America’s Struggle with Success

Things are often not what they seem. While our leaders insist they want success for America, their success blind spots often lead to bad decisions which sabotage our country (a la the shocking financial crisis).

The good news: a new lens, a new way of seeing, recognizing and measuring success in our leaders has been discovered in the human mind. We all possess it. I call it the deeper intelligence. What is it? The DI is the part of our mind that sees and understands far more than our conscious mind. The DI brings us an entirely new level of knowledge. It alerts us major blind spots and provides wisdom—clear guidance—in overcoming our tendency to retreat from success.

The DI establishes that there are three basic principles of success—core values.

(I will take a deeper look at success later including the five major fears associated with it prompting three types of retreats—these are the fine points of success.)

We can judge success for individuals and nations according to the three basic rules of life. These principles come from deep within the human psyche and are based on our three most basic needs. They are consistent from culture to culture—all human beings are guided by a deeper intelligence focusing on these three basic needs. Deep down we all have shared values.

Our Three Basic Needs: The Three Rules of Success

1. Our first need is for stability, security: it builds into us a sense of permanence, a solid identity. Two stable parents who together build a stable home produce stable individuals—this is nature’s model.
   
   This is why we want as many Americans as possible to own a home or live in a home, to live in a committed marriage, raise kids in a two-parent home with regular meals, adequate clothing and their own school.
   
   A stable nation means self-defense, strong protection of national boundaries: geographical, language, shared cultural values.
2. Our second great need is for autonomy—let me contribute, do my part, be all I can be. Freedom to be myself yet freedom within boundaries. Our DI has an innate understanding of the boundaries of freedom—where they start and where they stop. Intuitively we know freedom becomes destruction when we encroach on other’s boundaries and undermine their stability.
3. Integrity is our third great need. In essence integrity means “don’t lie to me about my first two needs. If you say you’re going to give to me stability and freedom give it to me and don’t take it away.” This is the deceptive power of words—our words can be in bounds and our behavior out of bounds. Words are empty without matching behavior. Leaders—be they parents, bosses, or politicians—can promise you that they have an individual’s best interests at heart and be violating the needs of that individual through their policies and decisions. For example, entitlement programs of an ongoing fashion build helpless victims. This is why ongoing welfare was ultimately destructive. While appearing helpful, it took over and violated the basic autonomy of the individual.

Our three basic needs/core values can be defined in one word: Boundaries

When you live out your three needs you are in bounds, when you violate your three needs you are out of bounds. When a nation violates these three basic values we are out of bounds as a nation—through leaders, courts/laws, and our interactions (for example slavery).

We now understand that success comes down to maintaining solid yet dynamic boundaries of freedom, stability and integrity—and involves constant choices. The DI gives us a new and deeper understanding of boundaries—sees the need for boundaries to which our surface mind is blind. The DI shows us that our three basic needs/core values involve “hidden boundaries”—deeper, stronger boundaries than any of us consciously realize.

Boundaries: Key to evaluating leaders and issues

Understanding boundaries is the key to evaluating our leaders, our country and ourselves—the key to understanding success. We can now examine basic cultural conflicts in a new light because we have learned that there are hidden boundary issues in each conflict (see below). We can either reinforce hidden boundaries to our advantage or eliminate hidden boundaries to our detriment.

First a word about people who strongly deny that absolute core values exist for all human beings from culture to culture. Such objections always arise in their conscious mind and they know nothing of their own deeper intelligence. The bottom line: remember the DI has clarified how a person often consciously disagrees with their own DI. (See deeperintelligence.com.)

As Dr. Robert Langs, the discoverer of the deeper intelligence, has said, “The unconscious mind without question has an inbuilt morality.” That morality is a constant core value deep within every person on earth, and therefore absolute.¹

Change in Common Sense—Today’s Boundary Blindness

Some people will say these rules of success are common sense, but common sense in our generation has changed and these basic core values are under attack. The “just common sense” folk must understand why. The no-boundary, anything goes, “tolerance’’ above all values, politically correct crowd has largely seized the day. They control both academia and the media—which values a “both-sides view” implying all views are equal. These no-boundary people suffer from “boundary blindness” because they consciously misunderstand our universal need for boundaries and insist that universal boundaries/needs do not exist.Disagreement in Core Values

So let’s see how the major success principles—core values—are played out in the nation’s values, in what we call the political arena. Take the core issues which seemingly divide us:  abortion, marriage, gay marriage, affirmative action/entitlements, gender-identity issues, and the power of the judiciary/Supreme Court.  If I told you that in our DI we all agreed on these issues you would say, “Impossible!” Yet now, by fully understanding our dual-level mind (the DI) with its valuable insight into the function of boundaries, we can see how and why it’s not at all impossible. It is indeed possible because our conscious mind has one take and our deeper intelligence quite another. All our basic conflicts come down to one fundamental question: where do we put the boundaries in relation to our deepest needs? (Slavery is a good example of boundary blindness we corrected when slave owners violated the autonomy of a human being while secretly violating their own consciences.)

Bottom line: America’s future at stake over boundaries

Here’s the major place America’s struggles with success—around the three rules of success which identify the “Boundaries of Success.” This is the great hope of the DI lens: it shows us our common core values and how we can resolve the conflict.

We must settle our core values problem because those who fight our core values (including their own) fight America’s success. In the end it’s an integrity problem for those who would attack, however unknowingly, the pure boundaries of stability and autonomy. For example, consider our financial crisis. Our political and financial leaders constantly violated boundaries of stability and autonomy by selling people houses they couldn’t afford. They ignored time-honored boundaries so the politicians could get more power and the financial wizards could get wealthier. They felt entitled and they acquired their entitlements by violating the success rule of autonomy—earning it fairly.

We will see that the real battle in our country is between the people who destroy boundaries and core values vs. the people who embrace boundaries and the right core values. Of course in cultural conflicts, both sides—in their surface minds—think they know precisely where the boundaries go and what the right core values are. But the DI shows itself to the human race at this propitious time to declare the fact of the matter: that the real conflict is between healthy boundaries and no boundaries. The DI teaches us all about the secret battle of the boundaries going on inside of everyone—and inside every single one of our leaders—and how it spills over to our culture, our public life as citizens. Whoever wins the battle of boundaries will determine America’s future.  And we now understand boundaries in an entirely new way—not as arbitrary, rigid regulatory factors but as an expression of important core values shared by all.

In the next article, we will look at the two presidential candidates through the success lens—the lens of the deeper intelligence.