banning research on their therapeutic benefits.

Altered states in traditional cultures

People in pre-modern and traditional cultures would routinely experience various altered states of consciousness through participation in ceremony and rituals. Also there would be a cultural openness to the experience of non-ordinary reality breaking through in various form (e.g. signs in nature, dreams, people hearing voices in their heads) and a general belief in a ‘spirit world’ that can communicate with this world. I think that one of the tragedies of many contemporary religious communities is that most people don’t experience life-changing altered states of consciousness when they go to church or mosque or temple. Instead, what is offered is teaching: the insights passed second and third hand from the religious founders who did directly experience the spirit world.

In the spiritual desert that is the modern world, people’s hunger to experience these altered states finds expression in many different ways. This includes taking drugs, various ‘alternative’ spiritual communities and practices, and experiencing certain types of music such as psy-trance music, (where the hypnotic beat of the music may have the same effect as the shaman’s drum) and chanting. Gregorian chant is an ancient Christian music form which creates an altered state. Kirtan is a meditative repetitive chant form from India. Taizé chants are a modern Christian revival of this music form with a lot of similarities to Kirtan. One of my personal recent favourite musical discoveries which takes me into a deep state is RyX.

The risks

Not all altered states are beneficial. Alcohol, while doing some loosening also depresses the brain’s ability to process and make new connections. This makes it the ideal drug for avoiding processing or dealing with painful stuff. But any experience which alters our consciousness can be used as an avoidance. And while avoidance can feel good in the short term, it is a harmful long-term strategy. Alcoholics find they need to consume more and more alcohol to achieve the numbing they seek, and the same can be true of any addictive pattern or substance of avoidance.

Another real danger of altered states is when someone has a lot of unprocessed trauma and their psyche has built strong walls around that trauma in order for them to function. In these cases a sudden and radical loosening of the rigid structures of the psyche could be overwhelming and re-traumatising.

Or in another language, the shaman might say that the spirit world is a place with dangers, just as this world has dangers (from venemous snakes and spiders to predatory humans) and we need to be respectful, exercise caution, and tread carefully. This is not a place/state to enter carelessly and without intention. When we lower our psychic walls there is a risk that unhelpful psychic entities/thought-forms can intrude. On the other hand, by loosening our rigid defences and belief patterns there is a chance for real and deep healing, processing of trauma, and profound and lasting growth.

The shamanic perspective is that when we journey (get high/go on a trip) is wise to have a guide who can protect us. This might be a guide from the spirit world who we have come to know and trust, or it might be the shaman herself.

In the modern re-discovery of psychadelics for therapy, there is a similar mindfulness of treading carefully, having an experienced therapist accompanying the ‘patient’ and building a safe container/environment for this work.

On a broader scale, the conscious and mindful rediscovery of working with altered states may be an essential tool as we transition from a dying and dysfunctional culture into something more human and life-enhancing. We literally may need to use altered states to alter ‘The State’.

If anyone is interested in exploring this field in a very safe way, I offer drumming journeys for individuals and groups. There are also various drumming journeys that can be downloaded for people to experiment with using headphones. Compared to psychadelics, it’s a very gentle and safe way to start exploring altered states and their amazing benefits.

The post Altered States appeared first on Mike Lowe.

Facebook has implemented a news sharing ban in Australia.

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.

Everyone who produces content that gets posted on Facebook is working for Facebook and not getting paid for it.

Personally I can live with that. But the news companies who have to pay the salaries and expenses of journalists and others who produce the news – well they are seeing their income drop as the advertising revenue they rely on flows more and more to Facebook etc.

Death of journalism

Potentially that means the death of professional journalism. And then, God help us when it comes to finding out what the people with power are up to, and being able to hold them accountable!

I know that the Morrison Govt marches to Rupert Murdoch’s tune and that is probably the reason the Australian government has introduced the legislation forcing Facebook etc to pay for news content posted on its platform. And the legislation probably could be improved.
But think of the big issues at stake here. It’s more than just Morrison, Murdoch and Zuckerberg.

Personally I’d like to see social media as a publicly owned service. It is too powerful to not be under democratic control. And the profits that are generated should be shared fairly with the people who produce the content that makes the platform engaging.

Propaganda on steroids

We have already seen massive evidence of the Facebook effect of spreading disinformation and undermining democracy in several countries.

It’s a propaganda machine on steroids, available for hire to anyone with the right money.

As Daniel Schmachtenberger said recently, nobody wakes up in the morning with an intention to spend 6 hours on Facebook. The fact that we do spend significant parts of our lives there is because it has detailed psychological profiles of each one of us based on our interactions over many thousands of hours. A.I. combined with big data means that Facebook’s algorithms can predict very accurately what we will respond to to keep us engaged. In many ways the algorithms know us better than we know ourselves.

For many people, Facebook (and to a lesser extent Google, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok) is their main interface with the world. It is how we keep up with our friends. It is also how we find out what is happening in the wider world.

There are very real dangers in allowing commercial companies to be the gatekeeper of this interface.

By banning news content and the sharing of news in Australia, Facebook is showing its power to censor what we see. Imagine what else it could ban, or what stories it could aggressively promote.

Somehow, this huge power needs to be brought under democratic control.

The post Why Facebook Should Pay for News appeared first on Mike Lowe.

Welcome to my personal blog where I explore topics that are interesting to me and, hopefully to you too. As I’ve said in the blog’s sub-heading, 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 breaking down and we don’t yet agree on what should replace them. Part of the problem is that just as the 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. Much of what I write is designed to stimulate deep thoughts and questions. 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 claim to an optimist, despite the dark topic matter I often write about. The Old Testament prophets often described a terrible future – not as a prediction of what was going to happen, but as a warning of what would happen if the nation continued on its present course. Their intention was to change that course and avert the disaster they prophesied. This is also my hope, that we will collectively and individually wake up in time and change direction.

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.

Everybody still gets the same income each time they pass “GO”, but all the property already owned on the board is a powerful system of wealth re-distribution from those who have less to those who have more. The different joining points for different ages reflects the price of property relative to median incomes over the last 40 years. It also reflects the fact that the world’s assets have already been unevenly distributed before we start playing the game of life, and as time goes on the unevenness increases.

In a normal game of Monopoly, when you land on a property and the “rent” owing is more than you can pay, you are out of the game. But in this educational version you aren’t allowed to quit. Instead the bank will lend you the money to keep playing, so you just keep accumulating more debt. And at the end of the night you don’t put the game away, you leave it as is, so that the next time you play you start from the same positions.

OK, you can point out all the obvious over-simplifications in this, and yes brilliant entrepreneurs can still succeed. But overall I think it does explain why we keep seeing the wealth gap widening and why we urgently need some wealth re-distribution mechanisms (taxes) in the opposite direction. Or better still, a complete re-think of how money and economies should work.

In the real world, property isn’t just land and houses but all kinds of assets, stocks, shares, currencies, precious metals, etc.

An Oxfam report that the 10 richest people in the world increased their wealth by half a trillion US dollars since the pandemic began. https://www.commondreams.org/…/abolish-billionaires…

And over the same period, the wealth of the US Billionaires increased by $1.1 trillion, and a further 46 billionaires have been minted.https://www.motherjones.com/…/the-pandemic-has-made-us…/

Over a longer time period, America’s top 1% has taken $50 trillion from the bottom 90% – something that now constitutes a national security risk!

It really is time for a different economic system that is less rigged.

Postcript

After initially posting this on Facebook, a friend pointed me to a couple of links to the origins of the game Monopoly, which was originally designed to teach people about the evils of unrestrained greed and unfairness. See: Monopoly Was Designed to Teach the 90% About Income Inequality and also The Landlords Game – episode 189

See Also

The Case for Radical Economics

Marx’s Critique of Capitalism

Capitalism is Destroying the World

Private Armies – It’s Just Capitalism

Warning – lengthy but profound reflection on a subject where angels fear to tread – the problem with religion and atheism.

Religion isn’t going away and progressives who continue to attack religion do themselves no favours. In fact their attacks simply fuel the “persecuted victim” narrative that Trump and the religious Right have so skillfully exploited.

What I hope my progressive friends could understand is that the problem isn’t religion – it’s bad religion. Yes, people of faith have committed many wrongs – but so have atheists. And people of faith have also done many great things – and so have atheists. Letting a person’s religious or non-religious allegiance be a major factor in how we judge them will seriously cloud our moral judgement. For many US Christians it meant turning a blind eye to Trump’s obvious moral weaknesses. For atheists it means viewing with suspicion and alienating people who could be potential allies on progressive causes.

I agree with a recent Rebel Wisdom commentator on the storming of the US Capitol, that the striking image of the Q-anon self-proclaimed “shaman” with his horned helmet and tattoos of pagan gods symbolises a resurgence of the irrational from the peripheral into the centre.

Whether that is a good or a bad thing is a whole and separate debate. The point is, it’s happening and there was always a certain inevitability about it. The human animal is not a machine that can thrive on a diet of pure logic.

Ironically, what I call “bad religion” shares a core underlying error with its atheist critics. The error of operating as if religion was a matter of propositional knowledge.

A proposition is a statement such as “the sky is blue”, or “the chair is made of wood”, or “humans and chimpanzees evolved from a common ancestor”. Propositional knowledge is language based (and is therefore limited to what we have words for, and the range of shared meanings we put on those words). It forms the core of our education system and dominates our culture to the point where we forget that other types of knowledge exist. And yet riding a bicycle is not about propositional knowledge. No book of propositional statements can give you the abilities needed to ride a bike, or appreciate a Beethoven symphony, or maintain a healthy long-term intimate relationship.

Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke describes four types of knowledge – “the 4 P’s” – procedural, perspectival, propositional and participatory knowledge.

Procedural knowledge is the embodied knowledge of sequences of movements (in a feedback loop with what we observe through our senses) to enact a procedure, such as catching a ball or tying a shoe lace.

Here I will quote from an article in Medium by Alexander Beiner: Lost Ways of Knowing:

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The next ways of knowing are closer to what we feel when we close our eyes in the woods. When we take a risk and stop trying to run, but instead listen to what’s around us. The voices, the growls, the creak of wood and leaf.

When we do this, we’re tapping into our perspectival knowing. It is your situation awareness, your sense of being ‘here and now’. This way of knowing is relative to the state of mind you’re in. It doesn’t feel the same to be lost in the woods when you’re drunk or tired or in love. Your cognition in this state is geared toward what is relevant, or salient, in your world right now. Vervaeke points out that this perspectival knowing happens when your relevance realisation machinery is coming into our online working memory. The result is a ‘dynamic pattern of salience’ — a whole map of perception mediated by what you’re paying attention to.

As we listen deeply, we might notice something else. The world can hear us, too. Owls watch us from the trees. Beasts smell us as they prowl the mist. We are embedded within these woods.

Coming deeply into this awareness brings us into a participatory knowing. It is the hardest to define, because it straddles our subjective experience and objective reality — leading to an experiential back and forth that Vervaeke calls the transjective.

When we are engaged in participatory knowing, we make identities for the world that are ‘co-relevant’ to us. To the shaman, the owl may not be an owl, but a living embodiment of a spirit that has something to teach her. This way of knowing is related to our full sense of being connected and in a dialogue with reality. It is the fundamental attunement between you and the world, and it is this very attunement that makes your perspectival knowing possible, which in turn makes your procedural knowing possible, which in turn informs your propositional knowing.

Our most meaningful ways of knowing do not spring from ‘knowing that’. Rather, the propositional knowing we use to build our maps springs from the embodied experience of being an active agent in the world, from a deep sense of attunement with our environment. Vervaeke points out that it’s by its absence that realise we need this way of knowing; often it is when we lose our freedom, or when our agency in the world is disrupted that we feel a sense of being disconnected. “Often we don’t notice it until we’re lonely,” Vervaeke says, “or far from home.” Or, perhaps, lost in the woods.(https://medium.com/rebe…/lost-ways-of-knowing-2180a80987d8)

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To go back to my earlier point about “good or bad” religion. It should be clear by now that “good” religion has very little to do with propositional knowledge and much more to do with perspectival and participatory knowledge. And when religion does fall into our modern Western trap of only operating from propositional knowledge, it falls into the trap of focusing on, and defending, literal interpretations of the sacred texts. Or to put it another way, “bad religion” is narrowly focused on questions like “Does God exist?”; “Is Jesus the Son of God?”; and “What does God say in the sacred texts?” On the other hand “good” religion is more focused on having an embodied experience which changes our perspective of our place in the universe and how we relate to everything, including ourselves.

Vervaeke outlines how religions include sets of practices, which he calls “psycho-technologies”, designed to bring about “enlightenment” – a state which is marked by enhanced “Relevance Realisation” (ability to discern what is most important in any situation as well as in the bigger picture).

Enlightenment exists within a deeper context of embodied awareness that “I belong” (I am in relationship with myself and my environment), and a mature sovereign sense of self which is distinct from personas (the masks/roles we put on), or sub-personalities, or our wounded inner-children.

Some of the psycho-technologies which lead us towards enlightenment include altered states of consciousness (though prayer, meditation, music and ceremony), the profound experience of “awe”, and the practice of Agape (Christ-like love) which witnesses the other with total acceptance (of the person, if not their actions) and reflects back with kindness. Note: Agape is not so far removed from good psychotherapy! (See the lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

When religion loses that experiential focus it tends to focus instead on the sacred texts and gets into literal interpretations which are uninformed by these transformative experiences.

Religion is much more than just knowledge or even psycho-technologies. Perhaps above all it is culture. For most of human history religion and culture were inseparable. One way to think about figures like Gautama/Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad is that they were enlightened beings who taught within the cultures of their time. What survives in the writings that have been handed down is a portrait not only of these teachers, but also the culture of their times. Those cultures may have included slavery, torture, capital punishment, oppression of women and homosexuals etc.

An enlightened way to read these texts, therefore, would be to look at where these teachers differed from their cultures. What did they emphasise and what did they not emphasise. How did Jesus treat women compared to the standards of his time? How did he treat people who broke the sexual codes of the time? What seemed most important to him?

A more enlightened way to read the Old Testament would be to view it as a journey from an older world-view populated by tribal “war-gods” where the victory of one tribe over another meant that their tribal god was more powerful – to a worldview where there is only one god of all humanity; a journey from a worldview where gods have to be appeased by blood sacrifices to a worldview where god is more concerned with justice, rule of law, and how we treat the widow and the orphan.

The problem with religion where propositional knowledge is the only game in town, is that it becomes all about the words in the text, which have to be taken literally. For example: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. So then we get the absurd situation where creationists have to deny science in order to defend texts which say that God created the earth in seven days. This narrow focus on the literal meaning of the texts (by both believers and atheists) misses the symbolic, archetypal and mytho-poetic nature of these writings. It is like the difference between hearing the music and seeing the notes.

And when you completely miss the music behind the notes the danger is that you emphasise the words which confirm your cultural and personal prejudices. This is particularly true of the Protestant churches (and perhaps Wahhabist Muslims) where so much falls on the authority of individual preachers and their interpretation of the texts. So we pick out the sentences from ancient and archaic cultures which appear to uphold our own beliefs and prejudices – for examples verses condoning slavery or condemning homosexuals or which say that women shouldn’t lead – and we conveniently ignore the rest (for example wearing mixed-fabric clothing) – and above all miss the deeper music of compassion.

But the problems lie just as much in the failings of mainstream secular culture. So many people feel adrift and alone. Without rituals and traditions for “adulting” (such as initiation) so many people remain developmentally like children looking for a father figure to rescue them. Without processes for moral development and dealing with moral complexity, people crave the certainties of a clear and strict moral code.

Without a sense of meaning in life beyond making money, people crave communities and codes that will fill that gap. In a capitalist society, where there is a human need there is a gap in the market, and the market is filling those needs in a variety of different ways. Some are cults, some are MLM marketing companies, and some look like traditional religious communities but are really cults whose deeper purpose is the pursuit of money and power. (See How To Spot A Cult)

Bad religion is bad for all of us – whether believers or non-believers – it leads to division, denial of science and can be manipulated by political forces as we saw with Q-anon and recent events in Washington. On the other hand good religion is good for all of us – it produces people with depth wisdom and compassion who serve all people, not just their own religious communities. So lets stop the religion bashing, or the atheist bashing, and focus on how we repair all that is broken in our culture

I saw this article yesterday after a conversation with a friend about this dilemma:

My answer is that we humans have evolved a specific mechanism – culture – which allows us to adapt to many different environments and changing situations. Unlike a Wallaby or a Deer, we are not born with a mostly complete innate sense of what kind of animal we are and what kind of environment we will exist in. Humans have to be shaped by culture over a number of years (it’s a year before we can even walk and another year before we start to talk).

To use an analogy, culture is like the Operating System which overlays the physical hardware and teaches us how to survive in our culture. And it is the culture which sits between our physical hardware and the natural world. We are inculturated in how to survive in our culture, and our culture provides the modifications of our non-human world to adapt it to the inculturated humans to live in.

Just as with computers, we can’t interact with a human without interacting with the operating system. Our best chance of understanding human nature is to look at humans from a variety of different cultures (and times). This makes it really hard to separate what is part of our core human nature (which can’t be changed) and what is cultural (which can be changed).

Thus, our (capitalist) culture shapes us to act in ways which get us money, because that it what we need to survive in this culture. But money is an abstraction, we can’t eat it. So although we may understand that what we really need to survive is food, clean air and water, temperature regulation (shelter, clothing) and tribe, we don’t scan our environments looking for those things. Instead we scan our environments looking for ways to get money.

It’s important to recognise that capitalism isn’t just an economic system. It’s also part of culture, part of the Operating System that shapes not only behaviour, but also the beliefs and understandings which generate behaviour. Other parts of that cultural operating system include language, history, philosophy, laws, religion, the material objects and tools we interact with and, above all, the modelling and stories we absorb through our TV and computer screens. All these things work together with the economic system of capitalism to shape us and how we act, think, talk and understand ourselves.

The multiple crises we now face, including the devastation of the earth’s life-support systems, are not because there is something wrong with humans as a species. They are the result of an outdated operating system that is at least 200 years out of date and is beyond patching – it now needs a complete re-write!

Now that would make a New Year’s Resolution worth chewing on!

See Also

The Money System is Rigged

The Case for Radical Economics

Marx’s Critique of Capitalism

Private Armies – It’s Just Capitalism

All we like sheep(le) have gone astray!

I’ve always loved the Christmas story. In the Northern hemisphere where I grew up it is closely associated with the Winter solstice (the point at which the days start to get longer again) and its theme of the coming of light into the darkness. And this marking of the seasonal transitions is linked to a deeper story about death and resurrection, power vs love, suffering and forgiveness and new beginnings.

It is traditional in some places to perform Handel’s Messiah at this time, an epic and timeless setting of the Christmas story composed in an incredible 24 days!

This year I’m reflecting on the words “All we like sheep have gone astray”. In an age of individualism it’s almost an insult to be compared with a sheep who (in our mythology) don’t think for themselves but simply follow the flock. And yet we are deeply social creatures who, no matter how much we kid ourselves, can’t avoid following the norms, beliefs and values of the people we surround ourselves with. I find it highly ironic that the people I know who are into conspiracy theories and accuse those who don’t share their views of being “sheeple” seem to be the most sheep like in their unquestioning and uncritical acceptance of the social media sources they follow.

Back in Handel’s time (and before that in the time of Jesus) the issue wasn’t so much whether people were like sheep, but who they were following – and it if wasn’t the Good Shepherd (the Divine; Source; Spirit; God) then they were likely to go astray or be led astray.

So have we, individually or collectively, gone astray like lost sheep?

I think of how lies have become so mainstream in politics, aided by social media, and how this has led to the erosion of trust and the potential for civil discourse.

I think of the fetishisation of money and it’s corrosive impact on that great statement in the US declaration of independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

At this time of late-stage capitalism it seems the only right that matters is the right to pursue money.

Happiness is worthy goal, but decades of research have shown that once people are lifted out of the survival stress of poverty, increasing financial wealth does not lead to an increase in happiness.

In fact many of the things that we know contribute to happiness are actually undermined by capitalism’s relentless pursuit of the dollar. Some of these things include social cohesion, community, meaningful work, creativity, confidence in the future, time to play and celebrate, connection to a healthy natural world and even birdsong (yes, a recent study showed a correlation between hearing birdsong and happiness).

This time last year, Australia was in the midst of some of the worst bushfires this continent has ever seen – something that climate scientists agree is going to be a more and more frequent event as the climate changes. Then we went, almost without break, into dealing with a global pandemic. Again scientists tell us that this is likely to become a more common occurrence as we place more deadly stress on the environment – the life-support system that we all depend on.

And yet for our Australian government, supported by donations from the fossil fuel industry and working in tandem with the Murdoch owned media (which dominates the media landscape here) these stark environmental warnings are “inconvenient truths” that get in the way of a “gas led recovery”.

Meanwhile legitimate refugees continue to languish in detention (at the cost of millions of dollars) year after year, denied the basic right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Meanwhile the Uluru Statement from the Heart continues to be ignored.

Meanwhile we continue to chop down our last remaining old-growth forests – again subsidised by the tax-payer in such large amounts that we could simply use that money to pay the people involved not to chop down the trees, and they would get more money than they currently earn!

If you also feel that “we, like sheep, have gone astray”, post in the comments below.

Meanwhile I wish everyone reading this a very happy Christmas and New Year. May there be a new light coming into the darkness of this world. May that light take up residence in our hearts, and may we all start following the Good Shepherd (whatever that may mean for each of us) who will not lead us astray.

(Another long and important read – I’ve tried to make this accessible for people who normally switch off when the word Economics is mentioned.)

One of the most painful aspects of a recession is the many people out of work, sometimes for a long time.

Mainstream economic thinking says that jobs are created by entrepreneurs and by more investment, so this should be encouraged with tax breaks for the wealthy.

There’s a partial truth to this, but it ignores an even more important fact that jobs are created by customers with money in their pockets.

In a recession painters are out of work although there are still houses that need painting. Cafes go bust even though people still like coffee, tourism operators close down even though people still want holidays.

Money is the oil in the machine

In its simplest form, money is a way to facilitate barter. I exchange my goods and services for other goods and services. This is still (or should be) the most important function of money. People contribute value through their skills, training, effort and time and in exchange they receive value in the form of money, which can be used to buy the fruits of other people’s skills, training, effort and time.

Money is like the oil in the machine which keeps the wheels turning and keeps the flow of value circulating from person to person. We might call this part of the economy the “Value-Circulating economy”.

In a recession the oil stops circulating and so the machine grinds to a halt. People are unable to contribute value and earn money because other people have no money to pay them.

Assets and rent-extraction

As well as contributing value, there is a second way that people can get money: and that is through owning an asset. The asset might be a second house that they rent to tenants, or some intellectual property like software or a drug patent that people have to pay to use, or money lent to others with interest, or shares in companies that you own either directly or indirectly through your pension fund. We might call this part of the economy the “Assets and Rent economy”.

This is an over-simplification, but bear with me.

Assets don’t create value on their own, but they can magnify the value created by people in the Value-Circulating economy.

By using advanced machinery, tools and software and innovative collaborative practices, an individual worker can produce many times more value than he could working on his own. An example of this was Henry Ford’s invention of the production line for manufacturing cars. Before Ford many car manufacturers were bicycle shops building artisan cars individually at prices only the very wealthy could afford. Ford’s mass-produced Model-T made it possible for the middle-classes to own cars, and he paid his workers more than the average wage so that they too could afford to buy a car.

But assets can also simply be like a leech, draining money from the Value-Circulating economy without giving real value in exchange. For example a patent on a drug that has long since paid for its development and where the licensing fees are not being used to develop new products, or some land owned by an absentee landlord who simply collects rent.

A system out of balance

A healthy economy would balance the “Value Circulating economy” with the “Assets and Rent economy”.

However, left to itself the system always moves towards being out of balance.The reason is simple: There tend to be limits on how much a person can earn by selling his time and the value he creates because we are all limited by the same number of hours in the week and even rock-star workers can only command so much hourly rate. Equally there tend to be limits on how much we spend on goods and services. We can only eat so much, drive one car at a time, own so many pair of shoes etc. So the Value-Circulating economy is relatively stable and tends to grow relatively slowly.

But with assets there is no limit. If I have more money than I need to live, then can buy assets which will return even more money, which I can use to buy even more assets.

The growth imperative

If I own a factory employing 100 people and I invest in new technology (e.g. robots) I might be able to produce the same number of cars with just 10 employees. The wages of the 90 people I let go now come to me as additional profit (minus the costs of buying the technology and the severance costs of the sacked employees). I can use that extra profit to buy even more assets, or develop even better technology so that I can employ even less people.

So long as the economy grows at the same rate as productivity increases, there doesn’t need to be unemployment and everyone benefits. Many more cars get sold, so new factories employ the workers displaced by robots. Capitalism needs us to keep buying more and more stuff to keep people employed.

But there are limits to growth – environmental limits and human limits.

The nature of assets and investment tend to accumulate more and more wealth in the hands of the wealthy. If we think of the total amount of wealth as a pie, then the wealthiest 1% of the world’s population now have more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people – ie almost all the rest.

This has consequences on, for example, property prices as the wealthy compete with each other to buy investment properties pushing up prices for everyone.

The corrupting influence of concentrated wealth

Another factor in the growing wealth disparity is that the very wealthy often also invest in politics, donating large sums to political parties, lobby groups, political “think-tanks” and media organisations in order to influence political decisions. This benefits them in the form of tax breaks and subsidies, weakening of environmental and social protections, awarding lucrative contracts and making sure that government picks up the tab for any social costs or damage to the environment. These “investments” in politics often offer bigger returns than any other kind of investment (for Australians, think Clive Palmer for example).

For most of the history of capitalism the wealth gap between rich and poor has mattered less than the fact that the overall size of the wealth pie has grown bigger. This has meant that the average person has had more buying power each year. Also, the gap between the wealthiest and the average person has been kept in check by progressive taxation policies until the last few decades.

A failed economic system?

But recently this model has hit a few problems:

• We are reaching environmental limits to growth – continuous growth on a finite planet is simply unworkable.

• The speed of advances in technology is accelerating beyond the normal capacity of the economy to adapt and grow. Even jobs previously thought to be safe, such as doctors, lawyers and truck drivers are soon going to be lost due to A.I.

• The political influence that has been bought by the Assets and Rent economy is now so great that in many countries the system is seriously rigged against people who actually create value and towards people who own assets.

For the first time, people in regular jobs who don’t own assets are seeing their buying power decrease as wages stagnate at a time when the cost of housing – whether owning or renting – is at all-time highs, and personal and household debt levels are also at all-time highs.

In summary

In summary, the system (in fact multiple systems – economic, political, ecological, social) are way out of balance and are not going to self-correct. The tired old policies of tax-breaks for the rich and cuts to welfare and public services are not going to get us out of the coming global recession.

We need more people to understand at a deeper level what is going on and embrace radical solutions. (Radical – from the Latin Radis – meaning “root”)

This isn’t about Left-vs-Right (terms which have become almost meaningless). It’s about really understanding how the current system is broken in ways that no major political parties are addressing. I’ve got a few ideas of my own about radical solutions. What are your ideas?

See Also

The Money System is Rigged

Marx’s Critique of Capitalism

Capitalism is Destroying the World

Private Armies – It’s Just Capitalism

Who’s fault is it? (another long but important read)

Who’s to blame? is not something we ask when things are going well. But when the proverbial shit hits the fan it’s often the first question that comes up. And right now, when so many people are struggling with what feels like a lifetime’s worth of shit hitting a fan of global proportions, it’s a question and a sentiment that is showing up everywhere. It’s a question that comes up whenever people are hurting and angry and looking for somewhere to direct that anger. Current popular targets of blame include various political leaders, certain wealthy individuals and corporations, the Deep State, the Illuminati, various ethnic groups or genders or even nations.

The reasons are understandable, and some people undoubtedly carry more responsibility than others. And I certainly don’t want to blame anyone for looking for someone to blame. But ultimately this quest (in it’s most common form) is toxic and just adds more shit to the pile that we have to collectively deal with. Let me explain:

Many of us grew up in environments where someone was always to blame. We may have seen our parents arguing over who’s fault it was that things weren’t working between them. We may have experienced the feelings of terror, guilt and/or shame when we broke some valuable item and wondered if we could get away with blaming someone else for it – a brother, sister or the family pet.But here’s the thing: Did finding someone to blame help solve any problem?

It solves one problem (which is why it’s so prevalent) – the problem of what to do with our hurt and anger. But it doesn’t help solve the problems which gave rise to our hurt in the first place. And in fact it only provides temporary (and limited) relief from our hurt and anger. It’s a bit like doing drugs or alcohol instead of doing the hard work of sorting our individual and collective lives out.

Blaming involves two core emotions which, for cultural reasons, we mostly handle in very dysfunctional ways:

Anger and Shame.Anger is a natural and healthy response when something is not right, when some boundary is being crossed, when some value that is important to us is being transgressed. When we feel anger it is a signal to take note that something needs to change and we may need to fight for that change (in archetypal terms, we may need to tap into the Warrior energy and step up into our power).

But fighting for change does not mean violence. In fact violence (whether physical or emotional) is rarely, if ever, an effective way to bring the change we want.

I once read an interview with the actor Ben Kingsley who played Gandhi in the 1982 Oscar-winning bio-pic. In the interview, Kingsley said that he thought the key to Gandhi’s character was anger. When I read that I almost fell off my chair! Gandhi is known as the founder of non-violence. And yet I know the truth of Kingsley’s insight. Gandhi’s long non-violent fight to bring change in India and South Africa was driven by a powerful anger at the injustice, racism and exploitation he witnessed. His aim wasn’t to hurt and punish the British. He fought to remove the evils of colonialism.

Traditional cultures who still initiate warriors know the value of taking adolescents whose anger is undisciplined and unfocused and training them to control and skillfully direct that energy for the benefit of the tribe.

Our culture has lost that tradition and as a result we tend to handle anger in an adolescent way. Everywhere we look in films and on TV anger is portrayed as synonymous with violence and problems get solved by finding the bad guys and killing them (or putting them behind prison bars).

As a result, when we experience anger most of us are conditioned to respond either by pushing it down (where it doesn’t go away but just emerges as passive-aggressive behaviour or gets turned inward, contributing towards illnesses like cancer or high blood pressure), or by lashing out with physical or emotional violence towards some target who must be blamed for the anger we feel.

A much healthier response would be to own our anger (instead of blaming someone else for it), to feel it in our bodies, express it with sound and movement in ways that don’t hurt anyone, and then focus this energy towards changing what needs to be changed. A healthy and wise warrior can distinguish between the problem and the person, and work towards solving the problem instead of attacking the person. Most of the problems facing humanity at the moment are systemic and can’t be solved by just getting rid of particular individuals.

Blame gives rise to that other intense and highly problematic emotion: Shame.

Like anger, shame is a signal that we need to pay attention to something. In this case it’s about the risk of exclusion and rejection.We evolved as social animals and our survival has always depended on being part of a group, a tribe (and now, less obviously a culture and economy). Despite the myth of the rugged individual, we can’t survive on our own. Even Bear Grylls depends on tools, clothing and knowledge provided by others.

Within each of us there are competing drives – doing what is good for us as an individual vs doing what is good for the group. At an evolutionary biological and cultural level it is essential that what is good for the group prevails over individual self-interest, because if every individual just does their own thing then nobody survives.

Shame is the mechanism for prioritising the group. We are hard-wired to observe how other people in our community behave, to learn the overt and also the unspoken rules of the group and then modify our own behaviour to align with that. When we transgress those rules we feel shame. We may even be shamed by someone else in the group who points out to us that the way we are behaving is not acceptable.

In its healthy form, shame is a signal that we need to modify our behaviour and bring it in alignment with the group or else risk exclusion and rejection. In our evolutionary past, exclusion would have meant death. So shame is an intense ‘life-or-death’ emotion.

Healthy cultures would use shame to try to modify destructive behaviours. The transgressor’s behaviour would be called out, the damaging consequences of their behaviour would be spoken, they might receive some painful consequence (like a spearing) but then it would be over and done with. The transgressor would get the message, modify their behaviour and continue as a full member of the tribe without forever carrying the stigma of their shame with them. Only as a last resort would a person be banished from the tribe.

Shame is healed when the thing we are ashamed of is seen by the group, dealt with (if necesssary) and then we are accepted fully back into the group.

Unfortunately our own culture doesn’t have healthy practices and mechanisms for healing of shame.

Instead of healthy shame that gets healed, many of us carry toxic shame – the belief that it’s not so much that I have DONE something wrong but that I AM wrong – there is something wrong with me, I’m a bad person, I’m too much and/or not enough.It often starts in our early years when we were told that we are bad, or no good, or stupid, ugly, lazy, clumsy, over-sensitive …. etc. When we were punished or abused we were told that it was our own fault and that we deserved what was happening to us.

With toxic shame there is no relief, no redemption. There is no behaviour to change, no easy way to come back into full open connected community because I AM the problem. The only way to make toxic shame tolerable is to hide – to create a mask that we bring out in public. We might even have several masks for different social groups, and on the surface of each mask we might appear to be happy, successful or whatever that social group has declared as most acceptable.

But there is always the fear that someone might see behind the mask.

All of us have this fear to greater or lesser extent. When there’s a lot of unhealed toxic shame the fear is very great. When there’s less shame, or when we’ve done a lot of healing, the fear is smaller.

Whenever someone blames us, that fear gets activated. When that happens we don’t hear “something you did is unacceptable”. Instead we hear the old voices of our toxic shame – “you’re bad, no good, stupid, worthless …” or whatever our own personal version of that script is.

Another name for this is humiliation – and it is one of the most unbearable, dangerous and destructive emotions.

People carrying a lot of unhealed toxic shame will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid humiliation. They often find any criticism unbearable and will always deflect it. They will make excuses, lie, hide evidence. Above all they need to find someone else to blame whenever something goes wrong – a scapegoat.

As researcher Brene Brown has pointed out, there’s a link between blame and shame and whenever there’s a lot of blame being thrown around it’s often an indication that the blamer is carrying a lot of shame.

So, wrapping it all up, the quest for someone to blame is understandable but ultimately destructive.

• It just contributes to more toxic shame, more hiding, more lies, more scapegoating.
• It perpetuates the adolescent destructive venting of anger.
• It further breaks down trust and contributes to the fragmentation and erosion of civil society.
• It does nothing to solve systemic problems which require all of us to collectively take responsibility for and modify our own behaviour where necessary.

A much better set of questions to ask are: “What has gone wrong? How can we collectively understand this at the deepest level? What can we learn from this? How can we restore trust where it is broken? How can we all, working together, solve this problem? Where do I need to change my own behaviour to be part of solving this.”

And part of my own answer to those questions would be that we need to do better at anger, shame, initiation of our young men and women, and we need to feel shame around things that actually matter – like environmental destruction and breakdown of trust – and feel less shame around stuff like poverty, sex, employment status and how many pretty things we have.

A lot of people are concerned about the loss of “normal” freedoms and rights that have been brought into focus by the pandemic. But I think the breakdown in trust that I see is even more concerning. Ultimately, I believe, this breakdown in trust will lead to the end of free societies, because a free society depends on an atmosphere of trust. Let me explain:

At one level, a free society requires a trust that people and individuals will act with fairness and responsibility towards each other and the wider society. Whenever people are doing stuff together, whether it’s a cricket match or workers’ cooperative, or people driving cars, or a country, there are rules and conventions designed to make it work for everyone. The more people voluntarily follow those rules and conventions the less force and intervention is required. The more people try to get away with stuff, the more police, inspectors, speed cameras, lawyers, judges and jails are required to enforce the laws.

But for most people to willingly do the right thing, they need to trust that the system is fair, that nobody is above the law and that the laws are fair and to the benefit of all the people, not favouring some above others. It doesn’t need to be 100% trust (impossible) just a basic trust that the system on the whole works well enough for them.

For people to trust the system, there must be transparency and accountability – which means that we trust the government and institutions to tell the truth about what they are doing and why, and we trust the media to report it honestly and without bias.The less people trust in the system, the less likely they are to play by its rules and do what the government asks.

And the less the government and power structures trust people to comply with its rules and directives, the more they will use force to enforce compliance. And not only force – they will use big tech to increase surveillance of people’s social media use, where they go, who they talk to, what they say, what internet sites they visit and what they search for.

Back in the late 1980s I witnessed firsthand the breakdown of communism in central and eastern Europe and the aftermath of the 1989 revolutions. Living in Poland in the early ‘90s I realised that one of the major casualties of late communism was a breakdown in trust. For years it had been obvious that what the communist government and institutions said did not match up with the reality that people saw with their own eyes. It was a system built on lies. Not only that, but because the government didn’t trust the people it governed there was a network of secret spies and informants, so people couldn’t trust other people outside their close friendship circles.

Governments that know they are not ruling with the consent and trust of the people will use the age-old technique of “divide and rule” to maintain power. If they can keep people distrustful and divided then they will expend their energy fighting each other rather than the government.

The communist system fell because people were able to overcome their distrust of each other enough to stand in solidarity against the government they distrusted. The movement in Poland that kick started that revolution was even called “Solidarity”.

Unfortunately that solidarity didn’t survive long afterwards (and few people understood why it was important and valuable after communism was overthrown) and the growing divisions in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe meant that a new generation of authoritarian governments rose up.

Now we in the West face a very dangerous situation. For decades, our trust in our own governments and institutions have been undermined by the corrupt influence of capitalism. The revolving door between government and, for example, the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists or the financial sector, meant that government has been acting more in the interests of those industries than in the interests of the people. The media is no longer trusted because it too has been bought by those corporations who want to use it to shape public opinion to vote in governments who are friendly to big business. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the extent to which people now distrust the institutions of science and medicine because of the way the financial interests of Big Pharma has directed what gets researched and what gets suppressed.

At the same time, people like Putin and Trump are actively trying to sow division and distrust through social media, Q-anon conspiracy theories and the constant accusations of Fake News and constant lying. The aim is to create a culture where we can trust nothing and no-one, because this makes us easy to control.

It’s all something that worries me a lot!

But understanding this also gives me a direction – something I can do:

Trust is like the oxygen that a free society needs to breathe, and we are like the trees that can emit oxygen.I can either create more trust or more distrust.

This gives me a lens for how to look at my presence on social media, for example. I won’t pass on stuff on unless I have a very high degree of confidence that it is true and that it is useful. There are certain poisoned wells of information that I will never drink from (people in my social media feeds who have been brainwashed by the various variants of the Q-anon conspiracy cult – and also the Rupert Murdoch press, for example).

Back in the 1970s, the great Russian writer and political dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote that there is a strong link between what he called “The Lie” and violence. Violence must always hide its ugliness through The Lie – and The Lie can only govern by way of violence. The answer, Solzhenitsyn said, was not to participate in The Lie. “Let The Lie come into the world, even dominate the world, but not through me”. And he quoted a Russian proverb “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

Sometimes we don’t know the value of something until we’ve lost it!

We’ve been taking democracy for granted for a long time. For some of us that means not thinking about or engaging in political debates, not bothering to vote (in countries where that’s allowed), not studying history.

I know that there are many flaws to democracy – and especially that it can be so easily influenced by money and hijacked by the vested interests of the powerful. But I tend to agree with Winston Churchill, that for all its flaws, the alternatives are much MUCH worse.

It doesn’t take a long look through history to realize that rule by monarchs, tyrants and dictators has been the norm, and many of them have been monsters! And without democracy there is no way to depose a monster except in very extreme circumstances and with a lot of bloodshed. The majority of tyrants have continued to rule until they either died of natural causes or were killed by another tyrant. This, for me, is the single biggest reason to value democracy – that it allows for the non-violent removal of a tyrant.

I really REALLY hope that the USA doesn’t succumb to the many forces that are already seriously eroding democracy. Because once it’s gone – well, it’s gone! History shows that those who have taken power for themselves don’t willingly give it up. Our democracy was hard won by ancestors who spilled blood for it, who were threatened, beaten and tortured for it. Let’s not give it up lightly.

A few days ago I watched “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” on Netflix and was deeply moved, especially by this section on mistakes. I can definitely remember as a child wondering if I was a mistake because there were times when I didn’t seem to be able to fit in, or get what was expected of me, and people didn’t seem to get me or appreciate me.

Exploring this in a couple of groups I’m part of, I’ve seen that this is a very common experience with different flavours to it.

Reflecting further on it, I was thinking about what I read in Francis Weller’s book The Wild Edge of Sorrow about how in traditional cultures children were sung into conception and then as they started to grow as children, the tribe would be sitting with the question, “what unique gift will this child bring into the tribe?” In other words, the culture had an expectation and a celebration of uniqueness and difference.

What a contrast to our culture where there is an expectation of standardization and being measured against an ideal (100% test scores) which almost nobody achieves. What I think I experienced as a child was a sense that I couldn’t follow this script that was being handed to me – it wasn’t me. And while I could try to pretend, I would never match up to the expectations being laid on me and would always feel a failure. No wonder this feeling of “being a mistake” is so common!

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.

The classic expression of this idea is in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, his allegorical fable of the farm animals who overthrow the incompetent alcoholic farmer and take over running the farm themselves with the slogan “two legs bad, four legs good”. Before too long, the pigs have established themselves as the new rulers and become indistinguishable from the humans, even walking upright on two legs, drinking alcohol and brandishing whips.

Orwell (a socialist) was expressing his disgust at the Russian Revolution and what he saw as the betrayal of socialist ideals. His other great work 1984 was a bleak portrayal of a totalitarian surveillance state, again with obvious parallels with the Soviet Union but actually even more relevant to today’s era dominated by monopolistic technology corporations.

Like the French Revolution before it, the Russian Revolution has been held up by traditional conservatives as a warning about the dangers of revolution. “Look”, the argument goes, “things may be bad now, but a revolution makes things even worse.”

There is much truth to this. Both revolutions saw much bloodshed and it is questionable whether people’s material lives were improved in the years following the revolutions.

But a revolution is different from a coup – a mere change of leadership.

The word Revolution comes from the verb Revolve, meaning to turn around (as in a wheel). A true revolution turns things upside down, it up-ends the old order. And the most profound way it does that is by changing the defining myths of a society.

What does this mean?

Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, describes how our species succeeded by achieving levels of co-operation which exceeded other primates. In the early stages, language was the important breakthrough, with gossip being an essential part of keeping track of who people were, where they stood in the hierarchies and how much we could trust them. But there is an upper limit to how many people we can keep track of (and therefore trust to co-operate with) using language and gossip alone – and that upper limit is about 150 people.

Then about 70,000 years ago there was a breakthrough which enabled humans to cooperate on scales much vaster than 150 individuals. That breakthrough was Myth – an over-arching story and set of beliefs which transcended any individuals and enabled strangers who shared the myth to trust each other enough to cooperate.

Early myths were about gods and other spiritual beings and heroic ancestors who ordained how we should live and what purpose our lives serve. Prior to the French and Russian Revolutions there were myths about the Divine Right of Monarchs.

Contemporary myths are about money, corporations, banks, property, work, poverty, individualism, education and democracy. These are all human constructs which could be changed in ways that the laws of physics cannot be changed. They are not objectively true in the sense that water=H2O is true, and yet, like the old gods, they are the glue which binds our culture together and shapes the behaviour of the people within it.

A true revolution doesn’t just change the people holding power, it changes the ruling myths, the core beliefs, of a society.

The French Revolution destroyed the old belief in the Divine Right of Kings and put in it’s place a belief in Liberté, égalité, fraternité (Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood). This was, in turn, central to the foundation of the United States of America with its majestic Declaration of Independence which includes: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. At the time, these were revolutionary ideas. The mainstream beliefs were the all people were NOT created equal – especially the aristocracy/peasants and men/women. Even many of the Founding Fathers of the USA were slave-owners.

Perhaps the most recent revolution of this deeper type was the collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989-1993.

At the time, nobody predicted it. From the outside, the power structures looked so solid. People were afraid to openly question the system and those who did faced imprisonment or worse. I remember speaking to a Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky in 1988. I had just returned from my first visit to Moscow and Leningrad. Bukovsky, then living in Cambridge, was smuggling fax machines into the USSR as a means to beat traditional censorship and enable a free flow of information. He was making what seemed at the time an outrageous prediction that the Communist regime would fall within 20 years. Nobody believed that was possible.

And yet behind the power-structures, people had, for years, quietly stopped believing. They understood that the Party lied to them, that what they saw on the TV was a distortion. But most importantly, they stopped believing in the ideology – the official narrative, beliefs and (for want of a better word) religion of the system. Like a termite-infested building, the impressive looking structures had become hollowed out. When the time came, they collapsed like a house of cards.

I see the same kinds of things happening now in our late-stage capitalist societies. More and more people are losing faith in the official myths creating space for new beliefs to appear.

We could end world poverty tomorrow if we chose. We could create a world where robots and machines do much of the work and the wealth created is distributed as a basic income for all, freeing up more of us to explore creativity, spend more time with our families and in leisure, or doing work that is more meaningful to us personally. We could choose to prioritise our planetary life-support systems ahead of share prices. We could create a new economy which serves people, instead of having people serve the economy. We could put an end to ruinous financial speculation which only serves to funnel wealth to the wealthiest. Further down the track, we could even dream of a culture without money.

All of this would constitute a revolution, a renunciation of the old myths and the embracing of new myths. Personally, I can’t wait!