Greatest Moonshot of the 21st Century?

 

On March 15, 2015 Fareed Zakaria featured Five Moonshots for the 21st Century on his CNN GPS program that included sending astronauts to Mars, 3-D printing a human heart, creating a star on earth, flying from New York to London in an hour, and mapping the human brain. These are all grand goals indeed, but in the book, you will now learn about the 2Selfs Revolution that will instigate the greatest moonshot of the first two decades of the 21st century that quite possibly could become the most consequential moonshot of the whole 21st century. Looking even more broadly, the 2Selfs Revolution will reverse our current mega-descent by establishing only the third mega-ascent in the history of the West that will create a long (2Selfs Age!) period of greater successes than we previously attained. As you read the 2Selfs Revolution book, you might come to believe that this mental revolution is the greatest (mental-world, problem-solving) moonshot since the Science/Enlightenment Revolution. The moon­shot you will learn about here is mapping the intangible human mind (as opposed the mapping the tangible human brain from Zakaria’s list of moonshots, which remains a laudable goal). 2Selfs Theory, which provides the technical underpinning of the 2Selfs Revolution, establishes a comprehensive model of the human mind, with unprecedented mapping of the many intricacies of its automatic mode. 2Selfs Theory also provides us with visibility to the big-picture significance of the 2Selfs Revolution.

 

To gain a solid perspective on the magnitude of the impact the 2Selfs Revolution will have on the greatness of the West, we need to compare it to the similar widespread effect the Science/Enlightenment Revolution had. These two mega-moonshots do not solve just one gigantic problem as other moonshots do (including the ones listed by Zakaria above)—they open the floodgates to solve an enormous class of problems; i.e., they create very rare culture-wide mega-ascents.

 

The Science/Enlightenment Revolution emancipated our latent thinking-self abilities that opened the floodgates to solve an extremely wide range of previously unsolvable physical-world problems with enormous effectiveness. That mega-ascent provided discontinuous improvements that included the advent of our many science disciplines, technology developments, and product creations that fueled our subsequent improvements in standards-of-living, well-being, and shared values for over two centuries, which created the Modern West and provided the basis for over two centuries of greatness for the West. Our current Manipulation Devolution is killing that greatness. However, the 2Selfs Revolution will overcome the Abilities Mismatch to emancipate our elusive and illusive auto-self idiosyncrasies that will open the floodgates to solve an extremely wide range of currently unsolved or inadequately solved technology-driven mental-world (human activities) problems. This mega-ascent will provide discontinuous improvements for our social systems (including in business, governing systems, economies, the antiscience creationism debacle, and the creation of shared positive values) and personal responsibilities (including drug addictions, high prisoner populations and recidivism, and voter manipulations). In doing so, the 2Selfs Revolution will resurrect the greatness of the West.

 

Overview of Crucial Auto-Self Activities We Need to Conquer

 

The following few paragraphs provide you with a glimpse of the many facets of the auto-self that are not currently understood and managed adequately. You do not need to understand each point right now; you will accomplish that as you read the book. The main point of listing these auto-self mechanisms is to help you understand how many currently unmanaged activities are going on within our auto-self, how these are contributing to the mega-descent of the West, and how conquering them will provide the opening we need to resurrect the greatness of the West. I have been incrementally creating 2Selfs Theory for nearly three decades; as a result, I not only deeply understand these aspects and many more of our automatic activities, I also have 2Selfs Worldview embedded within my auto-self, so I see human activities through the lens that exposes the current dysfunction and the future possibilities that reside within the auto-self. I can assert with extreme confidence and unwavering expectations that conquering the automatic mode of human activities is the only way to reverse our mega-descent and launch a mega-ascent into a new grand and glorious future for the West. Currently, the 2Selfs Revolution is the only way to achieve that goal, so it must happen and happen soon. It will have a decisive impact on professions focused on human activities and on overcoming the current dysfunctions we are suffering because we are not currently managing the auto-self. The 2Selfs Revolution will inevitably create revolutionary problem-solving ascents for most professions focused on human activities, including (but not necessarily limited to) businesses, business schools, economics, political theory and governing, history, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and religion studies and eventually on many human aspects of religions themselves.

 

Auto-Contexts

 

Robustly modeling automatic contextual frameworks, or auto-contexts to use the 2Selfs Theory term, creates the greatest 2Selfs Theory breakthrough. These hidden mental mechanism are currently major contributors to our mega-descent and when con­quered will become a major part of the mental revolution that will launch our desperately needed mega-ascent. Following are some examples of forms of auto-contexts that you will learn about in the 2Selfs Revolution book and that should give you insight into to how little the West (and humankind in general) currently understands about, and therefore how poorly we manage, the automatic mode of human activities.

 

Problem-Solving Worldviews

 

Worldviews are ubiquitous forms of auto-contexts that control our ability to think effectively about specific types of issues; they provide the foundation for solving problems on specific topics.

 

Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like. (Noam Chomsky)

 

With 2Selfs Theory, we can now see that the difference between a problem and a mystery in Chomsky’s sense is that we have an effective foundation (i.e., worldview embedded in our auto-self) for problems and lack a viable foundation for mysteries. As you successfully use 2Selfs Theory, 2Selfs Worldview will automatically and imperceptibly emerge within your auto-self, which will provide you the foundation to understand and solve mental-world problems discontinuously better than you current can. In fact, the difference between continuous (or incremental or normal) improvements and discontinuous (or disruptive or revolutionary) improvements is that continuous improvements operate within an existing worldview and discontinuous improvements transform the problem-solving worldview foundation.

 

Certainty Illusions and Two Forms of “Truth”

 

Auto-contexts impact our successes, well-being, and values in many hidden ways. Crucial among these are ubiquitous constructions of internal certainties that may or may not correspond to anything outside of our mind, our certainty illusions. Even more troubling, we often succumb to certainty delusions that verifiably do not correspond to the world outside of our internal mental states. A major result of previously opaque certainty illusions is that humans have two distinct forms of what they consider “truth.” When most people think an assertion is “true,” they assume that it corresponds to something “out there.” That is the correspondence form has of truth. However, another, constructed, form of “truth” exists for most people, and this is often the most profound form of “truth” for them. This form of “truth” exists “in here” and operates independent of any correspondence with anything “out there” (for certainty illusions) and against the known facts of the world “out there” for certainty delusion. You will learn in the book how our inability to understand and manage this highly deceptive constructed form of “truth” is causing major problems right now.

 

Branding/Propaganda

 

The political propaganda form of this use of explicitly constructed auto-contexts is a specialty of Donald Trump who uses it to construct certainty illusions and delusions in voters that negatively brand people and groups he does not like. These auto-context constructions have profound effects on people that they normally do not recognize.

 

Supraevolution

 

In the book, you will learn about an amazing newly recognized form of evolution, supraevolution, which resides in worldviews (i.e., in auto-contexts buried in the auto-self) we create and propagate. At the overarching level, worldview transformations are the underlying bases of our mega-ascents and mega-descents. We also can occasionally create supraevolutionary transformations within individual professions and with our overall shared values. Previously, all of our supraevolutionary events have occurred implicitly and indirectly. We are currently experiencing the West’s second supraevolutionary descent in the form of the Manipulation Devolution. You will learn that we have finally reached the point in the maturation of human problem-solving that we cannot achieve another overarching supraevolutionary ascent without doing that explicitly and directly because understanding and managing the supraevolutionary process must be part of our next supraevolutionary ascent. The 2Selfs Revolution will create that capability.

 

Discomfort-Based Vulnerabilities to Manipulations

 

In addition to the many ways you just saw outlined that our currently unmanaged auto-contexts are causing widespread and growing dysfunctions, which are contributing to our mega-descent, our inability to understand and manage some aspects of our auto-behaviors are also contributing to our current Manipulation Devolution. In the book, you will learn about many properties of the auto-self. Prominent among these auto-self properties is the Comfort Imperative that causes us to seek pleasure and compels us to escape discomfort when it exceeds our tolerance threshold. This creates growing venerability to manipulations when widespread discomfort increases, as we are now experiencing based on the many currently unsolvable problems along with terrorism threats and real but vastly exaggerated immigration problems. Many current politicians are deliberately stoking additional discomforts that cause many voters succumb to their seduction-trap manipulations in the form of simplistic solution to increasingly complicated problems. Simplistic solutions fail to solve the problems they purport to address because they focus on relieving the discomfort you have knowing that you are failing to solve important problems, but they feel to solve the important problems that are causing your discomfort. The book identifies many cases where people are trading avoidance of short-term discomfort at the price of suffering to the pain of long-term failure.

 

Launching the 2Selfs Revolution

 

The third mega-ascent of the West will occur when a critical mass of heroes, perhaps including you, emerges to lead the 2Selfs Revolution so we can resurrect the greatness of the West because we will create widespread abilities to solve human-activities (social systems and personal responsibilities) problems that are causing our current mega-descent.  

 

You can find an extended list of who will benefit from this book, which also indirectly provides an overview of the widespread benefits that will emerge from the 2Selfs Revolution, in Audience.

 

You will find a partial list of professions from which heroes might emerge to launch the 2Selfs Revolution. Will you become one of these Heroes?

 

After you read the book, you might want help to jumpstart implementing transformational change. You can learn about a possible source of transformational change and find more about the creator of 2Selfs Theory and the instigator of the 2Selfs revolution in About.