In the previous article, we saw that we accept the idea that politics is mean, messy, and petty. It’s “office politics” writ large. We saw that we’ve completely bought into it. When someone makes a comment about it being like that, we nod. We know! But is it really true?

It’s not true. It’s a human concept, along with our myriad thoughts about it. And feelings. And memories. And memories of thoughts and feelings. It all lives in our ideas. We see what people do and say and we invent a generalized truth about it. And that generalized truth justifies us putting up with it, even with us acting consistent with it. In politics, it’s okay to want to win, dominate, “fight the good fight”, and hope for the best. Even “take no prisoners!”

How’s that working out for us? Not so well.

Luckily, it’s not true.

We forget: To err is human. Mostly we think that means we sometimes make errors. Another meaning is that to be correct, to have our thoughts be accurate one must distill real life into concepts. But real life can’t be distilled into concepts- not really. It’s not just a simplification, it’s an over-simplification.

We map reality onto concepts, or we represent reality with concepts. This is by definition an approximate endeavor. It’s rough. It’s error prone. It’s not only not exact, it’s not accurate, except in a view. When you limit what you see to this way of seeing it, only then it looks true.

If you believe in God, consider this. God created reality. Humans interpret it and represent it with concepts. Reality works. Our thoughts about it don’t work so well. We’re not God. To be human is to fundamentally live in a world of presumptuously thinking we know the truth, continuously being in error.

Anything we know, we see through a view. When we look at politics lots of different ways and see the same thing- that’s when we know our thinking is “inside the box”, inside a context. We all share this context- our political context is a cultural context.

But it’s just a context. We have a choice about what context we use, if we can be so conscious as to realize it’s a choice, and choose.

How about we make a different choice?

I’ll wrap this up in the next post.

In some previous blog post, I wrote that politics is like in the expression “office politics”. It’s bad stuff. It’s people being petty, struggling to be right, struggling to make others wrong, struggling to beat others, win, and avoid losing. It’s people trying hard to dominate others and have their ideas dominate others’ ideas. It’s people trying hard not to be dominated by others, or their ideas. It’s bad stuff.

And we know that. We expect it. Maybe I’m avoiding it. If so, then it’s true and I don’t want to deal with it. Maybe I’m trying to fix it. That means it’s true and needs to be fixed. Maybe I’m hoping it doesn’t have to be that way. So I believe that’s the way it is, but I’m hoping we can do better. Maybe I’m resigned to it. That’s the way it is and there’s nothing I can do. All of these are built on it being true.

These are the way it is for our culture. I didn’t make this stuff up. I got it from others. I’ve certainly heard it over and over again from people with whom I’ve spoken about PeopleCount.org. This IS politics to us.

But it’s not true. It’s a human concept, along with myriad thoughts about it. And feelings. And memories. And memories of thoughts and feelings.

In the next article, we’ll see this way of looking at it gives us a choice.

But it’s not true. It’s a human concept, along with myriad thoughts about it. And feelings. And memories. And memories of thoughts and feelings.

We forget: To err is human. Most people think that means we sometimes make errors. Another meaning is that to be correct, to have our thoughts be accurate one must distill real life into concepts. Because thoughts are about concepts. But real life can’t be distilled into concepts- not really.

Mathematically, it would be called mapping reality onto concepts, or representing reality with concepts. This is by definition an approximate endeavor. It’s rough. It’s error prone. It’s not only not exact, it’s not accurate, except in a view.

And we have a choice about what view we look through, if we can be so conscious as to realize it’s a choice, and choose.

The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay said: “It is not true that life is one damn thing after another. It’s the same damn thing over and over.” It’s the bad kind of politics over and over because we refuse to see it’s a choice. So we keep choosing it. And then we say, “That’s life.”

What if we become aware that it’s a choice. And that we can make another choice? What if we invest a little bit of time, effort and even money into another choice, a new choice in which people count?

What if we build a structure that supports people counting in politics? We design the roles and responsibilities and rewards so it supports us continually creating a future where politics is simply how we work together to guide government and hold it accountable? We’ll give it an organization and rules that help it persist. We can make it empower citizens, elected officials and even candidates running for office?

It’s really just a choice.

You’re either part of the solution, or part of the problem. Choose.

I looked up the word “asshole”. When applied to a person, the dictionary says it means a despicable or detestable person. Or a stupid, mean, or contemptible person. UrbanDictionary.com says it’s “your current boss“… (Note: this blog has nothing to do with politics, at least yet…)

To me it means someone with little or no empathy. Someone who doesn’t care for others or their property or something else they care about, what’s important to them.

What about a guy who doesn’t care about others, but cares about following the rules so he stays safe and doesn’t have to deal with the repercussions? He’s also an asshole. (He’s just not a complete asshole…)

I care about others. I’m not saying I’m better than assholes, just different. I probably seem better to you. Because if I met you I’d be nice. I probably seem better for society because I clean up after myself. But that’s from your, or society’s points of view.

Most of us think empathy is good and being an asshole is bad because we empathize with people. We like to think of ourselves as good.[1]

Whenever I eat, my dog sits and watches me. So when I’m not eating raisins, I usually share with him. I like it when he eats. If I listen closely to my thoughts and feelings, when he’s eating I can detect my pleasure, similar to when I eat. The sensations are different, but the thoughts and feelings are there. This is empathy.

My dad is almost 90. At times, he’ll say, about some country: “Nuke the bastards.” He has said that occasionally throughout my whole life.

But he takes care of people. He’s always been generous and warm to my mom, my three brothers and me, and to our families. And to friends, their families, and neighbors.

He genuinely cares about others. He was an electrical engineer and then a manager, and then the VP of Engineering. He told me lots of stories about how the president of the company could neither design a product not run the company- his strength was only in sales. Dad had to steer the company from underneath for years. What he was most proud of was that by keeping the company solvent, he created a lot of good, steady jobs for people. That was the fulfilling part of his job.

And he loved animals. He hunted for years but never hit anything. One day he finally set up a hunting trip so he’d be sure to hit one. When the time came, he put his gun down. And he traded his gun for binoculars.

One of my brothers had a dog that was hit by a car. I was puzzled when my dad told me about it, and how much the hospital bills were. I asked him, “How do you know whether to hospitalize a dog, vs put it down?” He said, “It’s family.” He simply cared.

Then how could he say, “Nuke the bastards?”

In the human brain, our neo-cortex is large and handles all of our higher-level thinking. But when we’re scared, our amygdala takes over and we’re thrown into fight, flight or freeze.

Similarly, when we’re angry or mean, the empathy is turned off, or is overwhelmed.

I empathize with your wanting to control Congress, to have them work for you. I empathize with their frustration at entering public service and having to raise money and fight political battles instead of serving the public. I empathize with people who are angry, frustrated or even suffering because we can’t even pass laws that over 90% of us agree on.

That’s why, with your help, I’m creating PeopleCount.org. For me. And for you.

[1] Often we ignore the fact that we don’t empathize with assholes about being assholes. Except sometimes we do, when we act like assholes…

There are a number of people with vast resources who’d like to reduce the importance of money in elections. They haven’t been able to do it. They’ve tried all sorts of ways to limit campaign contributions. They tried to support candidates who’d do it.  They’ve spent at least tens of millions of dollars and so far have failed.

What they haven’t done is talk to me. I’ve tried all sorts of ways to contact them. One even gave me his business card. I called the number daily and left messages. I sent emails and even a few paper letters- nothing.

On the one hand, I don’t want to complain about “how life is”, about how we easily see from our own limited points of view. We easily accept reasonable societal standards without questioning, and unknowingly we accept how they limit possibilities. On the other, it’s been a long day/week/month and I promised to publish a blog…

I traded some emails with an angel investor who invested in a political startup. The two developers he provided a little funding to, in my opinion, are not marketing well. To have a decent chance of making a difference, they need some professional marketing, and a budget. I took a chance and wrote a longer email to him, since I don’t have his telephone number.

He replied that writing a long letter wasn’t going to change anything. Then he justified their efforts, “they’re doing what they can afford.”

He’s justified. He’s following “best practices” for startups- you put a little money in and the founders are supposed to try little things and market-test them until they find a niche that makes money. If it doesn’t work, it’s not his fault.

Never mind that politics has other forces at play. It’s a different arena that no one seems to understand. I think I do, but my understanding isn’t proven, and when others look at it from their points of view, without talking to me at least, it seems to them that I don’t understand what they think they do.

So far, only a handful of people have understood PeopleCount.org from reading about it. And some of them read a bunch of my blogs.

I sent a brief business plan to another investment group that’s very concerned about politics. I received an email that they were “unable to participate with the PeopleCount endeavor due to the demands of their existing commitments.  We wish you all the best.”

About 1% of people that read about PeopleCount.org understand it. They read looking for things that are normally possible. About 90% of people I talk to get it. Often not for long- when I see them again, the understanding was clouded by all the mythology we tell ourselves about politics. So I tell them again, and they get it newly.

So it’s not just political thinking that’s inside the box. It’s startups, investing, even being reachable by phone…

We all have mental cycles- habitual thoughts that distract us and make us less productive.

I just read Dan Pallotta’s blog post, Success, Suffering and the Self-Pity Cycle. His brain automatically compares him to others. When they have success, he has thoughts that he should be more successful and feels bad about it. It chews up time and thoughts that could otherwise be spent on a purpose we consciously choose.

When I was a kid, a few months before my fourth birthday, my younger brother was born (he and I are the middle kids of 4 boys). I don’t exactly what happened, but I decided I wasn’t wanted. I was devastated. I had great parents, good brothers, a nice middle-class life that continually edged toward upper-middle class, and a cool dog that fetched rocks. We lived in Seattle and there were huge fields nearby to explore, lakes and a great fair grounds downtown. I think around age 8 or 9 we started skiing, and at age 12 dad bought a boat and we’d go waterskiing. I was bright so school was easy and a often boring, but it could have been a good life. It wasn’t, because in the background, I was friendless and not wanted. Looking back, there were lots of opportunities for friends, but not being wanted, I slunk away in emotional pain instead of being with others.

There was a bit of hope in 9th and 10th grades. 11th grade was better and 12th much better, when a wonderful girl talked to me. A life that seemed worth living began.

My point is that for a solid 12 years my brain practiced being not wanted. They say you need 10,000 hours of practice to master something, about 5 years at 40 hours per week. The young me practiced being unwanted, lonely and miserable much more than that.

I discovered the pattern when I took The Landmark Forum at age 28. Seeing the pattern for what it was, I had the freedom to choose actions inconsistent with its “reality”. I practiced being in a new reality. Life got even better.

Today, 30 years later, as I work on PeopleCount, whenever my thoughts pause, the old brain patterns still arise. I’m obviously alone. It’s great to talk with people, even to connect with email, but it’s not the same as having a partner. It’s lonely. Except, those thoughts are just the result of old brain patterns.

Most of us have such crosses to bear. To survive, we have brains that constantly predict the future out of past experiences. To focus on tasks and make progress, we need the kind of brain that can create patterns that repeat, so we can continue work the next day. To appreciate and want to re-create delight and joy, connectedness and endless possibilities, we need the kind of brain that can dwell in dramatic thoughts and see reality as stories.  So our brains can also predict misery and suffering, sustain negative thought patterns, and dwell in dark worlds of hopelessness and trauma.

It’s good to notice them, and realize they’re artifacts of the brain, not real limits.

Heaven would be a place where we get to choose the quality of life. On Earth, we can have some of heaven, with a little effort, practice, and help from others. At least, those of us can who live in a peaceful society and are wealthy enough to not have to constantly struggle to survive. Perhaps a true heaven would be a place where we could live for a greater purpose, such as to share our wealth and peace with others. Yes, that sounds a lot like Earth.

Thanks, Dan. Life’s much better when self-aware.

In Leize Dolgih’s article: Negotiating Employment Agreements or the Real Reason Jennifer Lawrence Got Paid Less Than Bradley Cooper, she emphasizes “the cardinal rule of employment negotiations – IF YOU DO NOT ASK FOR IT, YOU WILL NOT GET IT.” This is great advice, but it’s not helpful. We already know this.

Luckily, Jennifer Lawrence’s openness about what happened to her let’s us help her, and ourselves, identify better advice. Jennifer said she didn’t want to seem this way or that way or haggle about money she didn’t need. But she sounded like she wasn’t sure.

My advice: Get some help finding out what you want and how to ask for it. Then you’ll be able to ask for it, and relax.

When you realize what you really want, you’ll relax.

Now, she realizes that she also wanted her salary to be fair. So besides negotiating a sufficient salary, she should have asked for fairness. Maybe that means her salary should be at least the salary of the lower of the top two male leads. Or maybe she should have asked for the average of the female leads salaries to be the same as the average of the male leads.

Do you see the difference between asking for more money and asking for fairness? She was getting enough money. But she wanted fairness, too.

PeopleCount is based on identifying what we want– a government that’s accountable to the people. Yet we ask for anti-corruption laws, campaign finance laws, constitutional amendments to alter court decisions and more. We’re trying to manipulate the laws to get rid of corruption and injustice. That’s all good. But we should also be building what we want, a system that delivers accountability.

So if you want salary, ask for salary. If you want fairness, ask for fairness, too. If you want government that’s accountable to people, support PeopleCount.org.

In part 2, we saw that as a problem solver, I can easily try on other views, as well as see that my own view is artificial. This allows me to be non-partisan, with effort. And being non-partisan is a requirement for PeopleCount.org to succeed.

I can understand conservatives and liberals, libertarians and socialists, even communists! It’s a bit hard for me to understand the depths of people who are dense, but it turns out that dense people are pretty evenly divided between ideologies.

By “dense”, I just mean not accustomed to thinking rigorously, to considering other points of view. It’s very common for people not to even realize that they see not the truth, but a very slanted view of it. Many of us are like this, processing knowledge and information that we’ve learned, but not having the habit of questioning our beliefs. That’s okay for many people, but in formulating a website that works for everyone, we need to consider many points of view.

In the end, I seemed to be the only one on the planet with a workable solution to the fundamental political problems of humanity. And I had the skills to make it work. Part of who I am is that I take responsibility for life. So I took responsibility for having the solution to humanities most fundamental problems. I seemed insufficient for the task. But upon consideration, I knew that was just a point of view, too. So I took responsibility for being sufficient.

Now I’m responsible for bringing into existence a system by which humanity will be able to communicate together to design its future, and act as one, through government, to create that future. We’re starting in America. Join me.

Someone asked me on Quora today, Did you ever have a life-changing experience? In the previous article, I told how a course, The Landmark Forum, let me overcome shyness and loneliness and get married. But then the marriage soured.

My marriage became difficult. We had a son with special needs, and my wife was often stressed. Often she’d yell at me and that made me miserable. Over the years, I had built up a lot of resentments about her behavior. So I did some therapy. How could I escape the misery when she yelled? Or at least, could I get rid of the resentments? Two different therapists said no those weren’t things they could help with.

Shortly after, I was trying to write a book about something I felt deeply about. I’ve always like to write, but could never stay on topic long enough to write more than a single chapter. Something reminded me about Landmark’s seminars. They were inexpensive and pretty close by, so I signed up. It was called “Being Extraordinary”, mainly looking at how we often don’t think of ourselves as extraordinary, so we don’t aim for extraordinary results. Like many of their seminars, the goal was to find all of our cultural beliefs and see them as beliefs instead of truth, so we could have more freedom in creating the lives we want. I signed up to have a breakthrough in writing the book.

I got my breakthrough in the first session! So in the second, I was done- I could just coast. But then the seminar leader asked me if there was something else in my life that wasn’t extraordinary- my marriage! And what would be an extraordinary outcome there? If I could be free of my resentments!

We did some work together and I saw that a “resentment” wasn’t a real thing- it was just an idea. So all I had to do was catch myself putting energy into them, and stop doing that. It took three days, and then I was free of a decade of resentment. A huge weight had been lifted from my life!

The next seminar was different. It was a deep view into how we think of “experience”. In it, I looked at the misery I felt when my wife yelled. It’s just a loud voice and words- why must I get so upset? When I looked deeply, I found the miserable associations that arose when she yelled. I practiced, when she yelled or scolded, to see them arise for what they were- old memories. Within a couple of weeks, my misery had stopped. Life got MUCH better!

In the 7 years since, I’ve stayed in seminars. I’m bright, but we all have blind spots. Landmark courses are all about revealing what’s unseen. And usually to see the unseen you have to develop a whole new perspective. And when you do that, life changes.

Someone asked me on Quora today, Did you ever have a life-changing experience?

I’ve had many. The biggest ones were really a series of them, due to some courses I took.

Let’s start the story when I was 28 years old. I took an amazing 4 and a quarter-day, $400 course called The Forum (today it’s called The Landmark Forum, is around $600 and is only 3 and a quarter days.).

I took it in 1985, mainly to get over my shyness. It was fascinating. We looked at how we put together our worldview as children, and how that view warps how life appears. I saw that I was afraid of rejection, so fear arose whenever I met strangers. When the fear hit, I froze and had nothing to say. So my family had said I was shy, and I believed them. Seeing that it was all due to a view, and not a strange substance called “shyness”, my mind was no longer so paralyzed. I saw new ways of talking with people and new opportunities for it. I began practicing not being shy.

It wasn’t till the next course that it fully hit me that all through my childhood I felt I wasn’t wanted! I sifted through my memories and my thoughts about myself and saw how completely the “not wanted” view had warped my life. It caused me a lot of lonely misery as a kid. Almost all the time, I had felt deep, hopeless loneliness. And I began to see that it was still shaping my life.

For instance, when I was with a girlfriend, things were fine. But after a few minutes apart, I felt lonely! Before the courses, feeling lonely in the middle of a relationship meant she wasn’t enough for me, she wasn’t the right one. After, I realized it was just a feeling that came over me out of habit. And when the feelings came up, those thoughts came up to. They weren’t accurate, they were automatic!

One of things I learned in the Forum was the difference between “what happened” and “what it meant to me.” For instance, the feelings of loneliness had meant “she’s not the one”, or “I’m not wanted.” They also had meant, “I’m miserable.”  Increasingly, knowing the difference, I saw the feelings really meant just that I was having feelings that I had practiced for many, many years. They say to master something, practice for 10,000 hours. I had practiced misery and loneliness for closer to 60,000! I stopped taking them so seriously, and the feeling lessened.  Life got MUCH better!

A few years later I fell in love with a wonderful woman and got married.  I stopped taking Landmark courses, we bought a condo, then a home and had two kids. But then things soured.  I’ll tell more about that, and how I over it, in the next article.

In part 1 we looked at different explanations for how I thought of this solution.  We left off with the question of which explanation was true? Was it God?  Was it fate, or just luck? Or did my choices bring me here?

As a mathematician and problem solver, these ways of looking at it are equivalent to me. They all accurately describe what happened, just from different contexts.

But which one feels most real? Try to remember- I’m a mathematician and problem solver. What feels most real is that my feelings about these don’t reveal the truth. In fact, I can immerse myself into any one of them and feel it’s completely true. I really see them as equivalent.

And perhaps that’s how God made me, with this ability to change perspectives with ease. It was just luck that I was taking a course about looking newly at life. It was my fate to see that I was resigned about politics, and my resignation supports the status quo with all its problems. I began to explore politics and teased apart its inner patterns. Then I chose to dedicate my life to bringing the solution to the world. And luckily, I had a few months of savings to fund this “time off” (though not enough to hire anyone.)

To me, it’s at least ironic that this ability to change interpretations easily makes me ideally suited, in some ways, to build this political solution. Though I have political bias from my upbringing and the society where I live, I can see that it’s just bias. So I can let it go and become non-partisan. And that’s a requirement for PeopleCount to succeed.

In part 3, we’ll further explore my ability to see from different points of view, to its conclusion.