The room went quiet and I inwardly smiled.  I have never been that brutally honest about myself even though I have spent the last ten or fifteen years examining my preference/prejudices as they arise in the midst of my interactions with others. 

I have all kinds of preferences.  Preferences regarding weight, height and width of people.  Some preferences about hair styles.  May opinions cause me to look sideways about some clothes.  I have prejudices about cars.  My ears have difficulty with some accents and dialects.  You name it and I have preferences. 

During my times of self-reflection I have virtually eliminated my preferences about race and religion.  And I’m proud of this.  However, Ron’s introduction reminded me that my recovery and reconciliation work has a long way  to go. 

It is my prayer that you will join the journey towards a kinder more inclusive world by acknowledging your preferences, especially your prejudices and use your power of discernment to create a more inclusive society. 

To help let’s look at a common phrase in our world today – Algorithm.  I first encountered this concept in the early 1960’s when friends were working as trainees in the Canadian banking system.  As loans officers they filled in forms prescribed by their bosses and made recommendations for loans to be approved for their customers.  These piles of paper then made their way up the chain and most often came back with a notice that their recommendation had been rejected. 

In questioning these rejections my friends learned that the “brass” had a formula (an algorithm) so that they could quickly scan the reports and determine if it fit within their written policy.  These formula were to allow them to more efficiently handle the volume of material they needed to deal with.  One of my friends came to the profound conclusion, “Their formula (algorithm) is used so they don’t have to think!” 

Our preferences and prejudices are also our tools so we don’t have to think.  So we can quickly respond to the situations in the world around us.  Our algorithms have been programmed into us by family and society from our birth.  And they affect everyone.  I do not know of a race, a church, a family that does not have an inbred set of prejudices that they utilize to avoid thinking. 

To determine if your preferences are helpful or harmful the key is to think!.  Examine how and why you jump to an instant opinion.  Question that snap decision.  Investigate the feelings and attitudes that are part of it.  And then gently and joyously think again.  Sometimes this process will confirm you initial opinion.  At other times you will see the error and come to a more sustainable conclusion. 

Canadian (Western) society is filled with “dry drunks” people who say they have no prejudice yet their thoughts, words, actions, and governmental policies betray them.  Sobriety in prejudice is consciously looking at how you interact in each and every situation in life and how you honour and respect those you interact with through words and actions that affirm and support. 

The post Thinking About Being A Recovering Racist first appeared on Thinking About Thinking .

Tariffs threats have created global anxiety.  To be honest these musings are causing people to get things totally out of proportion.  The threats are serious.  They demonstrate a deep commitment to patrimonialism² by the speakers. 

My personal observation is that while the mouths are blowing this hot air forward the real actions are consistently walking backwards.  The hot air is rising, but the actions are not being pulled forward by the rise of the words. 

This doesn’t make the words any less fretful,  however, it does allow those who want to take alternate actions the time to clarify and work on what will truly make a difference. 

As Haruki Murakami said in his Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech: “If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it’s too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us — create who we are. It is we who created the system.”

^{1 Mayo Clinic definition}

²  https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/analysis-details-the-100-year-old-sociological-term-that-defines-trump-s-leadership-style-and-putin-s/ar-AA1zLF0Zcid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=f814c7b613f747f1ebe1b1dca632e0e5&ei=140

The post Thinking About Hot Air & Anxiety first appeared on Thinking About Thinking .

How George Orwell was right — and Steve Jobs was wrong | Opinion

Opinion by Thom Hartmann

A fascinating article in The New York Timesthis week by Kurt Gray, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, gives us the beginnings of an understanding of how and why social media is so destructive to society.

Gray points out that most people assume humans have historically been predators, the metaphorical big cats of the jungle. In fact, Gray says, we’ve historically been prey, the victims of predators:

“This picture of fearfulness is consistent with our understanding of human psychology. We’re hard-wired to detect threats quickly and to stay fixated on places where threats once appeared, even after they have vanished. We fear that ‘child predators’ will abduct our kids even when they are safer than ever.

“Modern humans, ensconced in towns and cities, are now mostly safe from animal predators, but we are still easily frightened. Whether we’re scrolling social media or voting for a presidential candidate, we all still carry the legacy of our ancestors, who worried about big cats lurking in the darkness.”

Thus, if you could invent a drug that would cause people to be fearful — and thus stimulate the rage that comes from fear — you could have incredible control over a population if you could simply tell them where and against whom to direct that fear-induced rage.

We all have opiate receptors in our brains that modulate our response to pain. Compounds that bind to these receptors are produced naturally by our body in response to extreme pain and shock, and numerous plants—most famously, opium poppies—naturally produce chemicals that bind to and activate our opiate receptors.

When we lived in Germany back in the late 1980s, I loved to visit a nearby castle in Kulmbach and order mohnkuchen, a piecrust filled with poppy seeds ground into a paste with sugar and a few spices. I always felt so good after eating a slice or two of the pie; when we had a glass of a fresh German Riesling with it, my smile went from ear to ear for hours.

The mohnkuchen seemed to constipate me a bit, and when I noticed one afternoon that my pupils were pinned so small as to nearly vanish, the same as I’d noticed whenever I’d taken narcotic painkillers after injuries and surgery, the penny dropped. Turns out I was enjoying opium in that little German café in a way that people around the world have for millennia.

Similarly, I once shared a few days with a shaman from Peru; he had a bag of coca leaves, and we each chewed a few along with a tiny piece of alkalized ash to release its active ingredient as an afternoon pick-me-up. The buzz I experienced was considerably less strong than what a two or three cups of coffee provide.

Mountain-dwelling Andean tribes have been doing this for as long as there have been people in the region; they consume coca the way people in India and parts of China consume local tea leaves. We consumed coca leaf extract here in the US, too, from 1886 to 1929, in a drink called Coca Cola.

Somewhere on the spectrum from these drugs’ original state to their becoming increasingly concentrated and purified, a toxic/addictive threshold or tipping point is reached. I never experienced withdrawal symptoms from mohnkucken, but I did from the highly concentrated opiate painkiller (Oxycontin) I took for a few weeks for severe sciatica prior to spinal surgery and for a week after. It wasn’t terrible; a few nights of trouble sleeping and sensitivity to pain and touch, but there it was.

Heroin is concentrated opium poppy. Cocaine is concentrated coca leaf. Substances that are otherwise benign become both potent and deadly when they’re super-concentrated.

Which is exactly what the algorithms deployed in secret by social media do: they purify and concentrate hate and fear spread across the broader social media site, distilling the most potent memes and messages to the top and shoving them into people’s brains.

But that’s just the beginning of the damage these top-secret algorithms are doing to our societies and politics. By increasing our individual levels of fear and rage, they create a broader social sense of fear and rage, making these emotions far more easy to exploit.

Enter stage right “populist” politicians and media sites who push people’s now-sensitized fear and rage buttons for political gain. (Not to mention the billions earned by social media billionaires pushing this psychological heroin while absolutely refusing to publish their algorithms.)

Numerous studies show that when people believe crime is a serious problem in their own communities and lives, they measurably shift toward the political right of the spectrum. Law-and-order campaigns and promises of severe punishment acquire a sudden appeal, as Joe Biden and Bill Clinton discovered in the early 1990s and politicians everywhere since the pandemic have seen.

Fear of crime — and fear more generally (of your kids being victims of trans people or renegade surgeons in public schools, for example, or of immigrants raping your wife or taking your job) — push people toward an embrace of conservative and then authoritarian politics and governance.

When media promote narratives about crime being out of control — whether true or not — they measurably drive acceptance of more reactionary crime control legislation along with rejection of efforts at rehabilitation and reform.

There may be an even wider impact of social media’s promotion of fear and rage.

The Transcendental Meditation group reported in the Journal of Mind and Behavior on several 1970s and 1980s studies showing that when a certain relatively small threshold number of people in a particular community meditated daily, crime and violence went down.

Another report in Social Indicators Research found that when a group of meditators moved to Washington, DC between 1988 and 1993 that over those following years crime went down by an impressive 23.3%.

A comprehensive study was run during the 1883 Lebanon war, when a group of meditators took up residence in Jerusalem and meditated daily for two years. The result, almost certainly exceeding any possibility of coincidence, was:

— A 76% reduction in war deaths in Lebanon on days when there was high participation in the meditating group,

— A 71% decrease in war-related fatalities,

— A 68% reduction in war-related injuries,

— A 48% drop in the level of conflict, and

— A 66% increase in cooperation among antagonists.

If a certain threshold of people being intentionally peaceful for a year or two can lower crime rates, what happens when a certain threshold of people are daily enraged by the injection of fear and hate into their psychological bloodstreams?

Could it be that social media is directly (or indirectly) responsible for much of the swing we’re seeing around the world toward bigotry, hate, and violence? That rightwing movements are emerging as a result of the impact of social media, rather than social media merely and passively reflecting the trend as the social media companies argue?

The meditation studies are controversial, but it’s hard to dispute the assertion that as more and more individuals in a given society are racked with fear and rage, the result, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Big Brother, will be more hate and violence.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley has been thinking along the same lines. In his book The Tyranny of Big Tech, he wrote:

“Big tech has embraced a business model of addiction. Too much of the ‘innovation’ in this space is designed not to create better products, but to capture more attention by using psychological tricks that make it difficult to look away.”

The past two years have shown America and the world what happens when a social media company is captured by an unaccountable billionaire with a specific political goal. The site that was once Twitter is now a veritable sewer, filled with hate and Nazi-level extremists.

Is it possible this is making the world less stable, less peaceful, and more violent through a reverse “Maharishi Effect”? Are wars around the world and the recent assassination of a healthcare CEO demonstrations of the power social media has over society? School shootings? The rise of Nazi-adjacent militia groups here and in Europe?

The simple reality is that we won’t know until government steps in and requires these companies to both publish and moderate their algorithms and monitor/control the naked hate on their platforms. And that day can’t come too soon.

From <https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/other/how-george-orwell-was-right-and-steve-jobs-was-wrong-opinion/ar-AA1wzhhR?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=866573aaa14d4075923eeaf52da1db10&ei=17>

The post How Social Media Robs You of the Power to Enjoy! first appeared on Thinking About Thinking .

You might be interested in Larry Lessig’s Ted Talk on democracy.  This is an American tale, but has relevance for us as well. 

Our democracy no longer represents the people. Here’s how we fix it | Larry Lessig | TEDxMidAtlantic

YouTube – TEDx Talks – Oct 20, 2015

In his first run for federal office John Diefenbaker’s slogan was “Not a partisan cry, but a national need”.  Now is the time for each voter to live for changes that will make life better, more inclusive and to spread the benefits of success more broadly.

The post Equality, Responsibility, and Hope first appeared on Thinking About Thinking .

Take the word abandoned.  The Oxford dictionary begins with some of the emotional baggage attached to this word: cease to support or look after (someone); desert:”her natural mother had abandoned her at an early age”.  It continues: leave (a place or vehicle) empty or uninhabited, without intending to return: “derelict houses were abandoned”.  And then zeros in on the heart string pulls: condemn someone or something to (a specified fate) by ceasing to take an interest in them.

However, the dictionary also offers a less negatively loaded understanding of the concept: abandon oneself to – allow oneself to indulge in a desire or impulse.  (Note the term indulgence also carries a lot of baggage.)  In a constructive context this definition tells us we have the ability to focus on creating something by letting go of (abandoning) the distractions and habits that stand in the way of moving forward.  When this is done, those who prefer the earlier meanings of the word may uses those definitions to attempt to influence us.  Luckily we may opt to abandon the guilt and continue to live and create. 

Stating we wish to abandon duality is both a way of clearly stating what stands between us and the life we seek.  And it also points us to the underlying truth of life – oneness – wholeness – unity.  To consciously abandon duality is to embrace oneness. 

Oneness and individuality coexist in nature.  Think of an aspen grove.  Every tree in the grove has exactly the same DNA yet each provides special and crucial services to the whole organism.  (I will use the term trees for the individuals and grove for the organism until I learn a better way of identifying the parts.)  The trees in the higher or drier parts of the grove bring in micro nutrients that are passed to all the other parts.  Those in the lower and wetter areas provide water to assure growth and wellbeing across the entire grove. 

In the aspen grove there is no duality.  No mine and yours.  No better or lesser.  No right or wrong.  There is simply life.  In the grove individual trees age and die and new shoots take their place.  The death of one does not reduce the genetic components of the whole.  Similarly, the new shoot is not different genetically from any other part of the grove, it is simply another part of the life of the whole. 

The great religions of the world and the mystics they have produced, have attempted to communicate the spiritual oneness of all creation.  Being human some have focused on a small ethnic or cultural area of life while others imply that wholeness (oneness) is the basis of all life and creation – even the rocks. 

To abandon duality is to align with mindset of the aspen grove, with the spiritual DNA of creation and to live from that perspective. 

A.C.O.R.N. is an acronym for a daily practice that humans can use to align with the wholeness (oneness) of the aspen grove.  I know that Oak trees are strongly individualistic in their approach to life.  However, their seeds give us our acronym.  A – ask. C – commit. O – obey.  R – report.  N – notice. 

In the aspen grove parts have needs, nutrients, micro nutrients, water.  Individual trees  that have these share them. 

The post Abandoning Duality by Creating Practical Civility (Spirituality) first appeared on Thinking About Thinking .

There is a saying, “if you are moving forward and there is no one behind you (or with you) you are not a leader, you’re just out for a walk.” 

This brings us to a wonderful idea to think about – Positionless Leadership.  I’m certain you have experienced people with this wonderful quality.  They are usually calm.  Often quiet, yet active and when they are around things get done.  And when they are not present tasks seem to be hard work and projects struggle from step to step.  Then the PL rejoins the group, usually simply just appears and then everything begins to flow once more.  You always notice the difference, yet, have you ever thought about becoming one of these people?

When you think about the positionless leaders you have experienced you will notice some key characteristics that may be worth emulating. 

They have a quiet confidence. You will likely have no idea what their credentials are or if they have any skill, or talent relevant to the task at hand.  They’ll ask leading questions that usually bring greater clarity to what is happening or about to happen. 

They know “it” can be done, whatever it is.  Doubt doesn’t seem to infect them. They will have questions and concerns but rarely doubt.  “Being” might be the best way to describe their attitude.  There is energy, while it isn’t noticed at first it slowly infects the project and those involved begin to draw on this energy building the momentum. 

Positionless leaders start where things are, right now, and move forward from there.  They rarely want or need to know how things got to where they are now so they are able to bring clarity to what needs to be done and where the group energy needs to be channeled.  Not only do they start from where things are, they also start with what is at hand.  They radiate this cosmic sense that once you use what is at hand, what is needed next will be made both known and/or available. 

Then, they seem to disappear just as the project or task is complete and are rarely around for any celebration of the accomplishment. 

But they appear again, unasked when things start to fray, if the group is open to success. 

When things get done is it really necessary to create positions?  Many positions may be used a “place holders” rather than starting points for accomplishment.  Again, just a thought to think about. 

The post A New Vision – Positionless Leadership first appeared on Thinking About Thinking .