People often make me wonder. The things we do and don’t even realise we are following the group or being part of a herd. One day I was driving north on the freeway when again I was stuck in traffic. Frustrated I began to think: what the hell is wrong here? A few minutes later we began to speed up and slow down. Up and down and up and down. Finally some 45 minutes later when I got to the cause of problem I noticed a man standing behind a car someone had torched days earlier that was off the side of the road and nowhere near the traffic. I learned something from this: people are the same as ants in many ways. We stop. We think in discernible group patterns and we act accordingly. Here are some examples that I have also noticed.

Social Networks

People can whine about Myspace, Facebook or Friendster all they like. You know what, those sites are only popular because people forms groups around them and share common interests. They ‘hive’ around concepts. People who have mastered the art of being creaters of social networks have become the stuff of web legend. Popular language calls them mavens, sneezers, influencers and the like. I prefer the term pioneer because I think there is always that person out of the front of the group who can discern ahead of time what it likely to be popular and yes they usually pay the price for it.

Communication in groups

Ants have a knowing that allows them to build great things as part of a huge chain of communication. How do they do it? I don’t know and if you are reading this I am not sure I care to know. All I know is that I see them build huge nests. That is a team effort therefore they somehow communicate information to each other to make that happen. Consider Digg. A source of joy and frustration for bloggers. Digg is a hive. Sure, it’s moderated and has a hierarchy to it which surprises people. Still, it’s built by group communication, clicking and just enough manipulation to make it work. Ants!

Group perceptions and thoughts

We like similar things. I really like CSI, Torchwood, Doctor Who yet for me to enjoy these fine programs there has to be other people who enjoy them. In fact there has to be enough people to enjoy them and spread them around through group communication. Stephen King said it this way in On Writing… we can communicate using our minds. I can say tree and you have already seen what I am thinking in your mind. That’s telekinesis right there. You are seeing what I am saying when I say tree. It’s probably not the same tree but you get my point. Group perceptions are the same. We believe things in groups and build our identities around it.

In this video we have liberal (Australian Conservatives) and the Labour (the opposite). Notice how the comedy trio make light of the situation by playing on group perceptions. They use various political ideas and the way the recent Australian election was promoted as a way to share with us different ideas. The media do this in many many ways. People respond in a typical either/or logic box. Thus we are forced to take sides with two idiots.

Queens and Kings

In some ant societies there are head honchos which we call Queens. So it is in society we elect officials, make things popular and so on. We give people like Paris Hilton attention. We make Harry Potter a legend, we give precedence and through our group activity support and maintain the status quo. Over and over again. These things are made popular through interacting group perceptions, ideas and notions. Our queens and kinds are those we give ‘royal’ status through our constant conversations.

The chain gang mentality

Ants work in a straight line one after the other. I was watching them climb the wall at my house the other day and I wondered why do they do that. The know to go one after the other and form a line. As I thought about this I thought about work and how we do much the same thing. We work, never really questioning why this is the way things are and become part of a chain in a really long line. Day in and day out… nothing really changes.

Strategic Thinking and Action

Ants are great at thinking bigger picture.   They are fantastic and making small things grow into big things.  So are we.  When we work together that is.   In my family, as I imagine it is in yours, there is a lot of feuding.  Being the ‘peacemaker’ in the family I often find myself in the middle of it.  More times than I can count people make ideas they think are important which are really not.   We hold our ground when we could work together to make peace.  The amount of times I have seen great projects or research destroyed because people could not push aside their egos to work together.  Alas, it’s no wonder the world is in such a mess.

Moving heavy objects

Okay so this is where we part company with ants… we can’t move eight times our own weight.  AND we don’t have eight legs either.

In this observation we must remember that comparisons of us with insects is interesting but ultimately there is one thing that separates us from them.  Our ability to destroy things.  Humans have an uncanny ability to form ideological perceptions that destroy nations, spread evil and hate each other.  Do ants hate?  I have no idea.  I am not an expert in insects.  I can say that I admire their team spirit and willingness to work together to form complex wholes… something I rarely see humans do.

In today’s take take take world we can become distracted with a mindset of materialism.  We can go about accumulating our own wealth at the expense of others and not really know why we should be giving.  Sure, I have heard all the arguments before.  Well, I don’t want to give because I got ripped off or whatever.  The bottom line is you cannot afford not to give.  Here’s five reasons why:

Giving makes you happy

Are you really happy?  No really?  Why not shift your focus to making someone else happy and give them something need.  I guarantee it will make you feel an inner satisfaction you can’t replace.

Giving increasing your thankfulness

The more you receive and give the more thankful you will be for everyday.  One particular person I know is constantly giving and I asked him once why and he replied with, ‘I am so prosperous how can I not?’  He isn’t rich but you get my drift. When you consider the amount of takers we have this is a great attitude to have.

Giving gets you credibility 

Over a period of time if you are a giver somebody will find out.  Sure, you will have a hoard of moochers round your way but over a period of time you may become a ‘pillar’ in the community.  This is social wealth and that’s far more powerful than cash based wealth.  Who wants money without any power to change anything anyway?  Social power is what gets things done.

Giving releases love

Love is what this world needs right now.  My bible says, love your neighbour as yourself.  Love isn’t love until you give it away (so the song goes) so begin giving.  Do you want to show appreciation to someone… don’t say anything show them you love them by giving to them.  If you have to think about it then you aren’t in a spirit of genorosity and probably shouldn’t do it.  There are so many people who make excuses.  Don’t think just go release your love for someone by giving to them.  AND it doesn’t have to be money, it can be time
Giving opens up the door for receiving

I don’t know about you but when I give I get blessed in return.  I am not looking for an ROI strategy from this but I can say that when I don’t hold back on the giving I find myself oversupplied.  Do I know the reasons for this?  No.  I would say it’s a underlying spiritual reality.  Does it always produce results? Yes.   Being generous may not get you a million dollars in return but it will open up the door somewhere down the road for you to begin to receive.

So next time you are faced with an opportunity to release some wealth into someone else’s life I urge you to take the opportunity.  It will enrich your life in many, MANY ways.

Boundary judgments are those decisions we make that stand at the edge of what we think is possible and impossible. Think for a moment what you believe you can do. You have beliefs in you that say this far and no further. This is where I stop having ability. That is what I would call a boundary judgment. Say for a moment you are driving down the road and you notice a stop sign. The first thing you are inclined to do is to stop. This is a preprogrammed response to a typically non-complex boundary judgment. You have seen a sign and responded in accordance to what that sign represents to you.

A friend of mine from the United Kingdom once told me that when he came to Australia he was astonished at how people hammered through the orange light. One day on his way home from work he came to a light that went orange and was rear-ended by a man who was gearing up for the ‘hammer through‘ for the orange light. In Australia the amber ‘wait’ signal is widely interpreted as: ‘oh bugger it I have to hammer it to make it through before it turns red.’ In the part of the United Kingdom where my friend was from it meant time to slow down. Both of these are boundary judgments. So how can you recognise yours and what can you do about it?

The first thing to do is to recognise that you have a belief that stops you achieving and then deliberately do the opposite.  Say you have a fear of public speaking.  This fear is a boundary judgment that you has set itself up in your mind. You know need to deconstruct that belief and build a new one in it’s place.  That judgment you have in your mind about what stops you is the boundary fence (like the photo above).  It says ‘no more’.   Don’t pay attention to them.  Here are some others I have noticed in my life over the years.

Be creative but don’t go crazy 

Ever been given the so-called green light by your boss then told don’t go nuts?  Putting it another way, ‘be creative but don’t be creative’.   Now that’s a contradiction in terms and confusing as hell.

Do your study but don’t be too smart

So be smart and don’t study?  This is another boundary judgment on what we think is acceptable to us.  In reality it’s not that acceptable at all!  Why not just do your best and see what happens from there.

Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t

I really find this saying odd because it negates the possibility of a third solution… why have a devil at all?  Why continue to live with a problem than search for a way to get rid of it.  Why have the either/or logic box option here… why not just be happy and free?

Well that’s just the way it is around here

Translation: don’t try and change things around here because we don’t want things to change around here.   This is merely a perspective that has become a dominant belief in your mind.  Shift it out of there!

Remember whatever you want in life you can generally achieve by simply switching your beliefs.  What hinders us from seeing options in problems is not necessarily the realities… but what we think the realities are likely to be.

Do you have a dream?  I do.  I dream to be successful in all that I do.  One thing that kept me going through the hard times was a desire to see something happen in my life that was great.  I would say that at least on one occasion holding onto hope was very important.  Having working with a aid organisation for awhile now I can say of the hallmarks of extreme poverty is how people in the slums of the world lose hope.   The dreams they have escape them and the reality of the sounds, smell and feelings of their situation stop them from hoping for something better.   It’s sad to see older people who have given up hope that their dreams will ever come to pass.  Here are some reasons why you should never give up hope.

1. Hope is a goal setter

Hope sets the goal for some future event to come to pass.  Whether you realise it or not, you have the power to hope for something better.  When you focus on what’s happening in your life and hope sets in you will begin to dream.  We are all equipped with the mechanisms of hope, so there is no excuse.  Transcending reality is the hard part and I will talk about that in a later post.   You need some kind of goal to set for yourself so hope for something.  Ask yourself this question:  What do you like doing?  Are you doing it?  No?  Why not begin to hope you will?  Set a goal on the inside and begin hoping.  Without the goal how can you ever get anywhere?

2. Hope makes you feel good

Hope can be medicine for your soul.  Are you stuck in a terrible situation.  Begin to hope for things to change.  Recognise what it is that you want to change and begin dreaming about it.  Think about the underlying emotions that rise into your consciousness when you do.   What feelings do you feel?  Doesn’t it make you feel better.  The only problem is staying in that state.  You need to foster hope and make it grow.  You do this by remembering the hope day after day and entertaining it in your imagination.  I do this often and it has helped me tremendously in goals I have achieved and goals I haven’t.  I almost have a PhD which is the result of hoping for something first.  When I began this journey I wasn’t qualified and I should not have been let in.  But I hoped and believed and here I am today.  It all began when I had a dream in my heart of wanting to study more at university.   I will share this story in more detail later on.  There were times when I was studying over the past seven years that I felt I would never emerge out of it in one piece.  But, thank God, I never lost hope that I would emerge out of it with my dream in hand.  What do you dream about?  Begin hoping for it by seeing it in your minds eyes.  Hope for something better.

3. Hope is a template for faith

In the post that follows this one I will explain it in more detail.  Hope sets the goal and provides the template for you to believe.  The power of belief is something everybody has.  You use it to shape and guide your life on a daily basis.  Think of it this way: hope is the blueprint of your dreams whereas belief is the concrete.  What do you dream about?  I dream about a world where communities are transformed from poverty into prosperity.  I dream about things that spontaneously come to me during prayer, my children’s life and those that I teach.  This is not real it’s a dream.  Yet it provides the template for me to want something better in my life.  There is a saying I have heard in Christian circles, ‘hope deferred makes the heart grow sick’ (it comes from the proverbs).  When you lose hope you lose everything.  I have seen the reality of this in people’s life.  What you think about your life and the direction it’s taking is very much the substance of hope.  Everything you are doing is based on it.  If you are a practicing lawyer, doctor, accountant or IT person you once hoped you could do that.  That hope lived in you as a dream.  Now that you are doing it, you no longer hope for what you have.  Yet, if you didn’t hope in the first place you would have had to template to form a belief in you and you would have thrown it all away.

4. Hope builds optimism for the future

A very close friend of mind said it this way, ‘hope is faith in the future’.  I like that.  Hope is faith that at same point you will be experiencing a future dream.  Whatever it is that you want to do if you hope for it, see it and begin to expect it you will eventually have it.   You cannot reach your dreams if you don’t have one.  You cannot build a better life if you don’t think about what it is you want and hope like crazy.  Will you get it if you hope for it?  No, but you will begin to move towards it and without that you will never get your dreams.  Hope is the substance we use to lay down a blueprint for the future.  It’s the part of us that was born into us or discovered as we grew older and it’s the real us surfacing up from underneath letting us know that we are really there.    Today, why don’t you begin to hope and see what you find in your heart.

Remember what you see is not always what is real.  Hope forms a firm foundation for the future actions you wish to take.  If you don’t do it… then your life will resemble pretty much what it does at present.

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There is a growing amount of rhetoric in scientific circles about the nature of belief and scientific endeavour. I was exploring digg the other day and I came across this article. In it the author discusses the wisdom of crowds phenomena and evolution. What struck me when I reflected on the article was how a lot of scientific literature and things like this article still fail to grasp the concept of belief. Belief is a powerful concept and one that is largely overlooked.

So what is evidence

Evidence can be described as a empirically verifiable facts in scientific terms. Something that we have come to accept ‘as is’ through a rigorous testing process. Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert gave us the idea that we believe first and then go about constructing doubt. More to the point, we do not analyse first, we believe then we analyse. In an earlier article I spoke about the conjecturing process whereby I felt that we follow what Sherlock Holmes does. We reason through the facts and come to a meaningful conclusion, somehow, magically apart from belief. How can this happen? We look at the facts first? I don’t think we do. I think we work of assumptions, hunches and so on and then go to the tools to prove our point. What if the tools are just ways of confirming what we believe instead of actually verifying things? Has happened plenty of times before hasn’t it?

Facts may or may not be real facts they are tainted by what we believe and value we add to them. I can attribute causality to anything if I want and it will make no difference to you or anyone because to me that’s evidence. I can set up a hypothesis test and so on, it will only prove what I want it to. When you say that ’cause and effect’ is, you will not be persuaded otherwise. Why? Because you believe it.

Are scientists immune from this? I don’t think so. If they were immune from it then what they said would be perfect knowledge. The testing procedures we use to work things out are models. They are not reality. We use them to support (with evidence) our version of events. A belief is therefore built into the thing we are constructing because it’s built on the premise of something we think might be related. When the news caster tells us something that happened, ‘A man was shot in the head,’ that’s a fact he was. But then, ‘police suspect the wife.’ They ’suspect’ the wife? That is simply another way of saying we believe the wife is the killer but we lack enough evidence to prove the case. In such a case the belief spurns on the search for evidence not vice versa. The belief in evolution spurns on the search for it’s existence and validity. If this weren’t the case then why do we even bother?

Beliefs: the driving force

Why do we vote the way we do? Beliefs! Why do we believe? There is something deeper in what Dan Gilbert has found and I think we need to pay more attention to the ways in which we believe. In particular why is the human mind predisposed to belief? Why is it the case that we hear things and believe them? Why do we read a book like the origin of the species or the bible and think yes that’s it. That is a thought that has plagued me for years.

When I was a child my father used to tell me all kinds of stories. Stuff about the easter bunny and the like which I know now to be a load of crap (or do I?). At the time however I believed them and acted as if they were so. Until one day I realised that they weren’t. These beliefs limited me in how I understood things because a window was formed for me to look through. In became a way of seeing. When the tooth fairy shoved a dollar coin underneath my pillow in exchange for my tooth do the ‘evidence’ of the missing tooth confirmed what I believed. The tooth fairy existed.

The tooth fairy however does not exist. Even though I believed it first I went about confirming my doubts as I got older and yes I can say with a certain degree of confidence that I am sure she or he doesn’t exist. I can believe it if I want to and live the rest of my life with my belief as the evidence for the tooth fairy’s existence. Will I be a happier person for believing it? I don’t need evidence to believe, my faith is the evidence. Until I go searching for a new belief to replace the old one I have all the evidence I need. Think about your life…how many things do you believe and it’s enough?

Belief is evidence?

Say I take away belief from evidence and the evidence ’speaks for itself’. If this were the case then what would the evidence say? It wouldn’t say anything because what makes evidence ‘conclusive’ is the fact that we believe it. The two go hand in hand. Any evidence is useless without somebody to understand it and put it into context. The same set of facts shown to different people will yield a different point of view. Yet in some cases the evidence itself will create beliefs that later are changed in light of new evidence. So evidence without belief cannot exist.

Here we come to my final point in this post. Belief comes first in everything we do. We learn to construct our doubts later as we grow older. Yet, what we believe about religion, science, the death penalty, abortion, rape, murder and so on comes from what we think the evidence is saying to us because of our beliefs. There is no test that proves anything outside of someone believing it. We believe in the process of scientific testing so we hold it up as being relevant as leading to the ‘truth’… until a better test comes along. It’s a way of seeing that’s useful for now but it’s built on the foundation of beliefs about things and what we have come to expect from the scientific process. There is more faith involved in such things than those in the middle of it would care to admit.

In closing this post I would like you to picture with me what you think a pink elephant looks like. Can you see it?  If you can then we have shared something.  We both have seen a pink elephant.   What I think people do not understand is that beliefs are like a blank piece of paper.  They are largely impressed on us or written by us.  Either way there is no escaping them.  We all think, feel and act on the things we believe.  Whether it be science or solipsism, they are ‘actual’ and drive us to act. Beliefs are real.  They are causally effective.  What do you believe?

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