Tiger Woods and the Single Guy

To me, the most interesting guest on the many talk shows about Tiger Woods, was John Gray, the author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus—because what is so clear is that both genders see the situation from a different perspective. Another guest discussed how hard it would be for Woods to repair his image with women.

I'm not sure women can understand the extent to which men are conditioned by a culture that demands that they succeed and win at all costs, and that their payoff is sexual gratification with the women in beer commercials and girls gone wild videos. For men, this fantasy is the same as the need for a perfect body is for women—a compulsion they know is self defeating but is deeply programmed.

So for many single men like me, there is a sense of compassion and understanding for Woods' situation. While his breaking of vows of marriage is indefensible, I can understand how it happened and I took his statement at face value.

What struck me the most was his discussion about Buddhism and his reference to "attachment." That is what leads me to feel that he is sincere—because only a sense of surrender to something higher can heal the illusions men carry of what will make them ultimately happy.

Let me admit that I have been in therapy for my own wounds, not nearly as dramatic as Tiger's but for me very powerful and difficult demons.

When I was in college I came home and told my dad, "money isn't important to me. I don't need it to be happy."

This was a blow to a man who had struggled his whole life to make it here in America after a horrific ordeal in Europe, and who saw money as freedom and the key to fulfillment.

Despite what I said to my dad in college, I eventually began to see things the same way, and embarked on a mission to "make it". Somewhere along the line I found myself with a nice bank account but it was never enough, and I had no idea of how to love and be loved.

I also bought into the notions of my peers, and my father, that seeking my own sexual pleasure was a worthwhile lifestyle. At a low point I tried to connect to women who I only believed would be with me for what I could provide or give them materially, and my feelings of unworthiness led me to dull my emotions in any way I could.

My romantic fantasies were such that I believed that only another person's love would complete me and make me a man among men. Women were a prize or possession, not human beings with energies and feelings with whom I could deeply connect. And many women I met ratified those feelings and fears by only granting me their attention and devotion if I fit the image they had in mind as a provider.

Now, in my own work on myself with a therapist, I am trying to ascertain exactly who I am and what will fulfill me—because I tried many of the things Tiger tried. While I wasn't outed by the media, I realized on my own that it wasn't working. In my case, I broke up a relationship to pursue my "independence" and deny my need for deep connection—and all it did was make me confront my own loneliness and isolation. I hit the wall and needed help.

And that brings me back to Woods.

From a very early age his own bond with his father made him need to prove himself and make it—and he certainly did.

I would not be surprised if like me he had to deny his childhood wants and desires and become a man very early—his obvious drive and discipline as well as the sense of control testifies to that.

Then his father died, and the main reason he had for living died too—but he kept doing the only thing he knew –competing and winning and he tried to fill the void with the traditional roles of a marriage and a family.

And at the same time he finally felt he had the right to try to satisfy the need to fulfill what he believed were desires that would make him happy—he said that he felt he had earned that right—regardless of the consequences. We can view that as narcissism to be sure, but it is also quite natural.

What Woods has discovered, I believe, is that in his ability to control others economically their love was completely false. Those that truly loved him, and he could not control, were now deeply hurt and distrustful and this sudden awakening left him more alone than ever.

His activities with women, while disgraceful for a married man, still seem to me the acts of someone desperately looking for meaning in his life. He seemingly had everything and it still wasn't enough. Certainly his confrontation with himself came only when he was discovered, but in his position that was inevitable.

As a single man, my own struggles in this area—mainly stuffing down my feelings and trying to make inappropriate women love me and fill me up—did not hurt anyone but myself.

Woods of course played with much higher stakes and his actions had far graver consequences.

But to me, and many people remarked how depressed Woods looked, Tiger seemed like a guy who finally realized he needed help. He had abruptly realized that what really mattered were the people whom he really loved and who loved him—and that he might lose them.

Unfortunately for him, his actions have driven these people away and created deep feelings of hurt and distrust. And then, when he was discovered, his own sense of shame was such that he began to doubt that he was worthy of their love.

To him right now, I suspect he doesn't know quite who he really is, and while others urge him to just play golf and win, it has temporarily lost its meaning for him. The self he worked so hard to build and sustain is no longer viable.

For a single guy in L.A., it is hard to develop and maintain a network of people to fill those deep needs of connection and mutual love. People come and go and they are best friends for the evening.

As an only child, like Woods, I was doted on and spoiled on one level, and very alone on another. I learned to meet my own needs in ways that proved to be empty and vacuous. I believed money and control could get me what I wanted and needed and that my own personal comfort was paramount.

And, like Tiger, I spent a long time trying to live up to a notion of manhood and achievement that I assumed would fulfill me, only to learn that it left me empty.

So much of my life was consumed by a fear that I might not make it, or measure up, or succeed and when I did I could not enjoy it or let it fulfill me. Now I am trying to learn to get filled up with love, not fear, and to accept it naturally instead of trying to seize or control it.

Like me, Woods needs to learn to trust others, ask for help, and yield control and become vulnerable.

That doesn't mean all of his sins should be forgotten or even forgiven—but he is still just a human being—and he deserves some measure of understanding and compassion.

Which brings me back to Buddhism. This week the Dalai Lama is here, and to me his message is, simply put: be compassionate with others and yourself. Observe your own tendencies, emotions, fears and beliefs, and don't fight them but accept that they make you human and be kind.

My own struggle is finding fulfillment outside of the roles that I took on unconsciously. Meditation and therapy has made me able to observe (but so far not completely change) how deeply ingrained these "scripts" or "programs" are, and how removed my real core self is from the compulsion to follow these impulses.

I'm trying to connect to the person I was before all that programming and conditioning, and it's hard.

For one thing, those beliefs came from and are connected to those I loved most in the world—my parents. Every act of going against many of these tendencies feels a bit like betrayal. My father's voice is there often telling me – be tough, keep working and struggling, don't show any weakness.

My former girlfriend once asked me what my mantra or central belief was, and I said, "don't screw up." She suggested I replace it with "let love in." But it is very difficult trust in love and lose what you think is a measure of control.

In fact, it's so hard that lots of times I want to go back to stuffing down those feelings or dulling them, or avoiding them with work and achievement.

What I've begun to discover is that I need to connect to the little boy I never really got to be because I was so determined to live up to what others wanted. I need to protect and stick up for that core part of me and connect on a deep level with those that truly love me---and not succumb to the pressures of a world that want me to be a winner while I lose my deepest self.

It's an ongoing battle, and fortunately I have gotten help--and I won't have to please millions of people by sinking a high pressure putt and selling products for large corporations.

I also have no pressure to be a role model for others. But I now believe that each person who awakens to the need to be loving rather than self serving is an integral part of human evolution. Tiger is no different—except that with his presence and fame, if he can transform he can also be a powerful force for the awakening of others.

Hopefully it won't be by taking on another role and pontificating, but rather by becoming a quiet and humble example of how compassion for others and oneself can lead to peace and contentment.

 

Joe the Burglar: Advice for Aspiring Criminals

Joe is back with some tips on pursuing a successful life of crime.

Joe the Burglar on Social Media

Joe the Burglar shares some insights as a self proclaimed social media consultant.

A Sense of Proportion

On Saturday afternoon while picking up a prescription, the pharmacist told me that my doctor had asked to be called for a follow up. Before leaving I decided to check my blood pressure on the automatic machine, only to find the reading stratospheric and scary.

I walked around the store sorting it out, and realized that I had let the machine read the pressure through my sweatshirt. Surely that explained the high reading since I'd been normal for some time.

Without the sweatshirt I was lower, but still elevated. I took a few more readings, each one a bit lower, and decided it was heading down to the normal level and that I was okay.

The next morning, just before leaving for breakfast to meet a friend, I opened my laptop to check my nonexistent Sunday email, and found the screen completely white. I took a deep breath, turned it off and turned it back on, and it stayed completely dark; the hard drive light went on for a seconds and then stopped. This happened three times. I left for breakfast considering the consequences of losing my hard drive – data was backed up to my desktop but lot of stuff, like recent email in Outlook, would fall through the cracks.

At breakfast I completely forgot about the blood pressure, and was somewhat preoccupied with the laptop issue, but strangely accepting and detached.

After breakfast, I tried the laptop again, hoping it would magically reappear (maybe it overheated?) but it was dead.

I went to Fry's and bought a hard drive, returned, figuring the laptop would now work but I would have to reinstall Windows and a lot of other programs, but at least I'd have a laptop.

Unfortunately the same thing happened. The hard drive light went on briefly, then off.

I called Dell and determined that the cause of my problem was not the hard drive, but a defective failed graphics card or motherboard. I was lucky to get this information, because I was out of warranty.

By this time it was late afternoon and I had recorded all the football games. I decided to relax, take a nap and then have a normal dinner and watch sports.

After my nap I took a shower and tried a Google search on my graphics card and my laptop for problems, and found many pages of similar issues; it turned out that on the Dell forums several users had had their laptops repaired out of warranty because Dell had acknowledged this issue.

I called Dell back, and after talking to three reps from India, for over an hour while I watched the first football game muted, I got him to acknowledge that indeed I had the faulty graphics card or motherboard.

This came as we watched three diagnostic lights, one solid and two blinking, and it took me ten minutes of description with him misunderstanding and repeating the wrong sequence to get it right. Then another forty minutes with his supervisor to whom I sent the information from the web sites about those who had been helped out of warranty. He finally promised that he would try to help me but I needed to wait 48 hours for a return phone call.

That evening I relaxed and watched sports, but several times I reached for the laptop to check my email or go on Twitter, only to realize that it was upside down and dead on my coffee table (I turned it over to take out the hard drive).

That's when I realized the lesson: this machine was my constant companion and I was connected constantly when I was home.

Without it I could still go online and check email, but I would have to go into my office and use the desktop PC.

Suddenly, the intrusiveness of the Internet was no longer a constant reality. Until I fixed or replaced my Dell, I would be forced to be with myself, or with television, but no more multi-tasking.

I observed myself throughout the evening and noted my discomfort, and the frequency with which, during commercials, I went into the office and checked my email, which again, for Sunday, was virtually nonexistent.

The next morning when I awoke I was anxious, but not about the computer, but I was thinking about my doctor and my blood pressure. Shouldn't I go in and have it checked; after all he had requested me to call.

I managed to get a late morning appointment and went in, only to find that the pharmacist had misunderstood and I had not been summoned. But I told him about my experience with the public blood pressure test, and he took me into the examining room and tested me right away.

"You're perfect," he said.

Waves of relief gushed through my body. I had let myself foresee doomsday scenarios based on others' misfortunes and my own misgivings about my health. Now I had a new lease on life. It was almost a shock to realize that all was well.

It also became clear to me that this piece of news rendered my laptop problem insignificant.

I returned to Fry's and exchanged the hard drive for an external USB powered enclosure.

Back home I was able to put my Dell hard drive into the enclosure, connect it to my desktop PC, and recover almost all of my important email and calendar information, and other stuff that I had feared would be lost.

I began looking at other laptops online, and also at a few stores, but was overwhelmed by the number of new features, different processors and the potential pitfalls of the new Windows 7 operating system.

I watched Monday Night Football, and again realized the void caused by the lack of Internet connectivity from my easy chair. Very weird.

Dell called me that night, and my supervisor's assistant informed me that my issue was being looked into. It took me several tries to understand exactly what he was saying.

By the next day the discomfort of not having the laptop made me go out and look at replacements and check Craigs List, but nothing really clicked.

Then I got another call from Dell – a social media and forum miracle – they are sending me a box to return my laptop for repaid and they would send it back to me in a few days after they received it. Wow. Kudos to Dell when that is accomplished. I'll be tweeting their praises from my easy chair.

Now I am sitting back in the recliner and wondering – what will a week without my computer companion be like?

And what does it say about me that I might find it difficult?

And what about the millions of text messaging and web connected iPhone and PDA users who need their electronic fix everywhere, not just in their easy chair?

Perhaps this is a lesson I should really take to heart (pun intended).

First, my health is good, so nothing is wrong on the most important level.

Second, I can unplug from the Internet while I watch television – maybe – or maybe I should just unplug from the television as well. Could I do it? I meditate daily but apparently there is still a strong pull for my attention from all sorts of sources that don't really leave room for me, or my "self" while they're being accessed.

 

 

My Fascination with Ancient Wisdom

A close friend of mine with whom I often talk about esoteric subjects once commented on how I get to positions that require leaps of faith. He said I work from a place of rationality first, and go as far as I can with scientific or factual notions, and then I extrapolate inside to a place that cannot necessarily be validated scientifically, but which grows within me truth.

That's why I loved the Da Vinci Code and am looking forward to reading Brown's latest work, The Lost Symbol. Last night I watched Stargate for the first time in years, and had forgotten the beginning, where a discredited Egyptologist (James Spader) suggested that the Great Pyramid had no hieroglyphics, wasn't a tomb at all, but instead a repository of ancient wisdom inspired by visitors from somewhere—when someone said the word "Atlantis" everyone walked out of his lecture.

My own fascination with these notions began in my early twenties. When I worked in Cancun a bellman at my hotel actually turned me on to a book about the Great Pyramid by a Mexican writer, Rudolfo Benavides. This was incredibly ironic since I was daily dispatching my tourist clients on tours to see the Mayan pyramid, and the Pyramid of the Sun (Aztec) was in a nearby state.

My young friend fascinated me with speculations about the various mathematical and astronomical relationships encoded in the massive structure, which I later supplemented by reading the incredible Secrets of the Great Pyramid, by Peter Tompkins (author of The Secret Life of Plants and also Secrets of the Mexican Pyramids).

By now of course there has been massive publishing on this topic and notions of the pyramid shape as doing everything from sharpening razor blades to serving as a power plant in ancient Egypt and supplying some sort of electricity of light bulbs that let them work in the dark.

For those who don't know the various measurements that Egyptologists have taken over the centuries and what they imply, here are a few examples of what the various dimensions of the Great Pyramid may represent:

• The perimeter divided by 2 x the height of the pyramid is equal to pi - 3.1416
  
• The number Phi – or Golden Mean (used in the work of Michelangelo and the basis for the Da Vinci Code) - Φ equals 1.618 and represents a series of numbers (Fibonacci sequence) – 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89 and so on where each number is the sum of the previous two. This famous sequence is also found in nature and is the basis for much of biomimicry – engineering that replicates these relationships in human structures.
  
• Aligned to North – knew mass and circumference of the Earth – latitude and longitude
  
• Set in the precise center of earth's continental landmass
  
• Accurate measurement of the day, year, Great Precession (almost 26,000 years for axis of earth to realign)
  
• Measure of foot and cubit based on earth's rotation and actual scale
  

And on and on. Tompkins' book has an Appendix by a noted mathematician expounding on these relationships, and there is additional reference material suggesting that the 3 pyramids represent the constellation Orion, and that the Great Pyramid is aligned with various stars including Sirius, the North Star, and the constellation Pleiades.

At around the same time as I discovered Tompkins' work, Erik von Daniken became a worldwide sensation with his book Chariots of the Gods, which went through a long series of ancient monuments and speculated that all of them must have been built or inspired by greater intelligence of space visitors; in many cases they only made sense when viewed from the sky.

Not long thereafter von Daniken was discredited in the mainstream media for various financial shenanigans, and both he and Tompkins, along with their many more recent authors about the pyramids and similar subjects have been the butt of ridicule by conventional scientists and archeologists—just as James Spader's character was at the beginning of Stargate.

But very little of this really mattered to me—I used my travel privileges to go to Cairo and see the Great Pyramid and regardless of its actual measurements, its scale blew me away.

The fact that it is just THERE is enough to make you gasp. It's like when you take a deep breath and stop to think, why is all this here? What is the point of existence itself?

This experience was described by Jacob Needleman, a philosopher and writer, at the beginning of his book, A Sense of the Cosmos: Scientific Knowledge and Spiritual Truth. He describes walking past a news stand and seeing a photograph on the cover of National Geographic taken by the new (at the time) Hubble Space Telescope. He briefly read the caption and walked away, but returned a moment or two later when he realized that these weren't stars – they were galaxies with each tiny speck representing billions of stars. (Also credit Carl Sagan…)

Needleman writes if you stand out at night in a place where you can actually see the stars, and look up, you simply cannot get your "head" around this at all. He responds with the notion that "we need to rediscover how to join the attention of the heart to the powers of the mind and the perception of the senses." This becomes a stimulus or a pointer to a higher level of being or understanding.

It's like following the Fibonacci series out to infinity, or trying to conceive of the largest prime (indivisible) number – which it took a supercomputer to calculate but which obviously cannot "really" be the largest…

When you do this, you reach the limits of your left brain – your analytical mind – which science has made the ultimate arbiter of what is "real" in today's culture.

But at this point you sense in your gut with complete certitude that you've just scratched the surface of something far vaster and ultimately incomprehensible to our limited set of senses and neurons.

It is my feeling that by getting "a taste" of these kinds of experiences that our own capacity to know beyond reason can expand – not so much to explain something that our logic cannot truly comprehend – but perhaps to connect with it on some level.

What makes Dan Brown's books so entertaining is that he fits these puzzles into a genre where the supposition is that there are humans who possess this knowledge today, and who use it, and do not share it with everyone else. This is the basis of esotericism and it is impossible to prove one way or another.

In The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown introduces a character who works with the Institute of Noetic Sciences (an actual organization in northern California). Of course she is ridiculed by conventional scientists.

According to IONS, "Noetic Sciences are explorations into the nature and potentials of consciousness using multiple ways of knowing—including intuition, feeling, reason, and the senses. Noetic sciences explore the 'inner cosmos' of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) and how it relates to the 'outer cosmos' of the physical world".

What was so fascinating about Stargate was that a particular alignment of symbols could pierce the physical universe as we knew it, and open a dimension into its other side.

Today's renegade Egyptologists (the James Spader character) propound theories of the time of the Sphinx pointing to the existence of human wisdom far before recorded history. Writers like Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval and John Anthony West suggest that striations at the base of the Sphinx prove erosion—so that it existed in "pre-sand Egypt" – before the area became a desert.

(The DVD version of television special on West's theories was narrated by Charlton Heston).

Their work has been greeted with the sort of derision by conventional Egyptologists as the lecture by the James Spader character at the beginning of Stargate—but it is literally mind-boggling in its implications.

And now that there are numerous books and movies about the Mayan calendar and the significance of December 21, 2012, many peoples' minds are being boggled—albeit with catastrophic predictions of the End of Days that make great fodder for special effects.

I still remember an incident when I was travelling in Europe and fainted. While I was "out" I remember inhabiting many worlds and strange places but somewhere in the back of my mind I wanted to get back to my parents and friends in the present – and this desire enabled me to reconstruct a "set of facts" which constituted my location in space (Copenhagen) and time (a date in the 1970's) and when those facts clicked together like the tumblers of a huge combination lock – my eyes opened, and I was back.

Immediately my rational mind reinterpreted this experience so that it "made sense" as being simply "unconscious".

It is my belief that these ancient monuments and the wisdom behind them provide the means for us to explore and experience consciousness itself—by taking us beyond what we "know" to be real to a place beyond "knowledge as we know it"—in a space of breathtaking silence and awe when confronted with an immensity and yet a factual existence that we cannot rationally explain or comprehend, but which is simply there and speaks to us at a much deeper level of meaning.

This is the boundless space of existence itself—of nature, mathematics, music, symbol and true wisdom—manifest physically for our senses to experience briefly but for our limited rational minds to ultimately recognize their limitations to comprehend, and leap off into place or time we cannot as yet explain, and perhaps never will.

 

Is Wireless Just a Metaphor?

There are so many things we tend to take for granted. For me, sitting with my laptop in the living room and transferring files or accessing my desktop, or going online through a wireless network is so routine that I seldom consider what it entails.

Energy is flowing through what appears to be empty space.

What scientific evidence do we have that it's happening? Well, obviously if the files open or the web page loads, we know that wireless technology is real.

But what about or own technology? Neuroscience has shown that electrical energy actually moves through the brain as we think.

In fact, the stimulation of such energy can occur in surprising ways. There is a phenomenon known as "mirror neurons" that fire not by direct stimuli, but rather just by observation. The Fast Company blog describes the findings of Dr. Marco Iacoboni at the Brain Research Center at UCLA who believes that we are actually "wired for storytelling."

His research is based being able to measure the differences in mirror neuron activity when individuals were shown images or told stories by people with whom they empathized or identified; the greater the sense of connection the higher the mirror neuron activity.

This is fascinating on many levels, not the least of which is that it is literally a tangible measure of a quality we might term "emotion" in the brain.

In some personal matters I had occasion to connect with an individual in a professional setting, but one which was highly charged with emotional energy—and to feel our connection we held hands. Then I moved back across the room, and was asked whether I still felt the connection, and I joked, "I don't really believe in wireless."

But actually I do, and you probably do too.

How many times have had the phone ring just as you "happened to" think about who called?

Where this leads me is to the issue of what science considers "real" -- like mirror neurons – and what it considers irrelevant do to an apparent absence of evidence.

While we may certainly believe in wireless with respect to our laptops, we may not readily admit to such a belief with respect to our own technology – our minds and our bodies.

But the more we connect with either – through meditation, body work or some other "New Age" (and apparently unscientific) method – we can determine the reality directly based on our own concrete experience.

Do you miss someone who died or you no longer have contact with?

Have you ever identified that feeling in your body?

Is it any less real to you than your wireless connection to the Internet?

What about compassion, for others or for yourself?

Do you experience it when you meet certain people, or even when you see a posting on Twitter or Facebook? Do you sense it inside yourself, can you sometimes feel yourself shutting it off, or denying its reality in order to numb yourself to a painful reaction?

In a recent blog entry I wrote about Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation by Douglas Rushkoff as a particularly powerful description of why social media is growing as a response to the pursuit of profit at the cost of humanity. ("A shrill condemnation of how corporate culture has disconnected human beings from each other.")

But there is an undeniable movement toward reconnection—from the election of Barack Obama to the growth in social technologies—more and more people are accepting the reality of how important the energy of love and compassion is – and its reality as a physical, psychological and real force of nature.

One might speculate as I have that in some ways the Internet is an evolutionary nervous system in its ability to transmit this energy (wirelessly?).

But as many have noted, the key to conducting the energy of compassion, love or any emotion is belief. In another blog I mentioned a book by biologist Bruce Lipton, actually titled the Biology of Belief. (Its new subtitle is "Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, & Miracles")

Such a concept and much of Lipton's work is enough to give many traditional scientists heartburn.

What about you?

Can you make the connection between the undeniable reality of wireless energy that performs in our computer technology to the presence of a different flavor of energy (organic but no less real) that permeates our own being?

To me the recent advancements in neuroscience, psychology and quantum physics easily let me accept it intellectually—which can be the first step. But in my own experience, through meditation and sensation, I am finally beginning to know it, profoundly in my depth.

Unfortunately there is no real manual to troubleshoot our own technology – or perhaps there are too many conflicting manuals – from medical textbooks to religious works.

And so there are also no clear answers. But just as my web page loads, and my laptop's inner state is changed, so too, if I connect with the cells, tissues, organs and senses within me, I can sometimes feel and observe my own state changing.

Who performs the observation? That's a tough call. But the reality of wireless emotion and thought is no longer open to question, at least for me.

Social Media: The New Humanism?

This morning I briefly insinuated myself into a Twitter discussion between Marsha Collier and Chris Brogan, co-author with Julien Smith of the best seller about social media, "Trust Agents."

The topic was a story about a lame video posted on YouTube to address concerns by many irate users on social sites about the messaging shortcomings of AT&T's network for the iPhone.

The video featured a geek called "Seth the Blogger" (not to be confused with Joe the Plumber) using charts and graphs to explain the technical problems AT&T faces in trying to implement messaging properly for the iPhone.

Brogan and Collier discussed how ineffective this approach is at a time of social media, and Collier suggested actually responding substantively to issues raised on the social sites and demonstrating that the company is really listening as a more viable response.

Brogan, an evangelist for social media, has written often about how suspicious people are of corporations and institutions, so that the more influential people on the web, in social media, are dubbed "Trust Agents". They come by this status not because they are CEO's or spokespeople but because their actions, over time, have demonstrated competence, credibility and compassion in terms of sharing information and building relationships with others (through blogs and "tweets" and so on).

More recently Brogan recommended "Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back" by Douglas Rushkoff as a particularly powerful description of why social media is growing as a response to the pursuit of profit at the cost of humanity. ("A shrill condemnation of how corporate culture has disconnected human beings from each other.")

If you watched President Obama's speech on health care last night, perhaps you were particularly struck, as I was, by his description of frank testimony by an executive for a health insurance company in which he admitted that depriving people of coverage was a policy in line with what Wall Street demanded for the sake of shareholders, in spite of the fact that people were dying and suffering.

This is another blatant example of the corporate trend in customer "disservice" that is perhaps exemplified by the inability in many cases to call a company on the phone and talk to a human, and if one does, the human is reading a script and sounds like a robot.

To me, the growth of social media is, as Brogan and Collier also point out, a movement in opposition to this trend, to reimpose real and tangible human values over those of abstractions like profit and financial gain.

Wikipedia defines "Humanism" as "a perspective common to a wide range of ethical stances that attaches importance to human dignity, concerns, and capabilities, particularly rationality. Although the word has many senses, its meaning comes into focus when contrasted to the supernatural or to appeals to authority."

In my lifetime the distrust of authority has grown from a soft whisper to a bellowing roar as we have seen the growth of multi-national corporations and the pervasive power of influence in Washington.

While many might still scoff at Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social sites, the fact is that their rapid growth speaks to the need for people to locate and connect with similar sensibilities both for their own nourishment and sanity, and also to counteract the megalithic powers that threaten to snuff out humanistic values.

When United Airlines broke a musician's guitar and ignored him, his video on YouTube went viral, and suddenly he had power as an individual and the company had to take note and respond.

In this way the democratic aspect of social media is in complete harmony with American values of fairness and individual responsibility and autonomy.

Corporations and governments are certainly not all or intrinsically bad; many of our blessings would not exist without them. But we must not lose sight of the fact that these institutions are frequently run at cross purposes to the needs of many of our citizens.

There was a time when money represented the value inherent in tangible labor, goods or services. Now it has become a blip on a computer screen and an abstraction so that the recent prosperity came at the expense of huge debts amassed by financial wizards with no direct relationship to actual labor, goods or services. Instead financial instruments which leveraged debt at ratios as high as 40:1 on the dollar have made a few wealthy and many destitute.

Some like the Dalai Lama have suggested that this economic crisis was a wake-up call for humanity to reassess its most basic values.

And Social media is in many ways a natural response to these inequities, both in terms of the need for anyone and everyone to be heard and listened to, and also to reclaim the disproportionate power of institutions that abuse their might.

We have seen even more dramatic evidence of the power of social media to inspire and motivate disenfranchised people in places like Iran. The fact is that human needs trump abstractions like a balance sheet, and will be recognized, one way or another. It has become a global phenomenon.

Of course some people will use their own concept of humanism to assert their views over others, but what social media has shown (and Brogan's term is "social capital") is that people inherently recognize truth and decency over time, so that those with influence on the Internet generally earn it.

Human ingenuity has given birth to a new global nervous system, the Internet, through which humanity may be coming to its senses--with social media leading the way to a new recognition and reevaluation of priorities--so that people and decency matter more than power and greed, as we connect with one another in networks of community and renewed understanding.

The alternative is not pretty.