Thursday is “Find your Tribe” day.
If you have connection with your own heart, genuinely love yourself, you will have a happy life. If you find one other human being to love and treasure, you have the most basic “Mastermind” level (one other person with whom to function in a spirit of perfect harmony). These require you to forgive and understand your flaws: you have done the best you could with the resources you had. So have we all. Want better results? Get better resources, either within you or from outside you.
Way to compensate for a lack of resources, talent, even intelligence is to create “Mastermind” partnerships with other people, adding ONE PERSON AT A TIME to your circle until you have the power you need to accomplish your goal. Basically, the larger your goal, the more people you need in your circle. Remember that every legal, ethical dollar you will ever earn you will get from satisfying the needs and desires of other human beings. And this is the same way you will attract people to your circle.
WHAT DO THEY WANT? What do they need? Honorably, honestly satisfy the needs of other people, and you can attract them and hold them, and reasonably expect reciprocation. The truth is that you don’t need everyone to like you or love you.
If you are a writer, a Facebook group of 5000 people each of whom spend an average of 20$ a year on your work will provide you with a 100k income per year, perfectly sufficient for most human needs.
Find your tribe. A corollary is that the others need not be denigrated. I use the term “sleeping children” for some of them, but others are merely walking another path. Wish them well and let them go. In the arena of politics, there are few subjects where I cannot see that people are looking at the same question from a different direction. They are not fools or knaves or asleep–just see the Mountain differently. With most of these, it is possible to have honest and polite discourse. If they scream and foam, they are highly emotionalized, and logic will not reach them. In other words, they feel a threat.
What do they fear? You and your “tribe” need to respect these, their humanity and the possibility that THEY MIGHT BE CORRECT. If you cannot rationally consider how and why they might be correct, and the consequences of you being wrong, you may not have full access to your own logic systems, and may be more emotionalized than you realize. You may be “asleep”, dreaming that you are awake. Be careful.
Be respectful, in other words–offer others the same consideration that you would wish. On the other hand, you need to be protective of your own position and heart–you may be CORRECT, as well. Perhaps there is more than one “correct” (there usually is). Perhaps not, for all practical purposes. The ability to hold these discussions rationally and courteously is a good measure of your ability to determine truth.
Yesterday I posted a meme attributed to Socrates (it is probably older, and probably impossible to determine where it really came from) on the “three sieve test”:
- Is it true?
- Is it good?
- Is it necessary?
I believe that this test is an excellent one for elevating social discourse, and refining the sensibilities. There are certainly times when it is fun to discard them and just “go for it” conversationally, but discourtesy and confusion can easily result. In certain intimate company and casual situations, this is actually the point–have fun!
But if you are trying to get closer to the truth of what we are as human beings, and to create “tribe” with those who can help you achieve a financial, personal, or social goal, the “Three Sieves” are an excellent test.
By the way: in my estimation, about 1/0 of a percent of people are what I’ve called “smiling monsters”. Snakes. Genuinely venomous, dangerous people who thrive on death, chaos and fear. Dangerous as hell. You will NOT always have the option of simply avoiding them. Sometimes they will come after you and your children. If you have no taste for tromping on snakes, be certain that included in your tribe are a few Warriors, those selected by nature or nurture to do such tromping. But…don’t you DARE then criticize these people for being aggressive and violent. How dare you? They do what you cannot, provide safety for your children, and you externalize your own fear onto them, blaming them for being an aspect of your own psyche you cannot access?
Do this, and you don’t deserve the safety they won for you, often at great price.
More on such things later, but that’s enough for today?
Steve
(P.S.–I found a wonderful tribe of writers committed to social change. Some on the Left, some on the Right, and we had a wonderful time on the Writing Excuses Cruise. The timing couldn’t be better–we’re doing the REVOLUTIONARY WRITING class starting on October 8th, and if you are interested in writing to express your values to change the world, if you have the makings of a Dickens or a Rand within you, please join us! Polite discourse allows the human race to discuss our perspectives in a rational marketplace of ideas. Fiction allows us to emotionalize these ideas without ugly confrontation…a value I hold dearly. WWW.CREATETHENARRATIVE.COM)
Steven Barnes 