Genie 101

Our Mission and "Mighty Plan"

Group Genie's mission is to create and execute a plan to stabilize Earth's life-support systems and dramatically reduce all preventable suffering.  To many people this must sound grandiose or impossible.  But those who have read and understood parts of our plan, called Mighty Plan, begin to understand how our high-leverage strategies can lead to dramatic, unexpected changes.  What we do is a lot like inventing.  Before an invention comes along, something seems impossible to do.  Then, later, it becomes commonplace. Talking to someone on the other side of the world was unimaginable two hundred years ago.  Reducing suffering a hundredfold by the end of the century seems unimaginable today.  Yet, by using a series of 17 easy-to-understand "upgrades" we at Group Genie can imagine it. 

Mighty Plan is book-length, and the current version can be found at MightyPlan.Org.


The Sakai

Reducing all preventable suffering a hundredfold is, in fact, one of our primary goals.  We have a more detailed version of this goal that we call the Sakai.  (Sakai is a Japanese word that means frontier, limit, boundary.)   The Sakai is itself one of our 17 major upgrades.  It is an upgrade over the goal of  "world peace."  World peace is fine as a vision, but as a goal it has several major shortcomings.  It's too utopian and perfect. It has no time-frame.  It's also ambiguous: Do we mean just no war, or all-around peace, including economic and environmental balance? But one of its biggest short-comings is that it can lead to endless philosophical and religious arguments and speculation.  Compared to this, the Sakai is refreshingly clear.  We can look up the numbers, the amount of suffering that took place in the year 2000, looking at the top twenty sources of major suffering.  We simply divide this by 100, and we have the goals for minimizing hunger, war, disease and so on.  This leads to practical discussions and experimentation, not endless talk. 

Of course, the Sakai seems about as impossible as world peace--that is, until you understand how we figured out how to increase the pool of donations and volunteers to charities by about $500 billion a year.  And when you understand how our superprograms can accelerate human learning and lifestyle change, then suddenly the Sakai no longer seems so idealistic.  These two upgrades alone bring the Sakai into the realm of plausibility.  Our "Proof Through the Night" idea and the other 14 upgrades keep bringing it closer.  If the Sakai, a beautiful world, can be compared to a beautiful, desirable woman, each upgrade pulls the rug she is on toward us, inch by inch. 



Our Pretend Script and the Real-Life Drama

The 17 upgrades we mentioned are logical upgrades, or "hard" upgrades.  Like hard science or logic, they are clearly better approaches or methods than what most people of good will are currently doing.  But we also make use of some soft upgrades, things that won't appeal to everyone, but are useful to many.  One soft upgrade is using drama to motivate people.  Most people love drama and story.  Billions of dollars are spent on movies, books and TV dramas.  Billions more on all sorts of sports dramas.  So, to stimulate engagement, we use stories in two different ways.  First, we use stories and parables to illustrate many of the concepts in Mighty Plan.  Second, we are writing a script for humanity, and have cast ourselves in the role as 'the good guys.' 

In our script we plan to create imaginary crises, and deadlines to stimulate action. In a sense, we are creating a large game, a simulation.  One value of this simulation is that it can stimulate action and also prepare people for real crises and challenges.  Another value is that many or perhaps most people already think in terms of scripts and roles.  Psychologically, for instance, some family members take on the role of "black sheep," other play the martyr or "the good daughter."  And at the same time, people have life scripts for themselves, such as the typical "get a job, get married and have children."  What is dangerous or unfortunate is that these scripts and roles limit people's creativity and self-expression and often lower their self-esteem.  On a greater scale, what is dangerous is that many people assume a script for humanity.  Many people believe that since humans are basically flawed that we will necessarily destroy ourselves.  This script can help create a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the expectation of failure helps create the failure.  To counter these destructive scripts, we are creating a script in which Group Genie generates solutions that turn situations around.  Primarily our script revolves around the spread of a chain reaction of empowerment, but  many subplots will involve preventing various economic, political and environmental collapses that could prevent the chain reaction's spread.  Another part of the power of the pretend story is that probably more people would be willing to act in a movie about a chain reaction of empowerment and peace than would be actively interested in joining such a real peace movement. 

At the same time, of course, there is the real-life dramas of this century and how humanity will fair, but also the individual dramas of billions of lives.  Right now, there are almost one billion people struggling and in need of rescue.  Many will not survive dire environmental disasters, due to almost non-existent economic and political infrastructures.  It is already too late to help them.  But there are many people who will be at risk in 10, 20 or 30 years.  Using our strategies, you may be able to play the real role of rescuer.  (Or, if people fail to use or strategies or similar ones, you or your children may join the victims.  But our vision and our expectation is this:  Because of the firepower of the real ideas and methods we have created, skilled and caring people will join us, so as to communicate the methods to the world, and make the programs available worldwide.  The people of Group Genie will face and overcome many obstacles, sometimes by way of phenomenal creativity, but other times through relentless action.   People will use our superprograms and will create other programs that provide the learning environment and support systems that dramatically increase people's ability to make lifestyle changes that promote security, health, self-expression and solidarity with those in need. -- That's our story, and we're sticking to it!



For a key article, one that gives a more in-depth assessment of our work, comparing it to another approach, see Lester Brown's Plan B 2.0 versus Group Genie's Mighty Plan.   We highly recommend this article to those wanting to an introduction to work.


For the organizational structure of Group Genie, see "Join Us."