Last week I posted a book review that didn't get much attention. A few people have asked me to post it again, saying that it was a mistake to put it up during the DNC mania of last week.
I don't know if that's against the rules. If it is, tell me and I'll take this down.
Here it is.
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A new ebook has just been published that could hold the key to getting even more young people out for this election than for the 2008 election. It's called Get Your Future Back!, by P. J. Cultor. It explains why America is stuck and precisely what young people can do to unstick it permanently in just three days over the next two months.
What comes after the orange cauda porcelli is basically a book review. But there is extremely time-sensitive information in the ebook, namely, a step-by-step three-day plan for young people to follow leading up to the coming election that will transform America almost overnight.
If you want to skip to that information, be my guest. You'll find it after a line of ten asterisks below the fold.
Of course, you might want to skip the review altogether and get the ebook to see for yourself. The website is here: Get Your Future Back!
Let's get to it . . .
P. J. Cultor is the pen name of long-time college educator who has come to the conclusion that his generation has irrevocably failed in its responsibilities as stewards of the nation. It is time, he thinks, for the younger generation to wrest control away from their predecessors and set the nation on a creative new path into the future. His short ebook, Get Your Future Back! How America's Young People Can Reclaim Their Destiny, Heal the Nation, and Probably Save the World, tells young people just what's wrong and just how to go about fixing it right now.
And he means right now. One leg of his plan—his three-day strategy to break the political deadlock in the country—has to be implemented in the next two months. That's why spreading the message is so time-sensitive. In giving his message mere weeks top reach the young people who will have to implement it, Cultor is betting on their energy, and on their demonstrated skill at linking up with millions of their friends overnight to take action when they find a cause they think will change their lives. And Cultor clearly thinks that his plan will change everything in America for young people—and for everyone else too.
The book's intent is to show young people a new reason to turn out for the 2012 election. It explains precisely why nothing can get done in America today, precisely how the older generation is diminishing the prospects of the younger generation, and precisely how young people can reclaim their destiny. It contains a step-by-step, three-day plan for converting American government from a force that oppresses young people into a force that supports them, nourishes their potential, empowers them to create their own lives, and helps them to generate a New Vision for the future world in which we will all live.
The book has two parts—one theoretical and one practical. Part I shows that the older generations of Americans believe, for the most part, in seven "Major Myths" that distort all their thinking: the Myths of Scarcity, Self-interest, Competition, Independence, Religion, Tradition, and Capitalism. Belief in these Myths has led to a society in which Fear is a dominant force, and in which defensiveness, antagonism, selfishness, and pugnaciousness restrain, restrict, limit, and check the creative powers of the people. These constrictions fall very hard on the young, whose natural creative energy is almost unbounded. They feel, and are, crushed by the weight of all the negativity that emanates from the Myths.
Cultor’s attacks on the Myths are severely iconoclastic, and do not fall along the usual conservative/liberal ideological fault lines. For instance, the Myth of Capitalism is described this way: Free-market capitalism is an unquestionably beneficial and moral economic system. Cultor indicates that both conservatives and liberals believe this Myth; they differ only in their degree of adherence to it. Conservatives take it as an unquestionable truth, and rationalize away any negative consequences that flow from pure capitalism. Liberals take it as generally true, but they try to erect safeguards that will protect society from those who would use capitalism unscrupulously. Cultor's critique cuts through both these attitudes and shows that capitalism is inherently immoral, and hence, if it is to be allowed, it must be strictly regulated from the very outset by government so that its intrinsic immorality cannot grow beyond the bounds acceptable to decent members of society. This stance will certainly antagonize conservatives, who imagine that capitalism is inherently divine and can only be sullied by human regulation; but it will also disturb liberals, who tend to think that capitalism is good in itself, but has to be protected from unprincipled capitalists.
In like manner, Cultor’s approach to the Myth of Religion is not, as one might think in advance, a critique of the relations between Religion and Politics, or an attack on Religion itself. Instead, he identifies the Myth of Religion as the proposition that morality and decency depend on Religion, and then he goes on to show first, that this proposition is false—that is, that Religion has no special claim to dictate rules of behavior to human beings broadly—and second, that propriety and prudence require religiously derived codes of behavior to be kept separate from our social interactions. On the other hand, he nevertheless adds that the proper role of Religion in life—to reconnect individuals to the source of their being—can undoubtedly be something beneficial and creative in society. It’s hard to see what constituencies would not be perplexed by this complicated perspective. Even atheists would find something to complain about in Cultor's position.
The point of the theoretical Part I is to prepare the way for the practical Part II. As a result of the two principal attitudes toward the Myths—utter acceptance on the part of conservatives and qualified acceptance on the part of liberals—the older generation has fought itself to a standstill, making all change and progress impossible, and dooming the younger generation to a diminished, dispiriting future. And all this on the basis of beliefs that are, Cultor claims, in themselves untrue!
In Part II, Cultor quickly sets about showing young people practical steps they can take starting right now to wrest their destiny out of the hands of the older generation. There are several chapters in this Part. One teaches young people how to align with their creative drives; two others borrow some ideas from Seth Godin, the business-productivity-lifework guru, discussing how young people can find “the work” that will light up their lives and how young people can use their extraordinary social-networking skills to support and nourish the movement to eliminate the Major Myths.
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But the chapter I want to focus on, because it’s extremely time-sensitive, is Chapter Nine, "Vote Your Future Back.” Here Cultor lays out a simple, easy-to-complete strategy for young people to rearrange the entire political landscape of America in the next two months.
First, Cultor asks young people to answer one simple question. Since that attitude of conservatives toward the Myths is that of complete acceptance, whereas the attitude of liberals is qualified acceptance, he asks his young readers simply, Which of the two groups will be more helpful in replacing the Myths that have made your future so bleak? Is it possible that those who believe they are right in accepting the Myths completely will have anything to do with overturning them? Or does it seem more likely that those who have reservations about the Myths will be open to persuasion about overturning them?
The answer is obvious, and this determines the goal of the political strategy to shift America away from the deadlocked older generation toward a dynamic future for the younger generation: young people must go to the polls with a different intention than they had in 2008, when they turned out for the inspiring hope and change embodied in a young president that shared their ideals. This time, they need to use their votes to destroy the hold that the Myths have on our political system. They need to free the President they elected from the chains of the Myths, in order to help him make room for the New Vision that young people will generate once they lift the crushing burden that the Myths heap on their creativity. They must go to the polls, therefore, with the intention of voting out Republicans and voting in Democrats at every level of government. Admittedly, this is a crude device. But every Republican that remains in office after the election, animated as they are by conservative attitudes, will be a stumbling block to removing the power of the Myths in government. And turning over control of government to one party will instantly lift the logjam: new laws will pass through legislative bodies everywhere in record time, and the nation will begin moving again after years of stalemate.
This outcome seems favorable to Democrats, because it will be their policies that initially get implemented. But Cultor does not spare them. Unless they can learn to give up their belief in the Myths, young people will get rid of them in future elections, replacing them with others who can see the New Vision that the young will create. The present election will clear away the most prominent dead wood. But the next few elections will remove conservative Democrats, and everyone else who can't give up their allegiance to the Myths. Eventually, both conservatives and liberals will be replaced by New Visioners, and American society will have been transformed entirely.
Can young people really pull this off? Cultor thinks that they can, if they use their extraordinary connectivity skills to contact friends in a six-degrees-of separation manner. If just one person reading his plan will get ten friends to commit to it, and each of them gets another ten, within six or seven generations of contacts there will be millions of young people on board—many more than current campaigns have been able to move, even with all the billions of dollars that are spent on modern elections. They could probably do that in less than a week, Cultor thinks, bringing millions of new votes into politics through non-political channels. And if this strategy succeeds, Cultor believes that young people might even put an end to the wasteful election practices rooted in the Myths: once the nation understands that connectivity is more powerful than money, it will just be ludicrous to waste money campaigning any more in the over-the-top irrational way the older generation does it.
Seasoned political actors will find the strategy simple-minded and naive. But perhaps its simplicity is the very thing that could make it work. The sophisticated electioneering of modern times may not be prepared for something as fundamentally basic as friends getting other friends to commit to them just by alerting them to an exciting new goal. It undercuts all the traditional election practices, and short-circuits the hyper-complex advertising stratagies of modern politics. It’s a well known fact in scientific circles that an extremely complex system, in which lots of energy is expended just to hold the complexities together, can be destabilized quite easily by interacting with a very simple system that siphons off the energy. Maybe this will be the end of the Citizens United model of electioneering.
But young people need to initiate Cultor's plan in the next few weeks. That's why spreading word about this ebook is so time-sensitive.
If you are a young person who finds this attractive, or an old person who knows a young person who might find this attractive, pass on this post. Check out Cultor's Facebook author page (P. J. Cultor at Facebook) or the book's website Get Your Future Back! Send the links to your friends. The ebook is available at the usual ebook places.
Whatever you think of the strategy, the book offers young people a new reason to turn out this time—to eliminate from American politics the Myths that have prevented real progress for their generation. It offers them a new method for doing it—almost entirely virtually, without the necessity of coordinating with anyone else, but with the option to collaborate with their vast network of wired-in friends whom they love. And it offers them a new vision to strive toward—a world which their parents' generation is entirely incapable of imagining; a world in which no one has to expend all their energy in mere survival; a world in which everyone can use their intrinsic talents on truly creative pursuits; and a world in which transformation is the joyful norm rather than the painful exception.