Masculinity Has Been Neutered — Here's How It Happened

A lot has changed in the last 200 years, and a lot of it has been great. But some trends have had negative consequences.

Robert Glover has a PhD in family and marriage therapy, and he's been a therapist for a long time. Over twenty years ago, he started noticing a consistent pattern in many of his male clients that he eventually named "The Nice Guy Syndrome." It is a combination of thoughts and behaviors that distance these men from their own masculine nature.

He noticed it because he himself was a Nice Guy. He has been helping men recover from Nice Guy Syndrome for a long time now, and working to make others aware of the problem.

The reason it's a problem is that Nice Guy Syndrome prevents men from living up to their full potential, it makes their relationships with women difficult, it ruins their sex life, and it produces a lot of frustration. 

How did this syndrome come about? Because society has changed in several important ways. The following are some of the changes that led to men becoming disconnected from their natural masculinity:

1. Only a century or two ago, most boys grew up on a farm. So a boy was around men a lot — not just his father, but also his grandfathers, his uncles, and his older brothers and older male cousins. That changed with the industrial revolution. Men went off to work. Boys were left in the care of their mothers.

2. Along the same lines, people moved from farms to cities, which caused boys to have less contact with adult males. The reason this is important is because as a boy grows up, he is developing psychologically and emotionally with a male brain (developed in the womb) and male hormones (read more about that here), and he's supposed to learn how to deal with those by being under the influence of older men. That's how men learn to be men. That long lineage of wisdom passed down through the generations for hundreds of thousands of years has now been largely cut off by these social changes, leaving boys to be taught how to be men by women, people who don't have those hormones or that brain structure. It disconnects those boys for the rest of their life from their innate masculine nature.

3. Another big change has been a lot more divorce, leading to more boys being raised by a single parent, usually the mother. As the boy develops, masculinity is being defined by a woman.

4. Grade school is dominated by female teachers. Boys are being taught to get approval from women, and typical masculine behavior in boys doesn't usually get a lot of approval from female teachers. Boys learn their masculine impulses are wrong.

5. The women's liberation movement also became hostile to many aspects of masculine behavior, stigmatizing masculine behavior, and influencing boys to distance themselves further from their masculine nature.

6. Another factor that Robert Glover identifies as influential was the Vietnam war. Young men distanced themselves from older men by rejecting the "establishment." A serious riff opened up between men who had proudly fought in World War II and their sons who tried to get out of fighting in Vietnam. Their fathers couldn't believe it, and rejected their sons. And their sons grew up rejecting everything their fathers represented, and raised their own sons accordingly.

7. In many of the single parent households run by a mother, the mom made the dad wrong and tried to make sure their sons didn't grow up to be like him.

I would add to Glover's list that people move away more now than they used to. People are far more mobile than they were only fifty years ago, so if your parents moved you away from your hometown when you were young, they prevented you from having the influence of your male uncles, cousins, and grandfathers. It happens to a lot of people. It happened to me, and, in fact, it is still happening. I live in Seattle, for example. My uncles live in Northern California, Southern California, and Nevada. One of my male cousins lives in Southern California, not in the same city as my uncle. My other male cousin lives in Montana. My father lived in Arizona while he was alive. My brother lives in Europe most of the time. (He actually lives everywhere. He wrote a book about it. Check it out. It's called Gastronomad.)

My nephews live in Northern California and Las Vegas. My son lives in Thailand. All of the males in my family are separated from each other. Our influence on each other is therefore limited. 

This kind of mobility has been happening for decades. Whatever natural comfort and familiarity boys might have gotten about their own masculinity from hanging out with older males never happened because those older males were not there. Instead, maleness has been influenced and defined by mothers and female teachers.

Another factor Glover doesn't mention, but I think is worth noting, is fewer offspring. People are having fewer children than they used to, so there are fewer older male cousins, and fewer or no older brothers, and fewer uncles.

The result of all this disconnect between boys and masculinity is that those boys grow up to be Nice Guys who repress their own natural masculinity — their inborn ways of being, thinking, feeling, behaving, because they have the impression it isn't good.

Masculinity has been neutered. Castrated. It wasn't a surgical castration or a chemical castration, it was a cultural castration. Castration by indoctrination.

The result is men who don't know how to be men, who suspect and deny their own masculine proclivities, and it really interferes with the natural order of things in a relationship between those men and their female significant others.

Have you ever seen the movie Bedazzled? In one scene, Brandon Frazier plays a man who is an extreme SNAG (Sensitive New Age Guy). He's sweet, kind, caring, thoughtful, emotionally vulnerable, etc. He is exactly the kind of person that a doting mother would want her sweet little boy to be. And it is driving his girlfriend absolutely crazy. She's somewhat conflicted because he is what she was hoping a man could be, but now that she's actually dealing with it, it's driving her crazy. She cannot be attracted to him. It is unnatural.

Finally, in a fit of frustration, she bursts out with the honest truth: "I just want to be with a man who will ignore me and take me for granted, and who is only pretending to be interested in who I am and what I think so he can get into my pants..." Sometimes something is funny because it's a truth nobody wants to say out loud.

What can be done about this? If you think you have Nice Guy Syndrome, you are certainly not alone. You can recover from it, and it's well worth the trouble. Overcoming it will make you more relaxed, at ease, comfortable in your own skin, happy in your relationship and with your sex life, and fulfilling your potential.

The first thing to do is read Robert Glover's book, No More Mr. Nice Guy. He has several suggestions to help you recover from the syndrome. One of his recommendations, for example, is to hang out with men more often — especially men who grew up with fathers, uncles, and grandfathers around. They have absorbed what used to be absorbed in every generation.

One of the more interesting suggestions Glover offers is to stop doing favors for your woman. Nice Guys are driven to gain approval from the women they love. This is what they were trained to do. And the effort to stop doing things for your woman makes it painfully clear that this is a compulsion of yours. Overcoming that compulsion will go a long way toward helping you recover.

Another one of his suggestions is to stop being low maintenance. Nice Guys have learned (from the females who raised them) to be low maintenance, to be easy, to have very low needs. This pattern needs to end, so one of the practices he suggests is to do things to take care of yourself and to express your needs — to stop being so low maintenance.

If your masculinity has been neutered, it was done by indoctrination, and can be undone by you. You'll be happier if you do.

Listen to this as a podcast here.

Adam Khan is the author of What Difference Does It Make?: How the Sexes Differ and What You Can Do About It, Principles For Personal Growth, Direct Your Mind, and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb.

Direct Your Mind: What Needs To Be Done Next?

This question will help you stay productive, especially in a distracting environment or if you feel upset (read more about asking yourself a question). It is good all by itself, but I often add a little statement to the front of it when I use it myself. I say: That’s not worth the attention; what am I doing next? 

In your life, you know some people irritate you, some kinds of circumstances annoy you, and there are things that make you angry. When something bothers you, you have a choice: You can do something about it or leave it behind you. This question is for the things you aren’t willing to do anything about (or can’t do anything about).

There’s no sense in even thinking about something if you can’t do anything about it or aren’t willing to do anything about it. That’s easy enough to say, but the problem is, of course, that our minds tend to stick on things like that, don’t they? If something seems unjust or wrong, it’s hard to get it out of your mind. Negative feelings compel your attention. The feelings arrest your attention, and generate thoughts that arrest your attention too, even when you’ve already decided not to do anything about it.

It takes a firm act of will to unstick your mind and go on about your life, but it’s an extremely useful ability to have. Get in the habit of not ever dwelling on something you can’t do anything about. Train yourself to redirect your mind to something productive. How? By asking yourself the question: “What needs to be done next?” Or, “That’s not worth the attention; what am I doing next?”

Attention is your main resource. It’s really all you have that’s worth anything. So when your attention is consumed by useless thoughts or feelings or actions, you’re throwing pieces of your life down the drain, and there are so many good things you could be doing with your attention.

There are more things, subjects, people of a positive nature than you could ever put your attention on. Why waste it on something negative unless you want to, or unless it serves you?

Say there are ten billion potential objects of attention available in the world at any one time. But you are limited. You have only so much time. You can pay attention to only so many things at once. For the sake of argument, let’s say you have only a hundred available units of attention at any given moment. There are ten billion objects available, but you can only partake of a hundred. Why take fifty or even ten of your hundred units and waste them on something unproductively negative?

What would you think about someone who had a hundred dollars and spent ten dollars buying something she didn’t want, even though there were at least a million dollars worth of things she really did want? You would think she was foolishly wasting her money, right?

You can put a stop to the waste of your attention. Say to yourself: “That’s not worth the attention; what am I doing next?” Use the question to plug the leaks in your bucket.

Your mind is attracted to certain things, compelled by certain feelings, some of which are negative and harmful. And your mind doesn’t change direction easily. The machinery of your mind, if we can call it that, is stubborn. But you don’t have to put up with it. Start saying to yourself today, “That’s not worth the attention; what am I doing next?” and don’t stop until a new habit is formed.

Start with little things, and when the big things come along, you’ll have the resources to deal with them. As William James wrote:

So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

Use this question and use it often and you will have power and self-control far beyond your peers. But here let me issue the following clarification: This statement-plus-question (that’s not worth the attention; what am I doing next?) shouldn’t be applied to certain things.

If you have a drinking problem, for example, and it’s destroying your health and your relationships and your financial future, you can do something about it, so this statement-plus-question is not applicable.

If you are experiencing grief because a loved one just died, your grief is worth your attention. It is healthy to grieve and unhealthy to suppress it. And there is something you can do about it. You can’t bring your loved-one back, but you can talk to someone about it. You can write about your pain in a journal. People who do these things after a big loss are healthier in the long run than people who don’t.

Dale Larson, PhD, and his research team at Santa Clara University surveyed close to 300 people about events in their lives they considered shameful or painful, and also about how much of these things they kept to themselves or shared with other people.

The researchers then looked at the volunteers’ records of mental and physical health problems. Of course, those who experienced severely stressful things like losing a parent as a child or rape, experienced more health problems, but the problems were significantly reduced in those who had talked about it than those who kept it a secret.

And in general, those who tended to keep painful or shameful experiences to themselves suffered more headaches, fatigue, and indigestion than those who had a tendency to confide things with a trusted friend.

James Pennebaker, PhD, who has done a tremendous amount of research on this subject, says, “not discussing or confiding [a traumatic] event with another may be more damaging than having experienced the event per se.”

Apparently, holding things in is a kind of psychological “work” and it’s a strain on your system to do it.

I should point out that it doesn’t work to share your pain with just anybody and everybody. If you’re going to talk, talk to a trusted friend, someone you know won’t share it with anyone else and who will not criticize you or make fun of you, but will listen. Or, as Pennebaker has found, it even works to write it in a journal.

This statement-plus-question (that’s not worth the attention; what am I doing next?) is to use for the annoyances and frustrations of daily life, including the people in your life who like to mess with your head or who seem to deliberately try to make you unhappy.

Did you think you were the only one? Think again, my friend. We all have people in our lives who seem to act like friends, but bring us down in one way or another.

The author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott was once given this friendly advice: Find work as a seamstress or servant.

You’ve probably heard of Vince Lombardi. He’s one of the most famous football coaches in the history of the sport. An expert once said of him, “He possesses minimal football knowledge. Lacks motivation.”

In 1933 Fred Astaire had his first screen test. The testing director summarized Astaire like this: “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.”

The better you are, the more you accomplish, the more people will try to bring you down. That’s just the way it is and there’s nothing you can do to change that reality. You can, however, respond to it any way you choose.

I want you to remember something: Life is only so long, and then it’s over. Don’t waste precious moments. Don’t throw away your attention.

I know a woman who brings up bad news every time you talk to her. She reads the newspaper, and whenever there’s something particularly tragic or terrible, it obviously sticks in her mind, as it would most normal people. I don’t read newspapers for that very reason: I don’t want things like that stuck in my mind. There’s nothing I can do about a car accident that happened yesterday.

This woman brings up bad news, and doesn’t just mention it, but goes into graphic detail, and she’s skilled enough to give you a sharp, full-color image of the tragedy in all its vivid sadness.

When she talks to me, she gives me things that compete with other thoughts, images, ideas. There’s a limit to how many thoughts I can hold. The same goes for you. Our capacity for attention is limited. Even if we’re much better than average, we can only hold so many thoughts at once. So in this sense, thoughts are in competition for our attention.

Graphic, compelling, tragic thoughts compete very effectively because strong emotions demand attention. I used to listen to this woman, but then I realized something important: When she shared her news, it served her goals, but not mine.

Now as soon as the headline comes out of her mouth, I change the subject. I don’t let her fill me in on the graphic details. Luckily, I don’t have to talk to her much. But it’s an example of how some things that compel your attention very strongly don’t necessarily help you. Giving them your attention may serve someone else, but it only poured your precious moments down the drain.

The same holds true when the thought has not been put there by someone else. The human mind is incredibly full. Your mind can wander far and wide, and sometimes it stumbles upon a worry or fear, and even though it may be an emotionally gripping thought, that doesn’t mean it has to be thought through, figured out, or solved.

When something is emotionally commanding, it often feels as if the thought is clamoring very loudly for your attention, like a baby crying or loud moans of pain from someone nearby, but the feeling may have nothing to do with the worthiness of the thought itself.

After I decided to write books for a living, I was often haunted by the worry: “What if I never make it? What if nobody wants to buy my books? What if I try and try and I go broke and wind up a penniless street person and die of cold in some gutter as an old man?”

Somewhere along the way, probably in a fit of despair, I created that vivid mental image and it was compelling for emotional reasons. But it was a stupid thing to think. Yes, the book business is not as “secure” as some other fields, but I had made up my mind to do it, so this kind of worrying was not doing me any good.

This statement-plus-question (that’s not worth the attention; what am I doing next?) put my mind on a new track. When I get that image now of being a penniless street person lying in a gutter, this statement-plus-question is fast on its heels, and it happens so quickly now, the image has begun to motivate me and increase my determination.

How?

Because of the question: “What am I doing next?” Because of the haunting image, what I want to do next is work on becoming successful in the book business! I want to make sure I don’t goof off. It motivates me to burn the midnight oil. As soon as my thoughts turn to what I need to do, I am off and running and forget about the worries. I’m too busy making it happen to worry about whether it’s going to happen or not.

This is totally different from what used to happen. The image used to bring me down. The image was compelling because it was me in the image, and I was afraid of it. It was like a leach, sucking my lifeblood (my attention) and contributing nothing to me. It was a parasitic thought.

And what is the best thing to do with a parasite? Kill it. If you had a tick or a leach or an intestinal worm, you wouldn’t hesitate to cut its life short. Mercy or compassion for a parasite would be stupid. It’s leaching off of you. It is taking your life, your energy, your attention, and only taking. Giving you nothing.

When you have a thought in that category, show no mercy, show no coddling, and do not play around: Cut it off without delay.

And the way to cut off a thought, the way to kill it, is to replace it with a better one. The mind won’t remain empty for long. You can’t just stop thinking something. You have to have something better to think instead. It is counterproductive to try not to think something.

Two researchers from the University of Virginia — Daniel Wegner and Daniel Gold — told 110 female and male subjects to think about a past lover who they still desired. Then they were given eight minutes. Half of them were told to continue to think about the lover. The other half were told to suppress thoughts of their previous lover — to not think of them at all for the eight minutes.

Then the researchers hooked everyone up to a device that measures emotional reactions. It measured how much sweat they produced on the surface of their fingers, and the subjects were told to think about their former sweethearts again. Those who had spent eight minutes trying to get their old flames out of their minds had a much stronger emotional reaction.

One of the researchers, Daniel M. Wegner, PhD, is somewhat famous in psychology circles for his many experiments showing what happens when you suppress a thought: It makes the thought more intense and obsessional. Some of his earlier experiments went like this: He put people in a room with a tape recorder and told them to speak aloud whatever was on their minds, except for one thing — under no circumstances were they to think about a white bear.

The tape recorded their ongoing thoughts, which included something about a white bear, on average, about once a minute. There are billions of things to think about, but their minds kept coming back to the one thought they were trying not to think. They tried as many mental tricks as they could come up with, but the thought of a white bear kept coming back to them.

When you say to yourself, “That’s not worth the attention; what am I doing next?” you are putting your mind on something else instead of trying not to think something. And it works.

Do this often enough, and even a thought that used to haunt you often could begin to remind you to think the new thought. After awhile, your mind will start to streamline the process and skip right over the old thought, and at that point you’ve effectively choked off its lifeblood (the attention it was draining from your life). It only lives by your attention, and when it no longer gets any attention, it is dead.

And when it is dead, you have just gained more life.

The question, “What needs to be done next?” is also good on its own. It gets your mind thinking productively, no matter what’s happening. It can help you pull yourself out of a bad mood. It can help you get back on track. Try it today.

Adam Khan is the author of Principles For Personal Growth, Slotralogy, Antivirus For Your Mind, and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb.

Live! Death Approaches - Season 3, Episode 15 of the Adam Bomb Podcast

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The Oil Monopoly Causes Mental Illness

I was talking with the director of a large mental health hospital during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. When I talked to him, they had just finished building a new wing of the hospital, and he said they'd been extremely busy since the Great Recession began. He told me something I've never heard before — recessions always initiate a steep rise in mental health problems.

I must have looked surprised. He explained, "Well, people lose their jobs, which causes stress, and sometimes they lose their houses too. Under the strain, couples get divorced. Depression and anxiety increase. Anger and frustration rear their ugly heads. Sometimes people deal with it by drinking too much or taking drugs, and that causes even more problems. Sometimes the stress can trigger the onset of latent problems like psychosis and schizophrenia."

All of this got me to thinking. Since every time oil prices have spiked since WWII, we've had a recession in the United States, and since recessions cause more peoples' lives to fall apart, and since we could prevent rising oil prices from causing recessions if we had sufficient fuel competition, then it is not unreasonable to assert the following:

Oil's monopoly on transportation fuel
causes mental illness.

Or at least the oil monopoly plays a causative role in triggering a greater number of mental health problems than would otherwise have occurred.

So we can chalk this up as yet another good reason to stop the insanity of perpetuating a one-fuel economy. In addition to increasing our national security and boosting our economy, fuel competition can help keep our citizens mentally healthy. In addition to curtailing the money going to prop up dangerous women-oppressing regimes, lowering the amount of lobbying and influence the oil industry enjoys, helping to solve our garbage and landfill problem, helping people in developing nations rise out of poverty, and reducing the amount of pollution and greenhouse gases sent into the atmosphere, into the ocean, and into the ground, fuel competition can also literally make the world a saner place.

Adam Khan is the co-author with Klassy Evans of Fill Your Tank With Freedom and the author of Slotralogy and Self-Reliance, Translated. Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb.

Rising Oil Prices Cause Recessions — ALL of Them

Perk Earl wrote: "Economist James Hamilton has shown that 10 out of the last 11 US recessions were associated with oil price spikes." Read more about that here.

Higher gas prices are not just irritating. They affect the economy rather broadly, as the following excerpt from the book, Fill Your Tank With Freedom makes clear:

There is an insidious side-effect of rising gasoline prices. As people spend more money on gas, they spend less money on other things, and that causes the loss of jobs. “Since consumer spending is the main driver of the U.S. economy,” says Mark Cooper, Research Director of the Consumer Federation of America, “when speculators, oil companies and OPEC rob consumers of that much spending power, the inevitable result is a dramatic reduction of economic activity and employment.”

In Cooper’s study of the effect of oil prices on jobs, he discovered that every time oil prices have spiked since World War II, we’ve had a recession in America. In his study, he showed that because oil was about $30 a barrel higher than “costs or historic trends justify,” (from the summer of 2010 to the summer of 2011) gas prices rose by a dollar a gallon in one year, which drained about 200 billion dollars from the economy. This is about two percent of consumer spending. That doesn’t seem like much, but two percent less spending (200 billion dollars) created the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Another way to look at it is that because most of our cars are not capable of burning anything but gasoline, we imported about $500 billion dollars per year of oil, sending that money out of the country. That would have paid five million workers $100,000 a year! But the money leaving our country just leaves — doing nothing for us. If the same money was paid to workers here, it would have a huge ripple effect in our economy because that money would then be used to buy other goods and services in America.

Saudi Influence on the U.S. Government

Saudi oil billionaires have hired American law firms and lobbying organizations to promote their agenda within the U.S. political system. They keep these powerful groups on their full-time payroll. The Saudis alone have 100 lobbyists in Washington (the NRA, considered one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington D.C., has 28 lobbyists). According to Open-Secrets.org, the total number of lobbyists reported for the year 2012 who were working for the oil and gas industry is 736! But let’s just focus on the Saudis for now.

They not only have 100 lobbyists who spend their time persuading our politicians to adopt their point of view, but the Saudis influence individual politicians directly through the incentive of money, and it’s all perfectly legal.

In chapter three of Robert Zubrin’s book, Energy Victory, he details the amazing system of Saudi oil-money payoffs to American politicians. I’ll give you a few highlights here.

Many of the ways money directly influences politicians are officially declared as such. But there are “innumerable other influentials who accept well-paid consultancies from the Saudis and who chose not to make the connection public,” wrote Zubrin. “One of these appears to be former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who had to resign from his position as head of the September 11 investigative commission when he was asked to disclose his client list.”

He wasn’t the only one. Senator George Mitchell, former Senate majority leader, had to quit his position as vice chair for the same reason.

Another way Saudis influence American politicians is by spending big money for weapons made by American companies. The Saudis have spent about 100 billion dollars on sophisticated weapons they have not used (because Saudi Arabia is protected by the United States military). Their purchases give them influence — what the defense contractors’ say to politicians can be manipulated by the Saudis.

And since big defense contracts create lots of jobs, the Saudi influence spreads to the politicians in whose districts those jobs will be created.

Another way to legally give money to influential American politicians is through making a politician a board member of a corporation, and generously paying them for their “service.”

Here’s how it works: Saudi funds are used to create a business partnership. An important political figure is then invited to sit on the board. The business then pays the politician a fantastic sum for basically doing nothing. For example, according to the New York Times, former secretary of state James Baker has received 180 million dollars for his board membership in the Carlyle Group, an investment firm funded largely by Saudis.

This is not an isolated case. Far from it. According to former CIA counterterrorism case officer Robert Baer, author of Sleeping With the Devil, “…almost every Washington figure worth mentioning has served on the board of at least one company that did a deal with Saudi Arabia.”

Another legal way money is transferred to politicians is to invite influential people onto the board of a corporation and give them stock options in the company. The politician serves on the board for short time, and then cashes out the stock options, often reaping huge profits.

The above is an excerpt from the book, Fill Your Tank With Freedom.

With Fuel Competition, You Would Save a Lot of Money

How much would the average American family save if the Open Fuel Standard bill passes into law? Kelly Cook, the National Field Director for ACT! for America, has done the following calculations:

The price of gasoline and diesel has dropped 40 to 50 cents since those figures were used from the $4.00 level.

I’ve just used the following math, which is pretty indisputable and it would be instructive to your readers to follow the math...their potential savings.

The auto experts I’ve been seeing all seem to come in around the 12,000 to 15,000 average miles per year per car and/or pickup in the U.S. I’m sure this could be narrowed down with a little research.

Average family owns: 2.28 cars or pickups (source). The ratio nationwide is 55% cars and 45% pickups (source).

Average fuel mileage nationwide for cars is: 24.6 mpg.

Average fuel mileage nationwide for pickups is: 16 mpg.

Weight the number slightly to the favor of the cars since they have 55% of the total and I come up with an average of 22 mpg for cars and pickups.

13,500 miles per year average divided by 22 mpg =  614 gallons per year per vehicle.

Multiply 614 X 2.28 cars per family = Average U.S. family burns 1,400 gallons per year for all the family vehicles.

Current national average of gasoline / diesel (weighted towards gasoline) = $3.60.

Current price of natural gas refined methanol per gallon is $1.30.  (Raw cost = 30 to 40 cents + profit and taxes).

Plus add in the 60% range of methanol to gasoline = $1.83 equivalent range adjusted price to gasoline.

$3.60 minus $1.83 = $1.77 savings per gallon.

$1.77 X 1,400 gallons per year per family = $2,478 annual savings.

If the price were still at $4 for gasoline, the annual saving would be:

$4.00 minus $1.83 = 2.17 per gallon.

$2.17 x 1,400 gallons = $3,038.00 annual savings per year per family.

So we can reasonably say that the average family could save between $2500 and $3000 per year for their average 2.28 vehicles depending on how “generous” OPEC is at any given time.

Although the math is flawless here, it might not work out exactly like this. It might be not quite as good. It might be significantly better. As Mr. Cook says, "At best, this is a moving target because everything about the variables of my calculation are moving targets. Nothing is static – the price of oil, the price of methanol, MPG of cars and trucks, average cars per family — nothing."

But it's a very good rough estimate, and would create more discretionary income for us all, and that's always good for the economy. Two of the things Mr. Cook didn't try to factor in could also be significant: The continually rising cost of oil, and the petroleum costs on just about every other commodity. It is almost certain that oil prices will continue to rise in the foreseeable future. And since almost every product has been shipped, the rising cost of oil raises the price of everything else.

Each of us could have more money in our pockets every year. Let's pass the Open Fuel Standard and make it happen.