Overview
Our use of information technology has resulted in transparency. Our transparency has made it apparent that there is more ambiguity to life than we have previously conveyed to one another. The collective recognition of our ambiguity will lead us to desire greater autonomy in the way we live our lives. Living autonomously will enable us to cooperate and live harmoniously together. Finally, living harmoniously together will generate the potential for the fullest expression and experience of the thing that is most central to who we are: freedom.
Technology and Transparency
Freedom underlies this whole process. Information technology has provided anyone with access to it the freedom to communicate anything they desire to the entire world instantaneously.
Ambiguity
The resulting rise in transparency among all people who have engaged with this technology has revealed how we really are and consequently has given us the freedom to live in accordance with how we really are, as opposed to living by arbitrary rules and expectations. This is what is meant by ambiguity.
Autonomy
The transparency of our ambiguity is leading us to become more accepting of one another, as we realize that we all are much more nuanced as human beings than we previously thought. This in turn is leading us to have conscious conversations with one another in regards to what we really want as individuals and as an entire species.
One thing that is becoming clear is that people want to lead their lives by their own free choice, so that they may experience and express the power that comes from experiencing the full spectrum of who they really are. People don’t want to live by random rulebooks anymore, and if we are to create a functional world, that world will have to reflect and accommodate the completeness of who we really are. As such, a world that operates on black-and-white thinking is no longer in our best interest, because such a world simply does not map to how humans really are.
To create a world that works, we will individually have to exercise greater autonomy over our lives, so that we can accurately portray our potential. This makes sense because part of the truth about who we are is that we each are incredibly powerful beings. As such, to create a world that accurately reflects who we are- and therefore to create a world that works- we will each have to exercise our personal power and come to know ourselves more completely.
Togetherness
When people stand in their personal power and are freely being themselves, living life the way they desire to and growing along the way, it comes naturally to them to love other people.
Only a person who sees some benefit in controlling and manipulating others will do so. In a world where hiding is impossible, lies can go only so far, we have accurate ideas about who we are, and we allow each other to freely share our gifts and experience our personal power, manipulation of people becomes difficult, if not virtually impossible.
In a world where people have the freedom to live by their highest choice, people will find it easy to share with one another: it will be a natural extension of the expression of their desires. When we live in this manner we will not only be spiritually fulfilled, but we will be able to create all the physical abundance we desire.
Of course, when we are spiritually fulfilled we won’t desire things in order to give us a fleeting moment of gratification. Physical things will still be of use to us, be they won’t be the point. We’ll put our love of people before our love of things, and we’ll trade our materialism for humanism.
This means that not only will we no longer allow for the forced labor of people to create cheap products, but we won’t want those cheap products anyway. We’ll be happy to compensate one another (or not, depending on whether compensation is requested) for the freely-chosen creation of high-quality products, and we won’t need as many of these products because they are built to last, unlike so many things on the market right now. Even if people got the idea to create products that are bound to break or be defective, so that they could ultimately extract more money from other people, the idea wouldn’t go very far due to the inescapable transparency of our world. People would find out about it quickly, and that operation would not be given the needed fuel to exist.
Transparency vs. Security
None of this will be imposed upon us. If it was that would violate the point of all this, which is to experience greater freedom, and it would move us closer to dystopia than to utopia.
Indeed, our privacy has been chipped away at more than we originally thought it was going to be. Whenever you send an e-mail or text message or make a phone call, you can assume that someone else other than the person intended is able to see or hear it.
In the early days of cell phones and computers, we did not envision this sort of thing happening. But, it is due to the very transparency made possible by such technology that we now know that this is our reality. Whether a third party actually does actively monitor your communications is more uncertain, but it’s quite clear these days that they are capable of doing so.
Unfortunately the U.S. government has, at times, used its monitoring abilities in ways that are unjust, such as when the FBI wiretapped the hotel room of Martin Luther King, Jr. and subsequently sent him threatening mail. This is something a united body of a critical mass of conscious people will, in due time, no longer allow to happen.
However, the rapid disappearance of privacy reflects a deeper truth about reality, which is that everyone already knows everything about everything. Hiding is futile.
I’ve yet to successfully and indefinitely hide information I thought was worth keeping hidden. In high school I tried so hard to keep my sexual orientation a secret, but I later found out that, essentially, everyone always knew.
In the last year, both the insurance company Anthem and Yahoo! Mail were breached, and I was affected by both. This means that my personal information has been leaked, and someone somewhere has access to it. Who knows if, when, and how they will make use of it.
In college I studied cybersecurity, and I got to observe first-hand just how easy it is to take over another person’s computer, using an e-mail scam and some rather simple software. It is likewise easy to log into another person’s webcam or even security camera and see whatever it is that they’re seeing (yes, I have watched another person hack into webcams. Put good passwords on those things!... Unless you want to be watched by a random person. You might find that stimulating).
What most piqued my curiosity during my studies was the question of whether all this security was ultimately futile. Cybersecurity is basically an endless, inevitable war between the “bad” guys and the “good” guys. The bad guys find their way into the system, and then the good guys have to change the way they protect the system. Sometimes the good guys win as a result of people on their side finding holes in the system before the bad guys do. Of course, the system must be changed nevertheless.
I always wondered, Could there be a better way of doing this whole thing? What if we created a new system- perhaps an entire societal system- that made all this protection unnecessary in the first place? After all, all we’re protecting is 0s and 1s, and we’re using a great many resources to this end.
It’s a difficult question. If there was no protection to speak of I could very well find myself one day with a computer or a website that has been somehow manipulated—and, well, I can’t say I want that.
To answer the question about the necessity of information security, it will help to address the question of transparency and the protection of privacy more broadly.
First, it’s worth mentioning that privacy and national security are seen as being at odds with one another. However, on a personal level, we regard privacy and security as being one and the same: we feel secure when our information (e.g. authentication credentials, communications) is kept private.
This means that the government feels the country as a whole is easier to keep safe when there is transparency among its people and it can freely monitor those people. At the same time, individuals feel safe when their information is kept hidden, and they retain their privacy. And rightly so, because the leaking of their information can lead to events such as their bank accounts being drained.
There is an obvious conflict here: what our government wants and what we want as individuals are not the same. Not only that, but it seems that we cannot get the best of both worlds: we cannot keep our country safe and keep ourselves safe individually. We must choose one or the other.
Isn’t that strange? Shouldn’t the safety of the collective inherently imply the safety of the individuals therein? What’s going on here?
A System of Separation
What we have here is a Catch-22. The more we attempt to secure ourselves, the more security we need.
To secure something is to separate it from other things. If your information is secure, this means it is separate from the eyes, hands, and minds of other people.
Can we separate our information from one another without separating our entire selves from one another? Ultimately, no—we cannot.
The reason we apparently need all of this security is that we live within a system that propagates our separateness. Separation among the system’s parts (i.e. us) is integral to maintaining the status quo. For the economy to continue running as it is, we have to compete with one another, be materialistic, and be constantly beaten around by the sense that there is never enough of the things we need and want.
People only compete with each other when they perceive that outdoing others will benefit them: in other words, people compete when they think their power comes from overpowering others. Such a perception can arise only when we distrust one another and regard ourselves as being fundamentally separate from one another. Distrust and separation-thinking occur simultaneously: they are inextricably bound to one another.
A system whose parts distrust one another and live in constant fear can easily be manipulated and taken over by people who promise to keep all of the other parts of the system (i.e. the general public) safe, and they will accomplish this by controlling those parts. And so it is, that these ruler-parts of the system (i.e. the government, leading corporations, mainstream media) constantly tell us stories about how dangerous those other parts of the system (i.e. “not us”) are, and how they will do their best to protect us. These ruler-parts do this because the only way they can maintain control over us is by keeping us afraid, and we can only be kept afraid by distrusting and viewing ourselves as separate from the other parts of the system (i.e. each other).
Of course, the ruler-parts must see us all as being separate, too—otherwise they wouldn’t perceive themselves as gaining any security or benefit from controlling and manipulating us.
Uniting the System
Ultimately, the apparent need for security arises from separation-thinking. It is separation-thinking that the rise in transparency now has the potential to change—if only we consciously take the opportunity.
How will transparency achieve this? When the truth about ourselves gets out, we can at last let our guards down—the fight to maintain secrecy is over. As truths about people as individuals and as collective groups become public, we’ll start to see who we really are and what we really want.
It will become apparent to all of us that separation-thinking and control go hand in hand; and, unless we want to continue being controlled, trying to control each other, and all the while experiencing a struggle to survive, we will agree that it is in our interest to change our separation-thinking and our separation-based system.
When we allow each other to live freely we will naturally desire to cooperate and experience togetherness. With such desires in hand we will allow no one to be left behind. We will each share freely to the best of our abilities, and this will ultimately create a world of abundance, where no one will experience lack or a struggle to survive anymore. In a world where no one feels left behind, and there is no reason for distrust or fear, no one will desire to manipulate each other, because there will be no benefit in doing so—nor will such behavior be idly tolerated, as it is now.
In a world that operates on trust and unity, both information security and national security should be unnecessary. We won’t need the latest and greatest virus protection and encryption and bank accounts and ohmygod I need Social Security! and walls across the border of Mexico. We won’t need security because there will be nothing to secure ourselves from: there is nothing that we will have to separate ourselves from in order to thrive.
Inevitable Transparency
The only way to reduce and ultimately eliminate the need for information security is to create a system in which such security is unnecessary. Maintaining the status quo of our current, separation-based system requires information security.
The way the world is going, a status quo that is dependent upon separation, competition, distrust, and security cannot be maintained much longer. The tiny carpet that is our privacy is being pulled from underneath our feet, whether we like it or not. Once the cat’s out of the bag, it’s out. Once a person has seen the truth, he cannot unsee it.
The irreversibility of a truth becomes more entrenched as more people bear witness to that truth. There is no denying that enough people have now perceived the truth about ourselves, each other, and our world as a whole to reach a critical mass, whereby our world is now destined for drastic change—in some form or another. Conscious people who are aware of the truth simply will not allow things to be any other way.
People who know who they really are do not want to live in fear anymore: instead, they want to experience freedom. True freedom is possible only in the absence or defiance of fear. As such, a free world is one in which people can trust one another completely and regard themselves as being on the same side—as being one whole system, together.
A free world is one in which we enable each other’s freedom by using our personal power to give to each other freely. Freedom requires freedom on all fronts: to be free from suffering and fear, we must be free to be ourselves.
Inevitable Change
Transparency is inevitable, because it is already here. Transparency is the first part of humanity’s next step because it is the most immediate and relevant part. Transparency is the current wave that humanity is collectively riding.
One of the actions you can take now, and that many other people are taking now, is to promote and live in accordance with transparency. Whatever you know to be true, share it. The transparency of the ideas you share will make it that much easier to refine those ideas, because they will see the light of day. Truth does not expand in darkness.
Ambiguity is the second part of humanity’s next step because it is the inevitable result of transparency. We know this because it, too, has already arrived. We have already seen and are acknowledging that people are not as rigid as we have deluded ourselves into thinking we are. This is an incredibly important step in ending separation-thinking because exposing our truths and seeing that we really are not all that different from each other is helping us to lower our shields and feel safe with one another.
Autonomy is the third part of humanity’s next step because when we are transparent with each other it is obvious that we all desire to live freely, and when we trust each other we can allow each other to do just that.
Togetherness is the fourth part of humanity’s next step because to live autonomously is to live free of manipulation and control—and, therefore, free of fear, distrust, and separation-thinking. When we are free of fear from one another, it is natural for us to love one another. As such, we will exercise the personal power that arises from our autonomy to create consciously and to share what we create with one another. With no restrictions placed upon us, nor any perceived need to hide from one another, we will easily create the conditions in which everyone can experience having and being enough.
Look at it this way: when we control and restrict one another we limit each person’s potential. Then, we look down on people when we perceive that they aren’t doing or being enough. So, when we do the opposite and free one another we can each self-actualize and subsequently see one another as the great beings we all are. When we regard each other with such love, it becomes that much easier for us to live freely and to be our best selves—and so, the positive feedback loop of autonomy and togetherness continues.
Freedom is the fifth and final part of humanity’s next step because it will be clear to us that the best way to get what we want is to ensure that everyone else gets what they want, too, and we all want the same basic things: to experience freedom, intelligence, love, and power.
No one will be or feel forced to labor in ways they do not desire to, nor will there be any need for such force. What we perceive to be our needs as human beings will change, and we will find that there is no need to be so needy after all. When we can experience freedom, intelligence, love, and power simply by being ourselves and allowing everyone else to do the same, we won’t turn to random material things to help us have these experiences, and we therefore won’t require people to waste their lives producing such things.
At the same time, with cooperation, clarity, desire, and personal power in tow, we will find it easy to produce high-quality versions of the things that we do genuinely value and desire: in turn, people will find it easy to obtain such things. Where there are no restrictions on giving, you can expect to receive—though you’ll be so fulfilled that it wouldn’t bother you to receive nothing, because when you give you can’t not receive.
A world where everyone is free is a world where no one is left behind. Therefore, in such a world, you can expect to receive all that you need and want, but you won’t really need to receive it, because your deeper needs will be continually met by the complete experience and expression of who you really are. The more transparently you live, the more profound your experience of yourself will be. With that, all five parts of humanity’s next step come full circle.
The Eternal Truth
The essence of the changes in the world that are occurring now is the widespread recognition and embracement of the collection of truths about ourselves as human beings. As such, if you want to be involved in the changing of our world, you can do something that is incredibly simple: be yourself. You have been encouraged to do it thousands of times. Expect this to continue. It is all life asks of you: grow into the person you know you really are.
And so it is: to change the world, change yourself.
~
Afterword
Tattoo this on your foot, or your forehead, or wherever you please:
Technology > Transparency > Ambiguity > Autonomy > Togetherness > Freedom
Thanks so much to all the people who have played a role in the creation of our information technology—the very technology I am using to share this message right now. You have been instrumental in freeing our world.
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My latest book, The Growth of Our World, envisions the future of the world and how we can get there in detail. You can check it out here.