We need a truth commitment for the country.

We each need to have Truth be a clear expectation for a number of our key interactions with one another.

We need to define the commitment we make to truth very carefully and we should set the truth process that uses that commitment up to be achievable and to be understandable for large numbers of our people across our communities and settings and to be achievable in a number of our interactions with one another.

We should commit to being moral and ethical people who want Truth to be relevant to our lives and who believe that truth telling should be a personal commitment we make to ourselves and to each other in a number of relevant interactions and ways — and who believe that we’re better people with higher levels of self-respect when we say and tell the truth in those relevant interactions and settings.

We used to take pride in being truthful people. We need to bring that pride back into our lives.

We each need to make our personal and direct commitment to Truth as fully informed and aware individuals who know for key communications and processes what’s true and who know what’s not true — and who then choose truth as our commitment to one another and to ourselves in the most self-respectful ways.

We each then need to achieve that commitment and attain it with ourselves as the actual definer of what is real and true in what we say and what we do, relative to each other in our shared settings and our interactions with each other.

To make that work, we need to be people who have sufficient self-respect and enough personal honor, personal integrity, and sufficient self-worth to commit to have that commitment we each make to truth guide our words and our thinking and guide and structure our behaviors and steer and direct our communications and our interactions with each other in the most relevant and actual  key areas of our lives.

We need Truth to be the underlying expectation for that process for each of us and we need each of us to learn to be absolutely honest with ourselves about both the commitment we’re making and our faith and our personal ability and integrity in actually doing it.

What does Truth mean in that commitment and approach?

It’s a simple and clear expectation.

We need to each commit to saying true things and, most importantly and most clearly, we each need to personally commit to absolutely never say things that we know are not true at the moment and at the time that we say them.

We should each make the commitment to tell the truth and to never say something we know is not true in our interactions with one another.

We should  commit to saying only true things in our inter group communications. We should do that because we believe that the truth can give us a foundation and a path to build trust and it’s much more difficult and impossible to build trust without that level of truth as a key expectation and part of the process.

We need to build trust to be a nation at Peace with itself.

We should all want inter group Peace because it gives our children and our grandchildren their best shot for having a good future for their lives.

They will have very bad and often damaged lives if we continue down the road we’re at in too many places of being a people at significant levels of inter group and even tribal conflict, and our children and our grandchildren will be permanently surrounded  by people who will aspire and intend to damage them at multiple levels for their lives if we stay on the path we’re on.

Those patterns of instinctive behavior are clear and extremely powerful in steering our settings and our lives.

When we define someone to be a Them, we feel no guilt in damaging them on a number of levels.

We need to become an American Us at some core levels, and that can’t happen without creating some important levels of intergroup and personal trust.

We believe that we need to significantly reduce levels of conflict in our most troubled communities and settings and our goal is to do that in-part by each making that commitment to truth in clear and believable ways, and then achieve it for ourselves.

We can each do this for our own lives.

We can do this in-part as individuals because we can clearly each make that commitment to truth and to not saying things that aren’t true, and then we can each actually follow through as individuals by actually doing exactly that with our communications and with relevant aspects of our lives that are truth related so that everyone in every setting can trust what we say.

We can each make the commitment to truth from any setting that we’re in — and we can tell people who interact with us in each setting that we believe in truth as our way of communicating with each other in the actual setting we’re in, and they can expect that behavior from us as our future response and our basic ongoing interaction with them.

We need people who hear us in settings where we are working to build trust to know that we are absolutely intending and committed to be saying true things when we communicate with each other in public and direct settings. We can build trust by making that commitment and then by following through consistently to have it be a true reflection of what we say and what we do in every setting.

That commitment to truth and to truth telling isn’t what we too often do now in far too many settings.

We do not have inter group trust or interpersonal trust in far too many settings today, and that makes sense because we do things that make people know they should not trust us and people would need to be stupid to trust the people who say absolutely untrue things in those settings.

People too often tell lies and feel absolutely positive about that behavior and about the lies they tell because that’s what we have accepted as appropriate and acceptable inter group behavior today and it’s our expectation that accuracy and honesty are not our goals or our expectations in many of our communications and exchanges.

Tribal behavior is at the heart of many of those dishonest exchanges.

Our instincts to tribalize and to dislike the people we perceive to be of another tribe and who have some level of conflict, tension, disagreement, or negative interaction with our tribe, allow us to suspend ethics and basic levels of morality in our interactions with that other group of people.

We feel justified in lying when we believe that the lie meets the needs of our own group in a setting, and we don’t think or believe that creates an ethical problem of any kind when we are lying to people we perceive to be them.

When we are in a conflicted situation with another group of people, we often say untrue things as part of our response to the conflicts and as a way of gaining an advantage and a win for our group at the other group’s expense.

We have very different standards for people we perceive to be Us and for people we perceive to be Them in our current settings.

We Have Very Different Ethics for Us and for Them

We suspend ethics in many of our communications with some other people.

We don’t feel that we need to be ethical in some of those interchanges and communications.

We don’t consider saying things that are not true in those settings to be an unethical action or a functionally and fundamentally wrong behavior when we are doing it to someone we perceive to be an enemy or who we see as a threat to our group.

Many people believe strongly that they should be ethical in their communications with people who they identify as somehow being legitimate ethical relations, but don’t feel that those standards should apply to many people who are not included as being legitimate ethical interactions or people who legitimately get honest information just for ethical reasons.

We often follow the direction laid out by Sun Tzu in his famous Art of War book that calls for deceit, deception, misdirection, and intentionally misleading information to be used to win in our interactions with the other group in a war setting.

Sun Tzu had a dozen clear and effective ways of intentionally misleading the other group in a conflicted situation. He praised, saluted, and celebrated the leaders who were most successful in those efforts because they created wins, victory, and sometimes even survival for their own group because the deceptions channeled the enemy force in a setting into failing in their efforts to damage our group and sometimes gave us wins over the enemy when that damage to them happened.

It feels very right in a time of war to deceive and mislead and misdirect the thinking of the enemy in each conflicted and contested setting. It often can lead to both survival and victory for the group doing the deceptive things to the other group when they are interacting with each other and somehow create an advantage at some level with the deceit that we use that turns into a victory for our group.

It’s actually an instinctive thought process and behavior in some settings and some situations when tribal instincts are directly and explicitly activated.

Stephen Pinker writes about our very well aligned and deeply embedded instinct to defend our own tribe against enemy tribes, and in his recent book on mental models and processes, he says that when those thought processes and motivating factors are activated for our thinking, we can be extremely creative in inventing arguments, positions, and rationales and persuasive bodies of evidence that aren’t necessarily true but are often highly effective in making our arguments and supporting our side in the setting and they tend to feel true to relevant people when they are well described and effectively sold as part of that tribal support process for those interactions.

Pinker calls our ability to invent creative arguments for the positions of our tribe and then to use them effectively in group settings “a survival instinct” tied to our overall tribal behavior and he understands it to be part of our basic underlying packages of instincts that set up the cultures and behavioral expectations for our social behaviors for each of our groups in conflicted settings.

The packages of instincts that we use to guide our lives are clear and important to understand as we look at our behaviors and as we aspire to steer our settings toward inter group safety and Peace in ways that are aligned and supported by our instincts.

Hierarchical Instincts Shape Many Thought Processes and Behaviors

We have strong instincts to build hierarchies in every setting. We also have strong instincts to have alpha leaders in place in every setting and we tend to have their own alpha behaviors and emotions activated everywhere the hierarchies exist.

We have heads of families, heads of clans, heads of tribes, and heads of various organizational setting, with clear sets of instinctive behavior and we activate similar patterns of emotions and behaviors for whoever is in the lead position in any setting.

People who become Alpha in a setting tend to find that status to be emotionally and neurochemically rewarding in a high percentage of the situations and it’s often difficult to persuade someone who is head of a family or head of any group setting to give up that status when it is clearly in place and generating the instinct packages that get activated in people by that position and the relative power it creates.

People often aspire to remain captain as long as they can when they have that status and that position in a group.

They sometimes do divisive things to maintain that position as head of the group.

Part of the skill set and strategy approaches that emerge for those alpha leaders in each setting is to create and invent perceptions, positions, behaviors, and thought processes that are intended to have their group support them as leader as defenders and protectors of their group and to have their group oppose any other tribe or group that might be relevant to each setting and relevant to their sense of their group identity and tribal turf.

We tend to each have a deep need to be part of an Us and we have very strong emotions, values and behaviors that get activated when the tribal alignments and emotions are engaged in a setting, so the planet is covered with people in various groups who have those factors engaged and defining who they are and who are channeling their interactions with each other and with other groups in each setting in alignment with those behaviors and in opposition to the other groups relevant to each setting.

Those factors can and do trigger negative perceptions and behaviors between groups in many settings.

Those behaviors and those thought processes define, structure, and activate people everywhere. They tend to support and align with what we all expect, want, and need to be in our daily lives and in our interactions with the world we live in to both create our goals and to define our values and beliefs at multiple levels relative to the people in each setting.

We all want to be an Us.

There Are Six Alignment Triggers for Our American Us

It feels particularly good for each of us to be an Us in most settings, and we tend to steer in that direction when being an Us or becoming an Us or being part of an Us and supporting an Us is possible to do.

People feel good being in family alignment, tribal alignment, community alignment, ideological alignment, religious alignment, economic alignment, and being in various levels of cultural and social alignment, and people tend to have a sense of connection, appreciation, and attachment with the groups that are relevant to their lives each day because they somehow create a sense of Us in each of those alignments and settings.

We tend to create a sense of Us in response to six key instinctive triggers that can be activated in a wide range of settings to get people to have a sense of being Us.

Danger is a high priority trigger for making that sense of being Us happen.

Danger can be a very powerful activation tool. We align instinctively and effectively as an Us when we believe that we are actually in danger and that the danger is real to lives and can be responded to very directly by working together in some way to make the danger be reduced or countered or mitigated by group response.

Sun Tzu said in his Art of War book, that when there are men from various warring groups on a boat and the boat is actually sinking, the men will react to the danger and will align to save the boat.

The second most effective alignment factor that creates a sense of Us in any setting is for people is to have a common enemy. We feel very right when we are allied against a common foe.

Alpha leaders who are intending to have their group support them will often define a common enemy to help channel and increase that level of support, and the alpha leaders are often very skilled and effective at identifying that enemy and uniting their group against them in very explicit ways.

We also feel like an Us when we do things as teams and have those instincts, emotions, values, and mind sets activated. We love being on teams and we feel like an us — and sometimes generate serious loyalty towards whatever teams we create and are part of.

Functioning as teams can often help create alignment in a group setting. We love being on teams and create effective alignment attachments to other team members when we set up a sense of team identity and function for that setting.

We even have strong abilities to be loyal as fans for teams — and some of our people have strong team loyalty that can be a major energy commitment for their lives that definitely can create alignment and a sense of Us with other fans of a team.

We can also trigger a sense of Us by having a group identity that tells us who we are allied with for the purpose of being a group Us.

We can be a group Us by tribe or community or ethnic group or culture or other sense of identity that we believe tells us who we are as members of that group.

We have some very weak group identities that are relevant any time that we are in a setting, and we have some very strong group identities that define us with power and precision as clearly being a member of the specific group.

We know if we are members of the most powerful groups identities — and we have a natural trust and affinity in any setting for other members of that group.

Even the most powerful identities have subsets within the group — and each of the subsets is relevant to our understanding and alignment decisions and feelings within the group.

Native American is a major and very useful and well supported American group at one level — and we also have the strong reality that the Navaho and Cherokee are not always an Us in that setting, and it’s clear that each tribe or indigenous nation has its own set of definitions for who is an Us for each person in that group.

We have the ability to be somewhat creative in those sets of alignments, because we have great power to form groups at various levels — and our instincts and intellects are programmed to allow us to create functional and effective subsets within each group.

Hispanic is considered to be a group for many legal reporting purposes. That makes sense at several levels — and anyone who looks at the people who have that label closely know that the Cuban Americans have different internal alignments than the Mexican Americans and both of those groups are not identical with the Puerto Rican Hispanic people and anyone trying to reach conclusions about our Hispanic Americans knows that all of the differentiation factors are extremely relevant to the people in each group and need to be understood and supported if we want to form am American Us for the purposes of building Peace for our country going into the challenging years directly before us.

As we work on creating Peace for all of our communities, we need to appreciate all of the ways we have in each setting to have a common identity as a group, and we need to look at each community and understand who in each community represents a legitimate and meaningful group for those populations and we need to figure out how to get all of the groups to rise above just their most basic definitions and to somehow decide to become an American Us based on factors that unify us as a country and our collective and shared best interests as a nation.

We should use wealth as a trigger for that process.

We live in a world of great resources, great riches, massive assets, and great technological ability and knowledge, and there should be enough wealth here for people from every group to prosper.

We should be able to create win-win outcomes for every group, because we have the technology and skill sets to build a future that has everyone prosper and do well and our new artificial intelligence tools and skill sets should make that a highly achievable goal because we now have quantum physics and quantum biology and we can create safe and efficient energy and safe and productive biology and tool kits that let us create the future that we want for us all as a people and a nation and give us Peace in the process.

The fifth most effective alignment tool in our various settings has been to identify ways of sharing assets and prospering in the process — and we need to choose to go down that path today. We need to achieve that goal of full asset benefit and realization by functioning as a group.

Collective gain has been the fourth level of the group alignment pyramid for the past two decades because asset accumulation is very motivating for many people in many settings.

Group greed can be a powerful alignment tool — and it’s another strategy that people in alpha positions who want to continue to be alpha can use to both retain their own power and to channel behavior in specific directions that achieve that goal. We need our alpha leaders in every setting to agree that we should achieve win-win outcomes for every group and that we can do that by doing the right things to create inter group trust now and inter group good will now as an anchor for that process.

When we look at that pyramid, we can remember the famous Maslow Hierarchy of Needs pyramid that looked at patterns of behavior for individuals rather than patterns of behavior for groups. Maslow also started with Danger as the anchor motivation factor on his pyramid, and then he worked his way up the motivation factors to end with self-actualization as the top motivator on his pyramid.

He believed that when every thing else was dealt with in a person’s life, the motivation that continued to guide emotions and thinking was self-actualization and enlightened behavior by individuals.

This pyramid deals with group behavior, and the reality we face is that when we look at the world around us, there are two trains of thought that tend to be most relevant at the top of the group pyramid.

The very top trigger on the group alignment pyramid has two versions, and they both work.

One is Mission/Vision for the group. The other top trigger is loyalty to a leader and to a hierarchy and team aligned with that set of values and alliances for each group.

A mission/vision for the group can be motivating for many people — who can choose to believe in the mission/vision for everyone there and who want to achieve that mission by being in the group.

Some religious groups and some political groups have their group aligned and focused on those sets of defining and motivating factors for their group, and people inside those groups move up the hierarchy and have more impact and power when they believe in the mission of the group and sell it well to other group members.

The other version of the top alignment trigger that also has great power and impact is simply loyalty to a leader, and that doesn’t need to be tied to any other set of beliefs because it’s tied to a person who, in most settings where that happens, actually determines as the alpha leader what the group beliefs and key culture points are.

We Have Strong Instincts to Support a Leader

We very often have very strong instincts to be deeply loyal and to fight for and support a leader for our group who triggers the group leader instincts in their own mind and in the minds and emotions of the people in our group who follow that leader.

We have elevated leader loyalty to a very high value and a standard of commitment in a number of settings, and we have long histories of having Kings whose people were willing to die in order to have the King succeed in being King.

We know that model well.

Joan of Arc was loyal to her King and she believed that God had called her to have her King succeed on his royal throne because she believed that was a sacred goal for France to have him be victorious.

The Nazi component of the German Reich believed in Adolf Hitler as their sacred and alpha leader — and they made that loyalty a key part of being German for that entire war and process. The people who were Nazi believers were intensely committed to that loyalty and that approach to the world.

Anyone who says that the Nazis were temporarily mislead for those years can look at the old films of the German people in group settings during that time and see how powerful those instincts were for the hearts, minds, and emotions of those people — and how much the Germans actually were swept up in those alignments and their loyalties to that leader and felt good about being there.

Those sets of instincts worked there and they can also work extremely well here if if we know what we’re doing and do it with those tools in mind.

We can actually use that entire pyramid in multiple settings, and it tends to work whenever multiple people are part of the process and exist as some kind of group.

That pyramid can be used in any group setting to get alignment in a group.

Businesses who can convince their workers that there is a danger to their group that will be countered and defeated by working together as a group have a good chance of succeeding as an entity, and companies that have used those kinds of motivators have had success at many levels in achieving their goals and succeeding as organization.

Mayors who want to align their cities can use danger, common enemy, team activities and commitments, shared sense of community identity, functional wins and benefits from shared behavior, and a sense of mission and vision for the city to create that alignment.

Mayors often have people who are personally loyal to them who work hard to have the city succeed. We have alpha instincts, beta instincts, and even theta instincts that help us all understand our relative roles in those hierarchies — and the deputy mayors in each setting tend to have very clearly visible and aligned roles and functions for that process that tend to help each setting do the work it needs to do to achieve their goals.

Our challenge now is to figure out how we can move away from tribalizing as a country and going to war with each other in various settings where we suspend conscience and then do damage with other people with no sense that doing damage is a bad thing to do inside our own country, and build Peace instead by intentionally and skillfully doing what can make Peace happen and succeed in each setting where we are now conflicted.

We will be better off in the multi group settings that make up our country and communities today if we can somehow create some level of trust between the groups that allow Peace to happen — and that’s where we should now be working in very intentional ways to use truth and honesty as a tool of alignment for the settings and a foundation for Peace.

We Need to Make Honesty a Personal Commitment and Point of Pride

We can make going down that path of being honest a point of personal pride.

We’ve been there before.

We once took pride as a country in being trustworthy with other people.

Americans were trustworthy people as a core value of who we were and are.

We used to be able to say: “My word is my bond, and you can trust me at the most personal level because my values and my ethics will only allow me to keep my word whenever I give it as my word, and you can trust me not to promise one thing and then break my word and do another.”

We need to return to that level of ethical behavior because it is the only way to maintain and sustain personal self-respect as a moral and ethical person, and we know that full self-respect isn’t possible for each of us if we know we are not personally an ethical person.

It’s a self-fulfilling and self-defining role — and it is much more enlightened and morally appropriate as a behavior when we each tell the truth and when we have that be our new normal for the positions we are making.

It’s a very doable strategy and approach.

We should continue to have political and ideological debates, and hold different positions and beliefs on key issues, but we should absolutely not ever in those discussions with each other say something that we know for a fact is not true when we say it.

Let’s agree to not say things that we know are not true.

That isn’t an insurmountable or unachievable commitment for us to make because it is under our own personal control for each of us as a rational, intellectual, intentional and intelligent person to simply not ever say something in those debates and discussions that we know is not true when we say it.

We can each police ourselves with that commitment.

Our grandchildren need us to go down this path.

We should all want America to succeed because it is where our children and our grandchildren will spend their lives and we want them to have save and successful futures for their lives because we care deeply about them and we want that to happen.

We can go a long way down that road by agreeing to say true things on those issues.

Let’s Start a Truth Movement for America

Let’s start a truth movement for America.

We don’t need to get everything right to do truth.

We can be in error on facts or theories or suppositions and we can just disagree on those points in respectful ways as we go forward.

What we need to have in place is that we each commit to not say something that we know is not true when we say it.

We can and should also ask our leaders for the groups we are in to use that same standard — and the world would be a better place if some of them agree to do that — but this is a personal ethical and moral commitment and it’s under our control because it just applies to each of us who makes it.

You can sometimes lead your leaders.

That leading of leaders happens more often than you might think.

Leaders are often looking constantly and even eagerly for information from their groups about how they can maintain and even increase their relative position and power with their group, and leaders actually can be led in the right direction from people in a group if you provide quiet guidance to them on key issues and if you do it in a way that is more reinforcing than threatening to their position and yours.

Media and social media outlets also are often looking for information about how they can maintain and even increase their reach with the audiences and the constituencies they serve. They are often eager and able to learn things from their audiences that they believe will increase and solidify their audience.

It is entirely possible that you might be able to share this information about what’s true in a non-threatening and informative way with those people as well and you might be able to create some steerage in those areas and even some enlightenment levels by giving them that information in a functional way.

The very best social media steerage happens when people read something that they feel needs to be corrected or changed and then actually provide and add information to the flow that creates those channels of information and of enlightenment to and from those channels and actually persuades and influences the process by adding good information to the discussion and debate.

You don’t personally need to fight in those group leader interaction processes or in those group feedback processes to have an impact. Just steer a bit and see what happens.

“Truth” might be an easier sell than you might have guessed with some folks because their hearts were already at least partly aligned in those directions and because the additional information they received from you in talking about these issues and those behaviors was golden and relevant to their thought process and you gave it a channel for actualization.

Truth.

Worth trying.

And much less stressful than many of the alternatives.

We are reaching a point in our overall communications universe and our fabric of interactions where electronic media will be extremely important, and the core credibility of the source for that information will be increasingly relevant because there is so much fake news today and there are so many artificial intelligence tools and presentations that do fake versions and functional clones of the various people involved in all of those settings, that we no longer can trust our eyes to determine whether someone actually said or did what we think we heard them do or say.

In addition to the truth agenda, we will need someone that we trust to give us access to real flows of information about other people in the communications loop so that we know if what we just heard was really said by the person who appeared to say it.

We have reached the point where we need a trusted Truth monitor that can screen out and block or expose the fake versions of people for these conversations and interpersonal growth opportunities and let us identify at least some of the evil and damaging behaviors for those sets of issues.

That is possible to do — and we need someone we can trust to do it.

We might have the starter group for that process be people who decide to take the truth pledge for these conversations and communications and who post that commitment and create a link to this process by sharing this thought piece from The Institute for Inter Group Understanding website on any of their social media outlets.

Please share this information and proposal.

We can begin in a number of settings by just saying on the social media alignments we each have that we have read the thought piece about truth that this is in and we are directly are committed to not saying anything that we know is not true at the time we say it when we do our political discussions for this season and time with both our own group and anyone from any other group who is interested in those conversations and topics.

There are several “Truth” thought pieces on the site.

We also have some ‘Thought’ pieces on the site about win-win strategies and goals, and about understanding our instincts so we have them completely under our control and we don’t have them running and ruining our lives without us knowing what they have done to us when they have been engaged.

Let’s be smart on those issues, and let’s give Truth a chance whenever you can make that happen.

It’s free. And we each can do it.