One of the most depressing and unfortunate political phenomena we are seeing today in our country is that basically every day, many otherwise credible people from our political parties and our community leadership positions look directly into the camera and say things that are clearly not true and they feel no guilt or ethical constraints in saying those inaccurate and wrong things to the world because they don’t believe that it's an ethical violation or a moral failing to do and say false things to and about the enemies of their own group.

The people who are telling the lies don’t even flinch when they look into the camera, speak into the microphones, and say untrue things like: “No, that is not a change of position. That has always been his or her position on that point. His or her position has not changed and you're wrong to make that accusation even though it might seem that is actually a different position if you look at what seemed to be said on that topic in prior statements.”

People sometimes make those kinds of statements even when the video tape that was just shown of their candidate’s prior position makes it completely clear to every viewer, including themselves, that they are wrong and that their candidate did, in fact, hold a different position in the past and this wasn’t what was said before.

How does that happen?

We have the ability now to say things that are obviously not true and to believe that's the right thing to say purely because our side in that setting benefits from that position or that belief and so we say it, and we even exhibit energy in favor of that position because that benefit for our group is the most important factor that we build into our thinking for that position.

That set of interactions happens every day in many situations and settings in our country and our world today.

Why does that happen?

How can a significant number of grown people who generally pride themselves on their own personal levels of integrity and honesty, fairly often suspend integrity and abandon both ethics and honesty to make those kinds of clearly untrue statements?

Some people make those statements because they are paid political spokespeople and it is their job to say those things in the way they are said.

They're paid to lie.

But large numbers of other people who make those clearly untrue statements do not do it for money. They do it because they have instincts activated in their heads that make those kinds of statements feel legitimate and appropriate, and even right to them at a very basic level when they say them.

The people who make those false statements in those ways make those false statements and feel no guilt because they have activated the sets of instincts and the instinct-linked values, beliefs, and thought processes that make otherwise unethical behaviors, and factually inaccurate statements, entirely acceptable and justified and somehow legitimate when they are directed toward someone who is perceived instinctively to be a Them, because we all instinctively oppose and attack Them.

The four InterGroup instinctive interaction books all very directly explain those perceptions, those impacts, and the influence they have over our thoughts, emotions, beliefs and values.

The InterGroup books and key inter group website pieces all explain that we very often have entirely different sets of values relative to Us and Them, and those values have a major impact on our values, our thinking, and our lives.

We all tend to feel we should be ethical and honest and even accurate relative to dealing with people we perceive instinctively to be Us — and we too often feel no guilt in lying to Them or lying about Them, because our them-related instincts and thought processes far too often tell us to do whatever we need to do to damage and defeat Them when we interact with Them in any setting.

The key motivation that drives our thoughts and values in those situations is the perceived need and the emotional imperative to defeat an enemy Them. Our instincts are clear. Anything we do to defeat Them is felt to be the right thing to do.

“The Ends Justify the Means” is the standard thought process relevant to those situations, and people with those basic intergroup instincts activated far too often feel justified in using functional Means that too often sink to very low levels of morality and triggers high levels of intentional intergroup and interpersonal damage for those behaviors.

Sun Tzu, in writing his extremely  useful and directional book The Art of War2,000 years ago, accurately used and described those same thought processes, but he clearly did not invent those beliefs or behaviors. Sun Tzu clearly, explicitly, and very directly reflected those values and ethics free instinctive behaviors in his book by urging military leaders to constantly and deliberately deceive and mislead Them.

There is no sense, at any level, within Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, that any army or military leader should use basic standards of honesty and morality at any level in dealing with an enemy army except to deceive the enemy when honesty is situationally an effective tool.

Standards used to deal with enemies are clearly different than standards used for our own people. That is true in times of actual war — and we all tend to easily understand that difference in those times of war — but we need to understand that those same ethical standards are equally relevant relative to people we perceive to be Them in our times of Peace.

That difference on our own personal ethical standards used for Us or Them isn't a difference we tend to openly acknowledge, understand or discuss. We often deceive ourselves on how we deal with that whole range of ethical issues because we each tend to want to believe that we're ethical people.

We don’t usually realize, understand, perceive, articulate, or discuss how different our values are relative to each set of people. We tend to simply feel entirely justified in defending and supporting our Us and we too often can feel entirely right in doing whatever we need to do to keep whoever we perceive to be Them from damaging “Us.”

In World War II, we Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan and we firebombed the cities of Dresden, and Hamburg in Germany, killing large numbers of non-combatants in each of those settings, with no sense of guilt for any of those behaviors because the Japanese and the Germans were both Them to us at a very primal level when we dropped those bombs.

We did everything we could do to mislead and deceive both the Japanese and the Germans in that war because we perceived those people, at that point in time, to be a Them — and we instinctively feel no need to be honest in any way to a Them.

On a more local level, with the Us-Them instincts and their related values clearly activated for very long periods of time for the majority group who ran this country — this country has used extremely different standards and morality levels relative to Us and Them. The differences are clear.

The majority group Us that we created here for our nation did very deliberate and intentional ethnic cleansing — and forced the Native Americans across the country by the tens of millions from their tribal territories. That same initial majority group Us in our country actually enslaved millions of Black Americans and then large numbers of the people from that group practiced extreme intergroup discrimination and often violent and very negative intergroup behaviors to those groups of people after slavery ended.

Us-Them instincts are extremely powerful.

The people from the initial majority group Us in this country who perceived both Native Americans and African Americans to be Them did horrible and evil things to both sets of people — and the people in that group with those instincts fully activated felt no guilt for those clearly evil and damaging behaviors and did things in their own settings to make that damage very real.

Instincts have huge impact on our lives.

Those instincts can and do skew the way we think, and they can skew our behaviors as a core part of who we are and what we do.

With that much power over our thinking on such a wide range of behaviors for that extended period of time, it isn’t hard to see why those same kinds of instincts allow people to look directly into television cameras today and to lie, with no feeling of guilt, about sets of political issues that trigger those sets of instincts.

If you are looking for a good clue as to which people in our political world have their minds skewed at very primal levels into instinct-linked Us-Them thinking, values, and emotions, just look to see which people, who are otherwise honest and ethical in their everyday behaviors and who are generally accurate and honest in their interactions with other people, but who are lying clearly without hesitation on political issues and about their political foes in public and media settings today.

It is, of course, dangerous to us as a nation, and extremely dysfunctional for us as a people, when our politics degenerate at a clearly instinctive level into perceived enemy delineations for our political settings. It is dangerous and destructive and damaging over periods of time in our country when we perceive political opponents to be evil and intentional enemies — instead of simply accepting the other side in a setting as some level of purely political opposition.

We live in dangerous times.

We need to understand the situation that we're in better than we understand it now.

When either side in any setting sees the other side in that setting or situation to be the enemy, and not just the competition or the opposition, then the thinking for all the affected people, on both sides in each setting, far too easily can become clouded and dysfunctional at very emotional and damaging levels.

Intense and instinctive distrust of the other side in those situations is far too often supported, reinforced, exacerbated, and confirmed when people on the other side in those settings lie in their own public statements about basic issues and situations. Those can be very self-reinforcing cycles of negative interactions.

Either side in a setting can begin to trigger those responses and reactions. Once those interactions have begun, it is too often a slippery, simple, and very seductive slide into the most petty, destructive, and damaging types of intergroup and interpersonal behaviors.

Our instincts reward those negative, divisive, and destructive behaviors in each of us by making some of them feel very good. It can feel very good to people at an emotional level to take on attacks on behalf of our side. It can feel very good to do things that damage whoever we perceive to be Them in a situation or setting. People on our own side in those settings tend to celebrate and support those behaviors from people on their side.

Leaders in many settings often make the situation worse rather than making it better. Having our leaders directly involved in both supporting and triggering those negative intergroup behaviors makes the situation even more problematic relative to intergroup Peace. Unfortunately, our leaders too often get their own instinct-linked rewards for those kinds of conflicted behaviors and do damaging things that make the problems worse for their people and the other people in each setting.

Our leaders who know how to activate those Us-Them emotions in us too often gain personal power for themselves and those particular leaders can have their own alpha and turf instincts triggered and reinforced as the result of us having those negative intergroup instincts activated in our hearts and minds.

Alpha instincts generate their own emotional rewards in the people who have them activated. The InterGroup books and websites also describe and explain Alpha instinct related behavior.

Alpha instincts can be powerful and dangerous.

Far too many people in leadership positions love being alpha and some will encourage, and even incite, fierce and angry intergroup stress and conflict in order to become and remain alpha for their own group with alpha instincts strongly activated, and to then bathe in what is functionally an emotionally addictive neurochemical glow of alpha status that is too often generated and fostered by those instinctive reactions.

People in power in many group settings who have their alpha instincts fully activated often have a significant impact on the realities that exist in each relevant setting, and many people in that status will do high impact things to keep those instincts personally activated and steering the realities of their lives.

It feels good for humans and for several other species of social animals to have alpha instincts fully activated and steering the realities of their lives.

We have nations with alpha instincts activated in their leader where achieving that status on an ongoing basis has a very powerful impact on their setting.

That behavior is possible because we have a series of behavior and context patterns structured in the Morphic Resonance functional context for each species that direct both the survival strategies of individuals in each species and the behaviors in group settings for each member of the species and that steer us to those behaviors.

Instinctive behaviors are embedded at significant impact levels in that morphic programing, and that embedding gives alpha instincts a context for our world that's clearly significant, has an impact on our lives in every relevant setting, and creates significant issues and opportunities as they roll out into actual life.

We now can see that morphic design elements evolve for each species and tend to be shared inside each species in effective ways, and we're part of that pattern.

Our own set of alpha instincts are part of that package for us, and they steer our behavior in a number of ways at each setting.

We also have behavior patterns that encourage us to do deceptive things with each other in some of our public settings — and that cause us to do false things in some of those interactions as a consistent behavior for some interactions.

We are seeing all those forces playing out at several levels today in our society and our country. The number of people who are looking into the camera and deliberately lying today tells us how badly those instincts to defeat whomever we see as Them in some settings have taken root in too many heads and hearts and how dangerous they are now and today in those settings.

That is not a particularly enlightened or even safe way to live.

We Can Do Better

We can and should do better.

We actually used to do better on many of those issues in several of our settings.

There was a time in our relatively recent political history when some of our political leaders regarded each other with civility and respect — and some of our leaders and key people applied basic ethical standards to their interactions with people from the other political party. We have slipped away from that reality in far too many settings today, but we did have a relatively long period of time when civility governed many interactions, and people in some of our setting treated people from the other political party with dignity, courtesy, and basic respect.

That was a good place to be — and we should aspire to rebuild that pattern of interactions across our country again.

We will actually all be better off if we decide to return our political differences to the level where the other side in our political situations is seen by all of us as being a legitimate and well-intentioned opposition, instead of being an evil and demonized enemy at an instinctive level.

We need to convert our leaders to that thinking.

We need to lead our leaders to that place and to that behavior for our future as a country.

Leaders can be led.

We will all be better off if we decide collectively and individually to tell our leaders we expect them to solve our intergroup problems, and to not incite intergroup anger and trigger intergroup conflict. We will all be better off when we tell our leaders we expect them to tell the truth in their public utterances — and to not say intentionally untrue things in public settings about themselves or each other.

We need to be “truthers” as an expected behavior with each other.

People in most settings basically prefer Peace and strongly prefer damage free encounters with each other. We should steer in that direction.

Calling for a higher and more enlightened level of leadership behavior could work. It will work with some leaders.

 It is an interesting phenomenon that some of our leaders will want to continue to lead us so much that they actually can be steered into more civilized behaviors by the explicit and enlightened expectations of the people they lead.

 A significantly more civilized and more Peaceful leadership behavior can happen for many people in real settings if we insist on making it happen. We all need to lead from behind in an enlightened and clear way on those issues.

We need to make the decision to restore our political discourse to honest and respectful levels by not allowing the people in political and media positions who steer us with unethical and emotional language into having our own Us-Them instincts into full and situational activation.

That is not just a problem for our leaders. We have major insight problems with some of our social media and our commercial news media is also obviously a major part of the problem we need to address.

Our news media clearly has been a major part of the Us-Them division we feel in this country and has done damage in too many settings.

Too many of our media people today have their own most basic Us-Them instincts activated at a level that demonizes whoever they perceive to be Them. Those media people with those basic Us-Them instincts in full gear feel the same need to defeat Them as the most rapid politicians. Some of the media are also willing to lie directly and deliberately to their audiences and readers if they believe their lies can help defeat whoever they perceive in each situation and setting at a very primal level to be Them.

It is relatively easy for us as viewers to see which public and commercial media people have those instincts activated at the most dysfunctional levels, by their willingness to look directly into the camera and to lie directly about things we know are untrue.

For the most partisan of the media, the need and the obsession to damage and defeat their perceived Them is so intense they feel no remorse when lying. They sometimes perceive themselves to be Holy Warriors, and when they feel they are Holy Warriors, they can believe the Holiness of their cause justifies their blatantly and intentionally dishonest communications.

Both partisan media people and partisan politicians with the most negative Them instincts fully activated actually sometimes feel they are personally and directly aligned with a greater and higher level of “Honesty” and those people too often believe their perceived link to a generic higher honesty level ethically frees them from having to be accurate about inconvenient facts relevant to political conflicts.

That level of lying is not always intentional. People who feel those enemy-linked perceptions at the most extreme levels can also deceive themselves about what is really true. Self-deception is also too often a slippery slope for a number of people when we have our most divisive instincts activated. People sometimes feel they aren’t really lying when they say untrue things, because their thought processes are so strongly motivated to believe their own untrue statements, that the motivation and desire to hold that belief overpowers their perception of actual facts.

People with those thought processes activated can probably often pass lie detector tests about outrageous lies they tell in the heat and anger of those highly partisan moments.

The new standard we tend to use for whether or not to believe something in those situations is too often not whether a statement is actually true — but whether or not that statement “feels true.” Some of our politicians have actually indicated that their positioning strategy often involves saying things that “feel true” whether or not they actually are true.

Those leaders and media who use those strategies know there is a highly perverse and dangerous thought cycle where lies that reinforce prejudices are believed because of the prejudices they are based on — and the lies then sometimes actually function to reinforce the prejudices. Major segments of the news media are highly complicit in those strategies and behaviors.

All those dangerous, and sometimes dysfunctional, emotions and behaviors are directly exacerbated on a daily basis by the fact that media outlets and professional news staff now working in the current commercial 24-hour news cycle’s functional reality need to come up with stories each day to fill the entire 24-hours — and many of the easiest stories to come up with to fill that cycle are the ones that attack whoever each outlet defines in their world to be Them.

Filling all of that broadcasting time in those settings creates some unfortunate results — and keeping peoples’ attention as a media program and holding people as an audience can often be easier when the messages involve direct and inflammatory attacks on other people that generate emotional responses in the people who read and hear them.

Anger creates audiences, and anger is easier to activate, trigger, and sustain than understanding or wisdom for many social media and public media settings.

That problem of having great pressure to say inflammatory things to fill out the news cycle now reaches beyond the traditional media channels and outlets. The people attacking in the context of the broadcast media outlets are also now competing for audience and viewer loyalty with even larger audiences in some of the various social media outlets — and the social media outlets have the advantage of being even further insulated from many legal constraints or honesty requirements by the very nature and structure of the Internet and its various manifestations serve to make truth even less relevant at a practical and functional level for many media production sources and personal links.

The truth can take on a very perverse and sometimes problematic role across that entire range of media settings and political situations, and there are even some high volume settings where the audiences and supporters prefer points being made that are not true because they trigger emotions and tensions in seductive and effective ways and keep people’s attention in a high volume communication world.

In fact, for some levels of politics, for some Internet settings, and in a significant number of highly divisive media settings, telling lies about the other side in a political situation is sometimes welcomed and encouraged by the audience, and celebrated and embraced by the most rabid partisans for the various parties.

 Highly partisan people sometimes welcome obvious lies about their opposition — simply because the highly partisan people often place a highly positive value on anything done or said that does damage to the other side.

It is a sad fact of life, for both the media and the politicians, that many of the most fully committed and activated people from their own aligned group tend not to be bothered or put off by obvious lies and distortions that attack whoever they perceive to be Them, because the people who share their sense of Us and Them have similar instincts, emotions, and values activated, and those people tend to be very forgiving and accepting of even blatant and transparent misstatements and lies when the lies are clearly said to attack and damage a hated them.

The same people who would be offended by lies about many topics in their lives are too often forgiving, and even welcoming, of the specific sets of lies used to attack Them. Mob-like behaviors and mob-echoing and damaging thought processes are sometimes triggered in ways that make it acceptable, and even desirable, to various audiences when their leaders and spokespeople openly, clearly, and deliberately use lies to attack Them.

In extreme cases, where the truth might not be beneficial to the people on one side in a setting, they can sometimes attack and reject their own leaders for telling unpopular or inconvenient truths. Leaders in some settings have to be careful not to say some true things if their own group does not want that particular truth heard or said. That can lead to some very complicated and convoluted information flows, because the speakers need to shape their language on those sensitive and volatile issues around what people want hear — and not around the actual truth.

It is a very good thing to have a free press and it is a good thing to have our news media sources present opposing points of view — because we are all smarter and wiser when we have more information. Even the most partisan and biased of the media sometimes give us insights into important issues we would not otherwise know.

But if we want to have an informed electorate making good decisions about both leaders and key issues, we should not get our primary information about important issues primarily from intentionally skewed sources. We need to all understand how that media situation works — and we need to individually make the choice to choose news sources that are focused primarily on truth and accuracy, and not on generating stress, agitation, or division.

We need to understand the instincts that get us into so much trouble.

To succeed as a country, we need people to understand how badly we can be divided as a country unless we make deliberate choices to create intergroup understanding and Peace. To do that, we need to have a broader sense of a values based Us for our political processes and for our key community leadership issues.

We Need a Truther Movement for America

The InterGroup Peace books are all intended to help us achieve a more fully informed level of shared values, and more enlightened expectations and behaviors in all of our intergroup settings. The situation we are in today is not hopeless if we decide to make the changes we need to make to modify our culture to create a different set of expectations for our leaders and then support our leaders who follow that lead in our settings.

Knowledge is power. We need basic knowledge and awareness about all of those instinct-sculpted values and behaviors in order to achieve maximum power over them. As part of that process, we need to start a “Truther Movement” for America.

To restore both civility and enlightenment to our public discourse, we all need to very intentionally change our culture in direct ways to make honesty an expectation. That can be done. Every culture is invented and built. People who choose to make it change can modify every culture.

We need to make being honest a key expectation of our culture for our country today.

That is possible to do. Honesty could and should be restored to our political world by all of us simply and clearly setting honesty as a basic expectation.

People looking into the camera and clearly lying to us should no longer be accepted. We need to expect honesty from both our leaders and our media outlets.

We need to do explicit things to make that honesty happen. The truth is, we actually have tools today we can use to steer those expectations and we should use those tools now.

The Internet is part of the problem; we need to make it a major part of the solution. We can deal with that honesty expectation aspect of our culture at multiple levels by using the Internet and the various social media venues to respond very directly, and with vigor and clarity, when we see and hear untruths by either our leaders or our media stars.

We need to go to the high-volume social media venues and approaches.

We all have Internet access. We can use that access to communicate our values about the need for honesty in multiple and direct ways.

We should begin by asking our media and all of our leaders to make an explicit commitment to telling the truth. We should be clear in our truth expectations, and we should ask each of our leaders and the media to commit explicitly to telling the truth.

All media shows have Internet feedback mechanisms. Let’s use them and use them now.

If a reporter looks into the camera and says something that is clearly not true — even if you happen to agree with that specific untruth because it speaks to your own dislike of a person or issue — respond, and tell them you expect a higher level of honesty from them as a person and a media source. We can get honesty at a much higher level if we demand it and provide that feedback as a key tool for what we're doing.

We can and should expect the media, themselves, to use the truth as a standard for their stories and for their interviews. Shows like The News Hourhave those standards built-in today. They can be done.

We need to expect even the most partisan news stations to tell the truth about the issues they cover. They should rely on the power of their core beliefs to win the day, and not rely on dishonesty and deception to win the day.

The Art of Waris anchored in deception and deceit. We need the Art of Peace to be anchored in truth and honesty … with Win-Win replacing Win-Lose as the goal of our intergroup interactions.

Start with our leaders. We need to expect the people we accept and choose as our leaders to have honesty as a core value, and act in honest ways regardless of the setting and the expediency and short-term advantages that can result from being dishonest.

We need to be a people aligned and united by our shared beliefs and committed to a future of Win-Win for all of the groups that make up the fabric of America.

Too many of the people looking into the camera lens today and telling lies are doing things that will make that future success harder to achieve. We cannot allow them to sell us out on those basic values for their own gain.

We can — and we should — do a restart on all of those issues. A really good time to start again, do a cultural re-grounding, and an ethical and moral based restart — will be right after this set of elections is over.

We can turn our future after this election into a more civilized and civil set of interactions if we each get into our social media venues and explain the basic principles and practices of a truther movement for the country and then support the sites and communicators who make that happen.

We will need to do several right things in very direct ways now to make that happen.

We need a Peace movement. We need a values-based Movement for Peace. We need to make truth a major component of that movement and we need to incorporate values into our Peace movement that says lying is no longer accepted for our leaders as part of their political tool kit.

We clearly need a Truther Movement. We need to anchor the future for us all on honesty, and we need to do a number of right-things to help us all succeed.

Let’s set an enlightened path into our future — and let’s not allow the primal instinctive forces and thought processes leading us to bad places today have that same impact on us all in the years ahead.

Let’s have a Peace Movement anchored in a Truther Movement, with Win-Win as our commitment, our strategy, our goal, and our basic skill set.

The InterGroup books explain those agendas. We need to understand those processes, and we need to use them to build Peace as our future.