Group Genie’s upgrades offers people power. If people are not warned, most people, even decent people will invest most of the power in conventional organizations and projects. The problem is that conventional organizations don’t have the ability to address current and future problems. Some reasons are: 1) Most nonprofits and charities are competing for a limited pool of foundation money, donations and volunteer energy; 2) Since they compete, they continually spend more in an escalating PR battle to bombard the public with appeals for money and help; 3) Governments which should add to the public good are corrupted by profit-oriented organizations; and 4) Almost all of these organizations operate only on the bottom one or two rungs of the Ladder of Empowerment:
In other words, without some new paradigm conventional methods are inadequate to address the problems of this century. Even together, they will never be enough.
What I’m trying to get you to understand is this: You must invest most of the power that you get from this program in a greater pattern — in superprograms, in the other upgrades, and their chain reactions of empowerment. That’s because superprograms operate on all four rungs of the Ladder of Empowerment. The greater pattern has the best chance to catch up with and resolve the problems we are facing and the problems to come.
But the natural tendency of almost every reader will be to invest this power into personal projects and worthwhile organizations that they are familiar with. I’m warning you: Don’t do this indiscriminately. You must apply higher standards: supercharity, supergoodness, the Golden Rule 2.0 and other upgrades. Otherwise, there won’t be enough material and intellectual resources to spare for the needy now, nor for the people to come. It’s no exaggeration to say that if you just keep on doing the typical good things, you will be like people grinding up seeds for flour, seeds that should have been planted to produce crops to save many more lives.
In other words, the heartfelt goodness of most decent people is maintaining the ongoing destruction of the world.
That’s an unpleasant and disturbing thought. But an unpleasant reality is what this warning is trying to prevent. It must seem disorienting, but in the case of 95 out of 100 readers, your instinctive sense of the good thing to do, as well as your instinctive estimate of how much effort is enough, is wrong.
Commentary
This warning will probably seem too pessimistic to many readers. But it’s not based on pessimistic assessments like the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity, a 1992 document signed by almost 1,700 senior scientists, or based on sober assessments found in Lester Brown‘s Plan B, or Martin Rees’ 2003 book, Our Final Hour. Instead, it’s based on something you can demonstrate to yourself. If you take time to understand the Two Tables Model and the Golden Rule 2.0, you will get a rough idea of how much action is enough to maintain our vital life-support systems, and if you then take the Ecological Lifestyle Assessment and then think about how most people would score, you will realize that we are decreasing the stability of these life-support systems. Unless we move to a new paradigm, we will keep destabilizing our life-support systems, and eventually significant parts of one or more of these systems will collapse, leading to widespread loss of life, suffering and misery.
In my experience with groups of concerned people who have taken the Ecological Lifestyle Assessment, most were surprised and dismayed when they realized that, despite their efforts, they were still decreasing the stability of our mutual life-support systems. That’s why I estimate that 95 out of a 100 people instinctively misjudge their impact.
The goal of the article is not to cause anxiety or despair, but to get readers to realize that we need to make use of our upgraded methods, as well as any other valid upgrades that can boost humanity’s ability to address our mutual problems. The situation is urgent, but I don’t believe it’s hopeless. In fact, I believe that if a small number of people embrace Group Genie’s methods and approach, and then pass it on to some people around them, then eventually the power of our upgrades will become widely known and many people will then embrace them.