Earlier this week, I sent our business plan to a possible ally, someone who wants changes in American government that would empower American voters. The person who answered the phone said she’d send it right over for the team to pour over.

I don’t want them to pour over it. I want someone to read it over, perhaps furrow her brow a bit and ask, “What IS possible?”

What we’re up to is clearly impossible from almost every existing viewpoint. Our views are mired in our notions of how our world works. In some ways, knowledge is essential. In others, the more you know, the more your view is constrained by that knowledge. Too often, we confuse the facts and what they mean.

PeopleCount’s solution seems impossible to most people not because of what it proposes, but because of the meanings most people hang on to about “the facts” they think they know. That’s the way humans operate. It always has been. The only exception to that is people like me who study our own beliefs, who challenge our own sense of “knowing”, who examine our feelings of certainty and realize that mostly, they’re just feelings.

Yes, most scientists have been wrong. Most scientists felt certain that Newtonian mechanics was the law of the universe until years after relativity was proposed. Scientists are human. They’re not immune to feelings, nor to cultural understandings. But they have a method that’s pretty good. Yes, they get suckered at times into myths like about fat and cholesterol, but their method eventually pulled us out of it.

Political scientists have a harder time. While nutrition scientists can put people on diets and see the results, everything a political scientist does is immersed in culture. If they get some Americans to try a new way of voting, such as approval voting or ranked choice voting, they must try it with people who are deeply inculcated by our culture. And most people involved in politics are not political scientists, merely enthusiasts with strongly held beliefs.

Please, believe in PeopleCount.org. Or don’t. Simply create a new possibility for yourself, that we can all communicate together peacefully and build a system that enables and rewards members of Congress for being accountable. Then go on the current prototype page and vote. And make a donation. We’ll do the rest. You can believe it, later, as it unfolds. What is possible in your world is your choice.