HOW 130 MILLION AMERICANS

WILL SIGN

"THIS I BELIEVE?"

 

When a majority of American adults sign "This I Believe" the world will change, as we discuss here. But how in the world can we ever get that many signatures--130 million in fact?

 

The answer involves two key things:

 

#1) People who already want to collect signatures need to start doing it, with all of the creativity they can bring to the effort, and with the help of the "tips" provided below.

 

#2) We need to persuade more people (ultimately LOTS more people) to collect signatures.

 

Currently only a very small number of us are actively collecting signatures. Our total signature count is far from 130 million but pretty impressive considering that most of them were collected by just two individuals. We find it easy to collect signatures because most people who read "This I Believe" sign it. It is, however, much harder to persuade other people to collect signatures. Why is this? It's because most people don't believe that most people will sign when asked.

 

The Billionaire rulers of our society have gone to great lengths, with their control of the mass media and all the major institutions, to persuade people of the Big Lie that nobody except a few "crackpots" agrees with the ideas in "This I Believe." It is from television and radio and mass circulation magazines that we get our information about the hundreds of millions of Americans whom we do not know personally. Yet nowhere in T.V. Land or Radio Land or Mass Circulation Magazine Land do we ever see a person expressing the egalitarian values and aspirations in "This I Believe," even though the great majority of people in the United States sign "This I Believe" after reading it. The way people learn that the Big Lie is in fact a lie is by seeing the number of signatures for "This I Believe" keep growing and--even better--seeing how easy it is to collect signatures. The more signatures are collected, the more people will be persuaded that most people really will sign when asked, and therefore that it makes sense to begin devoting time and effort to collecting signatures. so that eventually a majority of Americans will KNOW that a majority want an egalitarian revolution, which will cause a political sea change.

 

This is why the rate of growth of our total number of signatures at a given point in time will be proportional to the total number of signatures collected by that point in time. Growth of this type is called "exponential" growth. Here is a plot of size versus time of something growing exponentially:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note that when one is at the beginning of growth (near the left hand side) the rate of growth is very slow, but eventually (near the right hand side) the rate of growth is very rapid. Many people associate the phrase "exponential growth" with just this rapid rate of growth, without realizing that the rapid growth rate only happens near the end, after an earlier period of very slow growth.

 

Of course, as we get close to the point where almost everybody who is going to sign has already signed "This I Believe" then it will start to get harder to find more people to sign it, and the rate of growth will get very slow again. So a more realistic picture of our signature count over time will look like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We can't predict how long it will take to collect 130 million signatures, but it is a realistic goal. Why? Because most Americans already agree with "This I Believe."