Socio-Economic Impact of Behavioral RNA™️

In order to understand impact of any kind, we must go to the source of behavior. No matter how complex the issue, human behavior will always be at the source of its environment. To understand the environment of issues socially, it is best to start with the foundation of oneself. Understanding oneself will help synthesize perception, modes of comprehension, emotional impact, and where one sits on the spectrum of empathy. Personal experiences are a helpful analog for the experiences of others and even communities and cultures at scale that you do not share. It does not necessarily mean that one will understand directly or even relate completely, but it does foster empathy as a beneficial starting point.

While social issues will always be the issue at hand with the human race, finding “the solution” is not a realistic aim. Rather, a realistic aim is to identify the issues to bring improvement to baseline dysfunction. Focusing on improvement outside of the solution will bring more clarity as well as precision to improve dysfunction systematically. This approach can properly impede the natural systemic issues that have and will plague our societies as throughout time and place they all have one thing in common — they’re created and run by human beings. From cultural biases to healthcare, there are systemic issues that have had a notable and very clear impact on our modern society.

With this empathetic viewpoint and emphasis on improvement in process, one can approach different verticals in business, government, or any organized entity and its compositions not as distinct or different but rather as a duality. This duality’s common denominator will always be people. Therefore the financial understanding, as well as equity, must come from the people, not the business. Hence, Behavioral RNA™️ functions as a financial metric.

While I will never claim to have a solution for many things (because I know that I don’t know most), I do have a fine-tuned ability for process and processing information as well as efficient recall of that information. This doesn’t make me want to be solution-oriented but, rather, uniquely process oriented. The ultimate goal for all of us as humans will always be to find solutions (hence why our most powerful tool as human beings is asking questions, first and foremost). With that said, a maniacal focus on a solution that most humans on this earth don’t have is not just a misstep but a mistake. As the public can see by the millions of articles published in academic journals about social issues, improvements in industry, and advancements in technology, everyone is constantly learning. Most of us don’t have a solution for anything. Therefore, I believe it’s most efficient in being a human to focus on process. If one happens to get lucky (as that’s what it would take to find a solution in that process) then the key is to be grateful, humble, and mature enough to teach that solution to others with empathy, respect, and grace for those that don’t know. For me, personally, I’d rather focus on what’s more realistic which is assuming that I will never find a solution to most of what I want to know. That will not stop me from striving forward to attain efficiency as well as effectiveness in my process.

Behavioral RNA™️ in context as well as in unison allows us all to understand our behavior outside of who we are, when we are born, and the result of what our life is projected to be through testing in school and achievements for prestige and social currency. The social sciences have been void of this non-discretionary tool until fairly recently. Simply put: by understanding our behavior outside of who we are, we are able to manage it all more efficiently, which in turn will lead to a more effective and systematic life.

Money/wealth is a clear way to see how behavior, as well as injustice in behavior, affects the effect of progress. The disadvantaged are (understandably) angry not based on a lack of gratitude but on uninformed envy. This deep-seated envy is rooted in systemic failure to provide for all and, instead, simply provide based on the emotional premise of “better than”. Therefore, in terms of the terms and conditions set forth by the constitution, the interpretation has been led by a lack of thought as well as a lack of proper and fairly enforced standards/process, all based on emotion while led by the perception of money being made. Hence the term “the land of opportunity” in America. The issue in the US is not that it is inaccurate to say the land of opportunity. Rather, it’s that its opportunity is insufficient unless the opportunity cost is equally assessed and calculated from a forensic perspective. This country that we all love so dearly is not just the home of the brave. It is also the home of a major part of the history of enslaved persons in the western hemisphere. As a Canadian born and raised with deep Jamaican roots and Portuguese, Indian and Scottish (hence: Douglas) lineage who now has the opportunity to live in America, I’ve had a unique point of view both witnessing and experiencing inter-racial relations in this country versus others. Like any origin story, the history of the slave trade in the United States set a certain foundation. Taking it away from the obvious human rights violations and looking at it strictly from an economic standpoint, slavery, in general, was fundamentally carried out for economic reasons. Generations of people born in this country as slaves were not legally or culturally treated as Americans despite being born on American soil because of their role in this economic engine. Laws were put into place that made persons of some ethnicities less economically valuable than others and, therefore, less protected than others. That practice molded a certain mindset around race that you can see in certain multi-generational Americans’ faces to this day.

This history and precedent set a certain tone and sent a message that’s not a black issue or a white issue. The color here is the primary color of humans — the blood in all our veins. When one sees the anger and frustration in certain people’s faces when groups of individuals are treated differently for no other reason than their God-given physical appearance, it is not just random people getting upset for no reasonable reason.

While we all experience suffering in this life, some experience disproportionately more than others through no fault of their own. As with anything, there is a spectrum of experience. Historical examples of the extreme ends of this spectrum are slavery, Native Americans being systematically killed, imprisoned, and/or driven from their homes, the colonization of Hawai’i and the marginalization of indigenous Hawaiians, or events like the Armenian genocide when millions were persecuted and killed for their belief system.

If one goes through the empathetic exercise of switching roles and races, what does it communicate about a person’s value? How does that affect the way a person is going to think about their life and the lives of others? What meaning is any human being going to derive and how will that affect their longevity and desire to strive for something?

I’ve watched people of every gender, nationality, race, social class, and religious background have absolute panic attacks, depression, and debilitating mental disorders based on social media comments from strangers they’ll never meet. If one can understand the impact of that communication coming from 15 years of social media/internet comments, one can extrapolate that sentiment to the degree of hundreds of years of laws and societal norms that govern it. Instead of just imagining, work to directly put yourself in the shoes of another person who’s experienced limitation and hardship due to no fault of their own. If one has ever received unequal treatment from a teacher or other authority figure, for example, then they can begin to understand unequal treatment coming from a law enforcement officer or judge. What needs to be understood is that it’s not about how new social media is or how old these historical events are, but rather the distinction between bullying verbal slights versus a societal structure that devalues and limits certain individuals based on arbitrary criteria. How would that affect how you think and feel? For example:

• Steven Spielberg can relate to being told he is not good enough as he was rejected from the University of Southern California (USC) School of Theatre, Film, and Television 3 times.
• J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books and the first billionaire author, was on welfare and struggling to get by as a single mom as her manuscript was rejected by 12 different publishers who didn’t think her work merited consideration much less publication.
• Oprah Winfrey had an exceedingly difficult childhood. She was raped at age nine and became pregnant at 14. Her son died in infancy.
• Albert Einstein didn’t speak until he was 4 years old and was presumed to have a developmental handicap. After he graduated, he couldn’t get a job in physics for two years and had to work as an assistant patent examiner to get by.
• Victor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning which is considered one of the most influential books of all time and sold over 10 million copies, survived the holocaust but lost his father, mother, brother and wife in the concentration camps.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted polio and was paralyzed from the waist down before he went on to become the president of the United States.
• Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, was rejected when he applied to Brown University, not because of his academic record but because the headmistress at his high school wrote a disparaging reference.

If individuals with this status in society can relate to injustice, anyone can.

The aim for improvement is not a matter of what/who is better or worse, who suffered more or less, or even who is responsible. People living today are not generally responsible for or even directly connected to the suffering caused in the past. But we can create more or less of it today by the degree of empathy we choose to have for the experience and background of others. At a minimum, this exercise has the potential to reduce unnecessary discord and disagreement and allow people to focus on productive shared interests and mutually beneficial activities in the present.

All of us on some level — no matter the perceived level of human worth that is assigned to us — have experienced suffering, unfairness, lack of accountability, and, most importantly, extreme stress because of generational traumas. To be unable or unwilling to empathize with injustice is to be disconnected from the spectrum of the struggle of being human. For anyone who feels above any of that, I’m not angry at them. I feel primarily pity for them. I constantly work to find forgiveness for the evil in their ignorance.

This empathetic exercise helps me understand the anger people have, particularly if/when they’re not given the proper information or logic model to follow to turn that anger into more productive emotions and actions. Those feelings are human feelings that all of us around the world share. It’s important to condition our minds to have the empathy to recognize this is a human condition, not a race condition.

This notable error in American history has and will have its consequences. Such dissonance must be met with empathy before contention and divisiveness in order to multiply the original intent of the constitution that we are all equal. While we may not all have been born equal, we are all created equal.

Upon doing my own forensic accounting, I’ve found that the only difference in us as humans that dictates our behavior is not race but what we are exposed to. While we are all different in our unique ways, we are just as much the same in that all our lives are limited. From this baseline, the core distinction in us is our behavior beneath what we are. What we are is far less important to our lives as individuals than who we are. Money plays the biggest role next to health in who we are as well as our emotional expression in both sectors.

Have you ever suffered at the hands of another person’s ignorance only to be blamed for the effect of your reaction when you had nothing to do with its cause?