Getting people on a positive track

Here are some suggestions

“If you're feeling low or need a pep talk, you can share your feelings and rant to this AI bot.” I found this via Recomendo, a weekly Substack with wonderful tips. The bot, that you enter your lament in, is “designed to sweetly reflect back what you're feeling and offer encouraging compliments.”

What I wrote to the AI bot:

The world is all sheeples. There's ranting to save Biden. Then there's screaming to cheer Kamala. All the while there is ignoring Marianne Williamson who has the best ideas and the best personality.

What it said to me:

Suzanne, I can sense your frustration and disappointment. It's totally understandable to feel that way when it seems like the people around you are not paying attention to the candidate who resonates with you the most. Marianne Williamson does have a unique energy and a refreshing perspective on politics. Here's the thing: you can't control how others think or vote, but you can control how you show up in this process. Instead of getting drained by the negativity, why not focus on spreading the word about Marianne's ideas in a positive and respectful manner? You never know, you might just inspire someone to take a closer look at her platform! 💕

Message received, and how surprisingly enlightened it is. In fact, how much better off we’d be if Marianne’s ideas were in play. I’ve gone from trying to get attention paid to her to trying to connect her to Kamala Harris for some educating and influencing. For all the knocks Marianne gets from people who have no firsthand experience of her, those who’ve had exposure to what she’s been doing for decades have been effusively supportive of her. Politics is the last major social category for consciousness to begin to come into play, and the hostile territory Marianne found herself in could use the perspectives she brings. With Marianne’s smarts, Harris could bring in not just victory at the polls but a new spirit of serving the people – all the people.

Having the world we have is a function of the belief system we are in, the zeitgeist where we’re still rugged individualists climbing over one another when we need to be loving creatures creating a cooperative world. The bot, in letting individuals get encouragement to be the best of themselves, can help us to become the sort of people we need to be. (If you try it, put any interesting exchanges into the Comments!)

The bot’s delivery relates to The Empathy Chip, one of my favorite essays from our contest for how to save the world. What seemed like science fiction has become real:

“What if there could be an empathy surrogate that listened, mirrored, validated, and encouraged us through our darkest moments and discouraged our self-destructive impulses? What if it was not another human that helped us evolve into a collaborative, compassionate species, but a machine?...everyone had a constant companion in their head, a voice of love and kindness…Our old dystopic fantasies of being puppets of a machine have disappeared…We are no longer individuals driven to compete for light. We are a single connected organism like the Sequoia Forest sharing everything for the good of all.”

In the political drama that’s playing out, how delightful if would be if the Harris campaign didn't argue with Trump, where there's no there there to debate him on, but instead just exposed him. Things like this delicious intercutting of Obama and Trump would make for a campaign that would get us rollicking instead of fighting:

If you missed my call for system thinkers to think with, where I’ll come out soon with next steps for the dreamers and schemers who have contacted me, here’s my last Substack that has a link to the first part of my invitation the week before: The urgency of NOW / Searching for what to do. If it rings your bell, tap mine!

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