100 Clues

My name is Bill Birney. This is my path to self- improvement. Each blog post is something new I have learned, or thought of, or discovered.

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Waiting for good to happen

You can’t go any faster than the guy in front of you.

Patience is a virtue.

Be careful what you wish for.

Funny thing about creating futures. If you don’t do it, someone or something else will, and it may not be what you want. Along with wanting comes doing, which starts with dreaming, progresses through planning and ends with creating.

Change isn’t the final product; it’s the process. In fact, there are really no final products in the universe, because everything is continuously changing. And that high-level change has many layers of sub-changes. One particularly important sub-change began when a certain black woman decided to sit in the front of the bus in segregated Montgomery, Alabama. This initiated a chain of events that led to the federal government making it illegal to tell black people where they cannot sit on a bus.

But that wasn’t the end of the change. Some say the change continues today. On a higher level, the change began when the first human being was born. But you can zoom back even further and see that there was no beginning and there will be no end. Change, evolution, forward movement are eternal.

The waiting state

I bring this up because it seems many people are in a constant state of waiting. We make plans and we wait, and we want and we need and we wait. Doing is what propels us forward, but there are always obstacles. We set a plan in motion and wait. Or we simply want something and wait for it to appear. We wait longer than we think we should and become impatient and frustrated. Then, we give up.

But giving up or stopping the process can’t be done. Here’s why I say that. When you say you’re giving up, you’re really saying you’re changing course, because everything in the universe is continuously changing. Everything is transitioning and moving. It is impossible to stop, end, freeze or give up, because eternal change forces one occurrence to trigger another occurrence – cause and effect. The moment you give up, that action causes something else to happen. Eternal change, eternal motion, without end.

So when you give up, you are in essence allowing the forces around you to control your life, run your show, make your changes for you. And this isn’t some obscure theory or point of view, it’s what really happens. And we need to know this and embrace it, because this is how we deal with events and needs and desires in life.

The journey

Creating the future you want doesn’t mean you do stuff and the future of your dreams pops out, like candy from a vending machine. Creating your future is the process you use to improve your life in ways that you want. Change isn’t the result, it’s the journey. The things you want appear along the way – cause and effect. You work two years to save the down payment to buy a house, which enables you to grow your family, so the human race can go on. Desires, choices, actions, and effects: all these things are life. Life isn’t a thing, it’s a state in motion.

You can visualize change as a horizontal timeline, moving persistently from left to right, and only left to right. You can also view change vertically from bottom to top, a small, possibly minor event (woman changes seats on a bus), up through layer after layer of sub-changes (racial tolerance improves) to the very top and initial layer, the first cause. If you view change as continuous and life as change, then the idea of waiting takes on new meaning.

For one thing, waiting implies doing nothing until something you want happens or appears. If you do nothing while the world around you changes, however, you will be placing yourself at the mercy of events out of your control – a victim. Many people it seems are in a continuous state of waiting: waiting for closing time, waiting for the clock, waiting for the next paycheck, waiting for their chance, waiting until retirement, waiting to die. How much is a person’s life worth if they reach the end of it and realize all they did was squander their time waiting, when they could’ve been doing?

Doing

It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you feel you’re making progress. You can go to college and land a good job, or you can drop out of college and travel the world on a tramp steamer, or you can never go to college and spend your time learning the kazoo.

Of course, there will be the occasional wait time while you’re sitting on the phone listening to elevator music. But simply spending your life waiting for good to happen is as meaningless as gambling with dice. You have no control over the outcome. You’re letting your life waste away by the minute. Regardless of whether good or bad happens, you did nothing to affect your life or the lives of others, or the world around you. Waiting is empty.

The choice

There’s a third aspect of change that relates to life and the choices you make. Inside each of our brains is an area that acts as a sensor to inform us of the rightness or wrongness of a decision. Every normal person has this. We all seem to inherently have the ability to learn that killing another person is bad and sharing is good. Even without much parental or religious guidance, children readily pick up on moral lessons, because we’re all born with the wiring to be social creatures – to get along with each other and be part of a society.

When viewing the visualization of change with the time horizontal axis and layer vertical axis, this third axis is invisible or integrated somehow. It follows the natural progression of the universe and enters, no touches our awareness only as a feeling, a sense. When I said it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you feel you are making progress, I wasn’t just talking about doing, I was also talking about this third aspect.

People don’t simply do things to cause change. We do things to cause change that makes us feel good. You need to feel the decision you make will move you in the right direction, make you feel like you are progressing, moving forward, staying in sync or in line with the motion of the universe if you will.

You know the feeling. You do something that makes you feel you made the right decision – complimenting a friend who was feeling down or signing a contract that you know is fair – and everything naturally works out. Another time you do something that you know is bad – you fight with your spouse and drive off angry or tell someone a lie that ends up hurting them.

I think of this change aspect as a kind of path through life. I know as long as I stay on the path, I’ll be happy, things will go my way and no one will get hurt. The path is identical for all people, all religions, all societies, all nations. Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but I feel if that woman hadn’t changed seats on the bus and inspired people to right a horrible wrong, someone else would have. Or some other event would have taken place that burned the wrongness out of that society.

I feel this because I know in my heart that the path inspires people to eventually fix wrongs. Buddhists call it karma – our actions have consequences. Christians fear no evil on their journey through life, because God is with them. This path is clearly marked, consistent and true. It doesn’t cause change; it guides change. It tells us when we are progressing in the right direction, and when we are not. And it is the reason we can and will naturally create the future we want.

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Using our brains to solve problems

We can’t create the future we want until we tackle some fairly major problems facing mankind. And we can’t do that until we believe that the problems are solvable. But it’s not easy to be optimistic when all we hear from the media is a steady diet of doom.

The news and talk shows are good at telling us what’s wrong in great detail. But we seldom hear a reasoned discussion of how to solve the problems or about solutions that are actually working. To get to that point, we need to change our perspective. We need to stop viewing world problems from a victim’s point of view, as overwhelming and impossible, and assume the position that things are difficult, but doable.

Population explosion

The scale of population growth today is truly staggering, but calling it an explosion doesn’t do much to help fix or even define the problem. It only serves to create a generalized picture of doom. To really tackle the issue, we need to decide exactly what it is.

The most visible effect of growth is overcrowding. If people were evenly distributed on the earth, we wouldn’t have overcrowding. But people tend to live in close quarters in urban areas. People used to be more evenly distributed back when many of them worked in farming. But most small family farms were bought or forced out of business by giant corporations. And that resulted in vast numbers of people moving to the city to find work.

Overcrowding in urban areas is said to be at least one of the major problems resulting from overpopulation. But it’s more a result of too many people trying to live in the same place. And this is only a problem if we don’t think about good ways to create communities, which is one thing that governments are good for.

It would be virtually impossible for individuals to solve large-scale overcrowding issues on their own. You need a big-picture view at the government level. Then, ideas come pretty easily. You also need money and the political will to do something about it. But in comparing high-density situations, we see there’s quite a difference between areas like Amsterdam and Dallas, and Baltimore and Mumbai. Why is crowding managed better in Dallas than Baltimore? Is it poverty or overpopulation? Is there something about being poor that causes people to live too close together?

It’s clear this problem isn’t going to be solved in a few paragraphs by an author who has little working knowledge of community design. My point is that the problem has a solution. It may be difficult and expensive, but the issue isn’t that the problem cannot be solved. It’s that politicians and governments lack the will. They also lack the money, but that can always be found with enough will.

So the problem is really how do governments get the will. In Dallas there’s plenty of will to create an attractive city and incentivize developers to design solutions to effectively handle a dense population. But in Mumbai, intentional community design is nonexistent in the slums, resulting in poor living conditions for a very dense population.

Other solutions for the overcrowding problem include redistributing the population. If you have too many people in one place, you move them around. And this doesn’t have to be done using draconian methods like forced busing. The government could use incentives such as the promise of inexpensive housing and good jobs. Unfortunately, politicians are more likely to see the benefit of giving incentives to big corporations rather than caring for people in poverty. We are more likely to see workers living in shacks around a large gleaming chemical plant than a well-designed community.

Poverty

Of course a lot of the population problem is caused by poverty. Here’s how it’s supposed to work. A person works, and sells her products or services, and then makes enough to live on and continue the process. If most people followed this plan there wouldn’t be poverty. But things happen that interrupt the cycle.

Rather than start by assuming we have poverty because of the population explosion, thereby concluding that there’s nothing we can do about it, let’s start with the assumption that the problem can be solved or reduced. In fact, let’s make it a goal, rather than immediately declare it impossible. After all, in concept anyway, there shouldn’t be a problem.

How do we head toward that goal? We can start with a very old concept: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Sounds like affordable education would be a good place to start. How do we get to that point?  It starts with will, which can come from the private sector but the government is a more likely place. Why? Because the government has an incentive to train people to help themselves. That’s how you create a strong society.

Think equality and sharing the wealth – government loans, education and strategic investment. Education gives people new skills that are specific to the community: how to run a business, keep books, get permits, plan a business. Loans enable people to buy homes and supplies, all with an eye to building a community, creating the future. Strategic investments incentivize people to work toward a common goal – eradicating poverty and improving lives.

Too many laws, regulations and other government actions favor top-down community growth, with incentives going to big corporations that make promises they often don’t keep. What about flipping that around? Design a system that makes it easy to start and run a local business (reduce permit fees, provide training) and protect those businesses from the predatory practices of large corporations (think Walmart killing small towns.) Now we have a bottom-up approach: incentivize local businesses and workers to grow and succeed, and you build a strong local community.

Unfortunately, all too often the incentive for political will comes from big business, and what could be a thriving community filled with happy citizens becomes just another case of graft and corruption.

Lack of resources

But a lot of the problems that cause poverty are caused by a lack of resources. The story we often hear is that the population explosion makes feeding all the people impossible. Presumably if the population could somehow un-explode itself, there would be enough food.

Let’s start there. Problem: you have a massive increase in people and they all need to eat. What do you do? Simple. You grow more food. You open up more land for farming, you create more seeds, you reproduce more cows. You create incentives for people to farm locally – reducing costs and impact on the environment. To support more people, you create more food, and to do that, you employ all those people. Think incentivize people to live closer to farms. This redistributes the population, decreasing overcrowding. Reverse the process that caused the problem to begin with. The guy who’s peddling a jitney in Mumbai can do far more good and improve his own life tending a farm.

But then maybe the resource problem comes down to this – water. And that comes down to this – too many people in one place. Again, is the answer doomsday? How about coming up with new solutions given an ever-growing population? Start by not polluting what water we have. Redistribute the population through incentives to even out the demand on the water supply. What about desalination? It’s expensive, but we have plenty of ocean water, and anyway what does expense matter when we’re changing our focus to helping people, bottom-up community building? People are what’s important. The giant corporations, dripping with money, can take care of themselves.

We have droughts in some areas and too much water in others. We know big corporations have the resources to build an oil pipeline all the way from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, so why can’t the same thing be done to transport water?

In California, corporate agriculture consumes 80% of the state’s water, but factory farm lobbies have convinced politicians not too look here. I think if I were a farmer and I was watching climate change turn California into a waterless wasteland, I might think about moving to say Oregon, where for now there’s plenty of water and a better climate.

There are solutions. Everything isn’t impossible just because things are changing.

Climate change

A lot of the resource problems are due to climate change. In fact global warming is about to force us to make some radical changes. Climate change is fairly easy to understand compared to the complexity of overpopulation, poverty and dwindling resources. It’s caused by greenhouse gases (primarily CO2), which come from human activity. The gases trap the sun’s rays and increase the temperature of the earth, which causes radical changes in our climate. The fix is easy to visualize. We stop the sources of the pollution, and we stop climate change from continuing at its current rapid pace.

We start with the low-hanging fruit like coal-fired power plants and mass burning of the Amazon rainforest. Then, we move toward sustainable energy that doesn’t pollute and we’re on the road to saving the planet.

Really the only problem here is people. The people who make lots of money from oil and coal, and burning rainforests have lots of money to buy votes and minds. Today only about half the U.S. population believes climate change is caused by people. With so few people believing the problem is real, and politicians and industry leaders striving to keep it that way, there is little will to solve a fairly straightforward problem. In the meantime, the world gets hotter, taking lives and making everything more impossible.

Greed

So when we total out the problems arising from climate change, as well as those from lack of resources, overcrowding and poverty, it comes down to individuals who prioritize their happiness over the well-being of others - greed. Greed is insatiable desire. A greedy landlord raises rent for no reason other than to get richer, without regard for the extreme hardship the act may cause tenants. In the same way, a greedy corporation strives to make as much profit as possible regardless of the suffering it may bring to employees and customers, and damage to communities and the environment.

Ultimately, the corporations and banks control governments and world policies and nothing can stop them – easily. Take the situation in Greece. Corrupt or stupid officials allowed the Greek economy to be placed at the mercy of giant multi-national banks. But when the house of cards fell, it was the Greek people who had to suffer to pay back the immense debt.

Of course, greed is built in to our psyche, so it cannot be stopped. But the greedy elite who fight every attempt to bring economic equality to the world’s population can be. Solving that problem, however, may require drastic measures, even bloodshed – think the French and American revolutions. It doesn’t have to come to that point, but controlling greed is the root of the most difficult problems facing life on earth. We need to be persistent in fighting back the cancer of greed through laws, regulations, boycotts, protests, whatever it takes in order to create the future we want.

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The good word

What good is hate and fear? If your answer is, “No good,” then take the first step. Go through your Twitter and Facebook names and remove the ones that are always negative, that make you feel bad.

Maybe keep a few of them – the ones that actually provide good information occasionally. But cut them down to say 20%. Then, think about the movies and TV you’re watching, and the video games you’re playing, and thin out the ones that are all about solving problems with hate and violence (physical and verbal). Think in terms of creating a more balanced entertainment diet. Watch a good sitcom instead of a reality show about self-centered people fighting and snarling at each other.

When you get home from a stressful day at school do you immediately turn on the news and become overwhelmed with all the politicians fighting and terrorists blowing up mosques and insane killers mowing down school children? The solution is easy, turn it off. Listen to some music instead. It’s good to be an informed citizen, but anything beyond that isn’t really necessary, especially if it is just ruining your day.

You’re probably feeling better already. But there’s more you can do. Move on to your environment – work, school, home, friends, the mall – and be mindful of how the people around you communicate. Are there people you deal with everyday who always feel the need to protect their territory, or use language that makes you and others feel like crap? What can you do about that?

Bad things you can’t control

On Twitter, you can create your online world by choosing who you follow. In real life, though, creating your own world takes a little more work. The problem is you don’t have a lot of control over things that happen outside you – a terrorist attack, an arrogant boss. Really, the only thing you have any direct control over is what you do, what goes on in your mind. And that’s the key to creating your world.

Something very bad happens to you when you experience a lot of negative stuff that you feel you have no control over. It’s called hopelessness. It’s probably the worst feeling you can have. If you’re wondering how it can be worse than panic, fear or depression, think about this. What would you do if you had a fear of snakes and you walked into a room filled with them? Of course, you would panic and leave the room as quickly as possible. Now, what if you were locked in the room with no way to escape? That’s hopelessness – your reaction to your worst fears, your worst depression, your worst anything with no way out. There’s no plan B, no one to help you, just you and everything bad you can imagine.

That’s what makes hopelessness so insidious and evil. For our physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing, we must always feel there’s a way out, something we can do, a chance that someone or something will come along and save our bacon before our plane hits the side of a mountain. It’s one thing to feel hopeless the moment before disaster strikes. But it’s another to feel hopeless all the time. With our media pumping out a steady stream of bad news, is it any wonder that so many people are clinically depressed and anxious? Is it any wonder that so many people turn to hate and fear as a strategy to fight back?

We feel like victims, we shut down, we stop caring or we attempt to protect ourselves by lashing out at others. We desperately try to hold on to something that can’t be held on to, and when the world outside fails us, our spirit deteriorates after years and decades. Hopelessness triggers the release of hormones, such as norepinephrine and cortisol, which is normal when we find ourselves in a panic situation. Under those circumstances the hormones help us deal with an emergency, but after decades they gradually wear us down physically. Our bodies waste away as hopelessness messes with our minds.

The simplest creature spends most of its time doing things to ensure that it will continue to live. Even under extreme situations, a bacteria will struggle to survive. So you would think that the most complex life form would have all the advantages in this area. And yet, people are the only animals that are capable of feeling hopelessness to the point of taking their own lives.

Create your world with words

I don’t think hopelessness is a given regardless of how bad a situation may be. I think hopelessness is all in your mind. As long as we are alive, we have the ability to learn new things. And, though it may be difficult, I think hopelessness is something we can learn not to do.

How do you feel hope in a world that is so full of hate and fear? You start by taking charge of your life. When a friend at work says something to make you feel bad, don’t just immediately accept it as the truth, and assume the posture of a helpless victim. Take the information and decide what you want to do with it. Think about your response rather than allow your emotions to control you. Don’t just take a bullet and feel hopeless. Use the problem-solving abilities in your mind to think about how to take the reins and make things better.

Hate and fear are not useful problem-solving tools. If you use those tools you will always make things worse, never make things better. You will not only hurt others, you will hurt yourself. Love and understanding, on the other hand, are good problem-solving tools. In fact, they are the only problem-solving tools. When faced with any problem, create an atmosphere of love and you will find the understanding to solve the problem, whether it’s dealing with a tyrant boss or a flat tire.

Imagine a future in which just half the people who normally react with fear and hate learned how to solve problems and view life with love and understanding. Words can be used to spread goodness or badness. Doesn’t it just make sense to take a moment before you open your mouth and think about what you’re doing? Your initial emotional reaction may be to spout a barrage of defensive hate, which we know won’t make anything better. Why not instead think how you can use your words to improve the situation?

Hopelessness implies no further moves are possible, checkmate. Therefore, it is impossible to feel hopeless as long as there is something you can do. And there will always be something you can do as long as you’re alive. And if you react with the intention of improving the world in some way, you will not only be practicing love and understanding, you will see that hopelessness is impossible.

Don’t wait for the good word. It won’t happen. Don’t live your life hoping that something outside you will magically appear and make everything better and solve all your problems. Hope and hopelessness are created by your mind. And as long as you are alive, you can learn how to create your own world, and help others create theirs.

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On viewing diamonds

Creativity is probably like happiness. Too much creativity, like too much happiness, and the feeling goes away. When you try to observe creativity, all you see is a spark, a burst of energy when the connection is made. Everything after that moment (the creating part) is craft: work and organizing and pruning and turning the original burst of energy into a product.

If the moment of connection could be grabbed and turned into a still image, it would be like a diamond – eternal, perfect light and perfect energy. But that moment is so infinitely small it can never be frozen and observed. Think quantum theory. Not only is that moment impossible to freeze and study, it’s empty. It has no physical mass. It can’t be picked up and placed under a microscope. And even if we could observe it, there would be nothing to see, because life and the universe aren’t still.

What is the thing

Everything moves and changes continuously. Even the most brilliant diamond moments fade to nothing over time. We can only observe the effect of the moment in the products we create. The more you try to hold on to something, the closer you look at something, the more you think about something, the farther away it gets, the less coherent it becomes, the less meaning it has, the emptier it appears.

It’s probably that argument that you need to look away from the physical identity and view it as a function – as a cause and effect event – in order to see it, perceive it. Look too close at a chair and all you see is sticks; look too close at a person and all you see is chemicals; look too close at creativity and all you see is paint on a canvas; look too close at happiness and all you see is a smile; look too close at a diamond and all you see is the wall behind it.

The thing itself is empty, but the idea of the thing is rich with meaning, even though the idea can never exist as a physical object. So existence is empty. Only ideas are real. People have it backwards. We want the physical object to be the thing because we can hold it. But it’s the thing we can’t hold that is real – the idea of the thing in our minds. Things are empty until we give them meaning.

We create our worlds

It has to do with the nature of people, what perception means. We are living and we exist, and physical things can only exist in a temporal world. Physical things can only be perceived as moving and changing. Even a rock is changing – from dust, back to dust. Changing, moving, evolving are the only things that matter to us. Reality. A still image, a mental state, anything people try to stop and label becomes meaningless or empty because we can only perceive something in the context of time, as moving and evolving. Those still images can only be perceived as ideas.

People have such a tough time understanding how to help someone diagnosed as schizophrenic or manic-depressive. That’s because they view psychosis as a mental state, a static image. Mental health can only be perceived in the temporal world, as the person lives and breathes, not as a labeled state.

We look at paintings that way. Our minds take the image and add life to it. When we see a picture of a dancer, it’s not the stillness, the moment we see, it’s the period of time before and after. The moment that’s captured by the artist is nothing but paint on canvas. A painting we can’t add movement and time to is meaningless, empty. A painting we can add movement to becomes a living idea.

We are only capable of thinking of something in terms of change – what we imagine doing to it either physically or in our minds. And we perceive any change in terms of cause and effect, as we rebuild the outside world in our minds – creating our inside world from the world we receive through our senses.

Cause and effect

We view everything in terms of cause and effect. Function is cause and effect to which we assign a purpose. If we can’t find a purpose for something, we fill in the blanks as best we can – intelligent design, for example. A tree falls and flattens a bush. Therefore, the function of the tree is to flatten the bush. In the universe, there is no concept of function (there is no concept of concepts). Function is something our minds create as a survival tool. Is there purpose to life? As far as the universe is concerned (if the universe could be concerned about anything), no.

People need meaning and purpose. Doing gives life meaning. Doing causes change. Change is the effect of cause. Can just one thing happen without there being a cause or effect? What was the first cause? Is the idea of cause and effect, like function and purpose, simply part of the wiring of our brains, which exists to help us survive? Why do we need to survive? Why do we need to ask why? These are all perfect examples of attempting to observe something that is empty. We can only observe life in motion.

Trying to turn something that can’t be written into a sentence

We can only understand a thing as an idea in terms of its existence in the cause and effect world of our minds.

Sometimes it’s impossible to look at people and see anything but robots. I wonder why people throw Frisbees back and forth and converse and walk to the beach and laugh. Don’t they know it’s all empty?! Why do kids throw rocks in water? They all do. Give a kid a rock and some water and they’ll throw the rock in it. I think, what a waste, how silly. Then, I feel empty and sad and wonder why I’m wondering all this. Then, I get the urge to throw a rock.

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United Villages of North America

The United States was founded on a set of ideas and values that we all agree with. That’s how people create any kind of unified system. They decide on what the point of the system is and then agree on a structure to give it meaning.

At all times people must approach a project with the attitude that they want it to succeed. And to that end people naturally try to structure the system around common ideas and values. In other words you don’t try to create a system around ideas that people don’t agree with. What would be the point of that? You can’t have a unified system without unity – agreement.

For example, the framers of the constitution agreed that the country wouldn’t have a national religion. They wanted the country to be inclusive of all religions. There were no doubt individuals who would’ve preferred a single religion (their own), but in the spirit of wanting the new country to succeed, they gave in or compromised. Had they stuck to their guns and refused to bend, it’s possible we wouldn’t have a United States today. (Imagine if our current congress was in charge of founding a nation.)

In addition to wanting the project to succeed, the creators of the constitution kept their focus clear. The resulting constitution is all it needed to be and nothing more, containing only those ideas that everyone could agree with. We may have become a Quaker nation or taken on some other national religion had most of the framers of the constitution agreed on that, and seen the need to do so. But they felt it was more important to focus on freedom for all, which meant separating church from state.

When everyone agrees, you have unity and you can establish a unified system of ideas. Without agreement, you have the opposite. Say I want to have X, but you won’t let me. We have a choice: peaceful resolution, in which we both compromise; a stand-off, in which nothing is resolved; or violent conflict, in which the person with the biggest gun wins. Neither of the last two choices works for creating a unified system, however. To do that, you need agreement and the desire of all parties to succeed – like-mindedness.

Like-mindedness

Electronic technology has made it easier today for people to find and associate with like-minded people – people they agree with. You can see the trend using decades of survey, polling and census data, showing where people live and how they vote in national elections. Not only are people getting together online, they are physically moving to live in communities of people they agree with. We are locating both physically and philosophically with people like us.

Essentially, it’s the global village concept envisioned by Marshall McLuhan in the 60’s. He saw how mass media – TV, radio, newspapers, telephones – had created one giant virtual village by enabling people all over the world to connect instantly. A person in Taiwan can instantly see what is going on in Norway or connect to someone in Zimbabwe.

And now the Internet has vastly expanded the concept of a global village. Instead of one media outlet reaching millions worldwide with a single message, billions of people can communicate in one-to-one, two-way, three-way or multiple-way conversations. The one-way communication of television and radio may someday become obsolete.

Now, instead of one giant global village, we have millions of global villages, each unified by an ad hoc set of ideas. A Buddhist laundromat owner in New Delhi can associate with others in a million different ways: with other Buddhists, with other laundromat owners, with other Buddhist laundromat owners, in big cities, small cities, anywhere, anytime.

Also the very nature of today’s jobs make relocation easier. People no longer have to live in company housing in Detroit or Pittsburgh. Technology and global trade policies have taken away our industrial-age manufacturing jobs and put us in service sector and high-tech jobs, which make it easier to be mobile. Instead of proximity to the factory assembly line, people can base their living decisions on what makes them happy – finding a community of people like them, with the schools they like, familiar shopping choices and amenities as well as common political views.

Creating our future

In the future, we will have many more ways to find the village that fits our needs and desires. A major part of creating the future we want is creating our environment, and that is getting easier to do all the time. The village we live in will include the people we want to be with, and the jobs that we want to do. And all those things will sync with our philosophies, politics, aesthetics and religious preferences.

Of course this is already happening and it’s not going away. It’s only expanding. Why? Because we can do it and we want it.

Imagine a more distant future in which the digital village concept makes our current structure of countries, states and cities obsolete. It’s already happening in the Middle East with communities forming around religious interests, erasing state boundaries. Cell phones and the Internet have currently enabled the Islamic State to organize in multiple states, in a sense, defining a whole new way of nation-building. A new kind of state that exists in multiple places, and can move and change shape. It’s not a stretch to imagine a new and more adaptable and mobile configuration of states based on like-mindedness instead of geo-political boundaries, which are really nothing more than lines in the sand. Looking at it another way, technology has enabled us to return to tribal living, in which Sunnis can live with Sunnis, fundamentalists can live with fundamentalists, and artists can live with artists.

Imagine a North America with no state lines. Instead of viewing political structure in terms of real estate, we can use the tools from the digital age to organize people in tribes, based on common ideas, philosophies, values. People relocate physically to be with and work with like-minded people, in communities that fit their lifestyle choices, formed, just like the U.S. Constitution, around a unified system built with common ideas. Think Salt Lake City in the beginning. A group of evangelical Christians could form a village in what used to be Colorado. A group of liberal, high-tech atheists could form a village around what used to be California.

The inevitable future

Is this the perfect solution? Is this something I’m promoting as a future utopia? Am I asking people to change what they’re doing? No. It’s something that was made inevitable by technology. Television, airplanes, washing machines, the Internet – all of these technologies have one basic goal: to take over tedious, difficult tasks so we have more time to enjoy life. We don’t need to spend months walking to New York. We can take an airplane or make a phone call. And today it’s just as easy to move there permanently for no reason other than it feels right.

This system of like-minded global villages then is inevitable because it’s motivated by the needs and desires of people. But as with anything made by man, it’s always a good idea to consider the possible negative outcomes. For example, how do we keep the gun-toting conservatives in one community from invading the peace-loving liberals in another community? Obviously, there would need to be agreements among villages, sharing of assets, perhaps a common economy to help with trade. I can imagine a federation of villages to pool resources and fight common enemies, a sort of United Villages of North America. In other words, we will slowly come around to establishing governments. But this time we have the opportunity to approach the problem from a completely different perspective, from the bottom up.

No one person or corporation is going to decide what happens. The technology has already decided. As McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” However, people do have the upper hand. We can and must realize what is happening early on. Merely sending more troops to Iraq to fight the Islamic State misses the point, because the enemy is using technology to form across states. We need to rise above individual differences of opinion to organize the chaos around the ideas and values all people have in common, in which the goal is the happiness and well-being of all.

[billbirney-blog]

Hardwired for life

Deconstruct someone and make a list of all the parts: eyes, nose, intestines, thoughts, emotions, memories, skills, language mechanisms, abilities, everything. Then, separate all the things that were determined by genes from the things determined by the environment in which a person was raised.

It would look something like this: most of the physical components, such as the length of the fingers and the size of the brain would be nature, genetic. Nature would also include mistakes, abnormalities and mutations that occurred during development, such as twins and missing fingers. Many of these mistakes could be caused by environmental influences, such as a mother who drank or took drugs excessively during pregnancy. But the majority of components in the environment list would be products of the mind: memories, the content of thoughts, and biases. Even balance, which is learned after birth, is controlled by the mind.

After identifying everything human as either nature or nurture, there are all the items that either apply to both nature and nurture or cannot fit neatly into either category. And most of these leftovers are also concerned with the brain or mind – not the content of thoughts, which clearly come from the environment, but the ways people think and make decisions.

Language is one of those cross-over components. The brain contains mechanisms for acquiring and using language. We learn to speak English or Swahili naturally because our brains are hard wired. Another example is walking. The brain is wired for walking, but has to learn how to operate the legs after birth.

Building a personality

What about parts of our personality, like love, hate, greed and altruism? Considering that all people possess these qualities in varying degrees, it’s reasonable to conclude that they are also both innate and learned. We are all born with the mechanisms to be both greedy and caring. And during our development and through our connections with other people, mainly parents, we learn how to use the mechanisms to form memories, make decisions and determine our behavior. We create our own individual and unique instances of hate and love, greed and sharing, empathy and sociopathy, and so on.

Do we get hate from our parents? Sure. We get the tools and wiring to hate, and then we learn how to use the tools first from parents, then from TV, friends and people in general. One person’s inherited hate tool may cause him to feel the need to be more self-protective, to more easily judge a situation as fear-inducing, and to lack the ability to feel empathy. Together, these propensities may manifest in an inclination to easily rise to anger and lash out with violent hatred. Another person may have an inhibited ability to feel fear, and so would have little desire or need to hate.

What about curiosity? What makes one person curious and passionate about learning, and another have little interest in new things or even react with fear to the world? It’s most likely the combination of inherited brain cell connections that initially motivate a person to either view the world with wonder, ask questions and think about how it all works, or view all new situations as potentially dangerous, assuming a victim mentally.

Inherited reactions

By just looking around you, it’s clear that a person’s view of the world does not only come from the way they were raised. Anyone who has ever had a child knows that very young infants can react differently to the same stimulus.  Bring one baby into a bright, noisy room and she will open her eyes wide and try to take it all in, while another child will react by squeezing her eyes shut and crying, and another will simply go limp and fall asleep.

The internal wiring we were born with plays a major role in how we react to events. The environment provides the stimulus to the senses, but it’s the wiring of the brain that determines how the stimulus is interpreted, how it is used, how it is turned into memories to form opinions and then drive our future decisions.

Why does one person join a protest supporting human rights, and another join the Ku Klux Klan or Islamic state? Why does a person look at a lunar eclipse and wonder why, and another see the same thing and hide in fear? The answers can be found in both our life experiences and the brains we were born with.

Hardwired from the start

And while we’re on the subject, what does “questioning” mean? Why do we need to know about the meaning of the universe and life? Why do we need to know “why”? Our brains are wired to question and fill the gaps in our knowledge. But many people cannot seem to live with uncertainty and inconsistency. They feel the need to find answers as quickly as possible, whether they’re true or not – all the gaps must be filled, everything must be complete, symmetrical, and straight and even. Other people are okay without knowing all the answers, and others see curiosity as a lifelong journey. Also, somewhere baked into the circuits in our minds is the notion of happiness and suffering. We all seem to have those ideas or needs, but they manifest differently in each person.

When we try to find and answer certain questions about universal truths we hit a brick wall. To fill the gaps in our knowledge, some people are okay with inventing answers, like religions, while others follow the wisdom of the crowd, and others find enjoyment in the mystery.

Manmade mysteries of the universe

But the truth is, questions are manmade. In the universe, there are only masses of rocks and fire, cosmic rays and black holes. Nowhere can you find why or how or what. A crab nebula exists because stuff happens. There is no why. The need to find reasons for everything exists only in the human mind.  There is no concept of good or rules or truth or god or any other property.

There is no concept of concepts. All of those things were created by man to satisfy the need of some mechanism we inherited in our brain cell wiring. The need to question and search for the truth are simply survival strategies that come with being human. We are like robots that do things and make things and think things. And to do all that we have tools like the need to label everything as true or false, good or bad, big or small. None of these needs exist outside our minds and they don’t matter, except to us. In fact the concept of “mattering” is manmade, as are the concepts of owning, believing, time, greatness and irony.

Nature and nurture and whatever else goes into a human being don’t matter either. The person who is curious, intelligent and altruistic is no more capable of staying alive than a fool who doesn’t care much, doesn’t know what “true” happiness is and doesn’t have a thought in his head. So any effort outside making life on earth as enjoyable and free from suffering as possible is a waste. And by waste I mean unnecessary for life on earth. Why? Because there is only us.

Beyond our physical bodies, there is something that we have in common with all life forms. It is that thing or force that turns matter into a living being; that gives us our minds and our motivation, our will, our identity. It seems to be the most important element in our or any life and it’s the only thing that is impossible to know. We can’t leave it off our list of components, but what do we call it?

Creating the future we want

How does this relate to creating the future we want? We are all different. We each have a different genetic make-up and different experiences. But most people agree that there are many, many more ways we are alike. So to create a future that works for everyone, it’s simply a matter of focusing on those things. Forget the universe and its mysteries, set aside trying to answer all those unanswerable questions. We can create our future by simply focusing on what makes us all happy.

[billbirney-blog]

What does trust buy us?

Can trust exist without honesty? Yes. It happens all the time. What you can’t have is trust without knowledge. Person A has no way of knowing for sure how honest person B is. He can only make predictions based on his knowledge.

You use trust to get something you want. You trust your car to get you to the store. If you didn’t trust the car, you wouldn’t be able to get the eggs you need to bake your cake.

Trust is a tool you use to make a connection or bond with someone or something. With a bond of trust, you allow yourself to be vulnerable in some way. You give up a degree of personal safety to the other party (or thing) in the belief that they (or it) will behave according to your predictions and provide you some benefit. Your decision to trust the car, then, is not based on the car’s honesty, but on your needs and the knowledge you possess about the car.

Our need to trust

You can never trust something 100%. That’s why you need knowledge and faith. You choose faith because you want something. Think of trust and faith as the same thing.

Trust is not an absolute, a property something possesses, a law of the universe. It’s just a tool we use. Trust enables us to do things and have things. Without trust, we could not survive. What does trust buy us? Life. The need for anything ultimately comes from our basic survival instinct. By trusting, we grow and thrive; by not trusting, we wither and die. We continuously analyze the world around us as to its trustworthiness.

You want to build a house in a tree. To do so, you need to trust that the tree will hold you. How do you make that decision? By gaining knowledge of the tree, and then trusting your knowledge. When you look at trust up close, then, you see that you’re really not trusting the tree so much as your knowledge of it. Again, you’re not so concerned with how honest the tree is. You have no way of knowing the essence of the tree, what it is to be the tree, the truth of the tree. You only have the knowledge you gain about the tree from your experience with it and from information you get from other sources. Honesty does not lead to trust. Knowledge leads to trust.

Trust, risk and belief

Again, trust isn’t a law of the universe or truth. It is based on a prediction you make. So trust is closely related to risk. Since trust isn’t an absolute or a truth, and is only based on a prediction, you must take a risk in order to trust something, be it deciding to climb a mountain or whether to vote for a politician. And risk, like trust, is driven by your needs and desires. The more you desire something, the more risk you’re likely to take, the more likely you are to trust something.

Trust is also closely tied to belief, which is what we want to think of as true. And people will believe anything that makes them feel safe.

If a snake oil salesman tells you his potion will make you live forever, you are more likely to believe him, to trust him, because you want it to work. You want what he says to be true, even though you may have a lot of knowledge to the contrary. You may be willing to take the risk because the need to feel safe is much stronger than the need for truth. The fact that you have no proof that the oil works matters little, compared to the possibility that you could live forever.

Belief is our own personal truth, and like trust, risk and faith, it is a tool. We use belief to help us organize the world, fill the gaps in our knowledge and get on with our lives. Without beliefs, trust, risk-taking, and faith, we couldn’t survive.

You’re hungry, so you need and want a strange berry growing on a bush to be good to eat. Even if your knowledge of the berry is sketchy, you are more willing to take a risk because it’s connected with your survival. Our basic will to survive is connected directly to our animal emotions, which almost always wins over our logical, thinking, human brain. And there’s a reason for that. Our logical brain is concerned with logic, and really can’t always be trusted to make decisions in favor of personal survival. But our animal emotions are 100% loyal to the person. Or at least, that’s how animals, of which we are one, are wired to believe.

Trust and life

If we never took a risk, never trusted, never believed, never had faith, we couldn’t survive – we would die. The whole species would die. In fact, it wouldn’t have survived to begin with, nor would any animal or living thing. Even a virus needs to have faith that the cell it’s injecting its DNA into won’t turn around and kill it.

The concept of trust then can be applied to all living things. Birds and trees need trust too. A tree uses its innate knowledge to trust that growing a certain way will bring it more life-giving sunlight. But honesty is a quality only the higher life forms possess. And not just humans. Crows, for example, use strategy and trickery too.

The truth about honesty

Honesty is a survival tool. We use honesty to make us feel safe and get us what we want. Like a group of crows triangulating on an unsuspecting robin, people use honesty to manipulate the trust decisions of others. Honesty is used like a trap. And the bait is knowledge.

People naturally want to believe something is “true.” We want to take risks and trust because that is how we survive. A person uses honesty to get what he wants by taking advantage of another person’s need to believe. And he does that by feeding the other person knowledge. The knowledge can be the actual truth (honest), or it can be a lie (dishonest), or a mix of both.

The honesty cocktail is given by person A to person B in the hope that it will convince person B to trust her. Person B then takes that knowledge and compares it with other knowledge he has attained, and decides whether to trust person A, based on his needs and desires.

Trust in fear

It’s often said that the problem with the world is a lack of trust among people. This is true. But honesty isn’t the solution, because you can’t trust honesty. The problem comes from fear. Not the healthy kind of fear that we have of things that are really dangerous, like being attacked by a tiger. It’s the caustic, twisted, sociopathic type of fear that comes from trusting the wrong people.

The fear-mongers of the world succeed by using honesty to earn people’s trust in order to manipulate them into believing that something, someone, some ideas can’t be trusted. (The Frankenstein monster is on a rampage!) When people lose trust, they lose their bearings. They revert to survival mode and start doing crazy things.

The individuals who make use of this technique have it easy. Fear is much easier to spread than truth. It’s a very effective message because it bypasses logic and knowledge, and reaches right into people’s emotional core. When groups of people are whipped into a fearful frenzy, all reason takes a backseat to save their own skin. Instead of checking in with their knowledge, people trust the fearful messages and take comfort in the embrace of an angry mob.

Fear causes our natural need to trust and take risks to diminish, become repressed. It causes us to lose trust in logic and knowledge in favor of decisions based on emotional responses, which are based on our need to feel safe and survive. We turn to the emptiness of hope, instead of searching for the truth.

Believe knowledge

People will always use their honesty tool to manipulate others into trusting their messages. That’s a given. But to bring back trust, we don’t need more honesty. We need to come back to trusting our knowledge and experience. Instead of reflexively reacting to fear, we need to use our natural curiosity to gain more knowledge, search for the truth, use our minds to think. We need to rise above the messages that appeal to our emotions, our need to survive, and start trusting our ability to reason and learn.

It’s often said that trust is built over time. As you learn about how a person’s behavior syncs with their words, you gain knowledge that enables you to predict how honest the person is, and whether she can be trusted. It can be a politician or a close friend, or other elements in the world around you. Trust is a tool. Through trust, we survive.

Our knowledge may not be complete or even true, but it’s all we have. To create the future we want, we need to learn to trust the basic goodness in humanity, trust the laws of the universe, trust our ability to gain useful knowledge from our experience, and put our faith in what we have – the things we know. I’m not asking you to trust me. I’m asking you to think.

[billbirney-blog]

Living the future

There’s nothing wrong with living now. In fact it’s a prerequisite for living the future. The problem is, now is over before you know it. By the time you know now, it’s gone.

Meditation is all about placing yourself in the here and now. It’s a good way to gain the proper perspective on the life. And that helps you to order your thoughts, see things for what they are and let go of all the stuff that’s unimportant. Why do that? In fact, why do anything? Because any act of “doing,” including thinking, propels you into the future. You “do” to affect or create the future.

While living in the here and now sounds very interesting and mysterious, practically speaking, it can’t be done. Living is an action; it’s doing. Living implies forward movement. The past may not matter so much, but the future really does matter, because that’s where this train called life is headed. I think what really happens when you meditate is you learn how to stand still and watch time go by.

Meditation is a very useful thing to do. When you meditate, you rise above your current state by concentrating on your breath and away from all those crazy thoughts buzzing around in your head. You become mindful of the world around you as it is, not through the distorted lens of a million confusing, conflicting thoughts – all that junk in your mind that builds up over time, caused by office politics, a friend who betrays you, some problem that refuses to go away, an unresolved conversation that keeps replaying endlessly. All those thoughts – good or bad – color your outlook and affect the decisions you make and the way you feel. In other words, over time you allow the past to control your future.

By meditating, you can clearly see how the tendrils of the past reach into and affect your future, and you can change what isn’t working for you – remove or retune the filters to create the future you want.

Facing forward

Now with a clear head and focused perspective, you can live the future. What does that mean? It means refocusing your perspective on the future instead of facing backwards and living your life reacting to events in the past. The future is a product of the past, but it’s determined by the things that happen right now.

The past may affect your decisions, but it does not control what you do. The moment 10 seconds from now is different from the present moment because of something you did. Whether it was pressing a button that set off a charge that took down a 20-story building or 20 beats of your heart, you made your life and the world a different place in some way. And the decisions you made during that time were either a reflexive response or an intentional, conscious, strategic action.

So living the future is the same as saying, “Living in the here and now,” which is the same as saying, “Living.” And you can either approach life facing backward or forward – allow the past to dictate your future or learn from the past to create the future you want. I don’t need to tell you how to allow the past to dictate your future. That’s self-evident. You listen to the past and do what it tells you to do.

Blank canvas

But creating the future is the opposite. It’s not self-evident at all. In fact, it’s pretty scary. Facing the future is staring at a blank canvas. It has never existed, so it is very empty. For it to exist the way you want, you need to create it. You need to paint what you want to see. You need to buy what you want to own. You need to build what you want to live in. You need to think what you want to believe. You need to imagine what you want to be.

Your blank canvas can be seen as a problem waiting to be solved or an opportunity waiting to be taken. To get ideas, look around you, look in the past, look in your heart. Make a list, do a sketch, try some things, ask friends, surf the Internet. But whenever you look for ideas, don’t allow them to control your decisions. Allow them only to inspire you. Don’t allow the past to push you kicking and screaming into the future. Allow the future to pull you forward. Think of time as a river. Be still and allow the current to carry you.

Future movie

I suggest not waiting 65 years to start living the future, as I did. You can start anytime you feel the inspiration. I made a list in my head of all the things that were important to me and made me happy. Actually, it wasn’t so much a list as a picture, a movie. I saw myself in a place, saw the people around me, and imagined how it all felt. I saw my house and where it was.

One thing that is very important to me is reducing my carbon footprint. And that also makes me happy. It makes me happy to do things that improve the conditions for living things – people, animals, plants. I feel happy knowing the future I am living is a journey toward that goal.

I also feel happiest without a lot of stuff and clutter. In my house, I don’t want a lot of fancy, superfluous things. I enjoy a simple, plain wooden table. I like space. I like to look around my room and see sparseness, just the essentials.

I also like the feeling of coziness. I don’t mean cramped and claustrophobic, but a space with little excess, just enough to fit me and my essentials. This isn’t the same as austere. I enjoy comfort. Simplicity really does make me happy. It calms me. My mind is frantic enough without having to live in a busy, hectic space.

It’s not a coincidence that the movie of my future syncs with my desire to reduce my carbon footprint. I don’t think you can create a successful future unless it is guided by your values. In my movie, everything points to less – less is more. I see myself living in a small house, with a small carbon footprint, that contains only the things that are important to me and make me happy.

It’s a small cozy space, but it’s nestled in green – trees, ferns. But where I want my house to be small, I want my world to be large. I want to walk outside my house, and see lots of green and good, happy people. But not too many people. I want just enough people around me to be able to feel connected and close to them. When I’m in a large crowd of people, I feel overwhelmed.

I replay this movie in my head and it makes me happy, because it serves my needs and reduces my carbon footprint. In other words, I can both live the future I want and contribute to making the world a better place. But that’s just me.

Happy good

I certainly don’t expect or even want everyone to share my future vision. Maybe you enjoy living in a big house in a crowded urban environment. If that makes you happy, then go for it. I do, however, feel compelled to push the idea of making the world a better place for all, as opposed to doing things that benefit only a few people at the expense of everyone else. If you enjoy living in a McMansion, I would hope that you make an effort to give back to the world by donating millions to those less fortunate. But if you don’t, there’s not much else I can do but hope.

But it is my firm belief, as I’ve stated in my posts, that the vast majority of people are good and will naturally make the right decisions for the future of the world, if given the chance. And the chance will come when we stop listening to the lies of the past, and start listening to our hearts; when we stop living the past, and turn around and face forward. Then, we all can start living and creating the future we want.

[billbirney-blog]

What are you going to do about it?

Are you composting? Are you driving an electric car? Are you carpooling to work? Do you recycle your plastic bags? Do you eat organic vegetables? Why aren’t you? If you want something, like a normal climate, why aren’t you doing something about it?

It doesn’t matter what your excuses are. You’re either doing something to improve your life and life on earth or you’re not. The atmosphere, depleted rainforests and your body aren’t going to improve on their own because you don’t have the time or you forget. Unless people stop dumping CO2 into the air, burning down rainforests and eating too much, the climate will get worse and they’ll get fatter.

Am I doing everything I can do? No. But I’m doing something. If everyone did something, it might be enough to counteract the damage.

The problems won’t go away on their own. They certianly won’t go away if you don’t believe they’re real. There is a large cohort of conservatives who believe all these problems were made up by the liberals. Global warming is a conspiracy along with composting and eating vegetables. And you can throw in higher education and the media too. And don’t get them started with drilling in the Arctic.

What are they doing about it? Plenty. They do nothing, plenty of nothing, which allows the giant corporations, who blow up mountains to mine for coal and pollute the environment, to do whatever they want.

Mad as hell

And so it goes with the future of the world: a lot of people doing nothing, which allows certain people who are doing something to fulfill their vision of attaining wealth on a massive scale.

Doesn’t it make you mad? It makes me mad. But liberals have ways to manage their madness. They meditate, go to their hot yoga classes and ride their bikes in traffic. After a good workout, they feel better – not so angry and upset. Unlike conservatives, they know how to manage their anger. They pride themselves on their managed anger and lack of stress. All those problems that can’t be solved simply melt away with a good massage. Thinking is difficult. Talking about unhappy things is stressful. And difficult and stressful things bring us down, mess with our chi, and then we get all bipolar and have to pick ourselves back up with pills.

On one level doing nothing is the best strategy. What do a fat redneck who believes he should be free to drive a Hummer and carry machine guns in public, and a gaggle of liberals leaving their worries behind in a hot yoga class have in common? They all breathe the same air. There’s more. They all need to eat vegetables to be healthy and they don’t like sinkholes caused by depletion of the groundwater to swallow their homes. And they’re all doing what they think is going to make them happy and suffer less.

But I think they could do more. Of course we all can.

Enter compassion

Compassion can save the world. And by save the world I mean create a future in which the planet is habitable and the creatures living on it have a chance to thrive and be happy.

There are two levels of compassion. First, there’s the personal level, which is based on survival. We take care of ourselves, love ourselves. We do things that make us happy and safe, such as carry a large machine gun in public and melt our troubles away in a hot yoga class. In level one, we strive to make our lives better.

After taking care of our own personal needs, we can transition or evolve to the second level. We turn around and face outwards, and we apply the same love and care we give ourselves to the world. This isn’t something we experience for an hour after Sunday school. You can’t get compassion by simply smiling at a stranger. It’s a feeling. And it happens naturally without trying at the very point you realize that you are okay.

When you truly love yourself, you feel safe, you have the answers. You know why you’re here, why you’re alive, and what you were meant to do. The love you feel for yourself extends outward to every other living thing. You don’t think twice about helping a sick child or taking in a friend who lost her job or sharing the things you possess, because you love everyone. You see everyone and everything as an extension of yourself.

Doing something about it

How does this relate to getting things done and creating the future we want? If you love yourself and view the world as part of you, you will naturally want happiness for all living things. And it applies to everything you do. All those things you did for your happiness, you want to do for the world. And when you do things out of compassion for someone else, the love comes back to you. Compassion is a win/win.

If you find you can’t get motivated to start recycling or donate your time at a food bank, it’s probably because you haven’t made the connection between doing those things and compassion. Picking up litter on the side of the road feels like work. You think, why should I clean up someone else’s mess? Let someone else deal with it. But as soon as you make the connection, the moment you understand compassion, you look at everything from a new perspective.

People have the capacity to do great things. Every great thing people have ever done was based on compassion, caring and doing for others. From inventing the lightbulb to caring for children to joining a march to Selma, history has proven the greatness that can come from facing outward. Even the atomic bomb was created for compassionate reasons.

In phase one, you do for yourself. In phase two, you do for others. So, what are you going to do about it? If you’re still in level one and don’t really feel the calling to level two, you should wait, don’t stress. That change can only happen from within. It happens when you realize your personal needs are taken care of. Your compassion toward yourself has made you a confident, whole and loving person. You feel completely safe. The world is filled with potential dangers but your fears are under control, and so is your anger and hate. You look out at the world and see yourself. The water, the trees, the animals – all of it is now part of you. This is what happens.

People who feel compassionate don’t need to carry guns around in public. But not everyone will have this experience. Billions of people will spend their lives in fear, always feeling the need to protect themselves, never feeling completely happy, confident and loved. They will hate and mock the very idea of unconditional love and compassion, fear the idea of feeling oneness with the world. They will always see the world as hostile, feel they are victims and fill their closets with guns and ammunition.

Probably, the most important and difficult act of compassion is to approach people who are stuck in the first level and let them know you care, listen to them and answer their questions with true understanding, give them your love and let them know they are okay. That’s what you’re going to do about it. Do a great thing. The world will change, and you will create the future you want.

[billbirney-blog]

Agree to disagree

It’s the key, really. As long as you’re not harming me and I’m not harming you, we can be adults. We can be tolerant of each other, allow each other space, negotiate and compromise to work out our differences, and be happy. We can allow ourselves to agree to disagree. Then, we can create the future we want.

But what does that mean? First, “we can create” sounds vague. If we are working on a creative project together – making a movie, for example – it is true that we are all working together toward the same goal. But “we” can also refer to you, mean and everybody else in the world? Is it possible for all the world’s people to work together on a project? Sure. The project we and all living things are working on together is called life. And we all have the same goals: to live, be free, be happy, love and be loved.

Second, the “future we want,” can be taken to mean all the people in the world want the same things for the future. But is that possible? Sure. Working together on the same project with the same goals means we all want the same future. The details vary – one person may want a gold-plated Cadillac, another laws against abortion – but all people have the same core desires and needs.

And that is what “we can create the future we want” means. By each of us creating our own individual futures with thought and intention, based on our common core desires, we the people of the world can create the future we want: a gigantic shared future, a blended creation.

Follow the leader

How is that any different from the way it is now? Well, that is what prompted me to write this blog. I find that many – if not most – people don’t live their lives with thought and intention. They think as little as possible and take the easy way out by following the crowd, which follows a leader. Powerful and influential leaders are often members of the wealthy elite class, which by itself isn’t bad. But often the people on top are driven by greed and self-centeredness, people who have disdain for the hordes following them.

Not all leaders are elite and evil. And even if they were, that’s not the problem. The problem is we don’t think. Instead of realizing we have the power to create our future, we give that power to a politician, a corporation, some entity that simply smiles and says, “Follow me.” And we do.

By listening to these entities instead of our own core needs and desires, we work against our own best interests. We also work against the best interests of everyone else in the world. The result is we work too much, get paid too little, and spend too much time on what isn’t at all important and is in fact bad for us. We are sad, depressed, stressed, afraid, crazy and unhappy. We waste our energy complaining, but do nothing about it.

This is why people in India leave their family farms to live in cardboard boxes in the big city, and why we continue to buy expensive gas-guzzling SUVs knowing that CO2 is killing our environment. We do what we know in our hearts is wrong because we have chosen to give up our freedom to choose in order to follow a bad leader, take the wrong advice, passively accept the wrong values, sell our souls to a manmade god.

If we were to look in our hearts and see what was there, we would realize that we each want to live, be free, be happy, love and be loved. And then we would realize all people want the same things we do, whether it’s buying a loaf of bread or trying to shut down an oil rig. If 7 billion people acted out of love, and a desire to live, be free and be happy, we would naturally create the future we want.

Growing up

What about disagreement? What if something that makes me happy, makes you unhappy? How can we achieve worldwide happiness with so many people all believing so many conflicting things? That’s where agreeing to disagree comes in. Unless you have discovered a magical method of separating yourself from humanity, you are a member of society, whether you like it or not. In exchange for us all allowing you to be a member, you have to learn to get along with us. You have to follow our rules in order to play this game called life.

It’s commonly called growing up. And yet some adults still have a problem practicing things like compromise, giving in, tolerance, and agreeing to disagree. When people become crowds, such as politicians in congress, individuals feel it’s acceptable to channel the social skills of three-year-olds. However, this strategy only benefits those who would like to see congress and our government fail.

Behaving badly

Which brings us to another question. What about other core qualities like greed, avarice, self-centeredness, hate and fear? What if I were to look in my heart and realize I would be happy acting on my need to take something that belongs to you?

These negative qualities are the enemies of a functional society. Why is that bad? Greed is a legitimate quality that we all share. That’s true. Greed and the other negative qualities are shared by all people and many animals, even plants, but they only benefit the individual, while the positive qualities benefit the individual and society in general.

People are social animals. We rely on our social connections to thrive and reproduce, but greed and those other qualities set us apart. One can never be happy focusing on negative qualities. The further into greed and self-centeredness we journey, the further isolated we become. We’ve all seen the movie about the self-centered person who comes to the realization he has only one friend. He becomes the only member of his private island, and soon realizes that his drive to find happiness has instead brought him emptiness.

But happy or not, deluded or not, the self-centered may become leaders, may achieve the status that comes with wealth and power. One of the qualities of a leader, good or not, is believing he or she is superior and special in some way, one of the chosen few. In other words, along with the qualities we admire in a great leader, come a certain number of sociopathic qualities that we should watch out for.

But again the problem isn’t with the person we are following, but with us. When we follow these people or passively resign ourselves to being their victims, we fuel the fire that perpetuates their drive, prolongs the suffering they cause. They will cease to exist as leaders if no one follows them. And this brings us back to the beginning – creating the future we want.

Before humanity can evolve toward global happiness without suffering, we need to learn to subdue our lesser qualities. How does that happen? By each of us making decisions and taking actions with serious, heartfelt thought and intention, based on our core desires to live, be free, be happy, love and be loved.

Taking action

Every day we hear from some group trying to persuade us to take action. They want us to join a club and carry a sign protesting something, go door to door and send in donations. And many of these causes are good and worthwhile, but are they truly taking action or just complaining? Have the organizers thought about all the ramifications of what they want to achieve or are they just frustrated victims? Many people don’t get involved and take a stand. And they don’t because they’re confused and tired, they work long weeks and don’t have the time and don’t see the point.

But we can all do something that’s much easier and more effective. And it doesn’t require carrying a sign all day. It just requires us changing our perspective, so we view ourselves as creators, doers, thinkers: people who think for themselves, believe we all want the same basic things, take action and realize that every action we take determines our future.

The elite at the top who sold us on their idea of the future, who we trust to lead us in the right direction and care about our shared future, actually have no more insight into what the future should be than any one of us, because we all share the same set of core desires. And when it comes to working out the details, we can agree or disagree, and just get along.

[billbirney-blog]

Bottom up government

This blog is focused on the future. I could call myself a visionary, like so many others, and reel off a bunch of shocking predictions. But I feel it’s more useful to view the future as something that we all share and control. The truth is I have no idea what the future will bring, but I do know for a fact that we can create whatever future we want.

Basically, the future doesn’t just happen on its own based on the ramblings of some futurist. The future occurs based on stuff happening – an earthquake, a homerun, the merger of two giant media companies, a birth. If nothing happened, if the universe was one gigantic still-life painting, if time didn’t exist, there would be no future.

If all this isn’t painfully obvious, I don’t know what is. And yet everyday some expert will make a prediction based on a snapshot of some doctored data and a very narrow view of the workings of the universe – Obamacare will bankrupt the healthcare industry, gay marriage will destroy Christian values, conservative PACs will kill democracy – and we believe it all.

We were put on earth to make things happen and that is what we do. We can either obey orders, do what we are told, follow the crowd, believe that the future is random and chaotic, and passively go with the flow, or we can use our minds to think and create the future we want with our very next action.

The people at the top

This blog is about exploring all the many, many things we can do to create our future. The people who like to think they’re creating our future now are at the top – the extremely wealthy, the elite, the powerful, and the politicians – basically, people with big mouths and fat wallets. Of course, they’re not interested in the future we want. They want the future to reflect their needs and desires, and they use their wealth to help them buy that future.

Think about what you would do if you had a ton of money and wanted more, and the only thing keeping you from getting richer was people. Let’s say you wanted to extract gas and oil from the ground beneath 1,000 homes in a small town. To create the future you want, you would spend money to influence the people and their government, so they would believe that letting you drill under their homes is beneficial to them in some way. You would show them how safe your process is and give them jobs and money, lots of money.

Of course you would be prepared with a good story and extra cash to buy government officials when sink holes started swallowing their homes and polluting their drinking water. Money would allow you to control the conversation by framing the homeowners as a small group of whiny trailer trash who just want to make it difficult for the job creators, who want to shut down the big benevolent oil company, and so on.

Dire predictions

With a future like this, controlled by the wealthy elite, it’s not difficult to make some fairly dire predictions based on what we know the elite want – which is not what we want. We know minimal action will be taken by the government to regulate activities that pollute the environment and worsen the effect of global climate change. We know the elite will continue to get all the tax breaks, and we will get very little relief. We know they will be able to continue selling drugs that are untested and overpriced, food that is poor quality, and services like cable TV that have minimal customer protections. We know this because the big businesses are protected by the government, because the businesses make large campaign contributions that get the politicians who run the government elected.

So it’s like shooting fish in a barrel to make dire predictions. Anybody can call themselves an expert and yammer on for a thousand pages. What’s not so easy is imaging a future that isn’t dire. With the current state of affairs in mind, how is it even possible to create a future we want?

The importance of the future

In previous posts I wrote about how we create our futures by the simple actions we take every day. Whenever we buy food at the grocery, decide what do next weekend, or vote for a president, we create our future. We also create our future when we accept money from a corporation to drill for gas under our homes.

If your future is important to you then you must consider the importance of every action and decision you make, because that is how you create the future you want. The people with the money and power know how easy it is to manipulate the crowd to go along with their plans, because they know people in general don’t think about the importance of their actions. People don’t seem to understand how a simple action today taken with minimal forethought can have a profoundly negative impact on their lives in years to come. People don’t take responsibility for their lives, thinking that they are merely victims of some grand scheme that is outside their control. People go through life in a fog, passively accepting whatever fate comes their way. But all of that can change in an instant with the very next decision you make.

Bottom up government

By ceding control of our government to the wealthy and elite, we have created a top-down structure. Decisions are made to favor the wealthy in the belief that their goodness will naturally trickle down to our level. But unfortunately that doesn’t happen very often. A good example of the top-down myth in action is when the government hands out favors to the job creators in the belief that doing so will benefit the people. The theory is if we give massive financial incentives to massive corporations, they will do the right and honorable thing by creating jobs and supporting our communities. However what usually happens is the incentives far outweigh the benefits.

We know very well what top-down government looks like, because it’s what we have now. But what does bottom-up government look like? Well, there’s a name for it – democracy. It’s a concept our country was founded on – government controlled by the people. With this form of government people vote for representatives who go to the capitol and make laws and regulations to protect them and enhance their lives.

But what has happened is that through our passivity and victim mentality we have trusted the wrong people with our futures. What was originally a democracy is now really a plutocracy – people governed by the wealthy and elite.

The most obvious way to revive our democracy is to vote for representatives who actually represent us, if there is such a thing. But we have the opportunity to go beyond merely attempting to undo plutocracy. We should be imagining a government that has as its mission the happiness and wellbeing of all people.

Our government

Our government can be whatever we want it to be as long as we stick with the rules outlined in the constitution. The elite have convinced many people that government should be small and powerless, that regulations should be reduced, that we should view the government as an external evil. But all these views are the views of the elite who want to continue as the entities in control. Naturally, if they want to remain in control, a strong effective government is their enemy.

A government by the people and for the people should also work for the people, be all about the needs of the people. Serving the needs of the people could actually increase the size of the government because it would be doing more. It could also mean more taxes to pay for it. We could expand healthcare to create a single-payer system that provides all people with affordable comprehensive and low-cost coverage. We could expand social programs to help more people in need. We could expand education to provide free college tuition.

We could go beyond reinstating programs that were killed over the years in order to provide tax breaks for the wealthy. There are many ways we could expand our government to make it work for us, be an extension of us instead of our enemy, provide better protection for us and bring an end to suffering and inequality. The goal of our reinstated democracy should be to work toward the happiness and wellbeing of all. With our government working for us, we the people can be united to create any kind of future we want.

[billbirney-blog]

Bottom up media

Whoever controls the media, controls the message. Whoever controls the message, controls the future. So to create the future we want, we need bottom up media – media controlled by the people.

What is media?

The term media can mean a number of different things. Today it refers to all the various forms of mass communication: radio, TV, recordings, movies, print and Internet media. For communication to happen, you need content creators (the producers of the messages), distributors (the systems for transferring the messages), and consumers (the target of the messages).

Mass media is a type of one-to-many communication – the most effective way to reach a mass audience, to control the message and the future. In today’s world, we clearly have a predominance of top-down centralized media. The primary content creators are located in major metropolitan centers – Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC - and owned by a handful of very rich and powerful corporations. Most local content creators and distributors are owned by the same national corporations and simply pass on the same centralized messages.

What we have is a heavy concentration of wealth and power – media corporations that are so massive and influential they are almost too big to fail. This centralization of content creation has the effect of unifying the voice, so we the consumer can flip to any channel or source and get the same messages. Movies, TV, magazines, music, commercials all have the same look and sound, all send us the same messages.

This small tightly-controlled world of mass media is all about determining what we see, hear, desire, feel and think. It’s controlled by for-profit corporations that own not only the content but the distribution, so there are no impediments, nothing to stop the flow. Money is funneled into the top of the machine and a steady stream of entertainment and pseudo-information flows right into our living rooms and right into our minds. Comcast for example started as a cable provider but now owns multiple content creation corporations. The message starts with NBC-Universal and flows right through the cable to you.

The sound of one voice

It’s all very slick, well-oiled, and highly profitable, and on the surface seems like a win/win for everyone. What could be wrong with Comcast owning the creation and distribution – a giant media corporation deciding what we see, hear, desire, feel and think?

Most of us consume media for entertainment – reality shows, dramas, news and award shows. Most of us are content watching national acts on TV, listening to them on our smartphones, and buying their CDs at Walmart. We trust this enclosed communication system to provide us with our messages; to supply us with our clothes, our music, our information, our politics and our values. We can sit on our couches and ingest this smorgasbord of messages passing by on the screen without lifting a finger – from the latest presidential contenders to the Kardashians. It’s like the old days when people went to the three-ring circus, except now there are hundreds of rings and it’s in our living rooms, 24/7.

We learn what to eat, what to wear, who to root for and how it all fits in to our lives. What could be wrong with passively allowing media corporations free access to our minds, to decide the messages we receive and our future? The primary goal of media companies is profit. When we ingest their messages, they make money and grow. Therefore, to make the most profit, they design their messages to be whatever we want to hear. What’s wrong with that?

The mediavore

People consume media the same way they consume food. For a restaurant to prosper they’re going to offer salty, sweet, greasy food – burgers, fries, pizza, pastries and soft drinks – stuff that we’re going to find irresistible, but is also cheap to produce, so they can sell a lot and maximize their profits.

Likewise, reality shows, game shows and infotainment are incredibly inexpensive to produce and are engineered to be very appealing, just like a big pizza with lots of stretchy cheese. The only difference between a reality show and a deep-fried quesadilla from Taco Bell is that we know one of them is bad for us. We are aware that one of them will clog our arteries, but we’re oblivious to the other one clogging our minds with an insipid parade of images and fatuous stories, the media equivalent of high fructose corn syrup.

Of course the media outlet that attempted to feed us a constant diet of intellectual programming would fail before it started. The channel wouldn’t be able to compete with the high fructose, fizzy stuff from all the other outlets.

Bottom up media

The antidote for mindless media isn’t all work and no play. It’s finding a balance – some intellectual, some comedy, some news, some Kardashians. It’s also finding media sources we can trust, that aren’t all about selling us something. But it goes beyond trust and diversity. In order to create the future we want, we also need to create the messages. Instead of living off a constant diet of high-processed mush from the top, we need to create content from the bottom up.

There’s one communication type I haven’t talked much about yet – the Internet. Currently most traffic on the Internet leads to giant corporate websites, like Google, Facebook and Amazon. But the Internet is primarily the only media type that allows people as well as corporations to reach a mass audience – one-to-many. And as long as we work to make sure our rights to a free Internet remain intact (net neutrality, for example), the Internet offers the greatest hope for bottom up media – media controlled by people.

Currently, Internet Service Providers, such as Comcast and CenturyLink, own the toll booth between us and the Internet, but the Internet itself is still open and free. The voice of the people is effectively shut out of the other modes, such as broadcast TV, cable, major print publications and radio (although low power FM radio offers some hope.) But anyone can start a free blog site on the Internet and communicate openly (for the most part) with the world. Could that be the future?

Who knows what technologies will be available to carry bottom up messages in the future. The Internet is the most obvious one now only because it is still open and free. But the airwaves belonged to the public too until they were given away to for-profit corporations by the federal government. We could lose the Internet the same way if we aren’t paying attention.

Creating our future

But technology aside, what will we do with our bottom up media? What will our messages be? We have trusted the top-down media moguls to create our messages for so long, would we even know what to say? Do people even have a voice? A quick look at YouTube or Tumblr answers that question. Given the opportunity, people express themselves with vigor.

What does the future look like for big media? We get a hint from what happened with the music industry. There was a time when all of our music came to us from a handful of powerful record labels. They owned the talent, the production and the distribution. Then the Internet came along. Today, any music producer can easily share their work online, circumventing the record label roadblock.

Where the industrial age centralized model of a limited number of media sources brought us one-to-many communication, maybe the future will bring us some expanded version of the Internet with many-to-many mass communication, and a break-up of the centralized top-down model.

The messages we get from the media empires of today are all about profit. If people are allowed to create the messages, we can bypass the profit motive. Then, mass media can be all about happiness – lifting the human race, instead of exploiting it. The messages in the future don’t have to be heavy and intellectual. What does the voice of the people sound like? It can be modest, profound, profane, passionate, but above all authentic. The voice of the people doesn’t have to be anything more than, “I am here.”

[billbirney-blog]

Fundamental right to hate

If you believe an idea is true, can you also believe it is untrue? Can an idea be both correct and incorrect, right and wrong? If you believe it’s true that a person is evil, what happens to your belief when you discover one day that the person is also good?

In a previous post, I wrote about truths and beliefs. My theory is that we will believe anything that makes us feel safe. All living things naturally strive to keep living – our survival instinct. To that end, we strive to learn which elements in our environment are helpful and which are harmful. Anything that threatens our survival is bad or evil – a hungry lion, a man with a gun or an idea.

We turn the things we learn into beliefs. Beliefs are part of our survival strategy. We want to believe that most things and ideas are helpful. But even if we consider something to be harmful, we strive to form a belief about it. For example, we want to create a belief that packs of wild dogs are harmful because it helps us survive.

After forming a belief, we feel safer. We feel safe with the belief that wild dogs are harmful. If we had no opportunity to form a belief about wild dogs and found ourselves confronted by a pack of them, we would feel very unsafe.

The more important a belief is to our survival, the stronger it is and the harder it is to change. After a while, a strong belief becomes a truth. At this point it becomes a law – it is written. In the future when we come across a pack of wild dogs, the truth can save us from a dangerous situation. We will feel safe because we have the strong belief – the belief that is true.

But what do we do when we get some information that conflicts with our belief? For example, we learn that packs of wild dogs are not always dangerous. Our first reaction is disbelief. We immediately discount the information, even when faced with the fact that wild dogs aren’t dangerous when they’re sleeping. But over time we may learn to trust that knowledge and amend our belief.

The more we learn, the closer we get to the real truth, which may be very different from the belief we call the truth. However, conflicting information needs to be very compelling to override a long-held belief, especially when it is very strong and important for our survival.

A different kind of truth

Now what about ideas like religion that cannot be proved or disproved? People probably formed an idea about packs of wild dogs after witnessing one attack and kill a person. In the same way, people formed ideas about the causes of things after witnessing events, such as solar eclipses, deaths, births, plagues and locust swarms. Like the belief in wild dogs, the religious ideas helped people understand, adapt to and survive in their environment.

The difference is, the truth about dog pack attacks could be observed repeatedly, regardless of where and when they occurred. A person in Africa would have the same experience as a person in China, for example. But observable information is different from causal speculation. Hundreds of years ago ideas about the causes of unexplainable phenomena, such as deadly weather events, could not be proven, so many “truths” sprouted up. The African may have a completely different explanation for a massive flood from the person in China. But that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters to each person is the belief, which makes them feel safe. It serves its purpose. The real truth is irrelevant.

A religious belief is a belief about the causes of everything we experience. It therefore plays a fundamental role in our survival by enabling us to understand and organize our experiences and thoughts about life, our very existence. It is natural then to believe that our religious (or anti-religious) beliefs are vital for our wellbeing, and that we view opposing religious beliefs as the opposite: arbitrary, crazy stories, easy to disprove, even dangerous. We see every day that people will kill or die rather than accept the existence of opposing religious beliefs.

No more room for fundamentalism

Our religious beliefs are among the most important beliefs we have, whether they proclaim that Jesus was born of a virgin, the earth is God, or there is no God. However, in an ever-expanding, ever-shrinking world, there is no more room for fundamentalism.

The religious beliefs a fundamentalist holds do not allow for the existence of opposing beliefs. A thousand years ago Christians rarely came in contact with Muslims, because the world population was much smaller and wide spread. Today, the two groups are continuously reminded of each other’s presence, via the Internet, and live satellite television. They live next door to each other, send their children on airplanes to fight each other.

Adhering to a strict set of irreducible religious beliefs worked when the world population was half what it is today, when communication was rare and groups lived thousands of miles apart. But fundamentalism doesn’t work today. Having a religious code that doesn’t allow for the existence of other religious codes makes it difficult or impossible for people to live together in close quarters.

The very definition of the word implies that fundamentalists feel they have the right and duty to actively exclude other religions; that they have the right to hate; that hate and intolerance is a useful strategy for reaching their goals. But a world order based on exclusion and hate is doomed to fail, especially with so many people living so close together.

The fundamentalist mind

Fundamentalism is less a property of religion and more a way of thinking – not so much spiritual as it is mental. A religious principle may declare that Jesus died to save us from our sins, but it doesn’t come to life until it is interpreted by people. When it becomes a belief held by a fundamentalist, the words on paper become a literal commandment, a law that propels them to action, to eliminate opposing views, views that cannot exist in their world.

To get to that point, the fundamentalist mind converts the words into a belief that is unique to the person. Like any other idea that a person forms, its conception may carry a very different meaning from the original intent because each person mixes his interpretation of the words with other thoughts, ideas, experiences, habits, patterns and memories. People also inherit a unique set of genes that may give one person a propensity for patience and tolerance, and another person a need for strict obedience and literal structure.

The fundamentalist personality then is the reason why a small percentage of Muslims have chosen to join the Islamic state, and why some Christians feel the overwhelming push to fight against abortion. In either case, it’s not the words in the Koran or Bible, it’s the way the words were interpreted in the minds of people with that type of personality that determine the actions they take. Fundamentalism is a way to view the world – a way to deal with a belief, a strategy one uses to feel safe.

So religious (or anti-religious) institutions may provide the words and framework for a set of ideas, but it is the minds of the individuals that create the religious concepts and drive them to action - turning one person into a Gandhi and another into a terrorist.

Creating our future

We all have the fundamental right to hate. We are also free to undertake greed, intolerance and self-centeredness. But in a world that forces people to live closer and closer together, these strategies are unsustainable.

What can we do? Tolerating intolerance isn’t the answer, because that enables fundamentalists to continue their crusades of ignorance and fear. Being intolerant of intolerance is also not the answer, because two wrongs don’t make a right. All-out war would simply inflame divisions, causing fundamentalism to spread its poison even further.

Learning how to effectively deal with fundamentalism is one of the keys to creating the future we want.

Strategies

Truth is irrelevant; the belief is everything. Therefore, simply confronting the fundamentalist with the “truth” will have the opposite effect. Our goal should be to find strategies that move people toward living together in peace. We miss the point if we attack religious institutions because fundamentalism takes place in the mind. We also know it doesn’t work to attack people. Not only does the “attack” strategy go against the goal of peace, a major attack on a core belief will be taken as a personal challenge, which can only be met by defensiveness and counter-attacks.

We need to find a way to cause the fundamentalist to change his beliefs without challenging them. We can do that by realizing what those beliefs mean to the person, by taking the time to understand that the person is good and he believes his ideas are good. Only after walking in his shoes can we begin to work on a solution together. The fundamentalist is the only one who can change his beliefs. And the only way he can do that is if he feels safe to do so. The new belief needs to feel safer than the old one.

So the most effective way to convince the fundamentalist to change his old belief is to prove the benefits of the new one. And isn’t it that way with anyone? To understand the fundamentalist we need to start by looking inside ourselves. The best way to change him, cause him to get rid of the hate, is to first see him as a human being with good points and bad points.

Convincing a fundamentalist to reduce the ill-effects of his belief system is not a job for the intolerant or impatient. The best plan for the short term is to start by practicing tolerance and understanding and compassion in our lives.

The future is created one person at a time. To create the future we want from the bottom up, we need to do things for ourselves that emphasize happiness, built on beliefs that emphasize harmony and togetherness.

[billbirney-blog]

Education for people, part 2

In the bottom up approach to work, people take charge of their lives and rethink their life goals around happiness, instead of trickle down goals that feed corporate interests. The result is people can work, contribute to society in ways that they enjoy, and spend the bulk of their time on things that they consider really important: their families, their home and neighborhood, and personal projects. For example, building a fishing boat or running a cottage industry from home.

To go along with this bottom up approach to work, we’ll need a bottom up education system – one that isn’t focused on the needs of industry, but is all about the needs and desires of people and their goals. To brainstorm what this education system might look like, let’s start from scratch - eliminate our industrial education model, and then add back in the parts that make sense and flesh out new ideas as needed.

Between the ages of 7 and 12, brain development slows. Children begin to understand how they fit into society and are able to take personal responsibility for their actions. This is the time when children can receive a more formal education. They can spend 3 hours a day in a classroom, increasing over the years if it makes sense as their needs and interests develop. 

This is where they learn basics like reading, writing, some math, and some formal history and science. The time when not in the classroom, however, should be spent playing and helping, exploring and learning about their world. For example, they can learn how to cook meals, mend clothes, balance checkbooks, work in the family or community garden, write stories, paint, sculpt, play competitive sports – keep busy with real projects that help them integrate into society.

By the time children reach 12 to 13, they have at least a rough idea how they want to contribute to society and make a living as an adult, and most importantly what makes them happy. During adolescence, important changes occur throughout a child’s body, including the brain. This is the time to gently move them toward their life goals.

Rather than receive intense, impersonal liberal arts education in a factory-style school, children should begin a customized education path that makes sense for their goals, their personalities, and their capabilities. For example, it doesn’t make sense for a kinetic child who enjoys working with his hands to sit in a classroom learning history and creative writing. He should start on a path that emphasizes doing – construction, mechanics, physics, and general math.

Another child may show an interest in medicine. She should start on a path that emphasizes biology, chemistry and psychology. And again school time should be divided between classroom instruction, lab time and real world experience. For example, the medical student could work in a hospital or help at a free clinic. And by divided I don’t mean tacked on – spending 6 hours a day in school with a little volunteer work during the weekend. I mean, 3 to 4 hours in school and 3 hours in a clinic, doing. The doing part of school receives equal importance to the learning part.

And as the child progresses through the final years of school, she should continue the process of classroom learning and real-world doing. By the time she graduates from a medical school, she has not only completed her mandatory residency program, she brings with her years of experience – starting from early high school – working with patients and professionals.

Overall, the school experience is designed to both educate and inspire, guide and follow – to prepare the child to work in society and give them the confidence and assurance that they own their lives and are in complete control of the paths they choose, that life should be enjoyed and a rich complete fulfilling life experience will come if they are allowed to do what makes them happy.

Education as part of living

What I’m describing is really a way to integrate education into our lives, so we move through life learning and doing, listening and speaking, taking and giving. This education style can be described as both on-demand and continuous.

By on-demand I mean we attain knowledge when we need it. If we get promoted and need to learn a new skill, we go to school and learn it. Currently, the model is top down – here’s the knowledge whether you need it or not. You have little choice. The government and industry knows what is best for you. The passive student sits in a classroom and ingests the information without taking responsibility for it because he wasn’t in on any of the educational decisions.

The on-demand model turns education into a bottom up approach. Students choose their paths through life and educators help them choose what, where and when to learn to help them meet their goals. Students make their own decisions, and take an active role and full responsibility for their education and life. Cheating on tests and acting out can’t exist when students realize who is responsible for their lives.

It’s commonly assumed by industrial educators that children don’t have the capability to make important decisions that will affect their life. But the bottom up approach doesn’t mean we must assume children can make adult decisions. The role of adult educators should be to give children the tools to make wise decisions on their own, not tell them they are incapable of deciding and then make all the decisions for them.

Educators take an active role by inspiring students and promoting topics for learning, especially when a child is young. However, we move away from the idea that the education system knows what’s best for the child to one in which the child knows what’s best even if he can’t verbalize exactly what he wants.

It will take some time for educators to fully integrate this approach into their teaching methods, but it can be done. And again, with this new approach the reason for education changes from preparing students to work in industry to helping students achieve their life goals – goals that are all about what makes them happy.

Continuous means learning and education never end. Currently, people feel that learning stops after college, at which time the work phase of their lives begin. With the continuous model, the cycle of learning and doing never ends. If a person decides to change careers and become a farmer after 5 years as a doctor, she can go back to school and start a new path, learning in a classroom and doing in the field.

If a 65-year-old retiree decides to become a philosopher, he is encouraged to go back to school too.  Why should a retiree go back to school? Because in the new education model, the goal is happiness, not to produce robots for industry. The 65-year-old doesn’t have to stop learning and contributing to society. In fact, there’s no reason why anyone over the age of 7 should not feel they are an active member of society. And learning and contributing are the ways to bring everyone into the picture.

Technology

The single factor that does the most to enable on-demand and continuous education for all is technology. Today courses delivered via the Internet are moving from the novelty phase to becoming serious competitors to traditional brick and mortar schools. Today one professor in a school may reach a hundred or so students per semester with multiple class sessions. Using the Internet, the same professor can reach tens of thousands of students in one live class session. And recordings of the session can be made available for on-demand viewing with no time limit and no limit to the number of students reached.

Also books and other tools can be downloaded and students can interact with the class in real time, making their physical proximity to a school irrelevant. In the not too distant future, online learning will be as at least as effective as sitting in a live school classroom. Improvements in the technology and the growth of online education is inevitable because learning online makes sense from so many angles. The end result will be lower cost of education and greater access by more people to live and archived lectures, and learning material.

A typical day for a working parent in the new bottom up world may consist of 3 to 4 hours working to earn money, a few hours working in the family garden or cottage business, a 1 hour online class on child psychology, some time playing games or going for a walk with the family, and an evening watching a good movie on TV.

In other words, with a bottom up approach to life in society, we shift from becoming work-centric to happiness-centric, in which we can find a balance of work, learning, contributing and enjoying life.

[billbirney-blog]

Education for people

During the Industrial Age, our education system, like many other systems in the world, was patterned after our industrial system. Industry used people and machines to transform natural resources assembly-line fashion into products – trees into houses, iron into automobiles, oil into fuel and plastics. The education system in turn used teachers, books and schools to transform children assembly-line fashion into workers for industry.

The operation of the education industry came from the top. Educated workers were the force that built American industry and those great industries were the cornerstone of the great American society, making the country the greatest in the world. Or at least that was the line fed to us by the great American leaders.

But that changed. Most of the great American industries fled the country in search of cheaper labor. The great American worker no longer has a good job with a pension at a great company making products sold the world over. Today Walmart is the country’s largest employer – a company that sells Americans cheap consumer items made in China.

So you would think with more and more American workers moving to Walmart and other low-wage service jobs, our education system would adapt. But the assembly line is still outputting thousands of workers every year, with majors in psychology, art, marketing, business and liberal arts, with no clear path to employment.

It would appear that the people at the top who control the system are either out of touch, don’t care, or don’t know what to do. Who gains by an excess of workers? Certainly, not the workers. A labor market that favors employers serves to keep wages low. So the beneficiary of an education system that produces a surplus of workers must be big business. And today with so many politicians receiving their funding from multi-national corporations, it’s clear why the education system can’t let go of its industrial-age roots.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on the details of education systems. But in the case of the American system, the devil is not so much in the details. People with on-the-ground classroom experience know more than I about class size and curricula. But I see the problem at a much more basic systemic level. And it goes back to how the Industrial Age model for education took shape.

Industrial-style education

It was a very different time. Industry relied on a massive workforce of skilled and unskilled people to run the brake presses and forges, and input data in typing pools. A military style management structure was required to keep everything running smoothly and efficiently. The factories and businesses used people to perform robotic tasks because there were no robots available.

So it made sense that the Industrial Age education system operated in an assembly-line fashion, because that was the most effective way to produce the robots to work in industry. Just like a factory assembled cars by adding the engine, then the hood, then the wheels, then the paint, students moved down the line from class to class, getting some English, then some history, then some art, and coming out after 16 years a fully assembled human robot, tailor made for plugging right into an industry job.

The vision of industrial education came from industry and passed through government down to the individual person. No one questioned the system because it seemed to work. But while the education system continued churning out workers, the industry was changing. All the while unions were helping to improve conditions for workers with higher wages and better benefits, technology and lobbies were helping business owners reduce their reliance on labor.

First, automation eliminated jobs. Then, computers came along to enhance automation in the factory and office. Not only factory workers, but typists, sewing machine operators, elevator operators and farm hands lost their jobs by the millions. Then, as a final blow, free trade agreements and other business-friendly laws sent the remaining jobs overseas.

Class offerings changed somewhat to reflect the needs of the labor market, but that really didn’t do much to bring back the jobs that were lost. The answer isn’t better teachers, smaller class sizes, more computers and so on. Fretting over how today’s outmoded education system can be retooled for an industry that no longer exists is pointless.

Rather than focus on superficial changes, we should be using this opportunity to explore a new education model that will serve us now and well into the future. We can rethink education entirely, from a top-down vision of assembling robots for industry to a bottom up vision in which education turns to serving the needs and desires of people.

Bottom up education

In the bottom up approach to work, people take charge of their lives and rethink their life goals around happiness, instead of trickle down goals that feed corporate interests. The result is people can work, contribute to society in ways that they enjoy, and spend the bulk of their time on things that they consider really important: their families, their home and neighborhood, and personal projects. For example, building a fishing boat or running a cottage industry from home.

To go along with this bottom up approach to work, we’ll need a bottom up education system – one that isn’t focused on the needs of industry, but is all about the needs and desires of people and their goals. To brainstorm what this education system might look like, let’s start from scratch - eliminate our industrial education model, and then add back in the parts that make sense and flesh out new ideas as needed.

For the first 4 to 5 years of life children learn from their immediate home environment, from parents, siblings, televisions, and so on. They learn how to use their bodies to walk and talk, and engage socially with the people close to them.

After 5, they need to expand their worlds and develop social skills. At this point, public or private education can enter the picture. Their brains are developing rapidly at this point, so they need a structured introduction to social interaction, working with their environment and thinking skills. This can take the form of an expanded daycare or Montessori.

In this settings, a child may spend 2 to 3 hours a day listening to music and stories, learning basic reading, writing and math skills, and performing indoor activities, such as art and playing music. But the bulk of their time should be spent playing – alone and with others. Play should involve doing as well as observing. For example, watching mom work in the garden and dad cook dinner, clean the house and work in the family cottage business.

So far, the new education system isn’t much different from the way it is today. But after the age of 7, children begin to take responsibility for their lives as their worlds expand, and the system should adopt a bottom up approach to respond to their needs.

Continued next week

[billbirney-blog]

Create the future you want

Every time you do something, you create the future, whether it’s building a new house, buying a candy bar, smiling at a baby or breathing.The things you do now, no matter how insignificant they may seem, have at least some effect on other people, the air, the water, the earth, yourself hours, days, even years from now. And when you add those things to the actions performed by all 7 billion people on the planet, you get a rough idea how the future of the world is created.

When you think about the future in this context, you realize how important your actions are. You’re not just doing stuff, you’re actually shapingthe future. So it makes sense to put more thought into what you do, be moremindful of your decisions. Even something as simple as throwing out a pile of newspapers will have some effect, especially when you consider that your actions are contributing to the effect of millions of people throwing out millions of newspapers.

You can create a future without giving your actions much thought. But by being mindful of your actions, you create the future you want. That kind of future implies intentionality: that you thought about and paid attention to what you did in order to get the desired results.

The habitual future

Most of the time we do things unintentionally or without paying much attention. We operate with our brains on autopilot: unconsciously, reflexively, out of habit, by reacting without thinking. We do this by delegating our decision-making power to unconscious mechanisms in our brain.

We learn habits and patterns by paying attention when we perform some actions. For example, we focus when we first learn to drive a stick shift car, shoot baskets or play the piano. Every time we perform the act, it becomes easier because the brain creates detailed neuronal connections that essentially record our moves. After a while, the habit or pattern takes over and we can perform the actions without having to pay as much attention to what we’re doing.

Our brains use the same unconscious process when we learn a sales pitch or listen to a radio talkshow host repeat the same stories and phrases. Unconscious patterns  are good because they save the brain from having to think and pay attention, which requires a lot of energy and effort. It’s the difference between doing a crossword puzzle from scratch and copying the answers the next day. When you’re playing basketball it’s beneficial to know the answers in advance. You want to know how baskets are made before the game, so you can concentrate on game strategy.

But there are times when we need to do more than simply tap into an existing pattern or habit – times when we need to think. For example, what if we learn a bad habit? Can we unlearn it? Can we unlearn the wrong way to drive a stick shift? What do we do when we develop an annoying tic?

The forming of habits and neuroses is a brain function that is largely automatic and out of our conscious control. Once the brain develops a pattern – good or bad – it can be very difficult to break or even understand what is going on. The mechanism in the brain that causes obsessive-compulsive disorder and other neuroses works similarly to a habit. It may be fairly easy to relearn how to use a clutch, but you may never be able to unlearn a neurosis.

Just about any idea can implant itself as a pattern in our brains with enough repetition. But we don’t necessarily need to repeat something to learn it. For example, one very important or traumatic event, like the violent death of a loved one, may be powerful enough to implant a mental pattern. When a person with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) experiences a trigger for example, the habit-like mechanism replays all the images and emotions of the event, completely out of the person’s control.

Habits, patterns and other unconscious things that we learn cause us to do stuff. And even though the actions are unintentional they still play a role in creating our future. Do we want a life that consists of neurotic compulsions and habitual actions? Do we want to be controlled by the talkshow voices we hear over and over again in our head or the unconscious emotional triggers we learn from an endless string of bad experiences?

A future that comes from performing the same habits over and over may be easy, but it’s meaningless. It’s easy because we don’t have to think or pay attention. We just allow the habit to replay endlessly. It’s meaningless because our actions aren’t moving us forward. We are caught in an endless loop that we believe is out of our control. We are essentially robots.

The conscious future

So we create our future every time we do something, consciously or habitually. In other words, we can pay attention and think about the future we want, or we can allow our unconscious patterns to create it for us, automatically, without thinking, without us even knowing. The decision is ours. It may be very difficult if not impossible to break out of a pattern but it is possible. And it is necessary in order to create a future we want. We can either be mindful of what we’re doing or decide to allow a lifetime of habits and patterns – good or bad – decide for us.

In the previous blog posts I wrote about a variety of things, but they all have a common theme – creating our future. And the main point I’ve been trying to make is that we have a choice. We can go through life, passively accepting what comes our way: going with the flow, feeling like a victim. However, these strategies for living miss one important piece. They assume that if we do nothing active to affect our future, everything will magically work out the way we had in mind.

But how can that happen? The workings of society may be very complex but they aren’t random. People make society what it is. And the people who affect the direction of society the way they want are the ones who take an active role. As you’re passively watching life roll by, there are those who actively make things happen in their favor. And those individuals may not act in a way that benefits anyone but themselves.

Am I saying we blame and go after them? Not necessarily. I’m saying all we, all anyone has to do to create the future we want is to be active, and we do that by not being passive. We do that by simply deciding what we want the future to look like and then actively, consciously doing. All people want the same basic things, so if we all act, we will naturally create a future for all people that is just, equal and safe.

Previous posts

In previous posts, we looked at:

Self-made victims – Passive people who are always worried and angry because the world doesn’t magically know what they want.

Bottom up approach to creating a future – Rather than allow the elite and super-wealthy to decide our future, we can pay attention to what we do.

The bystander effect – Describes why 7 billion people can’t solve some very basic problems.

Seeing unemployment as an opportunity – Life after the Industrial Age. We all can take advantage of technology to live the life we want.

Letting go – To truly create the future we want, we must let go of ideas, patterns, habits that no longer work.

Getting off the clock – Moving away from time-based living and working toward a life based on happiness.

Understanding how truth works – People will believe anything that makes them feel safe, regardless of the truth.

New approach for education – We can move away from the old Industrial Age style of work-based education to one in which happiness is the goal.

Creating the future we all want may involve protests, civil disobedience, group actions, sit down strikes and walk-outs. But for the most part, the future will be determined by our everyday actions, the simple things we do – building a subdivision, finding a cure for cancer, or disposing of an old TV. Everything we do is part of our future and the future of all people and the earth.

Do we passively allow random events and not so random decisions by a small group of active people control the direction of the future, or do we act with conscious thought, and create the future we want?

[billbirney-blog]

Belief is real; truth optional

I no longer get frustrated with people. I just lower the bar and everything is fine. Here’s the rule I follow: People will believe anything that makes them feel safe. It changes my whole perspective of the human race – explains why groups of people kill each other over details of the same religion, when we’re all searching for the same universal truths. For people, belief is more important than truth.

It’s useful to realize we are just not as evolved as we would like to believe we are. Picture a man who has allowed alcohol abuse to control him. He’s addicted, drinks excessively to avoid dealing with issues in his life. His alcoholism has alienated the people he works with, all of his close friends, loved ones, even his favorite bartender. Then, one night, as he lies on a sidewalk choking on his vomit, something happens and he sees Jesus in a bright flash. Something connects in his brain. The idea that Jesus died on the cross to save sinners is all it takes to bring him back from the brink.

The happening turned his life around because he conceived it as the “truth”. People need and want to believe ideas are “true”. We do this because we all possess a mechanism that compels us to deal with new ideas and experiences. But what isn’t so obvious – because it runs counter to our built-in belief system – is that what we think of as the “truth” is really just a belief. The real truth is not that useful to us. If it were we would all have the same religion or no religion at all.

A belief makes us feel safe

What is important, vitally important, so important that we will die for it, is our beliefs. The mechanism in our brain that vets new ideas is really not so concerned about the truth per se. Its foremost concern is for the survival of the individual. Therefore, the “truths” it allows in have everything to do with our safety.

The only time we will allow a real truth into our trusted memory block is when it makes us feel safe – snow is cold, sharp rocks hurt our feet, red berries make us sick, the earth is round and so on. So to understand the true nature of a belief, we need to stop thinking of it as a truth, and move toward thinking of it as a survival strategy that may or may not involve the truth. When we adopt this perspective, suddenly human behavior begins to make more sense.

It’s important to point out here that many of our beliefs concern things that are unsafe. For example, we feel safe knowing that lions can harm us. In this case, the object of the belief is unsafe, but it’s allowed to become a belief because knowing it makes us feel safe. In other words, it becomes a belief because it’s strategic to our survival.

Dealing with the unknown

But what happens when we experience an event that doesn’t provide us with enough information to understand it? Thousands of years ago, people had no way to explain violent weather events, diseases and strangers with different-colored skin. People could sense there was some kind of truth there, but without being able to explain the phenomena, they had no way to create a belief for it. Today, many people have trouble understanding climate change.

Unknown things that we can’t create a belief for, make us feel very unsafe. But we have a strategy to deal with those too. Along with the need to vet things in our world as safe (the “truth”) or unsafe (the unknown), people are obsessed with making the world fit an internal schema, so everything adds up and feels complete. Think of the schema as a form that must be filled out for everything we encounter. It compels us to ask what, where, why, how, where and so on.

We see a bird fly by and wonder why we can’t. We ask, how does it do that and why, and what do we call it. Throughout the universe, the concepts of what-ness, why-ness and how-ness are non-existent. They only exist in our minds as survival tools. It only matters to people that something in the sky is called a nebula and it does this and that for this reason. It only matters to people because we have a schema that we feel compelled to fill out. And if we don’t, it will remain in the unsafe pile and continue to make us feel unsafe and anxious.

But things don’t stay in the unsafe pile for long, because people can use another one of their clever human survival tools: imagination. Whether a person is an Aborigine faced with her first solar eclipse or a quantum physicist wondering about the erratic movements of a photon, our first reaction to an event is to categorize it and add it to our database. But if we can’t explain it based on other information in our trusted memory block, we simply make stuff up – anything to make sure all the blanks are filled in. The solar eclipse becomes a story about an angry god stealing the light away, and the crazy photon becomes grist for stories that fill the pages of science journals.

Age of Enlightenment

Thousands of years ago, it would seem people received adequate satisfaction from using their imagination tool to fill in the blanks. The human race moved along without much cognitive conflict, explaining away unknowns handily with wild and fanciful stories. But then a new thing called science ushered in the Age of Enlightenment. Suddenly, the real truth became fashionable. No belief was off-limits for questioning minds. Scientists discovered things every day that conflicted with long-held beliefs. Many of the unknowns that had been effectively satisfied with plausible stories were attacked by the real truth. The earth was no longer flat, and there were many reasons to believe that gods didn’t exist.

People reacted as we would expect. The beliefs that had made them feel safe for thousands of years were under attack. So rather than gladly embrace the new truths, reality and the people who were trying to push it became the enemy. The masses had their beliefs and the beliefs made them feel safe. And since truth doesn’t matter – only safety matters – the new truths could only be false and unsafe, and therefore something they had to defend against.

The scientific revolution continued regardless. Despite the mass anxiety that ensued, the constant pressure exerted by the real truth slowly transformed beliefs over many generations. By demonstrating the power of the real truth, and proving to people that a scientifically proven truth is safer than a made-up truth, people were able to gradually change their beliefs.

The bar for the human race is much lower than we want to believe, but that belief can change too.

Belief in the unknown

Today, global warming is a new truth causing global anxiety. To many people, global warming is as much an unknown as a solar eclipse was to an Aborigine. Not only is the concept of global warming very unsafe, but to think that man caused it makes the concept even more frightening. Yet even with the truth staring them straight in the eye, many people seem to be unable or unwilling to believe it.

Is it the fact that global warming itself is unsafe or that this new scientific concept conflicts with their current beliefs? We know that people are capable of believing unsafe things if they conceive of them as beneficial for their survival, so this refusal must come from long-held religious or political beliefs that are much stronger than the real truth. Maybe the best way to approach these people with the truth is to start by taking the time to understand their beliefs, and how they feel about them.

But on the other hand, there are all those people who believe global warming is a truth? How is it that so many people can put their survival on the line to believe a real truth? Because they choose to. The truth is, people can choose to believe a real truth regardless of its safety implications, regardless of strong long-held beliefs, if it makes logical sense to them. And that requires having an inquiring mind, and seeking out good information and using their intelligence to make wise decisions. For these people, questioning their beliefs, even those they’ve held all their lives, makes the most sense. It is more important to face their fears and believe the real truth than allow a conflicting belief to take hold of them. For them, the real truth makes them feel safe.

People will be people

But at no time is it okay to lose sight of the fact that people are people. There are times when a renowned climate scientist, say, may deny a real truth about something else – that his research proves a result he didn’t want, for example. The measure of a person’s truth-seeking ability may have to do with intelligence or level of education, experience, age, or how a person was raised. But one thing is certain: we are all people.

We all base our beliefs on our survival, which we sometimes obfuscate by calling intuition. We all ask questions about things, the answers to which only matter to us and our fellow humans. We all allow fear of the unknown to guide our decisions, but believe at times that we have special powers that enable us to rise above the human race. No one can claim to be super human. But there is such a thing as a person who is willing to embrace feeling unsafe in pursuit of beliefs that are really true, willing to face the unknown and say, I don’t know.