A Midwest Journal

(continued from part 2…)

The Zen of a Medianomic Lifestyle

If you started applying this to your own life, you’d quickly find that this is actually the most economical way to live. And the happiest and most sensible.

The government is actually telling you to be average. If you look over the tax code carefully, you’ll see they are also telling you to start a business and work for yourself – that’s where the real low taxes are. And you’ll see that the bulk of the jobs in the U.S. are created and maintained by small businesses. That’s what makes every recovery in a recession. When you make it harder for the bulk of your small businesses to get started, you are damping everything down.

But a living by Medianomics actually puts you into a sort of “Zone.” While you don’t have to be a big fan of Alan Watts, he did cover very simple explanations of Zen – which are applicable in any Medianomics lifestyle. Your best interests are served by simply enjoying the life you currently live. While you understand and empathize with the extremes, you actually live in the middle. And you live to experience your own life, not based on what “celebrities”, or politicians,  or Wall Street CEO’s do with their lives  – or any other extreme minority group. Your decisions are your own. People who stick with their traditional lifestyles live very mundane, but happy lives.

Like the credit card binge we all are now suffering through as well as the sub-prime mortgage mess our politicians got us into. We erred by moving from traditionally successful finances of savings and layaways. So the credit card industry now looks to be a blip on the radar. Politicians meanwhile tried to get more votes by pressuring finance companies to make risky loans to people who had never done anything before besides pay rent. Because home ownership was equated with a “right”. But it’s always been a privilege you earn. Always will be. And these guys crashed the economy (don’t worry, some group or another does this every 6-8 years like clockwork.)

If you stick to what works, what’s common sense, then you live a simple and happy life. You aren’t striving to keep up with all these fads going. You don’t dress like celebrities or cult guru’s. And you read the stories of stars and starlets who ruin their lives or kill themselves off over drugs or fast cars or psychotic lovers. Most of us don’t.  And that’s living in the Zen of the Medianomic middle.

Just be normal and enjoy it.

Medianomic Predictions

So, now you can predict what is going to happen:

• Every time one political party gets in power, they lose it rapidly. Always have a president of one party and a Congress of the other. Do nothing while they’re there.
• Extremists who threaten the middle (Islamic and other terrorists) will get wiped out. Not popular, as they don’t allow the average lifestyle to continue.
• If you are in a Long Tail group (Gays, Vegans, Environmental and animal “rights” activists) – make it easy to be compromised with in order to get what you want. Don’t run a campaign that everyone should live like you do. Just say you want to be left alone to live your own life. Those that do, can.  But don’t try to get the government to support your cause. Like organic farming, it usually gives you a result you don’t want – and no one else does, either.
• People who want to get elected (a form of celebrity) will stay in office only as long as they are “normal” to their constituents – and really accomplish nothing. You get a lifetime pension and benefits automatically, so why work at standing out from the crowd and risk being defeated in a primary?

And some advice about what you should be doing with your life:

• Use your common sense to pick your own careful path – and you can be in the “zone” all the time.
• Forget about listening to the mass media guru’s or news announcers who are constantly telling you the sky is falling. Realize that the sun will come up tomorrow, and the day after, and even the day after that.  Those extremists live by selling advertising to pitch products to the average Joe and Joleen – so they want to hook you into watching their shows in between commercials. Talk and listen to your neighbor on your block – you know them, the ones who have a house almost like yours…
• Vote for people who think and act like you do – and then hold their feet to the fire. If we had average Joes rotating through our elected positions (and maybe all government positions), we’d start having more common sense actions showing up – and maybe some real service, as well.
• Pick the social network of your choice – one which you can be average in.  Somewhere that you can lurk and watch the postings and not feel pressured to stand out, but can “like” all the stuff you actually do – pretty anonymously.
• Start ignoring the people who stand out from the crowd and try to lead it.

Because the trick to being happy in this seemingly chaotic world we live in is to luxuriate in the average, common-place stuff that surrounds you.  Realize that the average people actually rule this planet, not the titular leaders who change every few years. People vote with their pocket books and wallets and remote controls. Understand that the real power in this country is in your own neighborhood.

The next time some community-organizing activist comes around who says that you should go out and stand up for what is right and make a difference – that your purpose for living is to get your face on the evening news for the cause they are pushing… just quietly smile and nod and show them the door. But when that sales man comes in and says that if you buy “X” detergent because everyone else does – usher him in and get him some coffee and cakes. He’s telling you how great you are for just being yourself.

(continued from part 1…)

Medianomic Celebrities and the Long Tail

Chris Anderson has made a profitable study out of his “Long Tail” scenario. But he missed the most profitable point. The dull middle, where it’s really the most profitable. At one end, the “tall head”, you have celebrities and fads. Where a few people dominate one or two items and most of the advertising dollars to keep them there. For books, this means they have a steep curve up and just as steep down right after. They are blips on the radar. So any profit is made quickly – get in and get out. And too many are one-shot wonders – feast and then famine.

The Long Tail is the reverse. Very little profit made as you have to sell a lot of some very small-time sellers. Just as much total money changes hands, if not more – it’s a whole lot of hands, though. If you were running a bookstore, you wouldn’t keep a lot of these around.  A brick-and-mortar store couldn’t afford to keep hundreds of thousands of books available at any one time. The aggregate sales wouldn’t keep the lights on. And so long tail books usually do best as print-on-demand.

What keeps stores restocking are the evergreen products which continue to sell, regardless. You’ll find every bookstore in America (well, the bulk of them) sells some version or another of the Bible. Because people are always buying it. It’s the hands-down all-time bestselling book in history. Because is appeals to the middle, the median consciousness of English-speaking peoples. No, it’s not on the #1 spot every week. It just routinely sells. And sells. And sells.

So the real income to be made in book sales are authors like Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie, whose books just continue to sell, regardless of whether they are marketed or not. These aren’t Stephan King’s, or J. K. Rowlings’, or Dean Koonz’ – they are really more the William Shakespeare’s, Agatha Christie’s, Barbara Cartland’s, and Dr. Suess’s. No flash in the pan, but a consistent output of regular sellers – or one really good book based on common sense that just keeps selling regardless.

And if you look in any bookstore, you’ll find that the latest fad sellers are out front and hyped up. But the bulk of their stock is in books who just continue to sell routinely at moderate amounts. Anything that doesn’t sell is remaindered or discounted to get rid of it. Top-bottom-middle.

“Big Name” celebrities are mostly at the big head of this Long Tail. And you’ll see them mostly burn-out and fade from the scene. Some of them are smart, like Fess Parker (Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett), and Alan Hale Jr. (“the Skipper” on Gilligan’s Island) bought restaurants and lived comfortably. Others, like Jimmy Dean traded their fame for their own brand-name foods. The evergreen actors and actresses (as well as musicians) continue to have a nice living off of this. Dylan continues to churn out well-recieved hit albums, while infomercials are a nice income for those TV celebrities who were on for a very long time.  What is normal for the stage and screen wouldn’t be normal for you and I – but it can be a regular living like anything else. And the really long tail of celebrity-dom has people returning to their car sales or construction jobs after their one quasi-hit.

Medianomic Extremists, Gays, Acorn and Everyone Else

This study also embraces the extremists as necessary. Without them, life would be a bland bowl of lukewarm, un-salted oatmeal. Diversity is the spice of life.

But there is a caveat – don’t expect because an extreme view is tolerated that it will ever be accepted. Homosexuals (Gay’s, Lesbians, queers, fags, etc.) have never been and will never be mainstream. Nature has basically seen to that. And while there is every reason to give these their legal rights, they need to stay out of the mainstream in order to preserve those rights.

That seems odd, but it’s true. Their main problem is that they aren’t being allowed live a normal life in terms of hospital visitations, insurance, and so on. Otherwise, they’ve gotten everything they want, as long as they don’t step on anyone else’s toes – like dressing funny or scandalously, or playing loud music that keeps the neighborhood awake.  Their real problem is that government and religion are too closely connected. Government took over the function of saying what a “marriage” is, which is actually Religion’s function. If they would simply drop the marriage moniker and simply be honest, saying that they are just actually licensors of civil unions, then this whole scene would go away. (Then, if you wanted to be married, go find a church that agrees with you, that you can be average in.)

But “don’t ask, don’t tell” is another policy that won’t disappear soon. Because the  vast middle is straight. And that’s they way they expect people around them to act. (If you notice what happened with this in the news lately – Obama had to fulfill at least one political promise. The head of the military and the Secretary of Defense said, “Yes, yes – but, we’ll need a year-long study before we do anything with this.” So they effectively tabled the motion. Have your political cake and eat it, too.)

The majority only rules as long as they also listen to the extreme edges. That’s Medianomic politics defined.

You’ll find an interesting thing happening with the old Civil Rights movement. They went mainstream, got nearly everything they wanted corrected, and now are busy turning conservative and building their own “good old boy” networks.  When some flock-less “Reverend” tries to start a protest rally for some imagined “right” that was stepped on, you’ll see only a handful turn out. The extreme became part of the middle and now has little to complain about overall.

Now, when some extremists get into power, they often find themselves isolated. Mostly where they don’t quickly learn to become mainstream in their actions. Especially in this Internet Age. Acorn is a poster-child for this. Better get respectable if you are in the spot light – or you get defunded. If they’d studied what happened to the National Endowment for the Arts, they would have known. An example of doing this right was former-president Bill Clinton, who quickly learned to turn everything the Republican Congress approved into his idea. And we got the excesses of Welfare corrected, plus some other stuff. The worst presidential example so far was Millard Fillmore, who wouldn’t listen to even his own party – a real extremist, elected because he looked and sounded “Presidential.”

(continued in Part 3…)

Medianomics is an interesting study.

It’s lacked a name so far, even though it’s principles are well known and practiced. No one has tried to put it all into one framework before – but it touches all of our lives.

It’s been known mostly by it’s results: the mundane, the average, the hum-drum, the mediocre. And as much as it’s been run down, it’s the way the vast majority of us live our lives.

But practically, it runs the planet, produces the majority of the goods, and consumes them in turn. The subject of Medianomics actually runs this humankind planet we live on.

A simple definition (and graphical) is found in the Bell Curve. It’s all that big hump in the middle which researchers found are in neither extreme.

Practically, it really looks like a 3D bump -like one you run over in your average car -  as there are all sorts of extremes out on the edge with that great common bump in the middle. Most of our academia (itself an extreme) only compares two different types of things, instead of studying a universe of them all at once. But that’s how we live our lives – the law of averages sur-plus in technicolor.

What does Medianomics cover?

Just about everything. Politics, Religion, Government, Celebrities, Economics, Media, you name it.

Because Medianomics studies involve the middle ground. It involves what is routinely popular and common sense. It comes from finding the “median” or the middle.

But it also includes the study of extremist edges, the fads, the oddball stuff that winds up in Freakonomics books.

It’s easiest to explain if we cover some examples.

What Wal-Mart, Dubya and Obama have in common

Sam Walton found the “sweet spot” of merchandizing by finding out how to offer and deliver most of what everyone wants for just a little bit less than anyone else. He started it out in the Middle West, where big store chains like J.C. Penney, Sears and Montgomery Ward had settled long ago and become complacent, fat, and lazy. They were also shrinking.

Walton apprenticed in Penney’s, got a business degree in University of Missouri, and set up his business operations in Arkansas. This was contrary to the “conventional wisdom” of all time. No one starts and expands a national (and now multinational) business out of Flyover Country (except the very Medianomic Warren Buffett).  But the business model was the one which made the success.

You won’t find specialty items in Wal-Mart – just the usual stuff you can find anywhere. Sure, they’ll stock some extremely popular items, but once they quit selling, they are off the shelves and sent back to be remaindered. Merchanizing is a very cut-throat, black-and-white business.

Because average people have average needs. While they will buy flatscreen TV’s, they also buy a whole lot more soap, tires, and dog food. So finding suppliers who can give decently priced goods and then have them set up their headquarters and warehouses next to yours in the middle of nowhere is actually a win-win all around. If you study Wal-Mart’s hub-and-spoke distribution in conjunction with his sales strategies, you’ll see exactly how brilliant this guy was.

The key point is that he’s selling to the middle, with prices that they can afford – and keeping it all under one roof as a convenience. Same way with expanding into groceries.

Bush and Obama were elected with pluralities (well, mostly) – so they knew how to tell the middle of the country what they wanted to hear. Both of them had decidedly different coalitions of middle-ground supporters, but nonetheless, they were popular when elected. But both were found to be polarizing extremists, who dropped in popularity rapidly. Subquently this made it hard to get anything done.  Both spent a lot (LOT) of our taxpayer money in order to get a lot of support from Washington cronies,  but this made them extremely unpopular outside the Beltway. (Because we voted them in to act like we do – and spending borrowed money we know isn’t very wise.)

But they both applied Wal-Mart marketing (Medianomically speaking) of telling the bulk of the people what they wanted to hear. But this talk of bipartisanship really gets annoying after awhile. Because it’s not possible. Both political parties are extremist – so they are unpopular, except within their hard-core middle.

What is popular (and always has been) is the independent middle. People who make up their own mind, regardless of what candidates say, and what party they are registered with. And they are usually “surprised” when some politician doesn’t own up or follow up on their many promises. Because they are being told by politicians every two years (or weekly in a special interview on TV) exactly what political analysts think they wanted to hear.

But a funny accident happened when Bush cut taxes – revenue went up. Which means that to find the real  sweet-spot of taxes, they have to keep cutting.  People don’t mind paying taxes as long as 1) they get something valuable back from it, and 2) it doesn’t make things too expensive to buy or costs them their job.  No one knows what the popular level of taxation actually is. Because our politicians quit being average once they live in Washington for a few years. They turn into elite extremists. (Voter-enforced term limits usually cures that addiction.) Since most elected officials buy into the notion that spending other-people’s money on your local pet-pork boondoggle is the way to get re-elected. Not.

(Continued in Part 2…)

– Please pardon this political interlude –

Found this amazing lecture from Alan Watts, an Episcopal priest turned Zen Buddhist – and a very prolific and accomplished lecturer.

Here is a fascinating commentary on how government is actually optional to the person who is enlightened, who is independent, who is secure in their own being.

Government gets very insecure when people are secure and independent on their own.

They don’t like to have little facts pointed out to them, little accuracies in their lives like:

Mr. Obama – you say we are 1.4 trillion dollars in debt, yet we just approved two “stimulus” packages of over 700 billion each (and doesn’t this add up to that amount?) – and a lot of this is getting paid back with interest. Now if you just worked at getting it all paid back, wouldn’t that just take care of that debt?

Now you in the same speech say that having an increasing debt is very bad – but why are you then proposing a budget which spends way more than we are going to take in?

And did you know that the last time taxes were cut, it was the fastest response to any recession, and revenues actually increased?!?

So, Mr. Obama – how about you don’t spend more than you take in, that you look up what’s worked before, that you make these bail-out funds actually return to our Treasury?

Too simple?

It’s not my insecurity, after all. I’m happy out here with my little farm, finding beatnik philosophers like Alan Watts and Lester Levenson who are secure in their own skins and talk about it.

The knuckleheads we’ve somehow elected to represent us need some security in the worst way. Maybe they’d be more sensible if they were. Like those who aren’t going to get re-elected – they’re free to do and say whatever they want. Term limits anyone?!?

You create the world around you. Actually. But the trick is to stay in harmony with everything.

Most people are stuck at just creating things around them. They are wanting that faster car, more stylish dress or suit, the huge house. Along with this, they want people to think well of them, to admire them. And they want to keep it all safe.

To have all this, they also support various scams. Insurance, so that it can’t get taken away – and they pay huge annual fees for this. Government, so that someone has police forces and attorneys and court systems to protect what they own – of course, that costs them in increased taxes and numerous laws. Any corporation will pay out additional sums in advertising and lobbyist firms so that they can continue to control whatever scene they want.

There are just three desires which keep all this happening – control, security, and approval. Lester Levenson worked this out awhile ago.

Now, supposing people really just worked out how to create the world around them they wanted instead of working so hard with all these scams? The funny thing is, once a person really starts to live in harmony with the world, anything you want or need just shows up.

All those old philosophies have held this as true for a very long time. Remember that old saying, “Consider the lilies of the field, they neither sow nor weave, but are clothed in the finest rainment…” Jesus was trying to tell us this over 2,000 years ago. Buddha said similar, as did Lao Tsu in the Tao. When you go back to the Sanskrit and earlier to Huna teachings, you keep finding the same thing over and over.

We are all here to create a better place, to establish more harmony for all those around us. And of course, that also includes the environment and all the various other species we co-exist with on this planet. It also means people who believe differently and live different lifestyles.

But once you get to this point of just accepting what is around you and releasing everything you consider non-survival to you, it all gets quite simple.

Some key points:

• Once you get up to the point you can have anything you want, you don’t have to have a lot of possessions.
• You’ll always get your Happiness, Joy, and Peace from within. So the external world doesn’t affect you.
• There will still be Goals, but they will be intuitional – as are the rest of your life at that point. Everything just flows through you.

For me, this came as a concept that you are constantly working to help the perfection of every atom of every entity and thing around you to shine forth more completely. Because everything is generally perfect anyway. Just might need some help to show it.

The point is that you drop the ego and just Be.

Releasing becomes constant and you simply keep going up to higher harmonious levels. And the rest of the world around you (which you actually created) starts getting more harmonious as well. That’s just the way it all goes.

So just quit all the efforting and start getting more and more stuff showing up around you by simply releasing.

One last point.

Your path is entirely your own. There is only one Way for you – and that is the one you pick out and resolve for yourself.

This idea of using the releasing technique, my little joke of using “KISS BUTT” to get everything you really want in life – that doesn’t work for everyone.

There are exactly as “many paths up the mountain” as their are individuals in this Universe.  There can be no “one way and only one way” – because we are all connected, but completely different.

While all spiritual paths are correct in their basic data, many religions (and governments) go astray because they inherit the same problems their followers have. They think they are separate from everyone else and so they are right and everyone else is wrong.

Needless to say, this doesn’t work. Thinking someone else is wrong just comes back to you, doesn’t it?  Accepting people for what they are, giving them unconditional love – these actions will bring you acceptance and love in return, won’t they?

That old Golden Rule scene we’ve talked about over and over.

The other phrase I’m fond of quoting goes: “No one school has all the teachers.” That’s from the older Polynesian sayings, which are probably the oldest surviving philosophic system that this planet has. And those islands are amazingly peaceful these days.

While I tell people that releasing is probably the greatest discovery since Fire and the Wheel (right up there with sliced bread and spreadable margarine) – I also have to say that it’s not for everyone.

I tell you to throw away all that you’ve read here and prove it for yourself. That is really, really the only way to find Truth. Because truth is completely personal to you. No two people share the same exact truth.

Of course that explains why no government really works and dictators seldom end their career alive and in power.

The best approach is and always has been to let people work things out for themselves. Let communities solve situations as best they can, groups of communities decide what’s best on a broader basis, states to solve solutions based on a broad consensus (if at all) and the national government to simply keep its nose out – excepting only national concerns like defense and safeguarding trade lines.

And I’d love every single government employee at all levels to apply less kiss-butt and more KISS BUTT – they could release on having to control and approve anything for the rest of us, as well as only doing those things which would benefit others as they would like to be benefited.

But regardless of politics, just work out the optimal solution for yourself.

Whatever your path is – go at it until you achieve your own personal freedom and everlasting happiness. We all share one other, common thing – inside, we are all Masters. And we just need to let is shine out through all that we’ve stacked up on top of it. Do just that for yourself and we all win.

Thanks for listening to all I’ve said here. Now I’m done.

You can safely throw it all away and write your own blog now.

I wish you a great eternity.

I imagine by now I’ve offended so many Sedona Method purists that it’s not funny any more.

If you can’t see the humor around you, then you really need to release some more.

Like that joke I use: “You can get anything and everything you want in life if you only KISS BUTT.” Now, this is probably taken seriously by some career government officials who use that particular strategy to get re-elected term after term.

But the code in it is very simple:

• Keep It Simple, Sweetheart. Always apply the simplest release technique possible for any situation.
• Don’t move off your Butt to get what you need/want. Use only releasing to get it to show up in your life.

KISS BUTT – see? Funny, no? Well, at least you’ll remember it – which is the point.

The Universe can be seen to be one huge joke. And the people still here never got the punchline. Far from being the butt of the joke, they actually started the joke themselves.

For the Universe is built out of limits. We agreed to have limits and so we have them.

I do a lot of volunteer work for an outdoor education center called Scattering Fork. We take small groups out in the woods on what is callled a low-ropes course, and have them do team challenges – which make them think and act outside any particular box they are in. I’ve started telling them that there are the 1) rules for that particular challenge, the safety rules for that challenge, and anything else they want to make up for themselves. The first two sets you have to follow – but you can do whatever you want with the third set.

And it takes awhile before they figure out that they set far more limits than the challenge requires.

That is really a microcosm of this Universe we are in. None of this that surrounds you is serious. Start releasing all the time, consistently, and you’ll see this to be true. You’ll find yourself calmly cheerful, optimistically expectant for the next thing that the Universe is bringing you.

People who are serious about the world around them haven’t figured out what the joke is. And might not for a very long time.

But those who have will just smile quietly and ask you if you need any help with that…

Because that is actually how easy it all is. This world around us is a piece of cake, a cake-walk.

So remember, always:

All you have to do in life to get whatever you want is KISS BUTT.