Category Archives: Cooperation

The Independent Mind: Breaking Free from the Partisan Spell

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
August 14, 2026

This is a moment for cosmic re-evaluation, starting from an open mindCosmic Crossroads Beyond Division

The trouble started long ago when Democrats started demonizing Republicans and vice versa. When I was a kid, it wasn’t this way. It was like rooting for the Yankees instead of the Dodgers, although living in Brooklyn. It was surprising but not something to rouse animus.

Sportsmanship has always been an attractive characteristic of individuals, athletes, and famous people. People could be rivals, kid one another, but never come close to demonization.

My first realization came about the turn of the Century. Someone sent me a Halloween card whose cover said, “Want to wear a really scary costume this Halloween?” Inside it said, “Dress up as a Republican.” I had to shake my head.

After that, it came on in slathers, and the buildup was tsunami-like. My beloved business partner, the late Bill McKenna, called liberals “Libbies,” and it was obvious from his tone of voice that the female surname “Libby” was a giveaway that all Liberals were effeminate and not masculine enough.

The algorithmic intensity of modern media has brought this to a level absolutely on a plane with Brave New World and 1984. In fact, the proportion of movies, video series, and books about dystopia has shot up. It is as if the whole population is helping to order up dystopia to engulf us in consensus reality, by the amount of our thinking and dreaming about it, which is helping to bring it about. We are “Living the Nightmare” in our expectations, and now we have accepted it as the necessary reality.

It has become literally mass hypnosis.

We now accept it as normal that our leaders will be corrupt, lie to us, bully us, shoot us, and steal our money in every way possible. Yet, we go about our daily routines less happy than usual and more prone to escapism. We don’t rearrange our fundamental thinking about our loyalties because that would be too much to bear; the fear of the unknown floods in when we even come close to thinking about that.

We would not be that way if we were not surrounded by all of our tribe and reinforced in our tribal thinking by very select use of media channels that echo chamber us and keep out the bad memes that would undermine our sense of self and drag us down into doubt.

“This is who I am,” we think, without words, down at a level below our own conscious awareness. “I have chosen this course in life, and it’s far too late to turn back and become somebody else. The other Party is far too radical and ugly; none of my best friends and family like them.” In these subconscious self-conversations, we do not have enough intellectual prowess to point out to ourselves that there is a third option of not being hung up on either Party. If we take the time away from escapism to have these self-conversations at a conscious level, we will have more controllable intelligence to make sense of things. The third option is to become a political Independent, which about half the US population has already chosen. That would allow us to vote based on individual merits rather than robotic puppeting the party line.

It’s hard to admit to oneself that one has been a puppet and played like a violin for decades of one’s life. It’s better to let awareness of the truth come in rather than to protect oneself against the truth and to live in a shell of self-deception. The truth will sometimes show you that you say one thing and do another, and that the high and noble precepts you mouth are not reflected in your actions. Yes, this is a painful experience, but so is childbirth, and both types of temporary pain lead to an infinite amount of emotional payoff in the end.

This is a moment for cosmic re-evaluation starting from an open mind.

Love to all,
Bill

Starting Over

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created June 26, 2026

It’s a gloriously beautiful day in the future. The dark days of endless hate and hopelessness have finally ended. The United States has voted in a competent, pragmatic President who is inspired by the spirit of America and its dream for the world. The American dream of the preciousness of each human life and the dignity of every individual.

There is a lot of rebuilding and repair to do. Augean stables abound.

Rather than being overwhelmed by the scope of the task, Americans who begin this resurrection will feel grateful to be the lucky generations whose timing has granted them this historic honor. “We are the new Washingtons, Franklins, Jeffersons, Hamiltons, Lincolns,” they dare to realize with awe. “Completing their work.”

Starting over. A feeling of enormous creative license, freedom to paint on a grand scale canvas. And yet an imperative to start from and hew to originalism, the original Constitution, its exact words and meanings.

Even though that Constitution did not protect us from falling away from The American Dream into an American Nightmare.

That is where the creativity comes in. How do we Amend the Constitution so that it can never happen again?

Finally, a social media conversation worth having. A collaboration, a wikimedia, crowdsourcing at the highest level. With guard rails and guidelines contributed by experts in Constitutional Law.

Something better to do with the amazing media we have created.

A sense of common purpose.

Starting over is a lovely feeling.

What sorts of things will be up for discussion? What are some of the different ways things can turn out?

In one scenario, there may be a ban on the two-party system.

The idea of political parties is never mentioned in the Declaration of Independence nor in the Constitution.

In fact, many of the Founding Fathers were deeply suspicious of them. They referred to political parties as “factions” and viewed them as a threat to national unity.

For instance, George Washington famously used his 1796 Farewell Address to warn Americans against the dangers of political parties, arguing that they would lead to “alternate domination” and distract the government from its duties. Similarly, James Madison wrote extensively in Federalist No. 10 about how to control the negative effects of factions.

George Washington

Thomas Jefferson

The landmark political science book Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters by Green, Palmquist, and Schickler argues against the common political science theory that political party affiliation is a rational, calculated choice based on policy. Instead, it’s a deep-seated social identity, much like religious or ethnic alignments. People adopt a partisan identity early in adulthood. This identity acts as a perceptual lens that filters all future political information. Major events like recessions or scandals rarely shatter a voter’s core party identity.

A social identity does not have the same psychological status as motivational drives; it is more like a mask that is worn, not the inner urgings which cause all of our behavior. We stick to our early self-classification as Democrats or Republicans because otherwise we feel a loss of identity and as if we no longer live within the safety and support of a large group. All of this goes on below the level of our conscious minds. This is why we can be rabble-roused and manipulated to hate each other. If our conscious minds were in control, we would not let that happen.

When the reconstruction comes, there may no longer be political parties. The first new President may be an Independent. This was never thought possible, but today we see great erosion in the images of both parties. Americans want a real change and this might not be possible with the current two parties.

How do we stop money from controlling politics?

This is really a media question.

If there were a foolproof mechanism for identifying candidates willing to serve and who have proven by their actions to be the kinds of people that could possibly serve us well, the media exposure of those candidates could be provided for free, mandated by law. True, this would reduce advertising revenues by about 3%, but perhaps that would be worth the cost.

One way or another, in the reconstruction, we have to stop the buying of elections by the amount of money raised for advertising.

Neither gerrymandering nor filibuster appears in the Constitution. The Electoral College causes gerrymandering, so it is time to switch to popular vote. The two-party system causes filibuster, so in the Second Life of America, we can sweep those out together.

The FCC may have been a bit prissy in regulating American media before there was digital, but on balance, we were better off then than now in terms of what we allow in media.

With AI, it is well within technical capabilities to automatically fact-check everything and to filter out lies and false statements made innocently – or to allow them with the fact check alongside – something for all of us to decide together. Then we get the best of Free Speech without the current Orwellian, Skinnerian conditioning of our whole population’s acceptance of blatant lying as the new way of being we are all supposed to adopt because somehow it is manly?

We who are suffering through the new Dark Ages are entitled to let our hearts and minds have respite by living in the future when we emerge again in the Light.

Starting Over.

Love to all,
Bill

 

Regaining Tolerable Differences in Opinion

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created February 26, 2026

Last week, we began this discussion of finding things we can agree upon across the political spectrum. It is the issue of the Age, and so obviously not soluble in one quick blogpost. In this post, we intend to dive more deeply into finding the pragmatic solution steps.

Step one in any solution process is a situation analysis. In this case, what is wrong, and how did it get broken?

The Ideological Brain: A Radical Science of Flexible Thinking, authored by political neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod, is a good read which came out in 2025 and touches upon many of the subjects about ways to use the mind, which I come at from a different angle in my writings, and which Jerry Zaltman writes about in his books. Where Jerry uses terms such as “open mind”, and I use terms such as “hasty closure” and “dichotomania”, Leor uses “rigidity” and “dogmatic”, but we are all talking about the same things: different ways of using our minds.

Leor brings both genetics and epigenetics into the picture in reporting meta-analyses of neuroscience experiments conducted all over the world which have found that there are structural brain differences which account for the tendency to not update one’s thinking based on new evidence, but to stick with doctrine that explains everything in life, i.e. some ideology, a narrative designed to be logically exhaustive and prescriptive about how to live one’s life.

Darwin taught us nothing if not that survival depends upon the ability to adapt to changing environments. But if one is in an ideological state of mind, this adaptability is crippled.

My friend Joel Tucciarone uses the phrase “frozen perceptions”.

Leor points out that the structural brain differences do not necessarily precede the adoption or the conditioning into belief in an ideology, and that brain plasticity enables a person to overcome and change the brain structure by acts of free will. There is not a deterministic no-exit mind trap; we can choose to use our minds in unfamiliar ways and stick to it and free ourselves. However, she also points out that there is a tendency for a person who is locked into one specific ideology, if he or she gives that up, to fall into a different ideology. She hypothesizes that the regimentation and the comfort of not having to think about the complexity of existence seduce many of us to choose a prepackaged ideology. This is also my hypothesis, that the stress of Acceleritis causes many of us to subscribe to an existing comprehensive set of beliefs as opposed to making our own decisions about the perennial largest philosophical questions.

Unable to bear ambiguity, many will seek hasty closure in an ideology. Better to be like a scientist, leaving closure open until there is replicated proof.

When I was a child, I became aware of a number of political and religious ideologies: Fascism (WWII was still going on), Capitalism, Communism, Democrats, Republicans, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, et al, each with its own logically comprehensive beliefs and action rules. I intuitively felt no resonance with any of them; they all seemed limiting to me.

So ideology has been going on a long time, for thousands of years (Leor traces the word itself to July 22, 1794, I won’t be a spoiler, enjoy her beautiful writing), people have wedded themselves firmly to belief systems. But today the matter has come to a head in a way that seems apocalyptic even compared to the American Civil War and WWII, because of the ferocity of the unforgiving anger and loathing between the most extreme of the right and left political ideologues in the USA.

Leor again comes to the rescue here by reporting well-replicated experiments which indicate that ideological locked-in thinking spikes during periods of fear and threat. It would appear from the evidence that the bitterness and implacability of the ideological clash today is explained by the many frightening existential threats that have come together at this point in history. Thermonuclear, biological, chemical, psychological weapons of mass destruction, environmental collapse, risk of economic breakdown because of fiat currencies and gargantuan debt buildups, devastation of trust, mental emotional Acceleritis overwhelm, AI, and the absence of a plausible scientific spiritual worldview. If Leor is right about fear being a cause of ideological exacerbation, then this doomsday litany is among the unmooring terrors of the present epoch, which arguably explain why the left and right have morphed from friendly competitors into vicious hated enemies.

In my philosophy with which readers of this blog are familiar, fear itself is an alarm that wakens us to think creatively about some problem and to solve it, which is best done in a mindset of resolute courage and stoic resilience, i.e., turn off the fear alarm before you start to think about the solution. Accept the possibility of the negative outcome and see how you will handle it if it comes. Then, turn to creative thinking to prevent the undesirable outcome.

Instead of doing these things, our two political poles are blaming each other, besmirching each other, and justifying their own righteousness. I’m not saying that both extremes are equally at fault; I’m saying that is not the useful handle on the solution. Whoever has done whatever wrongs will eventually be sorted out and penalties applied to criminal acts where appropriate. In the meantime, a general amnesty is necessary. In the end, most of us will be found innocent, and the time for forgiveness of the masses is at hand.

“To err is human, to forgive is divine.” This was written by Alexander Pope in 1711 and has roots in the Bible:

  • “To Err is Human”: Romans 3:23 (“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”) acknowledges that making mistakes/sinning is a part of fallen human nature.
  • “To Forgive is Divine”: Ephesians 4:32 and Colossians 3:13 encourage Christians to forgive others just as God, through Christ, has forgiven them.
  • God’s Command: Jesus emphasizes the importance of forgiveness in Matthew 6:14, stating that if you forgive others, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

In my own humble philosophy, we each are an avatar of the One Consciousness, and have been given free will in order, across incarnations, to learn for ourselves the right ways to be, and this learning will be driven by errors we make. Error is inherent in the cosmic video game the One is playing. Therefore, forgiveness is implicit in the whole setup.

By forgiveness, I do not mean to say that those who continue to act against our interests should be empowered to continue doing those things to us. I mean that in our hearts we can remove the anger and hatred and replace it with understanding, compassion, empathy, and pragmatic solutions to no longer have to put up with those mistreatments.

Voting is the way in which we can take the most effective action. Communication with our representatives is something we can do every day we feel like it (and is our civic duty), and speaking up constructively without rancor will be more effective than joining in with the yelling. We shall also be able to communicate more effectively if we are not taking an accusatory tone, the listener, if he/she is not being blamed, will have a more open mind. If we take the love out of our voice, the people we most need to listen will not listen and will make sure to black us out of their consciousness.

Takeaways:

  • Open Closure
  • Adaptive Optimization Synthesizing Idealism and Pragmatism
  • Agility, Resilience, Adaptability
  • Ability to reset one’s mind (finding the hidden switch)

Love to all,
Bill

 

POWERFUL MIND 12 Simple Keys
Available NowPOWERFUL MIND 12 Simple Keys by Bill Harvey

SPECIAL EDITION: An Eye for An Eye

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Created April 15, 2024
Special Edition

The Iranian tactic has an ancient basis in the respective bibles of the “People of The Book.” As a species we have known for a long time the disastrous consequences of escalation.

This demo by Teheran starts a new era in geopolitik.

It was prophesied in my 2022 novel Pandemonium: Live To All Devices. Not to make more of a spoiler than necessary, a virtual reality television star leads a coalition to prevent escalation, sort of a global NATO, and it works by careful judgment of the optimal degree of retaliation (e.g. page 457).

Israel will now know that unmanned missile and drone attacks are the preferred mode of making “just enough” reparations. Next time there is an October 7th type action. But can anyone afford one more such action?

Does this new context offer an increased feeling of safety, that forms of mischief which have been vaguely tolerated in the past, fighting terrorists but not the people that sent them, those mischief forms are now off the table? Would anyone blame Israel for using these same air missile and drone tactics on Iran if there were to be one further provocation?

Should not everyone take the moment to back away from provocations they are causing right now? Start quietly winding them down?

We have reached a moment that was easy to see coming. For the past 8 years and even longer, governments around the world have been continuing to rattle sabers and appear as strong as possible to one another, as if we were still using TNT, as if bioweapons and cyberweapons and thermonuclear weapons and propaganda weapons were still back at the primitive WWII level.

A bunch of macho men in a life raft, each loaded to the gills with all sorts of exotic and superpowerful weaponry, goading each other in a dominance drill that goes on for a seeming eternity, until one of them accidentally shoves another due to a sudden ocean swell, and there is an explosive bloody free-for-all, which they all call off when they see they are all going to die.

That’s where we are folks.

Time to bring cooperation and competition back in balance.

We have been unbalanced in the competition direction as far back as we can see in written history.

The Greeks and the Romans made slightly better use of cooperation for a time, and rose as empires as a result.

These United States have until recently (with the exception of the Civil War) shown an amazing degree of cooperation. The Native American tribes had been the inspiration for the Federalist philosophy of government which the Founders adopted. This gave us the States.

If we are – the whole universe is – a single consciousness at play, this would explain the reason why cooperation works so well. It’s natural to our nature.

Nature also shows us competition, for mates, for land, for food.

We are hard wired and soft wired for both cooperation and competition.

Hard wired meaning in our physical structure including nervous system. Soft wired meaning programmed by our experiences.

Perhaps we were looking to the animals as our role models when we started off on this competition kick, where cooperation is less to be seen. And yet we see incredible cooperation among cetaceans, fish, birds, certain insects. In WWII we saw incredible cooperation by the Allies. We saw it on April 13th (EDT) when so many nations pitched in to work against an attack.

The U.S. Congress which has been commandeered and far from successfully achieving actual cooperation, is not going to play deaf to this wakeup call “courtesy” of Iran. If the public does not see a change in behavior it will demand the immediate removal of obstructors, those who show no sincere intention to legislate for the good of the public. I think we will see improvement before it goes that far. The moment calls for showing that one is alert to some need to change something. And that it cannot be delayed, procrastination rarely helps in a fire.

No more nonsense.

My Best to all,
Bill