Even in Tough Times, Life Is Largely About Acting on the Clues and Not Missing the Cues

A reader writes succinctly, "I've lost my job and I'm not having any luck looking for something else. What would you suggest?

It's been awhile since I've been in your shoes, but I've been there. Fortunately for my family and me, economic realities were much different then. But the feelings my wife and I had when we got down to our last five dollars with a new baby due in two months and no employment were probably not all that different from what you are feeling. I'm so very sorry that this has happened to you and so many others.

However, I realize that such condolences and $5 plus tax will get you a foot-long tuna at Subway, so having written those thoughts, I have decided simply to unleashed my fingers in free association, hoping that they'll finger something in my sub-conscious that will be helpful to you.

Here goes:

Your question is about how to survive in today’s tough new world.

What’s tough about it?

It keeps moving, changing shape, substituting things you don’t know about for things you do.

What DO you know?

You know what you’ve tried and found to not work.

What else can you try?

In the short run opt for anything that seems to work with whatever you can bring it.

And in the long run, look for something that feels right even though you can’t immediately bring it anything much that seems to work.

What if you seem to have run out of time?

Get lean and circle up to protect yourself.

And after that?

Experiment like crazy, looking first for things that are likely to produce resources for you.

And, after that?

See if you can find some allies who know something or someone who can use those resources?

And after that?

Tell the world about you and your resources using the new media. (It’s nearly free, it’s adaptable, it's scalable, and it's often exponential in its multiplier effects!)

And if this doesn’t work?

Get leaner still and do it all over.

And what should you do differently this time?

Learn more about how to use what you learned in the first run-through by searching the heck out of your area(s) of interest on the Web. (“It’s nearly free, it's adaptable, etc., etc., etc.)

And if this doesn’t work?

Make some money any way you can honorably do so.

What do you need to be careful of?

• People who promise they can show you how to make quick and easy money. (They nearly always want to sell you what they claim to know but will eventually ignore you.)

• Committing too much of your limited reserves/resources before you have a good sense of what you are seeking to do, where you need to go, how best to apply what you are learning.

• Not paying attention to what can go wrong ... what seems too good to be true ... what’s changing in the world even as you are seeking to adapt to what’s changing in the world.

• Acting on someone else’s enthusiasm without evaluating why it may be misplaced.

• Acting on your own enthusiasm without evaluating why it may be misplaced. (Sleeping on an idea is usually a great idea.)

What if you simply can’t find a way to do something different and make it work, and you lose everything?

Well, let it go peaceably and don't look back.

Figure out what’s the best thing to do with the few possessions and the relationships you have left to leverage, and start from scratch. You'll know a lot by then about what you are really like at your core.

What if your brain chemicals don't want to cooperate?

Get professional help if it is available and accessible. Talk to people you trust if you can't. Find others like you so the little kid inside you understands that this burden isn't yours alone. And, always, stay active, keep moving, keep trying different things.

What if you end up losing your house, your car, other things that you prized so much when you acquired them?

Think about what happens to people in horrendous disasters—floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires. Yours are probably not the worst of possible circumstances, even yet.

What if your spouse leaves you because you can't find any traction?

If you’ve been open and honest with her/him about what’s happening and have let them be a part of all this and they choose to leave, then you have to ask: Were they the right partner for you to begin with?

What if you have to declare bankruptcy?

Well, get all the good free advise you can about how to do it in a way that offers you every protection of the law.

Meanwhile, just keep moving, keep learning, stay hopeful. Because this too shall pass.

Even in the tough times, or maybe especially in tough times, life is mostly about not missing the cues and about acting on the clues.

Best wishes to you (and to us all)! And, good luck!

Posted by Dudley on February 20, 2009 | Permalink | [785 comments]

The Perturbating Has Been Going On for Some Time. Only Recently Has It Really Gotten Our Attention.

Longtime colleague and friend Ann Farris of San Francisco writes to remind me of an observation that Paul Kordis and I made back in the late 1980s in our book, Strategy of the Dolphin. The comment was called to her attention by her investment manager, who had received a gift copy of the work from her.

The observation we made is this:

“The current chaos and turmoil that our organizations and we, ourselves, as individuals confront may just be the cultural mind’s way of perturbating itself."

Her financial counselor suggested, "I guess this is what is happening now!"

Oh, yeah. In spades!

Posted by Dudley on January 28, 2009 | Permalink | [824 comments]

Why Barack Obama's Thinking Seems A Bit Peculiar: The Next American President's Way of Seeing the World Really Is a New Twist on Things.

Prior to moving to Gainesville, Florida, last summer, my family and I lived for 13 years in a northern suburb of Dallas, Texas. Plano, the place is called. This gave us a ringside seat to the rise of a political phenomenon some have nicknamed Dubya. No part of America, save for the ultra-wealthy "Park Cities" of Dallas County, put more dollars in the early campaign coffers of George W. Bush than the occupants of the McMansions and corporate towers of Plano.

So while many Americans seemed to have been caught unwares, we political junkies at ground zero in Texas pretty much knew what this country was getting as its 43rd President. During the campaign of 2000, I wrote several op-ed pieces arguing that Dubya was the real McCoy: a rather reckless Texas oilman with a cowboy's quick-trigger mien and a Lonesome Dove worldview.

And so it has come to pass.

This time, I'm watching the meteoric rise of young Barack Obama from a serene, university-professor-filled neighborhood in Alachua County, Florida. No oil, no cowboys, no eccentric Gus McCrae in sight. But one more time, I think I have a pretty firm grasp on what we are getting in the man we've just elected President. This is because those of us in my line of work have sensed for some time that something new was stirring in how people (or at least some people) think.

For a living, I track—and interpret—aspects of personality. Thinking skills. Ways of valuing things. How people see the world, and the kinds of world they wish to see. And the "smart is cool" package of rich nuances and capabilities visible in Mr. Obama's personality and skill set is a combination we "thinkologists" have been watching develop as a recognizable category in people for at least three decades now.

So to us, the surprise is not in how Barack Obama thinks. But that someone commanding his audacious combination of personal thinking qualities has surfaced this soon as President of the United States. Just as Mrs. Bush was amazed that it was son George instead of son Jeb who first ended up sitting there in the Oval Office, we can all be amazed that someone with Barack Obama's cutting-edge thinking skills has already achieved a similar triumph.

Looking ahead, what else can we expect of what is arguably a new kind of mind, as Presidential minds go, soon to be sitting in the driver's seat of the U.S. of A.?

Our next President already has us buzzing over his WD-40 approach to multi-tasking—juggling multiple activities at the same time. His amenable porousness to a wide variety of views. And his constant, confident "hope-timism" that we can find good results if we'll just make good choices and stay the course.

I think we can expect to see—quite often—a high tolerance for complexity and sorting through conflicting evidence to find the right stuff. People who think like Mr. Obama, our studies are showing, seem like they have been inoculated against being spooked by ambiguity, paradox and the unexpected like the rest of us have been inoculated against tetanus or the flu.

Anyone who wins the Presidency has to have an outrageous ego. But we are seeing in Mr. Obama that there are egos and then there are egos. Our next President seems to shrug off challenges to his ego as if the main thing that matters to him is what he can do to help you keep your ego intact.

As he is already counseling us on the economy, we can expect our next President to remind us more than once that frustration often precedes breakthrough. And that a lot of people who win don't deserve it, and many who lose didn't have it coming. He may even quote writer Dennis Wholey: "Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian."

Observing him like most of us will be observing him—from a distance—it appears to me that Barack Obama has come to terms with the reality that he isn't like everyone else. In fact, he isn't really like very many others at all. I think that he senses that he is prefiguring a new kind of thinking elite.

Elites aren't rare, of course. Human nature is a natural builder of hierarchies. But the elite to which Mr. Obama belongs seems to be tilted in the direction of high ethical and meaningful performance rather than winner-take-all wealth, status or control.

All this may sound too good to be true. We'll know a lot more in four years. But for now, for those of us who have spent our professional careers studying potential new human thinking capabilities, Mr. Obama is one of our most fascinating "lab specimens" thus far. Because it looks like the exceptional "do more with more" way his brain is wired is the real deal. And a real breakthrough in leadership circles at the highest level.*
___
*Some of my readers may realize that they have read some of the descriptive passages above in my book, The Mother of All Minds: Leaping Free of an Outdated Human Nature.

Posted by Dudley on January 17, 2009 | Permalink |

In Times Like These, It's Critically Important that We Don’t Leave the Universe Empty-handed. One of Its Rules is that Nothingness Begets Nothingness

One puzzle has confronted wise people almost from the very first philosophical discussion: Why is there something rather than nothing?

In other words, how has so much complexity managed to appear in the world? Complex things like people, for example. You’d think that with the world like it is, chaos would always triumph over order, old stuff would always smother new stuff, complexity would always lose out to ponderous stupidity and inertia.

But it doesn’t. And therein lies the reason, mysterious as its workings are, why the best thing we can do for ourselves in almost every instance is simply to try something. Send up an idea. Initiate a movement. And see how the world reacts.

Or as I’ve pictured it in my mind a couple of hundred times, throw the life ring out in front of you and swim to it.

Amazing as it is, when you offer the world something, as often as not, it takes it and runs with it. In your behalf and to your advantage.

Early in my career as a writer and thinker, I decided to be what people in the media still call a free lance. No job, no salary, no safety net. Just you, the marketplace and a world teaming with things to be discovered, explained, portrayed.

As a young journalist in the 1970s, my family and I wanted to live in Texas. The challenge was that the big media centers were in New York and Illinois. So, throwing the life ring out in front of things, I got on an airplane. I flew to Manhattan and Chicago and made cold calls all over town. And came home with a brief case full of assignments and new relationships with editors who purchased my work for years afterwards.

That's happened to me again and again. It's always best to offer the world something in place of nothing.

When things are as dicey and uncertain as they are today, it is understandable to think that this may not be possible. You may think that there are simply no resources, no energy, no opportunity available to you. And that may, in fact, be true. But to allow yourself to assume this, you are cutting yourself off from this mysterious force available in the world that has since the beginning of things, excelled at taking something and making it into something more.

The universe really can't make something for you if you haven’t offered it anything.

Make the offer, though, and it can be a wonder to behold. It may be just the smallest toehold. And then there may be a little movement here. Or a door you hadn’t noticed before opening there. An ally appearing unexpectedly. An opportunity that exists only because you offered up a reason for it to materialize.

I can’t guarantee a good outcome. There will be failures and forays that don’t produce so much as a flutter of progress or possibility.

But I can personally attest to this: There is more often something rather than nothing when you offer the universe something to work with. Offer it an idea, an opening, a movement, a plan, a design, a surprise, all matched by a good faith effort and the kind of sensible judgment that pays attention to what’s happening, learns quickly from its mistakes and seizes its opportunities.

These are tough times. It’s important that you and I not let the times leave us with nothing. The way forward is to think as diligently as we ever have about what we can give the universe to work with in our behalf. We always need to be scheming to give it something.

Posted by Dudley on November 25, 2008 | Permalink |

This Yo!Dolphin! Client Says She Has Hit a Brick Wall And Wants Answers That Cut to the Chase

From a Yo!Dolphin! Worldview Survey client in the U.K.: “I have trawled through some of the pages on my worldview survey and was pleased to know I am on the right track. However, I am struggling so much with my life that I desperately need more than just uplifting words. Are you in the businesses of helping someone who has imagination, a big creative spirit and lots of energy but has come upon a massive brick wall? Any feedback would be gratefully received.”—Stymied Sojourner

Dear Stymied Sojourner:

There’s a lot more to your Yo!Dolphin! report than uplifting words. There are pointed, plain-spoken suggestions for doing something different in your report, too. A lot of suggestions. So keep reading.

And here are other observations I often offer to people who feel that their nose has just run smack into an immovable force:

1) Avoid being alone. In most cases, being with others brings its own kind of healing. Choose your companions with care, putting companions who care about you at the top of the list. But you don’t have to bare your soul and your troubles to everyone around you. Simply being with others even in a casual setting can help push back the night.

2) Keep things simple, at least for now. Don’t try to fix everything at once. And don’t spend a lot of time trying to forecast the future. Brick-wall times in our lives are when things come apart. Our first instinct is to attempt to mend them, using what we know, what we have left, what we are comfortable with. What we try may work immediately, but often it doesn’t. Right now, think survival, not perfection. Think one step at a time, not the whole race.

3) Assign a small part of yourself—that is, your conscious, rational, thinking being—to monitor what is being felt as opposed to what is being thought out. So much of what we think we think isn’t thought out at all. This is “felt” information that comes to us from deep in our brain. The “felt” stuff causes us to believe we know all kinds of stuff, even when we are staring at evidence that what we are sure we know is dead wrong! It is entirely possible that the need to challenge some of your “felt” knowledge is a major cause of your brick-wall feelings. Write down your suspicions about feelings that aren’t right, aren’t true, aren’t helpful.

4) Take care of yourself from the bottom of the food chain up. That is, look after your Carp nature first, then your Shark nature, and only then your Dolphin natures. If any of these personas of yours feels (there’s those feelings again!) threatened, it will sabotage realities for the personas those “higher up.” Your Carp nature needs stability, family, security, the day-to-day stuff. Be sure it has it. Your Shark nature needs to feel some autonomy, some input into decision-making, a chance to win. Look for ways it can do so. Your higher Dolphin natures need you to heal, once and for all. And stay out of the shark pool. And grow more comfortable with changes in your life and world. But remember: ironically, a bold Dophin first requires a bold Shark and a bold Carp, all in the same brain/mind: yours!

5) Do things. Really do them. In the early stages of dolphin-hood, there is an Achilles heel quality to our thinking. As our brain/mind rushes to embrace an expanded new sense of enlightenment and empowerment, it fools us into thinking that all we need to do to make something true and real is to imagine that it is so. And that can be so very, very destructive. So misleading. So wasteful. So untrue. So personally dangerous. The world is mysterious, yes. The world is amazing, yes. But the world is still the world, and it has its ways and its rules, its priorities and its requirements. You will ignore them to your peril. If you want to walk on fire, you better be dead-sure that you first take the laws of physics into account.

6) Be careful of your gurus. Your personal coaches. Your therapists. Can they be useful? You bet. Can they also hurt you? They can. Use the caveat emptor rule of consumerism: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If your potential professional helper doesn’t appear to be walking the talk, she or he probably can’t help you do it either. So choose with care. Let the Dolphin part of your brain/mind make the choice by asking to see the evidence that the coach, therapist, clergyperson or whomever you are considering as a guide and sounding board seems … well, the best word I can think of is “competent.” People who are going to help you get your act together should pretty much have theirs together.

7) Understand that brick-wall times usually pass quickly, so we need to put them to good use. When you feel that your world has come apart, accept that it probably has. Who you are has once again become an open question. There will be no better time to ask yourself, “Is who I have been who I really want to be?” “Is who I have been who I was aiming to be?” “Is who I have been who I am really intended to be?” At first, such questions can seem impervious to answers. But they’ll come if you keep asking. And if it seems overpowering, remember that all you are doing is asking. You aren’t committing. Not yet. And if you choose not to, not ever. So don’t accept the fear. Embrace the spirit of the inquiry and see where it can lead.

8) You described yourself as “someone who has imagination, a big creative spirit and lots of energy.” Wow! That’s a lot of expectation to lay on a wounded, frightened soul. Let me suggest this: Be content for a while (for how long is your call) at being someone who doesn’t require that her imagination be on duty 24/7. Give it a break. Just be in the moment (I know that as a First Dolphin worldview user you know how to do this!). Forget changing the world, as big creative spirits are always see themselves doing. Find little things you can change now. Changes that can be useful to you. Changes that will bring you some stability, some solace, some leverage. And turn down the energy level. For the moment, run low-key, low voltage. Feel what it is like to let the universe run itself. Then, over time, ramp back up in all these areas to a point where it helps you feel confident, on purpose, ready to resume the journey at the pace and toward the goals you were created to pursue.

So what’s the first thing I’d suggest you do: Go eat. Not at home. Go out. Nourish yourself with good food, competently prepared. If you can find someone to share it with, do. If you can’t, then enjoy yourself as your own company. Be sure to do it in an exciting location. Why? Simply to remind yourself that there’s an amazing world out there. And that you are an amazing part of it. It is a world that never ceases to change. Hitting brick walls is merely a remainder that the world is moving on and that we don’t want to be left behind.

All best wishes to you!

Posted by Dudley on October 07, 2008 | Permalink |

Comedians, Fools, and News Anchors

On Wednesday the 10th of this month Norman Solomon wrote an article for Truthout.org entitled, “The Sickening Praise for The Daily Show.” In it he suggests that the media’s overwhelming praise for Jon Stewart’s “A Daily Show” might really be a tacit form of convoluted self-loathing. He points out that while most journalists consume themselves with examining the emperor’s embroidery Mr. Stewart blatantly goes after the big and relevant issues of the day, speaking naked truth to powers that would otherwise be clothed in lies.

In a nation where, in truth, mainstream media neither swings right nor left but rather has no substance at all, how does the Daily Show get away with reporting the real news?

Because it’s a comedy show!

In the past you could tell the horrid truth that everyone knew but no one wanted to utter, and if you did it with a “wink, wink, nudge, nudge, witty tongue-in-cheek,” you could become a famous playwright (Google "Shakespeare"). You could sing a little song, do a little dance, tell the truth and put seltzer down your pants. Why? Because comedy frequently provides a rather impervious armor for truth.

Consider the fools of the medieval court. They could hurl insults, laugh out loud at the preposterous, bring greed and ignorance into the light of day, poke fun at the nobility, break with convention, speak for the poor, and do a little tumbling all in a day’s work. All you had to do was claim to be stupid and wear a funny hat with bells.

Today you can still insult a president of the United States through an act of comedic mimicry and maybe even get a lucrative advertising contract (Google "Frank Caliendo"). And if you report the real news beneath a thin veil of joshin’ and jivin’ then you just might have the best comedy show of the season.

But addressing the important issues with straightforward and unbiased investigation on prime time; forget it! Only recently during the many-pronged bailout debacle has the news taken a breather to report a few facts about some really important issues. But for the most part I suspect that the media will soon slip back into its bog of pablum with barely an air bubble to show that it had surfaced.

Therefore, since we apparently have a postmodern mediascape where real news has been consigned to the dustbin, where conglomerates control the dispersal of public information and salivate at any opportunity to pull independent sources into the fold, where real journalists have been shackled to a news machine that serves up cold oatmeal with no milk or sugar, where the Fourth Estate is now a business unit that fills the airwaves with Lindsay and Michael and Brittney and Rush, perhaps the best we can do is to designate all news as comedy and insist that all news reporters wear a hat festooned with bells.

Maybe then we could get the real news.

Posted by Paul on September 22, 2008 | Permalink |

Which Will Come First in the Presidential/Veep Debates, the Chicken or the Egg? Answer: The Lemon Juice

With the formal debates between the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates about to begin, what better time to revisit Justin Kruger and David Dunning’s 1999 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, “Unskilled and Unaware of It”?

These Cornell University psychologists asked a group of undergraduates to take a battery of tests, including one to assess their skills of logical reasoning. What the researchers confirmed are probably among the most important findings in the history of the study of the mind.

What they found was that:

• The more incompetent people are, the more confidence they have in their own competence.
• The more incompetent people are, the less competence they have in recognizing competence in others.
• Even very competent people tend to overestimate the competence of others.

Neurologist Robert Burton makes the Kruger-Dunning article the centerpiece of an article in Salon.com warning that the upcoming debates are going to tell us next to nothing about what we really need and deserve to know about the candidates for the nation’s highest offices.

Even though it will likely never happen in a Presidential debate, here is what Burton would like to see happen:

• How the candidates respond when they are stumped. In his words, are they evasive, flustered or straightforward in admitting what they don't know or understand?
• How they each would respond when shown evidence that they are wrong. Burton wonders, “Is he or she capable of admitting to having made an error? Would he or she be flexible enough to change an opinion?”
• How adroit is each candidate’s intellectual grasp of scientific method when it comes to answering “difficult, complex questions about aspects of science such as global warming, stem-cell research or alternative energy sources for which they may not have adequate knowledge”?
• How does each candidate explain “faith-based” beliefs that he or she continues to hold that are in conflict with traditional reasoning and scientific method?

Burton says that knowing about such qualities of mind are critical in deciding which leaders are most capable of making the best decisions in bad times.

Americans’ experience with their current President is much on Burton’s mind as he reflects on the issue of how leaders adjudge their own levels of competence and the competence of others.

He writes, “Many of the failures of post-9/11 American policy were caused by or aggravated by the inability of our president to recognize his intellectual limitations (including his choice of advisors), keep an open mind, evaluate evidence such as the presence or absence of weapons of mass destruction, and listen to all sides of a complex issue. Perhaps this could have been avoided if Bush had been forced to publicly answer serious multifaceted questions prior to the election.”

Kruger and Dunning wrote about a person who held up two Pittsburgh banks in 1995 in broad daylight with no effort to disguise himself. He was quickly arrested after the surveillance tapes were shown on the 11 o’clock news. When the robber saw the tapes, he was incredulous. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled. He had been under the impression that if he smeared lemon juice on his face, he would be invisible to the cameras.

We have had a President for the past eight years who appears to be a strong believer in a version of “the lemon juice effect.”

Because the upcoming debates will be conducted the way these debates are usually conducted—in controlled conditions that have been rehearsed to a fare-thee-well—we can have little confidence that we won’t get another President with the same susceptibilities.

Because whatever happens in these debates, we won’t be able to take a very good measure of the candidates’ thinking abilities when they must confront complex situations for which they don’t know the answers.

But then would it really matter if we all did get a genuine look at the candidates’ competency level at handling the kinds of issues that Presidents of the United States must handle. Dr. Burton isn’t sanguine. That’s because we nearly all will bring such strong feelings about the candidates to the debates. Again and again, Dr. Burton points out, feelings trump reason. (That is, "felt knowledge" triumphs "reasoned knowledge."). Because of the way our minds work, we all tend to rub lemon juice on our candidate’s face.

It is not a situation calculated to build confidence in our ability to select as President the person best equipped to keep lemon juice—and egg—off the nation’s face.

For Justin Kruger and David Dunning’s article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, go here: Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
For Robert Burton’s article in Salon.com, go here: My candidate, myself

Posted by Dudley on September 22, 2008 | Permalink |

The Only Real Mystery in the American Presidential Campaign Is Who’s Going to Win. Otherwise, the Whole Campaign Makes for a Great Fish Story

In the tumultuous wake of the GOP Convention in America and the startling veep candidate selection that could put the likes of Alaska’s No. 1 hockey mom within one aging heartbeat of the so-called “most powerful job in the world,” we’ve had more than one of our readers remark among the lines of this Colorado non-hockey-mom: “I honestly can't still understand how they [the Republicans] get away with so much. I think I spent most of the night [watching Gov. Palin speak and the run-up activities] just shaking my head at the bravado and BS.”

But then, as we reminded this concerned Colorado mother and community organizer, who was an Obama supporter at the Democratic convention, she really shouldn’t have been surprised at either the behaviors or content of the GOP Convention (or the Democratic Convention either, for that matter) or a lot of the other developments in this showcase of political marathons. Much of the story line is actually as predictable as hurricanes in warm summer waters.

That's because one of the most real things in the world is the way nature works. And people are part of nature. And people’s beliefs are a part of nature. And people’s beliefs, especially in the aggregate, are hugely more predicable than most people believe.

In terms of the Yo!Dolphin! Worldview Survey™ model, which we at Brain Technologies believe to have few peers in its ability to explain “the inner ecology” of people, the dynamics driving the Republican Party and the McCain campaign’s strategy can be explained quite simply as shark belief users skillfully manipulating Carp belief users.

In an as yet unreleased book, my colleague, Paul Kordis, and I have prepared extensive descriptions of the American Carp belief structure’s internal dialogue—the one that the user of this worldview turns to, moment by moment, day in and day out, to explain the world to her/himself. Here’s some of that self-referential inner American Carp dialogue from our unpublished work:

“I don’t go in for a lot of highfalutin talk about airy-fairy social causes or the like. I simply do my share to eradicate the obvious evils that are plaguing our families, our jobs, our schools and our neighborhoods.

“I am against abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex, atheism, high-and-mighty science and the separation of church and state.

“I think our religious values should be taught in school and kids should be made to behave accordingly. I think that criminals should be afraid of the law and that harsh punishment is the only deterrent to crime.

“I’m not afraid of laws that invade people’s privacy because I have nothing to hide and these laws keep me safe from people who do. I think sex offenders are the worst people in the world and that more people than you could imagine worship Satan in secret and that these people all too often infiltrate every level of the secular world to spread their poison. The media is especially in the hands of bleeding liberals and hardened atheists. The minds of our children are being turned against us and it is our responsibility to do what it takes to keep them in line and on the right path, even if we have to administer harsh punishment.

“I also believe that the poor and the outcast have become so because of their impurity, non-belief and unrighteousness. Their sin has driven them from the creator and their earthly pain is the result, plain and simple. Therefore, those who have achieved authority, power and success are examples of the divine favor due to those who have kept the word of the prophets and followed the path outlines in our holy texts. They are just in their judgment of others, as am I. We are the righteous and the pious and have every right to incriminate against the sinner. We all have our place in creation; we should follow the commands of those above us and those beneath us should likewise follow our direction and moral authority.

“In the same sense my country is favored by the Almighty and is fated to reign supreme among the other nations. Our wars are pure and right, our forms of government and economic activity are by far the best in the world. We have discovered the true path in all things and other nations must be made to be like us if they are to avoid our wrath and the just punishment for their transgressions. There are many enemies in the world who hate us and envy our righteousness, our freedom and our possessions. But our leaders will crush them and our military power, therefore, must be unequaled. There are also many among us who would destroy us from within. Therefore, our national and local authorities will root them out and punish them and thwart them from their evil plans. And if this means that we must give up some of our liberties then the price is worth it. Our security is more important than our freedom and our obedience is more important than our dissent.

“Evil will continue to threaten our faith and our existence until the Almighty reappears, along with the holy prophets and the departed faithful, and takes the throne of this world, destroying the parasites among us and establishing the kingdom of righteousness on earth. Until that time our war against evil is perpetual and is our destiny and our responsibility. We cannot relent and we cannot compromise but must stand firm in our might and our principles, among which are our faith not only in spiritual matters but in governmental and economic matters as well.

“I don’t know a lot about the big dealings going on with money. I just know that we have a right to prosperity because it is our due as a loyal, hard working and law-abiding people. Besides, this country should be built on trade, on people buying things from each other and making the nation strong and prosperous. The most worthy are the most successful, and I aim to be one of those people some day, so it doesn’t hurt if I buy myself and my family a few things now and then. We deserve a piece of the good life this country has to offer and if I have to borrow a few dollars I know that I can trust those who lend money to me to handle all of the details. I pay my bills and I know that providence will provide if I live a good life.

“If we choose people in authority who support our beliefs and values then it will benefit us all and makes all of us prosperous. Those are well off buy the things that the rest of us provide and eventually we all benefit. Without them, we wouldn’t have jobs or the other good things in life. Therefore, we should praise their success and do what we can to contribute to it. Prosperity flows from our way of life to everyone’s benefit and must not be hindered. The only people who really suffer are the leaches who don’t want to take personal responsibility.

“In the same sense our environment is given to us to use as we wish to establish our dominion over it and to mine its riches as the reward for our virtue and our obedience. Creation is abundant and we cannot begin to take away from what has been provided for us. But, if the unrighteous and unbelievers possess lands and resources that are valuable to us then it is our duty to use them for our own purposes, for the sake of our government, our economy and our faith.”

You can feel the fear and resentment of the Carp worldview user throughout this description, and it is the American Carp worldview user’s fear and resentment that the American Shark worldview users are so skillfully manipulating—again!—in the 2008 American Presidential election.

What’s the antidote for those who seek a saner, more factually based, more humane and more hopeful, more competent and most complex America?

The political strategists on both sides of the great voter divide have it right. The battle is one of the diehard Carp and Shark worldview users versus all the rest. Can enough votes from gradually awakening Carp users and disaffected and concerned Shark users be combined with the First Dolphin, Prime Dolphin and Deep See-Change Dolphin worldview users' votes to win the day on November 5 in the quest for control of the American Electoral College?

This time around, our prognosticative skills are no better than anyone else’s. Our prediction is either Obama or McCain by a hair. It makes for fascinating political theater. If only the outcome were not so important, for America and the remainder of the world.

Posted by Dudley on September 06, 2008 | Permalink |