A New Way To See Humanity

As 2006 ends, The Humanity Project completes our first five months in the public eye. We hope you’re beginning to understand more about what we’re trying to do. And we hope that by now, you may also want to join this new, ambitious effort to improve our world. We need your help. Here’s one way to look at our work: The Humanity Project is trying to build a broad consensus for a different view of humanity than is common today. Like we said, it’s ambitious. But we think it can and should be done.

Specifically, we believe that:

1) Many, perhaps most, humans suffer from the feeling that we're not good enough somehow as an individual, that there is something "wrong" with us in specific, individual ways. This feeling is damaging to some people, crippling to others.

2) This feeling often weakens our relationships and families, limits our talents and work, harms our health and generally diminishes our lives to varying degrees, depending on the individual.

3) When those individual problems are multiplied by many millions of people, the cost to society is immense.

4) The cost of this same root-cause psychological problem is also demonstrated in more obvious social problems, such as drug and alcohol addiction, racism, violent crime and more, which we view as driven by these same underlying feelings when heightened to extremes. The worse people feel about themselves, the worse they often behave.

5) All of these feelings of being "not good enough" or having something "wrong" with us are irrational – learned without our awareness as we grew up. In effect, the only thing wrong with us is that we feel there is something wrong with us.

6) These feelings can be significantly reduced in many adults, partly by having individuals become aware that this is a common but very destructive problem they can change. That knowledge itself is a partial solution because it alters the way we view this problem and helps focus our attention on solving it. The past also shows that many individuals, famous and anonymous, have reduced these feelings to live productive lives, which suggests many others can do the same thing.

7) New childrearing procedures should be explored to help avoid or reduce these feelings as children are raised. We urge major research into this area.

8) Each of these efforts can be aided greatly by a social movement made of individuals who call attention to the significance of this psychological problem and work to find new solutions. This organization also can help create a new social ethic that says it is irresponsible for individuals to allow these irrational feelings about ourselves to diminish our lives. That ethic in itself can inspire and encourage individual change, improving some personal problems almost immediately and improving many social problems in the long term.

That’s the idea. In the next year, we’re going to find new ways to tell you and others about it – and we hope you'll join in our effort. Happy New Year to everyone, from everyone at The Humanity Project!

Nothing “Wrong” With You

If people feel better about themselves, chances are they will be a lot better members of society. And society improves as a result. Like so many ideas, it sounds simple. But it isn’t. I think most psychologists and psychiatrists and others who study the mind would agree that what we believe about ourselves affects our lives in huge ways. If we believe bad things, we begin to feel bad about ourselves, and this damages and limits us in just about everything we do: work, relationships, family relations, health, sexuality. That idea seems to be a generally accepted truth now. But what do we do with this knowledge?

That’s the question The Humanity Project is asking. We have at least one answer to offer: Let’s create a movement, a group of people, who all agree this is a big problem and who work to do something about it. Simply by focusing on this as an “issue” that affects, not just individual lives but society as a whole, we shine a spotlight on the problem. The Humanity Project also is a way to create a group of individuals who are committed to working on our own heads to feel better about ourselves – definitely NOT through sitting around worrying about our emotional problems, but by recognizing that we all just need to move beyond those problems and get on with our lives. We see this effort as a social responsibility. Because The Humanity Project says the only thing really “wrong” with any of us as individuals is that we feel that there is something “wrong” with us. That feeling creates powerful emotions that affect our lives, and the lives of those around us. Once we get past this belief and this feeling (and we each CAN get past these things …), it’s much easier to deal with the challenges and problems the outside world hands us. We hope you’ll want to join The Humanity Project and help us focus society’s attention on this problem. And help us figure out new and better ways to do something about changing it. We need your help!
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A Personal Thought

It’s my birthday as I write this blog – December 9. I suppose that’s why I’m thinking so much about the past today. And the future. Like many of us, I sometimes have to fight a tendency to get nostalgic and a birthday gives me a good excuse to smile, and maybe feel a little wistful, about what’s passed. But beyond that surface sentiment, more than anything else, I’m hopeful today. I’m personally hopeful as an individual, as I think most people in our society have good reason to be. And even more, I’m hopeful for humanity as a whole, all of us.

It’s true that, as I look around, I seem to see a lot of restless men and women. Many of us appear discontented, as if looking for something. But that can be a good thing, especially if what we’re looking for is almost within our grasp. Because looking around also makes me think that humanity is on the threshhold of something important: real self-discovery for the first time – a more meaningful knowledge than ever before about how and why we function as we do. I’m not talking here about religious or mystical concepts that can’t be tested in reality. I’m talking about science. We are discovering more of the underlying principles that determine human behavior, just as we know something of the basic principles that determine the behavior of stars and planets. I believe that a deeper and deeper understanding of human psychology will lead us inevitably to new ways of dealing with issues of physical health, for example, and new approaches to education and child rearing. As the new scientific knowledge of the mind trickles down to the everyday woman and man and child, we will each learn better methods for guiding our lives in a positive direction – and begin to view this effort as our responsibility. That’s what I’m thinking about today. Just a personal, hopeful thought I wanted to share as I look toward the next year of my life.

Changing Your Beliefs … About You

The Humanity Project has one main goal we’re trying to accomplish. We want to help you change some basic beliefs about who and what you really are. Wow, that’s quite a statement. But behind this goal, there’s a simple idea that’s been around for centuries but still hasn’t been accepted by most people: You and I and every human being possess the ability to control our lives to a great extent, and to make our lives better. We can be more, do more, understand more, feel more. Be more alive, more aware, more knowledgeable, more forceful. That’s really what our group wants all of us to believe. Because if we truly know we are strong, if we know we can control the direction of our lives, we can. And we then become a healthier, stronger member of society. And society then becomes a better place, one person at a time. No one has to change their religion or politics or any other beliefs to accept these ideas. They apply to all people of all races in every country. Every human being has vast power over their individual life.

As I said, these aren’t new ideas. They’ve been tested, not in laboratories, but in homes and churches and on the streets by countless thousands of people, both famous people and anonymous people. People who decided they would not live like victims of their past, and made huge improvements as a result. We tend to think these folks were somehow different from us. They weren’t, except maybe in this one way – they believed in themselves. The Humanity Project wants you to believe in yourself in that same way. Everything on our website is aimed at helping you do this. For free. And we’ll be adding new features before long to help even more, because we know that you need proof to really change your beliefs about anything. We want to show you that you’re stronger, more powerful, more amazing than you think. And we want you to believe this so deeply that it will allow you to transform your life for the better. If lots of us do the same thing, the world is a better place. That’s a new idea based on an old idea – an idea whose time at last may have come.