The Will to Change

Once one understands that change is not the arduous and complicated rocket science that self-interested “professionals” would have us believe takes years of their supervision to attain, the remaining obstacle is the will to change. It is a lot like many clamoring for “freedom,” but when they are given it, do everything they can to limit those freedoms rather than to fully express them. Not only will they not express them in themselves, they will discourage anybody else with the impulse to express those freedoms also from exercising them -- because they won’t, and wish to retain the status quo -- of everybody not being all they can imagine themselves to be because of some convenient excuse everybody else will agree to.

It is even fashionable among some people, to claim they would be President of the United States, if the current officeholder hadn’t stolen the opportunity from them. And thus they console themselves with their delusions that there is no need for change or improvement -- but it is the rest of the world that needs to come around to their self-assessment that they alone are perfection, and it is the rest of the world that needs to adjust their attitude to see that. That is their idea of “changing the world” -- and so of course, everything stays the same, because it would be far easier and simpler to just change themselves.

In fact, that is the only way the world ever changes -- when each accepts their own responsibility to do so. But we live in a time and culture that permits those from ever taking responsibility and accountability for their own lives and actions. Undoubtedly there is the 5% percent with “glandular problems” to account for their condition, but far too many also claim such handy self-diagnosis as their own convenient excuses. The capacity for self-deception in the cultural climate was never more supportive for doing so. But the healthiest will not avail themselves of such excuses -- if any other explanation is possible. And one never knows until he runs his own experiment, which in real life, is experience that conveys many unforeseen benefits.

It is entirely possible in this age of media and institutionalized learning, that many do not learn from personal experience any more -- as previous generations may have had to. Thus everything they know, and maybe all they know, is what others have told them is the truth of the world -- and are reinforced and rewarded for agreeing to that conditioning (indoctrination) rather than learning to test the truth of one’s own senses. Therefore, even what they know of themselves, is what the self-designated authorities tell them is how they ought to be feeling and thinking -- that this is the “correct” way to feel and think, and never mind what one really feels and thinks independently.

So the conditioning one seeks, is to empower one to be more independent, more confident and trusting of his own judgment and ability to think for oneself, because that is each individual’s real value for any society -- that he provides information not available to all, rather than the consensus doing so for each of its individual members. That’s how schools of fish or herds of animals move with the intelligence greater than merely the sum of its parts. That is the wisdom of all -- and not setting oneself up against the wisdom of all.