The New God in Town

The New God in Town.

The Internet has become a God. It has risen above the possibility of a false idol into the status of a full fledged deity.

In just my lifetime, it has grown from its humble roots into a force that is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. We ought to take notice.

Like the Christian version of god, the internet is now omnipresent. The internet is everywhere. There is no corner of our planet that the internet has not found itself. In addition, it exists even in space and on other planets.

The internet as we know it is what controls the mars rovers and deep space probes, it is accessible to astronauts from space, and brings us pictures of the furthest galaxies back home to our desktop computers.

Here on earth, it can be found from big cities into the furthest reaches of the most desolate continents. Farmers in barren parts of the Saharan Africa can use it, as can polar explorers and people flying on planes over the oceans. The internet is everywhere.

And yet with the internet being everywhere, it is simultaneously nowhere. Since Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet, nobody has been able to actually see it. Even then, he couldn't really see most of it, just what it did. It is just a bunch of bits and bytes moving around invisibly as electrical charges, points of light, and those magical radio waves.

For all the internet does and is in our lives today, there are few people that actually understand much of it. Almost everybody knows something about it, but it can be said that it has kinda gotten away from people. It certainly is bigger than the sum of its parts.

For as big as the internet is, it can also fit in the palm of my hand, or even just in my pocket. That old Protestant idea that god was so big that it filled the whole world, yet was small enough to fit into your heart has really happened with the internet.

In fact many new cardiac pacemakers are being built as wifi connected devices so that doctors can look at what they are doing, and tinker with them from a distance. I'm not sure if I would want to have an internet connected pacemaker. That seems like a bit of a security risk to me. But modern medicine has found that they can use this technology to help more people than they could otherwise.

Enough about omnipresence, the internet is also omniscient. It knows everything.

Actually, knowing everything is one of the things that makes the internet the most useful. I can access anything about the entire body of human knowledge from my desk. If I want to know when something happened, a quick search tells me. If I am curious about a disease, or set of symptoms, I can probably get a result from online faster and with more accurate results than I could from most doctors.

In ages past if I wanted to find a group of experts on any given subject, I would have to go to where they are. Generally experts on congregated where they could have the most access to other ideas and to people that needed their ideas. This was generally the great universities and public centers of the world. This gathering of ideas together was always one of the best reasons for creating large cities like Rome, London, Calcutta, New York, and others.

Ideas get together and create more new ideas. This is best done when they can interact with other ideas. Until about 20 years ago, the best place for this was in crowded cities. Today the best place for ideas to get together is online.

Nobody knows everything, except the internet.

The recent revelations by government whistleblowers like Edward Snowden have shown us how much the internet really knows about us. Through companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and others governments can collect unfathomable amounts of information on anybody and everybody. They can, so they do.

Recently it came out that some large retailers had figured out that they could predict whether someone was pregnant or not with remarkable accuracy including their due date, and they could often do it before the person even know it themselves. They really do know more about us than we know about ourselves, just like many churches believe god can do.

Since the internet now knows everything, it is also fast becoming omnipotent.

There is very little in the world that the internet can't do.

One of the few bastions of freedom left is in individual control of our thoughts, and yet even that is changing.

Studies done by Facebook in 2011 showed that they could affect moods of people simply by guiding what information and media they were able to view.

When the Iranian nuclear reactor was shut down in 2011, it was pinned on a computer virus. The virus was named Stuxnet. It was largely believed that it was created and deployed by hackers working for either Israel or the United States governments. Possibly by both governments in collaboration.

They were able to shut down a nuclear reactor without going within a hundred miles of it, and do so without any damage or loss of life. That seems pretty godlike to me. I think that was pretty much the point at which the internet truly became all powerful.

So here we are in 2015 with a new god roaming the planet and out into the cosmos. We know where this god came from, it was made by humans.

Most gods I think are made by humans, but this one has a somewhat more definite feel to it. Its something that almost everyone on the planet has been exposed to, and unlike religions of generations past, there is not really any penalty imposed for not believing. No penalty except that you can't partake in its goodness and greatness. Even if you are not a follower and true believer though, there are probably very few people in the world that would argue that the internet doesn’t exist.

Certainly there are those that know it exists, and choose to unplug from it. Others however may simply not be worthy enough to have very good access to it.

On the other extreme however there are the priests of the internet god. Much like priests of other faiths, these intrepid souls find a calling in understanding the mysteries of their god. They spend their time communing with their god, and both asking and receiving of its goodness. These are the engineers and hackers that have become such a core part of our new internet culture.

Those that become priests (of any religion) often do so out of greed. There is good money to be found in being the dude that everyone goes to when they cant get any answers from the great god. When people find that their connection to the divine has been severed, they call their local priest, and in this case that person is the tech support nephew or neighbor.

These penitent followers bring call up their local priest to find some divine magic to reconnect them. With the proper coding rituals and removal of the sinful browser cookies, the connection to the divine internet can be restored.

When the great internet god was first discovered a few years ago, hordes of the most savvy hacker priests flocked to the holy mecca of San Jose to built their own great churches and partake in the flow of cash that is associated with having a church or an internet start-up company.

In the beginning there were internet start-up churches all over. Many of them failed, but a few found large groups of followers. The internet churches found that clean code was a lot like the mythical clean living, and it made everyone’s lives easier and more fruitful.

The internet companies which had the best access, the cleanest code, and the cutest cat pictures soon found that their followers grew in number until they covered the face of the planet.

Today the great internet companies (churches) of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo extend all across the globe with hundreds of millions of registered users. Each day the penitent followers of the internet go to their favorite online sanctuaries to find answers to life's most perplexing questions, and to socialize with their friends and neighbors.

Years ago the great churches of history divided the lands between their different gods all across the world. The churches of democracy and republics jostled for position with the churches of monarchy communism and oligarchy. Everywhere control and money ruled.

In each area there were groups of people who used the ongoing worship of the people to build ever larger groups of followers. They leveraged these groups of followers into systems of control and power. In time these groups of followers coalesced into our modern nation-states. Within those nation states, smaller divisions of political and religious ideologies filled the land.

All in all, most people found that they had subscribed to a group of churches together. They would have a church subscribing to certain political ideology, and another for their spiritual beliefs.

An associate of mine explained to me that he was a member of the republican US church with another membership in a christian worship church and held fealty to the mind control system of the American Marines Force Recon. In addition to these however, he had recently joined the internet churches of Google, and Facebook. The most troubling one that he had come across however was Wikipedia.

Between Wikipedia, Google and Facebook, he was starting to question some of his old beliefs. He found that many of his beliefs over the years had been built on partial truths and lies. The churches of the internet however gave him free and uncensored access to more information than he had ever had before. This free access to information is a central tenant of the Internet God and its churches.

That is the same problem that many of the older churches and religions are having. Their old bases of power were built on being able to control the information available to their followers. This brought them great power and great wealth.

When the internet became available, that control of information was lost.

Both political structures and long standing religious churches have been hit hard by this free flow of ideas and information. Whether Mormon, Muslim, democrat, or socialist, the power of the leaders to control the flow of information is waning. Their loss of control is rapidly eroding their power base, and as a result they are trying to gain control over many of the upstart internet churches.

Google, Facebook, Apple, and most of the other large internet companies are getting squeezed by groups like the US Federal Government and the European Union's governing councils. In China, the Great Firewall was erected in an attempt to stem the influx of raw uncensored information. The US NSA realized that controlling the information was going to be difficult, so instead they are working to know what everybody is doing all the time.

The world that we now live in is one in which the old guard churches are being squeezed hard by the internet and its many followers. The belief in openness and freedom is spreading around the world rapidly. This new god is making inroads in every possible facet of life, and its not going anywhere.

In the middle east the internet was the vehicle that was used by dissatisfied people to overthrow or restructure 11 different nation-state governments. This Arab Spring movement was created and hatched by social activists and hackers in the back alley rooms of Facebook and twitter.

Even in the event of a global communications shutdown, the knowledge of these systems is now ingrained in the hearts and minds of engineers the world over. These engineers and their counterpoint hackers serve as the priests of this new religion and deity. The cat is out of the bag and the internet is not going anywhere.

Many philosophers consider organized religion to be a system of power and control over the hearts and minds of the masses of humanity. Conversely, the systems of organized power and control such as the governments of nation-states are regarded by many as religions in their own right as well. These old form religions are based on central control of information and authority.

In the world as we now know it the control is being shifted from a central hierarchical systems of history, to a distributed network, and it is the internet that has done this.

The pull in different directions between the churches of control and power and the god of free information are mighty.

In time we will see who is the more powerful god. Personally, I’m betting on freedom and human ingenuity. That has been the trend since forever. I don’t see it changing.

The old churches aside, I wonder what the old gods think about all this.

The Point of Decision and Responsibility

I remember when my life changed, it was January of 2011.

Today I look back, and I have a hard time imagining that I could have been the person I was before. The changes between him and I are so profound that the former me is almost unrecognizable from who I have become.

As a child I was taught that all of the things that happened in the world were the direct result of either the actions of god, or the actions of the devil, and as part of that, the ongoing struggle between good and evil.

I believed that if I chose the side of good, and worked as hard as I could to achieve that, then my path in life would be laid out for me by higher powers. The events in life that I encountered would be created for me to bring about a higher goal.

This set of ideas was the core premise that I built my life around. As I became an adult I constantly weighed my choices and actions against this measuring stick of a greater purpose. When I encountered challenges I understood that they were either outside influences that had been engineered for my growth and development, or they were opposition from evil influences.

This set of beliefs was comforting to me as it relieved me of may of the burdens of choice and responsibility in my life. I just had to make sure that my actions were according to my understanding of this higher plan.

The trigger

In November of 2010 my infant son died. The emotional pain that I went through in the weeks and months following were something that nobody should ever be subjected to. In the turmoil of that time I became very frustrated with my life.

In January I was faced with a series of financial challenges in our business that seemed too big to conquer. The end of the year brought about the closing of our first year as a retail store. As a result the landlord was asking for an additional sum to renew the lease and lock in our rents for the next three years. In addition we lost 4 of our employees in the week before Christmas, and I had been forced to take another job, and then quit it when I realized that my wife would not let me be out of her sight due to her insecurities about our marriage.

The total sales for the store's first year in business only amounted to about $140,000. The expenses were just slightly more than that. To move into the new year we would need to bring in an additional $20,000 in new capital just to keep the doors open.

This was the pinnacle and culmination of 8 years in a severely abusive marriage that I believed was the right path that god had laid out for me. The resulting depression and hopelessness was intense.

The moment of change

In that time of pain and despair one of the most important realizations that I had ever had happened.

I realized that I didn't know why our business was failing. I knew that it was having problems, but really had no good understanding as to the reasons behind it, or what to do about it. I also knew that the entire time that I had been married we had struggled financially. Just 3 years previously we had filed bankruptcy due to our construction company going under. In addition, we had been through many different financial struggles over the years and it didn't seem to matter what I did, the stress and strain was always there.

What I realized in that moment was that I didn't know enough about business to be in business. I realized that the struggles that we was having as a family and in business were because of MY inadequacies.

That was both very frustrating to me, and very liberating.

I no longer could blame an unseen or outside force for my misfortunes. I knew who was to blame, and it was me. That meant that I could change it.

I realized that in order to change my situation, I would have to change myself.

The solutions

That week I enrolled in an online college to get a degree in business management. I also started looking at other solutions for myself and our business.

I made a deal with a customer that was an accountant to teach me how to keep the books and understand them. Since the business was so short on cash, he agreed to trade his services for goods and services at the store.

I also started looking for other business mentors, and I started reading business books and reading information from business experts online.

As I came to understand how much I didn't know it was frustrating. At the same time however it was exciting and wonderful. Knowing that you can conquer a problem before you is a great thing, and this was a very new philosophy for me.

At the same time that I was going through this process I started having deep discussions with my Uncle Max about other aspects of philosophy. He taught me a great deal about logical thinking and using empirical evidence to make my decisions. He also taught me about logical fallacies and how they corrupt people's thinking. I realized that a lot of my decision making had been based on logical fallacies and misguided intuition instead of data and evidence. I vowed to change that, and started the long process of rewiring my brain and thinking.

I came to a lot of very good understandings over the next several months. I started to know what the problem areas in our business were, and we worked to fix them. I developed an addiction to creating systems in the business, and to finding as much data as possible to make decisions. This new way of thinking and doing was wonderful!

Backlash

There was a big problem with all of this however.

When a person starts rebuilding their life on logic, reason, and empirical data; it can create strain on relationships that were previously built on faulty thinking.

I knew that my marriage had problems. I had previously believed that our relationship was ordained of god, and that I should just stick with it and go along with the challenges that were encountered.

My wife had some severe mental disorders that had been diagnosed in her teen years, and they affected her daily. Many of the worst symptoms she managed through diet and exercise. The core basis of our relationship however had always been built on the idea that God wished us to be together, so we were. It took the responsibility for choice and decision making away.

In my new time of self responsibility, I realized that I could change and become a better person, and by extension that would make my marriage better. I knew that the problems that I had could not be fixed without new understandings and new information. So I worked as hard as I could to learn these new ideas and information.

In looking for better understanding about relationships I followed the same basic methods that I had learned for my business. I found as much good information as I could, then I weighed it against the standards of empirical data and looked for obvious errors, omissions, or logical fallacies. When I found these I discarded any ideas or information that were flawed, and kept whatever good information that I found. I then set out to incorporate what I learned into my life.

The reality of the situation is that my marriage did not survive this process. I came to the realization that my wife was abusive and her mental disorders made change almost impossible.

At the same time I was on this path of learning and self discovery, she was also on a path of discovery at the bottom of a large bottle of wine. The substance abuse issues that she had developed in her teen years came roaring back, and within a short time she had found her way into the criminal justice system for substance abusers.

I look back at the realizations that I had in those times of frustration and grief. What I see is amazing to me, both in where I came from psychologically, and the paths that I took to get where I am now.

The bottom line is that we each have control over our lives. We can choose to delegate control to others, whether real or imagined. We can't get out of the consequences of our choices though. I had delegated control of my life to an unseen god with a plan for my life, and an abusive wife. I then got to deal with all the consequences of their decisions and actions. As a result my life was a mess. I had all of the consequences, but none of the choice.

The results today

Today I have a much better life. I understand that the choices that I make directly affect my happiness. I know now that I can change my situation by learning and by taking appropriate action.

In addition I no longer delegate decisions for my life to an unseen power. I certainly weigh my decisions against what I understand as good, decent and honorable. I don't however base my decisions on what another person tells me is the will of god in my personal life.

If someone has a suggestion for me or advice, I consider it carefully. If it is a good idea with a solid basis in good knowledge, and it meets with my goals in life, then I will accept it with gratitude and incorporate it. If not, I can politely thank the person for their interest in my life and proceed with building the better life I know I can have.

Using this set of standards, I have found that there is no monopoly on good ideas. I have found that some people with excellent credentials and many followers have some ridiculous ideas. I have also found that some people with very little formal understanding or training can have some profoundly good ideas. There is no monopoly on either good, or ideas. I seek truth and understanding from all sources now.

This morning I sit here in the early morning darkness and I am amazed at the path I have walked. These past four years have been some of the hardest that I have ever been through. I have buried my son, closed my store, left an abusive wife, started over with almost nothing, rebuilt my life and married my childhood sweetheart. I found a daughter I didn't know I had, and brought my other kids out of the abusive mess that they were in. I have started a new business and a new life in a new place with family and friends that love and care about me and my family.

Most importantly I now have control and responsibility for my life and my results. I have a full understanding of how I can make my life better and I am actively engaged in doing just exactly that.

If there is a problem now, I know that the problem is most likely me. That simple fact alone makes all the difference, and it makes for a much happier life.

Until next time, you can do it! Hang in there.

The Lies we Tell Ourselves

The Lies we Tell Ourselves

“It’s one thing to quit. At least you started. But when we tell ourselves the “I can’t” lie, we do so without even having had the courage to try in the first place. And that’s the ultimate weakness. Not trying. 

When you combine your ultimate weakness with your biggest lie you end up with a life of frustration, a lack of progress, and the dishonor of knowing that you are avoiding self-growth in order to remain in the safe confines of your comfort zone. 

We lie to protect ourselves. And it works. It saves us from social and physical discomfort…in the short-term. But in the long run, it makes us weakened slaves shackled to a lifetime of unfulfilled potential.”   - Craig Ballantyne

One of the biggest reasons that people stay in abusive relationships is because of the lies. Often we think about the lies that we believe others tell to us, but the real problem is the lies we tell to ourselves.

I was in an abusive relationship for nine years. There were several points along the way that almost killed me, and at the end my son died.

Looking back at an abusive relationship, it is easy to talk about problems that the other person had. They are obvious enough that the relationship ended. They are easy to see and have to be talked about and worked through in order to heal from them. Harder still is seeing areas that we may have failed in, or need to do better in.

Shortly after I remarried I stopped lying to myself about the abuse that my kids were going through, and I started taking steps to protect them. As I said it at the time “I can't pretend that these problems don't exist anymore.” That was one of the biggest mental shifts that I ever had to make.

The thing about being truthful with yourself is that over time it gets easier. Just like it becomes easier to tell big lies after you have told small lies, it goes in reverse. Once you start telling the truth, it becomes easier to tell the truth again. This is especially true with lying to yourself.

I realized on my drive home last night that I had an abusive relationship largely because it was built on lies. It was built on the lies that she told me, and that I told her in return. More importantly though, it was built on the lies that I told myself about the nature of our relationship, and by extension the lies that she told herself.

Last night was something of an eye opener for me. When I picked my kids up from visiting their mom for the holiday, they told me in matter-of-fact way that young children do about some things that their mom had told them. I realized that the lies she tells herself are still very ingrained in her. I suspect that she may have been lying to herself for so long that she doesn't even know fact from fiction any longer.

Just about the time I was separating from my ex, my business mentor gave me a book to read that changed my perspectives on life. The book is Leadership and Self Deception, and I highly recommend it to anybody and everybody. It ranks as one of the best books that I have ever read, and certainly one of the most influential.

In reading this book, it talks about the schism that happens in the brain when we act contrary to what we know to be right. This schism releases chemicals in the brain which build up over time. When we try to go against what we know to be truth, it actually damages our mental capacity. I suspect that there are a lot of people in the world that lie to themselves so much, and so deeply, that they have rewired their brain function irreparably. I think that this factor contributes to abuse in more ways than any other factor besides mental diseases and disorders. In many regards I think it is in itself a mental disease, whether diagnosed or not.

The cascade of events abd behaviors that flow outward form lying to ourselves are pretty simple. First we lie to ourselves, and then we lie to others. Then we change our behaviors to fit those lies. Over time we convince those around us either actively, or by example to change their behaviors as well. As part of that effort they begin to lie to themselves and those around them as well. Like a pebble dropped into a pond, the ripples flow outward further and further.

In modern society there are lies that are so big that few people can even see them anymore. These lies started with simple small ideas, and then they got bigger. Many of these ideas create abusive situations in our society at large. These big lies have started wars, changed economies, and been responsible for the death and suffering of millions of people all over the world.

Evil thrives in an environment of lies. Whether those lies are the small lies that we tell ourselves to justify not living up to our potential, or whether those lies are tying us into an abusive relationship, or whether they are the big lies that start wars and spread death and destruction. They all start with a simple lie, and then that lie grows.

I left my wife because our relationship was toxic and she was abusive in many ways. Soon thereafter I decided that I would do everything that I could to be honest in my life and in my dealings with others. Integrity is hard wired into my being, and so lying to others has never been easy for me. Lying to myself however has always been fairly simple.

As I changed my outward behaviors to be honest with others, I found it harder to lie to myself.

As I started telling myself the truth, and stopped buying into the lies in my own mind, my life changed for the better. Like a snowball gaining momentum down a hill, it gets easier and more significant over time.

I found that as I held myself to be true to myself, and to be honest with myself, life became easier and more fulfilling. My personal relationships improved, and my business started getting better than it ever has.

The thing about lying is that we all do it. Whether we want to admit it or not, everybody lies. The worst lies however are the ones we tell ourselves. Lies like “I can't” are crippling.

As my friend Craig said in the opening statement, “in the long run, it makes us weakened slaves shackled to a lifetime of unfulfilled potential.”

The first step is to tell the truth. Whether this start of truth is to ourselves or others it starts just like lies do, as a small seed. Then little by little it grows and builds in momentum until it becomes so big that it fills our life. Unlike small lies that turn into big lies however, the cascade of telling the truth and acting with integrity will change your life, and my life for the better.

One of the hardest things however is holding to that truth wherever it takes you. Rejecting the lies about my abusive relationship forced me to protect my children. That in turn has become an expensive legal fight costing tens of thousands of dollars. It has also forced me to reevaluate my spiritual beliefs in ways that are very uncomfortable. I have had to admit to myself and others of misdeeds in business and in my personal life. That is a hard thing to do.

In the end however, it is liberating!

When I tell lies to myself, those lies control me and my life.

Without the lies however, I control my life and I love it!