Part 11
22 June 1997
Your Personal Empowerment
1. Regarding first-hand observation and
solidly skeptical testing: Our main purpose is to spark people at all
levels into looking at matters afresh and into checking things out for
themselves, first-hand, putting various issues to test instead of simply
going along with what everyone believes.
That concern includes not "mere ordinary
citizens" but specifically scientists and professionals as well, of all
kinds. Science may be the best thing we have going on this planet, but we
have to remember that "science" is first and foremost a human social group
behavioral phenomenon first (including all that ethological bother of
in-group and out-group behavior and territoriality!!!), and what it is
supposed to be, only a very long second. In a field where you (or
the institution which pays your salary) survive by grants; you'd best make
sure that your research results come out like that grant source
expects! Tell it like it actually happens and you're out in the
cold - you scientists among my readers are under far more pressure to
conform to conventional view, and to slide past present and past
oversights and gaffes, than is our "mere ordinary citizen."
(--And if you are a grant source -
especially with public money: you necessarily have to screen out all the
wild ideas and wild people from whom, historically, nearly all our true
breakthroughs came. You don't want a golden-fleece award to come looking
for you! --And since resources and people in each field are drawn to where
the money is, and virtually every field is now financed largely by public
money: virtually every field has been sterilized of its potential for
major, rapid breakthroughs. --Breakthroughs which would be happening
onrush if the field were first the true science it is supposed to be, and
other things second.)
Look with your own eyes, see things first
hand for yourself, and you are in for surprises. Don't just drift with the
cultural tide like so many dead fish.
Be skeptical. That is important. That is
the impulse which, when we act upon it, moves us to find truth, and
which has moved the more readily empirical sciences ahead of other human
pursuits. When we deal with new techniques for various effects, as we do
often in this column, we don't and can't depend upon belief to make things
happen for us. Using belief to make things happen, makes for very sloppy
techniques at best. The techniques (among other phenomena) we address here
work for very nearly 100% of anyone trying them. Flip the light switch
and, whatever our state of belief, the lights come on (nearly) 100% of the
time. But for this to work --
--But for this skepticism to work at all
for us, requires that magic word, "act" - the folded-arms,
closed-face-&-mind kind of skepticism does us no good at all.
Folded-arms automatic dysbelief is no more productive than is
automatic naive belief.
Easily 90% of everything I've been taught
has proven to be contradicted by what I can plainly see for myself. Which
makes me wonder about what you've been taught. --Which makes me
wonder about what you are teaching. --Which makes me wonder about
what I'm teaching! Frankly, what I can see for myself, as imperfect
even as that medium is, I trust a lot more these days than I do what I've
been taught.
"Everyone knows" that you are stuck with
the intelligence you were born with - meaning the lack thereof. More
refined levels of argument have so much percentage of your intelligence
due to genes and so much percent to environment. Think that dynamic
situation through. What percent of the outcome of play at second base is
due to the thrown baseball? Clearly, even slight variations in how you
combine the effects of baseball, fielder, runner, second baseman, crowd
reaction etc., will make huge differences in outcome all over the
ballpark! With that one statement I just destroyed maybe six of the last
eight major books on the subject of human intelligence. --And as for one
slight variation--
--As for one slight variation,
environmental in this instance the dynamic interplay of factors producing
a given level of intelligence down the line: techniques we publish here in
Winsights, techniques for receptive visual thinking as one of many means
to work the various parts of the brain more closely together, in
independently conducted state university studies have demonstrated a
substantial increase in I.Q. points for each 25 hours of easy, pleasant,
entertaining practice!
That ease and degree of
intelligence gain just doesn't fit "what everyone knows," so chances are
you never heard of the study until now (inquire to: Department of
Chemistry & Physics, Southwest State University, Marshall, MN 56258).
E-mail us at WWenger101@aol.com and we'll be glad to show you, for free,
how to replicate those and additional effects.
Nor does it fit "what people know" that in
almost any field, topic or skill, including especially the content
of the sciences, that by any of a wide range of methods, one may readily
gain years of proficiency in only hours or a day or so! (Read how
to do so in the book Beyond Teaching And Learning.) Installments #
8 & 9 in this Winsights series will give you at least some of
that.
--Nor did it fit my expectations
when, in 1979, a classroom of EMRs (Educable Mentally Retarded persons),
conducted in Windsor, Ontario by St. Clair Community College, using one of
our procedures (the "Beachhead" procedure in Techniques of Original,
Inspired Scientific Discovery, Technical Invention, and Innovation,
were able to come up with original - and workable! inventions. 27 were in
the class; 17 were able to give attention to the task; every one of those
17 mild retardates was able to come up with an original workable
invention! Retarded people just don't do such things. To be an
inventor, one is supposed to be six different kinds of
genius.....???
2. Empowerment:
The point being that what everyone knows,
especially what everyone knows about everyone's limitations, can stand
some modification. YOU are brighter than you think. So is the
person next to you. Very little of your intelligence is online with where
you are conscious from. Given the way we raise children in this culture
and treat one-another, it's a miracle that any of your intelligence
got reinforced into consciousness instead of having to go underground. Few
if any of us actually intended the vast array of suppression and shut-down
effects with which we've laced each other's existence, but maybe a brief
history lesson is in order at this point.
Until a few hundred years ago, it required
the more-or-less willing services of many, many human beasts-of-burden to
be able to support a few people in more appropriately human conditions. A
few of those few, in turn, would deal with the larger needs and issues of
the culture while the rest wasted their bounty and opportunity a la
Thorstein Veblen. Only those cultures survived long which found
ways to make most of their people content to be beasts of burden,
hewers of wood and haulers of water. The stabler cultures evolved a
zillion features and practices to assure that outcome. Other cultures
without that stabilizing feature disintegrated or became absorbed by those
which featured it.
Then came steam power and the
industrial revolution. We no longer needed hewers of wood and
haulers of water, thank you! we needed instead interchangeable cogs in the
machine, with technicians and middle-level managers to maintain
it.
Everything transformed - or so we thought.
Where previously we had fought over who got to rule, now we fought over
how that rule was conducted. We went through ideologies, world
wars, all kinds of paroxysms reflecting the changing nature of society's
need vis-a-vis what it means to be human. --But: we changed almost
nothing. That vast webwork of practices, a few conscious or deliberate but
the vast majority unconscious and reflexive, which had been used to make
most people content to be hewers of wood or haulers of water, now were
used to make most people content to be technicians and middle-level
managers.
Bang! --Here came the information
revolution. Now we no longer need middle-level managers, and soon
will no longer need most of the technicians either. All that struggle and
redefinition to do over again!...... Now we have to learn to use
one-another as full human beings, here in the information age. Nothing
less will do. We can cut to the quick and start treating with one-another
- and with ourselves! as full-fledged human beings, or we've got a lot
more wars and ideologies and struggles to go through.
Before I say this next thing, let me give
you my definition of one term we've bandied about, a definition which
could lend some meaning to all of this. The term, which everyone has used
to mean something unintelligibly different from each other's usages, is:
"Democracy." "Democracy" I define as "people having a meaningful
say in the decisions which affect them."
With that definition, unlike the others,
one can look at a given situation and specify exactly how much "democracy"
is actually present.
Why is this an issue for us in this
context?
Every aspect of your life is being
constrained, assaulted, reshaped, without your having an input into the
decisions of the decision-makers who are thus affecting your life. More to
the point, it has become convenient to the various establishments
conducting our society, that most of you find the world too confusing,
bewildering, and uncomfortable to think about very deeply or to look
closely at. It's the working belief of most who are in those
establishments that most of you aren't worth consulting with anyway, that
there's little if anything of value which any of you "laymen" (from their
perspective) could contribute to the outcomes. It's easier for them if you
don't get in their hair. They prefer that you settle for the
evening TV news, some beer, and maybe a joke or so at the
office.
--Not that any or many of "them" are
conscious of this attitude. Most have verbal-based attitudes and beliefs
which run in a very different vein. But "they" are embedded - as are we -
in a massive, nearly invisible soft web of reflexes and practices shaped
for us all in those bygone centuries when most people of a society had to
be made content to be mere hewers of wood and haulers of water.
I respectfully submit: if some major
national or world problem is affecting you, your children, your
well-being, much of what you've struggled so on behalf of: that you
own that problem as surely as does the president or agency head or
legislative leader or the company boss. You have every right to input on
that issue, whether we call that "democracy" or "only fair!" The
second part of what Winsights is about, week by week, is the fact
that contrary to what everyone knows, you are fully capable
of learning about, dealing with, finding effective answer to, just about
any major problem or issue! You are more than a match for almost
any situation, if you pay enough attention to your own first-hand
perceptions and free up a few notches from what everyone knows.
You can find effective answers where our pitifully helpless chronic
experts cannot.
From time to time in Winsights, we provide
a working tool or so such as in installment # 5, "Over-the-Wall
Problem-Solving" or in our various other published techniques on
effective/creative problem solving, on the prime intelligence-building
procedure Image-Streaming and on other enhancers. But the main thing is:
that you begin paying more attention to your own first-hand actual
perceptions, as contrasted to what everyone knows and what you
"know." Go see for yourself; test things out for yourself. Test what? For
starters--
Everyone knows you can't meaningfully
increase intelligence. For free, learn and practice the procedure, as a
test, which has thus far demonstrated substantial gain in I.Q. points + other more
significant kinds of gain for 25 hours' easy, entertaining
practice.
Everyone knows people can't learn a new
skill or even a profession in a day; it takes years of hard, concentrated
work and sacrifice. Many test by getting a little of that effect going
with Winsights installments # 8 & 9, then see where to go from there
if you like that kind of results....
Everyone knows hardly anyone can invent or
innovate, or make meaningful scientific discoveries.... Everyone knows
that world poverty can't be solved, or lasting peace, or the problem of
nuclear wastes (see installment # 10), or the destruction of the rain
forests, or global warming, or recurrent recessions and sluggishness from
time to time in the economy......
Friend, YOU can readily discover
effective solution to each of these grave issues, just as you can also
surmount the toughest issues in your own immediate life. Friend, we're
looking right now at apparently effective answers to each of these
more general or global matters! --Rather than promoting our
wonderful answer to this or that, though, what we are about and what
Winsights is about----
It doesn't matter, certainly it doesn't
matter to us, whose solution fixed the problem, only that it gets
solved effectively. My belief is that as you become empowered to deal more
effectively with what's in your own life and around you, and others become
likewise empowered by these tools and with this see-with-your-own-eyes
perspective, more of those greater problems will get
solved.
As you heighten your capabilities and make
your own life better and more rewarding, that helps improve the life of us
all. --And you have every right to do so, no matter how inconvenient that
might sometimes be to existing arrangements. |