[pnpgm] “The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.”

[Hsingai Altaica]

“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.” -- Albert EinsteinPlease forward this message to someone you know that you think is most likely to know someone, like Colonel Picquart, isn't free from hate but doesn't let his hate get in the way of doing what's right, in addition to anyone else you feel appropriate.Before the last of us alive today dies the age where love rules the world will be upon us. If we keep hold of our hate it will be an abusive love but love no less; Or we can discard our hate, even of those we think worthy of being hated and welcome in an age of benign love and mutual support.
How can we realistically achieve this world of peace? The good news is that it's simple and the bad news is that its hard. We have to talk and listen to people we disagree with.

The end of Megan's antigay picketing career and life as she knew it was triggered in part by strangers on Twitter who showed us the power of engaging the other.

"...but then a conversation would ensue. And it was civil -- full of genuine curiosity on both sides. How had the other come to such outrageous conclusions about the world?"

"There was no confusion about our positions, but the line between friend and foe was becoming blurred."

" I'd stand on a street corner in the heavy Kansas humidity, surrounded by a few dozen relatives, with my tiny fists clutching a sign that I couldn't read yet: "Gays are worthy of death." This was the beginning. "

"In my home, life was framed as an epic spiritual battle between good and evil. The good was my church and its members, and the evil was everyone else. My church's antics were such that we were constantly at odds with the world, and that reinforced our otherness on a daily basis. "Make a difference between the unclean and the clean," the verse says, and so we did. "

Just like Megan we are taught to hate the 'Other' before we know what the 'other' or even hate is.

And we must conclude that the problem cannot be solved by our sort of people, because we are the sort of people who make wars. War is the most consistent behavior pattern of the human race throughout history. In all ages, all cultures, all continents men have fought each other at intervals of a generation, often less and almost never more.

Why do we do this? Can we identify the reasons why we fight wars?

Yes, we can. Most of the causes of war, any war, are easy to list: Prejudice; the ability, emotionally and uncritically, to believe unreasonable things; excessive desire for material or power; excessive fear of others; belief in a destiny to control others; vengeance; ability to avoid seeing and facing unpleasant facts and taking appropriate action.

These are the main reasons why we find ourselves involved in wars. They are also, every one of them, well-known and recognized neurotic symptoms, familiar to every psychiatrist.

We call the Nazis neurotics, paranoids and so on, and doubtless we’re right. But we’re no less entitled to call our own reaction neurotic. We are the guilible people who twice in one lifetime believed what wasn’t true, and deliberately refused to believe what was true, because it was nasty and we didn’t want to believe it.

I would like to quote a German officer, a doctor, intelligent and keen, whom Bock Chisholm knew quite well in 1934. At that time, a year after Hitler took power, that officer told him quite clearly what the Germans were going to do, how they were going to do it, what their organization was developed toward at that time and what it would look like when they finished. The picture, to him, was perfectly clear. There would be a Prussian governor in every city and province of the world, with absolute power of life and death over all the people, under orders from Berlin. Prussian agricultural experts would organize the Canadian wheat farms. The German people, servants of the Prussians, would garrison the world. This was destiny—destiny of the human race to be controlled by the superior Prussian Kultur.

He was dangerously close to being right. Long ago a wise man said, “If a man have a garden in which there are poisonous serpents and beautiful flowers, he must first deal with the serpents before he may enjoy the flowers.”

The neurotic person doesn’t do this. He goes about his garden, admiring the flowers and pretending that there are no serpents, or, if there are, that they’re not poisonous—they are pleasant little playthings.

That is reminiscent of ourselves during the periods 1908 to 1914, and again from 1933 to 1939. We pretended everything in the garden was lovely, that everyone loved everyone else, that there weren’t going to be any more wars. The dear Germans were naturally slightly misguided, as we ourselves came to be sometimes, but they would recover and become the nice people they had always been at heart.

We are the people who allowed two world wars to arise. In Chisholm's mind there was no doubt whatever that if the English-speaking world had faced the facts as the facts were advertised in those pre-war years, they could have stopped both wars. But they went right on pretending that there weren’t going to be any wars. They were just as neurotic, and just as much responsible for war, as the Germans.

What we must have to prevent World War III, and perhaps the extinction of mankind, is enough mature people in all countries, and in the right places, people without the neurotic necessities that drive human beings into war. We have never done this before. We have never, any time or anywhere, had enough people able to see and accept facts, people who did not show the neurotic symptoms which we and every generation of our ancestors have shown, and which make wars inevitable.

How can we do it?

For the answer to that question we must first ask another: What causes these neurotic symptoms in individuals?

Just lately, in the 30 years or so before Chisholm discussed "The Re-establishment of Peacetime Society" in 1946, psychiatrists had found out; the causes. It is very difficult for one human being to know anything of what goes on inside another human being, or even inside himself. But in that century we had developed a new technique called psychoanalysis.

It’s a slow, cumbersome business. The psychoanalyst and patient have to spend at least an hour together every day, and keep it up for at least a year. But it does reveal things inside a human being that hadn’t been known before. It’s been done in many thousands of cases, and the results have checked well enough to establish certain things as new scientific facts.

For instance, psychoanalysts have found out what the human conscience is. We used to think conscience was a still small voice telling us, infallibly, what’s right and what’s wrong. But if it were, it would tell everybody the same thing.

It doesn’t. An Eskimo’s conscience tells him one thing, a Hottentot’s conscience tells him another, and a Torontonian’s conscience is different from both of them. You never, absolutely never, find an Eskimo born with a Hottentot conscience, or either of them born with a Toronto conscience unless, of course, the Eskimo or Hottentot is brought to Toronto as an infant and brought up like all the other Torontonians. And in that case they’re equally certain to have a Torontonian, and not an Eskimo or a Hottentot, conscience.

Your conscience is what you have been told right and wrong are. What psychoanalysts have discovered—a very important new fact—is that those basic attitudes are planted in the human mind before the age of six. Your conscience is what your mother told you before you were six years old.

Dr. Bruce Lipton said: 

95% of our life is coming from the programs of life. How to live life that we get in the first seven years of life. That’s why poor people stay poor. And rich people stay rich. ... Every human, and it’s a fact—every human first seven years, is download to hypnosis. The brain of a child under seven is in a lower vibrational frequency. When you put wires on a person’s head, you read electroencephalograph, reading brain activity. A child below 7 has a lower vibration than consciousness. It’s called theta [brainwaves]. Theta is imagination. That’s how kids play a tea party with mud pies, but to them it’s a real thing. A kid rides a broom, it’s a horse.
That’s theta. Imagination. Theta is also hypnosis.

And the idea is this: before you can become conscious, if you don’t have any programs, what are you going to be conscious of? So nature makes the first 7 years…what kind of programs are required to live on this planet? I say how do you get them? Theta is hypnosis. You just watch. You watch your parents, you watch your siblings, and your community. Because you have to learn how many hundred thousand rules? Think about it.

Just to be a functional member of a family, and a functional member of a community, there are rules. Teaching an infant these rules. I say, you don’t have to. First 7 years, they observe and just download it. Look this is not new.

The subconscious mind learns in two (2) fundamental ways naturally.

Hypnosis, which is the first 7 years. And after age 7, how do you put new programs in?

Repetition.

Practice.

You want to drive a car. You didn’t learn just by getting in the seat and putting the key in. You had to practice driving the car. You want to learn the alphabet. How many times did you go from A to Z? You know, try to go from A to Z before you can complete it.

Once you complete it, you didn’t have to go back and do it again.


And another equally important thing they’ve discovered: that in almost all cases, neurotic symptoms are caused by the burden of inferiority, guilt and fear that we all carry on our consciences. That’s what’s at the root of the human being’s failure to mature.

With this in mind, let’s turn from the individual to the nation, the world. Something, some universal force, has been present in all cultures to prevent the development of all, or almost all, the people to a state of true maturity.

What basic psychological distortion can be found in every civilization of which we know anything? It must be a force which produces inferiority, guilt and fear; which prevents the rational use of the intelligence; which discourages the ability to see and acknowledge patent facts, and which teaches or encourages the ability to believe contrary to, and in spite of, clear evidence; which makes controlling other people’s behavior emotionally necessary; which encourages prejudice and the inability to see, understand or sympathize with other people’s point of view.

Is there any force so potent and pervasive that it can do all these things, in all civilizations? There is— just one. The only lowest common denominator of all civilizations, the only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality, the concept of right and wrong, the poison long ago described and warned against as “the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

In the old Hebrew story God warns the first man and the first woman to have nothing to do with good and evil. It is interesting to note that as long ago as that, “good” was recognized to be just as great a menace as “evil.” They are the fruit of the one tree, and are different aspects of the same thing. We have been very slow to rediscover that truth, and to recognize the unnecessary and artificially imposed inferiority, guilt and fear, commonly known as sin, under which we have all labored, and which produces so much of the social maladjustment and unhappiness in the world. For many generations we have bowed our necks to the yoke of the conviction of sin. We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests, our newspapers and others with a vested interest in controlling us.

Manacles On Your Mind
“And ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”—good and evil with which to keep children under control, with which to prevent free thinking, with which to impose local and familial and national loyalties, and with which to blind children to their glorious intellectual heritage. The inevitable results are frustration, inferiority, neurosis, and inability to enjoy living, to reason clearly or to make a world fit to live in.
Human life it’s basically a programming and download from cradle to grave. You know you come out of the womb and immediately you’re influenced by your parents in terms of view perceptions and they’re not being malevolent, most of the time, anyway, the vast majority.

But they’ve been through the system you’re about to go through. The process you're about to go through, they bought it, accepted as normal, accepted to the crazy place to be sane and therefore that out of wanting to do right for you they’ll pass those perceptions on to you and then this is this is this you know.

The crippling of intelligence by these bandages of belief, in the name of virtue and security for the soul, is as recognizable as that of the feet of the Chinese girl who was sacrificed to the local concept of beauty. The result, in both cases, is not beauty of character or of feet, but distortion and crippling and loss of natural function.

Because perception is everything, perception dictates what you believe, what you don’t believe, what you’ll challenge, what you won’t challenge, what you’ll accept, you won’t accept. Once something has got your perceptions it's got you and it's got your life and it's got the collective perception it has humanity.

This is why we marginalize alternative ways of looking at the world because where do perceptions come from? They come from information received.

Intelligence is man’s only specific weapon for survival, and his destiny must lie in the direction indicated by his equipment. Whatever hampers or distorts man’s clear true thinking works against man’s manifest destiny and tends to destroy him.

Freedom to think freely is as essential to man’s survival as are the specific methods of survival of the other animals to them. Birds must fly, fish must swim, man must think freely. That freedom is present in all children —it’s known as innocence. It has been destroyed or crippled by local certainties, by gods of local moralities, of local loyalty, of personal salvation, of prejudice and hate and intolerance (frequently masquerading as love)— gods of everything that would destroy freedom to think, and would keep each generation under the control of the old people, the elders, the shamans and the priests.

Making Mature Men
What is maturity? What kind of human being must we produce to fill the breach in which our sort of man has failed?
Two eminent psychologists, Strecker and Appel, have defined maturity in terms of abilities which, if attained by enough people, would ensure the continued development of the race along the lines of its inherent destiny, without wars. After naming persistence, reliability, determination and the will to succeed, they say:

“The ability to size things up, make one’s own decisions, is a characteristic of maturity. This implies a considerable amount of independence. The mature person is not dependent unless ill. Maturity represents the capacity to co-operate, to work with others, to work in an organization and under authority. The mature person is flexible, can defer to time, persons, circumstances. He can show tolerance, he can be patient, and above all he has the qualities of adaptability and compromise.”

Were you and I brought up in that direction?

No, we were taught to be absolutely loyal to the local concept of virtue, whatever that happened to be. We were taught that Moslems or Jews, Grits or Tories, capitalists or socialists, Communists or Roman Catholics or Methodists or any of all other human groups were wrong and even wicked. Among all the people in the world only our own parents, and a few other people they selected, were right about everything. We could refuse to accept their rightness only at the price of a load of guilt and fear, and peril to our immortal souls. That’s what crippled us.

So the first thing we must do, to achieve a generation of mature human beings, is alter the basis of child training. We must substitute intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the “certainties” of the old people. We must stop imposing our local prejudices and faiths on our children. Instead we must give them all sides of every question, so that in their own good time they may have the ability to size things up and make their own decisions.

Dr. Lepton also said, "The movie “The Matrix,” is not science fiction. It’s a documentary."

As Morpheus tells Neo, "And this system is our enemy. But when you are inside, what do you see? These people are part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it. "

This suggestion that we should stop teaching children rights and wrongs and protect their original intellectual integrity instead, is, of course, always...by an outcry of “heretic” and " iconoclast.” The pretense is made, as it has been made to the finding of any extension of the truth, that to do away with right and wrong would produce uncivilized people, immorality, lawlessness, social chaos. The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and many other respectable people have escaped from these moral chains and are able to think freely. Most of the patients whom they have treated successfully have done the same. Yet they show no signs of social or personal disintegration, no lack of social responsibility, no tendency toward social anarchy. These are the reactions of the immature, the inferior, the guilty. They are not found in the mature integrated personality.

Freedom from moralities means freedom to think and behave sensibly, to the advantage of the person and the group, free of outmoded loyalties and the magic fears of our ancestors.

To bring children up in these freedoms, we should put their training into more competent hands. Bringing up children is the most important thing in the world today. It is not a job for economic or emotional misfits; for frightened, inferiority-ridden men and women seeking a safe, respectable and quickly attainable emotional or social status; nor for girls filling in their time before marriage. To be allowed to teach children should be the sign of the final approval of society.

Will this work

Magen's story
" Initially, the people I encountered on the platform were just as hostile as I expected. They were the digital version of the screaming hordes I'd been seeing at protests since I was a kid. But in the midst of that digital brawl, a strange pattern developed. Someone would arrive at my profile with the usual rage and scorn, I would respond with a custom mix of Bible verses, pop culture references and smiley faces. They would be understandably confused and caught off guard, but then a conversation would ensue. And it was civil -- full of genuine curiosity on both sides. How had the other come to such outrageous conclusions about the world? "
"Sometimes the conversation even bled into real life. ... He ran a blog called "Jewlicious," and after several months of heated but friendly arguments online, he came out to see me at a picket in New Orleans. He brought me a Middle Eastern dessert from Jerusalem, where he lives, and I brought him kosher chocolate and held a "God hates Jews" sign. "

"There was no confusion about our positions, but the line between friend and foe was becoming blurred. We'd started to see each other as human beings, and it changed the way we spoke to one another. "

"It took time, but eventually these conversations planted seeds of doubt in me. My friends on Twitter took the time to understand Westboro's doctrines, and in doing so, they were able to find inconsistencies I'd missed my entire life. Why did we advocate the death penalty for gays when Jesus said, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?" How could we claim to love our neighbor while at the same time praying for God to destroy them? The truth is that the care shown to me by these strangers on the internet was itself a contradiction. It was growing evidence that people on the other side were not the demons I'd been led to believe. "

"These realizations were life-altering. Once I saw that we were not the ultimate arbiters of divine truth but flawed human beings, I couldn't pretend otherwise. I couldn't justify our actions -- especially our cruel practice of protesting funerals and celebrating human tragedy. These shifts in my perspective contributed to a larger erosion of trust in my church, and eventually it made it impossible for me to stay. "

"In spite of overwhelming grief and terror, I left Westboro in 2012. In those days just after I left, the instinct to hide was almost paralyzing. I wanted to hide from the judgement of my family, who I knew would never speak to me again -- people whose thoughts and opinions had meant everything to me. And I wanted to hide from the world I'd rejected for so long -- people who had no reason at all to give me a second chance after a lifetime of antagonism. And yet, unbelievably, they did. "

"The world had access to my past because it was all over the internet -- thousands of tweets and hundreds of interviews, everything from local TV news to "The Howard Stern Show" -- but so many embraced me with open arms anyway. I wrote an apology for the harm I'd caused, but I also knew that an apology could never undo any of it. All I could do was try to build a new life and find a way somehow to repair some of the damage. People had every reason to doubt my sincerity, but most of them didn't. And -- given my history, it was more than I could've hoped for -- forgiveness and the benefit of the doubt. It still amazes me. "

"David, my "Jewlicious" friend from Twitter, invited us to spend time among a Jewish community in Los Angeles. We slept on couches in the home of a Hasidic rabbi and his wife and their four kids -- the same rabbi that I'd protested three years earlier with a sign that said, "Your rabbi is a whore." We spent long hours talking about theology and Judaism and life while we washed dishes in their kosher kitchen and chopped vegetables for dinner. They treated us like family. They held nothing against us, and again I was astonished."

"That period was full of turmoil, but one part I've returned to often is a surprising realization I had during that time -- that it was a relief and a privilege to let go of the harsh judgments that instinctively ran through my mind about nearly every person I saw. I realized that now I needed to learn. I needed to listen. "

"This has been at the front of my mind lately, because I can't help but see in our public discourse so many of the same destructive impulses that ruled my former church. We celebrate tolerance and diversity more than at any other time in memory, and still we grow more and more divided. We want good things -- justice, equality, freedom, dignity, prosperity -- but the path we've chosen looks so much like the one I walked away from four years ago. We've broken the world into us and them, only emerging from our bunkers long enough to lob rhetorical grenades at the other camp. We write off half the country as out-of-touch liberal elites or racist misogynist bullies. No nuance, no complexity, no humanity. Even when someone does call for empathy and understanding for the other side, the conversation nearly always devolves into a debate about who deserves more empathy. And just as I learned to do, we routinely refuse to acknowledge the flaws in our positions or the merits in our opponent's. Compromise is anathema. We even target people on our own side when they dare to question the party line. This path has brought us cruel, sniping, deepening polarization, and even outbreaks of violence. I remember this path. It will not take us where we want to go. "

"What gives me hope is that we can do something about this. 

The good news is that it's simple, and the bad news is that it's hard. We have to talk and listen to people we disagree with. 

It's hard because we often can't fathom how the other side came to their positions. 
It's hard because righteous indignation, that sense of certainty that ours is the right side, is so seductive.
 It's hard because it means extending empathy and compassion to people who show us hostility and contempt. The impulse to respond in kind is so tempting, but that isn't who we want to be. We can resist. And I will always be inspired to do so by those people I encountered on Twitter, apparent enemies who became my beloved friends. And in the case of one particularly understanding and generous guy, my husband. 

There was nothing special about the way I responded to him. 

What was special was their approach. 

I thought about it a lot over the past few years and I found four things they did differently that made real conversation possible. These four steps were small but powerful, and I do everything I can to employ them in difficult conversations today. "

"The first is don't assume bad intent. My friends on Twitter realized that even when my words were aggressive and offensive, I sincerely believed I was doing the right thing. Assuming ill motives almost instantly cuts us off from truly understanding why someone does and believes as they do. We forget that they're a human being with a lifetime of experience that shaped their mind, and we get stuck on that first wave of anger, and the conversation has a very hard time ever moving beyond it. But when we assume good or neutral intent, we give our minds a much stronger framework for dialogue. "

"The second is ask questions. When we engage people across ideological divides, asking questions helps us map the disconnect between our differing points of view. That's important because we can't present effective arguments if we don't understand where the other side is actually coming from and because it gives them an opportunity to point out flaws in our positions. But asking questions serves another purpose; it signals to someone that they're being heard. When my friends on Twitter stopped accusing and started asking questions, I almost automatically mirrored them. Their questions gave me room to speak, but they also gave me permission to ask them questions and to truly hear their responses. It fundamentally changed the dynamic of our conversation. "

"The third is stay calm. This takes practice and patience, but it's powerful. At Westboro, I learned not to care how my manner of speaking affected others. I thought my rightness justified my rudeness -- harsh tones, raised voices, insults, interruptions -- but that strategy is ultimately counterproductive. Dialing up the volume and the snark is natural in stressful situations, but it tends to bring the conversation to an unsatisfactory, explosive end. When my husband was still just an anonymous Twitter acquaintance, our discussions frequently became hard and pointed, but we always refused to escalate. Instead, he would change the subject. He would tell a joke or recommend a book or gently excuse himself from the conversation. We knew the discussion wasn't over, just paused for a time to bring us back to an even keel. People often lament that digital communication makes us less civil, but this is one advantage that online conversations have over in-person ones. We have a buffer of time and space between us and the people whose ideas we find so frustrating. We can use that buffer. Instead of lashing out, we can pause, breathe, change the subject or walk away, and then come back to it when we're ready. "

"And finally,make the argument. 

This might seem obvious, but one side effect of having strong beliefs is that we sometimes assume that the value of our position is or should be obvious and self-evident, that we shouldn't have to defend our positions because they're so clearly right and good that if someone doesn't get it, it's their problem -- that it's not my job to educate them. But if it were that simple, we would all see things the same way. 

As kind as my friends on Twitter were, if they hadn't actually made their arguments, it would've been so much harder for me to see the world in a different way. We are all a product of our upbringing, and our beliefs reflect our experiences. We can't expect others to spontaneously change their own minds. If we want change, we have to make the case for it. "

"My friends on Twitter didn't abandon their beliefs or their principles -- only their scorn. They channeled their infinitely justifiable offense and came to me with pointed questions tempered with kindness and humor. They approached me as a human being, and that was more transformative than two full decades of outrage, disdain and violence. I know that some might not have the time or the energy or the patience for extensive engagement, but as difficult as it can be, reaching out to someone we disagree with is an option that is available to all of us. And I sincerely believe that we can do hard things, not just for them but for us and our future. Escalating disgust and intractable conflict are not what we want for ourselves, or our country or our next generation. "

"My mom said something to me a few weeks before I left Westboro, when I was desperately hoping there was a way I could stay with my family. People I have loved with every pulse of my heart since even before I was that chubby-cheeked five-year-old, standing on a picket line holding a sign I couldn't read. She said, "You're just a human being, my dear, sweet child." She was asking me to be humble -- not to question but to trust God and my elders. But to me, she was missing the bigger picture -- that we're all just human beings. That we should be guided by that most basic fact, and approach one another with generosity and compassion. "

"Each one of us contributes to the communities and the cultures and the societies that we make up. The end of this spiral of rage and blame begins with one person who refuses to indulge these destructive, seductive impulses. We just have to decide that it's going to start with us. "

Christian Picciolini
You say,"But Megan was just a child holding a picket sign. Surely The hard core leaders of the Neo-Nazi's won't be swayed so easily."
"My journey away from violent extremism began 22 years ago, when I denounced racism and left the American white supremacist skinhead movement that I had helped build."

"I was just 22 years old at the time, but I had already spent eight years, from the time I was 14 years old, as one of the earliest and youngest members and an eventual leader within America's most violent hate movement. "

"But I wasn't born into hate; in fact, it was quite the opposite. I had a relatively normal childhood. My parents are Italian immigrants who came to the United States in the mid-1960s and settled on the South Side of Chicago, where they eventually met, and opened a small beauty shop. Right after I was born, things got a little bit more difficult. They struggled to survive with raising a young family and a new business, often working seven days a week, 14 hours a day, taking on second and third jobs just to earn a meager living. And quality time with my parents was pretty nonexistent. Even though I knew they loved me very much, growing up, I felt abandoned. I was lonely, and I started to withdraw, and then I started to resent my parents and become very angry. And as I was growing up, through my teenage years, I started to act out to try and get attention from my parents."

"And one day, when I was 14, I was standing in an alley, and I was smoking a joint, and a man who was twice my age, with a shaved head and tall black boots, came up to me, and he snatched the joint from my lips. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and he looked me in the eyes, and he said, "That's what the communists and the Jews want you to do to keep you docile." I was 14 years old, I'd been trading baseball cards and watching "Happy Days" -- I didn't really know what a Jew was. "

"But it was as if this man in this alley had offered me a lifeline. For 14 years, I'd felt marginalized and bullied. I had low self-esteem. And frankly, I didn't know who I was, where I belonged, or what my purpose was. I was lost. And overnight, because this man had pulled me in, and I had grabbed onto that lifeline with every fiber of my being, I had gone from "Joanie Loves Chachi" to full-blown Nazi. Overnight. "

"I started to listen to the rhetoric and believe it. I started to watch very closely as the leaders of this organization would target vulnerable young people who felt marginalized and then draw them in with promises of paradise that were broken. And then I started to recruit myself. I started to do that by making white-power music. And soon, I became the leader of that infamous organization that was led by that man in that alley who recruited me that day, who was America's first neo-Nazi skinhead and who had radicalized me. For the next eight years, I believed the lies that I had been fed. And though I saw no evidence of it whatsoever, I didn't hesitate to blame every Jewish person in the world for what I thought was a white, European genocide being promoted by them through a multiculturalist agenda. I blamed people of color for the crime and violence and the drugs in the city, completely neglecting the fact that I was committing acts of violence on a daily basis, and that in many cases, it was white supremacists who were funneling drugs into the inner cities. And I blamed immigrants for taking jobs from white Americans, completely neglecting the fact that my parents were hardworking immigrants who struggled to survive, despite not getting help from anybody else."

"For the next eight years, I saw friends die, I saw others go to prison and inflict untold pain on countless victims and their families' lives. I heard horrific stories from young women in the movement, who'd been brutally raped by the very men they were conditioned to trust, and I myself committed acts of violence against people, solely for the color of their skin, who they loved, or the god that they prayed to. I stockpiled weapons for what I thought was an upcoming race war. I went to six high schools; I was kicked out of four of them, one of them, twice. And 25 years ago, I wrote and performed racist music that found its way to the internet decades later and partially inspired a young white nationalist to walk into a sacred Charleston, South Carolina, church and senselessly massacre nine innocent people. "

"But then my life changed. At 19 years old, I met a girl who was not in the movement, who didn't have a racist bone in her body, and I fell in love with her. And at 19, we got married, and we had our first son. And when I held my son in my arms in the delivery room that day, not only did I reconnect with some of the innocence that I had lost at 14 years old, but it also began to challenge the very important things that drew me to the movement to begin with: identity, community and purpose -- things that I had been struggling with as a young boy. And now, I struggled with the concept of who I was again. Was I this neo-Nazi hatemonger, or was I a caring father and husband? Was my community the one that I had manufactured around me to boost my own ego, because I felt self-hatred for myself and I wanted to project it onto others, or was it the one that I had physically given life to? Was my purpose to scorch the earth or was it to make it a better place for my family? And suddenly, like a ton of bricks hit me, I became very confused with who I'd been for the last eight years. And if only I'd been brave enough to walk away at that moment, to understand what the struggle was that was happening inside of me, then maybe tragedy could have been averted. "

"Instead, I did compromise. I took myself off the streets for the benefit of my family, because I was nervous that maybe I could go to jail or end up dead, and they would have to fend for themselves. So I stepped back as a leader, and instead I opened a record store that I was going to sell white-power music in, of course, because I was importing it in from Europe. But I knew that if I was just a racist store selling racist music the community would not allow me to be there. So I decided I was going to also stock the shelves with other music, like punk rock and heavy metal and hip-hop. And while the white-power music that I was selling was 75 percent of my gross revenue, because people were driving in from all over the country to buy it from the only store that was selling it."

"I also had customers come in to buy the other music. And eventually, they started to talk to me. One day, a young black teen came in, and he was visibly upset. And I decided to ask him what was wrong. And he told me that his mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer. And suddenly, this young black teenager, who I'd never had a meaningful conversation or interaction with, I was able to connect with, because my own mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and I could feel his pain. On another occasion, a gay couple came in with their son, and it was undeniable to me that they loved their son in the same profound ways that I loved mine. And suddenly, I couldn't rationalize or justify the prejudice that I had in my head. "

"I decided to pull the white-power music from the inventory when I became too embarrassed to sell it in front of my new friends. And of course, the store couldn't sustain itself, so I had to close it. At that same time, I lost nearly everything in my life. I used it as an opportunity to walk away from the movement that I'd been a part of for eight years, the only identity, community and purpose that I'd really known for most of my life. So I had nobody. I lost my livelihood because I closed the store. I didn't have a great relationship with my parents, even though they tried. And my wife and children left me, because I hadn't left the movement and disengaged quickly enough. And suddenly, I didn't know who I was again, or where I fit in or what my purpose was supposed to be. I was miserable inside, and I often woke up in the morning wishing that I hadn't. "

"About five years in, one of the few friends that I had was concerned about my well-being, and she came to me and she said, "You need to do something, because I don't want to see you die." And she suggested that I go apply for a job where she worked, at a company called IBM. Yeah, I thought she was crazy, too. "

"Here I was, a closeted ex-Nazi covered in hate tattoos. I didn't go to college. I'd been kicked out of multiple high schools multiple times. I didn't even own a computer. But I went in, and somehow, miraculously, I got the job. I was thrilled."

"And then I became terrified to learn that they'd actually be putting me back at my old high school, the same one I got kicked out of twice, to install their computers. This was a high school where I had committed acts of violence against students, against faculty; where I had protested out in front of the school for equal rights for whites and even had a sit-in in the cafeteria to try and demand a white student union. "

"And of course, as karma would have it, within the first couple of hours, who walks right by me but Mr. Johnny Holmes, the tough black security guard I had gotten in a fistfight with, that got me kicked out the second time and led out in handcuffs from the school. He didn't recognize me, but I saw him, and I didn't know what to do. I was frozen; I was this grown man now, years out of the movement, and I was sweating and I was trembling. But I decided I had to do something. And I decided I needed to suffer under the weight of my past, because for five years I had tried to outrun it. I'd tried to make new friends and cover my tattoos with long sleeves, and I wouldn't admit it because I was afraid of being judged the same way I had judged other people. Well, I decided I was going to chase Mr. Holmes out to the parking lot -- probably not the smartest decision that I made. "

"But when I found him, he was getting into his car, and I tapped him on the shoulder. And when he turned around and he recognized me, he took a step back because he was afraid. And I didn't know what to say. Finally, the words came out of my mouth, and all I could think to say was, "I'm sorry." And he embraced me, and he forgave me. And he encouraged me to forgive myself. He recognized that it wasn't the story of some broken go-nowhere kid who was going to just join a gang and go to prison. He knew that this was the story of every young person who was vulnerable, who was searching for identity, community and purpose, and then hit a wall and was unable to find it and went down a dark path. And he made me promise one thing, that I would tell my story to whoever would listen. That was 18 years ago, and I've been doing it ever since. "

"You might be asking yourself right now: How does a good kid from a hardworking immigrant family end up going down such a dark path? One word: potholes. That's right. Potholes. I had a lot of potholes when I was kid. We all had them -- you know, the things in life that we hit that invariably just kind of nudge us off our path, and if they remain unresolved or untreated or not dealt with, sometimes we can get dangerously lost down pretty dark corridors. Potholes can be things like trauma, abuse, unemployment, neglect, untreated mental health conditions, even privilege. And if we hit enough potholes on our journey in life, and we don't have the resources or the help to navigate around them or to pull us out, well, sometimes good people end up doing bad things. "

"One such person who had potholes is Darrell. Darrell is from upstate New York. He had read my memoir, and he was really upset about the ending. You see, I'd gotten out of the movement and he was still in. And he emailed me and he said, "I didn't really like the way that turned out." And I said, "Well, I'm sorry." "

"'But if you want to talk about it, we could certainly do that.'"

"And after a couple of weeks of going back and forth with Darrell, I learned he was a 31-year-old military veteran who had been injured and was really angry about not being able to go to Afghanistan to kill Muslims. And one day on the phone, he told me that he had seen a Muslim man in the park praying, and that all he wanted to do was kick him in the face. I flew to Buffalo the next day, and I sat down with Darrell, and I asked him, 'Have you ever met a Muslim person before?' And he said, 'No! Why the hell would I want to do that? They're evil. I don't want anything to do with them.' I said, 'OK.' So I excused myself, and I went into the bathroom and I took my phone out in the bathroom, and I Googled the local mosque, and I called them very quietly from the bathroom, and I said, 'Excuse me, imam, I need a favor. I have a Christian man who would really love to learn more about your religion.' "

"'Do you mind if we stop by?'" 

"Well, it took some convincing for Darrell to go, but finally we got there, and when I knocked on the door, the imam said he only had 15 minutes left for us, because he was preparing for a prayer service. I said, 'We'll take it.' We went in, and two and a half hours later, we came out after hugging and crying and, very strangely, bonding over Chuck Norris for some reason. "

"I don't know what it was about that, but that's what happened. And I'm happy to say now that Darrell and the imam, you can often find them at the local falafel stand, having lunch together. "

"You see, it's our disconnection from each other. 

Hatred is born of ignorance. 

Fear is its father, and isolation is its mother. When we don't understand something, we tend to be afraid of it, and if we keep ourselves from it, that fear grows, and sometimes, it turns into hatred.

Since I've left the movement, I've helped over a hundred people disengage from extremist movements, from white supremacist groups to even jihadist groups."

"And the way I do that is not by arguing with them, not by debating them, not by even telling them they're wrong, even though, boy, I want to sometimes. I don't do that. 

Instead, I don't push them away. 

I draw them in closer, and I listen very closely for their potholes, and then I begin to fill them in.

I try to make people more resilient, more self-confident, more able to have skills to compete in the marketplace so that they don't have to blame the other, the other that they've never met. "



How will we do it?
Starting at the size of your pinky, with just 29 dominoes you can take down the Empire State Building. It's not natural to slow down and take steps to understand another person. These skills can be taught, and we can train our brains to experience a sense of belonging like never before. Ours is a big project but we've broken it down into small steps starting using Power of Porn, to save the world we have to make it so people aren't to busy with satisfying the vary bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs so we need you use the lowest need we can to get people to talk and learn how to understand people with different cultural backgrounds from them.
We'll start with WoMon a game for 1 or 2 players, It's you Basic Pokemon or Digimon World sexy monster girl collecting/training game but instead of beaning them on the head with a pokeball and earning gym badges to get them to follow you you have to build and maintain an intimate relationship with them. Based on Imago Relationship therapy and Adult Attachment theory.

WoMon is Charity Porn to build up the patrons to fund. You think it's just guilt free porn but really it's already forcing you into consider perspectives other that your own and to start looking at strangers not as some 'other' to demonize but as a puzzle to be solved.

Next will come the Anti-Wikipedia, instead of trying to be the source of god's own truth, It's a wiki of the personal truths of the entire world.It'll have Xanadu like transclusions and a culture of if you can't link back to the source you're taking reasonability for the information in it. By taking the behavior engineering advice, 'Don't try to make the doing the right thing the only option, try to make doing the right thing the easiest option,' a corollary to "Make the easy things easy, and the hard things possible."

Then Will add Stumpers! a site that crowdsources those questions that Google can't answer into a trivia game. This will be the start to a general purpose self-governed crowdsourcing marketplace based of Stanford's Daemo research.

Along the way will adapted SmartParticipation and InproveTheNews into an automated Deutschland spricht.

To help with communication and thinking will develop a IAL, called Maraine, with semiauto mated translation from and completely automated translations to the uses' native tongue. Maraine is a idiogryhic written language, like Classical Chinese, with it's words made up of Tetragrams. Like Chinese the reader is suppose the read the words in his own language thou the characters have simple names based on the Japanese syllabary, so each character can be pronounced as simple syllable of a constant followed by a vowel, as a mnemonic device or for word with no native equivalent

We are keeping the latest roadmap on our wiki.
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FootNotes
In 19th-century France, where this innocuous-looking piece of paper was discovered in 1894 by officers in the French general staff. It was torn up in a wastepaper basket, but when they pieced it back together, they discovered that someone in their ranks had been selling military secrets to Germany. 
So they launched a big investigation, and their suspicions quickly converged on this man, Alfred Dreyfus. He had a sterling record, no past history of wrongdoing, no motive as far as they could tell. But Dreyfus was the only Jewish officer at that rank in the army, and unfortunately at this time, the French Army was highly anti-Semitic. They compared Dreyfus's handwriting to that on the memo and concluded that it was a match, even though outside professional handwriting experts were much less confident in the similarity, but never mind that. They went and searched Dreyfus's apartment, looking for any signs of espionage. They went through his files, and they didn't find anything. This just convinced them more that Dreyfus was not only guilty, but sneaky as well, because clearly he had hidden all of the evidence before they had managed to get to it. 

Next, they went and looked through his personal history for any incriminating details. They talked to his teachers, they found that he had studied foreign languages in school, which clearly showed a desire to conspire with foreign governments later in life. His teachers also said that Dreyfus was known for having a good memory, which was highly suspicious, right? You know, because a spy has to remember a lot of things.

Colonel Picquart was high-ranking officer in the French Army, and like most people, he assumed Dreyfus was guilty. Also like most people in the army, he was at least casually anti-Semitic. But Picquart had discovered evidence that the spying for Germany had continued, even after Dreyfus was in prison he began to suspect: "What if we're all wrong about Dreyfus?". And he had also discovered that another officer in the army had handwriting that perfectly matched the memo, much closer than Dreyfus's handwriting. So he brought these discoveries to his superiors, but to his dismay, they either didn't care or came up with elaborate rationalizations to explain his findings, like, "Well, all you've really shown, Picquart, is that there's another spy who learned how to mimic Dreyfus's handwriting, and he picked up the torch of spying after Dreyfus left. But Dreyfus is still guilty." Eventually, Picquart managed to get Dreyfus exonerated. But it took him 10 years, and for part of that time, he himself was in prison for the crime of disloyalty to the army. 

A lot of people feel like Picquart can't really be the hero of this story because he was an anti-Semite and that's bad, which I agree with. But personally, for me, the fact that Picquart was anti-Semitic actually makes his actions more admirable, because he had the same prejudices, the same reasons to be biased as his fellow officers, but his motivation to find the truth and uphold it trumped all of that.

Just like being brave is not the absence of fear; It’s feeling the fear and doing it anyway. It’s doing it in spite of the fear.Virtue is not the absence of evil; It's desiring evil and doing good anyway. It's doing good in spite of evil.
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The Wholly Marine Corps.

Members of The Order of Her Noodly Appendage.
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--- It is with books as with the fire in our hearths; we go to a neighbor to get the embers and light it when we return home, pass it on to others, and it belongs to everyone.
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