Over the course of many years I spoke to many people about my chain reaction vision and methods. Usually I didn’t get much interest. At first I didn’t understand why people weren’t taking me seriously. When my arguments didn’t make much of an impression, I thought that results would. They did, but only a small one. Too many people had a gut-level doubt that the world could change.
It took me a while to understand why I didn’t have that gut-level doubt. Partly it was because I hadn’t experienced many personal setbacks. When your own life is running all right, it’s easier to be optimistic about the big picture. But I think that I also had a sort of chemist’s way of looking at things. Chemists often test their solutions on a small scale with less than a pint of chemicals. Once they get results there, they’re confident that the desired chemical can usually be made on a large scale. I had done the same thing, but with a learning structure that worked for a small number of people. To me, it was just a matter of setting things up to go on the larger scale. I believed that “raindrops make rivers.”
I think that the thing that killed most of people’s faith in my work, or even the belief that it could work, is a deep gut-level doubt. This doubt is so great that most people wouldn’t even want to listen to my approach. They often dismissed it before taking the time to understand it. The doubt is so immense that I consider it to be like a great flying dragon that has intimidated humanity everywhere around the world. It’s like a dark spell that has been cast over humanity that has made people despair for thousands of years. Here’s the doubt:
“For the world to change significantly, human nature would have to change. People are by nature self-centered; and although they’re sometimes generous, they have desires, fears, and psychological weaknesses that make such a goal impossible to realize. There have always been wars and suffering, so there always will be wars and suffering. Human nature is not going to change.”
I think that most people would agree with that doubt. It seems very reasonable. When I spoke to people, I thought I could see it in their eyes. It’s like the dragon was peeking out from their eyes and saying, “You’ll not make any progress with this person. I have made them confident that the world can’t really change the way you believe.”
There are three things wrong with the “Because there have been wars, there will always be wars” part of the argument.
First, through human history there has always been peace in some parts of the world. So all through history, some people have been able to produce or maintain the conditions needed for peace. They had the skills, values and structures to maintain peace.
This realization makes the dragon no longer seem invulnerable. But it doesn’t destroy the dragon.
Second, the argument is predicting the future based on the past. You can’t know the future based on the past.—Though true, this hardly weakens the dragon at all, at first, since people have no reason to believe the future will be any different.
But an even better argument is to think of humanity as being like a person with low self-esteem. Saying that, “Because there have always been wars, there always will be wars” is very much like a person saying, “Because I have always been a failure, I always will be a failure.” For instance, imagine a guy who has failed to attract women after several years of attempts. From this history, he starts to believe he will always be a failure with women. Once he believes that, that defeatist attitude will keep him from trying. Furthermore, the self-pitying attitude itself will repel most women; so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The same thing is true on the level of humanity. A belief that humanity will always suffer lowers expectations and helps keep in place a self-fulfilling prophecy of endless suffering.
Recognizing that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, however, is not enough. The guy with low self-esteem who can’t attract women has to learn skills and behaviors that will attract women, or that at least won’t repel them. In the same way, members of humanity need to learn skills and behaviors that will make a transformed world possible.
Superprograms are a tool for learning the needed skills and behaviors. In fact, superprograms can accelerate human learning. That’s what can make our future different from our past. Individuals can have more skills and knowledge, and they can make the organizations they belong to more effective. Therefore, if superprograms become widespread, they can raise the self-esteem of humanity. Then humanity won’t be like a person with low self-esteem whose past failures cause a future self-fulfilling prophecy of doom.
Raising the self-esteem of humanity is a huge concept.
The dragon is a planet-sized beast because a little of it is in almost everyone. But this website is dragon poison. Some people have only to read the above for the dragon to have completely lost its power over them. Others must read more of the website, and understand how superprograms streamline and support ongoing change. Still others must actually use the tools and experience some rapid gains before the dragon in them dies.
Here’s another doubt, a sister doubt that’s worth mentioning:
“In the course of human history, spiritual greats like Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed have been born. If together their great wisdom has only had a small impact on humanity, and has only brought the world to the present very imperfect state, how could anyone be born who could diminish suffering a hundred times more? The amount of wisdom and power that would be needed seems utterly inconceivable.”
When you first hear this thought, it makes our doom seem almost inevitable. But there’s actually a way to totally neutralize this doubt. It’s to clarify the distinction between spiritual and nonspiritual problems: Only a tiny percentage of all religious people reject modern medicine. Most devoutly religious people have no problem with taking antibiotics or getting an infected appendix removed. That’s because they see medical problems of the body as being distinct from spiritual problems of the soul.
So, since on a personal level you go to a doctor for medical problems and a minister or guru for spiritual problems, think of the world in the same way: It has medical-like problems in the environment, the economy, politics and the community that can be treated in environmental, economic, political, and local ways. It also has spiritual roots to some of these problems, but these can be treated separately.
If we have both doctors and ministers on an individual level, we should allow for both kinds of healers on the global level. Instead, most people, even many nonreligious people, seem to unconsciously expect or demand that people with global solutions also be spiritual mahatmas, or charismatic leaders. This assumption does twofold damage: It increases people’s pessimism about the future, and it causes people to rule out or even fail to recognize valid approaches. That could be fatal.
In contrast, if we drop the assumption, we will no longer expect or demand that someone be holy or superhuman before they can offer a plan to fix the world. If you go back to the doctor analogy, a surgeon could be arrogant or temperamental, but what counts is whether or not the surgeon has the skills and knowledge to save the patient. Virtue is not important in this case. But as soon as I say that I have to admit that most doctors act “doctorly” and that act almost certainly helps the patient trust the doctor, and helps with the healing process. However, any person who had a child that needed an operation would agree with the above statement — that ultimately it is knowledge and skill, and not the veneer of virtue that is of primary importance.
Let’s apply these ideas to the GroupGenie.Org and to me. The question is: Does the website have the skills and knowledge, in other worlds the strategies and methods, to save the patient, the patient being humanity? I can’t really say yes. But I can say that the methods if used are upgrades over conventional approaches. In other words, the patient has significantly better chances for survival and recovery. Next question: If I have methods that are significant upgrades, do I have to act like Gandhi or Jesus before you take them seriously? If you wouldn’t demand that a surgeon acts virtuously before he or she is allowed to save your child’s life, I don’t think you should demand saintly behavior of me or anyone else who offers upgrades that can save lives. If you did, you would be condemning many people to death, or to continued suffering. Then the dragon wins.
Instead, I hope this article has dealt that particular dragon a lethal blow. Of course most people unconsciously think in the way that aids the dragon. So you must correct them when you can.