On getting motivated to change. Part 2

(This is part two of a three-part series on my ignition process to change. Image Credit)

The history lesson in the first section of this article is important because for motivation to occur, the background information is thoroughly essential in understanding the collective perspective with which we assimilate our reality and the sprouting intellectual and moral dilemmas we face; the ability to contrast can help us detach from our environment, detect our points of intersection with society’s false ideas, extrapolate our flaws, recognize what matters at the end of our days and capitalize on our potential for change, genuine drive and appreciation of the growth process.

Lie #2: The more we own, the happier we become

Depending on the pattern with which we live life, with our minds we can rationalize anything and so it should be easiest to work in our own self-interest. But we all know that sometimes, we’re more destructive than we are constructive, because when emotion comes into it, the wiring changes the way we ‘should’ function.

Sophisticated techniques are used to engineer our consent for a product. For instance, during the late twenties, the American Tobacco Company decided to expand their market share by advertising overseas and approached Ed Bernays to handle the project. But Bernays informed the delegates that half the US market was yet to be tapped, he meant the female population because it was stigmatized for women to smoke then. So he sent a group of young models to march in the New York City Easter day parade. He then told the press that a group of women's rights activists would light "Torches of Freedom". On his signal, the models lit Lucky Strike cigarettes in front of everyone. The New York Times (1 April 1929) printed: "Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of 'Freedom'". This helped to break the taboo against women smoking in public. When the women were asked about it, they responded with a scripted line of it being their expression of independence (go figure).

If you’ve noticed, American corporations set the fad and their ads are the cannon against which we measure our evolution. Subconsciously, if I have the latest iphone, I am a hip person. Celebrities act as spokespersons promoting products so you too can feel like your committing your two cents in the direction of success when you make the purchase.

Success to an average Earthling means material gain and the climate created for this fantasy, think Hollywood and MTV, only purport corporation’s aims. It also generates a self-centered, narcissistic mentality akin to vain celebrity magazines. Our planet has enough resources to create a utopian society but the ambience of the now aggressively presiding ideology focuses on the satisfaction of a few which, inevitably comes at the cost of others.

Top notch physiologists are hired to manipulate us. Adults barely stand a chance, let alone children and adolescents. We need to stay informed to have better lives but when we’re reliant on the mainstream media, we’re exposing ourselves to their hypnosis. This is one man’s testament.

What else is there besides consumption to make us feel content about our lives? What’s the alternative to spending? Actually, a better question to ask is what is your motive for action? What is it that drives you in your life today, or even five years ago?

I understand we all need money to survive and I’m not advocating a monk-esque sacrifice or lifestyle but the words humility, evenness and modesty incorrectly connote meekness and timidity in today’s modern jungle This stretching and warping of behaviour is another symptom of the capitalist system, magnified by the mainstream in pop music, video and culture (think any pop/hiphop lyrics + video). In our society, the first thing they ask about is the car one drives because it exhibits one’s financial status and indirectly, one’s social status and the amount of respect and honor deserved. It shouldn’t be the case but it is, more often than not. And the reason society has normalized this is because, under the influence of corporation’s suggestions, this mentality empowers a materialistic drive.

By all means, do aim to make more money. If you work hard, you deserve it. Almost everyone works hard, but not everyone is equal in that sense. The scale is skewed towards the powerful few who want to continue to dominate and concentrate the flow of revenue in their direction. One percent of the world’s population own 90% of it’s wealth!

Can we penetrate the ‘scheme’ and ‘make it’? It’s built in a way that chains your labour (in other words, you) for a very long and miserable life: You graduate from college and Uni only to be debt-laden and desperate to find a job. You end up accepting a 9-5 job with a meagre salary which follows marriage and then you have to work within the framework of a family which cups any future thoughts of risk.

And as I mentioned in the first part, the very few who leach into the rich class, are the ones who are paraded as natural results of Capitalism, when in reality, they’re rarities who are idolized. Do you want to be a model, a superstar athlete, movie star or rock star? Ironically, they’re valued so much in repressive societies because they provide visual escapes from a depressing reality. If you aim to be a surgeon, a physicist or any other real superstar, you wouldn’t care less about a bunch of cosmetic people.

Maybe we can share? Maybe we shouldn’t wait for the ones in the one percent to humble down. Maybe we should start today, without any grievances, to empower each other using our own intellectual and tangible resources?

After all, we are who we are corresponding to our surrounding recognition, formed by our own thoughts and actions. And we can be great without having someone’s name on our clothes or a logo to brand our possessions or spend wasted time hanging out at malls and coffee shops confabulating like the cast of a TV show under the pretense that that’s a progressive lifestyle!

“The lesson of life that is rarely mastered is the art of fulfillment. And the reason is, it's about appreciation and it's about contribution. You can only feel so much by yourself because we all know, corny as it sounds, the secret to living is giving. We all know life's not about me, it's about we.... You must grow. We all know the answer here. If you don't grow you're what? If a relationship's not growing, if a business is not growing, if you're not growing, it doesn't matter how much money you have, how many friends you have, how many people love you, you feel like hell. And the reason we grow, I believe, is so we have something to give of value. What makes the difference in the quality of our lives is our ability to contribute; to do something beyond ourselves.” Tony Robbins

So why is that we can empathize with others and feel good about contributing to their lives? At a recent TED conference, V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at Salt Lake University, sheds light on this mystery.

“In the front of the brain, there are ordinary motor command neurons that will fire when a person performs a specific action, such as rotating a chair to sit on.

One recent discovery that has been made by researchers in Italy, in Parma, by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues, is a group of neurons called mirror neurons, which are a subset of those command neurons that will also fire when you’re looking at somebody else performing the same action, as though this neuron is adopting the other person's point of view, performing a virtual reality simulation of the other person's action.”

According to Ramachandran, the significance of these mirror neurons must be involved in things like imitation and emulation, “..because to imitate a complex act requires the brain to adopt the other person's point of view. Well, why is imitation important?”

“Let's look at the phenomenon of human culture. If you go back in time about [75,000] to 100,000 years ago, it turns out that something very important happened to human evolution. There was a sudden emergence and rapid spread of a number of skills that are unique to human beings like tool use, the use of fire, the use of shelters, and, of course, language, and the ability to read somebody else's mind and interpret that person's behavior. All of that happened relatively quickly.

Even though the human brain had achieved its present size almost three or four hundred thousand years ago, 100,000 years ago all of this happened very very quickly. And I claim that what happened was the sudden emergence of a sophisticated mirror neuron system, which allowed you to emulate and imitate other people's actions. So that when there was a sudden accidental discovery by one member of the group, say the use of fire, or a particular type of tool, instead of dying out this spread rapidly, horizontally across the population, or was transmitted vertically, down the generations.

So, this made evolution suddenly Lamarckian, instead of Darwinian. Darwinian evolution is slow; it takes hundreds of thousands of years. A polar bear, to evolve a coat, will take thousands of generations, maybe 100,000 years. A human being, a child, can just watch its parent kill another polar bear, and skin it and put the skin on its body, fur on the body, and learn it in one step. What the polar bear took 100,000 years to learn, it can learn in five minutes, maybe 10 minutes. And then once it's learned this it spreads in geometric proportion across a population.

This is the basis; the imitation of complex skills is what we call culture and is the basis of civilization. Now there is another kind of mirror neuron, which is involved in something quite different. And that is, there are mirror neurons, just as there are mirror neurons for action, there are mirror neurons for touch. In other words, if somebody touches me, my hand, neuron in the somatosensory cortex in the sensory region of the brain fires. But the same neuron, in some cases will fire when I simply watch another person being touched. So, it's empathizing the other person being touched.

Now, the question then arises: If I simply watch another person being touched, why do I not get confused and literally feel that touch sensation merely by watching somebody being touched? I mean, I empathize with that person but I don't literally feel the touch. Well, that's because you've got receptors in your skin, touch and pain receptors, going back into your brain and saying "Don't worry, you're not being touched. So, empathize, by all means, with the other person, but do not actually experience the touch otherwise you'll get confused and muddled."

Okay, so there is a feedback signal that vetos the signal of the mirror neuron preventing you from consciously experiencing that touch. But if you remove the arm, you simply anesthetize my arm, so you put an injection into my arm, anesthetize the brachial plexus, so the arm is numb, and there is no sensations coming in, if I now watch you being touched, I literally feel it in my hand. In other words, you have dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. So, I call them Gandhi neurons, or empathy neurons.

And this is not in some abstract metaphorical sense, all that's separating you from him, from the other person, is your skin. Remove the skin, you experience that person's touch in your mind. You've dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings.

And this, of course is the basis of much of Eastern philosophy, And that is there is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are in fact, connected not just via Facebook, and Internet, you're actually quite literally connected by your neurons. And there is whole chains of neurons around this room, talking to each other. And there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else's consciousness.

And this is not mumbo-jumbo philosophy. It emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience....So, the mirror neuron system underlies the interface allowing you to rethink about issues like consciousness, representation of self, what separates you from other human beings, what allows you to empathize with other human beings, and also even things like the emergence of culture and civilization, which is unique to human beings.”

So just like your brain’s reward system is made active at a fulfilling experience of your own, a similar sensation comes about when you are responsible for a similar sensation in someone else.

And a new Cornell study finds that lust for material things dissipate but our unique experiences remain with us for a long time, “The satisfaction we get from buying vacations, bikes for exercise and other experiences starts high and keeps growing. The initial high we feel from acquiring a flashy car or megascreen TV, on the other hand, trails off rather quickly.” At the same webpage, several similar articles are present that indicate possessions come second to experience mainly because, "Your experiences are inherently less comparative, they're less subject to and less undermined by invidious social comparisons" says professor of psychology Thomas Gilovich.

Whatever it is, even if it’s the shopping experience rather than the product that makes you feel good, at least it replenishes that high of good feelings and cures boredom, no?

At least it’s another quick escape from this malicious modern wilderness.

The emotional agony that is being dodged contain the ammunition that generates motivation for change. And by anesthetizing or stupefying ourselves, we are just delaying results. This was the loop that had vacuumed me into a depressed state of mind. Where was my climax moment that always came in happy-ending movies, I used to wonder? Had I not endured enough? Had I not slain the dragons and saved the princess? Maybe you’ve also internalized these false concepts and attributed your failure to some superstition.

Seek, analyze and decipher those feelings. They are your cues that bear your exclusive questions and your very own solutions. Don’t cheat yourself out of them. The oscillations in our mental temperament are there for individual reasons. And they only untwine one at a time, ricocheting from the previous conquest. The oscillations will never go away, i.e., there’s a universe of truth out there waiting to be uncovered and a lifetime won’t suffice. It’s these struggles; these explorations that must matter to you because they produce life altering effects which increase our capacity to give and add value to others.

This is the cycle that we must all indulge in- improve and contribute.

“Explore your web, the web in here -- the needs, the beliefs, the emotions that are controlling you. For two reasons: so there's more of you to give, and achieve too, we all want to do it. But I mean give, because that's what's going to fill you up. And secondly, so you can appreciate -- not just understand, that's intellectual, that's the mind -- but appreciate what's driving other people. That’s the only way our world’s going to change” Tony Robbins

On getting motivated to change. Part 1

(This is part one of a three-part series because, well, it’s a long process. Image credit)

I was not proud of me. I sometimes hated myself more than anyone else. There are things I’ve said and done that make me so ashamed. I think you can name some of them too.

In my misery, I’ve made other people unhappy. Especially my family.

I think I always had a good attitude, but never proper guidance. Things would’ve been ideal if I had that.

We’re not always right and we can never make amends for all the pain that we are responsible for. That would be impossible. And that’s why there’s a God.

And until two years ago, I was so sorry I wasted all that time.

So how did I make it up to myself and others? What motivated me to move and evolve?

First, we’ll sift through history to expose three major political lies that most of us have internalized as natural truths. This will aid us in extracting the dysfunctional social mirror from our present thought-patterns and help alter our reality maps to, second, get closer to the objective truth as we investigate our external world.

What I also intend to delineate is that we’re not rational beings in terms of what we ideally want as opposed to what we do; the small wiring in our left hemisphere has very little control and is usually dominated by the emotional centers and the limbic system and unfortunately, a highly sophisticated and corrupt political system has been able to tap into it and rewire us for their causes.

A bold statement. So let’s examine the evidence...

Lie #1: Communism = bad, Capitalism = good

After WW2, the US and USSR emerged as the only two superpowers. Each had a distinct political system; the former Capitalism and the latter, Stalinism (referred to as Communism. I’ll resolve the difference).

They grappled with each other to dominate the world by trying to influence as many countries as they could with their school of thought. They set off on bloody campaigns and proxy wars (cold wars) to incorporate their political ideologies in neighboring countries to increase their circle of influence.

Those attempts have shaped the current average Earthling’s mentality, and if you live somewhere close or in between, you’ve most likely been affected too.

Roughly, Communism, or Marxism to be more accurate, is described as being the political and economic theories of two German men named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, later developed by their followers to form the basis for the theory and practice of Communism. Central to Marxist theory is an explanation of social change in terms of economic factors, according to which the means of production provide the economic base. In simple English, the community, specifically the proletariat (working class: people like you and me who have to work for a living and produce) influence and determine the political and ideological superstructure in the country as opposed to the few rich and sedentary. It’s like democratizing the workplace so that the workers or employees are involved in the decision making and profit-sharing too. Sounds like fair democracy right?

It was originated in reaction to the natural evolution of Capitalism, which I’ll detail in a few.

Stalin ruled as a dictator. He and his “comrades” made decisions so we call his dictatorship Stalinism rather than Communism. (Prior to Stalin, the Russians were controlled by the Czar and Lenin persuaded people to revolt based on Communist ideologies through the Bolsheviks’ party. Right after his death, however, and the usurping of power by Stalin, Russia turned into another autocracy under a communist banner).

Communism was viewed with disgrace because of people like Stalin, associating it with authoritarianism, fascism or even Nazism. Today, countries like China and North Korea project themselves as Communist countries although they’re run by authoritarian regimes and dictatorships.

To add insult to injury, the standard definition for Communism in modern-day textbooks has devolved into: countries with government controlled business activities, implying that a central authority allocate resources and stifle choices and variety. This caught on, in part, due to capitalist propaganda.

That is false. However, since it caught on and many think that way, we refer to the original communist ideology as Marxism.

Since the Russians felt betrayed at what they perceived to be a stark Communist regime, after it’s downfall in the early 90’s, Russia accepted Capitalism with arms wide open presuming it brought with it freedom and equality. Thus, the only superpower in the world wielding the greatest influence was solely the US and the dominating business activity worldwide was/is Capitalism. Keep in mind that even in those fake communist countries, it’s capitalism for the rich and a form of feudalism for the poor.

Marx and Engels predicted the revolutionary overthrow of Capitalism by the proletariat and the eventual attainment of a classless communist society. Unfortunately, several failed attempts have been made but thanks to CIA orchestrated coup d'états, pandemonium and chaos has predictably been the corollary to such attempts.

Why fight Capitalism? (You’re probably more like,”What does all this politics have to do with me?” I’ll come to it, bear with me please.)

Capitalism is an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state (i.e the community). The core business textbook definition is: a society in which private individuals have the freedom of handling business themselves. In fact, the other term used for a Capitalist economy is Free Market economy, and then there are explanations outlining why either/or economies cannot be self sufficient because they both lie on the extreme ends of the scale, i.e., Communism to the left and Capitalism to the right (it’s more complicated than that but this is valid and clear enough).

Of course throughout history, we’ve been ruled by elites who owned everything due to their “divine rights” and made their friends and family flourish. And until recently, some 200 years ago, those who were in favorable positions were able to hand down their fortune to the now politically and economically dominant. And the very few who permeate the rich class, i.e., the ruling class, are the ones who are paraded as naturals to Capitalism, when in reality, they’re a bona fide rarities that are idolized.

The main argument for Capitalism is the existence of a democratically elected government that will regulate the private sector’s activities to maintain social interests and public goods and thus, create a balance. This will be somewhat in the middle of the left-right scale.

However, even before the second world war, and the resurfacing of anti-semitic hostilities across Europe, Sigmund Freud became extremely pessimistic about human nature as he witnessed the outcomes of the first world war, and began advocating the idea that the public have to be controlled. His nephew, Edward Bernays, combined the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle with Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter’s crowd psychology and became one of the first to attempt to manipulate public opinion using the subconscious, but for the benefit of the Corporations that hired him. He was employed as a Public Relations person and in charge of selling their products by creating (sometimes dishonest) marketing campaigns, or what we know of today as commercials and advertisements.

This went to full throttle (and in the wrong direction) after the second world war and the emergence of the US as one of the two major superpowers.

This is where we converge with politics.

Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy in his book Propaganda (1928),”The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized....In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

The American oligarchy, that hired Bernays, did to Capitalism what Stalin did to Communism; they attempted to overpower the government’s influence and hijack authority.

Rather than herding the masses towards democratic ideals, Corporations with the help of Bernays, gave us the illusion of freedom and democracy by suggesting that Capitalism and Democracy are synonymous and that their companies represented man’s venture for progress. And with the amount of profit they made, they began buying congress. (There, it rhymes as well.)

So basically, the leaders of both superpowers fused their people’s ideologies to maintain a self-serving fiasco. Symbolically, today, the Russian Mafia control the big businesses.

The US corporations are no exception. With delicate, complex and effective campaigns, they’ve propagated their own causes and converted them into lifestyles. ALL mainstream media belong to a few people who want to further their own agendas: Newscorp, Disney, Time Warner, Viacom etc. With the money they pocket, governments have been swayed (think the recent financial crisis and the corporate bailing. Who took care of the redundant workers?).

Thanks to Wikipedia, I also found out that, “Bernays' most extreme political propaganda activities were said to be conducted on behalf of the multinational corporation United Fruit Company (today's Chiquita Brands International) and the U.S. government to facilitate the successful overthrow (see Operation PBSUCCESS) of the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Bernays' propaganda (documented in the BBC documentary, The Century of the Self), branding Arbenz as communist, was published in major U.S. media. According to a book review by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton of Larry Tye's biography, "The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays & The Birth of PR", "the term 'banana republic' actually originated in reference to United Fruit's domination of corrupt governments in Guatemala and other Central American countries. The company brutally exploited virtual slave labor in order to produce cheap bananas for the lucrative U.S. market." “

If you’ve been educated within the system, you probably have a dilute sense of anguish about Capitalism’s “democratic” propaganda. If you're a business student, for example, you might argue that people have choices and can make their own decisions and that globalization creates job opportunities and helps the economy of a country by employing it's factors of production.

The above statements are true, but when contextualized with the status quo, relinquish their validity. Capitalism, today, is just another autocracy under a democratic banner. (Yes, even Obama’s America)

In a very enlightening documentary, John Pilger talks about what people are starting to wake up to: "Welcome to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund Conference in Bangkok. The aim of the conference is, and I quote, 'To find ways of eradicating poverty all over the world'. Alas, there are contradictions. You see most of the delicates are bankers. Now this is not to suggest that bankers don't care about poor people, it's just that somethings are hard to explain. Such as why the officials of the World Bank spend, in their pursuit of solutions for the poor, an estimated $45 million a year flying first class and staying in five star hotels? And why at this conference, chefs have been flown in especially from Paris to a country where children still die from malnutrition? And why they need to be shadowed by more doctors than most people in South East Asia see in a life time?

Fortunately, the people who can best advice them on how to eradicate poverty are just across the road! However, the bankers can't see them because a wall was put up to hide the poor people during the conference. The people responded by painting the wall in bright colours in order to attract attention. No doubt worried that the delegates might spot the odd poor person, the government then had buses parked in front of the wall! Most of these people are street traders, but in the build-up to the conference, hundreds of vendors were almost literally swept from the streets of Bangkok.

So here they sit, with their empty carts, hidden from view, unable to earn a living, until a conference discussing poverty moves on."

Not that these countries are poor, not at all, figurative international organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the UN are created to “regulate” trade and indirectly shackle poor countries with obnoxious debt and then, cut them some slack with very “lucrative” offers that bestow corporate control over vast amounts of resources. Capitalist/Private/Corporate control whose sole objective is acquiring more money. It also means using and abusing euphemisms like “globalization” and “externalities” [See Naomi Klien’s: No logo] to divert our attention from the fact that it means starving, underaged workers being paid by the hundredth of a second in sweatshops throughout the developing countries. To corporations, it’s profit at all costs and the ultra rich are protected from just about any crime they commit in a Capitalist system.

They set the conditions with which to create poverty and invariably benefit off of them. Also part of those conditions are indoctrinating us with the materialistic mentality that is so prominent nowadays and some other part is installing dictators with Western inclinations, specifically, Western corporate inclinations through out the world.

All we hear is 9/11, because the arms industry in the US needed a booster so they, along with the US government (which I hope that by now, is clear that they’re PA’s for corporations) created an excuse to continue with their operations and generate revenue and invariably maintain the US hegemony.

These are a list of countries that have tried to democratically elect popular leaders and have been victims of US foreign policy and the CIA.

Prof Edward Said reminds us why the Middle-East has so much antagonism towards the US, "All 22 Arab countries are dictatorships who are in desperate need of US government patronage to support them. So we are not about to engage in a real dialogue and in that respect, the Arabs keep themselves collectively in a way that is subordinate and inferior to the West and in fact fulfills the kinds of representations that most Westerners have in their minds about the Arabs.”

By placing a bunch of puppets as heads of state who cripple their people into accepting "globalization" as a saviour and a God-send, the US corporations gain and the US government establishes itself as an authority in the region to further it’s hegemonic agenda. For example, the Gulf countries trade oil in US$, which means we only accept Dollars for oil and no other currency, and that creates a huge demand for the dollar paper money, and seeing as America can print it however they like, their currency monopolizes the financial status of international commerce (because most the countries in the world need oil, which is refined and used for all kinds of industrial purposes). The stooge Saddam Hussein considered selling Iraq’s oil for Euros. This links to a website that tracked the political escalations of the beginnings of the war against so-called ”terrorism” to remove the tyrant from power as soon as he made public his views on selling Iraqi oil for Euros.

In addition, the Gulf pretends to have wealth, when it’s really concentrated in the hands of a few, especially in Bahrain. And to Bush, we’re a “beacon” of democracy in the ME.

This is where the history lesson comes to end and reality emerges out of the ethers.