Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created March 13, 2026

My favorite survey organization, Pew Institute, just did a global survey which finds that America is the country in which the largest percentage of respondents say that most of their countrymen are bad people.

Things have been trending in that direction for some time, but we are really hitting the bottom now.

Maybe that’s a good sign that we will soon be rebounding upward.

I’ve been tracking stuff like this for decades now.

Trust levels have been going down for a long time. Distrust in the US government began dropping in 1958. It’s not just the government. People don’t trust the media, advertising, corporations in general, other people in general, they don’t trust themselves, the Universe or God.

It’s not 100%. There are probably over two billion people on the planet today who are still generally trusting. Unfortunately, most of them are probably little children.

In 1971, the first edition of Handbook of Children and The Media by Dorothy and Jerome Singer told the world that heavy viewers of television news are more likely to distrust the next stranger they met. In today’s agitprop circus of openly biased “news” channels and foulmouthed, vicious, people-cancelling social media, the distrust creation by media has gone way through the roof.

Pew did a study in 2019 with almost as alarming findings. They wrote: “Those who think interpersonal trust has declined in the past generation offer a laundry list of societal and political problems, including a sense that Americans on the whole have become more lazy, greedy and dishonest. 49% of adults think interpersonal trust has been tailing off because people are less reliable than they used to be.”

It seems that not so long ago Johnny Mercer wrote the line “Howdy stranger, so long friend” and Will Rogers said, “I never met a man I didn’t like”. We were all happy being Americans and we lived in peace and harmony despite differing religions, races, ideologies, teams we rooted for, none of that stuff got in the way. We were grateful to be Americans.

Make Americans Grateful Again should be our slogan, if we have to have a slogan.

I was a spoiled brat, but I got myself out of that.

We have all been spoiled by America. JFK famously said, “Think what you can do for your country, not what your country can do for you.” Today, we can only ruefully laugh at that, whereas tens of millions of us were so inspired by it back then. So spoiled, we take our advantages for granted. So spoiled, we have lost sight of those advantages until now; we are aware that they could be taken away. So spoiled, we ceased seeing America as great. So negative despite our advantages that we can wreck the dream, dash all hope, cringe at all idealism, and 35% of us who could vote don’t even bother to do so.

It’s disrespectful to the Founders. And to the U.S. soldiers, sailors, and airmen who died to save democracy in WWI and WWII and since. And to our fathers and mothers who loved this country.

We have to shake off this spoiled brat-ism and get back to being grateful for America.

And that means erasing that hallucination that most of Americans are bad people. That isn’t the real-life experience we have every day as we go shopping, use public transportation, and meet people. Many of them smile back at us if we are smiling. Many of them are courteous. We are decidedly not being empiricists to believe in the nightmare that most people around us are bad. It’s paranoia, which is a disease.

I have about 30 Zoom calls a week and meet a lot of new people every week, and all of them are good people. Maybe I’m just lucky or a bad judge of character, but for anyone to think that most Americans are bad people – especially for 53% of Americans to admit to believing that – is a sign of just how deep into Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) we have sunk. That is a state of hypnosis, not awareness, overly subject to suggestion from outside influences.

Pew knows that this pattern of seeing fellow citizens as bad, which also exists in other countries, is skewed toward countries which are politically polarized. Sure, the folks in Party A think that the folks in Party B are bad; their own Party told them that, so it must be true. EOP is when you are so overwhelmed by too much to think about that you don’t want to think at all, you just want to subscribe to someone else’s pre-packaged viewpoint, hide in that herd you chose, and escape into media diversions as much as possible.

EOP is not a good way to be. When almost all of us are in it, and the media are blaring negativity at us 13 hours a day, the grey area between neurosis and psychosis shrinks, until it’s too late for a shrink, and we turn to legal drugs that don’t cure us but maintain our morbid state with less pain.

It’s time for a change. It starts inside each one of us. We call up our resolve and determination and form a strong intention to smile through it all and look for and enact the solutions, one by one, as the problems and challenges confront us each day. “Smilin’ Through” was the name of a sentimental movie long ago, and the movie’s musical score was my bandleader father Ned Harvey’s first theme song.

In our new mindset of resolve, we meet people expecting to like them and to help them and work with them. We don’t expect to meet bad people. Strong positive intentions and expectations without attachment – meaning if someone does not live up to those positive expectations, you take it easily in stride and still keep trying to help them out of it.

Most of the people who voted the other way from you were just in EOP, like almost everyone else. It is only a handful of visible political leaders who form our political opinions. It only takes a handful of bad apples near the top to create this horrid atmosphere; it isn’t the fault of everyone in either Party. Followers will be followers. Loyalty taken too far, encouraged by inertia and risk aversion, all change seems risky, and our closest friends may form a community of belonging which is attached to one of the Parties, and we don’t want to be outed from the group.

George Washington warned us against having a two-Party system, and if we had only listened. But we have made it work before, and we will make it work again. That happy state will come about much sooner if we drop this nightmare fantasy that most of our fellow citizens are bad.

The next time you catch yourself thinking ill of someone, check the empirical facts: what did they actually do, was it blatant bad behavior, or just a mistake? To err is human, to forgive, divine. How much of our mental putting down of other people might be projection — accusing them of things we do ourselves?

Having a positive viewpoint and being open-hearted are qualities of successful people. Such people magnetically attract others. With 53% of Americans dissing their fellow citizens, we are repelling each other, Gung Ho cooperation becomes impossible, and our collective success chances weaken. It makes no sense to continue in this mindless fashion; we must all clear our heads out now and start anew with a fresh page, all emotional peeves cancelled.

Give us a chance.

Love to all,

 

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, May 2, 2025.

“Americans Haven’t Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion”, Lauren Jackson writes in her article, and she cites Pew survey statistics to support her argument. In their flight from their childhood religions to everything from astrology to yoga, 92% of Americans still believe that something spiritual exists beyond the natural world. They increasingly feel, as Lauren does, that their current surrogates do not fulfil something still missing which they felt they got from religion.

She quotes from the latest US Pew findings that 36% of “religiously active” people describe themselves as “very happy” as compared with 25% of “religiously unaffiliated” people. “Religiously affiliated Americans are more likely to feel gratitude (by 23 percentage points), spiritual peace (by 27 points) and “a deep sense of connection with humanity” (by 15 points) regularly than people without a religious affiliation.” She also references Harvard  research pointing to better health among the religiously affiliated segment. In other words, the absence of religion does not merely leave many people feeling a sense of something missing, that absence has other even more concerning side effects.

Ms. Jackson finds it a positive sign that the flight from religion is showing signs of levelling off, perhaps suggesting that the trend could reverse itself. Nonetheless the proportion of people in the US who identify themselves as Christian stands at 63% in 2024, which is where it was in 2019, as compared with 78% in 2007.

The same Pew survey linked above shows that 27% of religiously unaffiliated people say they have become more spiritual over the course of their lives, which could be another sign of a change in direction.

In my book A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God” (2023), I postulated that in the absence of a scientific acceptance of the possibility of a God, the human race is left without a sense of purpose. Inevitably, we will devolve into a society of “cynicism, selfishness, egotistical self-centeredness, scarcity of wealth (only a few have it), power-mongering, hatred of ‘the other’, racism, xenophobia, fear, weapons of mass destruction, collapsing environment, dying species, fiat money, superficial [public] education systems, unmoderated platforms of social mass communication”.

In that book, I propose that—

Science and spirituality can be reconciled by admitting the real possibility that the entire universe is a single consciousness.

This is a real possibility because we know from each of our own personal experiences that consciousness exists, it is a real thing, each of us has it. If that is the case, then a much larger consciousness could also exist. Each of us could realistically be a part of that total consciousness. We might call that total consciousness “God”. And if we do, we are reconciling science and spirituality.

The religions within the domain of spirituality exist to translate the implications of the Oneness of reality in terms of what is right human behavior (ethics).

What, then, is one to do if one has the feeling of a need for something like religion, so as to feel belonging, to know what to believe, and how to behave? My model of reality could be a starting point.

However, as I write in that book, I do not recommend believing in anything. What I recommend is keeping one’s mind open at all times to the possibility that one is the Universe in the guise of one’s present role. Seeing in every moment whether that model helps explain what is happening to you, or not.

In terms of the sense of belonging, you might consider returning to a religion in which you felt happy, or trying out each religion that attracts you. Eventually, you may find a community of people with whom you feel a deep sense of belonging.

In terms of guidelines for behavior, this is one of the areas in which religions have probably in general, gone too far. The Ten Commandments and all of the words of Jesus do not micromanage us as strictly as many religions have done, and this was part of the cause for the flight from them. If my model of reality is correct, the Golden Rule suffices: since we are all really the same Being, one should treat everyone and everything else with love and respect.

However, I feel that the main cause of the flight from religion was not the restrictions it imposed. It was the intuitive sense for people living in the modern world that the picture of reality painted by the ancient scriptures did not ring true.

However, when looked at through the lens of the Universe as a single consciousness, everything in ancient scriptures suddenly makes more sense. I attempt to convey this in detail through my science fiction alternative history series, Agents of Cosmic Intelligence. In it, one sees how science and all of the events reported by ancient scriptures, and all of the religions, could be in perfect synch with one another. In the series Jesus, Abraham, Moses, Krishna, Buddha appear. Key scenes from the Bible appear. There is no deviation from scripture, yet is all consistent with quantum theory.

My hope is that at least the 92% of us who have a hunch that something spiritual exists—and maybe 100% of us—can feel more of a sense of common purpose and excitement at life by opening our minds to the possibility that we are all one Great Being together, channeling God through our acts of kindness and nobility.

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Here is a video and a piece of music which evokes the unity of the spirit. Enjoy.

Love to all,

Welcome to a special Pebbles blogpost.
Created October 23, 2024

Socrates took being a citizen to be a solemn matter.

He felt a responsibility to act in the proper manner for a citizen. He even agreed that the State had the right to put him to death, despite knowing it was their error.

Perhaps it is no longer the modern way to make such commitments to ideas.

Unless you are immune to reality, you are probably attuned enough to be voting in this election.

No election before ever had such significance in the history of the world. Many millions of people are getting very involved in this election. Many who are still undecided are preparing for it by studying the solutions that each candidate is talking about and trying to be objective in comparing these proposed solutions.

It’s the kind of thing you want to be a part of. Even if you never voted before, and never do it again.

Everything you experience teaches you things.

Here are my suggestions on how to get the most out of this election in terms of having a peak experience, knowing you are part of history.

Really feel alive. Take deep breaths. Look at the sky.

When you are in the voting booth (or voting in advance), here are the steps:

1.   Look and feel deep inside yourself, who you really are in yourself, not your parents, not anybody else. What do you want out of your future? For yourself, and all of the people you care about.

2.   Focus on one candidate. Let yourself imagine what it’s going to be like on that timeline if this one wins. How it will affect you, and all the people you care about.

3.   Do the same with the other candidate.

4.   Vote.

Love to all,

 

Live chat with my avatar now.