Natural Disasters, Fear and YOU

A 5.9 earthquake in Virginia??  Hurricane Irene?  Is the world coming apart at the seams?  My son felt the Virginia quake quite strongly as far away as Toronto, the city I grew up in and where I never felt a quake in two decades of living there.  Yet that city has felt two in the last 14 months.


Of course, my son was on the 12th floor of an apartment building, whereas I was here in Ottawa and closer to the epicenter but felt nothing, probably because I was in a ground floor meeting room at the time.  The higher up you are in a building, the more you'll feel it.  

As I listened to people's random comments over the next few days, there was one common theme - earthquakes and natural disasters are becoming more frequent and it feels like the planet is falling apart around us and under us.

Fear and Your Personal Resilience

It's nearly impossible to listen to all the low level fear-mongering and not walk away with a bit of the anxiety yourself.  As a community of people committed to developing our personal resilience, this should be a big concern for all of us because fear:

1. Raises your stress level and damages your health
2. Makes you prone to misinterpret what's going on around you
3. Clouds your judgment and gives rise to poor decision-making

And we are all fed an non-stop diet of fear and anxiety through the media.  You're told the economy is going down the toilet, Western civilization is on its last legs, there are super bugs waiting to eat you alive and now the ground under you is shaking as well.  


If you allow yourself to listen to all this there is almost no way you'll be able to keep your focus on cultivating inner and outer harmony in your life. 

For a little taste of Hollywood's contributions to the madness, turn up your speakers and "enjoy" this little clip:









"Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated..." 

But Is All This Really True?

Let's take earthquakes first.  Is it really true that the frequency and magnitude of earthquakes are on the increase?  Here's what the US Geological Survey has to say:

"We continue to be asked by many people throughout the world if earthquakes are on the increase. Although it may seem that we are having more earthquakes, earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater have remained fairly constant. (...) According to long-term records (since about 1900), we expect about 17 major earthquakes (7.0 - 7.9) and one great earthquake (8.0 or above) in any given year." 

Just propaganda to make you feel better?  Well, considering worldwide earthquake data is available instantly at your finger tips from many sources around the world, that seems unlikely.  Moreover, a casual glance at the hard data seems to support the USGS' contention - there has been little change in earthquake frequency and severity over the past several decades.  

Some people will look at earthquake fatalities, particularly with reference to 2010, and say, "Look, it's getting worse!"  However, the fatalities are entirely a function of where the quake happens to hit and in 2010 a major quake hit Haiti, one of the most vulnerable communities on the planet, causing over 350,000 deaths.  The fact that a vastly stronger quake hit Chile later the same year yet caused only one thousand deaths because of Chile's outstanding preparedness just goes to show you what a poor measurement the number of fatalities is.

The Joys of Instant, Free, Worldwide Communications

Over just the past 20 years, our ability to identify and track earthquakes has greatly increased because there are now more seismograph stations than ever - about 8000 worldwide.  


Think about this: when there was a major earthquake in the 1980s in, say, Indonesia, you could probably hear about it on the TV news.  There might even have been a video, though not necessarily.  And if you missed the TV news, you might find it in the newspaper, though probably not on the front page.  


If that same earthquake happens today, the videos will be all over Youtube within minutes, you won't be able to open your browser without having the video in front of your eyes and then your friends on Facebook will start talking about it too.  So the subjective impression we have that disasters are happening more often is just that, a subjective impression not always borne out by the facts.  

What About Global Climate Change?

To those living in denial about the reality of global climate change I have one thing to say: call my office and we'll arrange a meeting in Toronto.  That's where I'll show you the 30' x 40' piece of turf where we created a skating rink in our backyard for about three months of the year for over 20 years.  

No one can do that in Toronto anymore.  There's not enough snow.  It never stays cold enough for long enough.  For the past 20 years or more it's been impossible to replicate what we did back in the sixties and seventies.

The British Royal Society, perhaps the world's most prestigious scientific organization, has this to say about climate change:


"There is strong evidence that changes in greenhouse gas concentrations due to human activity are the dominant cause of the global warming that has taken place over the last half century. This warming trend is expected to continue as are changes in precipitation over the long term in many regions. Further and more rapid increases in sea level are likely which will have profound implications for coastal communities and ecosystems."

To the climate change deniers out there, it's time to wake up and read the memo.  

An Exercise For You

Here's an exercise you can have some fun with.  This will show you whether or not the media / social media are increasing your anxiety levels.  


Days 1-3

• Be sure to watch the TV world news and national news daily
• Keep up with your social media contacts as well
• Scan at least the front page of your local newspaper - even better, read a few pages 
• Then, right after you've done that, sit quietly and see if you can detect anxiety within.  Put a number on that anxiety from 1-10, where 10 is very severe.  Write it down.
• Then feel free to use EFT or any other method you wish to clear away the anxiety

Days 4-6

• Be sure NOT to expose yourself to the world or local news in any form
• Stay off social media - three days won't kill you and your Facebook and Twitter buddies will survive
• Stay away from television, movies, Youtube, etc.  This is a total media fast.  Read something inspiring instead!
• At the end of each day, do the same test as for days 1-3 and write down your results.

Then please feel free to share your results with us, either on this blog or by emailing our office.  We'd love to have your thoughts on all this!

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

 

When the News in Not the Truth...

Warning: Today's post is not politically correct.  It deals with a set of key issues involved in personal resilience, it may challenge some of your assumptions and even make you a bit uncomfortable.  We live in a very complex world and facing that complexity is not for the faint of heart.  

I remember it as if it were yesterday... Working for the Canadian government in late 2002, as the Bush administration was furiously building its case for invading Iraq, I was sifting through various publications that regularly came across my desk, including the Russian daily, Pravda, and the Washington Post.

As I read both newspapers' accounts of the Bush administration's attempts to coerce its allies to join in this ultimately disastrous crusade, I was shocked to see that Pravda's account was more objective than the Washington Post's.  


Can you imagine my shock?  Here I was, a seasoned intelligence analyst and former Soviet specialist used to thinking of Pravda as a propaganda rag of the worst variety.  The Soviet Union, after all, had two main newspapers only - Pravda ("The Truth") and Izvestiya ("The News").  Hence the old saying in Russia, "Pravda nye Izvestiya, Izvestiya nye Pravda" - "The Truth is not The News and The News is not The Truth." 


The Media and Political Agendas 

One of the upsides of working in the intelligence community was that you sometimes found yourself on the "inside" of world events and you got used to the fact that what appeared in the media was not the whole story.  And, to be fair, there are factors the media just doesn't have access to on a timely basis.  

However, this was very different.  This was a deliberate attempt to bury the facts and present the story in a very different light.  One way the Bush administration did that was to strongly imply that Saddam's regime in Iraq was somehow linked to the events of 9/11.  By that time, any self-respecting analyst - with or without access to classified information - could have told you that Baghdad had absolutely nothing to do with planes flying into the World Trade Center.  Saddam may have been crazy, but he was independently crazy.  


To a certain extent, the events of 9/11 enabled the administration and its media lackeys to use one of the most time-tested of all manipulation techniques - "wrapping it in the flag".  You simply form a spurious link between your viewpoint and the alleged good of the nation, thus automatically casting all dissenting points of view as "unpatriotic", if not actually treasonous.  This diverts attention from the huge flaws in your own position and prevents people from paying serious attention to the valid points your opposition is making.  Works almost every time...

The Media and Corporate Agendas

Is the mainstream media subject to corporate agendas?  Well just ask yourself what the permissible range of opinion in the mainstream media is on a major public policy issue such as health care?  Are you allowed to say the whole debate misses the point?  That allopathic medicine is a proven disaster?  That we need a new medical paradigm?  That pharmaceutical drugs are not making us healthier?  No, of course not.  And if you find anything about so-called "alternative medicine" in the mainstream press, it's more than likely been edited for political correctness.  


Along these lines we also need to ask ourselves why there's so much fear-mongering in the media.  How many terrifying threats to your health has the media told you about this week?  And what about the last several years, when we've been told to cower in fear from West Nile virus, Avian Flu, Swine Flu, and several other pandemics-that-weren't?




Media Consolidation

"Media consolidation" - a seemingly benign phrase if you say it fast.  What it really means is that in contemporary society, more and more major media outlets are owned by fewer and fewer conglomerates.  In other words, there is less and less competition and more likelihood that the interests of those who do own the media outlets will coincide more with each other than with those of the average citizen.  

As citizens in what we're used to thinking of as "free countries", we don't think much about this, and yet it's a pressing concern.  If we want to become resilient people, we need to be very aware of how our viewpoints are being manipulated.  

Warning: the video that follows is far from politically correct.  It may make you angry.  Or you may love it.  Below I'll tell you why I'm posting it...

Personal Resilience and Media Exposure

One of the hallmarks of personal resilience is the ability to focus your attention on what really matters.  Yet in a society of "information overload" where the vast majority of that information is functionally irrelevant to you or so dumbed down as to be meaningless, your efforts to cultivate personal resilience lead to a couple of logical conclusions.  As Tim Ferriss recently put it:


"Most information is time consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence.  I challenge you to look at whatever you read or watch today and tell me that it wasn't at least two of the four." (in The 4 Hour Work Week, p.87.)


Conclusion One: Reduce your overall media exposure.  This will free up your mind, banish irrelevant data, and leave you free to devote more time to truly meaningful pursuits.


Conclusion Two: Cultivate alternate sources of information.  Once you've concluded you really want to get to the bottom of a particular issue or set of issues, go looking for dissenting points of view and specialized pools of information on that subject.


For example, I personally like to keep up with geopolitical trends.  To do that I regularly consult the output of numerous specialized think-tanks on these issues, knowing that what's in the mainstream media is a) lacking depth and b) lacking a spread of opinions. 


Beware the Narrow Range of Opinions

In our Western democracies, there's an increasing tendency for the mainstream media to severely limit the range of available opinion.  This makes it easier to dismiss competing views completely, paint them as absurd and hope they don't come up again.  Thus the prevailing view is a manufactured consensus and becomes the politically correct view, the norm.  

This can be especially worrying in the United States, where the range of publicly acceptable opinions on a given issue tends to be narrower than in other Western countries.  The political arena is just one example of this, since the US lacks any serious voice on the left (socialist) or the right (conservative) of the political spectrum (In case you didn't know, what passes for "liberal" or "conservative" in the US are simply two slightly different takes on classical liberalism).

Another problem in the US is the lack of a tradition of non-acrimonious public debate, of a serious intellectual attempt to deal with issues in constructive ways, rather than allowing competing ideologies to emotionalize the debate, obscure the issues and derail the whole process.  

The bottom line here is the need for all of us to preserve our intellectual independence from the increasingly intrusive and decreasingly useful mainstream media.  We may not live in the Soviet Union, but nevertheless we need to face the fact that "the news is not the truth and the truth is not the news". 
 

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger  

Body Image Propaganda: Are YOU a Victim?

For those of us who work within the emerging field of energy psychology, there are few emotional issues that we run into with our clients as frequently as "self-image" and especially "body-image" - the "my body isn't good enough" syndrome.  

Truthfully, though, as an Orthodox Christian priest with a couple of decades of pastoral counseling experience, I can tell you it was no different.  Thanks in part to the media, we're living through a bizarre period in history where almost everyone seems to think there's something wrong with how then look.  


And it's quite bizarre when you think about it - women are trying to attract guys by making themselves thinner and slimmer, not realizing that we guys prefer cuddling flesh to cuddling skin and bone.  And the guys are trying to look like body builders, not realizing that the vast majority of women find the body builder physique repulsive.  

Naturally, the most vulnerable segment of the population is the youth, and especially the females.  The statistics on the video below may not surprise you, but they should at least give you something to think about, and you may want to share it and discuss it with your own kids:









Lest you think that the women are the only victims of this propaganda barrage, think again - the guys suffer from it too, just in slightly different ways.  Here's a look at the problem from the male side of the house:










So, however you cut it, we're a culture with a huge self-image problem.  The mild cases lead to unnecessary mental anguish and wasted time (consider that statistic about the average woman spending over two years of her lifetime doing her hair alone!), while the severe cases can head toward depression, eating disorders and death.
 

Not a pretty picture, but one we need to take seriously if we're to become more resilient ourselves and prevent the young people around us from being sucked in to the media-created illusions they're being bombarded with.  

So if you think this post or the videos we've featured her could help anyone you know, please feel free to pass it on!

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger 

Join the 5-Day MEDIA FAST!

That's not "fast" as in "quick", but "fast" as in "stay away from it"!


A "media fast" means going without all forms of paper and electronic news media for a week. To be specific:


• Absolutely no newspapers, news magazines, TV news, internet news, etc. Pretend you've moved to Alpha Centauri and no longer care what happens on our big blue ball in space


• Absolutely no unnecessary web surfing - i.e., unless going to a particular site is essential to completing a work-related task, don't go there



Now the good news; here's what you are allowed:

• Pleasure reading, preferably fiction


• One hour of TV per day, so long as it's not the news!




"Why Should I Put Myself Through This?"


Few people have any idea to what extent media reporting deliberately manipulates their opinions, carefully plays on their fears and anxieties, and presents them with a story that's so vacuous as to be completely useless.


Just last week I had to good fortune to talk to an expert in disaster management who has inside knowledge of the events surrounding the recent massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He explained to several of us in great technical detail how the media reporting of the incident is extremely misleading.


And, of course, much media reporting is simply there to serve a political agenda of one kind or another. In Soviet Russia they had only two national newspapers, Pravda ("Truth") and Izvestia ("News"). This led to the common saying, "Pravda nye izvestia i Izvestia nye pravda" - "The Truth is not the news and the News is not the Truth".


Unfortunately, for all of our self-righteous rhetoric about having a "free press", we're not always much better off, it seems.


All the more reason to "turn off the tap" in your own life. And it's tough to do because we get addicted to the input, the gossip and simply the background noise the media provides. Afraid of missing something critical? Right... that's about equal to your chances of winning the lottery.


Yet if you want to be a more effective and more resilient person, you need to take back control of the information streaming into your life. After all, why should you swallow all the anxiety the media's trying to foist on you??


If you even half of their dire predictions of the last decade had come true, you wouldn't be reading this - you'd have long since been killed off by West Nile Virus, Avian Flu, killer bees, al Qaeda, H1N1 or a stray asteroid impact. Yet here you are, living and breathing. Who would have guessed?


So I invite you to join me this week for the 5 Day Media Fast. As you go through this process, please feel free to leave your comments on the blog. My guess is that you're going to feel SO much better. Maybe even better enough to make some changes to your lifestyle ;-)






On your mark, get set... STOP!




~ Dr. Symeon Rodger