Alpha Instincts

We live in a world where alpha instincts shape behaviors in many important and foundational ways. We need to steer, channel, understand, and effectively and intentionally utilize those instincts to create an optimal and peaceful future for us all.

We’re all creatures of instincts.

Instincts shape and guide our cultures, our thought processes, our emotions, our beliefs, and our functional behavior in constant and powerful ways.

We need to understand that impact in order to steer it in peaceful, positive, and productive ways.

We need to be very honest with ourselves about who we are and why we do what we do. We need to understand why those sets of instincts create so much stress, damage, and conflict between people and groups of people in so many settings in our world.

We need to take enlightened and intentional control over our basic sets of instincts if we want to have a future of peace, safety, and prosperity for our children and our grandchildren, and for future generations on this conflicted, troubled, and dangerous planet that damages so many people in so many ways today.

We need to move past so many people feeling right about doing the damage they are doing in too many settings because of the impact that those sets of our inter group and group instincts have on our behavior, our values, our thoughts, and our lives.

We Divide the World Into Us and Them

We divide the world into Us and Them at a very basic level in every group and in every inter group setting. We feel right protecting Us. We feel right damaging Them wherever they exist in multi group settings, because it feels like the right thing for us to do in far too many settings — and that thinking defines who we are and what we do in all of those settings, with our own group and with whatever other group exists with us in that setting.

It's a powerful and sometimes very ugly set of behaviors and beliefs.

We suspend conscience in dealing with Them.

We lie to Them, deceive Them, sometimes enslave Them, persecute and steal from Them — with no sense of guilt or regret for anything we do. We believe that we actually should do bad and damaging things to whomever we define and categorize as Them, at an instinctive level in each setting.

We too often completely dehumanize Them. We feel no guilt or remorse in doing damaging and evil things to Them. We celebrate defeating Them.

That level of behavior and those sets of beliefs happen every day in far too many of those settings. We need to understand clearly why we do what we do in so many settings to hurt each other and ourselves in those settings.

We all have people in our groups who feel like warriors, champions, and even heroes for doing that damage on behalf of their group and for making those conflicts continue to happen. They have such animosity against the other players in each setting that it feels right and loyal to hate the other group forever.

This behavior happens often and it happens in plain sight. We should be aware that it’s going on and happening in our inter group settings. It shapes how we act and feel in all of those settings. It’s the normal behavior for the various parties in too many times and places.

We should learn to see that inter group and interpersonal behavior for what it is when it’s happening and we should now be entirely honest about what’s happening in all of those settings. We won’t be able to move past those behaviors until we see them for what they are.

They’re everywhere.

More than 150 Conflicts are Happening Now

We have more than 150 full-boat inter group conflicts happening in the world today. The people in each setting feel that they’re doing the right thing for their group with those conflicted behaviors. They continue to be conflicted in each area because it feels like the right thing to do in each setting to all of the people living there today.

Syria has a couple of tribal groups who’ve been killing each other for many years.

They feel right damaging each other now, and they will continue down that path for the indefinite future with no end in sight, because it feels like the right thing to do.

Afghanistan has multiple tribal groups killing people from other groups. Those people believe that’s the right thing to do in each setting — to hurt the other groups who also live there. They will continue to do that damage to Them as long as the opportunity exists.

Turkey has millions of people who aren’t from the basic Turkish tribe — who are feeling very legitimate in doing damage to other people based on their tribal alignment inside that country.

The Kurdish tribe inside Turkey is at perpetual war with their tribal overlords, and the Turks tend to oppress them, imprison them, and steal from them every day. They feel right doing that damage, because the Kurds are a Them to them and that Them-status triggers all of those packages of instinctive behaviors, emotions, and beliefs in those settings.

The Kurds have those same instinct-triggered reactions to the dominant local ethnic tribe happening in Syria, in Iran, and in Iraq. Kurds are being killed in all of those places. They’re fighting for power in all of those settings, and they’re in very long-term relationships in each setting that make it clear that those conflicts have no end in sight.

The Kurds, in all of those settings, fight to the death to maintain their own sense of group turf and group identity, with no likelihood that they will ever stop being Kurds in any of those settings, and somehow assimilate and blend into the majority tribe in each setting.

The Turkish government calls the Kurd groups “rebels” and “separatists,” and sometimes “terrorists” as they interact in those settings.

The Alpha leader of Turkey identifies with his tribe and calls the Kurds traitors to Turkey. He calls for them to be damaged and destroyed and then celebrates any damage done to them in any way that damage is done.

People who have no understanding of what’s actually happening in those settings label and describe all of those conflicts as political, situational, circumstantial — and even as ideological or partially theological and religion-based in some of those settings.

Our news media tends to miss the point of those conflicts completely. The Media can’t see tribes. They often create political names for the groups rather than just using the tribal names — even when everyone on one side of the firing line speaks one language and the people being shot speak another.

Apparently, you can lose your license to run a newspaper or a news service if you describe a tribal conflict by naming the tribe.

In the real world, those conflicts are all tribal at their core. They couldn’t be more tribal.

They’re all actually happening because at least one tribal group in each place is responding in instinctive ways to the other tribal group and damaging that group. They each want autonomy as a group for their own ancestral turf and they’re all very willing to fight the other group to protect their turf as long as that fight is needed for their tribe for that turf or space.

Too many people look at our world and only see the situational conflicts that are happening in various settings today. They don’t understand what’s happening in each setting. They don’t have any idea how major and consistent the basic patterns are that create all of those situations, and how much needs to be done to soften them or reduce the damage being done in so many settings with conflicts that will continue for as long as those groups exist as separate groups.

This should not be that difficult.

If you look clearly at the world and look what is actually happening, the patterns in each and all of those settings are pretty clear.

Some nations are going to damage themselves forever — until they somehow decide to make some of those issues less damaging in those settings, by recognizing what the issues are and then doing things with the local governance or local alignment approaches that reduce the trigger points for the conflict that exists in those settings between some of the groups.

Nigeria should clearly not be forced to continue to function as a nation with the significant internal functionality issues it has. Congo goes to war with itself very clearly and directly by tribes. Every democratic election in Congo is just a tribal census count for that population. The election processes they periodically conduct never softens the anger between groups that make some parts of that country permanently unsafe for large numbers of its people, based on the group they’re in.

Kenya has the same sets of issues.

Peace is possible on a limited scale in a number of those multi tribal countries, but it won’t happen on its own in most of those settings other than as truces and periodic cease fires. The people know at a very basic and core level who they oppose and they all know who creates anger and threats for their group in every setting. They believe in each group that those conflicts should continue in perpetuity as long as those differences exist. Tribal loyalty in those settings is perceived within each tribe to be a major personal virtue and positive attribute.

Switzerland Uses Cantons to Structure Peace

It isn’t hopeless.

Some multi-tribal countries have worked out their own trajectories to their own agendas for local Peace.

Switzerland has developed a model for inter group conflict that should be considered in a number of settings because it works so well for the Swiss.

They use cantons as a form of government, and they have each tribal group in that country run its own cantons.

Switzerland is three basic tribal groups who each explicitly and clearly refuse to give the other tribes control over their turf — and the Swiss maintain self-governing cantons to keep internal peace in the country without needing any level of assimilation or identity loss.

There’s no Swiss tribe or language, but they manage to create completely separate language, and cultural, and political control at the canton level to create and run what functions as the Swiss nation. They maintain Peace in Switzerland by doing that in respectful and probably functional, and clearly organized ways that respect the languages and the cultures of each group with no violence at any level.

In most settings where we have multiple tribal alignments, the reality is that one of the local tribes runs the country. Russia has multiple internal tribal groups as part of the Russian Federation. Each of the internal tribes has its own governance issues that they wrestle with constantly within the context of the national Federation.

The Russian speaking group functions as its own tribe and is the majority of the speakers for the entire country. They managed to have some members of the Russian tribe who were included in the national boundaries of Ukraine after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and that’s created some obvious conflicts there that run fairly clearly along tribal alignments and have tribal energy at their core.

The Ukraine issues that are highly visible today have deep tribal roots. That battle in those settings in that country won’t come to an end until the deep division along both language and tribe is recognized and resolved for that setting in some way that works for both groups.

We have alpha leaders in both of those countries who are taking a hard line along purely tribal lines. They don’t cross into the language territory of the other group. Each group has clear control over the areas where their tribal language is prevalent for most of the people.

They probably won’t resolve those issues, but they could end when one side runs out of ammunition and stops shooting people in that setting.

The current alpha leaders in the Ukraine as a country have their Us-Them instincts fully activated for the Ukraine tribe. They’re very reluctant to give any sense of legitimate status or credible control to the Russian-speaking part of their constituency.

The Ukrainian speaking army has alpha leaders who don’t want to lose one square foot of what they instinctively define as their own traditional and historical tribal turf. The Russian tribal leader aspires to control and own that turf where the people have always spoken Russian as their native language.

That conflict could probably be ended in minutes if each tribe just ended up with its own language linked turf.

The Russian tribe in the conflict there would probably make a deal that was limited to their tribal turf. But they’re having a hard time making that particular outcome happen, because the Ukraine tribe is just like all tribes tend to be, and they don’t want to give up any turf to another tribe.

The Russian Alpha leader has managed to identify with his own language group and tribe inside his country and they see him as their tribal leader. He believes his people are more likely to support him in the future as their national leader if he can show that he’s met the needs of his tribe and has unified part of his people under the Russian language and tribal flag.

The Ukraine issues are locked into the sense that the national boundaries are worth killing and dying for by both tribes. People everywhere tend to believe that national boundaries are somehow sacred and special and have an inherent legitimacy, even when they’re overwhelmingly accidents of history and artificial artifacts of various circumstances — rather than sacred and defined destinations.That settlement on the conflict in Ukraine will probably take some external influence to steer into place. Those parties are having a very hard time getting to Peace on their own. Neither tribe is going to surrender their turf to the other tribe if they don’t need to.

They will continue to fight until they run out of ammunition an suffer from some level of fatigue and situational energy drain that makes the conflict too much of a bother to continue and allows the logical territory division to happen.

Gaza Has Us-Them Issues at Their Functional Core

Gaza is currently in a major internal conflict that’s clearly based on Us-Them instincts at every level. Gaza has people doing the worst kinds of Us-Them behaviors to each other in the full sight of the entire world.

The widely publicized first attacks for Gaza were done by Hamas fighters who clearly were explicitly and intentionally damaging the people from the other tribe in their efforts.

The tribal issues couldn’t have been more clear for those initial attacks.

The attacking tribe suspended conscience and ethical behaviors to hurt and damage the people they saw as Them in that setting. The video tapes of their initial attacks show that they celebrated the damage they did to their Them there at that point in time. And some of the people doing the attacks clearly and visibly felt joy in making that damage happen.

That set off a cascade of explicit and structured Us-Them instinctive events that now continue to unfold in that space.

The response from the Israeli military to those first attacks has followed the Us-Them instinctive tribal reactions for those events to the core, and that military has now killed more than 20,000 Palestinians in response.

They also suspended conscience and eliminated a sense of common humanity relative to members of the other tribe who they regard in the most complete and clear way as a Them that deserves  every kind of damage that They deserve for being them.

The response by both sides in Gaza is almost a textbook demonstration of Us-Them instincts in full gear.

The leaders of that response for Israel from their military who have those instincts fully activated clearly feel no guilt for any of those behaviors or for those many thousands of deaths that have happened since that time. They don’t see the people they’re killing as anyone who should be regarded as any category of Us for that setting. Basic human decency is not a factor in their decision making or behaviors.

That same set of thoughts, behaviors, beliefs, values, and highly damaging behaviors is in play in Sudan and in Syria and in some parts of Ethiopia. The people hurting other people in all of those settings look very much like the Israeli military in Gaza this week. They have the same sense that evil is legitimate when your tribe is being threatened by any version of Them.

Syria obviously has groups doing that same damage to other groups in villages in that country. They have an alpha leader who exhibits all of the most damaging alpha behaviors on a tribal basis in that country and who has driven millions of Syrians from other tribes into exile and into ethnic cleansing results.

Similarly, the nearby Houthis are clearly a tribal group trying to get control over their own ancestral tribal space. They’re willing to kill people from the other tribes until that happens.

Ethiopia has some absolute clear cases of genocide between tribal groups there — and some levels of ethnic cleansing there have done extremely evil things to people who live in that area that have been so cruel as to be almost unimaginable for those people.

Gaza isn’t alone as a place where tribes kill tribes and feel no guilt for the damage they do.

Those patterns of instinctive behavior can sadly create significant patterns of negative and even evil inter group behavior whenever they’re activated. Those patterns usually include alpha leaders for each group who lead those behaviors for their groups and who get support from their tribe by doing those kinds of damaging things to the other group.

Alpha Leaders Often Do Significant Damage in Group Settings

Alpha leaders in many significantly conflicted settings push their groups to do dehumanizing and damaging things to the other group. That’s obviously happening now in Gaza and Syria, and it’s happening in plain sight of the entire world in ways that we can too easily recognize, because it is what it is in those settings and because those leaders lead in those directions.

The alpha leader of the Israeli group is a man who’s made his position clear on doing what he wants to happen in both revenge and future negative impact on those groups. He’s acting as though he has a moral and ethical right to go deeply down those paths because his own group was damaged at that point in time, and because he believes in revenge as an ethical code and as an acceptable behavior for his group.

The current slightly problematic Alpha status for that leader in Israel directly complicates that issue. He very much does not want to stop being Alpha for his group. The world has a clear look at what he’s doing and at why he’s doing it.

He’s willing to do whatever the very negative people who keep him in that lead job for his group want him to do to damage the other people in that setting. The need by that leader to maintain his own alpha role forever for his group supersedes any humanitarian issues that might exist in his mind for those sets of people.

More than 20,000 children and women and various levels of both civilians and possible warriors are now dead in Gaza as the result of those continued attacks.

The current Israeli leader says that humanitarian issues aren’t currently relevant. He says his own tribe was damaged and he will do whatever he needs to do to hurt, cripple, and defeat the people who made that damage happen.

Unfortunately for Israel, that behavior and those decisions are currently visible to the world. The standing of that nation in the eyes of the world is obviously being damaged. The evil happening in Ethiopia matches and parallels some of the Gaza situation — but no one on the planet is looking to see what’s happening in that country.

Many Israeli people are visibly disgusted and extremely opposed to those behaviors, but the situation today is that the leader at the highest level is taking them down that path and is in power today when the damage is being done.

The United States is beginning to put pressure to create less damaging behavior from Israel. That will soften some of those behaviors, but we’re getting involved only after the death rate exceeds 30,000 — and after the entire world watched us fail to respond in any meaningful way while that damage happened.

Israel will need to have a new leader in place before there’s any chance of a lower level of inter group damage and the elected members of that government have a significant number of people who want to expand the number of sites that Israeli settlers take from the Palestinians in both the west bank and Gaza.

We’ll probably go into a long period of intense anger for the Palestinians in that country. It will be very hard to achieve Peace because that anger isn’t going to support any level of inter group cooperation and alignment.

It’s entirely possible that the outside world will impose a two-state solution on the country by simply recognizing some level of Palestinian control and authority over major portions of the country — and enforce that status by not having Israel as the only spokes persons for that nation.

Other countries could refuse to honor any role for that country that didn’t give the Palestinian tribe a major voice.

The Israeli government will need to name a new leader at some point. The rest of the world will be able to decide what to do about interacting with whoever that leader is. The Israelis might discover that whoever they pick is the single most important leader they’ve ever chosen, because there’s so much damage to be repaired with the rest of the world. That person will have to do some very heavy lifting to both give themselves a chance for internal cease fires, and for international connections that allow the country to re-enter the world of civilized nations.

What we need to understand is that all of those countries that have conflict at all of those levels have alpha leaders for their relevant positions and groups. We can expect to see those same sets of behaviors and instinctive patterns in every setting. That is exactly what we’re wired to do and wired to create.

The basic patterns of behavior that we’ll see in all of those settings shouldn’t be a total surprise for people who understand how much Alpha leaders will do to stay in power, and how much impact those leaders have on every setting where they exist.

Alphas don’t want to lose power anywhere. We know what those behaviors look like for other settings where Alphas exist. Lion pride leaders both kill and die to hang on to that relative power status for their group and setting.

For people, it’s clearly a pattern and an expected behavior that alpha leaders want to hold on to power most of the time when they achieve it.

Alpha Leaders Prefer to Stay in Power Wherever They Happen to be in Power

Alpha leaders often have a deep instinctive desire to maintain their power once they achieve it. We see that in every setting where alpha positions exist.

We can expect behavior everywhere that supports and reinforces those alpha goals and approaches at almost every level of that set of behaviors.

It’s usually relatively harmless and not damaging as a behavior in most settings, because there are usually no lives at stake in those processes. Each alpha makes decisions that steer behavior, but those decisions usually don’t damage other people in the process.

Corporations have CEOs who tend to stay in those jobs as long as they possibly can.

Alpha power tends to feel good to whoever has it.

The CEOs of companies have people in their settings who salute them and who obey them and who say encouraging things to them in their roles and positions — and that set of behaviors and interactions very often feels good to the CEOs.

We can easily see and understand that similar responses and similar rewards exist for those sets of instinctive behaviors in other settings, and they tend to happen where alpha status exists.

Lion prides do have alpha leaders who get their own rewards and major life changes and experiences for being alpha. Alpha lions will sometimes fight to the death to maintain that status for themselves with the other lions.

Alpha wolves also have their own rewards for being alpha. They sometimes fight other wolves to maintain that status as well. Alpha stallions in horse herds tend not to fight to the death, but they often fight to the point of being damaged. The alpha stallions clearly crave and desire and want that status with the other horses in their herd.

It feels good to be alpha.

The species who most closely resembles people in those behaviors and emotional responses are the chimpanzees — who have both power and status as alpha leaders of each group, and who sometimes fight to the point of major damage to keep in their alpha position in their group.

Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson wrote an excellent and well-researched and well-written book called Demonic Males, which describes those behaviors and those instincts clearly and well. It explains why they have so much power and impact in our lives.

We need to build on that information to understand our own settings and lives, and to steer ourselves to positive and productive interactions, structures, and alignments with our groups and with each other.

We need to understand why those sets of connections and behaviors are so relevant to us and to the world we’re trying now to build. The behaviors we saw in Gaza make more sense if we have those levels of emotional impacts from those sets of instincts.

Our instinct is to have hierarchies in place everywhere that feed those behaviors.

We very clearly have hierarchies everywhere. We have alpha leaders for our communities, our military, our religious groups, our schools, our labor unions, and for every group where we have relative status and power positions — and where we all know exactly where we each are in that power and impact alignment.

One of the reasons why religious groups in our communities have so much difficulty aligning in collaborative and supportive ways with other faith groups, is that each group has an alpha leader, and the alpha leader in each setting insists on having their own alpha status in place and then reinforced by members of their own group.

Cooperative performance between sets of people takes second position in many settings to the alpha-relevant behaviors of the leaders of each group. The rewards of being alpha are often sufficient to keep people in position and in those roles for very long periods of time.

We Have Instincts to be Both Hunters and Gatherers

Men and women both have alpha instincts and behaviors. We can see them across most settings for both genders as part of our general package of instincts in our communities. We have two basic role patterns for group settings, and we tend to work with both of those patterns for the optimal performance of groups across a wide range of settings, because they help our families and groups survive.

We are hunters and we are gatherers as a basic way of organizing our lives and that carries over to how we live today.

We organize instinctively in very clear ways as hunters, and we organize equally instinctively as gatherers. The styles are slightly different in their functions and approaches, but they can both be very successful for the people who use them — and we use them everywhere and use them all the time.

As hunters, we tend to have group leaders and top-down commands for the next things to do in each hunting setting. We have heroes as hunters. We tend to celebrate heroic behavior for the hunter approach.

We tend to celebrate whoever killed the deer or the elk or the moose that fed the tribe. We also celebrate our warriors who are the most successful in doing warrior things against the other people who they come into conflict with.

As gatherers — at the other end of that continuum — we tend to be organized around group behaviors. We tend to have collaborative and collective behaviors and strategies for our gatherer approaches rather than chains of command for each function that we often use for hunting and in conflict settings.

War parties and hunting parties tend to have chiefs that lead down very directed paths, and the gathering groups in our structured settings are more likely to bring people together to talk about shared learning and best practices and appreciation of the gatherer skillset, so that we optimize the harvest from the available sources of food.

When we look back directly at our preindustrial history, most tribes and families collected about half of the needed calories from the hunting and fishing efforts, and about half of the calories from gathering nuts and collecting wild rice from the autumn harvest, and then storing it for the winter. Family groups in many settings needed both food sources to thrive. Our ancestors valued both for the survival of the family or the group. They created cultures, traditions, and practices that created success for both sets of ventures.

We’ve been good at using both management styles and both leadership approaches in our historic food sources in a wide range of our work settings.

Modern businesses and work settings actually tend to use both styles and find them both very useful.

Systems development in organizational settings tends to utilize the collaborative approach, and those skillsets continue to get better for business settings. The biggest private systems project in the world in the last decade was a $4 billion health care system that had a collaborative woman leader who helped set up clear direction and aligned shared processes, and then delivered a high-functioning and well-used system from that gatherer team to all of the relevant care sites.

The US version of that health care computer system was completely collaborative in its implementation and design. It managed to achieve the project functions and goals on time and achieved them in the budget that was created for the project.

The British government, at that point in time, used the hunter style to manage their equivalent project. They turned down the collaborate gatherer approach in favor of top-down systems directions and orders and commands given to the work force by the managers of the process. They both started with a $4 billion anticipated budget.

The top-down chain of command versions of the project done by the British government kept spending resources based on management edicts. They ultimately spent more than £10 billion in that country on that project before giving up and starting over with a new set of approaches — with the gatherer version being run and steered by the American gatherer leaders.

The American system set up on their gatherer management models is now perhaps the best system in care in that space today. The care sites that use it perform at very high levels for their care and they’re continuously improving. The model was set up with continuous improvement as a goal, strategy, plan, skill set, and explicit commitment by the organization that put it in place.

Having directional and sometimes dictatorial alpha leaders run that particular project failed, but the accurate description of the world we live in currently has us use that command-and-control model far too often to organize and manage almost all businesses in the country today and it’s often flawed in its results.

The hunter edict design approach has been the preferred model in a vast majority of settings. It’s often badly delayed or fails.

We have hierarchical leadership almost everywhere — with CEOs for companies and for community organizations and faith groups and schools of all kinds. We have layers of alpha-like powers in our health care and academic settings that fit those instinctive structures consistently and well.

We Use Academic Alpha Status to Run Many of Our Educational Settings

Our academic settings are generally layered with hierarchies and with people who have achieved various levels of Alpha status.

Colleges tend to have Presidents who are the official chief officer of the institutions and who are expected to lead from that position. The people who support the President in each college and university have their own set of assignments and approaches, and they tend now to run the rest of the organization in a large number of settings in clearly defined hierarchical ways.

Many schools also have major academic departments. Each of them tends to have their own alpha leader with all of those instincts activated and functioning for that setting.

There are often fierce and sometimes high-energy competitions to achieve those positions. The people who become department heads at universities and colleges tend to have the same staying power and the same basic survival motivations as the alpha leader in each lion pride and wolf pack.

Academic settings often have their own sets of turf issues, cultural behaviors, and local alpha behaviors relative to each of their functional areas. Health care settings also tend to have their own set of turf challenges.

The alpha leaders of Medical Departments in academic settings tend to have an extremely low level of cooperative and collaborative behaviors relative to any kinds of joint planning, goal setting, strategic thinking, and approaches that link any kinds of efforts in the organizations and settings they support.

The academic departments are also set up, in many settings, to have fierce battles with each other over streams of funding — and that competition over the flow of money keeps cooperation levels lower than they should be in many settings.

One dean of a major medical school said she was on the job for three years before she could get the fiercely independent and even prideful medical department heads to even agree to submit their budget requests on the same day. She considered having that happen a major success for her own leadership legacy and impact in that setting, and left them to run a government agency that also had deep-seated departmental sets of contested issues, and that required intensive steerage to make optimal outcomes happen in the face of dueling alphas in the major long-standing jobs of that category.

People in government agencies tend to have their own sets of turf and power linked issues. People who get into many of those positions feel absolutely legitimate in being alpha for that space and running whatever it is that their agency does to exist as a chain of command, rather than a collaboration with the other parts of each governmental unit.

Alpha instincts are relevant in all of those settings.

People like being saluted.

People who run businesses like to be obeyed and like to have their work direction given by them to their staff become the work that is actually done for each setting.

Heads of large companies tend to very much enjoy the alpha levels of support that those jobs create. It’s very hard to get people in our country to voluntarily leave large company CEO jobs for that reason. When people do leave those jobs, there is often a time when the former CEO is significantly and almost clinically depressed, because they go from having everyone saluting them and praising them and agreeing with everything they say and do, and they see the people in their old setting now saluting and praising whoever replaced them in the job and often ignoring them as they attempt to interact with the setting and with the business and to be heard on any issues.

Most CEOs who leave major jobs for any significant organization should be warned that will happen to them and it will be painful when it happens.

The same jarring adjustment happens for former mayors and former senators. It can be particularly jarring for former deputy mayors and senior legislative chiefs of staff in various congressional and legislative settings when those adjustments happen after the position situation and status changes.

The deputy mayors in many settings are used to also having large numbers of people who used to tell them they were important and who used to tell them that they were relevant people, and those former fans often completely ignore them and avoid them when they try to interact with the setting and the people.

Very few positions have less residual weight than a mayor who is no longer actually in that job. Former deputy mayors and former assistant mayors have even less weight than former mayors.

That’s why so many deputy mayors and legislative assistants of various kinds strongly urge their incumbent office holder to stay in office as long as possible. They don’t want that loss of status to happen to them when their office holder gives up that office.

In the larger world, the vice chancellors and the chief advisors for kings in some countries know that they’ll be replaced by whomever the current crown prince chooses for that position when the prince becomes king, so those members of the court tend to encourage the king to stay in power and not retire until they actually die in office.

In our world, we have leaders of faith groups who have alpha power over their groups and who have their own deputies of various kinds who stay in place as long as the leader is in that position, and who often continue to urge the leader to also stay in place and in the leader job for as long as possible.

That reality of status reduction fear adds to the reinforcement and the positive feedback that the alpha leader in many settings receives from his or her world and staff. It often makes the alpha job even more enjoyable because it’s a very positive flow of information and interactions from the people interacting with the alpha person.

It feels good to be alpha.

Being alpha in a family setting has its own package of rewards and advantages. People easily see what they are and people in cultures where they are heads of families know why they want to hold that position forever if it’s possible to do that.

Most cultures have developed patterns of having alpha power exist in family settings. The heads of families in the vast majority of cultures in almost all countries have some alpha power over their other family members and make that personal power and status an important part of their lives and decision-making process.

The heads of families in a wide range of settings tend to love and appreciate and expect that level of power over other members of the family and people with that power will often fight to keep it in place and will be offended, threatened, and even angered if anyone challenges their right to be in power in that setting.

In a major number of settings, the alpha status in a setting or family also has sexual factors linked to it. Wealthy men in many cultures have multiple wives, and many cultures damage and even kill unmarried men who have sex with someone that their culture doesn’t designate as being a legitimate sexual contact.

Our cultures have major component parts that deal with the issues of both gender and sexual activity. We’ve seen some changes in those aspects of those cultures over the past several years.

Many historic cultures have punished and even killed women who have sex outside the marital context. Many cultures also say that the only legitimate way for a man to have sex is within the rule sets created by their cultural setting and those rules are often enforced as well — and those rule sets are often an important part of the reality for people who live in those settings.

Cultures want their families to be successful and to survive. Having families in place has been good for the survival of the offspring for many settings.

Sex is an important part of people’s lives. It has the potential to have a major positive and beneficial impact on people’s lives and it has the potential to do damaging things to people if the sets of behaviors and cultural practices, rules and expectations exist that create damaging situations for people in a setting aren’t set up to encourage and reward various ways of allowing sexual activity to exist.

It’s one of the most important aspects of our lives and that is true under any of the various ways that cultures, communities, and settings are set up to make sexual activity a functional part of people’s lives.

Cultures often use it to bribe members of the group so that they behave in a way that’s beneficial for the group.

Cultures tend to encourage men to stay with their families and to feed and protect their families and many cultures achieve those goals by giving the men who do that and who are in those roles both power and sex.

Those patterns exist in cultures across the planet and they’re easy to see in many settings because they’re both clear and important to people’s lives.

The husbands who stay with the families in a significant number of cultures and primal settings get both power and sex in return for that loyalty and pattern of behavior. The underlying functional evolutionary related point of the entire process for those issues is to increase the survival rate for the children in each group by encouraging those behaviors. So, the wives in many organizational models in the preindustrial world get safe places to live, and they get protectors for their children if there’s a man in the package.

The cultures tend to support that with the processes, rules, and expectations that are set up for people from both sexes in those settings.

In many traditional settings, that particular package of benefits seems to be intended to give the children the best chance of surviving into the future. It has clearly defined roles for both men and women as part of that package. The cultures tend to have those roles be the expected patterns of behavior for the men and women in each group.

Many cultures create and enforce behavioral expectation for all parties in that set of approaches and behaviors that tend to feel right to the people in those settings. We have very strong sets of instincts that make us want to be in compliance with the cultures of our group. We can feel disloyal and highly uncomfortable. We feel like a traitor to our group if we act outside of those expectations.

On gender issues, we also have instincts to fall in love and to court each other and to attempt to attract people who we believe would be good partners for various gender-related encounters in our group. As part of that package, we also tend to have various kinds of marriage cultures and practices that we also seem to enjoy much. Those sets of behaviors can be like having another kind of alpha status in a setting for the people involved.

Every culture has various wedding practices that we also seem to enjoy and encourage for members of our group, and we strongly support having those sets of practices happening for the people in our group.

The most important events for families in many cultures are actually the wedding ceremonies and events that create that bonded couple in each setting.

Those are all clearly instinctive patterns of behavior. We see them everywhere because they have instincts at their core.

It’s pretty basic at a core level. It’s clearly, at the macro level, a package of behaviors that are intended to help families survive.

We Had Hunter Gatherer Tribes as Our Context for This Continent for Many Years

The gathering processes for nuts, berries, and wild rice actually kept most family groups alive as part of the total package of calories for each family on this continent. People seemed to feel very right in making those behaviors part of their lives for many thousands of years and they still exist wherever we have the opportunity for them to happen.

We have replaced those sources of calories with the food supply we have now and many aspects of those old practices don’t fit who we are now as a nation and a people.

The tribes here on our continent had hunters and gatherers and family units where the genders lived with their own direct kin and survived, and even thrived, because of the family unit and its role within the tribe as the context for their reality. We now have entirely different sources of our basic foods and survival related factors. We need to understand how that current approach to those issues guides our behaviors today.

The tribes in every setting have worked with the modern reality. They have their own processes of creating and allocating resources in tribal settings. We have capitalism functioning in most settings, and private ownership of resources that end up feeding and sheltering the people in every setting.

We have tribal expectations for both genders in the context of that ownership model for property and resources. We’ve created very clear rules in most settings for both income creation and wealth and control over the resources in each setting.

The economic model that best describes that old preindustrial approach, that existed for tens of thousands of years on this continent and that is still happening in some South American counties and some parts of Southeast Asia and settings in Indonesia, is probably the universal income model — where the elk or moose or deer that was killed by the hunters in the family was used and eaten by everyone in the tribe, and where the acorns that were gathered, dried, and baked were shared, and they fed everyone throughout the entire process with those two sources of food.

Tribes and clans fought with other tribes and clans for thousands of years and they all had alpha leaders who led that effort for every group. It was more incidental conflict and periodic episodes of conflict rather than actual armies attacking one another in those settings, but every tribe had its heroes and champions, and famous — and even legendary — heroes who all earned that status by doing battle with the other tribes.

The American Indian Museum in Washington, D.C. tells those stories very well. It’s worth visiting as a museum for this continent. It tells us so clearly about inter group and inter tribal behavior literally going back into prehistoric times for those people from all of those settings.

We don’t need to feel locked into any of those old patterns and packages of behavior today as a country. We don’t need to feel restricted or constrained by the behaviors, values, expectations, and approaches that were created by those settings. We have the ability to see them, understand them, and then make decisions about how we will use those instincts in our own settings and lives.

We’re building our own expectations for behaviors around the country that were built based on the concept of individual freedom and capitalist ownership of property and wealth — and we have a foundation and an anchor of democratic voting for all of the people who live here.

We’ve managed to create an amazingly powerful country with great science, great learning, great economic strength, great wealth, and very powerful relative status for our military in the context of the rest of the world that also has some levels of military strength for their settings.

We live in a world where other countries are going through all of the challenges created in all of those settings by a challenging mix of ethnic groups and different tribes inside many national settings that create situations where the nations are actually at permanent war with themselves.

Gaza shows us how bad those patterns can be when they fully blossom in any setting.

Inside our country, we have things to worry about for our own future. We’re doing some tribal behaviors on our own that we need to understand and resist.

The reality is that we’ve divided fairly recently in some settings into political groups that function with many of the same instincts that have tribes fighting and killing other tribes in other settings. We have people in some settings who are deeply activated by some of those instincts and behaviors.

We have some structural issues that we need to address to keep ourselves from creating our own Gaza energy and behaviors here for those sets of issues.

We also need to look at what we’re doing relative to our children. We’ve done some unfortunate things relative to our children from all of our groups.

We haven’t done the right things for too many of our children, which is wrong. We should correct it.

We have women giving birth and doing the heavy lifting for our children in our modern families. We’re not helping our children as much as they need to be helped to get the best start in their lives.

We don’t have the same levels of functional assignments given to people in our communities that used to exist for our families across our country for a very long time.

We haven’t created universal health care support and universal educational support for everyone that will allow all of the various groups that make up our country today to collectively and universally succeed as groups for the important decades that lie just before us.

Unfortunately, it’s clear that we have lost ground in some of our family support areas today for many families in a number of our communities.

We haven’t come up with particularly good ways of helping the mothers in our world today with the support that is obviously needed to raise and care for a child born to us as a community. Too many mothers who are in our work forces today are forced to raise children with very little support from other people in her setting.

The families that have both mothers and fathers in the home today obviously have advantages for child raising issues and processes, and that’s not the normal situation now for a very high percentage of our children.

We have far too many mothers who don’t have the kinds of support for their children that high percentages of mothers had in earlier generations from their own families and local settings.

Some families do have extensive and strong support today, but a high number of our birth settings basically offer almost no functional support for either the mothers or for their children, until the children reach an older age, and that is in marked contrast to the support processes that used to exist for more children in those settings in our communities.

We’re evolving the role of sex in our country. We need to do that carefully, appropriately, intentionally, and well. It’s an important part of our lives. We should have it be a blessing for us; not a burden or a curse.

We need to steer that process in directions that work well and create appropriate results and outcomes for everyone who has any level of sexual relevance or involvement in our settings.

We have changing expectations and evolving realities about the sexual functions and activities for both genders, as well, in our settings and communities. We need to steer those expectations in enlightened and positive directions to give us all the best future in those areas — and to not have anyone going down wrong paths and being forced into wrong and damaging situations or behaviors.

Laws and expectations have changed for both men and women on sexual issues. We need to use the new expectations to create the right results for us all.

We used to have extensive sets of laws that affected sexual activity, and we’ve managed to have a number of those laws disappear and change into new sets of expectations.

We see a definite change in the sexual activity levels and context for many of the women in today’s setting compared to the practices and realities that used to exist for women in our communities. We don’t have the same set of alpha instinct sets of expectations and powers that we had for many generations for men in those areas.

The law has changed.

For centuries, the only legal sexual activity for women happened in marital settings. Women weren’t allowed to have sexual encounters outside of their marriages, and men in most settings in American cultures needed to be married to have sex as well.

We’ve eliminated all of the laws that linked sex to marriage. We now have sex as a decision made by each woman and by each man in the functional context of their own situation and their own individual functional status today.

People are free to have sexual interactions with anyone in their community that is not a direct family member and who is old enough to be legally seen as a sexual adult.

We’re going through significant changes in our expectations of sexual encounters as a country today. We’re absolutely clear today and clear now that sexual interactions need to be consensual for both parties in order for them to happen.

We’re on the cusp of an entirely new set of expectations for both genders in our country today. We’ve seen the role of sexual activities evolve over time as well as part of our societal practices and approaches.

On some areas related to sex, we’ve made major progress and we’ve made it in fairly recent changes and approaches.

Sexual Coercion Is Now Clearly Seen to Be Wrong

We’ve very recently had the “Me Too” movement for our country, and a related series of public events and community understandings that have made massive progress for respectful inter gender expectations and behaviors in a number of public, political, and business settings — and done it fairly quickly relative to our overall community awareness and understandings on those issues.

We probably have more enlightened behaviors and more enlightened expectations on gender and sex-related issues that have been created in the last couple of years than at any time in our history or our past. We’re locking those expectations into who we are as a country and who are as a culture relative to sex-related issues. We’ve seen massive and enlightened changes in those areas in just the last couple of years. That has changed literally centuries of expectations and standards for those issues in a very short time.

We’ve also very recently had a series of game-changing sets of interactions across our communities and social media internal alignments along the lines of “Black Lives Matter” movements and beliefs and the combination of those sets of issues and the new “Me Too” sex-related issues have given us a very useful context for the next levels of interactions on both race- and gender-related issues and expectations that might have us thinking in more enlightened ways on a variety of issues and topics for the first time in our history at community levels.

We’ve had major discrimination across a wide range of topics, issues, and behaviors over the years on racial and gender issues and we’re addressing some of those issues much more effectively now.

We’ve only begun to make some progress in some of those areas in this century — since that millennium changeover time for us as a country — but the changes in that brief time period have been significant. We’ve had a major explosion and expansion of enlightenment in the last four years. Those changes are creating new sets of expectations for us as a country that are extremely beneficial to us all. They should be preserved and protected.

We have an opportunity to make progress on multiple levels on all of those issues today. We should support and use that opportunity now.

Some of that progress has taken a very long time to happen. And it’s extremely encouraging, because it’s finally happening. Significant progress is being made on many of those issues today and we should protect and build on that progress as a country and a people.

We should actually create a Peace movement for the country today that also has enlightened behavior on issues of gender and race added to our sense of who we are and what we now believe in this set of areas.

There are some areas of obvious change in the immediate past that we should celebrate as a country.

Women’s issues have been exploding in this country since the women’s march on Washington about six years ago. The progress in that space has been extremely encouraging. It now feels like component parts are inevitable and highly likely to be our new normal as a country.

Some pieces of the progress we’re making are structural.

We now have well-armed and highly competent women who are members of our military units and who serve in all levels in those settings and who have given us a better and more advanced set of women in those areas of the country.

We still have serious levels of sexual assaults in some of our military settings, but major areas of gender-related progress have happened for the military, and we should never lose ground on what is happening there.

We’re on very different trajectories for those behaviors compared to only a couple of years ago.

We can and should build on that foundation at this point in time, because it’s the new normal for our military settings — and it’s the new normal for our communities at large and for our businesses and employers on a growing number of gender issues and realities.

Behaviors that we shrugged off and either overlooked or ignored four years ago, in both business and community settings, are absolutely unacceptable now. We have major social media feedback and responses to those behaviors that create a new normal for the country in a number of important areas.

We’ve clearly changed our basic context for sexual interactions in the past couple of years as a country. The rest of the world continues to have large areas of the world with extreme discrimination, and even negative and damaging sexual and gender-related issues about women, but we’re making progress in a number of areas in our country. We’ve gone down paths that we won’t have to go down again.

We should understand and support what’s happening in those areas. We should have that be how we approach those issues going forward for us from here.

We now believe at a politically correct, ethically grounded, and very clear level that the absolute key is that sex should only be consensual, and we believe that it should only be voluntary, and we now have that set of rules applying to everyone who lives here and who has relevant sexual factors that affect our behaviors and our expectations for our interactions with each other.

That’s major progress and it just happened in the last couple of years as a new way of us thinking about those issues as a country.

We now believe that forcing people or coercing people into sexual relations is wrong, unethical, inappropriate, damaging, dysfunctional, illegal, and even immoral for the people involved. We have a growing number of people creating a growing public consensus on those issues and beliefs. We see both our community activities and our social media consensus process becoming extremely clear and direct on that entire set of issues.

The new normal is to insist on consensual behavior and to be critical, judgmental, and negatively responsive to anyone who pushes those issues in a different and less supportive direction.

Insisting that sex can only be consensual is absolutely not how we used to see, think, or deal with sex as a country.

It’s very clearly not how sex is regarded for most areas of the world today.

There are only a few settings that are as enlightened as we are on those issues. The rest of the world overwhelmingly deals in more negative ways with women’s issues. There are even too many settings where women can’t drive or work or own property, because they’re women.

This is a sea change for our country at a significant level. We need to understand it and we need to protect it as the place we now are.

Sex is no longer only the consequence of marriages and family rules and regulations, and various levels of coercion and mandated behavior. For our communities in this country, it’s now becoming something that happens only in consensual ways. We have a growing number of people in our country who believe that to be true and who want it to be how we deal with that issue legally, ethically, and morally as a nation going forward from here. We need to stay on that trajectory. We need to make that reality happen for the long term for all of us.

That change to consensual being the only path to sex lets each of us decide in our own lives how best to optimize the blessings that can be tied to sexual encounters that we have and choose to have.

Sex can be wonderful. Sex can be amazing. Sex can be loving and supportive and reinforcing for people in their lives. We should set up the functional opportunities for wonderful sex to happen for people who want it to be part of their lives.

People should also have the opportunity to completely not have sex be in their lives.

We need people to be able to just say “No.” We need to have that No define their sexual interaction with the world with no pressure from anyone or anything on those choices for their lives.

That new context that can also result from each of us choosing not to have sex become a functional part of our lives should be what we can do if that’s the decision we make for ourselves at this moment in time and history and if that’s how we want to lead our lives relative to sexual issues.

There are people who choose to have sex be a wonderful, joyful, pleasurable, reinforcing, and rewarding part of their lives. We should accept that as a choice and we should give that trajectory a chance to happen for people who make that choice.

Sex can be seen as a gift from God from people who also believe that quantum physics is a gift from God — and who also believe that quantum biology and explicitly programmed DNA and its 35 million connected enzymes are gifts from God — and who believe that even our packages of instinctive behaviors are gifts from God if we understand them and then use them to achieve our best lives and create the most appropriate trajectories for our interactions with one another.

As part of the Gift from God package, we should all do what we can do to help each of our children get the very best start in life.

We now have a much more extensive understanding of the extreme epigenetic importance that the first months and first years of life have on the brains of our children. We’re beginning to understand how absolutely important it is to provide the right levels of neuron connections in the brains of our children in the first months and years of their lives.

We should strongly support family support for each child. We should recognize that the children who don’t get that support in the first months and years of life tend to fall behind and stay behind for their entire lives in many areas of their development.

We need to do the right thing for every child to give everyone from every group the right start in life. We need to help every child get the neuron connections that give children from every group the very best beginning that links direct interactions with each child to the very best beginning for their life.

We owe it to every child to make sure that support occurs.

The epigenetics of early development are powerful and clear. We should all apply them to every child.

We Need a Peace Agenda for America

We also need to make sure that we don’t allow any of the angry and dangerous and damaging people, who are trying so hard in so many of our settings to tribalize us and to divide us, to succeed in their efforts to steer us to hateful, damaging, and divisive behaviors as a country and permanently damaging inter group war.

We should not be at war with one another today.

We each need to be accountable and personally responsible in our lives and our settings for what’s happening now on all of those threats and issues and opportunities with other people and other groups of people.

For today and for now as a nation, we should each have our own ethical and moral turf. We should each have our own very intentional ethical and moral grounding and agendas. We should understand all of the instinctive programing and sociobiological factors that steer and affect our lives.

We should each decide to steer our lives to doing the right thing for the right reasons — and doing that in the right way. We understand who we are and what we are doing. We each choose to be accountable at the personal level for our lives.

Being personally and directly and individually accountable is a huge and important decision. It’s one that we should try to get everyone to make because it’s the accountable thing to do.

We need to choose our friends wisely at this point in our history. We should be making friends. We can benefit from getting their support to achieve our most accountable trajectories and lives.

We should make important friends and we should encourage them all to do the right things for the right reasons — to help us all achieve the goals we each set for ourselves with our lives.

We should reach out to angry and unenlightened people.

We should try to show them that we need to help each other get to optimal lives. We very much want each person to win so that we can win together in key ways.

We need to do what we can to persuade angry and divisive people to want us all to be supportive, inclusive, and loving — and to mutually win in the trajectories of our lives.

We should be helping one another in our interactions and Peace efforts with one another.

We need to avoid and defuse people who want to hurt and damage us all in our interactions with one another. We shouldn’t let ourselves be lured down those paths to wrong thoughts and wrong behaviors by people who want to steer us in those directions and who are highly skilled and very intentional in making those trajectories happen.

We need our leaders to lead us to the right places — and do that well in enlightened ways.

We need to create accountability in the people who lead us and we need to make that an expectation of them being our leaders.

We need to create expectations for our leaders. We each need to communicate those expectations to each person who leads any setting we are in.

We need the alpha leaders from each of our groups in every setting to be asked by each of us to lead that setting to inter group Peace. We need our group leaders to earn and keep their alpha status with our group by reaching out to the other groups relevant to us and by setting up win-win settings and outcomes for us as groups and members of each community with those groups.

Some leaders are trying to get us into conflict with one another. We should recognize when that happens. We should very intentionally resist their leadership and we should cause them to fail in their efforts.

We each have the power to steer major segments of our lives. We should celebrate and use that power in the right ways.

We need to rise above the temptations to go down those most divisive paths. We need to avoid going down the slippery slope to angry and divisive behavior.

We clearly have alpha leadership instincts in place as a country in a number of levels and places where the leaders of some of the groups want us to fight. Those instincts can steer us both to Peace and safety and they can steer us to hatred, and to conflict and division if we don’t decide to recognize who is headed in that direction and then very intentionally create both win-win goal sets and inter group Peace for settings across the country and then expect the leaders of our group to steer us to Peace — not conflict, in order to continue as our leaders.

We need to understand that we’re currently at some real risk of having people decide to tribalize and damage each other in the process. We need to recognize when that’s happening, and then intervene directly to soften the negative energy for the people with the most impact from those beliefs and behaviors.

We do have some people in some settings triggering inter group anger in very intentional and effective ways, and we need to steer gently past this set of conflicts to give us the best long-term stability and Peace as a country, and then we need to do what we need in our interactions with the angry people to get them to return to being an American Us and our friend, rather than a tribal Them and our enemy.

We Need Win-Win Results for the Nation

It can be a very slippery slope to extremely tribal behavior if we don’t recognize the risk and then steer in the other direction to create win-win results for everyone.

We do have alpha leaders for some groups in our country who want their own power, who are willing to divide us and separate us and to have us tee’d up in angry ways to damage to each other so that they can maintain alpha power over their group and over the turf we should all somehow share as a nation at Peace with itself.

We need to rise above those most dangerous instincts. We need to very intentionally and explicitly and effectively interact in a caring, respectful, and even loving way with the angry people to create a sense of American Us that can give all of our grandchildren a wonderful future and a great life that has us at Peace with each other today.

We need the people who lead our groups in every setting to have inter group Peace as an expectation we create for them as leaders in each setting and then reward them when they succeed.

We should be sitting on the cusp of a golden age for our science and for our economy and our success as a nation.

We should recognize that it would be extremely stupid and wrong for us — with our vast science and with our huge array of quantum physics-driven equipment and processes, and with our highly flexible and productive quantum biology, with its own deeply programmed and programmable science for both DNA and RNA and for the miracles of life — not to create and reinforce a world where we all prosper and thrive and where we have a long-term future of Peace.

We should be going into a golden age of science — not into a dark age of primal, tribal pettiness, inter group anger, and even evil interactions with each other.

Gaza is showing us how close we are to evil right now in a very visible setting in very visible and extremely believable ways.

The people who do actual evil in our country often want to get other people in their group who also believe that evil is the right approach and who lie and cheat and deceive to get us to hate one another. Those people with those clear and very negative instincts activated in Gaza clearly feel no regret for absolutely inhumane behavior that they inflict on other people. They want to take us to evil places. They want us to feel very right doing evil things in alignment with the evil they do.

We need to reject those people completely and absolutely in favor of Peace in all of our settings today as a country and as a people.

We need to restore humane behavior to what we accept and support and create for each other and for ourselves in each setting where those instincts are activated.

We need to rise to another level of humanity so that it becomes the new normal and then lasts for years and decades, rather than existing for days and hours.

Alpha instincts in some people are creating risks for us all at this point in our history and our lives. We should see them for what they are and avoid having them damage our lives.

Let’s understand that approach and that risk. Let’s keep it from happening here now by deciding to care about our fellow humans as an Us, and then create win-win approaches for each group.

When we look at the universe we’re in, it’s clear that we have quantum physics that gives us lasers and computers and all of the mechanical wonders of the world. We have quantum biology that gives us DNA, a million enzymes, and photosynthesis. We have quantum Sociobiology that gives us our science, our instincts, our cultures, and our basic behaviors. It’s all a package that we should be using to have this magnificent planet be a place for us to live as a species and a set of conscious beings with wonderful mathematics and extremely good things that we do for one another — because it’s the right thing for us to do.

Time is linear.

Time is sequential.

Time is wrapped in relativity.

Time is linked with synchronicity and most importantly, our time is now.

Now is what we need to see, understand, and know.

Now is the time that is directly and individually and most personally relevant to us.

We’ve been given the gift of Now.

Let’s not waste it.

Catching the Four Basic Paradigms as the Foundation for Where We are Now

We have Wonderful Gifts from God when you look at the universe we’re in.

Let’s accept and appreciate and use the wonderful gifts we now have from God.

Faith based groups can actually celebrate the fact that science is now a religious event when we understand that the whole fabric of existence is clearly intentional at multiple levels. It couldn’t have emerged from creation as a package and with all of the connections, components, and pieces without guidance and without support and steerage at multiple levels.

Evolution happens in the context of the highly intentional RNA and DNA tool kit. It happens in important ways that we should understand and steer at this point in our history.

Quantum physics, quantum biology, quantum sociobiology, and the 35 million magnificently designed enzymes that are embedded in DNA and RNA are obviously gifts that didn’t happen by accident — and that give our universe the absolute wonder and beauty that we see all around us as we grow wiser and more adept in seeing, discerning, discovering, and delineating the world that we’re part of as part of that gift.

It feels very right to say that we want our grandchildren to be safe and to live in Peace, and to ask the people who are feeling anger and hatred toward other groups to be open to accepting the new science as a gift from God, and then making it work for us all in mutually supportive ways that support every belief system. They’re gifts that help us be stewards of this planet in the most effective ways.

We have enough people in our immediate world who want Peace to bring them together to make that happen. Most people prefer Peace. Build on that preference.

Ask the people in each multi group setting to trust one another and appreciate the need to align with one another — and then literally, where it’s possible, actually hold hands and reinforce the linkage we all have with one another.

Be in touch with each other in that very direct way.

Ask the people in each multi group setting to share support with the people who want to hurt us. Then ask them to become aligned in loving and enlightened ways to make Peace happen in the most supporting way by steering us all down that path.

Say True Things

And let’s only say things now that are true.

We can decide to make Truth our goal, our commitment, our strategy, and our path to interacting with one another.

We should decide to help each other find that path of saying things that are true and enjoy being on it.

Telling the truth to one another can be extremely useful and reinforcing in that process. We should decide to do it starting now in each of our lives.

We could start on that path right now by deciding not to say anything that we know is not true at the time we say it — and to only say true things in our interactions with one another. That’s a practical, achievable, and doable thing to do.

Start now.

Actually, right now.

Start today, start here, and start now to only speak the truth in those interactions with each other.

Just don’t say anything that you know is not true.

That’s entirely doable for each of us.

It’s totally under our own control and we can each just do it.

It only takes us to make it happen for us.

Happy Birthday everyone who has a birthday today.

We live in a world of great beauty and huge blessings. Let’s celebrate the beauty and let’s appreciate and love the blessings.

Let’s steer this world to the place we want it to go and let’s feel the Joy when that happens.

Be well, everyone.