Category Archives: A Plan for America

Take Joy Whenever You Can

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Created October 28, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Life today: it would be funny if we were watching it on Saturday Night Live.

We used to say life imitates art. Now we can say life parodies itself. These events today are a satire on who we really are, what we’re really worth.

Mass hysteria creeps up on you like boiling a frog. Who knew we are experiencing mass hysteria right now? It helps to acknowledge it rather than keep mum and look away. The NPR-IBM Watson poll finds that 84% of Americans are angrier today than a generation ago, and 42% are angrier this year than before. The Washington Post just put out an article entitled “On TikTok, Nothing Goes Viral Like Rage”. We the media are feeding the rage when it would be more sensible to calm audiences where feasible. All this scary and angering content coming through the media without solutions being offered is pretty irresponsible.

Irony is that we put fear into people and that leads to suicides, crime, and increased drug and alcohol use. Then the latter things make us, realistically, even more fearful. It’s a self-accelerating equation.

“Fear is the mind-killer.”

–Frank Herbert, Dune

Those of us who can control ourselves need to resolve to not put any more fear into the system. There’s already enough. Adding more is not heading toward solution.

We are acting as if there can never be any negative consequences from pandering to rage and anger. As if it can’t induce revolutions, civil war, pockets of militia takeovers, splits in the police and military, all kinds of negative consequences that will not benefit us.

Thinking merely of money, for those of us in the media business, why do you think advertisers are cutting back on ad spend? Did the rage condition reach a certain level causing forecasters to report upside and downside scenarios with no notion of which will happen? Could rage amplification have had anything to do with that?

What’s a person to do? Rage is fear taking arms. Neither fear nor rage solve whatever problem drove you crazy in the first place. Fear and rage are dangerous signs that the victim is inducing self-harm using time that would be needed to solve whatever the catalyst problem was.

This is similar to not taking a problem seriously enough to actually be forced to think about how the problem could be solved and then to create and execute a plan.

We shall not soon be rid of these troubled times. They will not disappear magically with so many people and so much money polarizing emotionally. Even if the media were to lend a calming hand, some degree of trouble will still lie ahead. We need to prepare ourselves. We need to sober up from the indulgent hysteria.

The same causes as WWII, the same ideologies fighting, inclusive collaboration (Democracy) versus hierarchical meritocracy (today’s rationalization of Authoritarianism). The hierarchical part is the most obvious part of Authoritarianism, the merit part is mostly a matter of who currently has the power, the force, the money. A misleading dichotomy as all dichotomies are. The real answer we will someday realize is to balance them both together, and to do it with respect for all, not just at the end of the game, but with respect to all, at every step along the way there.

If we can sane enough of us in time, we can maybe get away with a cold war with pockets of violence and minimum fallout of all kinds, and a slow process of getting everyone to get with a gung ho program for planet Earth and a let-up of egocentric selfishness. It’s time to take seriously what the body alarms have been trying to wake us up to. The same battle of Good and Evil all over again, except both sides esteem the Good and only subconscious forces keep us apart. If God forced us at gunpoint to have a Huis Clos conversation about it (i.e., locking us up with no other option), we would probably in a matter of time see that rational discourse once it comes on the scene enables win/win scenarios to be concocted. But God is trusting us to make it work, and to make HerHim proud.

So, this is a message for those of us who would be on the side of the adults in the room to take ourselves in hand. To make contingency plans with eyes wide open and courage in our hearts. Before we can approach that we need to purge ourselves of fear and anger. In order to do that we must allocate alone time to contemplate ourselves and meditate, and learn which voices in our heads and impulses truly represent who we are, and which ones are beneath us, dead snake skin to be shorn off. Then we will be ready to lead others during the times of stress. To keep others calm and reasoning toward solutions, rather than helplessly wallowing in problem statement tantrums.

In your self-contemplation you need to first determine all of the things you are afraid of, imagine the scenes that you most do not want to see happen in your real life. Be there, feel it as deeply as you can, as if it were happening to you right now. For each downside scenario, see yourself deal with it. See how you are equal to it. You know what is right and will stand up to the moment should it ever come. Then you can feel that you are prepared and can decide actions you can take to protect your life from that scene ever happening, and then you can take those actions. Those are the sane things to do to solve the problem, do only the sane things from now on.

When you’ve done enough work on your fears to feel the courage in you and be confident of it, also visualize the scenes you would most like to live through. Appreciate those outcomes but don’t be attached to them. Because it is sane to not become attached to outcomes. Being attached to outcomes reduces the probability of experiencing those outcomes. I can’t cite proof for that but my own life has taught it to me and I hope to be able to pass it on to save others pain.

In other words, be stoic. Resigned fatalistically to whatever will come, able to deal with it sanely and constructively, wasting as little time as possible. Why be that way? Because it is pragmatic, it works in the real world, it leads to success, sanity, happiness and joy. It reduces illness and increases immunity. It lets the love out and in.

Crossing a bridge too far for some, sane stoic behavior is in tune with God’s Plan, it helps move the plan forward, whistling while we work.

The processing of fear and anger into solutions and action. The Bible speaks of any given tyrant, “but he hardened his heart” and held on to the rage bringing with it its underlying fear and attachment, and this led to his downfall. The hardening of hearts is out of control nowadays. We are privileged to live in such “interesting” times. We’re living through and collectively inputting into a historic moment – we can act shamefully or the hero/ine in us can emerge. That’s the Big Choice – the meaning of our times. The next octave of WWII, in our laps to handle.

The fear and rage are the ocean we swim in right now. It helps to tune in to your senses and be wherever you are with your environment without admitting the existence of any world beyond your senses and the immediate environment you can see. If you don’t see anything scary or that makes you angry in that scene, credit that. Cut off the thoughts and images and bad feelings associated with stuff that is not there with you right now. Only let in what is there right now. Works even better in nature. This is like an emergency switch for when you start worrying about politics and family safety. If it isn’t Here Now, stop focusing on it except when you have to prepare yourself for something specific.

Take joy at every moment when conditions permit. Choose joy. Fill your minutes and days with Joy as much as you can. Hold darkness at bay. You will be a joy lantern to others, who will like catching it.

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Love to all,

Bill

 

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Why Does the World Seem to Be Moving Away from Democracy?

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Created October 21, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

In my regular MediaVillage column the other day I advised the political parties to use imagery rather than just words in their midterm political ads. This was based on a finding that only 38% of Democrats and only about 20% of Republicans and Independents consider democracy to make it into the top two vote-deciding issues of the day. The greater concern is with money, meaning the declining portfolio values of investors and the cost of living going up. Voters clearly want those pain points to be made to go away by some form of governmental action. In the face of those felt pains on a daily basis, the idea of protecting democracy seems abstract and maybe even farfetched. My MediaVillage column implied showing, in ads, how life would be like if America became like Russia and China, people ratting each other out, getting conscripted and sent to war, not able to say what is really in their hearts and minds, and so on. This would be the way to get past abstractions and make the importance of democracy felt.

I was thinking of the great spot of the little girl smelling the flowers and then an A-bomb goes off behind her, which spot ended the presidential aspirations of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Images not words. I was picturing midterm political ads in the next couple of weeks with Americans having a loving dinner until political police kick in the door, 16-year-old girls in peaceful protests beaten to death, and so many other kinds of scenes like that which go on every day in most of the world, who live in authoritarian states rather than in democracies, ads showing those same sorts of things happening right here in America. That would be sure to cause a rise in the perceived importance of protecting our democracy in polls.

Americans are so sure of themselves however. We feel that it can “never happen here.” Which makes “protect our democracy” seem like mere political manipulation language, and we have all hardened ourselves against being manipulated.

I’m no longer so sure about the “It can’t ever happen here” thesis.

One of my former partners, a Chinese patriot in a long family line of Chinese patriots, told me sadly one day that he couldn’t stand to live in China because people were forced to rat each other out, so that you could never trust your neighbors to know anything beyond the superficial about you and your family’s doings. This was in 1983 when I visited China with him and found its ambiance very friendly, except for the airports and the soldiers inhibiting taking of some photographs. He said I didn’t know the half of it. Before he passed away he told me it’s much worse now.

Could it happen here, people ratting each other out to the government? Well, yes, in some States that are now attempting to pass or actually passing legislation paying bounties for reporting women seeking or having abortions, that’s a big step toward one of the many distressing things about living in an autocracy. One such law could move us a long way away from the kind of free-thinking freedom we’ve been used to for hundreds of years. And into the growing camp of countries who choose strong men to rule by force so as to allow individuals who play the game right to grow wealthy and powerful themselves, and the hell with everyone else.

Why is this happening now? Why didn’t it happen before? Newton’s Third Law: there is always an equal and opposite reaction. For more than a half century, civil rights, feminism, coming out of the closet, Hispanic immigration all made great strides in America, making it even better than it had always been. Then a line was crossed when Obama was elected. The shining moment. Not seen that way by everyone. Some white folks really disquieted. Pendulum starts to swing, metaphorically obeying Newton, we get Trump, Trump cozy with autocrats, acts like one, millions of Americans emulate him and let it all hang out.

Neil Postman said that television would eventually take us to a place where we all acted like we were on TV all the time. So did Aldous Huxley in his own way. We are here, living proof they were both right. Living as if in a dream world that pays very little attention to truth, facts, reality, where the average person plays back whatever they hear persuasively put, by people they are biased to believe in, in the expanded media, whether it’s backed by facts or not. Those of us lucky enough to go to college learned to think for ourselves but apparently many of us quickly forgot about that stuff under the endless media barrage. And Acceleritis. Let’s never forget that the human mind has limits and we are being pushed beyond those limits and have been for many decades by the media onslaught embedding our subconscious program of giving up trying to think for ourselves because it is all just too complex and everchanging. A great breeding ground for autocracy. Grand scale knuckling under to bullies.

That’s why it’s happening now, and why it’s already happening here. “It can never happen here” is obsolete. We are already about 40% of the way into autocracy. Fortunately, Millennials and Gen Z are thinking for themselves more than most of us. But we saw how 60s idealists were largely in finance by the 80s, so we can’t count on the purity of youth to save us. It’s an internal fight each of us has to win against our own tendencies toward autocracy, having bad feelings about some other people, unable to transcend that level of thinking and emerge into the daylight of solutions thinking, uniting rather than arguing. The essence of American democracy from the beginning. Rational discourse and civility, the genuine effort to find the win/win solution or get as close to it as possible. A uniquely American idea which echoes the importance placed upon balance by the eminent Greek philosophers.

When the question is asked in a poll after the kind of acerbic and heated media conversation that has been going on about democracy, the average person probably looks at this as a Democratic Party issue not as a really universal one. And answers accordingly, with the subconscious belief that “it can’t happen here”, that democracy is not the big issue of the day. Despite the first violent insurrection breaching the capitol in history. Insurrections are not democratic events, they are the signature of the start of most autocracies. Anyone who would use violence in those ways based on such skimpy evidence and self-delusional thinking would not hesitate to create laws to keep people from having abortions, from voting, for incentivizing tattling on others and taking vigilante actions, for gaming elections with districting, from stalling progress via filibustering, for arresting people on suspicion without habeas corpus, for allowing the state to cause individuals to disappear when considered desirable for the common good, for allowing people to be publicly humiliated in social media within purposely-impotent restrictions, for allowing legislators to goof off on the job for political gain ignoring the needs of the people, for allowing people to tell lies in the media with zero accountability… and all of the other tricks of the trade of the ever-dominant political form on the planet.

Here we are living it large and spoiled into thinking nothing can change that, all we need to do is pay less for gas and stabilize the stock market and go back to sleep. Too bad it isn’t that way, but it isn’t. Thousands of smart and calculating people have decided, long ago, to impose their will and take over control of the USA despite being a minority, and they have almost completed the operation. Millions of us have taken their word for things. Stuff happens in the world that Biden & co had no control over, yet the voters are told that that crew caused it all, and millions of people accept that without a second thought. They caused inflation, they caused the economy to go down, kick them out and put us in. Anyone running on that sort of ticket will not get my vote. I want to see solution plans, not irrelevant blame allocation. The best people in both parties can do a better job of forming their ideas and communicating them effectively, because right now the tailwind is going to people who are themselves internal autocrats, probably brought up by harsh parents, and who have the money, power, and will to win. That minority must not be allowed to take over the brightest hope of humanity. Elect Democrats or Republicans not based on their party but based on who they are and what solutions they are proposing. Are they putting down their competitors? Do they exude anger? Are they citing verifiable facts you can look up on Urban Legend and see are true, or are they telling what’s true to them?

The stakes are not just gas and stock prices. The stakes are slavery for ourselves and God knows how many generations of our progeny, if we stay asleep at the switch and let the strongest democracy ever to exist on Earth, backslide all the way centuries back into autocracy by simply voting the party and going back to whatever we were doing.

Please: Think. Feel. Vote.

Love to all,

Bill

 

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The Two Future Scenarios We Must Choose Between

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Created May 13, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

One of these scenarios is very easy to visualize. It’s the downside scenario of war. We’ve seen the way this works and are extremely familiar with it. We can picture it, including sitting under a mushroom cloud ourselves, something I’ve been visualizing all my life.

The upside scenario is not nearly as easy to visualize. We as a race have not expressed much about that scenario. We seem morbidly attracted to dwelling upon the negative.

And yet we seemed to be making some progress there for a while.

In 2003, the late Mark W. Zacher, a pioneer in the study of global governance, wrote a paper published by Cambridge University Press called “The Territorial Integrity Norm: International Boundaries and the Use of Force”. In it, he cited nearly 100 academic authors in establishing his case that “coercive territorial revisionism” was on the decline since the end of WWII. Many of the scholars he referenced indeed painted the same picture.

Alas, today we see that this relatively halcyon period appears to have come to an end. WWII-size battles reducing beautiful cities to rubble in Europe are now happening again. Do we have to go back into the old game? Is it built into us that there will never be an end to people fighting for ground?

In the development of species, the hardwired instinct for territoriality behavior goes back at least as far as the first reptiles and perhaps even further back. But humanity, possessed of more obvious intellectual credentials than other Earth species, in discovering what instincts are, could use its brains to conquer instincts – or can we?

Why is it that Putin and his supporters feel the urgent need to own more land when they already are such a massive piece of geography? Opinions in the press suggest that he is driven to re-establish the U.S.S.R. And why would that be what drives him? Why would he not set equally lofty goals for leading the human race into space, or building larger particle accelerators than the west, or some other goal that is more original? The goal of simply taking over the neighborhood goes way back, it’s imitative behavior, it may make us remember a person in history but not necessarily in a positive way. It’s been done before. Why not show off by doing something new?

Why would China place such importance on taking back Taiwan which had previously been called Formosa? There are so many other things for China to do, and they are already doing most of them, and doing well at them. If the specter of war were swept off the table China should be among the most confident and hopeful nations on Earth. Why bother with adding another small swath of land to their country? When one takes land by force it’s only a matter of time before someone else is there attacking you to take that land back. It’s almost guaranteed to become a perpetual motion machine keeping war in the lives of your descendants for many generations if not forever.

The human race has so many better things to do rather than return to the old bullying game. It’s gotten so old. First, we have to bring the pandemic down to permanent containment, which implies far-reaching progress in being able to anticipate the directions mutations could take, and getting the jump on them before they go there. Then we have to bring everyone up to par in quality of life. Then we have to bring education up to an unprecedented level that is individualized to each person’s gifts and aspirations, lifelong education that starts in the home from birth and lasts throughout the individual’s lifetime. The list goes on and on after that, so many things to do to make us all feel a sense of purpose, of meaning.

Underneath everything else all of us are driven by a search for meaning. We didn’t make it any easier for ourselves when we made it unhip to allow for the possibility of God. Even in a world that avoids God like the devil, a person can still live a meaningful life by simply bringing her/his gifts out for the enjoyment of others. Putin and Xi each have huge canvases on which they are free to paint beautiful pictures the world can adore, why settle for the bad guy role, even if lies and censorship can make people keep their mouths shut? Why is that the way that Putin and Xi can make themselves the happiest?

If we didn’t have such a rich roster of activities into which we could happily throw ourselves, then maybe I could understand playing the war game, but that game has worn thin its welcome. We’ve had a good run since the end of WWII – not without enough violence for anyone with a taste for that stuff – but staying away from major wars. Why break the winning spree now? Just because they can? I suspect that is the real explanation.

But no one’s hands are clean. The rest of us have not done enough to paint the picture of what life could be like if there is world cooperation on the broadest scale. Dystopias have more drama in them, and more opportunity for action scenes, while utopias are easy to put down because cynicism is hip. So few if any utopian movies or television series or novels. “Star Trek: The Next Generation” came as close to a utopian vision of a united Earth culture as we’ve seen on television. Lost Horizon by James Hilton (1933) was a novel and then a movie which showed how a sequestered culture could live in harmony (the story of mythical Shangri-La).

When Joe Biden was elected, I wrote a series of fictional stories here in Pebbles in which Joe reached out to Vlad and Jinping and detailed how cooperation could be attained and how lovely that would be for everybody, with me hoping that was in his plans. My c dream soon collapsed, but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up. If we don’t detail the upside scenario we will continue to slide down into this downside scenario we’ve been stuck on for too long. Someday soon we may never again have the option of revisiting this upside visualization opportunity, there may not be a someday if we don’t start now.

Love to all,

Bill

 

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Unifying Our Idea of Social Progress

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Created April 15, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The most powerful cultural change driving world and personal events today is the underlying sense of loss of belief in the American Dream.

I’m paraphrasing the words of Walker Smith, former President of Yankelovich, for many years the most psychologically sophisticated research company serving the marketing field, speaking today at the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) annual AUDIENCExSCIENCE conference.

What is or was the American Dream and how could it account for what is happening outside the US today? Because Walker was not just talking about the USA.

The American Dream has always meant the hope, aspiration, and expectation that each generation would be better off than the preceding one.

This idea did not necessarily exist before the USA came about. In the Middle Ages, the prevailing feeling was that things used to be better in the ancient world’s Golden Age, and that was now all gone forever, never to return. 

The Renaissance opened the door to art and science and technology in ways which restored the human race’s belief in itself. This led into a period we call the Enlightenment which then lost touch with the human spirit and curled back into the awe-neutralizing world we live in today, formed in the Eighteenth Century. 

The democratic revolutions in America and France were a turning point that restored the zeitgeist of hopefulness about the future, revivifying the optimistic inspiration of the Renaissance. For more than 200 years the American Dream inspired people around the world to work harder and smarter and with more inspiration to shape a better world for their children and secondarily for themselves.

And now it appears that Walker Smith is right, there is a prevailing tacit sense of disillusionment, tacit in the sense of not being expressed as directly as he expressed it today to me and hundreds of other leaders of the world’s marketing and media intelligentsia.

Walker showed compelling survey results to back up his point. In countries where most progress has been made toward economic success, social justice and the dignity of the individual, he showed that after decades in which most people believed their kids would have it better than themselves, today the majority believe that the kids will have it worse.

A later speaker at the conference showed a verbatim comment made by a Gen Z person indicating “I no longer trust government, other people, or the world.” 

Both optimism and pessimism are biases, less desirable than objectivity, but between them, one helps and the other hurts, because any mindset becomes self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s the way our minds work. Pessimism forces us down into the pit we feared. Optimism gives us back the natural zest for life and enables us to overcome – anything.

Data shown at the conference confirms that Gen Z (people born since 1997) are far above average in holding brands to communicate, by their actions and authentic words and images, that brands recognize their purpose is to make life better for everyone. And yet now these idealists are already experiencing the disappointment in their own golden dreams, all too soon, all too soon.

We can’t let this go on.

What gutted our confidence?

Walker had pointed us at the Starting Points of a generation, telling us that each generation reflects what the Cultural Tent Pole events were when they came into the conversation.

For Gen Z, the oldest of whom is now 25, when they were first starting to use media they heard about the war on terrorism, and the US limited ability to dial back violence everywhere. As they grew up, they saw a growing divide along partisan lines within the US, mirrored around the world. The idea of limits was reinforced and the idea of possibilities was diminished. The split into red and blue idealists played out as one side limiting the other side from being able to make improvements.

They may have consciously ignored most of this while playing expressively within their social media communities, but nothing could have protected their subconscious minds from imbibing these toxins.

Unifying our ideals and values is necessary if we are to protect Gen Z and all future generations from reruns of the worst of history.

We have the power. We have to use it constructively. We need to unify our idea of “What IS social progress?”

Social progress starts with the criterion that one’s own descendants should have it even better than we do. That is the most unifying ideal of all. We should all find it easy to agree on that if nothing else.

Avoiding Derailment

The idea that everyone should benefit runs into major difficulty when it is looked at through the lens of a person who feels threatened. That person does not want a level playing field because they already feel cheated and are therefore naturally skeptical about the idea that they should support other people more than they have been supported.

The person who feels threatened is probably subconsciously feeling a sense of inferiority. In our materialistic culture the need to take work that is uninspiring leads the average person to live out a life of quiet desperation (TS Eliot) conducive of a sense of inferiority and of throwing one’s life away. So that there is a very large pool of people who instinctively flinch away from taking care of other people because they feel someone ought to be taking better care of them. 

The sense of inferiority was historically an albatross that Russia still bears. But the dissatisfied and resentful chords in the human chorus are not limited by geography, these poisons to the spirit are everywhere, and reduce openness to ideas about sharing with those even worse off than ourselves. Only those who feel good about themselves subconsciously and consciously can authentically support the idea of equality.

This does not mean putting the movement toward equality on hold. I personally feel that the momentum toward equality is now established, by the efforts of millions of people from Nelson Mandela to Martin Luther King and on and on, including the people of show business, and Gen Z will make it happen if we don’t complete the job, but we will. 

Instead, what I’m suggesting is that we don’t confuse the issue by too quickly bringing in more specificity, as we re-establish the unifying notion of a better life for our kids. All of our kids. That would defeat the drive to unity, a message in a bottle in all languages, e.g.: Rodovoi. Danketsu. Tongyi. Aikyam. Yachad. Henosis. Our objective here is unity in re-establishing the universal dream of human social progress. Today, in the present context, it can only be founded on one remaining point of solidarity: our children.  

So, as we sew up the ravaged flag of idealism and courage facing the future, in the complex world of motivations, we can’t go too far too fast. Start with the one universal common ground: our children. We must make a better life for them. We cannot, for whatever reasons we concoct with our brilliant rhetoric, justify anything less than a commitment of our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor (Thomas Jefferson) to this unifying ideal. This is the philosopher’s stone by which to navigate the rest of the journey. 

Because we must first re-establish unity of realistic idealism before we can turn to specifics.

Take the present most divisive issues and give them a rest. Let your hearts and minds discover what else there is to be said, with positivity, constructiveness, and encouragement. What will help make for a better world for all the generations to come. Words and feelings and actions that bring us together again. Don’t skip to step two, please, focus on step one.

Love to all, 

Bill

 

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