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May 1, 2024 - Doug Collins Podcast
24:00
The Power found in not being a Sheep
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, welcome to Midday, Midweek, however you want to put it here on the Doug Collins Podcast, Wednesday edition.
Glad to have you tuning in, wherever you may be, riding along, sitting at work, wherever you may be listening, we're glad to have you as a part of this.
I want to get into something that I picked up on a little bit last week.
If you remember my conversation where I just, you know, I've talked about the majority.
I've talked about Congress.
I've talked about the fact that we've divorced politics in real life.
I want to take it a step further.
I had a book, and I'm going to recommend this book.
Basically, I'll recommend anything that the guy does.
If you're online and you're watching this on Rumble or YouTube or anywhere else, just look at John Maxwell, Thinking for a Change.
This book is about...
Let me check here.
I think about 10, 15 years old now.
It's not a brand new book by any way, and it's highly successful.
Yeah, actually, it's almost 20 years old.
But it goes into this issue of thinking.
And I think this is an interesting part because the topic for the day is going to be the trap of getting along.
And this is...
The problem that I see in so many.
So after the break, let's jump into this discussion here on thinking and also the discussion on the trap of getting along.
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That's promo code COLLINS. Alright, what do I mean by the trap of getting along?
There's a story that sort of sets this up a great deal, and it was a Professor at the University of Cologne in the genetics department tells the story of one morning how in a high school the teacher set up a He took a telescope to look up into the heavens and see the planets and see the moons and those kind of things.
And the first student got up there to the telescope.
He said he couldn't see anything.
But when the teacher asked if he could see anything, he said no.
And he said in his nearsightedness, the student blamed his nearsightedness on the view.
So the teacher showed him how to adjust the focus.
And the boy finally said he could see planets and moons.
So he said he could see it.
One by one, the students all in this class stepped up to the telescope and saw what they were supposed to see.
Finally, I know we're seeing the planets, the moons, and all.
Finally, next to the last person who was getting ready to look into it said, I can't see anything.
The teacher basically screamed, you idiot, you have to adjust the lens.
And the student tried, but he finally said, I still can't see anything.
It is all black.
The teacher, disgusted, looked through the telescope himself and then looked up with a strange expression.
The lens cap still covered the telescope.
None of the students had been able to see anything.
And the issue here was, the part of that story was is that everybody was willing to accept the praise of the teacher At the expense of their own vision.
In other words, they were willing to say, okay, this first guy said he saw planets and stars, so I'll just say planets and stars, even though I can't see anything, I don't want to be the odd one out.
I don't want to draw the wrath of the teacher.
Let me draw this out in a little bit bigger picture.
Too many times today, conservatives, and that's who, you know, again, conservatives listen to this broadcast.
We have liberals who listen to this broadcast and some people in between.
But too many times it's easier to be liked.
We've all done it.
Okay?
It's been there.
We've all done it.
It's easier to say what most everybody's saying, go along with the crowd, and because it's just, you know, the old saying is it's safer in numbers.
Well, not necessarily.
If you're not questioning, if you're not thinking for yourself, if you're not doing the things that need to be done to actually engage public discourse, and this is one of the reasons why, like I said, on the Salem Network, the Doug Collins podcast, probably one of the more unique podcasts on here, I don't simply get on here and discuss the conservative talking points every day.
I'm not going to do it.
I'll tell you what is conservative.
I'll tell you what I think is right.
I'll tell you what I believe you need to think about and then make your decisions.
I am a conservative who believes in thinking.
I am a conservative who believes that education is good.
I'm a conservative who believes that different opinions can be heard, not agreed to, but can gain something from that opinion.
And it may be just the fact that I now know why I disagree with that person.
We've got too much out there that simply pushes us to be conformist at the discussion point of saying you're a non-conformist.
It's the ultimate hypocrisy.
Basically saying that we want you to think like this, and if you don't think like this, then you're an idiot, you're a conformist, you're a rhino, you're a dino, you're whatever it is.
But really deep down, they want you to think the same way because it's easier.
It's easier to think the same way.
It was easier for these other students to get into that telescope, look up at the world, and say, I see planets and moons.
No, you don't!
You see a darkness that evades the truth of life, and it took somebody willing to say, I don't see it.
For the teacher, who is the instigator, I believe, of the conformity here, because of his attitude, To look up and realize he never took the cap off the lens.
How many of us go through life today with the cap on the lens looking forward?
And I don't know about you.
And again, it's not easy, and I'm not telling you to go out there.
There are times that you're going to ask questions, you're going to hear something, and you're going to agree with it.
And it'll be the vast majority of the people agreeing.
And that's okay.
As long as you come to that conclusion by looking at it, thinking about it, and accepting it for your own.
Not simply because Doug Collins said it.
Not simply because anybody said it.
It's got to be something you own on your own.
And this is a part That it's going to be difficult.
Now, if you look at the congressional life that we talked about last week, if you look at political life, there are certain things that I believe.
Now, I believe them because I've seen them work, okay?
And I believe them because I have looked at them, I've studied them, I've read them through the historical, you know, past.
I think too many times we also, another thing is we believe that new is better.
And the reality is for those of us who read biographies, those of us who read history, we realize that very seldom is something Completely new.
I've talked about it before on this book.
If you go back and read the Jefferson biography by Meacham and he talks about and he goes through the history, you can see how the forming of our country and how parties and non-parties and the switch between legislative and executive, we see that.
Then we see also his other book about Andrew Jackson in which we see the depth And breadth of the discussions in 20s and 30s, 1820s, 1830s of America dealing with this issue of slavery, which again in 25 years led to a deadly civil war.
And it was the discussions of how deeply our country is divided.
I hear today some very naive politicians and even more naive, it seems like media, who say we've never been more divided as a country.
That's just a flat out lie.
This country's always had division.
And we have been much more divided than we are now.
And people now are saying, well, we're on our way to civil war and others.
And look, if we continue down a path that relegates sides and then degenerates sides into a way in which they feel no out, then we have a real problem.
And it is concerning...
Outlooks about that.
I prefer to believe that people will come to their senses far beyond before a civil war, if that could even be possible today, would come about.
But I do believe it is degenerated to a point in our civil discourse that it keeps us from having solutions to real ideas.
Now, I will say there's a popular saying that I've heard for many years, and that is the thinking that got you into the problem is not the thinking that's going to get you out.
And this is something That needs to be examined, discussed, talked about.
We only typically go back to what we feel we need.
We only go back to what we feel is right.
And if it was right once, it'll be right again.
Sometimes that is true, sometimes that is not.
But the problems that we're in today, it was the thinking that got us into those problems.
It was going to take required different thinking to get us out.
If it was not true, you would not be in the situation you're in, necessarily.
Now, that's not true for 100% of life or anything else, and I probably, there are very few people who could send me an email or get onto this podcast and say, all of this is, Just one way.
That there's only one answer to all of this.
That's just probably not true.
Because in most of life, I mean, now there's certain things of morality and health and those kind of things that are inviolate that we look at as far as belief.
But most of our problems have gotten us because there's one person who believed one thing, another person who believed another, and maybe a third who believed another, or maybe even a fourth who believed another.
And We either assimilate each other's ideas or we ferry around, if you would, one of the ideas at the expense of the other ideas as being wrong or apart from what is the known standard.
If this is where we're looking at, And I'm trying to get you to think deeper about Israel's issues all over the world, whether it be Israel and Gaza, whether it be Ukraine and Russia, whether it be our energy policy, whether it be our tax policy, whether it be our foreign policy, whether it be our military issue.
It is deeper to the point of how we govern in the United States.
As I said last week, I believe part of the problem that we have Is that we get trapped into the ideas that guide us here, and we don't realize that we're divorcing the theoretical from the reality, and that's not going to help anyone.
You know, John Maynard Keynes actually said, the difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as it is escaping old ideas.
I mean, again, sometimes, as I said just a moment ago, it's the issue of getting you out of something that you're already in does not mean...
That you're going to use the same thinking that got you there.
In fact, many of you are stuck in your job, you're stuck in your family because you're using the same good idea, that one good idea or one good project that you then ride on for the rest of your life or career.
Try to anyway.
How many of you have seen this at work?
How many of you have seen this at your job?
Or in politics, you see somebody give one good speech and then they write it for years.
Or they do one good project at work and it was a good thought, it was a good project, they put it into play and it may have made success for the company or success for that person, but yet they've not had anything else.
It's because When you think and you get into this sort of what we'll say is the get along attitude or the herd mentality, the biggest problem you're going to have is coming up with new ideas because you got to get rid of the old ones to start with or at least modify the old ones because they only come to a certain point of working.
It's just like running.
It's like exercising.
If you don't change up your exercise routine, if you don't change up your eating habits, Then your body becomes used to the very athletic training you're doing and you're not going to gain as much after several months of doing the same thing.
The same run of one mile will get you to a certain level.
It will not take you any further.
And if you don't go any further than one mile or run it any faster than one mile or you don't do anything to change that up, you're going to get the same possibilities or the same, I guess, broken hope.
Why do we fall for this kind of thinking?
Why do we fall in our country for that, well, if it's conservative, it's right.
If it's liberal, it's right.
If it's this, it's right.
If this person said it, it's right.
If they've said it on a podcast, it's right.
People, you know, what it is, though, as many times is if we latch on to what we want to believe, it gives us a false hope.
And again, Maxwell talks about a lot about this in How we think about this kind of attitude is important into us knowing what we can or can't do and setting rightful expectations.
It provides false hope if you just believe that, you know, the popular thinking must be the right thinking, that if everybody else is thinking it, then it's going to be okay.
We must always remember that there's a huge difference between acceptance and intelligence.
People may say that there is safety in numbers, but that's not always true.
Acceptance and intelligence aren't always right.
We've seen some people make some bad decisions.
Look at some of their choices in movies.
And from personal opinion, that movie was awful, but yet everybody all of a sudden grabs around it, or a song takes off, or a book takes off.
Why?
Because some people say, this is the best thing that I've ever seen, and they want to be a part of the crowd mentality.
It becomes popular.
Hey, have you gotten the latest X? Have you got the latest phone?
Have you got the latest computer?
Have you read the latest this?
What's the hit item of the day?
Again, is all that wrong in and of itself?
No, but if it hinders us to thinking that we're not thinking for ourselves and we're just accepting what others put out there for us, then yeah, you're going to have a problem in that.
Remember, and this is something that Maxwell speaks of in his book, and it's a lot of times really interesting that popular equals normal equals average.
This is sort of a thing.
If you thought about it, that the popular is what everybody thinks, and if everybody can think it, then it's probably not exceptional.
It's probably the average of everybody.
So thinking that gets us to a point in politics, life, or anywhere else, or your business, your family, or anywhere, has got to be thinking that actually makes you think differently.
Some of you have heard this, and I have a friend of mine who's talked about this before, and I've heard it in other contexts as well.
It said that great minds think alike.
And I'm sure some of you probably heard this.
You may even use it yourself.
The simple fact of that is that's not true.
Great minds do not think alike.
Usually we use that term in regard to somebody who says something that we agree with.
And so that if they say it or we've said it, then great minds are thinking alike.
In other words, we're believing that our thought is the cutting edge, it is the best thought out there, and other people agree with me, so undoubtedly it must be a great thought.
Well, the very essence of that is great minds thinking alike is very, in essence, wrong to start with.
Great minds do not think alike.
An Einstein does not think like you or I. Elon Musk does not think like you and I. Steve Jobs did not think like you and I. Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, all these people who grew up in this tech age that brought us into this area which we're at now, do not think like other people.
If they did, they would be like other people.
They think in different spheres.
They think in different levels.
They think in different arenas.
And that doesn't mean they're better, necessarily.
It just means that their intelligence factor, their questioning factor, their motivation factor is all different than the herd walking around.
You know, Musk had this vision, and Bezos with Amazon, and all these companies that had visions outside of their own.
Steven Jobs at Apple.
And one of the problems that Apple had is, I think if you really want to understand how genius thinking actually takes place, is look at the discussions about Apple as it was growing when Jobs was there, when Jobs left, and then came back.
Again, it's very easy to see how inventive, out-of-the-box thinking will help you.
That means what do you have to do to do that?
Number one is think about things.
Don't just simply follow.
Don't just accept the latest person that you believe is the guru.
There are some great people out there who think really out-of-the-box and are different, but just because they say it doesn't make it to be true.
Try it for yourself.
If you agree with it after you've thought about it, then you're assimilating They're ideas, and you're making them your own.
Take into account that other people are going to think differently than you are.
And it doesn't mean that you have to agree with them.
But I have liberal friends who I disagree with on most everything, but that I can learn something from.
It may be the wrong way to do it, but I'm learning something from it.
And we've got into this polarization process.
Of ideas that if you're not with me, if you're not with my group, if you're not with my tribe, if you're not with my clique, if you're not with the group that I read and listen to podcasts on, or I listen to their radio show or TV show, or I look for their books, and if you're not looking at those, then you're not part of the in crowd.
This is sort of like the Dr. Seuss.
Do you have the stories of, do you have a star or not having a star?
I mean, we've got to get out of that because there are other views out there, and some of the best ideas I have had have maybe not necessarily been ideas that I will agree with in total, but after I look at them, I think about them, I process them through the lens of my life experience, and I look at them through the processing of the lens of the world in which I am in and the world in which I have had experience,
they begin then to be able to form an opinion that may not have been exactly where I thought I was going, but after thinking about it, Have given me a new idea.
These are all ideas and all things that you can look at going on, but you've got to continually question ideas.
And then number one, you've got to be used to being uncomfortable.
And what I mean by that is ideas that are not in the popular mainstream will make you uncomfortable.
You're not going to think like everybody else in the neighborhood.
You're not going to think like everybody else at the water cooler at work.
You're not going to think like everybody else at the political party meeting.
And it allows you to put forth your ideas.
You may not be accepted for them.
And that's okay.
Now, some of that may be that if you have ideas and you've not run it by anybody else, again, the ideas that are tested are the ideas that endure.
An idea that has not been tested, a thought that has not been tested, an idea or belief that has not been tested, how do you claim it to be a real belief if you run up against someone who doesn't believe like you do?
I've said this many times before as believers, as Christians.
You know, look, you have your faith and your belief, and that is great in church.
It's great in Sunday school.
It's great in the choir.
It's great wherever, where nobody's questioning that belief.
But when you get out into a world that does not have any hope, that it believes the world is against them, that there is no God, that if there is a God, he doesn't care, or worse yet, he is vindictive.
Then how do you defend your beliefs in the face of God?
Disbelief.
Unbelief.
That's when these become real to you.
So I wanted to follow up from last week's podcast discussing this because I believe, as conservatives, we have to regain our mantle of thinkers.
We have to regain our mantle that ideas are good, that education is good, and that if we simply abandon the field of education and TV and arts and music and studies and philosophy, and if we abandon that to those in the other camp, Just simply because we either don't want to deal with it or we just want to get along to get along because it's too hard to be different, then we're heading for a defeat and our country will be the worst off for it.
So I've been challenging you, you know, whether it's books like John Maxwell's Thinking for a Change or other books out there, find ways to go read, learn, listen, find your own ways and find your own ideas.
If you do that, then we're on a better path.
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