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As I've proposed the process changes in this book to others, a small percentage have been uncertain that these changes are needed or possible. In response, the last few pages of this book address such concerns.

The system is too entrenched to be changed

I'm not surprised when people seriously question if things can change, as those in control are very powerful. We have lived under the hierarchical control of the elite through political representatives for centuries and under their control as monarchs for millennia before that. Past elite are portrayed as heroes, as the smartest and the best of their time. We are taught to respect and admire the elite for their wealth and power and we are conditioned to the mindset that we are less than they are. The class system is alive and well in the US.

We are taught to see political representatives in the same light. We have been indoctrinated that we are powerless, uninformed, and less intelligent and that we need professional politicians to speak for us and to take care of us. We have been taught that those in authority are there because they can do a better job. We tend to project superhuman intelligence and capabilities onto politicians we favor and see the opposing politicians as arch villains. Narcissistic and sociopathic rulers use this conditioning to manipulate us by displaying extreme confidence as they play on our fears. We are conditioned to giving up our power to someone else.

Control over our thinking and our hope through the media is the real power of hierarchy. Regardless, don't worry. We have everything that is important that the elites have and more.

• Collectively we have more intelligence than any one of them or their smartest expert has.

• Together we have all the power. They only have power because we are holding them up and deferring to them.

• Together we can determine better solutions than their political parties can and have.

• Our democratic solution process will be more effective, more efficient, and lower risk than the representative governing process that they established to rule over us.

The first step of change is hope. If you have even a glimmer of hope, let it grow by taking one small step, one action. Sign up for candidate notifications on our website EndPoliticsNow.com/notify-me. That's how change begins. We are at a turning point in history. It's easy and it's painless.

But I am afraid of changing our governing processes

Fear of change is very understandable and normal. As our strongest motivation is to stay safe, some people will want to stay with the current system to avoid any change, even if it has the potential to make things much better and to make us freer, happier, and safer. What we can see and know feels the safest because it is familiar, even with all its flaws.

We have been bombarded with propaganda with two objectives. The first is to make us feel threatened and scared if we have a counter opinion and to persuade us to keep our heads down and our mouths shut. Conformity is promoted as the only safe option. The second is to persuade us to believe in an extreme threat and to vote for their candidates and consent to the actions of those in power in response to the threat. That is why every situation is branded as a "war." With every crisis, we are on the brink of disaster and we might not survive, or such is the propaganda.

Propaganda is a more powerful weapon than physical force. Once you control the flow of information, you control the minds of the people. At best, I expect the proposals in this book to be ridiculed with a lot of eye rolling by politicians and by any media that they control. I expect that they will hire and muster political experts, behavioral experts, media talk show hosts, writers, and anyone else they can coopt or hire to spread propaganda to discredit our movement.

We can anticipate that their goal will be to make voters afraid of us and afraid of what will happen if they support us in any way. One strategy could be to tell voters that they must not vote for us or it will split the vote. They may try to make us look radical and extreme, with little understanding of what we are doing. Fortunately, their normal strategy of fear won't have as much effect as they hope because we will not enter the election until we have the supporters to win it. Therefore, they can never be sure when our candidates will compete until after the fact.

In addition, we will recruit our own influencers and political experts. Actually, the need for a true democracy came from past and present political experts. They have been advocating a true democracy for at least 50 years. I simply brought all of the pieces together into a viable, implementable solution once technology presented the opportunity. These political professors and experts explained rationally why neither representation nor socialism was the answer. Check out the bibliography. A true democracy is the only possible answer.

People listen to their friends. The more our grassroots movement grows, the more momentum it will attain and the more people will believe in the message and the solution. Sign up to receive notifications and we will keep you informed periodically of the progress of the movement and of the growth in the number of supporters.

I don't want "those crazy people" to have a voice also

If you are afraid of the people solving issues together because you think that half of the country is crazy, stupid, or blind, then you have missed a major point of this book. That belief is the result of political division propaganda promoted by the political parties and sold by the media for their benefit. As you recall in the first chapter, I fell for it as well. Regardless, it isn't true.

Surveys often ask black and white questions with response options that emphasize extreme differences. Naturally, the poll results end up divided into two groups. Media stories show comments and sound bites by extremists as if everyone in the other party held the same views. Every news event is spun by each party in an effort to tear down the other. The two major parties increasingly take more extreme voting positions against each other. All of this garners media attention, convincing their voters that their party is the only hope while earning more advertising dollars for the media. The psychological warfare of the 1950's is now called marketing.

When we look at reality, we find that many of people's beliefs are similar because we all have similar needs. Few extreme differences actually exist. People are quick to throw out a broad, generic judgement against an opposing ideology, but when you start talking the details of a specific issue, people are much more aligned than they are polarized.

That is why vTaiwan was able to find consensus on issues like online sales of alcohol and Uber vs. taxis when the politicians couldn't. In the German survey that asked a very broad question, about 34,000 participants submitted about 800 unique statements. They entered about 2 million assessments of those statements. This survey represents a confidence level of 99% with a 0.7% margin of error.

The results are shown in the dot plot in Figure 17-4. Each dot represents one statement. As you can see by the dots on the left, most people felt the same way. They only split on a few statements on the right side of the dot plot.

Figure 17-4

The political parties would have you believe that the dot plot would be reversed, that almost all of the dots would be to the right because citizens are naturally divided in their beliefs because those in the other party are stupid or corrupt. But that isn't true. That is propaganda. In reviewing the dot plots in the surveys posted on Polis, there is generally much consensus regarding the statements in every survey.

In addition, our democratic solution process doesn't ask people to simply vote emotionally on ideological lines on a solution presented to them by politicians. Instead, it leads them through a solution process one step at a time. People begin where they are by entering statements and assessing the statements of others about the issue. Next, they do the same for their needs. They naturally develop more understanding of the various perspectives of others as they read their needs. They read validated information in documents and learn how others respond to the information as well. Then they submit ideas that could be part of a solution. Now they have shifted their thinking from blaming and anger to understanding and creative solution development. Collaboration continues as a solution is selected, refined, and confirmed. Our democratic solution process was designed to eliminate division and to foster empathy, understanding, and creativity. This new process is much better than the current adversarial political process that foments opposition, anger, and even hatred.