Tag Archives: Mission

What Do You Really Want?

Powerful Mind Part 27
Created September 8, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Read Powerful Mind 26

Strangely this is not something we normally think about. The subject usually rises to our conscious mind only at times of great shock, typically the loss of a loved one, a job, or something else we greatly value. At other times most of us appear to assume that all of that has been decided already, we are “obviously” doing what we want to do with our lives, and so we just go along day to day doing our best, mostly guessing or following the path of least resistance in order to not make things any worse.

The species or at least the intelligentsia has finally admitted that homo sapiens are not rational actors, hence the science of behavioral economics. P.T. Barnum could have told us that a hundred years ago. However, some of us may be more rational than others, and for a rational person, it makes the most sense to stop life for a moment or longer while seriously considering what the real you really wants. How else can a rational person guide his or her decisions on a moment to moment basis?

As soon as one sets to making an objective fact-finding study of oneself, one finds that there are a great number of things that come up as probable wants, including both material and immaterial things. Page 95 of Mind Magic lists these, for example: “You may want money, specific possessions, status, fame, glory, power, accomplishment, respect, a large family, many lovers, to be loved, to be known, to be happy, health, long life, adventure, travel, certain feelings, certain experiences, etc.”

A more abstract list appears in my work on human motivations through Next Century Media, which discovered 265 psychological variables driving television program choice, and RMT (Research MeasurementsTechnologies), which distilled these into 15 life motivations. In Canada where RMT is already integrated with Vividata (“The MRI of Canada”), here is the latest snapshot of how these 15 variables rank across the population of Canada:

Motivational States by Ethnicity-vividata

As you can see, wealth/success is the main driver for most Canadians, but there are differences in motivation ranking by different ethnic subcultures in Canada. Culture is definitely a factor in shaping our individual motivations. However, as this book Powerful Mind being serialized here has often pointed out, we as individuals are much better off to be able to discover what we ourselves deep down really want, and to not automatically go along with all of the ways we have been shaped by outside forces. It’s much better to contemplate our lives to the degree that we can be the ones to decide what we truly want out of life. Aristotle wrote that the un-contemplated life is not worth living. I would say that slightly differently: one is not living the fullest life possible if one is swept along by external forces from beginning to end.

Life situations also affect our motivations. For example, note how important the motivation of “belonging” is to people who recently moved out of their parents’ home, and how important “security” is to people who recently retired. (These measurements are not based on survey questions asking people what motivates them; it is based on what television programs they report watching, and the method has been validated by five independent studies.)

Motivational States by Life Events - vividata

If we look across all of the cultures in our hisandherstory (aka “history”), we see that in many of them, great value was placed on self-transcendence (altruism) e.g. the Zhou Dynasty, self-knowledge e.g. Greece in Socrates’ time, creativity e.g. the Renaissance. When we look at our current culture, the situation is quite different. In the cancel culture of today, idealism in any form is something that causes people to “cringe”. Cynicism and snide remarks are the safe harbor for conversations. Science in recent centuries has assumed that the universe is an accident, therefore the culture does not believe that there is meaning and purpose in life, nor is idealism defensible in objective terms. Authoritarians rise to power by promising to remove all of the causes of fear, similar to the protection racket. In our culture therefore it is less likely that you have chosen to want idealistic things, or if you have, it is because you are exceptional.

Wanting the Approval of Others

One of our most ignoble wants is the approval of others. Hence the high ranking of “belonging” among the 15 motivations. In order to “fit in”, one generally is expected to share the same values, pastimes, and sayings of the group. After a while, individuals forget that they are wearing a mask and start to believe that the mask is really them.

Make a study of yourself. Take your time. Write down notes as the spirit moves you. What do you think you really want most out of life today? Was it always that way? What was your dream when you were very young as to what you would do with your life? Did it change? Why did it change?

Assume that in your own case, there was the “Me That Was Born”, who you really were, before the culture and other people started to shape you. Using all of the access to memories which you still have, what did that person want out of life, and where were the change points along the route to now?

If you look at the list of wants and motivations above you may see that you have always wanted all of these things to some degree but today there may be only a couple of them that really energize you. You may see how running after some of the other things took you off into directions you didn’t enjoy and have now processed past those wants. Or, you may find that nothing seems to matter anymore, it’s all falling short, you need something more, but have no idea what it is.

One clue is to think back about the things that you’ve been good at, and that you enjoyed doing. Those are your gifts to the world. Your Mission is to do those enjoyable things that you do so well so as to make as many people and other living things as happy as possible. If you follow that star it will take you to the Flow state.

My best to all,

Imagine Living Your Dream from This Day Forward

What if the Mission of the USA Is to Demonstrate Democracy?

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Originally posted June 11, 2011

In the previous blog post we asked the question, “What are we here for?” “We” in this case being the United States of America. (Of course, asking this question of oneself, “What am I personally here for?”, is one of the highest uses of the mind, and we recommend it as a meditation — but that is a subject for another posting.)

We didn’t propose any answer to that question and instead invited readers to ponder it for themselves and come up with their idea of what the Mission of the USA is — or should be.

In the post before that, we offered a starting list of 14 things that all people should be able to expect of their government, implicit in the evolved social contract between and among individuals and the nation to which they pay taxes. Making the tacit explicit is always a good idea in any kind of contract or simple oral agreement — being explicit about what otherwise would be hidden assumptions prevents bad feelings (or worse) from happening later on.

On that list of 14 items, one of them is “Democracy (sharing control)”. In that posting I suggested that some of the items on the list could be combined with other items, so the eventual list would probably be shorter. Now let’s consider for a moment that Democracy could be the linchpin, or cause, around which all the other items on the list exist as effects.

Why postulate that Democracy could achieve so much — clean air, fair prices, and all of the other 14 things on the list? Because if people are effectively sharing control, in the end they will do what is best for the people, to the extent that they can figure out what works and what doesn’t — even if only by trial and error.

Not everyone believes this. To those who believe in Aristocracy or even Meritocracy, Democracy is tantamount to mob rule, and can go in any direction right or wrong; like putting one’s life in the hands of fools.

Plato in his Republic described pure Democracy being able to work in a polis (city) of 1000 well-informed and well-educated citizens. Most philosophers since have interpreted Plato to mean that Democracy would break down in larger numbers of people, and perhaps Plato did mean that. However, Plato did not have the Internet. Perhaps with TV, radio, print, outdoor, the Internet, Mobile, Social Media used in the right way together, the citizenry could be educated, kept well-informed, and their brain power tapped and aggregated quickly — resulting in working Democracy across hundreds of millions of people.

Or perhaps the polis idea still holds, and people should self-rule within small pieces of geography, and then those geographies vote. In principle, this is not so far from the USA plan — if citizens had stayed involved in politics in their communities, which very few of us have done. Possibly the messes we now see would not have gone so far out of control had we not abdicated the right to stay involved politically within our local areas.

Can there be a realistic process to bring ourselves back to the ideals on which our country was founded?

To be realistic, such a Renaissance Project would need to involve the private and voluntary sectors as well as the public sector — and would probably need to be driven by the private sector, as it appears to be the least poorly functioning of the three sectors, especially when the profit motive is tempered by the will to do good for all.

If we think novelistically about a plausible scenario, the first vision that pops to mind is an Internet company launching a fun, social, massively multiplayer realtime gamelike site, that quickly and virally attracts a huge loyal audience, in which the main game is to “Sim” (in the sense of the successful videogame series) running the world as it exists today.

If designed with social awareness, it throws off huge profits from advertising while tithing 10% of gross revenues to philanthropy, the money allocated according to the Democratic process — the vote of the site’s audience.

If the site also attracts audiences outside the U.S., even in countries that are not anything like Democracies, so much the better.

Do we citizens of the United States still believe in Democracy as intensely as Jefferson and all of the Founding Fathers did? The Founders enshrined the “consent of the governed” in the Declaration of Independence. Hobbes, Rousseau and John Locke had “invented” the ideas of social contract (consent of the governed) in the 1600s–1700s, and Rousseau’s 1762 treatise came only 14 years before the American Revolution. Locke’s term “natural rights” was invoked in the framework for our country, as no country before it or since.

If the mission of the USA is to demonstrate Democracy, then let’s make it the inspiring core of a new energy in this country. Some specifics on how we might do that — ideas worth testing perhaps — in upcoming blog postings here.

Best to all,

Bill

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

What is the True Mission of the U.S.A.?

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Originally posted June 3, 2011

What is it that we are striving to achieve as a nation, our Purpose on Earth?

What did Tom Paine expect of us, or George Washington?

If we do not know our purpose then no matter what good we may achieve on the face of the Earth, we will be rudderless inside. We won’t know where we’re going or how we want to get there. We will be guided by the plan du jour. Any good we do will be random, grasping at straws of tactical opportunity to head toward the seeming good at that moment – and we have seen how repeatedly in history who or what at first seems good turns out to be not as good as we thought.

What is worse, during a period when we have forgotten our purpose, the nation will be contributing little to the spiritual nourishment of its citizens. Yes, I said spiritual – a nation owes it to its citizens to create an environment where the citizenry finds it easy to slip into feelings greater than their individual selves, and can act on and become those feelings through and through. In the previous post I referred to that perhaps too vaguely as the “Facilitation of individual development” – I probably should have specified physical, intellectual, intuitional, emotional, perceptual, and spiritual development.

Despite separation of Church and State, and widely ranging opinions as to the spiritual details of the Founding Fathers’ notions of the nature of reality, no one can deny the spiritual resonance of the words that led to our nation’s birth.

Are these not spiritual words: Liberty, Equality, Justice. They evoke a state – albeit typically all too brief – where our emotional being is swept up into something larger than our personal self. In the current hyper culture this brief flash of inspiration might go by too fast for consciousness to notice it.

Those words used by the Founders are spiritual words. Words that refer to, and evoke, states of spiritual sensitivity – openness to the duty we owe others, owe the Universe, owe in fact to God, whatever you conceive Him to be. Ideals that many humans envy but consider pragmatically irrelevant in their actual moment-to-moment dog-eat-dog lives here in the hypersphere*.

Regardless of the efficacy of those words then or at times like WWII or today, even when a nation fails to nurture spiritual ideals as part of its heritage, in our moment to moment existence on Earth we must consider the measurable value of being a nation focused on spiritual ideals.

If we could be that inspired nation again – or if we are still that nation right now but not taking enough notice of it – then one way or another it is time to tap into that tide of human positive emotion that can energize creative thought and enable right action.

So let’s consider again – what is our true mission as a nation?

In the absence of creative thought and in the heat of trepidatious events, piling up one after the other without respite over decades, the country has accepted its present mantle of world cop – protecting the weak from aggressors.

What if that isn’t the main point of our existence?

It would be terrible to have accepted the role of world’s cop, and then fifty or a few hundred years later when the world has become a rational and emotionally positive society, a cop is no longer needed. Or the role that had been cop in mean times is ever sinking down to a kind of nudnik level, solicitously protecting people from themselves in pestering ways. America, the world’s nudnik?

We have the opportunity now to choose our own destiny. Let’s as a nation agree on what it is. And let’s start the dialogue, here and now. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

Best to all, Bill

*Not in the sense of spheres in four or more dimensions, but in the sense of the Earth in Acceleritis™.