WAKE UP AMERICA! - CHAPTER EIGHT

THE PERSONAL POWER SOLUTION

"Ideas are a dime a dozen" is a common cliché. Sometimes an idealist gets a brilliant idea. He writes a book about it, expecting that people will buy the book and the world will change. He or she gets disillusioned if this fails to happen.

In order for the world to change a sequence needs to occur: idea --> product --> marketing --> application. This could be called the free-enterprise sequence of change.

There is also a statist sequence of change: idea --> law --> punishment. If people perceive it to be in their interest they will follow the law; if not, they won't. Sometimes the statist sequence provides economic opportunities to provide goods and services to those who don't want to follow the law. Lawyers and accountants serve those who don't want to pay taxes. Drug merchants serve drug users at greater profit to themselves than there would be in a free-enterprise economy. The statist sequence may also bring about unintended consequences, such as drug users stealing, robbing and murdering to acquire the drugs they crave.

The following table approximates the relative importance and value of the elements of the free-enterprise sequence of change:

ELEMENT      RELATIVE VALUE
-------      --------------
Idea:        1 unit
Product:     100 units
Marketing:   10,000 units
Application: 1,000,000 units

Obviously, this is a rough guess and will vary greatly from instance to instance. But it provides certain perspectives. An idea may be useless if you can't turn it into a product. A product is useless if you can't market it. The effort in developing successful marketing for a product may be a hundred times more difficult than developing and producing the product. And even if you market a product in great numbers, few people may use it. The effort to get an idea applied may be a million times greater than the effort to generate the idea. Of ideas generated and suggested, it could be that only one in a million gets successfully implemented.

The strategy for implementing individual freedom and power needs to include:

1. Develop the best and most workable ideas we can identify into marketable products and services.
2. Mass-market these products and services.
3. Organize Human Power Groups to bring about successful mass-application.

One way to start a Human Power Group is to get this book into the hands of your friends and acquaintances. If any of them is interested in increasing their personal power, then start a group.

HUMAN POWER GROUPS

Imagine that in every city and most towns there are Human Power Groups. They are informally linked in a network to share ideas. Every Human Power Group is organized according to the likes of whoever establishes and manages it. The purpose of the Human Power Group is to increase individual power. Here are some of the things that might be done in such groups:

• Discuss the ideas and principles in this book.
• Generate other ideas for increasing individual power.
• Assist each other to become freer, healthier, more powerful,and more prosperous.
• Develop creative ways to wake up Americans to their personal power.
• Involve unemployed people; find creative ways for them to do things for which they can be paid.
• Develop products and services which can be profitably marketed.
• Adopt the "Inside Angle Orientation" - see the Introduction to this book.
• Look for new human success programs that can be implemented.
• Look for ways to improve existing success programs.
• Identify human failure programs; do something about them.
• Organize private, independent schools.
• Launch an initiative to teach the illiterate - reference: Illiterate America by Jonathan Kozol. One-third of America's adults are functionally illiterate.
• Become a "synergic power organization" - an organization in which everyone exercises power in such a way that everyone else's power is increased - a mutual-power-enhancing organization. Identify and formulate the principles of such an organization.
• Become highly profitable.
• Find ways to overcome the "Semmelweis-reflex" - the automatic rejection of the obvious, without thought, inspection, or experiment - see the Introduction to this book.

THE WE-DON'T-HAVE-ALL-THE-ANSWERS PERSPECTIVE

Many individuals and groups have attempted to create new or advanced civilizations. In every society there are probably people who are dissatisfied and who want to improve society. I'm one of these. For many years I've been looking for the "keys" to do this.

Suppose there are a hundred "keys" to advanced civilization - a hundred things that need to be achieved for such an advanced civilization to become reality. I propose the following ratios:

1. The "average person" knows one of the keys.
2. The typical advanced civilization activist - Lao Tzu (Chinese philosopher), Aristotle (Greek philosopher), Nietzsche (German philosopher), Gurdjieff (proponent of self-observation), Gandhi (Indian leader), Fuller (author of Utopia or Oblivion), Hubbard (founder of Scientology), Rand (founder of Objectivism), etc - knows ten of the keys.
3. In order to bring about advanced civilization a hundred keys need to be known, integrated, and implemented.

I have no idea how accurate my ratios are. But I expect they are in the right ball park. (And this is not an attempt to demean any of the above individuals or their movements. In my opinion, they have all made great contributions to increased quality in the world. Some of them may even be 20-key or 50-key people.) Now if I were to attempt to define or describe in detail what I mean by advanced civilization I might fall into the typical advanced civilization activist trap. I would define advanced civilization in terms of the ten or so keys I think I know about. In my opinion, all such attempts have failed or have produced rather limited results.

What typically has been happening is that the average one-key person makes contact with the ten-key activist or movement. The one-key person thinks the ten-key activist or movement has all the answers and is what he or she has been looking for all along. The one-key person then becomes a convert to learn the ten keys to advanced civilization. The ten-key activist or movement tells the convert that they have all the keys and there is no need to look further. Unfortunately the ten-key activist or movement is 90 percent ignorant of the keys necessary to bring about advanced civilization. So, advanced civilization never manifests. I suggest this has been the general history of attempts to create advanced civilization.

A further problem is that it is very difficult for the ten-key activist who poses as a 100-key know-it-all to personally develop further and to handle the remaining unhandled problems and unwanted conditions in his or her personal life.

My answer to the dilemma is the "we-don't-have-all-the-answers" perspective. Maybe we can create a network that uses this perspective as a foundation. Maybe I can connect together a diversity of ten-key activists in a network such that the 90-percent ignorance factor can be reduced. Crudely stated, suppose I can find ten ten-key activists and it so happens that each ten-key activist knows ten different keys. Together these ten activists will then know all hundred keys necessary for advanced civilization.

Of course, in practice it won't be this easy or simple. Some of the ten-key activists will know keys that overlap those of others. There will be some keys unknown to all ten activists. Some will refuse to accept some of the keys. Nevertheless, such a network should increase the chances of creating advanced civilization. We need such a network of Human Power Groups.

Their purpose is to increase personal power, which may be our best shot at solving both individual problems and America's problems.

PERSONAL POWER THROUGH CHOICE

To get an appreciation of the extent to which practically all of us are negatively programmed, I strongly recommend that you read What to Say When You Talk to Your Self by Shad Helmstetter. Much of our negative programming comes from all the times our parents said "no" to us. They said "no" many more times than they said "yes." They also said many other negative things. Many of these negatives now reside in our brains in the form of human failure programs. Helmstetter claims that for most people the percentage of negative programming is around 75 percent - in other words, 75 percent of our personal programs are human failure programs. Helmstetter estimates that most of us were told "no" and "you can't do that" and "you'll hurt yourself" about 150,000 times!

Helmstetter's method for replacing the negative programs with positive programs he calls "Self-Talk." He provides Self-Talk examples for specific purposes like: how to stop smoking, how to improve self-esteem, etc.

Helmstetter has written a more recent book called Choices in which he suggests twelve basic choices:

1. I choose my strength.
2. I choose my honesty.
3. I choose my belief in myself.
4. I choose my goal and direction.
5. I choose to accept others as they are.
6. I choose to make my decisions for myself.
7. I choose to be always responsible for my own actions.
8. I choose right from wrong.
9. I choose to work for what I believe in.
10. I choose to learn from my mistakes.
11. I choose to love and be loved.
12. I choose to choose in every detail of my life.

Helmstetter has also written two other books: The Self-Talk Solution and Finding the Fountain of Youth Inside Yourself. I recommend all his books.