Tag Archives: Democracy

How Do We Protect Our Elections and Voting Rights At The Same Time?

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created May 21, 2026

The question of non-citizen voting in U.S. elections is a major point of public discussion. Extensive data, recent state-level audits, and nonpartisan research show that verified cases of non-citizen voting are vanishingly rare, representing a minute fraction of a percent of overall votes cast.

When state election officials conduct extensive audits using federal immigration databases (like SAVE) and Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) records, the initial lists of “suspected” non-citizens routinely shrink drastically upon investigation. This is usually because the data relies on outdated status reports (e.g., individuals who were green card holders when they got their driver’s license but have since become naturalized U.S. citizens).

The Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR) and recent state reports provide the following official figures:

Note: “Potential” or “Suspected” means the individuals were flagged for review; subsequent checks usually reveal many are actually naturalized citizens who simply haven’t updated their DMV profile.

The conservative Heritage Foundation maintains a national database tracking verified instances of voter fraud. Going back to the year 2000, their database documents fewer than 100 cases of non-citizen voting across the entire country. Given that hundreds of millions of ballots have been cast in that timeframe, the percentage is statistically close to 0%.

A landmark study by the Brennan Center analyzed 42 jurisdictions during the 2016 presidential election (tabulating 23.5 million votes). Election officials referred only 30 cases of suspected non-citizen voting for investigation—amounting to 0.0001% of the votes.

Why It Happens (When It Does)

Data shows that the microscopic number of non-citizens who do successfully register or vote are almost exclusively Lawful Permanent Residents (green card holders) rather than undocumented immigrants. These cases are usually driven by administrative errors (such as being automatically prompted to register while getting a driver’s license) or honest confusion about eligibility rules, rather than intentional fraud.

Recent data from major polling operations, including the comprehensive PBS News/NPR/Marist Poll and federal tracking data, outlines where the public stands:

High Bipartisan Support for Specific Stricter Laws

When polled on specific legislative proposals—such as photo voter ID mandates or proof-of-citizenship requirements—supermajorities of Americans consistently voice support.

Voter ID Requirements: Between 81% and 84% of Americans support requiring a government-issued photo ID to vote. This includes roughly 95%–98% of Republicans, 79%–84% of independents, and 67%–70% of Democrats.
Proof of Citizenship: Approximately 75% to 83% of Americans favor requiring proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote for the first time.
The SAVE America Act: A White House data release tracking public sentiment on federal election security legislation shows 71% overall support for tighter federal restrictions on voter registration eligibility, including half of rank-and-file Democrats.

Fraud vs. Access: The Public Divide

Despite broad consensus on IDs, the public splits significantly when asked about the core philosophy governing election laws. The Marist Poll reveals a sharp divide over whether the priority should be stopping fraud or maximizing turnout:

The Primary Concern: 59% of Americans believe it is more important to ensure that everyone who wants to vote is able to do so. Conversely, 41% say the bigger concern should be ensuring no one votes who is ineligible.
Partisan Splits: This question is highly polarized. 70% of Republicans prioritize stopping ineligible voters, while 86% of Democrats and 53% of Independents prioritize maximizing voter access.

Perceived Threats to Elections

When Americans are asked to name the single biggest threat to safe and secure elections, voter fraud ranks high, but it shares the spotlight with other anxieties:

33% cite voter fraud as the top threat.
26% cite misleading information (including concerns about AI-generated misinformation).
24% cite voter suppression (worrying that strict laws will turn away eligible voters).

Notably, 57% of Republicans view voter fraud as the top threat, whereas 41% of Democrats view voter suppression as the primary threat, and a plurality of independents worry most about misinformation.

In summary, the percentage of Americans who want stricter laws depends heavily on how the question is asked. If asked about voter ID and citizenship verification, support sits overwhelmingly at 75% to 84%. However, if asked whether tightening laws to prevent fraud is more important than protecting voter access, only about 41% of the country prioritizes fraud prevention above all else.

When forced to weigh election security against voter access, a clear majority of Americans prioritize ensuring that eligible voters are not locked out of the system.

According to the comprehensive PBS News/NPR/Marist Poll on Election Security:

59% of Americans state that their primary concern is making sure that everyone who wants to vote is able to do so.
This concern is heavily driven by partisan lines: 86% of Democrats and 53% of Independents prioritize maximizing voter access over stopping potential fraud.

Fear of Voters Being Turned Away

Anxieties regarding specific voting rights being taken away or restricted at the ballot box have hit a multi-year high:

58% of Americans believe it is likely that people will show up to the polls only to be told they are not eligible to vote.
This represents a striking 16-percentage-point jump from when the same question was asked in 2020. Among Democrats, this fear rises to 74%.

Concern Over Gerrymandering and Vote Dilution

While broad polling generally measures “gerrymandering” through the lens of overall trust in the political process, the sentiment that the system is being rigged to minimize the effect of certain votes is incredibly widespread.

Threats to Democracy: In the February 2026 Marist Poll, 78% of Americans stated that they believe U.S. democracy is “in jeopardy” or “under serious threat.”
The “Voter Suppression” Threat: When asked to isolate the single largest threat to a safe and fair election, 24% of Americans specifically point to voter suppression (the intentional restriction of voting access).
Lack of Confidence in Fair Elections: Driven heavily by the ongoing “arms race” of mid-decade redistricting across states like California, Texas, North Carolina, and Virginia, public confidence that state/local governments will run fair and accurate elections dropped to two-thirds (66%)—a 10-percentage-point decrease from late 2024.

Data tracking from organizations like the Pew Research Center confirms that large majorities of Americans intuitively favor electoral fairness and believe that extreme partisan gerrymandering actively undermines confidence in whether their individual vote actually matters.

What do these facts tell us? Despite the incidence of voter fraud being close to zero, 41% of us want stricter laws preventing it, outweighing in their minds the risk of citizen voting being made so much more difficult or diluted that “one person, one vote” no longer applies, and minority rule can take over America.

How can we explain this?

Possibility #1: 41% of us are racists.

Possibility #2: 41% of us are unaware of the near-zero factual threat of voter fraud to date.

Possibility #3: 41% of us simply want the Republicans to win, regardless of the issues or consequences.

Possibility #4: 41% of us fear the perceived weakness of the Democrats more than they fear anything else.

Possibility #5: 41% of us fear that the elections are going to be rigged from now on, because of the actions now being taken by the government, and they want stricter anti-fraud laws to protect us against that. (However, the laws that we need to prevent that are not being strengthened, in fact the weakening of voter rights strengthens that.)

Possibility #6: all of the above to varying degrees. This is the likely real answer.

What should we all do?

Take action to make sure the facts about voter fraud statistics are known by as many people as possible. We can all do this in social media. Let’s make social media socially a positive force for a change.
If you do not see yourself as weak, run for office, or help someone you see as strong and wise run for office. Socrates and George Washington agreed that wise and morally strong people must be willing to accept the role of governing, even if they would prefer to do something else with their lives. Unfortunately, the public votes for strong over wise, so if you are in any way involved in politics or are willing to become involved now that our country needs all of us to become more involved, and you are a combat veteran or simply a strong person, hear and take the call now.

Happy Memorial Day Remember and Honor May 25, 2026

Love to all,

Live chat with my avatar

How AI Might Help Shape a Better Future for American Politics

Leave a reply

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog
Created March 6, 2026

I’ve been asking AI a lot of questions lately about the American Revolution. I can see it like a movie now. Sort of like the original 1960 Ocean’s Eleven, when we see how the gang comes together like iron filings around a magnetic story arc.

In the real his-and-her-story (formerly known as his story, i.e., history), John Adams got religion first, around 1765, PO’ed by the Stamp Act and Taxation Without Representation.

George Washington, always methodical, gradually shifted his attitude over a period of years, 1769–1774, in increasing indignation against the British treatment of Americans as inferior. The major stimuli included trade restrictions and the Coercive Acts. But there was also a personal matter. He had joined the British Army, and because he was American, he was given the rank of Brevet Captain instead of full Captain. Apparently, his mother had rankled him all his young life with put-downs, which made him extra sensitive in his adult life to treatment like that.

Thomas Jefferson was drawn into the revolutionary mindset ~1774 (the turning point year, as we shall see in a moment) by the issues of infringement on natural rights and self-governance.

Alexander Hamilton joined the movement in 1774, spurred by political unrest in New York and the Continental Congress.

Benjamin Franklin was the last of this group to join. He spent decades in London trying to bridge the gap between the colonies and the Crown. He truly believed the British Empire could be saved. The turning point was the “Hutchinson Letters Affair” (1774), where he was publicly humiliated by British officials. He realized reconciliation was impossible and sailed home in March 1775, arriving in Philadelphia just after the battles of Lexington and Concord, ready to serve the rebellion.

Thomas Paine joined the American revolutionary movement upon arriving in Philadelphia from England on November 30, 1774. Recommended by Franklin, Paine quickly immersed himself in colonial politics, publishing his influential, pro-independence pamphlet Common Sense on January 10, 1776, which galvanized support for the revolution.

The American Revolution was primarily influenced by Enlightenment philosophers, most notably John Locke, whose theories on natural rights (life, liberty, property) and the social contract directly shaped the Declaration of Independence. Other key influences included Montesquieu (separation of powers), Rousseau (popular sovereignty), and Thomas Paine (republicanism). Most of the Founders themselves also wrote brilliant philosophical treatises. If we had leaders today who were as creative in thinking about the future, we would probably not be in the current mess.

Enter AI.

The USA is a representative democracy, and this worked for almost 250 years, but it is showing signs of wear. The necessity for representatives was obvious all this time because there was no way for all of us to vote every day on every big and little decision and still get anything else done, like producing goods and services, inventing things, defending the nation, etc.

AI does change this. It would be possible for each of us to tell AI everything we want government to do and not do, every day, as the spirit moves us. AI could combine all this input from ~325 million people, knowing which ones are adults and eligible to vote, which ones are citizens but minors, which ones are immigrants not eligible to vote. AI could provide summaries of what We, The People want continuously to the government at all levels, as well as to the press and to educators and back to all of us.

This would seem to be a highly probable eventuality at some point. It might start very soon as unofficial experimentation and perhaps as a more constructive channeling of the shouting match we call social media.

This would use a lot of computing power and have a high carbon footprint and possibly lead to some breakthroughs in clean energy sources.

Rooting out biases in AI and the need for continuous fact checking would be crucial in such a system.

Bad actors would focus on political cybermanipulation. Good agents of the Justice and Intel systems would work to keep them from ruining a good thing.

But wait! How would this be better than polling? Doesn’t polling serve this function already?

Polling is limited to the ideas which are already on the table. The AI method would pick up creative new ideas even if only one person came up with them. In fact the national governmental AI should not be a single AI but a collegial team of AIs looking at the same data from many viewpoints, some looking for new ideas, some fact checking, some looking for historical precedents, and so on.

Polling has another problem of representativeness. The response rate to polling is typically under 10%, suggesting a very large nonresponse bias. Pew and other sources taken together suggest that something like 87% of Americans use social media, implying a willingness to key in at least a few words every now and then. The AI scenario envisioned here would be voice driven rather than requiring keystrokes, which would also be an option. In order to maximize engagement, the government could offer modest tax rebates based of the degree of contribution to the ideas of the nation.

We would still need representatives and the rest of government at all levels to carry out the wishes of the people. In fact, the mess we are in now is only slightly the result of imperfections in the system the Founders designed, and a much larger factor is the imperfections of the people in that system.

If we elected people who were of good character, devoted to the good of the many, more of us would vote.

“Using data from the University of Florida Election Lab, a new analysis by the Environmental Voter Project shows that 85.9 million eligible voters skipped the 2024 general election, far surpassing the 76.8 million ballots cast for Donald Trump or the 74.3 million for Kamala Harris.

If “Did Not Vote” had been a presidential candidate, they would have beaten Donald Trump by 9.1 million votes, and they would have won 21 states, earning 265 electoral college votes to Trump’s 175 and Harris’s 98.” This quote from the Environmental Voter Project website.

The party system was not included in the U.S. Constitution. It actually started as a result of the greatly differing visions of Hamilton and Jefferson. Hamilton wanted a strong federal government and industrial development in order to make the U.S.A. a major world power. Jefferson wanted more of an agrarian distributed nation. Hamilton’s views spawned the Federalist Party, and Jefferson’s gave birth to the Republican Democratic Party. The two men, although at odds ideologically, were able to work together and make deals such as the one which created the first national bank and led to what is today the Fed.

The Party system today is essential to get Presidential candidates to be known to the public, a costly affair because advertising is not free. In the future, it is conceivable that a different system might emerge in which the media charge nothing for political advertising (which would increase the cost of advertising to all the other categories by less than 3%).

Schools ought to bring back civics classes and inspire some students to become dedicated public servants motivated by non-ego, non-money, and non-power motivations. People who are of that ilk who want to run for office ought to be lifted up by even the small set of early supporters they find. Social media provides a way for the bubble up from grassroots method to be potentially viable. If the product (the candidate) is authentic enough and of high character, a noble human being like the Founders, for all their human flaws, he or she will go viral. The new mayor of New York is an example of what can happen (I do not know enough to say anything pro or con about his character; time will tell, let’s give him a fair chance), but he did rise rather rapidly from obscurity.

Times look dark when creativity has not been fully leveraged yet. There are more possible outcome scenarios than appear to be on the table based on the loud megaphones of the two parties and limited time each day for creative thought and imagination. AI and HI (Human Intelligence) together in harmony can overcome all messes.

Umberto Eco Deeply Understood and Cared

Leave a reply

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog: July 26, 2024

Umberto Eco at his home.*

The Italian novelist, essayist, deep thinker Umberto Eco won first prize in a Fascist essay contest when he was ten years old. He was a product of his culture: Mussolini’s Italy was all he ever knew up until that point. That was reality. Fascism was his way of life, although not consciously. He had no inkling of other worlds then. The year was 1942.

Less than a year later on the morning of April 27, 1943 he learned from a radio broadcast that “Fascism had collapsed and Mussolini had been arrested.” (Five Moral Pieces) He ran out and looked at the headlines on the suddenly large numbers of newspapers and saw that political parties that must have existed in secret were all coming out. Until that moment he had believed that every country had just one party and in Italy it was the Fascist party.

“My God, I had never read words like ‘freedom’ or ‘dictatorship’ in all my life. By virtue of these words, I was reborn as a free Western man.”

Eco having been conditioned as a Fascist was released from that condition by outside forces and uplifted. He became a teacher, philosopher, scientist, best-selling novelist.

His concept of semiotics permits us to read the signs in all things since all things may be interpreted as signs in themselves. We all constantly create signs, both intentionally and without conscious intent. This was his unique perspective on the nature of reality.

In Five Moral Pieces he dissects fascism in its broader sense (i.e. not limited to Italy’s version) into a specific set of attributes. This is relevant because he was a person born into fascism and took it for granted as part of life. He experienced liberation by the Allies and the transformation of the way of life. His mind changed and he much preferred the new social contract and its freedoms. He realized himself as a passionate supporter of diversity.

Eco provides the following list of clues to help humanity detect fascism:

“The cult of tradition“. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur.
“The rejection of modernism“, which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity.
“The cult of action for action’s sake“, which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.
“Disagreement is treason” – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action.
“Fear of difference“, which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.
“Appeal to a frustrated middle class“, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.
“Obsession with a plot” and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson‘s book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.
Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak“. On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
“Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” because “life is permanent warfare” – there must always be an enemy to fight.
“Contempt for the weak“, which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.
“Everybody is educated to become a hero“, which leads to the embrace of a cult of death.
“Machismo“, which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold “both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality”.
“Selective populism” – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of “no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people”.
“Newspeak” – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

Thanks to Wikipedia for distilling these attributes, which saved me time; I have condensed the Wikipedia listing.

Eco published his essay on this subject in 1995. On July 11, 2024, another great writer and thinker, David Brooks wrote an essay in The New York Times aimed at understanding why America today is not repelled by the idea of authoritarianism. His conclusion is that, until the 1960s, America had a balance between reason and religion which, while disagreeing on one level, agreed upon the moral and ethical grounds for conduct. Then, starting in the 1960s, America began to become less religious, and reason and science on their own did not present as compelling a case for upholding idealistic values:

“At the same time, science and reason failed to produce a substitute moral order that could hold the nation together. By 1981, in the famous first passage of his book “After Virtue,” the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre argued that we had inherited fragments of moral ideas, not a coherent moral system to give form to a communal life, not a solid set of moral foundations to use to settle disputes. Moral reasoning, he wrote, had been reduced to “emotivism.” If it feels right, do it. In 1987, Allan Bloom released his megaselling “The Closing of the American Mind,” arguing that moral relativism had become the dominant ethos of the era.”

“In other words, Americans lost faith in both sides of the great historical tension, and with it the culture that had long held a diverse nation together. By the 21st century it became clear that Americans were no longer disagreeing with one another; they didn’t even perceive the same reality. You began to hear commencement speakers declare that each person has to live according to his or her own truth. Critics talked about living in a post-truth society. [James Davison] Hunter talks about cultural exhaustion, a loss of faith, a rising nihilism — the belief in nothing. As he puts it, ‘If there is little or no common political ground today, it is because there are few if any common assumptions about the nature of a good society that underwrite a shared political life.’”

“Was there anything that would fill this void of meaning? Was there anything that could give people a shared sense of right and wrong, a sense of purpose? It turns out there was: identity politics. People on the right and the left began to identify themselves within a particular kind of moral story. This is the story in which my political group is the victim of oppression and other groups are the oppressors. For people who feel they are floating in a moral and social vacuum, this story provides a moral landscape — there are those bad guys over there and us good guys over here. The story provides a sense of belonging. It provides social recognition. By expressing my rage, I will earn your attention and respect.”

“The problem with this form of all-explaining identity politics is that it undermines democracy. If others are evil and out to get us, then persuasion is for suckers. If our beliefs are defined by our identities and not individual reason and personal experience, then different Americans are living in different universes and there is no point in trying to engage in deliberative democracy. You just have to crush them. You have to grab power and control of the institutions and shove your answers down everybody else’s throats.”

“In this climate, Hunter argues, ‘the authoritarian impulse becomes impossible to restrain.’ Authoritarianism imposes a social vision by force. If you can’t have social solidarity organically from the ground up, then you can impose it from top down using the power of the state.”

“The task, then, is to build a new cultural consensus that is democratic but also morally coherent. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this work of cultural repair will be done by religious progressives, by a new generation of leaders who will build a modern social gospel around love of neighbor and hospitality for the marginalized.”

I agree with Brooks that America, and the human race, needs and deserves a reason to value liberty, equality, justice, democracy, and differences of opinion. I don’t necessarily agree with his proposed solution of waiting for religious progressives to convince the masses of a modern social gospel. We need a solution now. My proposed solution is for the media to provide broad coverage to the idea that science cannot rule out the possibility that the universe is a single consciousness, the same consciousness that each of us thinks of as “myself”. Once there is near-universal realization that this is a real possibility, all of the moral compunctions required by religion return as the only logical course of action if we are all universally connected. It was aimed at this end that I wrote A Theory Of Everything Including Consciousness and “God” and made the ten-minute video Connectedness.

I am convinced by my own experiences that the truth is we are all parts of the greatest adventure that could ever exist, and we all benefit by win/win thinking and action. This is diametrically opposed to the zeitgeist of the present day. My research finds that this concept of who we are and what the universe truly is, appeals to all factions in the political spectrum. This scientific lens also supports the claims of the great religions, that their founders and saints received knowledge from a higher source, and even explains how “miracles” might have actually happened. This scientific and spiritual picture of reality can be the glue that puts us back together. We don’t have to prematurely accept it as scientifically proven until it is, but we can popularize the notion as a leading possible explanation for the nature of reality. The more this idea is exposed open-mindedly in the media the more likely we are to survive as a species.

Carpe diem!

My best to all,

Live chat with my avatar now.

*Image source: Aubrey, CC BY-SA 1.0 resized <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s Possible

Leave a reply

How Little We Know About the Nature of Reality, and the Technique for Remembering This

Originally posted February 16, 2012 as a recap of the first year of blog posts here at Pebbles in the Pond.

On February 17, 2012, this blog was a year old, with this our 52^nd post. In reviewing what we have attested to over the first 12 months, here’s a recap of some of the possibilities that we put forth — for the benefit of all who want to ply into whatever might be valuable for the greater good.

We have said It’s Possible that:

All religions may in a sense be right. Looked at a certain way, Religion and Quantum Mechanics and our own experience converge on what reality is. The common thread is that the Universe is a single conscious object. If that is the model then all is explainable — the prophets and saints who channeled today’s major religions; the behavior of subatomic wavicles; what John Wheeler’s information-is-substrate physics really means; the tendency for justice to be done in the long run; our own transcendent experiences — love, bliss; the benevolence of the universe, obvious when we are cleansed of the things that bring down our minds. All these phenomena make sense in a Conscious Universe. Nothing is left unexplained. Although the rest of time remains for physics to fill in the blanks, the overarching nature of reality can be intuited long before science knows about how the system is sustained (we might say, how the illusion is projected) at micro-to-macro levels.
All we have to do to tune in our own intuition as a guide to further exploring the nature of reality from the inside, is to stop making believe we know something. The Human Effectiveness Institute is not about issuing dogma. Our basic methodology is to admit that most of what we think we know as individuals is hand-me-down “knowledge” biased by traumatic experiences in our forebears and ourselves, catchphrases from movements that captured us into their statistical meme waves. In other words, very little of what we say to ourselves, and then habitually emotionally and bodily assent to as the truth on which to base decision making, is actually solid knowledge assimilated into wisdom of right action and/or understanding/forgiveness of self and others for missing the right action. How little could be proven in a court of law, or proven to a team of scientists. How many questions are actually being avoided. How many assumptions are made that rationalize subconsciously that we are being sensible to not ponder questions.
Acceleritis™ is the reason we do not ponder, and instead charge on, driven by rationalizing assumptions below the level of our own awareness. Fear of not performing in the accelerating stream of this culture and thus the awful consequences of poverty, unaffordable ill health, rejection/loneliness, an abject sense of zero self-worth, and guilt — all of which makes us keep up the rat race in a way deeper and more dangerous than at the obvious level. The very way we use our minds is different because of the racing culture.
Visible language is possibly what started the acceleration of information per day. Writing brought language into our vision, which is our dominant sense as primates. Until written language just 6000 years ago, for millions of generations our ancestors — just as dependent on our eyes as we are* — communicated by signals and noises, and in thousands of recent generations before writing, had turned these sounds into sophisticated language. But how it blew our minds when we were able to see this sophisticated language. To make an analogy, sex is very important to us. Just like seeing is. What if sex carried language i.e. telepathic words heard automatically from the sex partner during the act. That’s the kind of thing that happened to us 6000 years ago. The admixture of two potent sides of our being — language and seeing. It immediately made our minds race with questions and ideas. These continue to accelerate for each generation to this day, and will be even more accelerated for our grandchildren’s grandchildren.
We need techniques to contend with Acceleritis better than we currently contend with it. Evidence for the “possibility” of our Acceleritis hypothesis abounds so I won’t belabor the point. Failure of governments to be effective, corporations whose left hands and right hands do not even know the existence of each other, individuals living generally way below the level of constant bliss, although it is an inch away all the time. We offer techniques in our book and DVD, and in excerpts in this blog. Steal this book. Share it. We want everybody to have these techniques.
There are measurable levels of being. Our experience can be ennobled by techniques that aid our ascent out of Acceleritis into the Observer State where our minds are clear and courageously self-honest to an absolute degree. And further, into the Flow State (aka the Zone) where everything seems to be doing itself perfectly (and observers agree), because we are no longer living our lives separated from the universe but are experiencing being in that universe and somehow the same with it. The identity issue has faded and it is as if you are the Universe acting naturally without feeling like you have to worry about how it is going to come out. The innocence of “not thinking you know something” is a conducive launching pad. Thinking you know everything and acting rapidly as if always under time pressure is not conducive to Flow.
Democracy was one theme last year in this blog. Working together (Gung Ho!) is obviously very aligned with joining into oneness with the universe. Democracy is a good idea because it reflects the nature of reality — we are all one so it is logical that the One would want to benefit from the collective wisdom of all of its parts — this too is a possibility.
Readers have thanked me for not writing about the media business. Last week someone said to me “What a relief — something I like to read that has nothing to do with the media business — I read enough about the media business!” Yet in the past year there were some thoughts about all business and how they use media. Looking across articles about custom content, clashboards, and building human relationships with customers, the main theme has been breaking out of the “TV commercial” genre into new forms that fit the inventory avails but have more short- and long-term positive effect on the relationship of a brand and its customers. Such as 30-second and other length units that give good advice (e.g. in such product categories as beauty, pet, baby, home, financial, etc.), report good corporate citizenship activities in interesting and personal ways i.e. stories of real people affected, and pure entertainment such as we see once in awhile on Youtube, brought to you by the brand in the same way that the brand would do this for full-length program true sponsorship. Thus having the same Gratitude Effect that lifts sales, trust and loyalty.

Those are the main possibilities we have been chatting about here. As to your technique, we are not suggesting you believe any of these things, just accept them as possibilities to be cautiously tested along with your cautious testing of all other possibilities. We especially suggest that you cautiously re-test all the possibilities you now take for granted that are welded into your life and your instant-by-instant interior life — the guidance system of feelings, images, thoughts, rationalizations, analyses, syntheses, hunches, and so on. which constitutes your inner senate and resolves its turbulent symphonies into your instant-to-instant outer actions.

Now is the time to step away from Business As Usual when you take counsel with yourself. That is our suggested technique for the week. When you realize and remember that you have more choice than you typically exercise, stop what you are doing and check in with why you are doing it. Watch as if from a third-party position the way your mind deals with this and other questions that will then arise. See if you can change the process to one completely different, if only to explore other possibilities. Don’t be stuck in your own usual way of doing things. Live in the moment and the moment is always new, everything starts again now, unencumbered by whatever has gone before, a fresh start, rebirth.

Best to all, and thank you,

Bill

*Information processing in the brain drops significantly when eyes are closed, shifting brainwaves down from high-speed beta to slower alpha.

Follow my regular media blog contribution, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers. Read my latest post.