—-

Can I say how delighted I am to be away from the calm of Westminster and Whitehall?

This is Kim, a nine-year-old Vietnam girl, her back ruined by napalm, and she awakened the conscience of the nation of America to begin to end the Vietnam War. This is Birhan, who was the Ethiopian girl who launched Live Aid in the 1980s, 15 minutes away from death when she was rescued, and that picture of her being rescued is one that went round the world. This is Tiananmen Square. A man before a tank became a picture that became a symbol, for the whole world, of resistance. This next is the Sudanese girl, a few moments from death, a vulture hovering in the background, a picture that went round the world and shocked people into action on poverty. This is Neda, the Iranian girl who was shot while at a demonstration with her father in Iran only a few weeks ago, and she is now the focus, rightly so, of the YouTube generation.

And what do all these pictures and events have in common? What they have in common is what we see unlocked and what we cannot see. What we see unlocked: the invisible ties and bonds of sympathy that bring us together to become a human community. What these pictures demonstrate is that we do feel the pain of others, however distantly. What I think these pictures demonstrate is that we do believe in something bigger than ourselves. What these pictures demonstrate is that there is a moral sense across all religions, across all faiths, across all continents — a moral sense that not only do we share the pain of others, and believe in something bigger than ourselves but we have a duty to act when we see things that are wrong that need righted, see injuries that need to be corrected, see problems that need to be rectified.

There is a story about Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister, going to see Ronald Reagan in America in the 1980s. Before he arrived Ronald Reagan said — and he was the Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister — “Isn’t this man a communist?” The reply was, “No, Mr President, he’s an anti-communist.” And Ronald Reagan said, “I don’t care what kind of communist he is!” (Laughter) Ronald Reagan asked Olof Palme, the Social Democratic Prime Minister of Sweden, “Well, what do you believe in? Do you want to abolish the rich?” He said, “No, I want to abolish the poor.” Our responsibility is to let everyone have the chance to realize their potential to the full.

I believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from people of every religion and every faith, and people of no faith. But I think what’s new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world. We now have the capacity to find common ground with people we will never meet but who we will meet through the Internet and through all the modern means of communication, that we now have the capacity to organize and take collective action together to deal with the problem or an injustice that we want to deal with, and I believe that this makes this a unique age in human history, and it is the start of what I would call the creation of a truly global society.

Go back 200 years when the slave trade was under pressure from William Wilberforce and all the protesters. They protested across Britain. They won public opinion over a long period of time. But it took 24 years for the campaign to be successful. What could they have done with the pictures they could have shown if they were able to use the modern means of communication to win people’s hearts and minds?

Or if you take Eglantyne Jebb, the woman who created Save the Children 90 years ago. She was so appalled by what was happening in Austria as a result of the First World War and what was happening to children who were part of the defeated families of Austria, that in Britain she wanted to take action, but she had to go house to house, leaflet to leaflet, to get people to attend a rally in the Royal Albert Hall that eventually gave birth to Save the Children, an international organization that is now fully recognized as one of the great institutions in our land and in the world. But what more could she have done if she’d had the modern means of communications available to her to create a sense that the injustice that people saw had to be acted upon immediately?

Now look at what’s happened in the last 10 years. In Philippines in 2001, President Estrada — a million people texted each other about the corruption of that regime, eventually brought it down and it was, of course, called the “coup de text.” Then you have in Zimbabwe the first election under Robert Mugabe a year ago. Because people were able to take mobile-phone photographs of what was happening at the polling stations, it was impossible for that Premier to fix that election in the way that he wanted to do. Or take Burma and the monks that were blogging out, a country that nobody knew anything that was happening until these blogs told the world that there was a repression, meaning that lives were being lost and people were being persecuted and Aung San Suu Kyi, who is one of the great prisoners of conscience of the world, had to be listened to. Then take Iran itself, and what people are doing today, following what happened to Neda, people who are preventing the security services of Iran finding those people who are blogging out of Iran, changing their address to Tehran, Iran, and making it difficult for the security services.

Take, therefore, what modern technology is capable of: the power of our moral sense allied to the power of communications and our ability to organize internationally.

That, in my view, gives us the first opportunity as a community to fundamentally change the world. Foreign policy can never be the same again. It cannot be run by elites; it’s got to be run by listening to the public opinions of peoples who are blogging, who are communicating with each other around the world. 200 years ago the problem we had to solve was slavery. 150 years ago I suppose the main problem in a country like ours was how young people, children, had the right to education. 100 years ago in most countries in Europe, the pressure was for the right to vote. 50 years ago the pressure was for the right to social security and welfare. In the last 50-60 years we have seen fascism, anti-Semitism, racism, apartheid, discrimination on the basis of sex and gender and sexuality; all these have come under pressure because of the campaigns by people to change the world.

I was with Nelson Mandela a year ago when he was in London. I was at a concert that he was attending to mark his birthday and for the creation of new resources for his foundation. I was sitting next to Nelson Mandela — I was very privileged to do so — when Amy Winehouse came onto the stage and Nelson Mandela was quite surprised at the appearance of the singer and I was explaining to him at the time who she was. Amy Winehouse said, “Nelson Mandela and I have a lot in common. My husband too has spent a long time in prison.” (Laughter) Nelson Mandela then went down to the stage and he summarized the challenge for us all. He said in his lifetime he had climbed a great mountain, the mountain of challenging and then defeating racial oppression and defeating apartheid. He said that there was a greater challenge ahead, the challenge of poverty, of climate change, global challenges that needed global solutions and needed the creation of a truly global society.

We are the first generation that is in a position to do this. Combine the power of a global ethic with the power of our ability to communicate and organize globally with the challenges that we now face, most of which are global in their nature. Climate change cannot be solved in one country but has got to be solved by the world working together. A financial crisis, just as we have seen, could not be solved by America alone or Europe alone; it needed the world to work together. Take the problems of security and terrorism and, equally, the problem of human rights and development: they cannot be solved by Africa alone; they cannot be solved by America or Europe alone. We cannot solve these problems unless we work together.

So the great project of our generation, it seems to me, is to build for the first time out of a global ethic and our global ability to communicate and organize together, a truly global society, built on that ethic but with institutions that can serve that global society and make for a different future. We have now, and are the first generation with, the power to do this. Take climate change. Is it not absolutely scandalous that we have a situation where we know that there is a climate change problem, where we know also that that will mean we have to give more resources to the poorest countries to deal with that, when we want to create a global carbon market, but there is no global institution that people have been able to agree upon to deal with this problem? One of the things that has to come out of Copenhagen in the next few months is an agreement that there will be a global environmental institution that is able to deal with the problems of persuading the whole of the world to move along a climate-change agenda.

(Applause)

One of the reasons why an institution is not in itself enough is that we have to persuade people around the world to change their behavior as well, so you need that global ethic of fairness and responsibility across the generations. Take the financial crisis. If people in poorer countries can be hit by a crisis that starts in New York or starts in the sub-prime market of the United States of America. If people can find that that sub-prime product has been transferred across nations many, many times until it ends up in banks in Iceland or the rest in Britain, and people’s ordinary savings are affected by it, then you cannot rely on a system of national supervision. You need in the long run for stability, for economic growth, for jobs, as well as for financial stability, global economic institutions that make sure that growth to be sustained has to be shared, and are built on the principle that the prosperity of this world is indivisible.

So another challenge for our generation is to create global institutions that reflect our ideas of fairness and responsibility, not the ideas that were the basis of the last stage of financial development over these recent years. Then take development and take the partnership we need between our countries and the rest of the world, the poorest part of the world. We do not have the basis of a proper partnership for the future, and yet, out of people’s desire for a global ethic and a global society that can be done.

I have just been talking to the President of Sierra Leone. This is a country of six and a half million people, but it has only 80 doctors, it has 200 nurses, it has 120 midwives. You cannot begin to build a healthcare system for six million people with such limited resources.

Or take the girl I met when I was in Tanzania, a girl called Miriam. She was 11 years old, her parents had both died from AIDS, her mother and then her father. She was an AIDS orphan being handed across different extended families to be cared for. She herself was suffering from HIV, she was suffering from tuberculosis. I met her in a field, she was ragged, she had no shoes. When you looked in her eyes, any girl at the age of eleven is looking forward to the future, but there was an unreachable sadness in that girl’s eyes and if I could have translated that to the rest of the world for that moment, I believe that all the work that it had done for the global HIV/AIDS fund would be rewarded by people prepared to make donations.

We must then build a proper relationship between the richest and the poorest countries based on our desire that they are able to fend for themselves with the investment that is necessary in their agriculture, so that Africa is not a net importer of food, but an exporter of food.

Take the problems of human rights and the problems of security in so many countries around the world. Burma is in chains, Zimbabwe is a human tragedy, in Sudan thousands of people have died unnecessarily for wars that we could prevent. In the Rwanda Children’s Museum, there is a photograph of a 10-year-old boy and the Children’s Museum is commemorating the lives that were lost in the Rwandan genocide where a million people died.

There is a photograph of a boy called David. Beside that photograph there is the information about his life. It said “David, age 10.” David: ambition to be a doctor. Favorite sport: football. What did he enjoy most? Making people laugh. How did he die? Tortured to death. Last words said to his mother who was also tortured to death: “Don’t worry. The United Nations are coming.” And we never did.

And that young boy believed our promises that we would help people in difficulty in Rwanda, and we never did.

So we have got to create in this world also institutions for peacekeeping and humanitarian aid, but also for reconstruction and security for some of the conflict-ridden states of the world. So my argument today is basically this. We have the means by which we could create a truly global society. The institutions of this global society can be created by our endeavors. That global ethic can infuse the fairness and responsibility that is necessary for these institutions to work, but we should not lose the chance in this generation, in this decade in particular, with President Obama in America, with other people working with us around the world, to create global institutions for the environment, and for finance, and for security and for development, that make sense of our responsibility to other peoples, our desire to bind the world together, and our need to tackle problems that everybody knows exist.

It is said that in Ancient Rome that when Cicero spoke to his audiences, people used to turn to each other and say about Cicero, “Great speech.” But it is said that in Ancient Greece when Demosthenes spoke to his audiences, people turned to each other and didn’t say “Great speech.” They said, “Let’s march.” We should be marching towards a global society. Thank you.

(Applause)

—–

Brown speaks of seeing an “unreachable sadness” in the eyes of Miriam, the HIV orphan in Tanzania. I have been amazed to hear the backlash to this talk. Upon reflection, I sense Brown’s talk is piercing an unreachable sadness in us. Do we dare dream humanity can actually reach where he is pointing.

Kenya directly invests money in constituencies through a Community Development Fund (CDF). While giving workshops in Karachuonyo Constituency, I noticed that the majority of CDF projects were unfinished. Viewing this from my investment mindset, I saw egregious abuses of capital.

One day, while looking at the four walls of a long-stalled classroom project, with a flash of clarity, I suddenly saw what the community saw, the patrons had not forgotten their village. Sure, the classroom was unusable, but that wasn’t the point. The four walls represented the village had not been forgotten by its elders [patrons]. Turns out, CDF monies are, in fact, a “Cake Distribution Fund.”

In Kenya, everyone wants to know their elders have included them in the distribution of rents/the sharing of the cake. Given they also know themselves as poor, little fish, they are happy with crumbs. Big Fish [elders] get to eat first. They can have as much as they want. When they are done eating, everyone else shares the leftovers.

Capitalists don’t get it about corruption. We don’t see it for what it is. When we do, we can get development done.

Time to turn off the aid tap?

Dambisa Moyo is to aid what Ayaan Hirsi Ali is to Islam. Here is an African woman, articulate, smart, glamorous, delivering a message of brazen political incorrectness: cut aid to Africa. Aid, she argues, has not merely failed to work; it has compounded Africa’s problems. Moyo cannot be dismissed as a crank. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, she heads the Africa strategy of a major bank. Nor can she be dismissed as a renegade who has rejected her roots. She is deeply wounded by the lack of development in Zambia, her home country. So what is she saying?

The first stage in her argument is that aid is easy money. If governments had to rely upon private financial markets they would become accountable to lenders, and if they had to rely upon taxation they would become accountable to voters. Aid is like oil, enabling powerful elites to embezzle public revenues. She catalogues evidence, both statistical and anecdotal.

But the core of her argument is that there is a better alternative. Governments could find money for development through financial markets, both international and domestic. Historically, the governments of those countries that have successfully developed funded investment by recourse to international markets. In order to borrow, they needed decent credit ratings; to get the ratings, they had to be transparent and prudent. The discipline of transparency and prudence were as important as the money in promoting development. Some of the stronger African governments have at last started down this road. She also sees huge scope for innovations in micro-finance, such as the group borrowing pioneered by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

What should we make of these arguments? As it happens I taught Moyo both at Harvard and Oxford, but her ideas are decidedly her own. I think that they deserve to be taken seriously. The function of aid is not to make us feel better about ourselves; it is to promote development, and if a well-informed African tells us that we are inadvertently having the opposite effect, we had better take heed.

So is there solid evidence to refute her claim that aid worsens governance and so impoverishes? Unfortunately, the research on whether aid is effective is frankly shambolic. At the level of an individual project we can often show it is effective, but this misses Moyo’s point: that what matters is the overall impact on the society.

There is indeed some evidence that aid tends to worsen governance, though whether enough to offset its beneficial effects is unresolved. Certainly, the evidence is sufficiently troubling that respected experts share her concerns. Adrian Wood, formerly chief economist of the Department for International Development, has argued that there should be a ceiling to aid as a proportion of the budget. The consensus academic view, to the extent there is one, is probably that large aid inflows, like large oil revenues, tend to reduce government accountability to citizens.

However, cutting aid may not be the best response. My preferred alternative is to strengthen its potential for “governance conditionality”: aid agencies should insist on both transparent budgeting and free and fair elections. That said, I have to admit that Moyo has a good retort. She shows how feeble aid agencies have been: when occasionally one gets tough, others compensate. Within aid agencies, performance is judged predominantly by short-term criteria such as how much aid is disbursed, rather than longer-term effects on accountability. Based on past behaviour, a government could assume that the aid would keep flowing more or less regardless of what it did.

However, even admitting the severe limits of donor ability to improve governance, I doubt that many of Africa’s problems can be attributed to aid. It is, in my view, something of a sideshow. Because it lends itself to a simple morality story of guilt and reparation, it receives more attention than is warranted. Paradoxically, despite her radically different argument, Moyo has ended up with the same punchline as the conventional, politically correct diagnosis: Africa’s problems are the consequence of our transgressions.

By the same token, I think that Moyo’s message is over-optimistic. She implies that, were aid cut, African governments would respond by turning to other sources of finance that would make them more accountable. I think this exaggerates the opportunity for alternative finance and underestimates the difficulties African societies face.

Moyo has been unlucky in her timing. In the brief interval between writing and publication, the book’s argument has been overtaken by events. The opportunity for African governments to raise money on international markets has evaporated even more rapidly than it opened around four years ago. The global financial crisis has drastically reduced investor appetites for risk: for example, the government of Kenya had planned to raise $500m through an international bond issue, but that is now out of the question.

International investors have over-reacted: in reality the investment opportunities in Africa have not deteriorated as sharply as those in the OECD, but irrational exuberance has been replaced by irrational caution. By chance, the collapse in private finance has coincided with a shift in donor priorities from social spending to infrastructure.

As a result of these two changes in mood, suddenly the aid agencies look to be more important as sources of finance for investment than at any time in the last two decades. While the commercial banks have stopped lending, the World Bank has never been as busy.

African societies face problems deeper than their dependence on aid. Divided by ethnic loyalties, they are too large to be nations. Yet with only tiny economies, they lack the scale to be effective states. As a result the vital public goods of security and accountability cannot adequately be provided. In their absence the valuable natural assets that many countries possess become liabilities instead of opportunities for prosperity.

I think that African societies need international help to overcome these problems; it is just that the help they need is not predominantly money. Aid is not a very potent instrument for enhancing either security or accountability. Our obsession with it has detracted from the more important ways in which we can promote development: peacekeeping, security guarantees, trade privileges, and governance.

But we must hope that Moyo’s thesis is right: Britain has just implemented the sharp cuts in aid that she wants to see. Although this was achieved inadvertently, as a result of the sharp depreciation of the pound rather than by a cut in the sterling-denominated budget, it will have the same effect.

Paul Collier is professor of economics at Oxford University and author of ‘The Bottom Billion’ (Oxford)

Rebel with a cause: Dambisa Moyo - A global economic strategist at the investment bank Goldman Sachs in London, Dambisa Moyo formerly worked as a consultant at the World Bank in Washington DC. She grew up in Lusaka, Zambia, and studied economics at Harvard University and then (for a doctorate) at Oxford. Kofi Annan has praised ‘Dead Aid’, her first book, as a “compelling case for a new approach to Africa”. Historian Niall Ferguson’s response to it was that “This reader was left wanting a lot more Moyo, and a lot less Bono”.

Good ideas are common - what’s uncommon are people who’ll work hard enough to bring them about.  — Ashleigh Brilliant (via affremblequotes)

***
Monday, January 26, 2009 11:45 AM

Hello,

Hope this mail finds you well. Hope your days have been really refreshing.

Yesterday, on my way from church I met a friend of mine and as usual asked me how I was faring. My response to him was “I’ve never been any more better than now!” That response deeply struck him because it was far much from deep beyond my lips. And it came with an accompaniment of immense joy, satisfaction and stress-free - engulfed by a huge presence of greatness. My friend has known me for quite some time and knows such a time of the year, many people would be lamenting the financial hard times. He would expect a story that goes something like “well, I’m still struggling as usual”, or “you see, things are really tough nowadays”, or even “the going is getting tougher”, and so the story would go. These are all statements I’ve heard from many a people and also they are statements I used to make some time back. They are the usual statements for people leading a usual life. I no longer belong there. I find myself somehow sheltered from such turmoils and torments of difficult times. Never in my entire life have I enjoyed such great peace of mind, great courage and confidence, such serenity and abundant comfort, than what I’m going through.Yes, not even ever during my greatest achievements nor my finest moments have I experienced such a renewed flow of life in my life! It’s like I’ve just opened my mental eyes to behold the treasure house of infinity within me - to live gloriously, joyously and abundantly.

The month of January is particularly challenging.The unemployed are faced with a myriad and frustrating nightmares of coping with life without a coin. This is coming at such a time when, making a shilling and getting ahead are the preferred ethos of our times. It’s against this old paradigm that my response to my friend caught his attention.My “I’ve never been more better than now” response was like, in a sense, an island of tolerance in a sea of intolerance. Ah, what our alternative thinking training has done to me is turning out to be more unthinkable, even awesome. It gives one the master key and power to access and smash through the mental roadblocks that sabotage ones future. I keep on inviting many to align their minds to and harmoniously vibrate with the universe - the reservoir of all greatness. The timing can never be more apt than now.

Over the years, Kenyan society has learned and mastered the dependency culture. But the mastery of this culture has left many disillusioned and desperate. Many appear stressed and fatigued - a demeanor highly incongruous with their environments. The mindset of poverty on display is even more alarming. Nevertheless, what is more relieving is the power of transformation contained in alternative thinking training which a few people within my area are grasping.

Following the December 2007 election and the subsequent violence in Kenya early last year, majority of the “losers” and their “followers” were utterly disappointed. This was evident through the disintegration of the community. One of the civic candidates, who is a friend of mine once approached me and vowed “never to go back in politics and never to involve himself in any community affairs”. Because “I’ve tried to show this community the right direction but they have refused”, he added. Well, this moved me. I looked at him and asked him to tell me what he intended to do once elected but felt he couldn’t achieve now that he was not elected. “I would have constructed roads in our ward, built schools, put up a lighting system”, etc. Then I asked him whether he was sure he couldn’t accomplish all that without necessarily becoming a councilor. He shouted at me “but how can I do all that when I’m not in power and can’t access the (government) resources to implement the projects?” This gave me an opportunity to share with him the concept of alternative thinking and most importantly the “Work”. What a transformational journey! I told him that it’s not about positions, because the fulfillment of our resolutions lies not on what we want to do , but rather, in who we choose to be. My words led him to a pensive mood, his facial expressions changing from that of a bold and cunning politician to a warm smile of a little kid.

Our conversations kept growing with time. We would meet at most of our evenings and further share. I felt enlightened whenever I listened to what he was going through. The more we shared the more he re-examined himself, and the more he developed a strong sense of commitment towards the community! And the last 3 months bears witness of this simple yet powerful moments we’ve had with him. Through the sharing, he has managed to put together a group of 560 people, with no no age, gender, tribe, class or even religion barriers. The group keeps growing.

Though the objective of the welfare group is to support one another through contributions, it is becoming more interesting whenever I share with them about our alternative thinking training. It’s fulfilling to see how, not after long, those who people who appeared perpetually stressed, depressed and repressed, now taking charge of their own lives. And better still, how they keep themselves mentally self-sufficient, self-poised and self-pleased.

Initially, the group intended to recruit members from within its own ward. But barely 3 months down the line, people come a long way to join this increasingly fun-filled ‘market of ideas” - and the cash tills keep ringing! With a monthly contribution of only Kenya shillings 300,there is a new sense of responsibility. It is gradually dawning to us all that we should stop expecting that the onus for changing our destiny rests with those responsible for our hopelessness. Initiatives like building schools, earlier left to the government, are now topping the priority list which now the community feels is their role to upgrade the learning standards of the area. The experience of watching this community arise and rise, and cross ranks, with the slogan “Together we can” is novel entertaining in itself. I’m overwhelmed when I hear statements like “Oh, so we had reduced ourselves to cry-babies over issues that are largely within our control!”

Change of mind set, what a breakthrough!

Much love.

Munish.

Feeling trapped by a job, relationship, or routine, but terrified of making a change? Martha Beck shows you how to feel your way to freedom.

Sheila and I are conversing at a drug treatment center, where she’s been remanded. Counselors are listening, so we can’t plan a way to break her out. As it happens, escape is the last thing on Sheila’s mind. I’m not coaching her through the woes of being institutionalized for drug use but prepping her for her upcoming release.

“In here everything’s simple,” Sheila says. “Outside I’ll have to deal with my crazy mom, get a job, pay the bills. I don’t know how to handle that without drugs.” When I ask her to picture a peaceful, happy life, Sheila draws a blank. “I can’t imagine anything except what I’ve already seen,” she says.

The despair in her voice is so heavy it makes me want to huff a little glue myself, but two things give me hope: a fabled land known in the annals of psychology as Rat Park, and a montage of other clients, once as hopeless as Sheila, who went on to live happy, meaningful lives. The concepts I learned from Rat Park, channeled through the behaviors I’ve seen in those courageous clients, just may transform Sheila’s future.

But first, what is this mythic Rat Park? And how might it relate to you? The term comes from a study conducted in 1981 by psychologist Bruce Alexander and colleagues. He noted that many addiction studies had something in common: The lab rats they used were locked in uncomfortable, isolating cages. Testing a hunch, Alexander gathered two groups of rats. For the first, he built a 200-square-foot rodent paradise called Rat Park. There a colony of white Wister rats found luxurious accommodations for all their favorite pastimes—mingling, mating, raising pups, writing articles for newspaper tabloids. The second group was housed in the traditional cages.

Alexander offered both groups a choice of plain water or sugar water laced with morphine. Like rats in other studies, the traditionally caged animals became instant addicts. However, the residents of Rat Park tended to “just say no,” avoiding the drug-treated sugar water. Even rats that were already addicted to morphine tended to lay off the hard stuff when in Rat Park. Put them back in their cages, however, and they’d stay stoned as Deadheads.

Alexander saw many parallels between these junkie rats and human addicts. He has talked of one patient who worked as a shopping mall Santa. “He couldn’t do his job unless he was high on heroin,” Alexander remembered. “He would shoot up, climb into that red Santa Claus costume, put on those black plastic boots, and smile for six hours straight.”

This story jingles bells for many of my clients. Like Smack Santa, they spend many hours playing roles that don’t match their innate personalities and preferences, dulling the pain with mood-altering substances. Miserable with their jobs, relationships, or daily routines, they gulp down a fifth of Scotch, buy 46 commemorative Elvis plates on QVC, superglue phony smiles to their faces, and head on out to whatever rat race is gradually destroying them.

Sheila was actually a step ahead of most of my clients, in that she knew she was locked up. Most people are trapped in prisons made of mind stuff—attitudes and beliefs such as “I have to look successful” or “I can’t disappoint my dad.” Ideas like these—being deeply entrenched and invisible—are often more powerful than physical prisons. When we’re trapped in mind cages, gulping happy pills by the handful and fantasizing about lethally stapling coworkers, we rarely even consider that our unhappiness comes from living in captivity. And if we ever come close to recognizing the truth, we’re stopped by a barrage of terrifying questions: “What if there’s nothing better than this?” “What if I quit my job, lose my seniority, and end up somewhere even worse?” “What if I break off this relationship and end up alone forever?” “What if I get my hopes up and the big break never comes?”

When the alternatives are staying in the familiar cage or facing the unknown, trust me, most people choose the cage—over and over and over again. It’s painful to watch, especially knowing that liberation is only a few simple steps away. If you suspect that you might need to engineer your own prison break, the following pieces of commonsense advice can set you free forever.

“I just don’t think I’ll ever find the right life for me,” Sheila frets.

“Of course you won’t!” I say. “How strange to think you would!”

It amazes me how often people use that phrase: “Find the right life.” Would you walk into your kitchen hoping to find the right fried egg, the right cup of coffee, the right toast? Such things don’t simply appear before you; they arrive because you rummage around, figure out what’s available, and make what you want. (If you’re rich, you can hire a chef and place your order, but you’re still creating the result.)

Bruce Alexander’s rats were hand-delivered into paradise. Lucky critters, indeed—but not nearly as lucky as Alexander himself, or the rest of us humans, who have the astonishing ability to envision and build Rat Parks. All animals are shaped by their environment, but we, more than any other species, can shape our environment right back. We can cook the egg, brew the coffee, paint the room, change the space. We can fabricate our Rat Parks, and we must, if we want them built to spec.

“But I don’t know what I’m trying to build,” Sheila protests when I tell her this. “How can I create something when I don’t have a clue what it looks like?”

Time for commonsense suggestion number two.

I often invite clients to play the dead-simple game You’re Getting Warmer, You’re Getting Colder. The client leaves the room, and I hide a simple object—say, a key—in a tricky place, such as the inside of a cake. (Not that I would have done this with someone locked up. Like Sheila. Absolutely not.) When the client returns to the room, he almost invariably stands still, and asks, “What am I looking for?”

Obviously, I don’t answer him. The only feedback I’ll give is “You’re getting warmer” or “You’re getting colder.” Eventually clients will start moving. Guided by the words warmer and colder, they quickly identify the general hiding area. Then there’s a period of confusion, fueled by assumptions like “Well, she certainly wouldn’t hide it in the cake.” They go back and forth for a bit, then stop and demand, “Where is it?” Again, this gets them nothing. Peeved, they revert to following the “warmer/colder” feedback until they arrive at the object.

I’ve never had a client who didn’t ultimately succeed. Not one.

My point: Life has installed within you powerful “getting warmer, getting colder” signals. When Sheila thought of leaving the treatment center, her tension, anxiety, and drug cravings soared. The time she had to serve was “warmer”; her outside life, “colder.” Certain activities were freezing cold—dealing with her mother, working, paying bills. As we examined each of these, we found that her guidance system was giving her beautifully clear messages. For instance, being around sane noncriminals, even officials at the treatment center, felt “warmer” than Sheila’s crazy dope-dealing mother. Working in the cafeteria, with its institutional predictability, was “warmer” than her old cocktail waitress job, where she’d flashed her flesh to elicit unpredictable tips from drunken customers. Living within her economic means felt “warmer” than credit card shopping sprees she couldn’t afford.

True, Sheila was a long way from her own Rat Park. But with the knowledge that her navigation system was functioning perfectly, all she had to do was play her life as a game of You’re Getting Warmer, You’re Getting Colder. The same is true for you. It isn’t necessary to know exactly how your ideal life will look; you only have to know what feels better and what feels worse. If something feels both good and bad, break it down into its components to see which are warm, which cold. Begin making choices based on what makes you feel freer and happier, rather than how you think an ideal life should look. It’s the process of feeling our way toward happiness, not the realization of some Platonic ideal, that creates our best lives.

“My life is so far from perfect,” Sheila says as we end our session. “I don’t know if it’s fixable.”

She’s ready to hear my third and last piece of commonsense advice.

This step is something I stole from philosopher and engineer Buckminster Fuller. Bucky, as his friends knew him, chose for his epitaph just three words: call me trimtab. Trim tabs are tiny rudders attached to the back of larger rudders that steer huge ships. The big rudders would snap off if turned directly, but, as Fuller famously said, “just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So…you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.”

Every life is a series of trim-tab decisions. Should you read tonight or watch TV? Choose what feels warmer. Self-help or thriller? Choose what feels warmer. Cuddle with the dog or banish him from the bed? Choose what feels (psychologically) warmer.

If you make mistakes, no problem; you’ll soon feel colder and correct your course. Making consistent trim-tab choices toward happiness is what steers the mighty ship of your life into exotic ports, safe havens—in short, into every Rat Park you can imagine, and then some.

I say goodbye to Sheila not knowing whether she’ll set her trim tabs toward happiness or back to her drug-abusing cage of a life. I’ve learned not to get my hopes up with humans, who aren’t nearly as clear-sighted and authentic as rats. But our session reminds me to keep following my own tiny feelings and impulses to their distant and amazing destinations. So instead of worrying about Sheila—or me, or you—I’ll choose to trust our powerful instincts, our desire to be happy, our amazing human capacity for invention. You may choose cynical despair instead—it’s all the rage in intellectual circles—but if you care to join me, I think you’ll find it’s a whole lot warmer over here in Rat Park.