Category Archives: Important Ideas

We Can’t Afford Widespread Neurosis Anymore

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Created November 17, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

It’s pretty obvious that the human race is somewhat out of control.

It could be that, in the past, it was even more out of control than it is now.

But if we look only at the time period since we learned how to make atom bombs, we are now at an “Out-Of-Controllness” level that is at an all-time high within the defined period.

Maybe we were more out of control during the Crusades, but we couldn’t do as much damage then.

Now as compared to prior to 1945, we have done vast destruction to the environment threatening our own survival, have caused innumerable species to go extinct ahead of us, and are still playing party politics and other warped games as if there are no consequences. That’s how much damage we continue to do every day, and we haven’t even started with the atom bomb toy yet.

Enough self-criticism. Now, what are we going to do about it?

The hub of the problem is the way we don’t use our minds.

We don’t use our minds as they were elegantly designed to be used, the way Socrates used his mind, the way Washington and Jefferson and Franklin and Lincoln used their minds… we have many good role models to choose from, as we come back from a race of neurotics.

What is a neurotic? WebMD tells us that “Neurotic means you’re afflicted by neurosis, a word that has been in use since the 1700s to describe mental, emotional, or physical reactions that are drastic and irrational. At its root, a neurotic behavior is an automatic, unconscious effort to manage deep anxiety.”

Acting irrationally is the core of being a neurotic. But don’t we all? Isn’t it irrational to get emotionally overwhelmed by certain situations? The point of the mind is that it has more than just reason as its powers. It has intuition, feelings, perceptions, conditioned motivations, “realized self” motivations, a subconscious, and more. We act based not only on reason but on all of these functions. And that’s the way it should be. However, we ourselves have very little insight into the way we function so it is all kind of a sloppy process. Until we start practicing what Aristotle called “the contemplative life” which modern science calls meta-cognition: the mind inspecting the mind. This is The Way out of neurosis.

The process needed for the entire human race is a cleansing of the spirit, a self-governed “mind wash” available to each individual. Right now, most people don’t even know that they need it. Most people who know they need it don’t want to admit it (they are the ones closest to leaping over the gap if they could transcend denial).

The estimable Norman Hecht sent me a very insightful New Yorker article which makes the point that Trump may be on his way out but that does not remove the appetites of the core that supported him. And what are those appetites? Fear-driven racism and extreme irrational behavior. And what class of behaviors do those fall in the range of?

Right. Those are neuroses. The class of mental/emotional/physical diseases medical science has been tracking since the 1700s.

Eastern psychology noticed those behaviors going back far earlier than writing, based on memes embedded in time-binding songs that can be tracked back to about 10,000 BC thanks to Herotodus, Plato, et al. We have known about these syndromes for a very long time and have never addressed the removal of the problem.

We talk about schemes to save the environment but not to save ourselves from mental emotional self-destructive behavior. Because that is the reason why neurosis is important to remove, because neurosis works against what the individual is motivated to achieve, which is why it is irrational.

If we continue to ignore the primary cause of all of our lethal threat vectors, and try to use outmoded and failed methods to reach reconciliation with China and the others with whom we are now engaging in reptilian combat rehearsal, we are in for a very bad future, as Fareed Zakaria points out in a recent article.

The international conversation as well as the domestic conversation both have to change if we are to show ourselves truly on the road to recovery from mass neurosis. This fictional conversation between the world leaders is closer to the direction we must go than is our present course.

Step one is to come to a clear understanding that there are other, better, ways to use our minds than the general method in use today. Neuroscience calls it the DEFAULT NETWORK. It is a random walk and results in random noise across the corpus callosum. From there we must go to the Observer state, the state of expert meta-cognition. Ram Dass and Daniel Goleman were generous in their comments on my methodology.

My approach is not the only way to free the mind. Psychotherapy, meditation, yoga, psychedelics under supervision with proper setting and mindset, innumerable approaches exist to move out of the default network, what my manual Mind Magic calls EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure). And into a state of relative free will and autonomy, with full insight into your own conditioning which therefore neutralizes the effect of the conditioning.

Yep, you got it right, this is a rather unusual proposition: upgrade the mental/emotional competency of the entire world population. I totally agree, it’s over the top for me to suggest that such a thing is worth putting time into, when the amount of neurosis and its ingrained nature by this point appears insurmountable no matter how many of us want to change the world.

I just don’t like the alternative.

I say let’s give it a go, shall we?

Love to all,

Bill

 

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USA: Nine of the Most Probable Scenarios

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Created November 7, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

On the eve of the most important election in at least the last 100 years, three writers have compellingly described a scenario in which the US at the time of the 2024 election goes into a period of guerilla civil war driven by the burning desire by some to forever live in a state of White supremacy. The writers cite history including very recent events around the world linked by a fear of losing White majority. They centrally point out that the playbook was put into the form of a novel called The Turner Diaries written by a neo-Nazi in 1978.

Barbara F. Walter writes:

Pages of The Turner Diaries were found in Timothy McVeigh’s truck after he attacked a federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Patrick Crusius, the alleged El Paso Walmart gunman, and John Timothy Earnest, the accused shooter at a synagogue in Poway, California, echoed the book’s ideas in their manifestos. A member of the Proud Boys can be seen on video during the insurrection on 6 January 2021 telling a journalist to read The Turner Diaries.
The US is not yet in a civil war. But a 2012 declassified report by the CIA on insurgencies outlines the signs. According to the report, a country is experiencing an open insurgency when sustained violence by increasingly active extremists has become the norm.
In this early stage of civil war, extremists are trying to force the population to choose sides, in part by demonstrating to citizens that the government cannot keep them safe or provide basic necessities. The goal is to incite a broader civil war by denigrating the state and growing support for violent measures. Voter suppression bills have been introduced in almost every state since 6 January. Election deniers are running for office in 48 of the 50 states and now represent a majority of all Republicans running for Congressional and state offices in the US midterm elections this week.
Civil wars almost never happen in full, healthy, strong democracies. They also seldom happen in full autocracies. Violence almost always breaks out in countries in the middle – those with weak and unstable pseudo-democracies. We are already seeing elements of this in Europe, where rightwing anti-immigrant parties such as the Sweden Democrats, the Brothers of Italy, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, the Vlaams Belang in Belgium, the National Rally in France and the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs in Austria have all seen their support increase in recent years.
Regulate social media, and in particular the algorithms that disproportionately push the more incendiary, extreme, threatening and fear-inducing information into people’s feeds. Take away the social media bullhorn and you turn down the volume on bullies, conspiracy theorists, bots, trolls, disinformation machines, hate-mongers and enemies of democracy. The result would be a drop in everyone’s collective anger, distrust and feelings of threat, giving us all time to rebuild.

Stephan Marche writes:

Any failure to recognise electoral outcomes, even in a few states, could result in a contested election in which nobody reaches the threshold of 270 electoral college votes. In that case, the constitution stipulates a “contingent election” – acclimatise yourself to this phrase now – in which each state gets a single vote. That’s right: if no candidate in an American presidential election reaches the threshold of 270 electoral college votes, the state legislatures, overwhelmingly dominated by Republicans, pick the president, with each state having one vote.

Christopher Sebastian Parker writes:

Election-related violence generally takes place when the following four factors are present: a highly competitive election that can shift power; partisan division based on identity; winner-takes-all two-party election systems in which political identities are polarised; and an unwillingness to punish violence on the part of the dominant group. All four are present in America now, and will be more amplified in 2024.

These disturbing notions caused my mind to imagine the various ways this situation might be headed off at the pass. Of course, I agree with Barbara F. Walter that social media must be regulated to permit free speech that is respectful and does not concoct baseless fantasies to stir fear and loathing. This is not too much to ask.

But I do not have the feeling that social media regulation to permit “free fair speech” removing lies and hatemongering is sufficient to move us out of the reap of the whirlwind that these writers portray in their respective articles. More action is needed to curtail the tragic downfall of the USA which to some intelligent observers is near at hand.

What action would that be? My immediate urgent recommendation is that you vote, and do so with these possible scenarios in mind.

What I am also doing here is laying out a few ways this could go.

Scenario A and B: It goes down exactly as these writers describe. The US is taken over by one party, which although a minority, retains power and uses it, leading to an ongoing civil war (Scenario A), or to a pogrom to ethnically cleanse America (Scenario B).

Scenario C: Before the 2024 election, a national referendum is held, leading to a three-tier federated USA. Instead of just States and Federal government, the USA modifies its Constitution to allow a middle federation level consisting of Blue States and Red States. The Supreme Court might be in this level, so that the Blue States have one Supreme Court and the Red States have another. The Federal level would have as its main areas of control the State and Defense Departments, plus the Intelligence agencies. In order to keep all of us safe from outsiders, centralized power would be necessary. The main point of this scenario would be to neuter the need for violence against ourselves.

The Red States might choose, the way South Africa did in the 20th Century, to continue to be a White Supremacist place for as long as possible. In this scenario, three things are predictable: non-White people would move out of Red States and some Whites into them – and some businesses would also move. Global companies would tend to move into Blue states – because operating globally they have to sell to everybody and most of those bodies are not White. Thirdly, the younger generations who are more inclusive in their thinking would lobby within the Red states to eliminate the supremacist tenor, and in time, they would become the leaders, and the bicolor State system would someday be repealed.

In Scenario D, following the midterms and the continuing trend away from peaceful democracy and into violent takeover, most of the people in the country decide to go the other way in 2024, keeping extremists out of power, and the FBI and all other relevant governmental agencies eliminate the domestic terrorists by force.

In Scenario E, Scenario D happens sooner, in the midterms.

In Scenario F, the current situation continues with no clear winners for a long time, but does not totally descend into the depths of hell, just ongoing sporadic violence and we all get used to it and blasé about it, like we adapted to the pandemic, and like we adapted to WWII.

Scenario G is the end of freedom for awhile practically everywhere on Earth, as a small but powerful White minority, skewed toward people with much money and/or addiction to violence, seize a degree of control unprecedented in US history (but highly precedented in all other history) and make life uncomfortable for tens or hundreds of millions of people. In this scenario the situation ends in violent overthrow of the government by a second American Revolution which re-establishes a full American democracy.

Scenario H is just like Scenario G except Americans are not able to do it on their own. Instead, the rest of the non-White world eventually takes over America and any other remaining bastions of White power. In one variation of Scenario H, the entire White race is eliminated. Today there is no faction seeking to eliminate the White race. I can see no significant probability of such a thing ever happening, except if Scenario H White Supremacy Hegemony takes over the world.

There can be other scenarios, these are just a few to choose from when you vote tomorrow.

May God protect us.

Norm Hecht comments helpfully, adding a ninth Scenario I:

“Thank you.

I hope and believe that the major Republican donors will drive the party to more sanity. The Democrats have seemingly no young bench strength, but losses next Tuesday may force sensible change to the middle and youth. We can only pray for the 2024 Presidential election will have younger moderates on both sides. Should the Democrats move to the center the increasingly large number of unaffiliated independents are likely to join the Democrats. Then the Republicans will be forced to move to the center to avoid being a permanent minority party.

Just a few thoughts.”

We’re all in this together. It can come out good for all of us, it just takes creativity and sufficient respect to enable communication.

And your vote as the starting point.

Love to all,

Bill

Note: I rearranged certain quoted sentences for flow in this context, and inserted the link on the word “feeds” because I thought the research project I linked to is very relevant to what Barbara F. Walter was saying.

 

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Cultivate Your Own Virtues, Including Conflict Resolution

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Created October 14, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

In these dangerous times, the one thing you can do to help the world is to help yourself, by bringing out the best in yourself.

Imagine for a moment that the worst-case scenario actually happens. Say battlefield nukes are used by a person who only cares about himself, and then the use of nukes by capable parties escalates until numerous cities are wiped out and this continues until one day, you and your family come up from the basement and risk the radioactivity. And find yourself in an anarchistic society of survivors trying to pull together self-sufficient pockets built around local farms. What skills will you have to contribute?

If you’re a carpenter, plumber, electrician, doctor or dentist, farmer, or can repair machines, you will be very important to the community. Today many of us are knowledge workers and our abilities might not be immediately perceived as essential to survival. What can we do to help besides babysit, teach children to read, write and calculate?

There will always be a need for people who can help resolve conflicts through dialogue, who can serve as the voice of reason when others are locked in opposition. These are people who have processed their own internal divisions and can be objective and compassionate, who have conquered their own egos.

The value of becoming such a person – or becoming even more of such a person – is not dependent on the downside scenario. By uplifting ourselves we stand a better chance of bypassing the downside scenario. My main ongoing point is that the root causes of today’s horrifying threat vector salad are within ourselves, and that only by assimilating ancient knowhow can we transcend our racial immaturity and bootstrap ourselves to a society where leaders and citizens are profoundly converted into a state of enlightened self-interest. This is what the Founders, especially Jefferson, held as the ultimate vision for the USA and then the world.

This is not to expect spiritual enlightenment as being as close at hand for we eight billion human beings on Earth, that will surely take longer to accomplish. Enlightened self-interest is the same as pragmatism, the fully embodied predisposition to create win/win situations as being the ones that will be sustainable and most beneficial to everybody.

By contrast, the ego seeks only the satisfaction of the one self, obtusely blind to the inevitable backfire effects of winning so much personally as to force others to lose.

What we call ethics is the body of work that seeks to contain the damaging tendencies of the egos who have taken us over, much like the puppet masters in Heinlein’s novel and motion picture of that name.

What are your virtues? What are things that are best about who you are? What are your shortcomings? How can you overcome them? This is a contemplation well worth having some beautiful autumn day, perhaps today, sitting in nature where the human psyche is automatically uplifted. Bring a means of recording your revelations e.g., a notepad and pen.

The virtue of a metal is its strength. The word comes from the Latin vir, meaning man. The original application of the word was to a man’s valor, and the meaning expanded to cover honor, morality, goodness, kindness, fairness, charity, hope, spiritual faith in the goodness of the universe itself and/or of its Creator, taking care of others, and many other virtues.

In a conversation with his son, as reported by his students, Gautama Buddha taught that honesty is the primary virtue, because if a person would lie, then that person could be deceiving in other ways, such as pretending all of the other virtues.

Winston Churchill may or may not have been aware of the Buddha’s statement when Churchill proclaimed courage to be the foundational virtue, because all of the other virtues rest upon it, even honesty. It requires great courage to be honest, and great understanding to know when to not take honesty too far.

Greek philosophy assimilated earlier Eastern philosophies in esteeming balance as the most bedrock virtue, because in order to do right in a specific situation, one would need to balance all of the virtues together. This reflects a deep insight into the importance of situational (context) factors, an awareness of the complexity of things, and how such variation mandates a decision-making process which transcends black and white abstractions.

Today’s situation definitely escalates the importance of the virtue of courage, the ability to conquer one’s own fears. It’s much harder for a materialist to achieve the level of detachment which is possible for a person whose intuition is strongly supportive of the idea of a benevolent universe. However the Stoic philosophers did not depend upon spirituality to help individuals become resigned to outcomes beyond their control to prevent. Stoicism teaches that nothing is gained by fear, that in fact fear undermines the ability to overcome whatever situation is causing the fear. This was pragmatism appearing much earlier than Charles Sanders Peirce, and in subtler form.

Accepting what is and working on the controllable parts of the situation are strong plays regardless of one’s view of reality.

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The Virtue of Dialogue

Socrates and Plato were great believers in the value of dialogue, which they saw as leading to truth and deeper understanding than hortatory one-way writing. Plato explained this in relation to the value of inner dialogue as a means to reaching deep intuitional understanding of oneself and of external situations.

Dialogue was important to the Founders who believed that people elected to represent the people could talk things out reasonably and reach right decisions. Being elevated beings themselves, they may have over-estimated their fellow Americans a bit. I’ve always loved the Lorenz Hart line in the song “I Wish I Were In Love Again”: “the conversation with the flying plates”. That image seems to fit the conversations going on nowadays in the legislature, and among the three branches of US government. It would be good if we could get back to actual dialogue instead of performative anger mismanagement.

The importance and strength of dialogue can be seen if one looks carefully enough, even in current day events. In the recent UN dialogue and voting on human rights, although the many smaller countries of the world are keeping their options open and trying to play the superpowers off one another, the voting went against Russia because of the open military aggression against the Ukraine. China was not censured despite evident of flagrant human rights violations, because China is not currently invading anybody. The germ of good news I see in that is that (a) China is smart enough to read the signs and the likelihood of their invading Taiwan is now reduced a notch as a result of that vote (b) the Russian people are smart enough to see that invasions are out of style in the new world order (c) other nations who might be tempted to invade someone have relevant new data to include in their calculus.

Make yourself stronger, help others do the same, encourage people to do the right thing, do not vote for people who are concerned only about themselves no matter what they say (what they say is calculated to get your vote, do not be manipulated by your ego and your old inner rhetoric). Be prepared to deal constructively with whatever situation you find yourself in. Open your mind to all possibilities about the benevolence or indifference of the universe. Quantum physics has proven the existence of teleportation. The universe is a lot stranger thing than suspected by the anti-spiritualism movement within science in the last few hundred years. Science itself is in the slow process of changing its mind. Keep a good thought and good feelings. Live out each day with gusto and love. What’s the point of life if you’re always postponing enjoyment for some future state, as if you won’t allow yourself to smile until conditions are met. Heaven is right here in the present moment if you let it in.

Love to all,

Bill

 

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Walking In Someone Else’s Moccasins Is Rarely Accomplished

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Created September 23, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

It’s so easy to say things but so hard to ever do them actually.

That bit of advice associated with Native Americans but probably evolved within every culture in the world is most profound: put yourself in their shoes. What would you be thinking, feeling, and doing?

It requires a willing imagination to do something like that. Most of time people are just saying those things not even attempting to actually do them – because they think they already got the point, but didn’t.

Hearing any old proverb, one tends to assume they are now obeying it having been reminded of it. As if it is easy to do. Just hear it, remember agreeing with it, set it aside and express agreement, then move on, coming from exactly the same place you were in before hearing the mantra.

It is easy to actually test out the proverb, but it does require concentration, time, patience, openness, imaginal powers (many of us have let that muscle atrophy), and a genuine desire to understand the adversary of the moment.

In the Acceleritis Culture, one does not have time for such fripperies.

We might think a person is strange who actually took a minute to mentally/emotionally put himself in another person, sense what that would feel like, enduring the discomfort of the long pause in the conversation. Because it’s not just a proverb, it’s an exercise, something you make time to do, because it’s one of your responsibilities as a human being.

Some ancients in every culture came up with this same exercise and the proverb is merely the mnemonic to remind us to do the exercise, pointed at each person with whom you have any discomfort.

There was a time when the human race automatically understood stuff like this, and knew it was a level above the importance of choosing the right style or watching the right influential. Perhaps from an ethical point of view the Neanderthals were the Golden Age.

I jest to make a point. Our obligation being the stewards of right now, is to make this the Golden Age.

Admittedly that seems laughable given the darkness of the latest half decade, but we have to remember that we are the same brave people we were before the present darkness set in. That gaiety will return. It can Be Here Now.

We are all affected, we therefore are each responsible for sauve qui peut. (Save as many as you can.)

We seem to have lost respect for the dignity of the human race. Realizing this can lead us to become more courageous, serious and open-minded.

If God is watching, let’s make Her proud. (We should rotate God’s pronouns every 2000 years.)

We can’t endlessly shrink from debate with people who seek to debate with us, or seek otherwise to possibly to do us harm. “We” must speak together with “them” (the us/them tendency is built into our language) only after agreeing to keep it nice, and then keeping it nice.

Fortunately we have that age old adage exercise, Moccasin Imagination Mode (MIM). Before thinking of talking about it, see if you can begin to feel the way they do about it even just a little bit. You’ll gain an understanding of larger issues you never thought about before.

Here’s a report of my recent MIM exercise. It had been brought about by the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and then the articles about colonial brutality. In my MIM, I imagined many scenes out of many times, and felt strongly one way then another. In one vision I saw and heard the Queen saying, with a tear in one eye, “We thought we were sharing civilization.”

The tendency to demonize one another is demonic.

Share warmth.

Love to all,

Bill

 

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