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This post is a response to an interesting question I received about my upcoming audio webcast/teleclass on Voter Savvy entitled A Non-Partisan Guide to How to Decide - Practical Tools for Assessing the Candidates on What Really Matters Beyond Partisan Politics.

This person wrote about being amazed at how many folks are ineffective Spin-Busters. She wanted to know how to get those who are entrenched in beliefs based on lies to recognize that their belief is harmful. She proposed that this is a type of addiction and used the analogy of a 400 pound person who has their degree in nutrition but continues to hold onto beliefs that prevent them from losing weight.

Here is my response. In terms of people's relationships with spin, I have observed three main groups:

1. Spin-Busters know how to recognize spin, know how to separate spin from fact, and know the best resources to use when they don't know enough about a particular issue to be able to do this.
2. The Well-Intentioned Confused are spin-susceptible citizens who want to learn how to separate fact from spin, and who want a better understanding of the root causes of our issues than they know how to find. This group is perhaps the majority of us who want to be better citizens and more effective Spin-Busters, but whose beliefs and decisions have too often been successfully manipulated by those who fall in the third category below, the Rightness Addicts.
3. Rightness Addicts whose ideological rigidity and ends-justify-the-means mentality does huge daily damage to democracy and our republic. The most extreme form of Rightness Addiction is what I call Fanaticism Disorder, which I have written about in A Declaration of Global Responsibility.

I designed my upcoming Voter Savvy audio webcast/teleclass largely with the second group in mind. This is because I believe this group is today's New Silent Majority. I believe this extremely large group of voters, who cut across the entire political spectrum, will determine the outcome of the 2008 elections in the United States.

I want to see the Well-Intentioned Confused become better equipped to make their selections based on facts rather than on the perpetual litany of lies offered by the spin purveyors who over-populate politics and the media.

I want all of us to become better at assessing candidates in the age of spin. I want to see a new generation of Savvy Citizens rise up who are effective Spin-Busters, who truly understand the fundamentals of democracy, and who insist that their elected representatives and government employees embody the Governmental Integrity that a healthy republic requires.

It is not my main mission to reform Rightness Addicts suffering from Fanaticism Disorder. Because the most of these folks suffer from a psychological thought disorder, they are beyond help. My main mission is to educate the Well-Intentioned Confused who comprise today's New Silent Majority and who still remain far too susceptible to manipulation by Rightness Addicts.

The main ways I deal with Rightness Addicts in my work, when I deal with them at all, are: 1) One person at a time, privately; and 2) On the shows on which I am interviewed where I have opportunities to expose their illness to the Spin-Busters and Well-Intentioned Confused who are tuned in to that show.

It is important that all of us recognize that the broad scope of problems we face today have come about through the pervasive lack of integrity that is deeply damaging our society.

It is even more important that all of us develop a deeper understanding of the root causes behind this epidemic of lack of integrity.

And it is most important of all that we outgrow the defeating habits that have caused this and replace these habits with the seven core life skills that integrity, fulfillment, success, solution creation and leadership ALL require.

Making all of this information available as widely as possible is why I wrote my two-award-winning book, "The New IQ: How Integrity Intelligence Serves You, Your Relationships and Our World."

If you want to delve deeper into what I have written on this website above and beyond the complete blueprint I have provided in The New IQ, you will find below some useful search phrases to plug into my website’s internal search engine. You'll find it in the upper right corner of each page on www.TheNewIQ.com website.

Rightness
Fanaticism
Spin
Silent Majority
Debtism

While you're looking around, remember to register for my upcoming audio webcast/teleclass on Voter Savvy: A Non-Partisan Guide to How to Decide - Practical Tools for Assessing the Candidates on What Really Matters Beyond Partisan Politics.