Open Letter to Tony Robbins on What is Holding Me Back

Dear Tony,

I asked a friend whom I respect, who could best help motivate me in my current mission. His immediate reply was: Tony Robbins. Recently I attended a free seminar you conducted (designed to get people to sign up for one of your not so free seminars). I signed up for more.

Your seminars are aimed at people looking to make a breakthrough in their lives. I attended your free seminar, a not-so-free seminar, and have signed up for what for me is an extremely expensive seminar. You admonished participants to deal with whatever seems to be standing in their way of playing full out in achieving their goals, and after a little progress, I realized one of the things that has held me back:

It was you, Tony.

It was things you said.

A woman engaged with you on how to encourage some of her proteges to enter your world of success. You gave her some advice, and told her you were concerned by the fact that 37% of young Americans now look to socialism as a valid alternative to what we have today. You spoke of how you went to Russia yourself and saw people on a train eating caviar while the majority remained in poverty.

There are so many things wrong with what you said, it’s hard to know where to begin.

You always recommend your students take notes — and perform actions to reinforce their learning. So I am asking that you stop reading now and without using the internet or a dictionary, write down your definition of socialism.

No cheating! Write it down.

Now write down your definition of communism.

If your definitions are the same, no wonder you are confused.

Besides those who can’t come up with anything other than “I don’t know what it is but they tell me it’s evil,” the most common definition I get is the exact same definition that is given for communism. People will say the “means of production is owned by the state”. Through the years the Republican Party has gone out of its way to collapse the distinction between communism and socialism.

So what really is socialism? Here are some internet takes:

1) Socialism is compatible with democracy and liberty, whereas Communism involves creating an ‘equal society’ through an authoritarian state, which denies basic liberties.

2) Under communism, most property and economic resources are owned and controlled by the state (rather than individual citizens); under socialism, all citizens share equally in economic resources as allocated by a democratically-elected government.

My personal take on democratic socialism: Where the government provides for its people what is difficult for them to provide for themselves. Most of the countries in Europe are considered to have different forms of socialism combined with capitalism — and most people in Europe can own private property. All of them get medical care and many get free college.

To me, when the government builds highways, repairs roads and bridges and erects traffic lights, that’s socialism. When most industrialized countries in the world have affordable healthcare for all, that’s socialism. When society faces issues like global warming in ways we cannot do as individuals, that’s socialism.

Socialism, the word, has often been abused. Hitler’s “The National Socialist German Workers’ Party” was about as far away from socialism as one can get.

When Republican President Dwight Eisenhower allocated huge amounts of funds to build roads and bridges and other infrastructure to benefit all Americans, that was socialism. Rich people paid up to 93% of their incomes in taxes back then, while today the poor of America often pay more taxes than the rich. Some rich companies pay no taxes at all. Today, Democrats are forced to spend valuable political capital just to try to pay for the mending of crumbling roads and bridges — something that benefits all Americans — as the world keeps plummeting faster and faster towards despotism.

What you witnessed in Russia was not communism or socialism. No self-respecting economist would tell you that Russia — -the country that once was dedicated to communism and raising up the worker — -has anything other than the worst kind of capitalism today. It is an oligarchy ruled by a dictator in an almost mafia-like way — where the might of the police in that police state equals right and political opposition is either jailed or killed. Workers in Russia and China today are exploited worse now than ever, some of them working 11 and 12 hours a day for a pittance. What they have in China and Russia today is closer to good old fascism than anything else.

If you think Russia is bad, then why have you aided Donald Trump and Fox News — (who sided with Putin in the Ukraine and are trying to move our country towards an oligarchy as they have in Russia)?

You claim to believe in God. If your god was the creator, he created life that has need of food, clothing, and shelter which requires a certain amount of work to be done. No matter how many millionaires you create, there will always be a need to tend and harvest crops and perform so many other tasks — that workers do. Since we will always need workers, how can we better the lives of workers? And if machines take over doing the work, how will we distribute what people will need?

Perhaps some of the 37% of the young people embracing socialism saw that over half a million Americans were plunged into bankruptcy by medical bills — while no one has been plunged into bankruptcy from medical bills in Europe or any of the other 30 plus countries that have socialized medicine today.

Perhaps some of those 37% are aware that scientists have known about climate change since before the time Jimmy Carter was president, but greedy corporations have stood in the way of real change along with the politicians they control. This is a problem that could end life on this planet as we know it. For more, read the full Green New Deal authored by socialist Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Here is a simplified version from the original: https://berniesanders.com/issues/green-new-deal/.

Perhaps some of those 37% are aware that other countries realize their future relies on how well they educate their young. They not only provide free college but in some cases even pay for room and board for students — treating it like a paid job. The 37% realize that some of the most innovative ideas have come from people of humble beginnings, and also know that many of them will become slaves imprisoned by student debt. The most important way we could grow our economy is by providing free college education to any who wish to partake of it. My eldest daughter got scholarships to get her degree, but was told she needed a master’s degree to maintain her job as a college professor. Her $80,000 education loan mushroomed to over $220,000 because the loan deals we give students today have worse conditions than the mafia offers. Like many other young people, this has placed a great financial burden on my daughter and her young family.

You speak about identity. I know you like to be the big man buying meals for starving people, but wouldn’t they be better off with a minimum wage tied to the cost of living? Wouldn’t they be better off with healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt them, college loans that don’t enslave them, and a government that is able to face the realities of climate change unencumbered by the greedy demands of fossil fuel companies? Does investing in stocks and financial advisors who gamble our money create anything useful in your god’s world? Maybe allowing people the ability to fish is more sustainable and empowering than giving them a few free meals.

It seems that your work aims at making greedy people even greedier. You rely on the “Twenty Screen Door” idea for enticing people to participate. There will always be some people who defy all the odds to become successful. If you look at where they are now and what they went through, it seems like a miracle. The “Twenty Screen Door” idea says if you fling a bucket of water through 20 screen doors and play it back in slow motion — for the water that gets all the way through without being stopped — it looks like a miracle. However, some water was always bound to get through.

The fact is that if every one of the people attending your seminars became millionaires, money would not be worth so much any more. Not everyone can be in the 1% — and, frankly, appealing to the greed in people when greed is the most harmful sin facing the world today is not making our society better — but worse.

Al Gore

I’ve heard your story at least twice now about how Al Gore was in one of your audiences when you asked the audience what had stopped them.

Al Gore shouted out, “Not enough Supreme Court Justices.”

You then proceeded to tell him that you would have voted for him if he had been more passionate in his debates — the way he was in his film about climate change. It was his lack of passion that kept him from being elected.

That is completely false. Bush’s brother was the governor of Florida during that election, and Katherine Harris, (his Secretary of State), kept interfering with the lawful recount of votes (something that is done in every close election). When a judge from the Florida Supreme Court would order the recount to continue, Katherine Harris would use her office to interfere over and over again. Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court (which had judges appointed by Bush’s father on it), stepped in and simply decided the election. They did have the authority to step in — but they could have simply ordered the Florida Secretary of State Harris to stop interfering with a legal recount. By the way, when the votes were finally recounted — Gore actually had won (irregardless of the fact that he wasn’t passionate and you didn’t vote for him). So you were wrong. Gore did win, but a Bush loaded Supreme Court thwarted democracy and handed the presidency over to Bush’s son. The problem was that Gore actually didn’t have enough Supreme Court justices supporting the will of the people and their votes.

I would like to make one small suggestion to you for the future. I know you have read a lot of books on self-improvement, and I truly believe that you believe in what you are doing and that many people can benefit from your work. But try reading some books on the issues facing our country today — and maybe next time vote for the candidate whose ideas for dealing with those issues are the best rather than the one whose looks you like best — say like an Al Gore who understood the problem of climate change instead of a former oil man who had no ideas on the subject.

In your course work you quote the great playwright George Bernard Shaw — who considered himself a socialist. So were Mark Twain, Thomas Paine, George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, David Ben-Gurion, Henri de Saint-Simon, Nelson Mandela, Naomi Klein and Martin Luther King, Jr. to name a few. You might want to acquaint yourself with Bertrand Russell, Eugene Debs, John Steinbeck, Jack London, John Paul Sartre, Andrei Sakharov, Norman Thomas, Robert Reich, Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff. But I don’t recommend speed reading as you will lose much of their writings’ beauty, nuances and wisdom. By the way — that is only a very short list of people who called themselves socialists — as most of the great thinkers of our time have called themselves.

I would suggest you read some books about the issues facing this country by a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, and maybe you will understand better why young Americans are embracing socialism. I challenge you to read any two of his three books and to find even two issues with which you disagree with him on (other than he embraces democratic socialism).

Progress

You talk about one of the most important things to you is that people continue to progress. I agree. There are many people in this country — and around the world, who have stopped growing. This has partly been due to greed and what it has done to people by those with influence and power who have employed fear to break people and their use of law enforcement as a kind of occupying army.

Our wise forefathers knew that for our country to thrive it must embrace change “…towards a more perfect union.” They deliberately made it difficult to alter the constitution — but they did allow for amendments to provide change. It has always been the progressives that have brought about changes such as ending slavery, giving the vote to all races, giving the vote to women, and more. It has taken courage to bring about everyone of those changes.

When women got the vote, the League of Women voters hosted debates between the top contenders for the presidency. During the years, contenders on the far right pushed conservative Republicans, and progressives pushed Democrats. Once securing their party’s nomination, candidates then tended to run towards the center to get the most voters they could. Seeing how the extremes often made salient points and called them out on their hypocrisies, the two parties got together and took the debates away from the League of Women Voters and made it far more difficult for third and fourth parties to qualify for the debates. Thus, progressive votes have been taken for granted by Democrats who, like Republicans, have run towards the middle — and very little real progress has taken place now in this country for decades.

It was a socialist wishing for progress who exposed the meat-packing industry’s greed over health. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle alerted America to this problem as did many of his other (more than 40) books did on other problems. When he ran for office he was the victim of some of the most devious and vicious attacks ever made — read I, Candidate for Governor: and How I Got Licked by Upton Sinclair — (especially the last half).

Your Examples

I want to reiterate here, that my purpose is not to embarrass you or to undermine your work. I feel you honestly want to make a contribution and that you have indeed helped people. But you have mentioned that you shouldn’t hang around with poor influences. Perhaps that is what you have been doing with the Fox people. You can learn a lot about that by watching the mini-series The Loudest Voice. However, the series did not bring out the important fact that Fox News was taken all the way to the Supreme Court over a story it ran with that they knew before hand contained incorrect facts. The arguments put forth by their attorneys for doing so were that freedom of the press and freedom of speech made it okay to lie — and, that even though their name is Fox NEWS and they sit on a set similar to NEWS broadcasts, that they really are not news but just entertainment and therefore not subject to having to be accurate.

But the main reason I need to speak out is that I made a vow to myself to start speaking out when I hear things that are just plain wrong.

One of your examples is Sam Walton starting a business and becoming a huge success — a multi-billionaire with his Wal-mart company. You fail to mention that he imports products from China made by exploited workers, and that he pays his own employees so little that he gives them classes on how to work the system to get benefits — meaning that part of their “wages” come from the taxes you and I pay so his employees can make ends meet. His business has accepted tax free periods to come into communities, ruined small business owners, and then pulled out when the tax-free period ends. I told a friend about a movie showing Wal-mart’s real impact on communities, and she said something like, “Any company that hires an old woman to stand out in front to direct people can’t be all bad.”

Another case of emotions over ruling facts.

My friend was too lazy, too unconcerned with fellow Americans, and too greedy for what she perceived as her savings on lower prices, to even spend the time to watch the film: Wal-mart: The High Price of Low Cost. I suggest you watch it sometime.

Just to be clear, you appear to be okay with exploiting workers by giving them non-liveable wages as long as it’s technically “legal” to do so.

On the other hand, Costco gives its employees a decent salary — and the CEO takes home a far more reasonable salary than most CEO’s. Their employees are much better off, and happier for it. This would be an example of an employer treating his employees fairly, instead of the example you chose to use.

Another one of your stories told about you challenging workers to get your program up and running within a relatively short time. One of the companies you were working with said that it would be impossible to do in such a short time, so you, in effect, fired them. Another company took on the task and accomplished it. But at what cost? Have you ever asked yourself what was the toll on the relationships of the workers who obviously put in long overtime hours to accomplish the task? Would they have been able to do this and also take your classes? Could they be there for their families and still get your rush job done? Were you more important than them and their families?

I was horrified when you told people to look at someone in the room with them, or on the screen, point to them and say, “I own you.” We have a guest staying with us who deals every day with persons still suffering from the ancestor traumas of slavery. In my household, no one owns anyone.

You may say the “I own you” is a way of giving you courage in the field of business — but how does that square with the idea of playing win/win with your business partners?

When computers and other technologies came in, they could have been a boon to humanity. Workers could get jobs done in less than half the time. But instead of making the work week shorter, and hiring a second crew to accomplish a job which would have spread the wealth — employers cut staffs and had people work just as long of hours as before. Some of them may have gotten ill health from overwork, but the profits increased exponentially for employers.

I once suggested a three day work week. This would give employers higher profits because there would be two crews working six days every week instead of one crew working five days a week. If someone left for some reason, there could be a temporary replacement already trained to take up the slack while a new employee was found and trained. The biggest objection to it, was that employers would have to contribute twice as much to healthcare for employee programs. Of course, if this country had healthcare for all, that would not be an issue. It would also mean that more than half a million Americans who have gone bankrupt because of medical bills would still have meaningful, viable lives.

I was very happy (and surprised) to see you take on the dairy industry. At a school where I worked we used to put on nutrition workshops for the parents — and warn them about the hormones and pus, and other things in milk which humans are not meant to have. Unfortunately, we still had demonstrations by the milk industry where a cow was brought out and her milk shot around at students — giving the old arguments about calcium, etc.

Race

I know you have made your programs available to people of all colors and nations. That is an admirable thing. You also employ both men and women, and People of Color. But I would be willing to bet that you are ignorant of how many People of Color look at law enforcement as an occupying army to fear, rather than being there to protect them.

The persistence of racism is a major factor in our country. As our country and our population grew and technology evolved, the wisdom of our forefathers did not evolve along with us. Rather than promoting the benefits of democracy, our foreign policy has been based upon greed. We backed a Catholic minority in Vietnam which exploited its workers to supply goods to American companies at low prices. We could have been on the side of those workers, extolling the virtues of democracy. It’s no wonder that, instead, so many Vietnamese were enticed by the ideas of communism at that time.

Throughout our history, police have been used against labor movements by those exploiting workers. How was that justice? Today, openly racist police literally get away with murder and then get backed up by corrupt government officials who themselves are racist. As knowledgeable as you are, Mr. Robbins, I would be ready to bet you have no idea just how bad the situation with racist police has been in this country — nor how bad it continues to be today.

There are three major lies about police reform which need to be addressed:

1. That there are only a few bad apples among cops. The truth is that the problem has been getting worse instead of better. In the last 8 years the number of deaths at the hands of police have increased every year. Out of every million Black people in this country, seven will die at the hands of police (and that is only the “official” record). That’s more than three times the ratio for whites.
2. That if someone seeks reforms be made in law enforcement, they are calling for the elimination of all police. No one says we don’t need police. But if we weed out the abusive racists, the public will begin to trust the police again which will make their jobs easier. We will always need police to deal with criminals and bullies. But cops who are criminals and bullies themselves while wearing badges are too often the problem now.
3. That championing the idea of checks and balances means that we accept that all people are bad. On the contrary, when power corrupts those in power, it takes brave persons of good will to implement the methods of balancing power to make checks and balances work. When people like Mitch McConnell don’t employ those checks and balances, the system fails.

My next challenge to you is to join me in finding a way to increase respect between law enforcement and all citizens. Some who seek a job with a badge and gun suffered trauma in their youth. They need help, and/or need to be weeded out of an occupation where they often cause tremendous, unnecessary grief. The complaints against abusive law enforcers must stop being routinely destroyed. The top law officials who have condoned the destruction of complaint files must face the consequences of violating the laws they were sworn to uphold. Law enforcement officers should protect all participants during strikes rather than bullying those striving for a better life.

How Much is Enough?

Years ago, one of my work-out partners at a gym was a gentleman who directed a TV show. He made a good living. I asked him if he would ever have enough. His answer was “Never.”

I felt sorry for him, because to me he was condemning himself to a kind of Sisyphus hell where he would never experience fulfillment or satisfaction during his life.

I also met a man working in Hollywood who told me that he slept with at least one new woman every day (he told me; “they think I can get them parts”). I felt sorry for him as well. The best sex comes from intimacy, and true intimacy cannot be achieved in one day. A relationship makes all experiences in life greater and time increases the appreciation and the ability for true intimacy.

You talk about having many houses, a private plane and an island getaway. When will you have enough?

I am enrolled in your courses and have found value in them. But I must tell the truth as I see it. My mission is to produce a mini-series that enlightens our country to what has been going on far too long with law enforcement, so that we can progress in making our country a better and safer place for all Americans. To ignore the truth is to condemn ourselves to keep repeating the problems of the past. To me that is unacceptable.

I share your concern that 37% of young people embrace democratic socialism. If they cared enough about others to learn about the issues, there would be more.