Hugh Mackay Quotes

I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that - I don’t mind people being happy - but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It’s a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying “write down 3 things that made you happy today before you go to sleep”, and “cheer up” and “happiness is our birthright” and so on. We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position - it’s rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say “Quick! Move on! Cheer up!” I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness”. Ask yourself “is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is.

You have five hundred Facebook 'friends'? That simply means you've redefined 'friend' to make it something like 'a contact I exchange data with'.

You don’t have to be rich to leave a positive legacy; you don’t have to be intelligent, famous, powerful or even particularly well organised, let alone happy. You need only to treat people with kindness, compassion and respect, knowing they will have been enriched by their encounters with you.

Slowing down to rest isn’t a moral failing—it’s essential to help us recharge and reflect. As Hugh Mackay told me, being human is an undeniably demanding business

It's inevitable that people who are trying to manipulate, persuade or deceive us in their own interests would try to pretend that they are driven by...the finest expressions of our common humanity - altruism, compassion and kindness. [p63]

All catastrophes have the same effect: they sharpen our understanding of our interconnectedness and mutual dependency, they clarify our values, they enourage us to rethink our priorities, they expose our prejudices, and they build our resilience. [p45[

Only those who have been on the receiving end of poverty, unemployment, homelessess, mental illness, domestic violence, racism, sexism or ageism can fully identify with others' reactions to those distressing experiences. Only those who have been members of marginalised minority can fully appreciate how that feels. [p50]

There's no such thing as a boring subject, only a bored listener who hasn't bothered to search for the relevance of the message to them.

...faced with so much mystery, most of us find it hard to settle for simple awe.

The deepest sense of life's meaning and purpose arises from our interdependence and, in turn, our willingness to relate to others and respond to their needs. [p49]

We do the right things because it's the right thing to do. We respond to others' needs because they have those needs. Our survival depends on cooperation. [p61, paraphrased]

Here's the cardinal rule of the good listener: receive before you respond. [p97]

Our own brand of democracy has reached a point in its evolution where we expect ruthless, self-protective pragmatism from our politicians, rather than idealism; where noble sentiments are likely to be dismissed as the 'vision thing'; where winning is everything, civility is in short supply, and the lack of respect between political opponents - sometimes amounting almost to loathing - only serves to reinforce voters' cynicism about all of them (a cynicism deepened when voters occasionally learn that some of these combatants are actually quite friendly with each other offstage).

I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that—I don't mind people being happy—but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It's a really odd thing that we're now seeing people saying "write down three things that made you happy today before you go to sleep" and "cheer up" and "happiness is our birthright" and so on. We're kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position. It's rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don't teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say, "Quick! Move on! Cheer up!" I'd like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word "happiness" and to replace it with the word "wholeness." Ask yourself, "Is this contributing to my wholeness?" and if you're having a bad day, it is.

The truth is that we will learn nothing from our sadness, our suffering, our disappointments or our failures unless we give ourselves time to experience them to the full, reflect on them, learn from them or, in modern parlance, process them.

Forgiveness calls on deep reserves of moral courage: the courage to break out of the spiral of self-pity; the courage to set aside resentment; the courage to rise above biterness; the courage to act well, when all our instincts call on us to act badly. p112

When books sweep the world with characters and plots that seem unutterably grim...you have to ask whether we willingly incorperate such material into our lives because we need more shadows, clouds, drama, or perhaps because vicarious exposure to such material equips us, psychologically, for potential exposure to the real thing. [p35, Chapter 1 Taking the rough with the smooth]

The disjuncture from politics, on the other hand, springs from something which concerns all these poets: the shattered nature of Scottish consciousness, which isn't a low flat floor of peasant culture on which all stand together but a wild junk-yard of high culture fragments, English imports, oral traditions of 'the Scots commons' and proletarian 'socialist realism' from the thirties.

To listen to someone means devoting time to the process, putting your own concerns on hold, remaining silent even when you’re dying to say something. Patient listening also involves a willingness to postpone judgement about what is being said. Mostly, we want to rush in to agree, to disagree, to object, to correct; but listening demands the patience to let all that wait until the other person has finished saying to us what they want to say to us.

The integrity of any theory, Kuhn argued, lies in its falsifiability - that is, its openness to the possibility of repudiation in the light of more evidence, fresh insights or a more creative interpretation of data whose significance was not previously understood.

Certainty is the enemy of reason and of reasonableness.

Words are, of themselves, meaningless. We invest them with meaning, and, over time, come to feel as if certain words mean certain things. We construct dictionaries and then think they tell us what words mean, but dictionaries are mere historical documents, museums of meaning...

There's plenty of symmetry in revenge, but no virtue.

we might do well to accept that a noble, courageous, well-lived life is one in which we are equipped to experience and negotiate the full range of emotions: neither seduced by the lure of happiness nor obsessed by the grim and gritty aspects of life, but open to whatever comes and ready to learn from it all.

How we respond in the face of a challenge tells us more about who we really are than all the pious rhetoric about our alleged attitudes, values or aspirations. [p37]

If things just keep going along as smoothly as if we're on a railway track, reassured by the regularity and predictability of that clickety-clack, clickety clack, why would we bother with introspection about the meaning and purpose of it all, let alone the direction we're taking? p37

Accept that you can't control many of the things that happen to you. Stop wishing for things to stay the same, or to to be different. Above all, remember that your own struggles are part of the human struggle, shared by everyone you meet. [p53. Chapter 1 summary]

Stories abound... of governments' heavy reliance on focus groups and other forms of research to pre-test the likely political effect of policies. Not to test the integrity or efficacy of the polices; not to see whether it fits within a particular philosophical framework, merely to test its palatability or, to be brutally frank, its likely contribution to a government's prospects of re-election.

We thrive on our sense of belonging to families, neighbourhoods and all kinds of groups and communities. We utterly depend upon our social connections for our emotional and physical security, for our sense of well-being, being accepted and taken seriously. [p57]

Homo sapiens. That's a label we invented for ourselves, of course: Latin for 'wise man'. It may be hoped that we will eventually either evolve into something worthier of that appellation or aspire to an even better one. How about Gens unanima - 'harmonious race' or ' a people of one spirit'?

multiculturalism is the art of creating harmony out of diversity. [p58 Chapter 2: We were born to cooperate, not compete]

...Signs of the purest form of human love: the love that has nothing to do with emotion or affection; the love that say we will treat each other kindly and respectfully, regardless of how we happen to feel about each other, because we know that's the only way a human community can thrive. p19 [Prologue: A Loving Country?]

If you want to reinforce someone's existing beliefs, attack them.

People with passionate convictions tend to see the world through the lens of their passion - whether psychological, spiritual, or economic - and interpret everything they hear according to whether or not it harmonises with their own one-note samba

One report found that smoking fifteen cigarettes a day is a healthier option than living on your own, a state of being sociologist Hugh Mackay calls the “global warming” of demographics. But then we learn that 60 percent of married people feel lonely. Seemingly we are all lonely, regardless of the number of up-close humans in our lives.

Chivalrous or not, there was no denying that of the 1,667 men on board, only 338, or 20.27 percent, had survived as compared with a 74.35 percent survival rate for the 425 women. On April 21 the bodies of the Titanic’s victims began to be pulled out of the north Atlantic by the Mackay-Bennett, a cable ship that had been sent out from Halifax with a hundred tons of ice and 125 coffins on board. The Mackay-Bennett’s captain described the scene as resembling “a flock of sea gulls resting on the water.… All we could see at first would be the top of the life preservers. They were all floating face upwards, apparently standing in the water.” John Jacob Astor’s body was found floating with arms outstretched, his gold pocket watch dangling from its platinum chain. To the ship’s undertaker it looked as if Astor had just glanced at his watch before he took the plunge. It is often written that Astor’s body was found mangled and soot-covered and that he must therefore have been crushed when the forward funnel came down. Yet according to three eyewitnesses, Astor’s body was in good condition and soot-free, and like most of the other floating victims, he appeared to have died of hypothermia. On April 25 the body of the Buffalo architect Edward Kent was recovered. In the pocket of his gray overcoat was the silver flask and ivory miniature given to him by Helen Candee on the grand staircase, and these were later returned to her by Kent’s sister. Frank Millet’s body was found on the same day and identified by the initials F. D. M. on his gold watch. The next evening the Mackay-Bennett left for Halifax with 190 bodies on board, another 116 having been buried at sea. A second ship, the Minia, had arrived on the scene, but after a week’s search it retrieved only seventeen bodies, and two other ships would find only an additional five. The Mackay-Bennett landed in Halifax on April 30 to the tolling of church bells and flags flying at half-staff. Horse-drawn hearses took the bodies from the dock to a temporary morgue set up in a curling rink.

Socrates said that personal fame counts for nothing if your life isn't itself of virtue, and the same goes for political power. We could certainly demand more virtue from our politicians, starting with a more respectful attitude towards each other as legitimately elected members of parliament, and an inflexible commitment to always telling the truth.