So much evidence abounds indicating Copiosis and a MUCH BRIGHTER FUTURE looms on the horizon. It would astonish me that so many pessimistic people fear the future. That is, if I didn’t know each person creates their experience through expectation, belief and what they focus on.
Human majorities focus on doom and gloom. So all they see contains fear-confirming evidence. Meanwhile, so much stuff happening – on the same planet – tells the tiny, radically optimistic minority here at Copiosis that a bright future looms.
That minority enjoys far more leverage than the doom and gloom majority.
While individuals ultimately own responsibility in choosing what they give their attention to, all of us go through pretty unavoidable conditioning that turns us into pessimists. Until we drop the conditioning.
Meantime conditioning’s various forms perniciously keep us shackled to self-created evidence confirming our fears and keeping us stuck. An example of said conditioning trains us to respect “authorita”. 🤣
But authorities often act in their best interest. Not ours. Yes, “authorities” often includes parents, partners…even presidents.
Where does it come from?
It makes sense such people act in their own self interest. Most people do. But letting them shape our reality doesn’t make sense. Yet we do it.
People come into the world wanting to live the way they knew possible before coming into the world.
In a Future Thinkers Podcast episode, Daniel Schmachtenberger, an evolutionary philosopher and strategist, and social engineer stunned us when he described how people let others shape their world. He then detailed how to get out of it and in so doing become a world changer. His simple recommendation: regain your innate creativity.
His longer explanation offered such startlingly accurate insights, we’re sharing a paraphrased version here. Listen to the original interview here.
The interviewer starts with a question. She says: A lot of young people ask us what they can do to create more positive and sustainable futures. Schmachtenberger suggested earlier in the interview that creating the future involves “closing loops” and the interviewer asks him to clarify, add more to his answer. That’s where it gets good.
I would have them look at why they ask that question, Schmachtenberger said. To the degree they see authorities and look towards those people for answers, they must overcome such thinking.
Think about the way most people grow up. As children we rarely got punished for doing what authorities wanted us doing, he said. Mostly we got punished for doing things we wanted to, that maybe appealed to our own sensibilities or desires, intuitions, feelings.
Punishment, reward and trust
Most of the time we got praised and rewarded for doing things authorities either wanted us to do or at least aligned with what we figured from previous experiences, they would probably want us to do.
Very deep conditioning drives this, Schmachtenberger explains. The conditioning makes us to look to others, to look to teachers and Sunday school leaders and parents and authorities to tell us how to live our lives.
When we touched our bodies, we found touching the best-feeling parts of our bodies got us most in trouble. Obviously doing what feels good to us generates punishment, so we can’t trust our feelings, we learned.
Authorities know, so we can apparently trust them, but not our feelings. Meanwhile no one shows interest in our thoughts or perspectives only predefined right answers authorities gave us. They praised us when we followed them and we got in trouble when we didn’t. Generally authorities showed no interest in our aesthetic and design ideas. They wanted us keeping clean things that were someone else’s design ideas.
Schmachtenberger said we got conditioned very deeply in that system. Most people work at jobs that cause more net harm to the world than benefit. And they don’t feel good about them, but they do not trust their feelings. Nor believe they can do something else. Or they don’t know how to figure out what to do. They also don’t believe in themselves enough to self assess or self initiate.
Most people, when they look at various world situations, feel not okay with much of the way the world runs. These feelings come from beauty in them, even if expressed as anger or jadedness. They don’t believe in their own solution finding, to figure shit out, so they just numb out. They numb out on alcohol or on TV or whatever they do.
The outliers think different
Look at people who meaningfully move the world forward. They solved some problems people had not solved, but really needed solving. Nobody taught them how to do it. That’s because no one could. The problem wasn’t solved yet.
Schmachtenberger said, nobody taught Edison how to make a light bulb. Nobody told Gandhi how to get home rule for India. Such people decide what to do because they knew that it was important before having any idea how to do it. Then they trusted in both their rightness of it enough and their own capability to learn. Then apply themselves deeply and continue through all the early not successes until they found stuff.
I would encourage young people take profound responsibility for their existence, Schmachtenberger said. Know a lot of people and a lot of books and a lot of courses have valuable shit to teach. But if an adequate answer to what they should do with their life existed anywhere, that whole thing would be done already.
The fact that the things aren’t done means all the best teachers and thinkers have not got it yet. A young person can learn from them but remember they’ll bring something original to add, not only in terms of their work, but also in terms of their creativity.
Deliver the world from darkness
Schmachtenberger said, to look around. See everything that really bothers you. What bothers you guides you. Then see all the things you really love. All the beautiful things that tell you they represent connection.
For example, animals are beautiful and all the devastation of animals in their habitat really bothers you. People are beautiful, so homelessness and war bothers you. Children are beautiful so bad education systems bother you.
Look at what you love. Look at how what you love receives so much neglect in various areas. Realize it does not have to be that way any more than the world had to stay dark in the time of Edison. And yet for all of human history before Edison, it did.
Edison took on something that seemed impossible and literally delivered the world from darkness.
Once you’ve examined all this, Schmachtenberger said, pick a topic then study the shit out of it, without thinking that a completely adequate solution exists.
A lot of partially good solutions exist. Maybe a totally good technology exists, but no one figured out its market feasibility yet. Maybe it needs something more. Study the problem well. Study what an adequate solution looks like. Gain a real clear insight of what an adequate solution looks like in your own area of what you care about.
As things emerge that you feel like you can contribute to, as you learn about your topic, contribute. Continue assessing on your own. Initiate on your own with, of course, good input from all the places of good input. Take deep responsibility for impacts you create in your life while here.
Then all of the study, all the training, all the application that you need to empower the kind of impact you want to have, make sure that happens. Make sure that shows up.
Stigmergy in essence
We like what Schmachtenberger offers because it represents our stigmergy-based culture here at Copiosis. We don’t cater to “authorita”. Because we know such people fight for the status quo and rarely support change. Especially change they perceive as threatening their stuff or their wealth. Even if it doesn’t actually do that.
Here at Copiosis the implementation organization, we bring in and empower cultural fits to do whatever they feel drawn to so long as doing that moves Copiosis forward. In that way we nurture ideas from All That Is, instantiated in individual humans, humans who know the possible world rises from the one we live in today.
Changing the world starts with moving out of indoctrination we all received as kids. Starting there, we align ourselves with that which we knew before we became human. Then, in our unique way, we become super human.
Super human. The world needs more of them. We do our part. How about you?