A pivotal book to the anti-globalization movement is called Another World is Possible, by Dr. David McNally.  A good movie about the anti-globalization revolution turning violent is called The Fourth World War.

Tom Friedman is a great journalist, and used his journalistic abilities and skills to research his book.  Dr. McNally is a professor of political science and studied globalization from an economic direction by looking up some actual numbers to see what was going on.  And what do you think he found?

I won’t bother going into his numbers here, because that would just give people something to try to disprove.  He discovered the shadows of Entropy and The Limits to Growth.  Namely, that endless economic expansion in a world with a finite supply of resources is not physically possible.

Dr. McNally takes the very sensible approach to predicting the future of globalized Capitalism by backing up to the beginning, studying where Capitalism originated, and seeing how it had progressed from there to the present day.

I’ve already shown you a basic outline of how chiefs became kings and kings became aristocrats by being the continuing line of people everyone else looked up to due to their superior control of energy and material resources.  Chiefs had simple genetic advantages that made them alpha males throughout the course of our evolution, but as people developed more complex economies, the people who started out with slight advantages kept multiplying their advantages generations by generation by leaving inheritances to their children, educating their children, and using the political power their economic power gave them to write laws in their favor.  All this time, by controlling the most energy and material resources like the evolutionary chiefs, they’ve been maintaining a sensory illusion among most people, most of the time, that their economic success is proof of their superiority and their benevolence.  Or if nothing else, their economic and political advantages made a lot of people decide to cooperate with them to try to get them to be benevolent.

The transition from feudal aristocracy to Capitalist aristocracy began in England about 350 years ago.  Under feudal aristocracy, peasant farmers lived and worked on their land and paid taxes.  Then some aristocrats discovered that they could make more profit on the peasants’ work by commodifying time.  Peasants who farmed their own land could farm their land however they wanted.  As long as they paid their taxes, they were free to produce as much or as little beyond that as they wanted.

The way peasants were farming their land was the same way they had always farmed their land.  Each of their houses were built on their own private land, and other land in their villages was set aside as communal land, which might be wheat fields, sheep pastures, forests, rivers, or whatever.  The communal land was for everyone to use, and since everyone lived in the same village with everyone else, the people in each village developed a sense of how the communal land needed  to be used—how many sheep each person could graze in communal pastures, how the work was going to be divided in growing the wheat, how much each person could hunt in the forests, how much wood they could chop, and how many fish they could catch from the river.  They measured their economic success in terms of everyone getting enough to eat.  As you may have noticed, that means English peasants lived more or less the same way the Yurok did.  Or the O’Odham.  Or people all over most of the world.

The first Capitalists realized that the peasants using communal land prevented them from controlling how hard each peasant worked.  Peasants with land controlled their own livelihoods.  So the first Capitalists began enacting what became known as the Enclosure Laws, and also began evicting peasants from their lands.  The aristocrats took ownership of the land, and then started charging the peasants rent on individual plots.

Now that the peasants didn’t work their own land, they were no longer in control of their livelihoods.  Now the only way they make their livings was by selling their labor.  That made them dependent on people who did own land, and that let the people who owned the land control how hard the peasants worked—which inevitably meant they made them work as hard as they could.
What the first Capitalists had discovered was that the peasants needed two things to make their livings: their land and their labor.  If the Capitalists took control of the land, they took control of the peasants who depended on it.  Also, now that they claimed ownership of half of the land-and-labor equation, they could claim ownership of half of the product of the peasants’ labor.  (That’s the basic idea, anyway, regardless of how much rent the Capitalists actually charged the peasants.)

Out of all the skills and abilities people in England had at the time, a few turned out to be far more powerful than the rest.  These were certain abilities and skills for mathematics and social interactions.  People who had also accumulated a lot of material resources—namely, aristocrats—were well positioned to put their combination of abilities and skills to use.  So these people used their social abilities and skills to negotiate certain laws into existence, and then used their mathematical abilities and skills to use the laws to channel more material goods—money, or anything they could sell for money—into their hands.

The laws were simply agreements made among people about how they would interact with each other.  These first Capitalists figured out how to persuade people to make agreements that would favor them.  The other people might’ve realized how much the agreements they were making would benefit the Capitalists, or they might not have.  Once the agreements were made, each individual involved believed that every other individual involved intended to uphold the agreement and to help hold everyone else responsible for upholding the agreement.  The basic result was that it was a lot easier for the first Capitalists to persuade groups of people to make agreements than it was for any individual in the group to un-make the agreement afterwards.
Now let’s fast forward 350 years and see how these patterns have developed.

By now, most people in the industrialized world don’t own productive land.  Most people in the industrialized world can’t combine their labor with land to provide for themselves.  A lot of people own other things they can combine with their labor to provide for themselves, but most don’t.  That means that most people are still making their livings by selling their labor—and depend  on selling their labor to make their livings.  Whatever kind of a job you have, when you go to work, you use certain things that your employer owns to perform your work.  You employer owns half of the labor-and-land equation you need to make your living, so he claims 50% of the product of your work (or some percentage, but that’s the idea).  You are now paying rent on the tools, or truck, or photocopy machine, or whatever you use in the form of producing something that your employer can sell, some fraction of which he then pays you for your wage.

Whatever kind of a job you have, you use certain skills and abilities to perform your work.  Regardless of what kind of a job it is, you will notice that there are two things that are crucial to the survival of your employer’s company.  One is customer service, the other is accounting.  That is, the ability to negotiate, and the ability to accumulate resources.  Or, a certain type of social ability and skill, and a certain type of mathematical ability and skill.  The people who have these abilities and skills use them to channel material resources into your employer’s hands.  Which is why he makes more money than you do.

The other thing we can look at is how Capitalists are using their social and mathematical abilities and skills to write enclosure laws in the modern world.  That is, how they’re making social agreements that cause more material resources to flow into their hands.

First of all, there’s the North American Free Trade Agreement.  With the NAFTA, for the first time in history, representatives of corporations gained the ability to sue national governments directly.  That is, our government leaders who write the laws agreed  to let corporate representatives sue them.

By granting corporate leaders the ability to compete directly against national governments, the government leaders who wrote the laws elevated corporations to the status of political units equivalent  to national governments.

There are more corporations in the world than there are national governments.  Their leaders were not elected by citizens.  Their leaders’ goals are to channel material resources into their own hands.  Many of these corporations control more material resources than federal governments.  As of 1999, the people at Microsoft controlled assets worth the gross domestic product of Spain; the people at General Electric assets worth the GDP of Thailand; the people at Wal-Mart assets worth the GDP of Argentina; the people at Cisco Systems assets worth the GDP of Iran; the people at Lucent Technologies assets worth the GDP of South Africa; the people at IBM assets worth the GDP of Columbia.  In 2000, 51 of the 100 largest economies in the world were corporations; only 49 were nation-states.

It could be argued that the concentration of material wealth in the hands of a few people who had great ingenuity for investing it into new inventions is what made our technological level possible.  Most people’s livelihoods depend on their selling their labor now, but in return they get cell phones and fresh fruit in the winter and planes to ride in to go visit their mothers a thousand miles away.  That is true.  But at what cost?

Mr. Friedman believes that it’s possible for nobly minded people to struggle against Globalization 3.0—or with it, or alongside it, or whatever he prefers to call it—to create a humane form of Capitalism.  But obviously he completely misunderstands the fundamental problem the Globalization 4.0 revolutionaries are struggling against.  If we struggle against the people who are making Globalization 3.0 happen, we’ll be struggling forever, and we’ll have to devote our entire lives to fighting for the privilege to be safe from people who want to drive us off our farms so they can make more money from the land by charging us rent.  The struggle of the Globalization 4.0 revolutionaries is the struggle against the laws and other social institutions that make Capitalist oppression  possible in the first place.  Laws that let Capitalists do things like:

The people at Coca Cola buying the rights to an entire water shed in India, and banning everyone in the area from drawing water from wells on their own land;

The people at Monsanto and various other biotech companies taking out patents on genes found in plants, some of which were domesticated by indigenous people, who have been growing them for 2,000 years, and now charging people for the rights to grow their traditional plants;

The people at Myriad Genetic taking out patents on two human genes they discovered that indicate a susceptibility to breast cancer, blocking women from finding out if they have these genes, suing the Canadian government for ignoring their patents and testing women for these genes, winning the case, forcing Canadian doctors to send the women to get tested at Myriad’s labs for three times the price, which the Canadian government couldn’t afford, and thereby preventing these women from finding out if they’re susceptible to breast cancer;

The people at Pfizer charging AIDS patients in Africa 25 times their annual income for two months worth of AIDS treatment—or trying to charge them that much, anyway.

The problem with allowing corporations to compete against federal governments directly is that federal governments exist to protect their people (supposedly, anyway).  A federal government is (supposed to be) an agreement among all the people of a country to work together to keep themselves safe from individuals amongst them who would threaten other group members, and to keep themselves safe, as much as possible, from external forces, including other groups of people. Our primate ancestors figured out how to do that about 20 million years ago, and with the stroke of a pen the Capitalist pigs outlawed it.

What Mr. Friedman doesn’t seem to understand is that by the time we of the Globalization 4.0 revolution destroy all of the laws that make economic oppression like this possible, we will no longer have a Capitalist economy at all.

Another product of Capitalism is institutionalized racism.  As Malcolm X once said, “You can’t have Capitalism without racism.”

In the first book I told you about the evolutionary origins of racism—skin color being (or at least, seeming to be) an easy way to recognize whether a person belongs to your tribe or not.  Well if you’re the kind of people who try to charge people 25 years’ worth of their income for 2 months worth of medicine, how do you get people to put up with an economic system like that?  There are a lot more of them than there are of you.

How else, but by teaching all those people to hate each other, just like Rex did with the kids on his playground?  Dr. McNally devotes a large chapter of his book to the economic origins of racism.  He starts by looking at the laws that affected laborers in the Americas back when the Americas were first being colonized, and traces them from there.  In the beginning, there weren’t many laws, and laborers were all equal to each other.  Then Whites started being granted more rights and Blacks’ rights were taken away, and so were the rights of other individual groups of people.  Soon enough, Blacks and Whites were two completely separate classes of laborers.  By this point, all the Blacks were slaves and none of the Whites were slaves.  So the Blacks hated the Whites and the White laborers distrusted the Blacks.  Then their White leaders taught the White laborers to believe the Blacks were sub-human.  And as a society we still bear the scars of that to this day.

And then they did the same basic things to divide all other races from each other.

And then they did the same basic things to divide ethnicities from each other.

And then they did the same basic things to divide religions from each other.

And then they did the same basic things to divide women from men.

Capitalists passed a lot of laws about who was allowed to immigrate to countries, who was allowed to own property, who was allowed to go to school, who was allowed to vote, who was allowed to have what jobs, who was allowed to testify against who in court, who was allowed in which public parks or schools or stores or restaurants, who was allowed to live in which neighborhoods, who were allowed to own guns, who was allowed to use physical violence on who, who was allowed to marry who… etc., etc..  We don’t have laws like that anymore, now we just have a society full of people who grew up with laws like that, who assumed those laws existed because certain groups of people were better at certain things, or certain groups of people were more dangerous than others.  Or maybe those people’s children, who learned their attitudes from their parents.  These people never figured out how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together, so when they saw one group of poor, illiterate people working at filthy menial jobs, and another group of well-to-do, well-educated people working at clean supervisory jobs, they assumed that proved those people were best suited for each of those jobs, not that there were a bunch of invisible laws forcing one group down into one category and leaving the other category wide open for the other people.
War is one of many results of racism, because wars depends on the public being taught to feel like a certain group of people deserves to be killed, injured, maimed, driven from their homes, and subjugated.  Dr. McNally devotes some of his book to showing how much of warfare since the origins of Capitalism has been fuelled by the pursuit of profit—and usually a huge amount of profit for a few people.

I’ve heard a lot of people argue, as Dr. McNally does, that all of war is a conspiratorial economic system for the materially wealthy.   That obviously can’t be true, because coalitional violence is a universal constant of humanity.  Tribes of nomadic hunter-gatherers who don’t have classes of materially wealthy people fight wars against each other.  Two people out of a tribe of 50 who get killed in a war against another tribe deep in the jungles of Brazil doesn’t make the evening news here in America for a couple of obvious reasons, but that doesn’t change the fact that those people just lost 4% of their population, which would be the equivalent of 12,000,000 Americans being killed.  That 4% of the population of 50 were just as critical to their political and economic systems as 4% of the population of 300,000,000—they performed vital jobs, they had vital skills and abilities, they were parts of people’s families, and so on.

To say that all of war is a conspiratorial economic system of materially wealthy people now is not only misleading, but also dangerous.  That leads people to believe things about the world that simply aren’t true, and then to take action on those faulty beliefs.  I’ve written two huge books so far and now a third about how much believing in things that aren’t true gets people into trouble.  To say that all of war is an economic conspiracy of the materially wealthy now would require the intervention of some invisible force that intervened at some point in history and made war stop being one thing and start being the other.  Our inability to observe that force doesn’t prove it doesn’t exist, but in situations like this you need to consider the possibility that the person who believes that force needs to exist to explain the evidence is simply mistaken, and the progression of events can be explained using observable evidence, but the person just hasn’t figured out how.
At one end of the history of our species we have Cro-Magnons with their brand new multi-piece tools.  At the other end we have the Iraq war.  Wars are always, and have always been, won by whichever side manages to combine energy and matter to direct force against their enemies most effectively.  So here we arrive at the origins of war as an economic system:  Fighting a war requires material resources.

Hence the reason the Mesopotamians with their advantages in material resources conquered their neighbors, and their cultural descendants eventually conquered most of the world.  Along the way, people with certain abilities and skills were able to acquire more material resources than the other members of their groups, and they used their material resources to affect the group’s decision-making more than other members of the group did.  Everyone involved was attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.  The materially wealthy people—who had good negotiation and mathematical abilities and skills in the first place—were good at using their abilities, skills, and resources to persuade a large number of people that the benefits of fighting the war were worth the effort.  In other words, the same combination of abilities and skills they had used to accumulate their material wealth could now be combined with the material wealth they had accumulated to alter a lot of people’s perceptions of the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA.   Meanwhile, the materially wealthy people also perceived an opportunity to preserve the survival of their own DNA more effectively by making profits on the war, so they used their abilities and skills for persuasion and mathematics to figure out how to make the most profit possible.  So the economic divisions that critical combination of abilities and skills began keeps growing wider and wider.

Then you get the initial sentiments for the American Revolution, where some colonists wanted to stop being the subjects of Britain, being amplified by materially wealthy people who realize that American independence would mean no more taxes to pay to the king.

Then you get the initial sentiments of the Civil War, where a lot of slaves wanted to be free and the president wanted to free them, being amplified by materially wealthy people who realized that paying the slaves would make them much more productive workers.

Then you get the initial sentiments of World War I, in which people of the major European powers perceived each other as threats, amplified by materially wealthy people who were making profits from foreign colonies, and who realized that their economic competitors in most of the other major powers in Europe had foreign colonies too.

Then you get World War II, which began with the sentiments of a lot of people of the winning countries of World War I wanting to get even with the losing countries, amplified by materially wealthy people crushing Germany as an economic power; and then materially wealthy people supporting Hitler in his rise to power by crushing the German labor unions and keeping the Germans from adopting Communism; and which ended with materially wealthy Americans who had vast supplies of material resources and the only large industrialized economy that survived the war unscathed, taking the opportunity to economically colonize Europe by offering to help them rebuild in exchange for favorable trade relations.

Then you get the Korean War and the Vietnam War, where two different groups of people were rebuilding their countries after the Japanese were driven out and were setting up Communist governments, combined with a fear of Communism among Americans, which materially wealthy people amplified to help them prevent the spread of Communism—which really blurred the lines between U.S. economic foreign policy and political foreign policy, since Communism made economics directly political;

Then you get the Cold War, where public fear of Communism was amplified by materially wealthy people who made sh*tloads of money on the military industrial complex;

Now we have the Iraq War, which began with a public fear of Arabs, Muslims, terrorists, and weapons of mass destruction, which materially wealthy people—including our own president—amplified to control access to the world’s second largest oil field;

And along the way you get dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller-scale versions of the same pattern.

After losing the Vietnam War, the Capitalists discovered a new weapon:  weaponized debt.  Hence the reason Dr. Sachs said that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank needed to be fixed.  Remember what I said about people with good social and mathematical skills and abilities being good at tricking people into making agreements that were a lot easier to get into than to get back out of?  The idea of a world bank and an international monetary fund that can loan money to help impoverished nations solve their economic problems sounds like a good idea.  That is, until you consider that the Capitalists only loan the money to the people who need it on two conditions:  that these impoverished people pay interest  on the loan, and that they restructure their country’s economic system the way the Capitalists want it.  That includes privatizing basic services that are socialized in a lot of countries, like railroads, electricity, phone service, and water; cuts in governmental spending on medicine, education, and food subsidies; the resulting pay cuts and layoffs for public employees; the removal of barriers to foreign trade and investment; and the devaluation of the local currency, which makes their exports worth less and their imports cost more.  Basically, these Capitalists are telling these impoverished foreigners to set up an American economy in their country so they’ll have all the problems we have in America, in addition to being impoverished and owing interest on their loans.  And I’m sure you remember from the last book how the unsustainable use of resources makes economic inflation inevitable, because the same amount of currency remains in circulation while the supply of material resources left to spend it on diminishes. So these Capitalists offer to help these foreigners in the short term, and knowingly push them into economic graveyard spirals to colonize them economically.

There are 190 federal governments in the world, and so far, about 100 of them have been “given” “loans” from the IMF and World Bank.  In 1970 the combined third-world debt in the world was about 70 billion dollars.  By 2000 it was over 2.5 trillion dollars—which means it multiplied about 35 times in 30 years.

You know what that means.  Lots of people being pushed into poverty, and then hunger, malnutrition, starvation, famines, and plagues.  You remember my example of the hope economy from the last book, where I talked about a loaf of bread being worth a pound of hope, and my raising the prices of bread forced you to trade more and more hope for your daily bread?   The Capitalists “gave” the Peruvians a “loan” in 1990, and within a year bread was 10 times more expensive, fuel was 30 times more expensive, average real wages had dropped by 85% from their 1974 levels, and 83% of the country’s population couldn’t meet their daily calorie or protein requirements.  You remember what I said about spending the year after I graduated high school living in Ecuador?  When I heard the story about the economic collapse in Peru it really got my attention, because the city where I lived when I was there was about 100 miles from the Peruvian border.  What Dr. McNally doesn’t mention in his version of the story is that the population of Peru at the time was nearly 3 times the size of the population of Ecuador, and two years after the Peruvians were “given” their  “loan” their economic situation had grown so desperate they were poised on the brink of invading Ecuador.  They backed down in the end, but let’s just say that was a stressful time for a lot of people I knew.

Oh, and by the way, you remember those million people who got hacked to death with machetes in Rwanda two years later?  Guess who loaned their government officials the money that paid for those machetes?  That’s not to say that the entire genocide was masterminded by Capitalists.
But you remember those Capitalists who won’t sell AIDS medicine at prices AIDS patients can afford, and who hold women hostage with their own breast cancer genes?   I think it’s worth mentioning here that the people at the IMF and World Bank are forcing the survivors of the Rwanda genocide to repay the loans for the machetes that killed their own families.

Now that brings me to the War on Terror.  A lot of people have been talking about a “war without end”.  Why won’t the War on Terror ever end?   Because the terrorists could be hiding anywhere, they can attack from anywhere, and they’re never going to surrender.  They’ll fight with small, localized attacks of various types, like the insurgents are using in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, but all over the world. To fight against that, we’ll need a highly mobile military that can go into a hostile area, strike, destroy the target, and move on to the next area.  The global war of terror is going to Vietnam all over the world, with no clearly defined locations, or targets, or enemies, or objective, or strategies.

Now you remember all those people who are so good at using their abilities and skills at negotiation, persuasion, and mathematics to keep profits flowing into their hands?  Their idea of economic success depends on sealing off wells to prevent people from drawing water on their own land, forcing indigenous farmers to pay them for the right to plant the crops their own ancestors domesticated, letting people die of AIDS, and letting governments collapse.  Do you think some starving Third World peasants might try to fight back against people like that?  And how are they’re going to do it?  Maybe with…  oh, gee, let me think about this… maybe, say, small, localized attacks of various types, like the insurgents are using Iraq and Afghanistan right now, but all over the world? To fight against which, the Capitalists will need a highly mobile military that can go into a hostile area, strike, destroy the target, and move on to the next area?   Which would make the global war against Capitalism Vietnam all over the world, with no clearly defined locations, or targets, or enemies, or objective, or strategies?

Do you notice a few things starting to fall into place here yet?

That brings me to The Fourth World War.  The Fourth World War is a documentary movie made about anti-Capitalist movements all over the world that have already turned violent.  It starts out peacefully, with peaceful demonstrations—that don’t accomplish much.  Then people start using peaceful demonstrations more directly—called direct action—and start doing things like driving the army out of an encampment in Mexico by walking up to the camp, cutting through the barbed wire, walking in, and occupying the camp.  Just like a restaurant sit-in back in the days of the Civil Rights Movement, only this time at a military base surrounded by scores of soldiers holding assault rifles.  Then people keep marching in the streets, but then they start getting beaten down and arrested by police.  So they start fighting back; then the police start shooting tear gas; then the protestors start throwing rocks.  Then it keeps escalating.  The next time the protestors march, some of them come ready for a fight, because they already know it’s going to happen.  The police are there waiting for them, in riot gear and armored personnel carriers.  Then they use the protestors who showed up wearing masks, and carrying clubs and homemade shields and bricks, as an excuse to start beating people down and shooting tear gas at them again.  The protestors who came ready to fight take on the police, and some of the other protestors back them up.  Meanwhile other protestors break into banks or corporate offices or whatever they’re there to protest—meaning Capitalism in general—and destroy everything in sight.  It started in places like Mexico, South Africa, Argentina, South Korea; then it started spreading to Seattle and Genoa and Melbourne and anywhere else the G8 or World Trade Organizations tried to meet.  Then the rioters start breaking through the police lines and destroy one of the police riot tanks.  Someone spray paints WE ARE WINNING on the side of the riot tank.  Then the police start shooting people, like Carlo Giuliani the Anarchist who attacked the Italian police jeep with a fire extinguisher and got shot twice in the face by the cop in Genoa, or Brad Will, the American reporter who got shot in the stomach by the paramilitary thug in Mexico, or countless other people whose names have never made the news.  Then the rioters start throwing Molotov cocktails.  Then people get hold of rifles and flee to the countryside to wage guerilla wars against the government, like the Zapatista Army of National Liberation did down in Mexico back in ’94 and up to the present.  There’s a different version of this story unfolding in different parts of the world, but that’s the general progression of events that’s happening everywhere.  The movie ends with a scene of about 20 Palestinian boys, probably between 6 and 10 years old, throwing rocks, a couple using slingshots, and one or two using actual slings, David-and-Goliath style.  Then suddenly an Israeli army tank comes barreling through their midsts, 55 tons of steel with machineguns and a three-inch cannon, and sends the boys scattering.  But only far enough to get out of its way and pick up more rocks to throw at it.

It’s peaceful demonstration turned to rioting turned to organized rioting, just like I told you was going to happen in the last book.

The movie was titled The Fourth World War as a multiple-entendre.  What we consider Third-World countries generally refers to counties that don’t have Western (First-World) or Communist (Second-World) economies for any of a number of reasons.  You could call countries that are being actively enslaved by Capitalists Fourth-World countries, which is a term I thought of years ago.

But the term The Fourth World War came most directly from something Albert Einstein said after the nuclear arms race began:  “I have no idea what they’ll fight the Third World War with, but I do know what they’ll fight the Fourth World War with—sticks and stones.”

It could be argued that the Third World War was fought with nuclear weapons, just not nuclear weapons that were ever used in combat.   You could say that the Third World War—more commonly known as the Cold War—was an economic war fought with nuclear weapons, with both sides racing to build them until the Soviet Union went bankrupt.  And that’s when globalization began…

With so many movements around the world that have broken down into violence to some degree or another, you can just imagine how many there are that haven’t yet broken down into violence.  Dr. McNally talks about a lot of movements like these that are happening in various places.  You can find out more about them in his book.  I’m devoting this book to showing how a peaceful revolution could be waged anywhere people have free speech—and how the Capitalists are probably going to turn it violent anyway by refusing to admit they’ve lost and driving people to desperation.

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A lot of progressive activists I meet wrinkle their noses and gag and get sick to their stomachs whenever I start talking about how science and logic can—and must—be applied to humanity.  But considering that I’m trying to agree with you and help you succeed at your own goals, I can’t help but think that maybe you don’t understand what the words science and logic actually mean, or why the things they refer to are relevant to your goals.

The word logic was probably introduced to our collective vocabulary by Mr. Spock more than by anything else.  He would say things like, “Captain, logic dictates that you should exercise caution when making out with green alien women,” and “Captain, arming our photon torpedoes while surrounded by five Klingon battle cruisers would be highly illogical.”

So based on the way Mr. Spock used the word logic, what does it mean?

If you didn’t already know the definition, but you were logically minded enough, you could deduce that out of all the possible meanings it had each time he used the word, there was one meaning that was always a constant.  But most people aren’t that logically minded.

You’re trying to figure out what a word means based on how a person is using it.  And remember, 80% of interpersonal communication is conducted emotionally.  It seems awfully ironic that I should say that 80% of interpersonal communication is conducted emotionally when I’m talking about a Vulcan who has learned to control his emotions and act upon logic exclusively, doesn’t it?  Well there’s the catch…

The fact that 80% of interpersonal communication is conducted emotionally means that 80% of interpersonal communication would have no effect on Vulcans.  But Vulcans can’t possibly talk without talking in a certain tone of voice.  Since 80% of interpersonal communication is conducted emotionally, you naturally interpret 80% of interpersonal communication emotionally, even when it’s a Vulcan talking.

So now the question is:  How did you perceive Mr. Spock to be communicating emotionally whenever he used the world logic?   Whenever he was talking about logic, he was always talking about something that was very important to him, and he always talked about it in a calm, steady voice that made it seem that this thing he was talking about made the world make sense to him.

Everything Mr. Spock ever said he said in a calm steady voice as though the whole world made sense to him.  That is, except maybe when the ship was under attack and half the bridge was blowing up and he had to yell to make himself heard over the noise.  Well he always talked as though the whole world made sense because he always perceived the world in terms of logic. He was the perfect scientist.  He always knew what he knew about the situation, and he knew the limits to his knowledge of the situation.  He always talked as though the whole world made sense to him because the whole world did make sense to him.  That includes knowing that there were some things he didn’t know, so he couldn’t explain or anticipate them.

When he talked about logic in the way he talked about it, based on your emotional interpretation of the way he talked, it seemed to mean that the word logic meant “whatever makes sense to Mr. Spock.”  Then if you heard anyone else use the word logic, it would seem to mean that the person was talking like Mr. Spock to try to make you think they were Mr. Spock—or at least, to try to get you to react to them as though they were Mr. Spock.  Of course, you could tell that they were not Mr. Spock, so that reduced your interpretation of the word to “whatever seems to make sense to this person”.  Then parents of Star Trek fans would try to use the word on their kids in order to try to make themselves sound intelligent and sound like role models their kids would look up to, and say things like, “But having a messy room isn’t logical,” or whatever.  So now your interpretation of the word has been corrupted to the point that you think it means “someone’s opinion about something”.  Hence the argument I hear all the time about “Well evolution seems logical to you…”

A jigsaw puzzle is a logic puzzle. If a piece fits in one place, then it doesn’t fit in any other place.  If a piece fits in one place, then no other piece fits in that place.  If a piece has a certain color on it, then it could fit in some parts of the puzzle but not in other parts.  If the piece has a second color on it, then it can only fit into a part of the puzzle that has both of those colors in it.  If the piece is a certain shape it can attach to some pieces but not to other pieces.  And so on.
The whole world is a giant puzzle, in which all the pieces fit together in some way or another.  If A then B.  If B then C.  If C and D then E.  If E but not F then G.  If G and H but not I then J.  And so on.

Logic is the study of systems of cause and effect.  If you have some of the pieces to work with, then you can try to figure out what the other pieces are and how they fit together.  If you use what you know about a system to develop an understanding of that system, then you necessarily develop your own predictions of what results that chain of cause and effect will produce.  The proof of whether you were right or not will be whether the effects you predicted come about.  If they do, that supports the possibility that you were right.  If they don’t, that proves that you were wrong.

Science is the application of logic to the physical universe.  The universe works in a certain way, and all the pieces of the universe fit together in a certain way.  The universe works in the way that it does because of the way the pieces of the universe interact with each other.  So just as with any other logic puzzle, if you can find some of the pieces, you can try to fit them together to figure out what the other pieces are and how they fit together.  Then the proof of whether you were right or not will be whether or not the effects that you predicted come about.  If they don’t, then your logic is proven to be faulty.  If they do, then your logic is supported.  It isn’t guaranteed, because you might’ve made a mistake but got lucky and came up with an effect that happened anyway, although not for the reason you thought it would.  But if your logic continues to yield accurate predictions consistently over numerous tests, then that proves that your logic is correct.  (Or at least, it does in layman’s terms.  In science, technically there are no truths, only discoveries that haven’t been disproven yet.)

So now the big question people always ask is:  But why is it necessary to make accurate predictions about other people?  Why can’t we just deal with each other and see what happens and let everyone figure it out on their own?

Well to answer the second question first, we can’t just deal with each other and see what happens and let everyone figure it out on their own because the world is not governed by political correctness, the world is governed by survival of the fittest.  Making accurate predictions about what other people are going to do is not only necessary it is so critical that you do it all the time without even realizing it.  Every single time you see another person, subconsciously you ask:  Based on everything you know about that person, are they going to try to kill you?

Once upon a time, some people didn’t ask that question, and now they’re all dead.  We aren’t descended from those people; we’re descended from the other people.

Familiarity breeds amicability.  You can see this happening whenever you see the same people on a regular basis, even if you never interact with each other.  The more times you see each other without interacting, the better you feel like you know them and the more you feel like you can trust them anyway.  If either one of you started talking to the other one day, the two of you would feel like you knew each other in a way, even though you’d never talked to each other before and knew virtually nothing about each other.

I ride the same bus to my job at the same time every morning.  On my bus there’s the kid in the red sweatshirt who listens to his headphones all the time, there’s the university chick who reads books about herbology, and there’s the guy with the facial piercings who works in the laundry room of the hospital.  After 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 times or whatever of riding the same bus, those all seem like people I know, even though I don’t know them.

When I was about to move out of my last apartment and didn’t think I’d be riding that bus anymore, one morning I said to the guy with the facial piercings, “I’m curious—you dress like you work at a hospital, but what kind of a job do they let you have at a hospital with all those facial piercings?”  He said he worked in the laundry room.

As it turns out, I still take that same bus partway to work in the morning.  Now whenever I see the guy with the facial piercings, we say hi to each other.  But the familiarity in our voices is noticeably greater than what you would expect it to be after our having had one four-sentence conversation or whatever it was.  The difference is that we had also seen each other about a hundred times before that or something, and not once did either of us try to kill the other—or mug each other, or beat each other up, or anything of the sort.  That’s a pretty important thing to know about each other.  Hence the increased familiarity with which we greet each other now.

This phenomenon was studied officially by psychologists sometime after World War II.  Out in those fake countryside Disneyland suburbs, a cheap way to the make the houses look different from each other is to use identical blueprints but reverse them from one house to the next, so that each house is a mirror image of the house beside it.  (That’s how the house I grew up in in Maine was built—and so were the three houses around it.)  The result is the driveway of one house is adjacent to the driveway of the house beside it, and so are the side doors of the houses.  As a result of that, people with adjacent driveways would see each other a lot more often than either of them would see their next-door neighbors to the other sides.  The result of that was that people with adjacent driveways would talk to each other more, be friends with each other more often, watch football and drink beer together more often, borrow each other’s drills and lawnmowers more often, help each other rake their leaves more often, or even just feel like they knew each other better even if all they did was wave to each other when they both came out of the house to go to work at the same time every morning.  People could’ve been doing all of those things with their neighbors who lived to the other side of them, but they weren’t doing those things nearly as much.  So why would the simple act of seeing each other more often lead to all of that?

Simply put, if you’ve seen a person 100 times and all 100 of those encounters passed by without the other person doing anything harmful to you, that’s a much bigger, much more important, and much more useful piece of information that you have to work with than if you had only seen the person 20 times, 5 times, once, or never.  If you’ve seen one stranger 100 times before and another stranger you’ve never seen before, you have a lot more information about the first to use to predict what he might do this time around than you have for the other person.

The next question people always ask is:  But why does it have to be a mathematical prediction?  Why can’t we just feel it intuitively or something?

All predictions are mathematical predictions. The only difference is that I’m consciously aware of that and you’re not.  Any attempt by you to figure out what the other person is going to do is a mathematical prediction because you are attempting to predict the effect that person’s presence is going to have on your ability to preserve the survival of your DNA by the most effective  means perceivable.   If the presence of the other person reduces the number of your children that are going to grow up to have children of their own, that’s something really important that you need to know.  And so it goes for every other evolutionary motivation and the effects it will have on the survival of your DNA.

All of evolution is governed by statistics.  Every single one of your ancestors, and mine, and every single ancestor of everyone else in the world, for the past 7,000,000 years, had the brain power to make enough accurate predictions to have at least one child who grew up to have children of their own.   And no amount of touchy-feely political correctness on your part is going to change that.
All of evolution, and all of life, is a gamble.  We are all alive right now because all of our ancestors played the odds, placed their bets, and won.

Then there’s the argument about, “But all reality is subjective.  Why do you believe you can make mathematical predictions about other people’s behavior?”

Science, as logic applied to the universe, depends on five basic things:  observability, universality, self-consistency, reproducibility, and debatability.

A lot of bleeding heart liberals have a real problem with this idea, but science is an extreme form of democracy.  Science is a process by which people figure out how the universe works through observation and rational discussion. The progress of science depends on people having access to information and education, and on their being allowed to talk to each other, ask questions, find answers, and disagree with each other.

It is true that everyone’s perceptions of reality are subjective, but if you with your amateur perspective on science know that, why do you believe that people who devote their careers to science haven’t thought of that too, and figured out a way around the problem?  Pure conceit on your part, perhaps?

By requiring that scientific discoveries be observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable, scientists have established a process of triangulating from their subjective perceptions to see if they all perceive the same things.

Observability means that any scientific discovery begins with evidence that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched by anyone.  The only thing direct observation proves is whatever was directly observed.  If you start reading meaning into the things you observe, you’re no longer talking about observability.

Universality means that any pattern of cause and effect that you identify must always happen under all conditions.  If you identify a pattern of cause and effect that only happens under some conditions, you’ve only identified part of a pattern of cause and effect.  You still haven’t identified why it doesn’t happen under some circumstances.  Evolution is a universal pattern because evolution is always the adaptation to environmental pressures.  Thermodynamics is a universal pattern because matter and energy always move from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration more than they move from areas of low concentration to areas of high concentration.  The Periodic Table of the Elements is a universal pattern that relates the number of protons atoms have to their chemical properties.  Friction always produces heat.  Gravity always attracts matter to other matter.  Electricity is always caused by the flow of electrons.  And so on.

Self-consistency means that all the related evidence has to fit together into a pattern of cause and effect.  If making your pattern of cause and effect work depends on ignoring some of the evidence, your discovery isn’t science.  You’re just making stuff up.

Reproducibility means that other people have to be able to use your pattern of cause and effect to produce accurate results.  If you discover a pattern of cause and effect that only works when you use it, again you’re just making stuff up.

Debatability means other people being allowed to look at the evidence, ask questions, find answers, and try different patterns of cause and effect.  If your discovery depends on preventing anyone from doing any of those things, your discovery isn’t science, it’s dogma.

A lot of bleeding heart liberals believe that controlling the way people are allowed to think isn’t democracy.  But that isn’t true.  We all live in the same universe, and this process of triangulation among subjective perceptions to discover objective patterns of cause and effect for how the universe works has proven to be a successful strategy for outmaneuvering our subjectivity.  It doesn’t work that way because anyone decided it works that way; it works that way because that has proven to be an effective strategy for outsmarting the discrepancy between objectivity and subjectivity.

The alternative is for people to respect each other’s beliefs, like bleeding heart liberals always say people have to do.  But that is the real antithesis of democracy.  When you say that people have to respect other people’s beliefs, you’re attempting to force them to do what you want them to do.  And once you force people to respect other people’s beliefs, what happens then?  Respecting someone else’s beliefs means not telling someone else that they’re wrong.  But once you do that, you’ve imposed limits on how much people are allowed to debate.  But conditional free speech is not free speech.  If you believe that people have to respect each other’s beliefs, and you believe that anyone who disagrees with you is evil, you don’t believe in free speech, and therefore, you don’t believe in democracy.  You believe in mental Communism, because you’re trying to maintain social stability by forcing everyone to live at equally low intellectual levels.

It is true that people who are not scientists are capable of making objective discoveries.  It is also true that people who do make new objective discoveries always face an uphill battle for acceptance of their discoveries among scientists.  The Niesen approach to science is the most controversial of all, because working from the bottom up has been done to death.  Instead, we learn non-scientific systems of thought well enough to recognize patterns of cause and effect that are observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable.  That doesn’t prove that the people discovered what they thought they discovered, but it does prove that they’d discovered something.  Then all there is left to do is to figure out what they did discover.  Then we put all those discoveries together, and we end up discovering things that traditional scientists assumed were completely impossible to discover.  I call that folk-science.  It hasn’t exactly gained a whole lot of acceptance among the scientific community, for a number of reasons.  One is that basically nobody possesses the skills and abilities necessary to replicate my work.  Another is because a lot of professional scientists with big-time academic credentials would have to admit that a stupid college drop-out figured out a new approach to science that they didn’t and that I made a lot of important discoveries with it that they assumed were impossible.

Anyway…

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If you’ve read this far into my books, you must be serious about wanting to save the world.  I ended my last book by showing you how and why I’m in a race to take over the world before the Capitalist imperialists and Christian fundamentalists do it, and at the same time I’m in a race to start a global revolution, before someone like Timothy McVeigh starts it his way.  So I guess I have to take a break from being a joker for a while and be a drill sergeant joker instead.

If you are a progressive activist, by definition you are outnumbered and outgunned.  Your political ideology, whatever it is, is in the minority, and your opponents have a lot more resources to work with than you do.  No amount of passion or devotion on your part can save you.  If the best idea you can come up with is that people should do what you say because you feel that you’re right, you’re trying to win a battle of opinions against a far more powerful foe.  And you will lose.
If you want to defeat your enemies, you have only one choice:  You have to outsmart them.  They are already winning the battle of opinions, and they will continue to win the battle of opinions simply because they possess superior numbers and resources.  A battle of opinions can only be won by might-makes-right.  They have all the might on their side, and you don’t.  So you have to think of something else.

Your enemy’s strategy leaves him vulnerable at two points:  his numbers and his opinions.  Practically any conflict that has ever been won has been won because the victors attacked their enemies at their most vulnerable points, not their least vulnerable points.  For any side who seemed to be overwhelmingly more powerful than their opponents, their attackers had to get very creative in identifying vulnerabilities.  The North Vietnamese beat the Americans by sending lots of badly wounded and emotionally traumatized soldiers back to America.  The Americans beat the British in the American Revolution by learning strategies and tactics from Native Americans, who the British assumed were just lowly savages.  In both cases, the more-powerful-seeming side accused the other side of not fighting fair, but in both cases, the more-powerful-seeming side’s concept of the fair way to fight was the way they were prepared to fight and the way that would guarantee they would win.  But as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.  In spite of the fact that they didn’t believe their opponents fought fair, their opponents still won, which was the ultimate goals of fighting the war in the first place.

So if you intend to win, you will do it by attacking your enemy at his most vulnerable points.  You can plan on your enemy accusing you of not fighting fair.  But that also might require you to fight in a way that you don’t currently consider to be fair.  Your enemies had a strong influence on your cultural values and your childhood development, after all.

Attacking your enemy’s opinions is easy.  I’ve already given you two books about that.  Your enemy believes—and feels—that one thing is true about the world, but all the evidence indicates that something else is true about the world.  In the first two books, for every point that I made I gave you examples of evidence you can point to in everyday life.  As much as possible, I’ve used a philosophical approach to that, since everyone in the world is philosopher—because everyone tries to make sense of the world somehow.  But as I showed you in the introduction to the second book, every philosophical point that I raise is directly transferable to science.  That means that you can get any scientist to validate every philosophical point that I’ve made.  (Or at least, any scientist who has a broad enough background to keep up with my approach and sufficient ability to keep up with my level of intellect, which admittedly many people can’t.)  As long as you know the right questions to ask, the right way to ask them, the right people to ask them to, and the right places to look for answers on your own, you or anyone else can replicate all of my work on your own.  So by the end of the last book, I rendered your enemy’s opinions about human behavior and the global environment completely obsolete.

There is one catch to doing this, which is that your own opinions about some things probably contradict the evidence also.  Religious and cultural perspectives on the world are one reason for this I’ve showed you, so are gender differences, and so are emotionally unhealthy childhoods. As I’ll show you later in this chapter, animal rights activists are falling into that trap also.  I can’t undo your childhood development any more than you can undo your enemy’s childhood development, so whatever emotional attachments you’ve made to whatever ideas you’ve made them to are your business.  All I can say to that is:  look at what the evidence says, and then move things around in your brain however you need to move them to make you believe it.

I know that sounds awfully totalitarian of me, but the difference between me and Chairman Mao or whoever is that for every single thing I ever tell you I can hold evidence up in front of your face, and I can show you how all those pieces of evidence interact with each other to produce a certain result.  If you can look at all the evidence and the results it produces and still insist that the process of cause and effect I’ve shown you can’t possibly happen, that ought to be your first clue that your perception of the world is fundamentally flawed.  Well that’s exactly the problem your enemy has, and that’s exactly why he’s causing the problems in the world that have made him your enemy.  So if you can’t overcome that problem within your own life, don’t expect to be able to overcome it in your enemy’s life.

Attacking your enemy’s opinions all by itself still isn’t sufficient, however, because as long as a majority of people feel like your enemy is right in spite of any amount of evidence you show them, your enemy still has everything he needs to win by might-makes-right—no matter how good you are at proving that he’s wrong.

To defeat your enemy, you must eliminate his numbers and boost your own.  To do that, you must address the fundamental question of why your enemy has more numbers than you—in spite of the fact that his opinion about how the world works is fundamentally flawed.

Your enemies are able to function effectively as a political unit because they share a unifying ideology.  Their political system has a well-defined foundation.  If you are a progressive activist, it’s a pretty safe bet that you have realized that the foundation of their political system doesn’t work.  But there are a lot of reasons people can decide that.  Leaving that political system and its foundation behind does not automatically move you to another category.  Hence the fundamental problem the general progressive activist movement is faced with:  lots of people agreeing that the old way doesn’t work, but not being able to agree on what needs to be changed, and therefore not being able to function as an effective political unit themselves.

To solve that problem, you must develop a unifying ideology of your own.  Your only other choice is defeat.  Defining that unifying ideology has been my goal from the very beginning.

Your enemies are unified by their ideology for three main reasons.  First, it serves as a common point of reference to use among them in interacting with each other and with the rest of the world.  Second, it makes their lives feel complete.  Third, it has proven effective for uniting them to work toward their common interests.

As I said at the end of the last book, a political ideology, or any other ideology that serves as the foundation for a civilization, is an attempt at a scientific theory, to answer the age-old question people have always faced:  “Based on what we know about the world, if we do this, what will happen?”

A common point of reference is critical for a foundation for a civilization or any other type of political system, because everyone needs to be able to anticipate what everyone else is going to do.  Without that, you have social instability and internal conflict.  Then a lot of people stop cooperating with your political system and try to figure out some other way to get the things they need.

On an evolutionary scale, if people can’t predict what other people are going to do, they can’t anticipate the best way to expend their own energy and resources to preserve the survival of their DNA as effectively as possible.  If you can’t anticipate what another person is doing, you can’t anticipate whether it’s going to benefit you or harm you, so you can’t anticipate what course of action on your own part will produce the most favorable results.  Some people are willing to take their chances and trust that everything will turn out all right, but no majority of people would ever agree to a political system where they can’t anticipate each other’s actions.

In order for an ideology to serve as the foundation of a civilization, it must answer every single question anyone has ever asked about life.  This is a direct product of human evolution also.  Since people have the ability to wonder why the world works the way it does, they have ability to wonder that about every single thing in the entire world.  Therefore, an ideology that doesn’t explain every single thing in the entire world can’t serve as the foundation for a civilization, or any other political system, because no majority of people will ever feel that the ideology is complete.  If your ideology isn’t complete, they’ll find an ideology that is complete and use that instead.

To this point, science has been at a disadvantage to religion in explaining every single thing in the entire world, which is why it hasn’t been able to compete as an ideology.  To the majority of people, feeling like the world makes sense is a better choice than admitting there are some things they just don’t understand.  Once again, on an evolutionary scale, the best way to survive and reproduce is by being able to predict the results of any decision you make.  As I’ve said before, two points define a line and all the other points along that line.  If you can figure out how the past created the present, then you can predict how that chain of events will continue to shape events into the future.  Every ideology is an attempt at a scientific theory, but traditionally, people have compiled what they did know about how the past created the present, and then just made stuff up to fill in the gaps.  Here comes the magic word again.  The most effective ideological foundation for a civilization is one that will accurately predict the results of any course of action your people take.  But barring that, the next best thing is an ideology your people perceive to adequately predict the results of their actions.   It won’t adequately predict the results of your people’s courses of action, so sooner or later it’s destined to break down.  But in the meantime that perception of adequately predicting the outcome of their actions gives you social stability.  And once again, if your ideology isn’t capable of producing social stability, your people will find an ideology that does give them social stability—even if only temporarily.

This is why I have devoted over 800,000 words so far to showing how much of the world is understood scientifically, and to answering every question I’ve ever heard anyone ask about life.  There are many ideologies—and especially among progressive activists—that comply with the evidence we have (meaning science) for the most part, and which can be adapted easily to incorporate the rest of the evidence, in order to create an ideology that can accurately predict the results of people’s actions, and thereby serve as the foundation for a peaceful and sustainable global community.

If you can’t adapt your own ideology to compliance with scientific evidence, then your ideology will not yield accurate predictions.  That will be all the proof your enemy needs to convince the public that your ideology doesn’t work.  And for anyone who’s undecided, if they can already see that your ideology doesn’t work any better than the one they’re using now, why should they bother trading their old ideology for your new ideology?

Unless you know more about science than I do, you have to face the fact that whatever ideology you’re using is flawed.  Even if you do succeed at replacing your enemy’s old ideology with your new ideology, you’re going to fall into the same trap your enemy has.  You ideology will not yield accurate predictions, it will cause unexpected problems, and it will not maintain social stability.  In the end, the only way you could get people to continue cooperating with your ideology would be by force, which is exactly what your enemy is doing right now.  So if you can’t adapt your own ideology to scientific compliance, don’t expect to be able to adapt your enemy’s ideology to scientific compliance either.

Your enemy is able to maintain his advantage in numbers because his ideology has seemed to a lot of people to successfully maintain social stability and predict the outcomes of their actions, so a lot of people keep using that ideology.  Here is where you target his opinions.  If your ideology is scientifically compliant and your enemy’s isn’t, you can show people why his ideology doesn’t work and yours does.  If you’re good enough (which not everyone is, but some people are), you can systematically destroy any argument he puts forth.  Whatever ideology he’s using, there’s some evidence out there somewhere that it can’t explain.  Your enemy’s only solution to making his civilization function is to try to force whoever is suffering the unexpected consequences of his actions to continue to cooperate with his civilization.

The future of our world has come down to one giant chemical reaction.  The one choice we have left is whether we’re going to make that chemical reaction work in a way that can keep everyone alive, or we’re going to make it work in a way that can’t keep everyone alive.  If your enemy is using a flawed ideology, he can’t possibly make accurate predictions about the results of his actions, which means he can’t possibly make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep everyone alive.  Whether you do this intentionally or not, if you hold evidence up in front of your enemy’s face and show him why his ideology doesn’t work, you’re showing him part of the giant chemical reaction.  And you’re showing him why you understand it better than he does.

Every person and group of people who are being forced to endure the inaccurate predictions of your enemy’s political ideology is a piece of their civilization that’s crumbling away.  An ideology that can solve those people’s problems without creating new problems for someone else is a wedge that you can use to break those people away from your enemy’s political system.

This is also known as “divide and conquer”.  Your enemy began that division when he chose to try to force people to cooperate with his faulty ideology.  You just finished the job.

Next, your will learn how to put forth all of your arguments strictly in human terms.  However important you feel the rest of the world is is your opinion.   It’s fine to believe that other things in the world are more important than people, but that alone will not suffice.  People are inherently self-interested.  The most fundamental unit of human behavior is self-interest, which means that all human behavior revolves around self-interest.  That includes your own.  Unlike most people, you correctly perceive that there are other things in the world that are more important than people, but unless you can make all of your arguments in human terms, you can’t expect to make your positions personally meaningful to a majority of people.  If you can’t make your arguments personally meaningful to a majority of people, you will be defeated.

All the main points that are being put forth by progressive activists can be made in strictly human terms.  Some smaller parts of those arguments can’t be made in strictly human terms.  Some of those arguments simply are not valid, while most of them will always remain gray areas that can’t be proven conclusively one way or the other.  If you stop defending your positions on gray areas, your enemies will win automatically, even though their positions aren’t any more conclusive than yours.  But on these gray areas your own victory will never be possible, so don’t expect it to be.

You’ll see examples of all three of these throughout the book.  One example of an argument that can be made in strictly human terms is the threat posed by the extinction of species.  Every species in the world took thousands of years to evolve, at the very least.  Every species plays a critical role in its environment, and every natural environment in the world has been evolving through the collective input of all the species in it for thousands of years at the very least.  When people drive a species to extinction, the environment of that species is changed forever.  Humans can’t possibly recreate that species, they can’t possibly undo the effects that the loss of the species has had on its environments, and they can’t expect the environment to create a replacement for that species within any period of time that will be relevant to us.

An example of that is the way global warming is changing the migratory patterns of some birds.  If birds fly north when the air temperature reaches a certain point, and that point moves to sometime earlier in the spring, and the birds depend on a certain species of insect having mated by that point, but the mating habits of those insects is controlled by the length of daylight, global warming will change the temperature, and thereby change the migration pattern of the birds, but it won’t affect the daylight cycles, and therefore won’t change the mating cycle of the insects.  The birds will arrive at the destination of their migration before the insects have mated, and therefore the food they depend on won’t be there.  So the birds will starve.  That will cause further ripple effects that will further break down the natural cycles that bird’s environment depends upon.  If the insects then mate on schedule and their population size isn’t controlled by the birds anymore, and the insects feed on the leaves of a certain tree, that greatly increased number of insects is going to eat a greatly-increased number of leaves, which could potentially kill off that species of tree in the area.  That would throw off the natural cycles of every other animal in the environment that depended on that tree.  And so on. The bird’s environment is far more complicated than anything humans are capable of creating, and the loss of the bird would have irreversible effects on the environment.  Conceivably, the loss of that bird could kill an entire forest.  Therefore, the value of that bird can’t possibly be measured in money, because money can’t adequately measure the impact that the loss of the bird will have on the world, and consequently on the environment that people depend upon.

An example of an argument that simply isn’t valid is the argument that people should stop using draft animals now that they can plow fields with tractors.  A tractor depends on fossil fuels.  Mining and burning those fossil fuels destroys environments, which harms more animals and harms them far more greatly than using draft animals to plow fields.

An example of an argument that spans a gray area is the argument that people should stop eating meat because eating meat is animal cruelty.  Humans are predators.   We have always eaten meat.  It is true that we have the intellect to use to stop eating meat, but it is also true that expecting people to stop eating meat simply out of compassion for animals contradicts a fundamental law of our evolution.  Therefore, it is inconceivable that any majority of people will ever agree to stop eating meat simply out of compassion.  There are valid arguments that can be made on both sides, and neither set of arguments conclusively proves or disproves that eating meat is fundamentally wrong.  However, by putting forth all of the arguments on both sides, humans’ relationship to other animals can be defined as well as possible, which eliminates some types of interactions between people and animals on both sides, but not all of them on either one side.  By focusing on relationships between people and animals that are possible within the physical limitations of the world, and eliminating potential relationships that aren’t physically possible to maintain, we can eliminate a lot of useless debate and focus on debate that actually serves some purpose.  That useful debate will never be won by either side, but at least it will define what the gray area is and keep people (some people, at least) examining their relationships with other animals, in order to best redefine their relationships with other animals as necessary to meet the changing situation of the world.

Next, you will measure your success according to the degree to which you help make the chemical reaction of environment keep everyone alive.  The alternative to making the chemical reaction of the environment keep everyone alive is to make it not keep everyone alive.  This is a strictly human goal.  Making the chemical reaction of the global environment keep everyone alive will necessarily include protecting the environment and will leave room for debating other gray areas.  However, if you choose not to make the chemical reaction of the environment keep everyone alive, then the success of your political goals depends on killing people.   Your enemies are already making this choice.  If you are not making the opposite choice, then your revolution serves no practical purpose, so don’t expect any majority of people to go to the trouble of supporting it.

Whatever ideology you’re using now, you are virtually guaranteed to define your sense of success in terms that won’t make the chemical reaction of the global environment keep everyone alive.  That’s not to say that you don’t want to keep everyone alive, but that is to say that your ideology is founded on principles that are scientifically invalid.  The success of your ideology as you currently define it would not result in a chemical reaction of the global environment that could keep everyone alive.

For example, a lot of activists I know try to use free will as the fundamental unit of human behavior.  That belief is false.  Therefore any political ideology founded on that belief will not yield accurate predictions, and therefore is useless in making the chemical reaction of the global environment keep everyone alive.  The fundamental unit of human behavior is the individual’s perception of the effective preservation of his DNA.  People will use their free will or surrender their free will depending on whichever they perceive to offer them the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA.  And political ideology that’s founded on the simplistic assumption that free will is inherently good and the absence of free will is inherently bad will not yield accurate predictions of human behavior, and therefore is useless in developing effective political revolutionary strategy.

If you cling to the belief that your own ideology is right and attempt to apply science selectively to advance your current political goals, then your goal obviously is not to develop political ideology that can succeed within the physical limitations of the world.  That renders you useless to the revolution.  It also raises the question:  If your goal is not to mount a revolution whose success is physically possible, what exactly is your goal?

I meet a lot of activists who tell me that they don’t believe that science can work as well as I claim it does because they feel this or they feel that.  Your enemies are already trying to force the world’s chains of cause and effect to cooperate with their feelings of how the world should work, and all they have to show for it is a lot of inaccurate predictions and a world full of unexpected problems that are spiraling out of control.  Once again, if your goal is not the opposite of that, your revolution serves no practical purpose.

For you or your enemy to refuse to adapt your subjective perception of the world to account for all observable evidence is nothing but childishness.  If your ability to perceive the world is clouded by your emotions, you will learn to apply your emotional aikido to your life to any extent necessary to make the problem go away.  Your enemy’s emotionally clouded perception of the world and his childish stubbornness have resulted in his faulty ideology, and his fault ideology is his greatest weakness.  For you to attack your enemy’s greatest weakness will require you to do whatever it takes to break yourself free from an emotionally clouded perception of the world, childish stubbornness, and faulty ideology.  If you choose not to do all of those things, you choose to be defeated.

You will learn to bark orders, and you will learn to accept barked orders.  Emotional communication consumes time and energy.  The enemy is trying to kill you as efficiently as possible.  When you are engaging the enemy in battle, when you are preparing to engage the enemy in battle, and when the enemy is posing a threat to you, time and energy are precious.  If you can see with your eyes that a comrade is taking action to meet the enemy’s threat or achieve any related goal, and he starts talking in very direct terms, if you start diverting time and energy away from the mission to say things like, “I don’t appreciate it when you talk to me like that; it makes me uncomfortable,” then succeeding at the mission is obviously not your highest priority.  If succeeding at the mission is not your highest priority, then don’t be surprised if you fail.

Next, you will learn to fight like men.  I mean that in the evolutionary sense.  Your enemies already know how to fight like men, which is why they fight so effectively.  Men fight by developing a working understanding of the situation, defining their goals, and then acting decisively to achieve them.  Men don’t fight by trying to hug and kiss their problems out of existence, or understanding their enemies to death, or emotionally sympathizing with their enemies.  Men fight by doing whatever it takes to win.

This is another example of a way that your enemy’s success is only made possible through his overwhelming numbers and material resources, and it illustrates another weakness for you to attack.  All struggles among groups of people are political struggles.  Men fight peaceful political struggles the same way they fight wars, and they win for the same reasons—because they develop working understanding of the situation, they define their goals, and they act decisively to achieve their goals.  Your enemy’s weakness in this case is the fact that his working understanding of the situation is founded on ancient traditional beliefs, so his working understanding of the situation does not work as well as yours.  Hence the reason his political ideology makes inaccurate predictions and creates unexpected problems.  He defines his goals and takes decisive action to achieve them, but with an incomplete working understanding of the situation, the results he achieves through his decisive action are never quite what he intended them to be and always create unexpected problems in the long run.

If you solve that root problem by developing a superior understanding of the situation, defining your goals, and then taking decisive action to achieve your goals, your superior understanding of the situation will produce superior results.  In the same way, a Japanese peasant with a simple farming tool is no match for a heavily armed samurai, but a Japanese peasant who knows how to use a simple farming tool to block a samurai’s sword, attack the weakest points in his armor, and turn the samurai’s own force against him is a match for a samurai.  As progressive activists, you are outnumbered and outgunned, so to make up for that you will learn to fight more effectively than your enemies.

When you learn to fight like men, you will learn not to compromise with your enemy.  If your enemy is willing to abandon his position completely, adapt his political ideology to full compliance with science, and join in your struggle to make the chemical reaction of the global environment keep everyone alive, he is welcome to do so.  Until that time, he is still pursuing a course of action that won’t make the chemical reaction of the global environment keep everyone alive, which means that his political system still depends on other people’s deaths to make it succeed.  If so, the problem he is creating has yet not been solved, and the conflict between his goals and yours has not yet been resolved, so he is still your enemy.  You will not compromise on your own goals to win temporary victories.  The laws of physics that govern the chemical reaction of the global environment are unforgiving, merciless, and remorseless, so in order to adequately represent the laws that you serve, you will learn to be so also.  If you choose to stop short of making the chemical reaction of the global environment keep everyone alive, then you choose to be held accountable for your failure by the chemical reaction of the global environment itself.  If you choose to stop short of achieving your goal and to call that success, then you choose to depend on other people dying to make your political system succeed.  Once again, if you make this choice, then you choose to make your revolution serve no practical purpose.

Finally, in learning to fight like men, you will learn to eliminate the threat before the threat eliminates you, in whatever sense that applies to your situation.  Your enemies will do the same to you.  Your enemies have different goals than you do, and they have different resources to work with to achieve their goals, so how you eliminate the threat before the threat eliminates you will be different, but you will do it.

Next, you will learn to think objectively.  I have to devote the entire Atheism chapter to showing you what that means and how it’s done.  But for now, here’s a short and practical version.

If you let yourself be governed by your emotions, and you expect that to be sufficient for engaging your enemy, you are walking into a trap.  Your emotional state alters your perception of the world by altering your information and anti-information packages.  This necessarily makes certain courses of action seem like good ideas to you, and shuts other options out of your perception.  Your enemy will use this against you if you give him the opportunity.  He is already using it against you right now.  He probably has been using it against you your entire life.  This is psychological warfare, we are fighting in self-defense, and our enemies have a big head start over us.

The best practical example of this I’ve seen that I can think of is in the way a friend of mine raises his kids.  My friend served in the army, and he uses a lot of training techniques he learned in boot camp on his kids.  He’s not training his kids to be highly efficient killing machines, which is what he learned in boot camp (and everyone else learns), he’s raising his kids to be healthy adults who can participate in the adult world, so he’s applying the same techniques to a different situation.

One evening I was over at his apartment.  His kids had been acting up all day and hadn’t done their chores.  So finally he marched them out to the kitchen and told them in very direct and unyielding terms to get the dishes washed.   One of his kids started to cry.  So my friend told him, “Check yourself.  Is crying going to help you get the dishes washed?”  That might seem uncompassionate to a lot of progressively minded people, but my friend contained the situation.  He pulled his son’s perception of the world out of his saddened emotional state and focused it on the situation at hand.  His kid’s goal in starting to cry was to use emotional communication to appeal to my friend’s reproductive and social instincts and get him to take pity on him for not having done what needed to be done.  And that was not a solution to the problem at hand—namely, that the dishes were still dirty.

My friend then went on to explain, still directly, but more compassionately now, that he wasn’t simply trying to get them to wash the dishes, it was also his responsibility as their parent to teach them how to work to do the things they needed to get done, just like he and their mother (his wife) did.

You get similar training in aviation, for dealing with hazardous personal attitudes.  If you get a certain attitude, it affects your perception of the situation, and that creates information and anti-information packages in your mind that make certain courses of action seem like good ideas and shuts other choices out of your consciousness.  The five hazardous attitudes that have been identified are:  anti-authority, impulsivity, invulnerability, macho, and resignation.

The trick is:  You have to suffer from four of those hazardous attitudes to want to be a pilot in the first place!   Anti-authority to be so determined to find a loophole in the Law of Gravity (which is what aviation is), invulnerability to think you can get away with it, macho to think you’re good enough to do it, and impulsivity to try doing it before you come to your senses and change your mind.

Instructors solve this problem by training their students to fly a certain way.  Then they train you to crosscheck between the way you’ve been trained to fly and the way you are flying.  If you aren’t flying the way you’ve been trained to fly, then you have to ask yourself why you feel like flying the way you are flying seems like a good idea.  Once you identify the hazardous attitude you’re being affected by, you recall to your consciousness the antidote to that hazardous attitude—that is, the argument against flying that way, which you’ve been taught over the course of your training.  Once you remember why flying the way you are flying is dangerous, you remember what you’re supposed to do differently in order to fly safely.

In writing these books I’ve tried to apply the same technique to everything that can ever happen in life. By telling you about all these different sensory illusions that affect people, I’ve showed you why they seem like good ideas, why they don’t work after all, and how to think your way out of them.

So if you’re fighting for a cause and you aren’t winning, check yourself.  Why do you feel that what you’re doing is supposed to work?  And what part about that isn’t happening?  If you thought that what you’re doing was supposed to work and you can’t see any obvious mistake you’ve made, it means you’re overlooking something.  Either there’s something at work in the situation that you weren’t expecting, or else something was at work within the situation all along and you haven’t noticed it.

Start with the other people:  Abilities, skills, resources, personal history, cultural background.  You’re trying to communicate something to them to alter their perception of the world to make them act differently.  Is one of those five things presenting an unexpected obstacle to you?   If you’re right in what you’re saying and the other person isn’t listening, it means there’s something at work within their brain that’s dumping part of your message into an anti-information package, so the full meaning of your message is not reaching them.  If so, that thing at work within their brain got there in one of five ways.

Then check yourself.  Was it possible for your approach to the problem to succeed?  If someone else was doing what you’re doing, would you expect them to succeed?   If not, it means that something is at work within your own brain that’s creating information and anti-information packages that are distorting your perception of the situation.  Same checklist:  abilities, skills, resources, personal history, cultural background.  How did that distortion of your perception get into your brain?

This is important to point out because a lot of progressive activists I’ve met are rebelling against institutions that have oppressed them all their lives.  These people form information and anti-information packages that say that everything the institution stands for is bad and everything that’s the exact opposite of the institution is good.  We live in an industrialized economy built on science and objectivity, so a lot of people assume that science and objectivity are bad and therefore emotion and subjectivity are good.

If you grew up feeling oppressed, then your enemies have already built information and anti-information packages into your brain to make you feel that doing what they want you to do is right and to shut other choices out of your consciousness.  They did this on purpose.  Since they did it over the course of your child development, it will be very hard for you to undo them, and you probably can’t undo them all the way.  If you believe it’s impossible for anyone to write a book that could replace the Bible as the dominant book of the world, there’s a very good reason you believe that and I don’t.  I was never taught that anti-information package.

In the last book I showed you how Capitalism is a mental illness.  Hence the Doomsday Equation.  The people who control the majority of the world’s material resources believe things about the world that simply are not true, and they are acting upon those beliefs in ways that harm other people.  But a lot of people who are trying the hardest to fight back against Capitalist oppression are suffering from variations on that mental illness.

If you feel that science and objectivity are bad and you feel that emotion and subjectivity can save you, in spite of the fact that you can see with your eyes that your enemies are using science and objectivity very effectively to defeat you, and they continue to do so—which is why the world’s problems keep getting worse instead of better, no matter how hard you fight—that should be your first clue.  Your enemy’s greatest weapon is very efficient, which is why it’s his greatest weapon, and which is why he’s your enemy.  So obviously his weapon serves a purpose.  If you refuse to accept that because you’re so emotionally allergic to his greatest weapon, and expect to defeat him by ignoring it, then what you are practicing is not a political ideology, it’s a highly developed emotional defense mechanism.  So if you can’t win much public support because hardly anyone thinks that what you’re doing is going to work, there’s probably a good reason for that.
Next, you will learn to respect everyone as your equals, including your worst enemies.  This is a trap I’ve seen a lot of progressive activists fall into.

I’ve already showed you why respecting everyone is critical to making your communities function—because a lack of respect is a threat to other people’s social standing.  Back in the old days of Volume I, that was enough.  But now that I’ve told you about information packages and now that we’re talking about militarized emotional aikido, respect takes on another important role.
Your enemy is your enemy because he’s using different information and anti-information packages than you are, which lead him to act differently.  If he had the same information and anti-information packages as you, he’d be acting the same as you, and then he wouldn’t be your enemy.

Either consciously or subconsciously, you believe that every single decision you make in your life is right.  Indeed, every decision you make in your life you make because you perceive it to offer you the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA.  And preserving the survival of your own DNA by the most effective means perceivable is your definition of “right”.

Once you recognize one decision as being “right”, you automatically create an information package that labels all other possible decisions as “wrong”.  Therefore, if another person makes a different decision from you, you automatically perceive what the other person is doing to be “wrong”.  This could be either because you perceive the other person’s actions to threaten the survival of your DNA, or because you perceive the other person’s actions not to preserve the survival of their own DNA as effectively as possible.

If you make one decision and another person makes a different decision, and you don’t perceive their decision to be “wrong”, it means that either consciously or subconsciously you are aware that they were working with a different information package than you were, which led them to make a different decision.  Even for as mundane a decision as which flavor of ice cream you want to eat, if you like vanilla and the other person likes chocolate, and you don’t perceive that the other person’s decision is “wrong”, it’s because you know that different people like different food, or their taste buds work differently, or something.  Most people are so well aware that different people prefer different food that they don’t even realize that they could’ve thought that eating a different flavor of ice cream was wrong of someone to do, because this entire thought process happens subconsciously.

But suppose you didn’t know that different people’s taste buds work differently.  Suppose you liked vanilla the best and you assumed that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that vanilla was the best kind of ice cream there was.  Now when someone else prefers chocolate ice cream, what are you going to think of that person?

By assuming that your decision was “right” and that the other person made a different decision in an identical situation, you have created more information and anti-information packages in your brain.  You’ve put the possibility that the other person could have a good reason for making a different decision than you into an anti-information package.  The only possible explanation you’re left yourself with is that the other person wasn’t capable of making the right decision.

Now, to try to further understand the problem, you’re going to try building upon that faulty assumption.  Is the other person too stupid to make the right decision?  Are they insane?  Are they on drugs?   Are they doing it out of malice?  Are they evil?  Have they been possessed by Satan?  What?

Now your lack of respecting the person as your equal has led you to making the faulty assumption that they made the wrong decision because there’s something wrong with their brain.  Now you’re assuming you’re inherently superior to the other person.  Now you’re assuming the other person’s point of view isn’t valid.  Therefore it isn’t important.

Now you’re underestimating the other person.  Now you’ve shut a lot of their possible courses of action out of your consciousness.  Now there are a lot of things they can do to you that you’re not expecting.  Now there are a lot of things they can do that will take you by surprise.  As I said in the last book, this is exactly the mistake President Kennedy and his administration made in the Bay of Pigs invasion, when they assumed that the Communists must be oppressing the people in Cuba, so the Cubans would welcome a U.S. invasion and rise up in revolt—even though anyone in President Kennedy’s own Cuban Affairs department could’ve told him that wasn’t true.  This is the same reason he assumed an invasion force of 1,400 men trained and equipped by the U.S. could defeat the Cuban army of 200,000 men—which are odds any army private would laugh at.  (Which is not to say the decision was funny.)

If you assume that the other person isn’t equal to you, you’ve also shut a lot of your own possible courses of action out of your consciousness.  If you believe that people eating chocolate ice cream is wrong and you assume they’re just too stupid to like vanilla ice cream, or they’re insane, on drugs, evil, possessed by Satan, or whatever, what choices have you left yourself with to solve the problem?  If you assume that you know enough about the situation to determine that your decision was “right” and theirs was “wrong” in the first place, and you’ve shut out the possibility that the other person is capable of making the “right” decision if only they were making it under different circumstances (if there even is a right decision to make), then you’ve pretty much reduced your choices to some version of might-makes-right.   And as I’m sure you remember, that’s exactly what the chocolate eating majority did to the vanilla-eating minority before the vanilla ice cream civil rights movement.

Of course, in real life, people don’t really care about flavors of ice cream enough to decide that some people eating the wrong flavor of ice cream proves they’re inferior, and to try to solve the problem by beating the other people into submission.  Oh, no, in real life people concern themselves with important things, like religions, races, cultures, and gender differences.   Then you get things like the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, the Jewish Holocaust, slavery, segregation, apartheid, the Massacre at Wounded Knee, the European conquest of the Americas in the first place, the Ku Klux Klan, religious discrimination, racial discrimination, cultural discrimination, discrimination against women, Pagans getting fired for wearing their Pentacles to work, women not getting hired in the first place, drivers getting pulled over for Driving While Black, other drivers getting pulled over for Driving With Long Hair, neighborhood gentrification, and proposed constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage.   In all of those examples of historical events and current events, one group of people assumed they knew enough about the situation to determine that they were “right” and the people who disagreed with them were “wrong”, they assumed the second group was inferior to them, and the best solution to the disagreement they could think of was to try to beat the other people into submission.
And our goal is to be the opposite of that, remember?

During the Vietnam War, or World War II, or any other war where American soldiers were trained to think of the enemy as a lower form of life, you could get away with that.  The enemy was equally able and equally motivated to kill you, but he was still a lower form of life.  You could think of the enemy as an inferior, without underestimating his intelligence, because ultimately, the conflict was going to be decided by firepower, not by a battle of wits.  You only had to outsmart your enemy long enough to kill him before he killed you.  You didn’t have to try to build a mutually beneficial civilization with him afterwards.

We of the Globalization 4.0 revolution are waging a war of ideas.  A lot of the enemy are already waging wars of ideas against each other, and they’re trying to win with bullets.  It isn’t working for them, and even if we were dumb enough to believe that a war of ideas could be won with bullets, the evidence clearly speaks otherwise.  Attacking the enemy’s bodies is useless, so we attack ideologies.  That requires us to recognize the enemy as our equals in every regard, because the only way we can win is by outsmarting them permanently.

And by the way, outsmarting the enemy permanently is a continuous process—meaning a dynamic process.  We can’t win by outsmarting them once and then resting on our laurels.  We can’t win by defeating them and then holding them under armed guard for the rest of eternity either—that’s been tried and it never works for anyone.  We can only win by developing an ideology that is so fundamentally superior to theirs that anything we use it for we can do more effectively than anything they try to use their ideology for.  If this was a war of bullets, you could say they were trying to win the war of bullets by building more guns, while we were fighting the war of bullets by building better factories.  No matter how many idea-bullets they’ve got on their side, we’ve got better idea-bullets.  And the only way for them to build idea-bullets than are good enough to compete with our idea-bullets is by using our ideas to build their factories.  And that means the only way for them to defeat us would be by abandoning their ideology and adopting ours wholesale.  But then they’ll no longer be our enemies.  That’s the whole trick to our strategy, and it’s so simple I don’t even have to keep it a secret from anyone.  The idea-bullets aren’t our weapons; the factory itself is our weapon.  It’s a reality-virus.  We don’t have to fight for the sake of destroying the enemy, all we have to do is to fight for the sake of driving him to such desperation that he starts building our factories to try to manufacture our idea-bullets.  But then all he’ll be doing is building our idea factories for us.

The whole Globalization 4.0 revolution is an ambush, and people have been laying it for a century and a half.  And now the enemy is charging into so fast that there’s nothing he can do to stop.  I can stand up here and shout, “Hey, Capitalists, look out!  You’re running into an ambush!  You’re running into an ambush!”  And it still won’t do them any good. And that’s why I’m King of the World and you’re not.

Nah, nah, nah-nah-nah!

I’ve made myself King of the World by learning to recognize everyone as my equal.  Most people can’t match my intellect, or even come anywhere close, but that doesn’t change the fact that everyone is making the best decisions they can based on their abilities, skills, resources, personal history, and cultural background.  (And as usual, their “best decisions” refer to attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.)  I use my abilities, skills, resources, personal history, and cultural background to make the best life I can for myself, just like everyone else does.  I do all I can to make the best life I can for myself within the physical limitations of the world, not to prevent anyone else from making the best life they can for themselves in the process, and to help other people make the best lives they can for themselves along the way.  The end result turned out to be that I very well may be the most important person ever in history, but that still doesn’t make me superior to anyone else, that just means my combination of abilities, skills, resources, personal history, and cultural background turned out to be crucial to the fate of the world.  Or whatever.  And I know this, and I don’t pretend it isn’t true, and I take action accordingly.

Oftentimes I seem like I don’t respect some people as my equals, but there’s a very specific reason for that.     We are in a race to build a globally sustainable civilization before global environmental disaster strikes.  Teaching people takes time.  Some people have made such strong emotional attachments to the idea that they’re right that there’s virtually nothing I can do to teach them anything.  Some of those people (like, most of them) are threatening me, with their environmentally unsustainable lifestyles if with nothing else.  A lot of other people (I’ve learned the hard way) mistake my appearance of respecting them as equals for proof that they know as much about the world as I do, and then they start trying to get me to compromise on science just so they can feel  like they know as much about the world as I do—which just proves how little they understand about science or the world. Since I simply don’t have time to teach everyone everything they need to know, the best I can do is to try to kick everyone in the right direction and hope they can figure it out from there.

But enough about me.  You’re the one in boot camp…

Next, you will learn that making the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep everyone alive will not be possible within the foreseeable future.  Our goal is global equilibrium, and it has never been done before within the realm of human experience, so there is no way for those of us who are starting it to know exactly how it will happen or how long it will take.  However, the development of agriculture and the industrial revolution were both adaptations people made to their lifestyles that previously had never been done before within the realm of human experience, and this time we understand the patterns of cause and effect that govern the chemical reaction of the global environment better than we have at any other time in history.  We will have to figure out what we’re doing as we go along, but there is no reason to believe that we can’t succeed.

With every action you take in your life, you either move the chemical reaction of the global environment closer or further away from keeping everyone alive.  In order to participate in a society with an industrialized economy, we necessarily will have to make use of that industrialized economy and all the environmental destruction it brings with it.  However, if the environmental destruction you cause is less than the environmental destruction you prevent as a result of using resources, the net result of your action is moving the global environment closer to keeping everyone alive.

To use myself for an example, I’m using a computer to write this book, and I will use other industrialized technology to publish it and send a copy to you.  But by giving you the information you need to solve problems in your life, your community, and the world at large, the net result of my use of industrialized technology is to move the chemical reaction of the global environment closer to keeping everyone alive.

You make that same basic choice with every action you ever take in life.

Currently, our global environment doesn’t work in a way that can keep everyone alive.  As I will go into later in this book, making the global environment keep everyone alive technically will never be possible, because that would require us to abolish death itself.  There is a very specific reason that I refer to the goal of our revolution as making the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep everyone alive.  The chemical reaction of the global environment is a process by which atoms and energy move through the environment, move from the environment to people, and move from people back to the environment.  As a result of humanity’s impact on the chemical reaction of the global environment, atoms and energy are not moving through that cycle in a way that makes it physically possible to keep everyone alive.  We can’t abolish death, but we can abolish famine, plague, war, and poverty.  We can’t force the environment to keep everyone alive, but we can make it physically possible for each person to interact with the global environment in a way that can keep them alive—which is not what we have now.

Between now and the success of our global environmental sustainability revolution, the chemical reaction of the global environment will not work in a way that can keep everyone alive.  That means that humanitarian disasters are inevitable, and that means that innocent people will die.  But every innocent person who dies between now and then is not proof that our revolution is failing.  Quite the contrary.  Every innocent person who dies between now and then is just one more reason for our revolution.  Every innocent person who dies is just one more proof of the failure of out enemy’s political system.

Currently, a big reason the chemical reaction of the global environment doesn’t work in a way that keeps everyone alive is because some people wield the power to affect the chemical reaction of the global environment, and they choose to wield that power in a way that makes that chemical reaction of the global environment not work in a way that can keep everyone alive.  You could say that some people wield power over other people, and they choose to use that power to decide who is worthy of living and who isn’t.  That’s the basic idea, but how exactly it works takes quite a while to explain, and it will be an ongoing theme for this book.

Those people and the power they wield are threats to all the people they choose to wield that power against.  That means that one big thing that can be done to eliminate the threat is to eliminate the power those people wield—or even to eliminate the people themselves, if all else fails.  I can show how this global environmental sustainability revolution can be carried out perfectly peacefully, but I can’t force anyone—let alone everyone—to listen to me.  If you choose to threaten other people, then you choose to accept the inevitable risk that they’re going to fight back against you any way they can—in other words, do everything they can to try to protect themselves.  If you choose to threaten other people, then you choose to accept the risk of their killing you in your sleep, or shooting you in the back, or poisoning your food, or setting fire to your house, or kidnapping your children, or taking your wife hostage, or crashing an airplane into your office building, or… whatever.  It is the goal of all life to survive and reproduce.  If you choose to threaten someone else’s survival and reproduction, you can’t control how that person is going to react to you, and neither can I.

(So I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again:  If the global environmental sustainability revolution I’m outlining here turns violent, don’t look at me.  Those 9/11 hijackers attacked people they felt were threatening them by crashing their airliners into centers of political and economic power—not into community gardens and farmer’s markets.)

Short of eliminating people who wield power, we can eliminate their possession of that power, or their will to wield it against other people, or preferably, both.  That’s what all these books have been about.

Next, you will cooperate with all other progressive activists who adapt their ideologies to scientific compliance.  There are a lot of old rivalries among various groups of progressive activists, and you will put them aside. As the saying goes, “United we stand, divided we fall.”

Christians and Atheists are one example.  Each group looks down on the other.  The most effective means of complete scientific compliance would be for all progressive activists—and everyone else in the world—to abandon religion altogether.  However, due to the ideological disadvantages that science has always faced compared to religion, Atheism requires a level of emotional fortitude that most people don’t possess.  In simple terms of energy efficiency, adopting a pre-packaged philosophical ideology (that is, a religion) is a far more energy efficient means of finding an effective perceivable means of preserving the survival of your DNA.  Therefore, it is inconceivable that a majority of people will ever choose to abandon religion.  However, if all, or at least, many religions are adapted to complete scientific compliance, combined with my universal scientific theory of the world that serves every purpose of religion but more effectively, it is reasonable to expect that Atheism will attract a lot of new support.

Communists and Anarchists are another example.  Again, each group looks down on the other, and in addition, Communists allied themselves with Anarchists and then betrayed them in the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and at various other times.  So today, people from each group are plotting their ascendance to world domination or whatever, and sees the other as a threat, so they try to eliminate each other before the other side can get anywhere.  And that’s really sad to watch, because neither side is working with a scientifically compliant political ideology, which means that neither side’s ideology can accurately predict the results of people’s courses of action.  The goal of both groups is to construct a peaceful society whose survival is physically possible given the physical limitations of the world.  Unfortunately, few people if any on either side know enough about science to make their ideologies scientifically compliant, but presumably if people on either side did learn enough about science to make their political ideologies scientifically compliant, they’d do it.  If so, the best type of relationship between people and their government is simply a gray area whose parameters can be outlined but can never be resolved completely, which means that ongoing debate is necessary to ensure that different points of view are represented.

Every existing progressive political ideology works well in some situation or another, and works well for achieving some goals.  Obviously if your former ideology wasn’t useful for anything, you wouldn’t’ve used it, would you?  Well the same goes for every other progressive ideology.  That means that whatever political ideology you’ve been using, is good for accomplishing certain things in certain circumstances.  If you’ve been using it very long, you’ve developed skills for accomplishing those things in those circumstances even more effectively.  Well the same applies for everyone else who uses any other political ideology.  You all have the same goals, you’re well prepared to work toward that goal in some ways, and other people are well prepared to work toward that goal in other ways.  By this point in time, I think it’s safe to assume that every possible approach to every problem has been thought of by someone.  That means that if you all work together, you can surround your enemy on all sides and lay siege to his position.

Next, you will learn enough about science to be scientifically independent.  In these books I’ve outlined how fundamental laws of physics and biology interact to create humanity’s current relationship to the global environment and how we could change our relationship to the global environment to make it not kill us.  For each individual topic, there is plenty more out there to learn.  For anything you learn about biology or human behavior, look to see how animals or people are attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.  For anything you learn about physics or environmental science, look to see how atoms and energy are moving from highly concentrated areas to more even distribution throughout the world.  For anything you learn about biology interacting with physics, watch to see how the living organisms depend on collecting matter and energy and concentrating them into small spaces.

By making yourself scientifically independent, you make yourself locally autonomous.  The difference between me and you is that I know a lot about how the laws of physics and biology create the general situation that you are dealing with, but you know more about the specific situation itself.  The Soviets made the mistake of trying to use a central authority to orchestrate a worldwide revolution, and it didn’t work, because the leaders in Moscow were not familiar enough with anyone’s local conditions to be able to make effective decisions.  So instead, the laws of physics and biology are our central governing body.  If I show you how to figure out how they apply to your specific situation, and you figure out how to work effectively on your own or with other groups, then I don’t need to be a central governing body.

Don’t get me wrong, I am still King of the World, and as King of the World you shall obey my every command.  I hereby command you to attempt to preserve the survival of your DNA by the most effective means perceivable to you.    But that’s really easy, because you were already going to do that anyway.  But now that I’ve told you what I know, whatever you do to attempt to preserve the survival of your DNA by the most effective means perceivable to you will be a lot more effective because now you perceive a lot more than you did before.  By learning enough about the world to solve your own problems effectively, you make me King of the World by making yourself King or Queen of your own world.

Next, you will learn to fight as long and as hard as it takes to win.  Your enemy is already doing this.  It isn’t a question of how hard you want to work, but of how badly you want to win.
A big problem facing the general progressive activist movement right now is lack of commitment.  Activists say things like, “If we want to win, we have to commit to this.”  And then sometimes some people don’t commit to it enough, so the more dedicated among them commit to it more to take up the slack.  Then the most dedicated people end up trying to carry the weight of the entire group themselves, and they can’t get as much done as they could if everyone was working together, and those people start falling behind in the rest of their lives, and eventually they burn out and give up.  And then that group loses its most dedicated members.

So let me tell you something about commitment…

Commitment is the emotional result, and the consequent behavioral result, of your perception of your chances of succeeding at whatever you’re doing.  (Or, more generally, your perception that your course of action will yield favorable results.)  If you perceive subconsciously that what you’re doing isn’t going to work, you lose interest in it because it seems to you to be a waste of your time and energy.  If you try to make a conscious choice to commit to it anyway, that might help, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t help very much.

Luckily, I have solved 90% of this problem for you.  I’ve equipped you with a political ideology that is superior to any previously existing political ideology, because it yields the most accurate predictions for the results of people’s actions.  By using a political ideology that is built directly from fundamental laws of physics and biology, no matter what you apply that ideology to, you will be more successful than your enemies will be when they attempt to apply their ideology to the same situation.  (Or at the very least, you will be able to produce favorable results more efficiently—your enemies may seem to be more successful than you overall because of their advantages in numbers and material resources.)

Your success will produce further commitment on your part.  Your success, further commitment, further success, and further commitment will help you overcome your disadvantages in numbers, because if you show that you are successful, more people will join you.

The 10% of this that still depends on you is your application of this ideology to your situation in whatever way you need to apply it to succeed at your goals.  That includes adapting your perception of the world and adapting whatever ideological background you’ve been using to get as far as you have, to full scientific compliance.

I think of these books as the B52 of the peace movement.  I can invent them, I can design them, I can build them, I can mass-produce them, I can fuel them, and I can arm them.  All I need now are pilots who are willing to learn how to fly them and are willing to carpet bomb their enemies into oblivion.

Finally, you will develop your sense of humor.  You will have fun doing this.  As Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to join your revolution.”  There will be dancing in the revolution.

You will learn that there are no established ideas that can’t be challenged.  That begins with all of your own ideas.  It also includes the Theory of Evolution and the Laws of Thermodynamics, but challenging them won’t do you any good.  Some of the greatest scientific minds in history have tried it, and they all failed.

As I said in the very beginning of the first book, you can’t solve all the world’s problems if you can’t laugh at your own mistakes.  If you try to solve your problems by taking your ideology ever more seriously, it will never work.  Right now we’re all caught in a crossfire between Democrats and Republicans who aren’t willing to face up to the fact that they’ve each made some big mistakes, and we’re caught in a crossfire between Christian fundamentalists and Muslim fundamentalists who aren’t willing to face up to the fact that they’ve each made big mistakes.  And where is it getting us?

None of your enemies are using fully scientifically compliant ideologies, so it is inevitable that things will go wrong for them that they didn’t expect.  To this point, their solution has been to try to apply their ideologies to their situations even harder, and what good is it doing them?  In effect, your enemies are walking up to doors marked PULL in big orange letters, and trying to push on them.  When they don’t open, they try to prove that they really do know what they’re doing by pushing even harder.  And it still doesn’t work.  Everyone who can see what’s going on can see they’re making a mistake, but they’ve invested so much time and energy into building up their image as people who know exactly what they’re doing—even though they don’t—that they can’t afford to back up and fix their mistakes, because if they do that they’ll be admitting that they don’t know exactly what they’re doing.  So they keep pushing harder and harder on the door marked PULL and accuse us of being trouble makers for believing that their plan is never going to work.
We don’t have that problem. We don’t define our success according to our ability to convince everyone else that we know what we’re doing; we define our success according to our ability to actually open the door.  By building our political ideology directly on fundamental laws of the universe, and defining our political success in terms of applying those laws of the universe to our situation in order to produce favorable results—namely, keeping everyone alive—we have invented the novel concept of actually reading what the sign says before we try opening the door. So while our enemies were stuck outside pushing on the PULL door, smiling for the cameras, and getting their PR crews to spin a lot of damage control, I snuck in the back door and drew a map of the entire building.   Now that we all know how the building is laid out, all there is left to do is to bring in the lights, the sound equipment, the food, the drink, and the tables and chairs, and then invite everyone else in the back door and get the party started.

We are going to make superficial mistakes, just like everyone else makes mistakes, because we can’t anticipate everything, and we’re going to have to figure out what we’re doing as we go along.  But we already know that, so we don’t have to worry about it.  What we are not going to do is to make fundamental mistakes.  Unlike our enemies, we are not going to define our political success according to our ability to make things happen that aren’t physically possible and then wonder why we aren’t succeeding.  We measure our success according to our ability to accomplish our goals, and we will adapt our approaches as necessary to succeed at our goals, because clinging desperately to approaches that don’t work doesn’t help us accomplish our goals.

Since we’re starting out with a map of the building, figuring out how the doors open is not an insurmountable challenge.  We have already moved beyond the question of if we can succeed at our goals, the only questions left now are when and how.  Out in front of the building our enemies still can’t figure out how to open the doors, while we’re throwing a party inside.  So what do you suppose that’s going to do to his advantage in numbers and our disadvantage in numbers?  And now they’re smiling for the cameras and wiring dynamite up to the PULL doors.  Now, if we took our political ideology as seriously as they take theirs, the best solution to the problem would seem to be something like bursting through the doors, tackling them, and beating them up.  But why bother?  If we just peek out the second story window above the door, we can wait for our enemy to light the match and then dump a bucket of water on his head before he lights the fuse.  All the energy we save by not trying to convince everyone that we can do the impossible is energy that we can devote to showing everyone that our enemy is trying to do the impossible.

By not depending on convincing everyone that we know everything, we save ourselves from trying to win a head-on collision against our enemies who do try to convince everyone that they know everything.  We do know everything—or at least, we know a lot more than our enemies do—so all we have to do is to let the results speak for themselves.  Now we use our advantage in our ability to accurately predict the outcomes of actions against our enemy, move out of his way, and turn his own faulty ideology against him.  We defeat him as efficiently as possible by helping him to defeat himself.

Political aikido.

You will develop your sense of humor, because if you can laugh at your own mistakes and at your allies’ mistakes, you accept that the fact that you’ve made mistakes is not the end of the world.  If the world isn’t going to end, it means there are still solutions to the problem.  So stop worrying about your mistakes and start looking around for other solutions.

If you do take your political ideology seriously, it means that you don’t feel that you can afford to lose even one fight.  If you can’t afford to lose even one fight, then it must mean that your political ideology doesn’t work very well.  That explains a lot about why our enemies take their own ideologies so seriously, and why they try so hard to scare everyone else into taking them seriously.  If your ideology actually works, you don’t need to do that.

If you develop an ideology that works so well that you don’t have to try to force people to take you seriously, people are going to notice that you succeed without needing to worry about succeeding.  That’s going to make your political system a lot more fun to participate in than your enemy’s.  That’s going to bring in a lot of support for your political system and rob a lot of support from your enemy’s political system.

If you develop political ideology and political strategy that works so well that you don’t have to worry about losing some fights, it’s a mark of conspicuous consumption—a status symbol.  The ability to win so many victories that you don’t have to worry about not winning a few is a mark of success all by itself, regardless of how big or small, old or new your political movement is.  We are not going to let victories go to waste intentionally just to prove we can afford to, but it’s inevitable that we won’t win all the time.  But that doesn’t matter, because as long as we have enemies, there will be no shortage of victories for us to win.

If you have to focus a lot of your attention on shutting possible courses of action out of other people’s consciousnesses (which is exactly what you’re trying to do when you try to force people to take you seriously) you shut a lot of possible courses of action out of your own consciousness too—simply because you can’t focus on some things without neglecting others.  We take the laws of the universe seriously, because we have no choice but to abide them, and neither does anyone else.  Our enemies are trying to break them, and that’s threatening us, which is why our enemies are our enemies in the first place.

On the other hand, our enemies are trying to write their own laws about how the universe works.  They’ve got a big head start over us as convincing people to believe them, but that just gives us another opportunity for our David and Goliath tactics.  Since our enemies are trying to write their own laws for how the universe works, they have no choice but to try to force people to take them seriously.  They must expend effort to shut other possibilities out of other people’s consciousness.  If they don’t, their political system will collapse.

So all we have to do is to bring other possibilities back into people’s consciousness.  And since we’re already using the universal brain structure of humanity as the foundation for our political ideology, every part of our political ideology already exists within everyone’s subconsciousness.  So bringing new possibilities to people’s consciousness doesn’t depend on our trying to add the new possibilities to their consciousness, but simply to bring them to the surface.  There we have the Laws of Thermodynamics on our side.  You can bring new possibilities to people’s consciousness by drawing peace symbols on the sidewalk with chalk.  Shutting those ideas out of people’s consciousness costs our enemies a policeman’s salary.

Granted, the physical limitations of the world are counterintuitive to people’s universal brain structure, and that requires us not only to add information to people’s consciousness, but to add information that people naturally reject because it conflicts with the information they start with.  But once again, we have the Laws of Thermodynamics on our side.  Everyone who is getting stuck at the losing end of our enemies’ economic system already realizes that they keep having to work harder and harder just to stay where they are.  Here in America, as the harnessing of environmental energy becomes ever less efficient, the cost of living is going to go up and most people’s standard of living is going to suffer.   For the people whose environmental economies we’re colonizing, they can see the natural resources that they could be using being siphoned out of their economies in transactions that always prove to be advantageous to the American imperialists, so their standards of living keep suffering too.  That means that our enemies are putting the Laws of Thermodynamics into everyone’s consciousness for us.  That means that all there is left for us to do is to show everyone how all the pieces fit together.

Unlike our enemies, now that we know the physical limitations of the world and we have the universal brain structure of our species for the foundation of our political ideology, everything else is fair game.  So we don’t have to shut anything out of anyone’s consciousness.

Like I said in the first book, when you have all the science on your side, the only choices your enemy has left are to join you or to try to fight against fundamental forces of the universe.  It’s no longer a question of if we will win this struggle, but when and how.  So relax and enjoy it.  If you can make joining your revolution more fun than joining your enemy’s side, you’re holding all the highest cards.

So like I said two books ago, let’s get this party started!

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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A big piece of the fallout from Globalization 3.0 that we’re getting here in the desert is a lot of illegal Mexican immigrants.  The story behind it is pretty simple…

As I’ve said before, the Founding Fathers of the United States were all Christians, and they wrote the Constitution before the Theory of Evolution or the Laws of Thermodynamics were discovered.  That’s causing a number of problems now.

Due to their shared cultural background they all took certain things for granted about human behavior and how the world worked.  They assumed these things were true because no individual in the group had a perspective on the world that was different enough from everyone else’s for anyone to realize that any other perspective was possible.  They realized that they couldn’t anticipate everything, but they didn’t realize how much they couldn’t anticipate.  So they wrongly assumed that certain things were true about the world, and then they wrote the Constitution based on that assumption.  But as a result of these fundamental errors they made in writing the Constitution, human behavior has strayed from what the Constitution was prepared to deal with.  The Founding Fathers included a provision that the Constitution could be amended to meet the changing times, but they didn’t include any provision for what to do if it was discovered that the Constitution was fundamentally flawed.  Amending a Constitution that’s fundamentally flawed would only cure symptoms of the real problem.  To solve the fundamental flaws in the U.S. Constitution, the Constitution needs to be rewritten.  And considering how hard it is to amend the Constitution anymore, rewriting it would be politically impossible.

One specific way the Founding Fathers erred in their understanding of human behavior was that they all believed in a general Christian origin of human behavior.  They all assumed that people are inherently good but are tempted by evil.  There’s nothing in there about the preservation of anyone’s DNA.  And there’s nothing in there about what to do if people don’t turn out to be inherently good.

What the Founding Fathers wrote was a Constitution that works perfectly (let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, anyway) if everyone in America was raised according to their religious values and cultural background.  But everyone in America isn’t raised that way.  Lacking the cultural values the Founding Fathers took for granted, they left gaping loopholes in the Constitution that let people follow the letter of the law, claim that what they’re doing is perfectly legal, and act completely differently from what the Founding Fathers expected.

That brings us to Capitalism.  Capitalism, as it worked in the late 18th century, was  “an economic system that was different from monarchy”.  In the late 18th century, the material resources available in America seemed to be infinite.  So a Capitalist economy, as far as anyone in America in the late 18th century could tell, was an economy that let anyone work in whatever way suited them best, and that rewarded hard work.  It didn’t attempt to be an egalitarian economic system, because the Founding Fathers took a hierarchy of the universe for granted.  That meant they did it subconsciously.  Think about it.  The Americans had just fought a war to drive the British lords out of America, but they still served The Lord.  They were no longer serving the king of England, but they were still serving the King of Kings.  And nobody saw the contradiction there.  If they won their independence from an Earthly king, but they still served an imaginary king, how much differently were they really going to act now?

Even if they were consciously aware that they believed in a hierarchy of the universe, they had internalized the idea so much that they wouldn’t’ve realized how much they acted upon that belief subconsciously.   That is, they could imagine a society that was more egalitarian than what they had, but they couldn’t imagine how egalitarian it was possible for a society to be.  And even if they had enough vision to imagine a more egalitarian society, the majority of Americans couldn’t—which meant that if they tried to force egalitarianism upon everyone with the Constitution, nobody would accept egalitarianism, or the Constitution for that matter.  That was why George Washington wanted to free the slaves but he realized that before that could happen, he had to convince all the slave owners to join a government that would be capable of freeing the slaves.
So now Americans had built a political and economic system where everyone was allowed to work in whatever way suited them best and would be rewarded for their hard work, but they still believed in an invisible kingdom that created a hierarchy to the universe that was beyond their control.  The Founding Fathers and everyone else in the late 18th century continued to act in a hierarchal manner, assumed that’s what they were supposed to do, didn’t write anything into the Constitution to change that, and called the perpetuation of their hierarchal cultural tradition freedom.  So some White men were supposed to lead, and others were supposed to follow.  And if you came from Africa or North America and you made all your tools out of stone and you had skin the color of dirt, where else were you supposed to belong in the hierarchy but at the very bottom?
Now skip ahead 200 years.  We have a Constitution written on the faulty belief that people are inherently good and that we’re supposed to have the hierarchy that the Founding Fathers had.  That means that if some inherently good people exploit other people, that’s still inherently good, because they’re fulfilling their roles in the imaginary hierarchy of the universe.

Now the infinite supply of material resources the Founding Fathers thought we had is gone, but the hierarchy they believed in remains.  Now that we’re running out of material resources to extract from the environment, the only way to get material resources through hard work is to take them from other people.  And under the imaginary hierarchy of the Founding Fathers, that’s justified.

In a world where our supply of natural resources is limited, Capitalism is inherently anti-democratic.  Once you label an object your “own”, you control how that object can and can’t be used.  And you prevent anyone else from deciding how it can and can’t be used.

Here we arrive at the fundamental conflict between Capitalism and the Use-Value economic system.  Under a Use-Value economic system, rightful ownership is not defined by physical possession of an object.  Defining rightful ownership by the physical possession of an object depends on people’s belief that the ability to acquire material possessions is an adequate measure of human value—which it isn’t.  Possession of an object doesn’t prove willingness and ability to work for it; it proves a combination of willingness and ability to work for it and opportunity to get it.  If willingness and ability to work for an object were the only factors involved, you could say that inherent human value could be measured through possession of material objects.  That would mean that a Capitalist economic system was an equitable economic system, because the only differences in economic status would be caused by the people themselves.

That opportunity factor is what destroys the possibility of Capitalism resulting in an equitable economic system.  However, the Founding Fathers believed, on some level or another, that opportunities were created by their imaginary hierarchy of the universe, and that it was by each person taking advantage of the opportunities that presented themselves that the rightful hierarchy of the universe could be realized.  I can say that the Founding Fathers must’ve believed this, even if only subconsciously, because there is no other way to reconcile the possibility that ability, willingness to work, and opportunity could create an economic, and consequently, political, system in which all men were created equal.  For them to build a hierarchal economic and political system and call that “equality” depends on their belief that a divine power is intervening in their political system.  (Well, the other possibility was that they believed that all people were created equal, people were equal for reasons no one of the 18th century could precisely define, but that if they established that idea as the founding principle of a country, they would at least set events into motion and eventually someone would figure out a secular way to define human equality—which is exactly what I’m doing.)

Under a Capitalist economic system, if your parents were millionaires and someone else’s parents earned minimum wage, the fact that when you grew up you made enough money to buy a mansion and the other person only made enough money to live in a tenement apartment, proves that’s what each of you deserve.  That perpetuates the invisible hierarchy of the world that the Founding Fathers believed in.  But as evolutionarily equal humans, all inherent human value is equal.  There is no other way to measure human value scientifically.  That means that regardless of the imaginary hierarchy of the universe the Founding Fathers believed in, under the secular government they set up, all human value is equal.  They even said that themselves, that “All men are created equal”, even though they didn’t possess the science at the time to fathom the full meaning of that statement.

A Use-Value economic system is not perfectly equitable, but unlike Capitalism, it is a conscious attempt at equitability.  As I showed you in my example of Crusoe Island, rightful ownership is determined according to a combination of who needs something the most, who was willing to work for it, who was lucky enough to get it, and how important the thing really is.  If you find some medical supplies they belong to the doctor automatically.  If you find some medicine, it belongs to whoever is sick, automatically.   If you find a field full of strawberries, they belong to everyone.  If you find a few strawberries, they belong to you and whoever was with you when you found them, or else to you and whoever you want to give them to.

Under a Capitalist economy it’s a lot easier to keep track of rightful ownership, because that only depends on simple arithmetic.  If you have a hundred million dollars and get a hundred million more dollars, now you have two hundred million dollars.  Determining rightful ownership under a Use-Value economic system would depend on a gigantic calculus equation using a lot of theoretical numbers, which no one has ever figured out how to write.

However, the fact remains that in a world with limited material resources, a Use-Value economic system is the only one that can result in everyone getting what they need.  The Founding Fathers thought we had an infinite supply of resources, and everyone at the time agreed with them, but they were all wrong.  At the time they could get away with acting as if we did have an infinite supply of material resources, and everyone acting upon what they all believed to be true was the easiest—and probably only—way to create economic and political stability.  But now that we can see that the beliefs they based their economy on were not true, we can see that we’d better build our economy on what we know to be true about the world now.  That necessarily will mean that we’ll end up with a different economy.  And an economic system built on equal human value, in which economic success is defined by everyone getting what they need, is the definition of a Use-Value economic system.

A Use-Value economic system functions differently from Capitalism, but that’s unavoidable.  Capitalist competition drives innovation, and that leads to people finding ever more efficient and productive ways of doing things.  A Use-Value economic system isn’t competitive, and therefore it doesn’t drive innovation.  But building ever more machines that do things ever more efficiently and productively necessarily depends on extracting ever more material resources from the environment.  But we don’t have any more material resources to spare.  So once again, you can see that Capitalism isn’t an economic system that’s going to do us any good.

A Use-Value economic system depends on everyone learning to be content with what they have.  That is, after the resources get redistributed so everyone gets what they need.   Everyone learning to be content with what they have doesn’t result in a competitive economy, and therefore, doesn’t measure economic success by people’s ability to continue extracting resources from the environment.

But the Constitution says we have a Capitalist economy.  That means that replacing our Capitalist economy with a Use-Value economy would not depend on our amending the Constitution but on rewriting it.  At any time, we could say, “Hey, this Constitution is bullsh*t, because it doesn’t work anymore.  Let’s write a new version now.”  But we don’t.  We’ve all been taught to believe that the Constitution is right, and that anyone who suggests we should get rid of it and write a new Constitution better be thrown in prison.  So we go on participating in this suicidal economic system for the sake of maintaining short-term political stability.  But a suicidal economic system can only lead to economic instability, and that means political instability.  So we’re sacrificing long-term political stability for the sake of short-term political stability.

That brings us to the North American Free Trade Agreement.  We wrote the North American Free Trade Agreement based on our faulty assumption that everything the Constitution claimed to be true about the world—either explicitly or implicitly—really was true.  That meant that the success of the NAFTA, like the rest of our Capitalist economy, depended on people being inherently good, the world’s material resources being infinite, and divine powers creating a hierarchal, but somehow equitable, political system.

So what happened?  What the f*ck did you think was going to happen?  The inherently self-interested Homo sapiens who occupied the highest tiers of their economic and political systems willingly used their abilities and worked hard to claim all the material resources they could as their rightful property, as efficiently and productively as they could.  But for some reason, they couldn’t find any resources that nobody else was using, so they had to claim for their own resources that people were already using.

So the Mexican aristocrats started buying American agricultural produce that had been subsidized by the U.S. government and importing it to Mexico, where they could sell it more cheaply than Mexican farmers could sell their own produce.  So the farmers lost their land and had to move into the cities to look for work, just like the farmers in Haiti did when people started importing rice to Haiti more cheaply than their own farmers could grow it.  Conveniently, all those aristocrats who imported the agricultural produce had also built a lot of new factories to take advantage of the NAFTA.  And now they had a whole bunch of unemployed farmers looking for work.  Think that was a coincidence?

But there’s a catch.  Right next door to Mexico is the United States, where there’s even more money to be made.  So here comes a flood of immigrants.  Some of them get through the border legally, and the rest… don’t.

A lot of people have been working on this problem from a lot of different directions.  I once met up with a Presbyterian minister who had been involved in the No More Deaths movement since the beginning, who told me the history of the border since the NAFTA went into effect.

20 years ago, people came and went across the border all the time.  The town where I grew up in Maine is about 5 hours from Quebec City.  Before the NAFTA, life on the Mexican border was pretty much the same as life on the Canadian border.  People from Mexico worked in U.S. border towns and commuted from one country to the other all the time, people from both sides would cross the border to go shopping for whatever they couldn’t get in their own country easily, people had families living on both sides of the border, whatever.  Security was a little tighter here than on the Canadian border, because there was a lot more incentive for Mexicans to immigrate illegally than there was for Canadians.

Then Mexican farmers started losing their land.  They could move into the cities and get jobs in the factories.  Or, since they had to relocate anyway, they could just move to America and make even more money.  So here came the flood of immigrants.

American politicians and law enforcement agents tried a lot of different things to stop them, and none of them worked.  Then, in some border city, someone got the idea to build what basically amounted to the Berlin Wall.  It worked.  So they built another one in another city.  Then another, then another.  Within a few years, every border city had one.

Then someone said, “This is great, but the border is 1,800 miles long.  How are we supposed to wall off the entire border?”

To that, someone replied, “We don’t need to.  All we have to do is to wall off the cities.  The desert will do the rest.”

By that he meant—and he may even have said it, but I’m remembering this conversation from 3 months ago—that once people couldn’t cross the border in the cities anymore, they would try to cross it in the desert.  But a lot of people would die out there, and eventually, enough people would hear about it that they’d give up.

It hasn’t worked.

To date, about 4,000 Mexicans have died in the desert.  And they keep on coming.

For this Presbyterian minister I was talking to, that conversation was a turning point in his life.  Because that meant that this plan for securing our borders depended on killing innocent people.  And for this Presbyterian minister, that violated a set of rules that were way the hell more important than anything these mortal politicians had in mind.

So now our border politics have turned into a complete clusterf*ck.  We had the border agents, and we keep hiring more and more of them and giving them more and more equipment.  Then we had the Minute Men, who consider themselves a patriotic militia who volunteer to help the border agents defend our country against the invasion of Mexican peasants.  And now we’ve called out the National Guard.

On another side we have a lot of groups who are out to provide humanitarian relief for the Mexicans. They set up stations out in the desert where people can find water, food, and emergency medical supplies.  At first the border patrol agents, Minute Men, and National Guard wanted to guard the water stations and use them for bait.  But the two sides argued it out, and eventually the three factions of the border guard agreed not to stake out the water stations.  But now, to make the water stations work, the people who set them have to go down to Mexico and spread word there that the border guard has agreed not to stake them out, because if the Mexicans thought they were guarded, they still wouldn’t use them.  But now that some people have found them, what do you suppose the odds are that they spread word back to Mexico and now the unguarded water stations are being used as planned way-stations in a new Underground Railroad?

On another side, we have the Mexican drug lords, corrupt politicians and law enforcement, and the human trafficking blackmarket.  People who are taking their chances on crossing the desert are easy prey for a lot of people.  Corrupt politicians and law enforcement take bribes or extortions from migrants.  At one point someone even sent some of the Mexican army to the border to conduct training exercises, to try to scare people away.  Drug lords pay immigrants to carry drugs across the border for them.  And the human trafficking blackmarketeers take payments from Mexicans to smuggle them across the border.

Now the border guard are installing infrared cameras at all their border checkpoints, so they can see heat patterns coming off of people’s bodies no matter where they’re hiding in a vehicle.  A lot of Mexicans have died from heat and suffocation riding in cargo compartments.  A couple summers ago, someone stopped a trailer truck on the border.  And when they opened up the box trailer, they found 19 people dead.  When I first moved to Arizona, I was driving around down by the border in my van, checking out the desert, and I got questioned by police three times in one night.  Part of their reason for stopping me was to see if I was smuggling anyone.  The other part was to warn me to be careful of people trying to steal my van.

And on another side there are the six Native American nations who had the U.S.-Mexico border drawn right through the middle of their land.  And just like the Haudenosaunee and so many other Native Americans on the Canadian border, now they’re all people of the same nation, but some of them are citizens of one colonial country, and some are citizens of the other.  Now they all have to go through other people’s checkpoints just to travel from one end of their land to the other.

Now U.S. politicians are talking about temporary work visas and immigration reform and amnesty and tougher laws.  Now every single law that affects U.S. citizens has its own interpretation for illegal immigrants.  You are allowed to send your kids to school, you are allowed to go to the emergency room, you aren’t allowed to get a driver’s license, and you do have to pay your income tax, but the IRS won’t report your illegal citizenship to anyone else.  Or whatever all those laws have been changed to by now.

We have so many illegal immigrants here that if they were all caught and thrown in prison, the first 10% would make all of our prisons overflow.  So instead they’re transported back to Mexico.  And by now, a number of immigrants have been recorded laughing in the immigration officials’ faces and saying, “Fine, take me back to Mexico. I’ll be back here next week.”

A lot of Mexicans have lived here for two generations.  The parents came illegally and have been living here illegally for years.  Then they had kids here.  Their kids are legal residents but the parents aren’t.  So when the immigration officials come to the door, the parents have to leave but the kids can stay.  Or maybe they just deport one of the parents and break up the family.

Now every May 1st we get tens of thousands of Mexicans marching and protesting through the streets of L.A., Phoenix, and every major city near the border.  They keep repeating the fundamental truth that the economy of the southwest depends on illegal workers.  They take the jobs no White people want.  To get White people to want to do those jobs, people would have to pay so much money that they couldn’t afford to hire anyone.  So this is yet another example of what happens when people want an economic system that their political system isn’t capable of supporting—somebody figures out a way to cheat.

That brings me to the No Borders movement part of Globalization 4.0.

So far, all these people have been asking, “What are we going to do about all these illegal immigrants sneaking across the border?”  The members of the No Borders movement asked a fundamentally different question.  They backed up to the very beginning and asked:

What is a border?

So here we go with another version of the history of the world.  But you’ve already heard all the parts of this story before…

Once upon a time there were a bunch of monkeys in the world.  They lived in tribal groups for their mutual protection, meaning for basic cooperation toward their mutual interests.

Then they evolved into humans and kept living in tribal groups so they could cooperate toward their mutual interests.

The tribal group is an economic and political unit.  Within the group, people combine their energy to serve their mutual interests—the definition of cooperation.  That group of people acts to serve their mutual interests.  That concentration of energy is the foundation of an economic system, and the group of people acting in a certain way is the foundation of a political system.

In order to define who is in your group, you have to distinguish them from the people who are not in your group.  People also need land to live on and to provide their food and other material resources.  People also need a stable supply of food, so they plan ahead and know where their food is going to come from.  The obvious solution to all of these needs is to divide up the land and say that the people in your group live on this land and the people in the other group live on that land.
So a border is an agreement between groups of people about which land belongs to which group.
Now here’s the catch…

You know how all those Capitalists are globalizing their corporations?  And you know what I said about those international interests, alliances, networks, and sympathies dissolving the power of national governments?  What the f*ck do you think illegal immigration is besides globalized labor?

A Capitalist economy is competitive.  That competition drives innovation, which causes people to find ever more efficient and productive means of doing things.

Or…

A Capitalist economy is competitive.  The goal of competition is to win and to eliminate your competition.

So which do you think it is?  If Capitalists were competing for the sake of driving innovation, then the more competition there was, the more successful their Capitalist economy would be.  If driving innovation was the goal of Capitalism, then the Capitalists would welcome as much competition as they could possibly get.

On the other hand, you know what I’ve said about how the most effective way to compete is to compete against people you know you can beat?   And who are the easiest people to beat?  The materially poorest people.  And who are the materially poorest people here but the displaced Mexican farmers?

If Capitalists truly believed that competition benefited a globalized Capitalist economy, why wouldn’t they want to dissolve national power even more and erase all their borders?  We’re globalizing Capital, so that Capital can be moved from any country to any other country.  So why do they have such a problem with workers trying to move from any country to any other country?  Do we have a competitive economy or don’t we?

Of course we do.  The Capitalists are competing against Labor and eliminating them as competition right from the start.

So what is a border?  It’s more than just a line drawn on a map.  It’s a line drawn on a map plus all the emotional and political significance people attach to the idea of the line drawn on the map.  The border doesn’t just exist on the map; it also exists in people’s minds.

The name says it all:  Illegal immigrant.  An immigrant is a person who was born on one side of the line and now lives on the other.  He’s called illegal because when he crossed the line he broke the law.  Doing things that are illegal is bad.  Or at least, everyone is taught to feel that doing things that are illegal is bad.  And in this case that bad word is being applied not to a thing the immigrant did, but to the word immigrant itself.  So what else does the name “illegal immigrant” translate to besides, “bad person”?

Now politicians and the people who control the media spread the news to people everywhere that their country is being invaded by waves of “bad people.”  What do you suppose people are going to do about it besides hire more police, pass more laws, and build more prisons to keep them safe, elect politicians who promise to do something about the problem, and live in fear of what all those “bad people” are going to do?   It sure would be hard to get much of a reaction out of anyone if you referred to these Mexicans as “people who are desperate for jobs”, wouldn’t it?

Unrestricted immigration would result in an imbalance in our environmental economy.  The United States already has the most environmentally destructive economy in the world.  Every person we add to our economy makes our economy bigger and increases our environmental impact.

If a flood people all came moving up here at the same time, what would they all do?  Where would they all live?  How would they support themselves?  How would they convert energy and material resources from things that aren’t useful to people to things that are useful to people?  Where would they get all those material resources?  Each individual couldn’t possibly predict the effects his presence would have on our local environment.  Nobody could predict the effect that everyone’s collective presence would have on our local environment.  Practically overnight our cities would end up looking like they had been swept over by a swarm of locusts.  That would mean economic instability, and that would mean political instability, as Americans started acting in whatever new way they had to act to try to keep themselves safe from the Mexicans.

So here we are, supposedly fighting this War on Terror, with a government that’s manufacturing foreign threats to our country, and a media that’s making sure that everybody hears about the threat.  And what do you think happens next?  A lot of American workers living in fear of Mexican workers and fighting back, and vice versa.  If they weren’t fighting each other, the American workers could ask them, “Hey, why do you want to leave your homes and your families so badly and come take our jobs?”  To which a lot of Mexicans would say, “Because I lost my farm and I need some work.”  Now the two groups are communicating, and communication opens the door for cooperation.  And workers working together for their mutual interests means Labor competing against Capital.  Competition is supposed to be good for our economy.

What do we have instead?  Divide and conquer.

The No Borders movement is still new, and its members are still figuring out their strategies, but this is the problem they’re working on.  It’s a new project, but it’s no great departure from what any of them have been working on before.

Unrestricted immigration wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem of people overstretching the environment.  But it is the only way that Globalization 3.0 can be considered fair.  If Capitalists are allowed to move their capital across borders freely, why shouldn’t people who sell their labor be allowed to move across borders freely?  Is the goal of globalization to make us a global community, or isn’t it?  If the goal of globalization is only to make more money for some people, we aren’t a global community, because the goal of our so-called community is not the mutual benefit of all of its members.

This seems to conflict with what Mr. Friedman said, about globalization benefiting everyone.  There are just two things wrong with his prediction:  The Theory of Evolution, and the Laws of Thermodynamics.

(See what happens when you try to develop political and economic strategies without taking the time beforehand to learn how the world actually works?)

First, the Theory of Evolution.  All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.  I’m sure you’re getting sick of hearing me say that by now.  While it is true that Globalization 3.0 is leveling the field between the materially wealthy and the materially poor, it is also true that the materially wealthy are making the choices they’re making for a reason.  Materially wealthy people got materially wealthy by investing their material wealth in ways that would make them more materially wealthy.  So if they’re investing in anything now, what other reason could they have for it but to make themselves ever more materially wealthy?  And if the rules of Globalization 3.0 are written to let the Capitalists make themselves ever more materially wealthy but prevent Labor from making themselves more materially wealthy, that’s obviously not an equitable economic strategy, which means it can only lead to ever more economic inequality.

Mr. Friedman’s strategy for how Labor should make themselves more materially wealthy is to cooperate with the Capitalists.  But if the Capitalists get to write the rules, they’re going to write them in their own favor.  That’s what Capitalists always do.  Why should Labor expect them to do otherwise?  And how is inequality in decision-making ability supposed to lead to economic equality?

The unrestricted immigration plague-of-locusts economic strategy wouldn’t benefit anyone but the Mexicans in the short run.  But under the current economic strategy, they’re losing their farms and dying in the desert, and the Capitalists are making a profit on that.  So if the current economic strategy is that inequitable now, why should Labor expect it to get any better?

So the plague-of-locusts economy isn’t a valid economic strategy, but it is, at least, a direct opposition to the equally invalid death-in-the-desert economic strategy.  Competition is the only thing Capitalists can understand, and competition is exactly what they’re getting.  The plague-of-locusts economy puts a balance of power in the hands of the people who are currently caught at the losing end of the death-in-the-desert economy.  So until anyone comes up with a better solution to the problem, at least this way everyone involved has a choice.  And if you’re trying to use the death-in-the-desert economy and some people don’t feel like cooperating with you, you’ve got no one to blame for that but yourself.  So innovate, motherf*cker, innovate!

The Globalization 4.0 movement already has a better solution to the problem.  It’s called localized organic agriculture.  And as it so happens, that’s exactly what the displaced farmers were already practicing.  But then the Capitalists drove them off their lands.  Well if it’s fair for the Capitalists to do that, then it’s only fair to let the displaced farmers try to make the best of their situation.  And if you don’t like the choices they make now, too goddamned bad.  You should’ve thought of that ahead of time.  That’s what happens when you initiate economic strategies without consulting the people they’re going to affect.

If the plague-of-locusts economy did succeed, in the end America would go bankrupt—or something close to it.  First American Labor would lose their jobs to cheap Mexican Labor.  Everyone’s wages would be driven down, so no one would be able to pay their taxes or make much of an economy happen here at all.  If Labor couldn’t pay any taxes anymore, the Capitalists would have to pay all the taxes, and then they’d lose a lot of the money they thought they’d made by setting up their international corporations to let them move their capital back and forth across national borders freely.  Somewhere along the way, we’d run out of money to pay the farm subsidies that let the Mexican Capitalists import American produce and sell it cheaper than the Mexican farmers could sell it, which is how they drove them off their land in the first place.
I call it the plague-of-locusts economy, but I really should call it the chickens-coming-home-to-roost economy.  And if you don’t like it, innovate, innovate, innovate!   A lot of people didn’t like the death-in-the-desert economy, so innovating is exactly what they did.  And now if you don’t want people to use the plague-of-locusts economy, think of something else.

As for the Laws of Thermodynamics, trickle-down economics is a myth.  Jeremy Rifkin published Entropy in the early years of the Reagan administration, and for those of you who are too young to remember, trickle-down economics was President Reagan’s solution for everything.  In the Thermodynamics chapter I told you how energy is always radiated out in space every time anything happens in the world.  I talked about food chains, where energy is always lost between one level and the next, because a lot of chemical reactions happen in between.  If a deer eats some leaves and then a bear eats the deer, a lot of the sunlight energy that was contained in the molecular bonds of the leaves never reaches the bear, because the deer used it for the energy he needed to live. The deer used some of that energy and some of the atoms he got from his food to build new molecules for his body, and that energy was stored in the molecular bonds of his body.  That’s the energy the bear got.  If you then came along and ate the bear, again, a lot of the energy the bear ate would never reach you.  That’s why the only large animals anyone ever domesticated were herbivores.  If you wanted meat, you could domesticate cows, then feed them to domesticated bears, and then eat the bears.  But if you just ate the cows, you’d get a hell of a lot more meat out of the deal.  Or you could not raise cows at all use their former pastureland to grow beans instead.  Now you’re eating the sunlight even more directly, by cutting another tier out of the food chain.

You could call a food chain trickle-up economics.  So guess how trickle-down economics works.  The exact same way, only in the other direction.

According to Ronald Reagan’s idea of trickle-down economics, if we give tax breaks to the materially wealthy, everyone will make money out of the deal.  If someone makes a bunch of money and then uses some of that money to pay you to do a job, you make money as a result of their making money.  But here’s where the Laws of Thermodynamics crash the party.  You earned the money as a result of doing something.  Energy radiated off the Earth in the process and was lost from our environmental economy forever.  Sure, the money reached you, but by the time it did, there was less energy in our environmental economy for you to trade your money for.  That means inflation.  That means that your money isn’t worth as much as it would’ve been if we’d cut a tier out of the Reaganomics food chain and given you the tax break directly.  I know it doesn’t sound like you getting paid to do a job should devalue your money, but that’s just a product of the Laws of Thermodynamics being counterintuitive to us.  If you were the only person involved in the Ronald Reagan economy, you’d be right.  But at the time we were talking about a national economy made up of 250 million people.  Today we’re talking about a global economy made up of 6.5 billion people, all of whom are using an industrialized technological level—although some more than others, and some a lot more than others.

Everyone in the Globalization 4.0 movement has already figured this part out too.

I suppose now would be a good time to point out that the global Anarchist movement has been working on Globalization 4.0 for about 150 years.  The Capitalists have been working on Globalization 3.0 for about 15 years.  The goal of Anarchism is to level the playing field among everyone, to empower individuals, to dissolve hierarchal social systems, and to replace them with a horizontal social structure.  In other words, the goal of Anarchism and Globalization 4.0 is to do everything Mr. Friedman said is happening in Globalization 3.0.  The two things the Anarchists have lacked to this point are an effective communications network and a unifying ideology.  In other words, the Capitalists are building the infrastructure the global Anarchist movement needs to be able to succeed.

And the universal ideology?

Heh, heh, heh…

So I have to wonder:  Are the Anarchists who are protesting Capitalist globalization really just a bunch of immature children kicking and screaming about the world not being fair, as Mr. Friedman accuses them?  Or do they have such a highly developed ideology that Mr. Friedman can’t even understand what the f*ck they’re talking about?  The Capitalists aren’t having any trouble turning their ideology into practice, but they’ve hardly had any time to develop an ideology compatible with Globalization 3.0.  The Anarchists have developed an ideology that’s so compatible with Globalization 3.0 that they can call it Globalization 4.0.  They haven’t yet figured out how to put their ideology into practice effectively, but at least they have an ideology that’s compatible with the economy we have now, which is more than the Capitalists can say for themselves.  The Capitalists have been stumbling through this economy and making up an ideology to go along with it the whole time.  The Anarchists started at the beginning and identified an ideology first, and then started looking for how to put it to use.

In the end, the goal of the Capitalists is to compete.  In a world with a growing population and diminishing resources, that competition necessarily will make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can’t keep everyone alive.  The goal of the Anarchists is to make the chemical reaction of the world work in a way that can keep everyone alive, because to do otherwise would be authoritarian.  It would depend on people deciding that they possessed greater human value than other people, and therefore that they deserved to live while the other people deserved to die.  And given the choice between a globalization strategy that depends on people dying to make it succeed, or one that doesn’t require people dying to make it succeed, guess which one I picked…

“When they came for the homosexuals, I did not speak up because I was not a homosexual.  When they came for the Socialists, I did not speak up because I was not a Socialist.  When they came for the Jews I did not speak up because I was not a Jew.  When they came for me, there was no one left to speak up.”

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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Now for the biggest challenge of all:  What does human evolution tell us about our relationships with other animals?

Animals can’t speak for themselves, and a lot of people are using that against them.  So a lot of people have been giving animals the short end of the deal and then playing dumb, pretending they don’t notice.

Determining an appropriate relationship between our species and other animals can never be a complete process, and it will always depend on people debating a lot of gray area.  But when you put all the cards on the table, a lot of possible relationships can be eliminated, and all the possible relationships within the remaining gray area can be a lot better defined.

Now that I’ve shown you how evolution has created a universal brain structure for our species, it’s just one more step to show you how that universal brain structure applies to the entire animal kingdom.  Quite simply, the universal brain structure of humanity is just a unique variation on that universal animal brain structure.

Naturally, each species has its own variation on the universal brain structure.  But when you consider the magnitude of the interactions we’re talking about here—such as when it’s okay for people to kill animals—using that basic universal brain structure of the animal kingdom to determine the animal’s opinion is not that difficult at all.

First of all, I’m sure a lot of animal rights activists wanted to lock me in a cage and squirt bleach in my eyes when I said back in the first book that all animals always use all of their abilities to their fullest potential to deal with their situation, and that yields Thomas Jefferson’s definition of Greek animal happiness.  For one thing, that was Chapter 4, and you’re now on Chapter 32, so you didn’t understand enough about evolutionary psychology back then to understand the whole story.  For another, the first volume was about how evolution had shaped humans’ perception of the world, and that made a good illustration of the fact that animals always use all of their abilities to their fullest potential to make the best of their situation because they don’t perceive themselves to have a choice, but humans do have that choice but they often don’t make it and feel unhappy as a result—because they feel torn between two choices, wanting to choose both at the same time, and therefore feel like they aren’t making the best of their situation no matter what they do.

To see how this applies to animals now, let’s skip to the second volume.  In the second volume I told you that all animal behavior, and consequently all human behavior, was the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.  So what do you think animals are doing when they always use all of their abilities to their fullest potential to make the best of their situation, besides attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them?  So now that you know that trick, we can factor the concept of philosophical happiness out of their perceptions and decision-making processes.

If you’ve ever owned a cat or dog, you know that your pet communicates emotionally.  That emotional communication must originate from somewhere, which means emotion that the animal is feeling.  So now that we are talking about animals and their perceptions of the world, we can talk about animals’ emotions.

Also, now that we’re talking about physical limitations of the world, we can eliminate some possible interactions between our species and others, and better define other possible relationships.

First of all, humans are predators.  Predators eat meat.  Meat comes from animals.  End of story.

In the first book I told you about blood types.  I’m blood type O, which is the original blood type of hunter-gatherers.  I eat meat because meat is one of the foods that my body is best at digesting.  What else do you suggest I do?

People have the intelligence to enable them to choose not to eat meat, and some people make that choice.  In the same way, people all over the world have practiced religion for the past 60,000 years.  People have the intelligence to give them the choice to give up religion now and practice Atheism, and some people make that choice.  But to expect everyone to give up eating meat is as futile as expecting everyone to give up religion.  So while worldwide vegetarianism out of sympathy for animals is an option, it’s not practical as an ideological foundation for a civilization.

Second, leather and wool are renewable resources.  So are meat, milk, and eggs.  I hear some animal rights activists say that now that we can make our clothes out of petroleum products there’s no reason to make them out of animal products.  Using animal products kills individual animals. Drilling oil destroys entire environments.  So more damage is caused to animals by drilling oil than by using animal products.

As far as hunting wild animals goes, we are all descended from hunters.  We are a part of the natural world, and it is a part of the natural world that humans hunt.  Some choose not to, but expecting everyone to give it up out of sympathy for animals is futile.

Domesticated animals add a twist to the basic universal brain structure of the animal kingdom.  Domesticated animals, by definition, are animals that have genetically evolved through their interaction with humans.  By selectively breeding wild animals that had traits that were favorable to humans over the course of thousands of years, humans have created new species of animals.

The fact that humans created new species of animals by breeding them to their own needs means that these animals are no longer the animals their ancestors were.  The controlling factor in domesticated animals’ evolution was their usefulness to humans, not their adaptation to surviving in their natural environment.  That means that releasing all of our domesticated animals into the wild would be animal cruelty, because we would be forcing them not to live in conditions that their genetic evolution has best prepared them for.  That means that their quality of life would suffer, because when they used all of their abilities to their fullest potential to deal with their situation, they would not be able to provide for themselves as well in the wild as they could in captivity.

This, of course raises the question:  Captivity under what conditions?   The obvious answer to that is:  The conditions under which they were domesticated, or conditions very close to them, anyway.  Horses, cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, donkeys, and camels were all domesticated by the Mesopotamians prior to the writing of the First Testament of the Bible—oops, I mean, the Old Testament.  The conditions those animals lived in in Colonial America at the end of the 18th century were probably not terribly different.

As this relates to raising animals for food, there is no decision we can make that will prove favorable to individual animals.  Either we release them into the wild to fend for themselves in conditions they aren’t well equipped to deal with and let a lot of them die, or we raise them under the conditions they are equipped to deal with and then kill them and eat them.  But as species, it’s safe to say that thousands of years ago our species made a deal with their species, that if they provide for us, we’ll provide for them.  Scientifically, that’s exactly what happened, because humans’ domestication of other animals was a coevolution in which each species helped the other to survive and reproduce.

If everyone in the world stopped eating meat now, our domesticated animals would no longer serve any practical purpose to us, which means no one would have any reason for keeping them anymore.  They’re ill equipped to survive in the wild, and if we stop raising them in captivity, their species would become endangered.

As this relates to the use of draft animals, draft animals are a renewable resource.  The truck or the tractor you would need to drive to do the job of a horse depends on an industrialized technological level to maintain, which means that it’s not a renewable resource.  Europeans were able to grow a lot more food in the Americas than the Native Americans were because the Europeans had horses, oxen, and donkeys to help them plow land the Native Americans (or anyone else) couldn’t plow by hand.  Considering the number of people there are in the Americas now, there is no reason to believe that many people could be supported by plowing all of our fields by hand.  But luckily we have draft animals that have evolved for thousands of years to deal with precisely these living conditions.

As this relates to animals kept in zoos and circuses, individual wild animals are being removed from their natural environments and are being forced to live in captivity.  However, most people who see those animals in the zoos or circuses will never be able to afford to go on an African safari, so they will never be able to see those animals in their natural habitats.  And unless you intend to sail to Africa on a wooden sailing ship and ride though your safari on horseback, once again you’re depending on an industrialized technological level and the non-renewable energy it entails to make your safari possible.

By showing some wild animals in captivity, you make those animals tangible to the people who see them.  If you then tell those people that there are more animals like this living in the wild, and the choices the people are making are threatening their natural habitats, it will be much easier to convince the people to change their behavior than if you just tell them to stop buying ivory or whatever because it endangers some animals that as far as they can tell only exist in movies and books anyway.  So once again, through the sacrifice of some individual members, the species is protected.

As this relates to animal experimentation, this is where the tide starts to turn…

First of all, animal experimentation for psychology and neurology experiments.  These books were made possible in part by experimentation on animals.  Some of the scientists whose work I’ve referenced made their discoveries thanks to research that had been conducted on animals.  The end result of the sacrifice of those animals was that we finally figured out enough about people to build a civilization that isn’t globally self-destructive.  A globally self-destructive civilization threatens every animal species.  So once again, species are protected through the sacrifice of individuals.  And I’d just like to point out that I personally have never carried out any kind of an experiment on an animal.  On the contrary, I was able to write these books by being very, very, very good at making observations about people themselves, and about animals living in healthy conditions.

Now we come to animals being used for product testing, and we reach the end of the road for humans’ use of animals.

But before I go any further, let me jump back to the last book.

The future of civilization and our species depends on our constructing a cooperative economy within the physical limitations of the world.  You can’t truly cooperate with anyone unless you respect them as your equal.  That’s not to say that you have to believe that they are of equal skill or ability to you, or that you have to make them feel like they are, but that is to say that they are equally deserving of your respect for being who they are.  If you can’t respect a person as your equal, you can’t possibly engage in an interaction with them that will prove mutually beneficial.  At the moment you define yourself as superior to them, you define yourself as more important than them.  If you believe that to be true, then the actions you take in regards to that person will be built upon that belief.  If you define yourself in your own mind as superior to the other person, you decide that you are more qualified to make decisions than they are and that you have a better sense of what people should do than they do.  You will then act according to your perceptions, just like you always act according to your perceptions, with the end result of an inequitable relationship—because you won’t believe that an equitable relationship is necessary.

Right now we have a competitive economy, just like Mesopotamians, Europeans, and Americans have always practiced a competitive economy.  Well who are the best people to compete against?  As always, the ones who are the least able to defend themselves.

But now we are running face-first into the physical limitations of our competitive economy.  Now that we’ve filled the world up with so many people and so many weapons, and the world’s resources are being stretched so thin, pretty much anyone who wants them can get hold of AK47s to defend their resources.  So competing against other people keeps getting more and more difficult—meaning less and less economical.

So who are the next easiest group of people to compete against?  Our own descendants who haven’t been born yet.  If we go down to South America to try to pillage more material resources that the people who live there need to keep their environmental economies functioning, and we meet up with a militia of indigenous people armed with smuggled assault rifles, what’s our alternative?  We could just pillage resources that our unborn grandchildren will need to keep their environmental economies functioning, and let the natural cycles of the world break down before our grandchildren get the chance to do anything about it.  And that’s what we’re doing.

Well animals are easy to compete against too, since they can’t speak for themselves or fight back.  So our competitive economy is preying on them.  As you may have noticed, in every example I’ve given so far, either the animals benefited in some way or another, or else the interaction was millions of years old and therefore its own part of the natural cycle of the world.

So here’s why I’m beginning this book with the animal rights movement:

Until we respect other animals as being equally important parts of the world, and limit our interactions with them to ones that are mutually beneficial, we don’t have a cooperative economy.  At best, we would have pieces of a cooperative economy, where everything that wasn’t specifically included in that cooperative economic system would be fair game (no pun intended—okay, yes it was).

This is simply an expansion on the concept of human rights, to make them living being rights.  If one person isn’t entitled to human rights, it voids the human rights of every single person in the entire world, because those people no longer have their rights simply by being members of the Homo sapiens species, they have their rights because someone somewhere has chosen to grant them to them.

So it goes with a globally cooperative economy and living being rights.  A globally cooperative economy depends on everyone in the world respecting that every single living thing has just as much right to be here as everything else.  Obviously we can’t abolish food cycles, so you have to continue to eat other living things and play your own inescapable part in the natural cycles of the world, but in the process you can still respect other living things as being equally important parts of the world as you.  Once again, this is simply a matter of people altering their own behavior by altering their perceptions of the world.

The importance of human rights to a globally cooperative economy is obvious.
Living being rights are critical to a globally cooperative economy not for the sake of emotional pity for animals but for the sake of developing cultural values and for building a safety margin into our economy.

I’m willing to bet that people who had pets for most of their time growing up are more sympathetic to animals as adults.  If you spend ten years getting to know your cat or dog and treating him like a member of your family, then you’ve learned something they teach you on Sesame Street, but in a much bigger way.  Namely, that people—and creatures—who don’t look like you have feelings and personalities too, and they try to get the things they need to make themselves happy, and they need certain things in order to be healthy, and… everything else I’ve been telling you about for two books and counting.  If you recognize that an animal can be a member of your family, and you recognize that there are lots more animals in the world, it’s no stretch of the imagination to see that those animals are important too.

If you’re an animal herder and you recognize that your animals are an important part of the world while they’re alive, even though you are going to kill them and eat them eventually, you will see to it that you keep them happy and healthy.  That turns into an economic safety margin because if you keep your animals healthy and then things go wrong for you and you have a bad season growing hay for your horses, you can afford to let them go a little lean for the year and then go back to feeding them their regular lots the next year.  That’s the basic idea, anyway.  If you try to raise more horses by sacrificing their health and happiness, you’re already stretching the animals to their limits.  Then if things go wrong and you have a bad year, you have no standard of living left to sacrifice, so you have to start sacrificing the animals themselves.

So any time you have any kind of an interaction with an animal, ask yourself:  In what sense this is a mutually beneficial relationship for the animal?   If there is no answer to the question, there is no reason to believe the animal would agree to it.  For one thing, that does not contribute to a globally cooperative economy.  For another, an interaction that is not mutually beneficial in any sense at all is the most fundamental definition of “animal cruelty”.

Finally, just as for human rights, if living being rights don’t apply to one living being they don’t apply to any living being.  If you offer anyone one loophole in living being rights, they’re going to start looking for more.  And naturally, just as with anything else, the most energy efficient way to protect living being rights is for everyone to change their perspective on the world as necessary to change their behavior.  The alternative is to support a lot of non-food-producing people who would enforce living being rights, and that inefficiency alone would be an added threat to living beings, beginning with the organic farmers who would have to work harder to support more non-food-producing people.

So back to interactions between people and animals.  In what sense does using animals for product testing the safety of cosmetics or household cleaners produce mutually beneficial results for the animals?  I’ll give you two hints.  First of all, there are already animal-testing-free products available, which means it is possible to produce these products without harming animals.  Second, if the products depend on an industrialized technological level to produce, they’re already harmful to animals, so there’s nothing left to be discovered through animal testing.

Now for factory farms.  In the first book I defined Thomas Jefferson’s Greek animal happiness by saying that all animals always use all of their abilities to their fullest potential to make the best of their situation, which means that all animals are always happy.  Well back in Thomas Jefferson’s day, people weren’t raising animals in what are, for all intents and purposes, Nazi concentration camps.  Now we raise pigs in cages that are so small they can’t turn around, we grind up baby male chickens and then feed them to other chickens, we grind up baby male cattle and feed them to cows, we raise veal calves in small cages that prevent them from getting any exercise to develop their muscles, to keep their meat tender, we don’t feed them any iron, and we make their cages out of wood so they can’t gnaw on the bars to try to get iron into their diets that way, and these animals live and die packed together in warehouses, without ever seeing daylight once in their lives.  This is not a mutually beneficial relationship in any way at all.

When we domesticated animals for food, we created new species of animals that depend on us for their survival.  But now we are forcing those animals to live in conditions where it isn’t physically possible for them to use their abilities to lead healthy lives.  No matter what choices the animals make in life, they will always suffer.  There is nothing the animals can do to escape suffering.
As I said in the last book, human babies are born into the world expecting to see human faces.  In the same way, domesticated farm animals are born into the world with abilities that suit them well to depending on humans and living on farms as of 5,000 years ago, or just 200 years ago, or anything in between.  Their perceptions of the world have evolved accordingly.  Cows expect to find fields full of grass.  They’re probably fatter than their wild ancestors, so they can’t run as fast as their wild ancestors, so now they can’t survive in the wild as well as their wild ancestors, so now they depend on us and our fences to keep them safe.  Now we aren’t giving them the fields full of grass, but we’re still giving them the fences, so we’ve broken our end of the agreement.  We’re using our advantages in abilities and resources to force them to live in conditions that will always be beneficial to us and will never be beneficial to them.  This is exactly how Capitalists treat their workers—unless their workers band together in unions and pass labor laws—it’s exactly how the White treated the Blacks in South Africa, it’s exactly how Americans used to treat their slaves, and it’s exactly why materially wealthy Mexicans are driving subsistence farmers off their land to provide a labor pool for their factories right now.  Factory farms, animal product testing, and all other interactions between humans and animals that are not beneficial to animals in any sense, are just more ways that imperialistic people prey on those who can’t defend themselves.

The answer to this problem, of course, is free range ranching.  Or something close to it, anyway—no matter how they raised farm animals in the18th century, it was a lot closer to free range ranching than what we have now.  You can’t produce as much meat per acre of land through free-range ranching, but you do return to a mutually beneficial relationship between humans and animals.  The animals are healthier this way and you kill a smaller number of them, but you don’t endanger their species.

That brings me to the main argument for veganism.  For humans to eat vegetables is more thermodynamically efficient than for humans to eat meat.  By eating meat, you’re turning soil nutrients into plant matter into meat into food.  By eating vegetables, you’re turning soil nutrients into plant matter into food.  By cutting out that extra step, you make that process a hell of a lot more energy efficient.  The nutrients get into your body with fewer chemical reactions, so less heat radiates out into space in the process.

Jeremy Rifkin, the Prophet of Thermodynamics gave an example of this in Entropy, and he’s quoting an example given by a chemist named G. Tyler Miller.  Suppose you have a wide river valley with a slow-moving river flowing along the bottom and meadows to either side, where some indigenous people live on the riverbanks so they can fish in the river.   The food chain consists of grass, grasshoppers, frogs, trout, and humans.

According to G. Tyler Miller, only about 10-20% of the energy each species consumes makes it up to the next level of the food chain.  The animals use the rest of the energy to live, and it radiates out into the atmosphere.  In Mr. Miller’s words:  “Three hundred trout are required to support a man for one year.  The trout in turn must consume 90,000 frogs, that must consume 27 million grasshoppers that live off 1000 tons of grass.”  So every adult male in the river valley depends on 1000 tons of grass to keep him alive each year.  And so far, we’re talking about stone-age hunter-gatherers.

When you start adding industrialized technology into the equation, it gets even worse.  Go to any vegan website and you’ll find statistics that tell how it takes 18 barrels of oil to raise a 1,000 pound cow, so every pound of beef you eat costs a gallon of oil.

A lot of vegans point to India and say that cows are sacred there, so obviously it’s possible for people to choose not to eat beef.  But these vegans usually say that in snobby tones of voice, as though they and the Indians are just plain smarter than Americans, and Americans are just stupid brainwashed consumer zombies, and why aren’t they smart enough to take pity on cows too and change their lifestyles?  Well let me tell you a little something about India…

India has a smaller land area than the United States, and it has a population of over a billion people.  Those people are all descended from hunters, just like we are.  A lot of individual people here in America become vegans out of emotional sympathy for animals, but a billion people don’t make the same choice spontaneously.

The Indians have run into a physical limitation of their environment.  If they ate beef, they wouldn’t be able to produce enough food with the land they have to support their population.  Each person in the river valley consumed 1000 tons of grass per year.  That was a five-tier food chain, and grass to cows to people would only be a three-tier food chain, so it would be more energy efficient.  But what are we talking about now?  Only 500 tons of grass per year to keep each person alive?  If you cut the cows out of the food chain and start growing beans instead of grass, now you’re down to a two-tiered food chain.

Once upon a time, somewhere in India someone had the great idea that people should stop eating cows.  But half a billion carnivorous people (back then) would not agree with that person out of emotional sympathy alone.  That person’s great idea was reinforced by an environmental pressure—the fact that raising cows for food was no longer energy efficient enough to support their population.  That environmental pressure made that one person’s good idea seem like a good idea to half a billion other people because that great idea was a solution to a problem that directly threatened everyone’s survival.  Adaptation to an environmental pressure is the definition of evolution—in this case, a social evolution.

So the vegans’ solution is for the people in the river valley to start growing wheat instead of catching fish, and that way the river valley would produce 1000 tons of wheat per person per year.  Their argument is that if people all over the world could produce food that efficiently, we could solve global hunger almost instantly.  And that is true—temporarily.  But unless you have a plan to stop the global population explosion also, eventually we’ll fill the world up with so many vegans that we won’t be able to grow enough wheat—or rice, or soybeans, or anything—to keep them all alive, and then we’ll be right back into global hunger.  And this time we’ll have nowhere left to run from it, because now there will be no more energy efficient of a way to produce food than what we’re already doing.  That’s still a formula for global environmental disaster, and that’s still a formula for World War III.   And in this version of World War III there will be 30 or 40 billion people in the world all fighting each other to try to stay alive, instead of just 8 or 9 billion people.

Ironically, a lot of vegans are also feminists, who say that women should be allowed to have whatever number of children they want.

Next we have animal testing for medical experiments.  Medical experimentation on animals does not benefit animals in any sense.  On the other hand, we’re sacrificing animals to help keep people alive, and there’s no way any majority of people will ever be convinced that’s wrong.  On the positive side, however, our technological level, along with the world’s supply of non-renewable resources, is reaching its peak.  When there isn’t enough non-renewable energy left to continue supporting our current technological level, we’re going to have to start building down to a simpler technological level.  And we’ve already done all of the medical testing we need to find out everything we’ll be able to do with medicine at that technological level, so further experimentation shouldn’t be necessary.

Speaking of “medicine”, when traditional Native Americans talk about their spirituality, they refer to it as “medicine”.  There’s a good reason for that.  Native Americans’ spirituality is their primary health care system.  That is, they realize that everything in the world is connected, and in order to be healthy, you have to keep everything in balance.  Colonial Americans work at jobs they hate just so they can afford medical insurance.  But that adds stress to their lives.  That added stress to their lives takes a toll on their physical and emotional health.  So what exactly is being accomplished here?

When you talk about the negative effects that stress has on people’s health, you’re talking about thermodynamics again.  We evolved to deal well with certain living conditions.  If we remove ourselves from those living conditions and try living in conditions that place us in perpetual states of conflict—require us to constantly fight to stay alive, although it’s not necessarily fighting in the literal violent sense—then that added conflict is going to inflict physiological damage on us.

The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity demonstrates this best, I think.  Your physiology evolved to deal with certain sensory inputs, and your physiology has to keep working in a certain way to maintain your physical health.  If you get a lot of sensory inputs that your physiology isn’t prepared for, it’s going to make energy and atoms start moving around in your body in ways that they weren’t supposed to move around.  Your body is going to divert those atoms and that energy to wherever they seem to be needed most to keep you alive in the short term, but it can only move the atoms and energy to those places by not moving them to wherever they were supposed to go.  That’s exactly what happened when my uncle went away to fight in the Second World War.  His brain simply was not equipped to listen to that much artillery being shot at him, so by the time he came home his brain no longer worked in a way that allowed him to function in day-to-day life.  The energy and atoms that his brain had to divert to keep him alive in the short term inflicted permanent damage on his health in the long term.

The Native Americans’ spirituality gave them their sense of oneness with the world, and that sense of oneness with the world kept them healthy.  So they didn’t fall into the trap of constantly having to work harder and harder to pay for better and better medicine to cure them of the harm they were inflicting on themselves.

So if Americans start learning how to eliminate conflict from their lives by living differently and becoming evolutionarily self-aware, they’ll be able to eliminate a lot of health problems.  That would eliminate a lot of their need for (external) medicine, and that would do a lot to eliminate their need to conduct medical tests on animals.

Next we have animal testing for psychology experiments.  As I’ve said, I didn’t need to conduct any animal experimentation to write these books, but some of the discoveries I’ve referenced in these books were made through animal experimentation.  But now that we’ve figured out enough about humanity to figure out what’s been going wrong for us and build down to a sustainable lifestyle that won’t threaten any animal species anymore, that’s a big argument in favor of ceasing psychological experimentation on other animals.  The main argument in favor of continuing psychological experimentation on animals is that it has medical value for humans.  So this is gray area that has no easy solution.

Just because I’ve had to take the college dropout low road to scientific fame and fortune, I love an opportunity to stick my switchblade in academic snobs’ guts and twist the knife.  So here’s how I figured out how to write these books without any animal experimentation.

Over the course of my life, I’ve met a lot of different people and done a lot of different things.  The best way I can describe how I perceive human behavior is that I’ve always been aware of electricity flowing through people’s brains.  I couldn’t tell where it was coming from or where it was going to, but I could tell when it wasn’t going to the right place, and I could tell when people thought it was going to one place but it was actually going to a different place.

Over the course of my life, I’d stored a lot of conversations I’ve had and things I’ve heard people say where the electricity just wasn’t flowing the way the person thought it was, or was flowing differently from the way they wanted me to believe it was flowing.  Each one of those was a logic puzzle that I just didn’t have enough pieces of information to solve.  By comparing all of these conversations to each other, I was trying to establish some universal points of reference.  I hadn’t discovered any yet, but I had developed a set of probabilities to narrow my search.  If I could reduce any one part of any conversation to only one probability, I would have a piece of the puzzle.  But to this point, every conversation I’ve ever had was a probability wave, where at each point in the conversation there were a few different places the electricity could’ve been flowing.  But I kept having more and more conversations I couldn’t decipher, so it was like I was standing in an ocean of probability waves.

One morning, a little over four years ago, I was working at my job, sanding body filler and wood putty with an orbital sander—making my $10 an hour. We had a radio playing, and sanding body filler and wood putty is really boring, so when a truck commercial came on the radio, I got to wondering:  Everyone thinks car and truck commercials on the radio are so stupid, how the hell can it to be profitable for anyone to pay to put them on the radio?

Then I got to thinking that the spokespersons in the commercials talk like and act like that largest marketing demographic, and then I remembered a conversation I’d had with one of my cousins three or four years earlier, when she was telling me about something one of her philosophy professors had told her in college about people having inherited their tribal instincts from their primate ancestors.  I realized that by acting like people who the people of the biggest marketing demographic would recognize as members of their tribe, the commercial spokespersons were getting their audience to trust them, and then were getting them to sympathize with the emotions they were showing toward a particular product.  If people you recognize as members of your tribe are excited about buying new Chevy trucks, buying Chevy trucks must be a good idea, so you should do it too.

Then I got to thinking about other types of human motivators, and I remembered the Maslow Hierarchy of Human Needs from my flight instructor training, and I remembered the Five Human Motivators from my small business management class when I was getting my associate’s degree in Building Construction at Eastern Maine Technical College.  From that I pieced together the Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior, and realized that what seemed like a chaotic system was simply an interaction of eighteen simple systems.

Then I realized that the amount the audience’s behavior would be altered would be proportional to the amount of energy the radio spokespersons put into their emotional communication.
So I discovered the Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior and the Theory of Evolutionary Relativity within about two minutes of each other.  And just like that, all the probability waves collapsed and left me standing in the middle of a field.

I went home that evening and started writing the first volume of this book. And ever since then, I have never had a conversation with anyone that I couldn’t unravel, and I have never heard anyone make any observation about human behavior or life in general that didn’t fit within the Theory of Evolutionary Relativity.

So back to animal experimentation.  My question is:  Out of all the scientists who argue in favor of continuing psychological experimentation on animals, how many of them do you think are still doing it for the sake of making valuable discoveries, and how many do you think are doing it just because their ability to make a living depends on them torturing animals, because they never bothered to learn any other job skills?

Finally, pets.  This is a big gray area, but the arguments on both sides are very well defined, and a few possibilities can be eliminated.

Two big arguments can be made in favor of keeping pets.  First, you’re giving an animal a home.  Second, you give your family members—and especially children—exposure to animals.  That gives them the opportunity to get to know a few animals personally, and to learn to communicate emotionally with creatures who aren’t capable of communicating in words.  That way, when these family members hear about animal rights and the destruction of animals’ habitats, they can sympathize more with the animals being affected because those animals are pretty much like their pets.  That’s not to say that all pet owners do this, but it is to say that people who have had exposure to animals are a lot more likely to do it than people who haven’t had exposure to animals.  And of course, when you’re talking about statistical likelihoods, you aren’t referring to the behavior of individuals, but you are referring to sociological forces.  That means it’s a safe bet that a population of people who keep pets are going to be more concerned about the well being of animals than are a population of people who don’t keep pets.

The big argument against keeping pets is:  Under what conditions are you keeping them?  If it’s a type of pet you have to keep in a cage, how can that be considered beneficial to the animal?  When you chose to get your pet, you chose to sentence him to life in prison.  You chose to force the animal to live in conditions that aren’t evolutionarily natural.  The animal was born into the world with genetic instincts that made him expect to find certain things, and you have prevented him from ever finding any of those things.  Mice, rats, and hamsters evolved in confined areas, I suppose you could say, so it is possible to replicate the living conditions they expect in a cage—but only if you actively replicate them.  The confined area of the cage all by itself isn’t similar enough to the evolutionary conditions of the animals for you to consider it acceptable to the animals.
As for larger animals, like rabbits and birds, life in a cage can’t be called anything but a life sentence in prison.  Rabbits have strong legs for running long distances really fast.  Birds have wings for flying in the sky.  How much of those things can the animal do in his cage?   So how can you ever provide your animal with acceptable living conditions at any point in his life?  You could say that you’re keeping the animal safe by keeping him from getting eaten by predators that could catch him in the wild, so you’re giving him a long life that he wouldn’t be guaranteed in the wild.  And in the same way, you could spend the rest of your life in your bedroom and never have to worry about getting hit by a car when you’re crossing the street, but do you?  There would be so much to life that you’d miss out on that way.  You feel like you need those things because you have the ability to try to get them.  If you didn’t have the ability to try to get those things, they wouldn’t be things you would feel like you were supposed to have.  But using your abilities to get them requires you to take risks.  Well wouldn’t your animals tell you the same thing if they had any way of doing it?

Cats and dogs pose another problem.  Neither of them evolved as indoor animals, so keeping them as indoor animals can’t be considered beneficial to them.  They have the ability to go outside, they know how to live outside, and they have the ability to find their way home again.  So why do you want to keep them inside all their lives?

If you live in the middle of a city where there’s lots of traffic everywhere, you could keep your pets inside to keep them from getting run over.  But if you live somewhere like that, why are you getting a pet in the first place?

On the other hand, if you live on the edge of civilization, like, in a housing development near a National Park where lots of people pay lots of money for their houses so they can feel  like they live close to nature, and you get a cat or a dog and let him run around outside, guess what.  You’re changing the ecosystem of the very same natural environment you just paid all your money to go live near.  Cats and dogs are predators, and they’re being introduced by humankind.  You’re throwing off the natural cycles of the environment where you live, because animals that didn’t get hunted by cats and dogs now are getting hunted by them.  These animals didn’t evolve around cats and dogs, so they don’t have natural defenses against them.  They might have natural defenses against other animals that also work well against cats and dogs, but then again, they might not.  Meanwhile, the natural predators of those animals are being deprived of a food source, which means your local environment will no longer be able to support as many of them.
Felines and canines live all over the world in the form of cougars, other large cats, other smaller cats, wolves, coyotes, and foxes, but thanks to selective breeding, domesticated cats and dogs have characteristics that their wild relatives don’t.  But the biggest difference between domestic animals hunting local prey and wild animals hunting local prey is that domestic animals have an artificial food supply.  Your local environment can support basically an infinite number of cats and dogs, because you’re bringing in food and then feeding it to them specifically.  When you let them out, it’s inevitable that they’re going to hunt other animals sometimes, because it’s instinctive to them.  Local predators depend on local prey for their food exclusively, which puts a limit on the number of wild predators the local environment can support.  So that finite number of local predators who depend on local prey exclusively is at an obvious disadvantage to the infinite number of domestic cats and dogs that can depend on humans for all their food.  That relatively infinite number of domestic cats and dogs could easily eat all the wild prey in the area and drive the wild predators out of the local environment—either drive them into extinction or drive them out of the natural environment that you paid so much money to live near.

On the other hand, if you live in a town where the neighborhoods don’t have much traffic, like where I grew up in Maine, or on the edge of civilization where there are only a few people, like where I lived growing up in California, there isn’t much harm in letting your pets outside.  In the first case, you already live in a well-settled area, so the local environment has included a lot of people and their pets for a long time, so there isn’t much damage your pets can do.  In the second case, there aren’t many people, so there aren’t many pets, so even though your pets will compete against local predators, they won’t compete very much.  The local predators are limited by the number of their prey, and the domestic animals are limited by the number of people.  Then all the food that you feed your pets is food that your pets aren’t extracting from the local food chain.
Somewhere in between those two cases lies a gray area.  All of America was wilderness once upon a time.  Every town where people and their pets have been a part of the local environment for decades was once the edge of civilization where the number of domestic predators was limited by the number of people.  Somewhere in between, enough people moved into the area and brought their pets that local predators stopped being able to compete for food.  Is there any way to control that?  If people move into the area little by little, I doubt it.  But if you build a huge housing development on the edge of the wilderness all at once, you’d better ban outdoor cats and dogs, and their owners in turn better choose not to keep domesticated animals for prison inmates.  If you let all those domestic predators run around outside, your local environment is f*cked.  And if you force them to stay inside all their lives, that’s just animal cruelty of a different kind.

As for declawing cats:  Right before my former roommate the New Age game show host moved to Phoenix, I was out looking for an apartment.  She had two cats, so I had to find an apartment that would take cats.  I went in, looked at the place, liked it, told them which apartment I wanted, and told them when I had to move in.  They told me they could have the apartment ready by then.  So on moving day I packed up my van and dove over there to sign the lease.  And somewhere in the middle of page 13 or wherever it was, I came to a list of conditions that I was supposed to initial individually to show that I had read each one specifically and that I agreed to it.  One of them said, “All cats must be declawed.”

“Wait a second,” I said, “you never told me about this.”

“You never asked,” said the leasing agent.

“I asked about bringing cats in.  We were talking about cats.  You never thought this was relevant to the conversation?”

“Well that’s a common practice at apartment complexes all over here.  What’s the big deal?”

“Our cats are our friends, our family members,” I said.  “Not pieces of furniture.  If you had told me about this, I never would’ve agreed to move in here.  I have no choice but to sign this lease now, because I’m all out of time to look for somewhere else to move.  But I’m not initialing this one.”

The lady said that I could wait until my roommate moved in and then we could come back and initial it then, or something like that.  Instead, I never even told them when my roommate moved in, let alone her cats.  F*ck ‘em.

What people euphemistically refer to as “declawing” cats actually refers to cutting off all their toes at the first knuckle.  As in, if I’d told that leasing agent bitch that I’d agree to get our cats declawed on the one condition that she agreed to go home tonight and de-nail all of her children, the only way she could make her children cease to grow fingernails and toenails would be by cutting the ends off of all their fingers and toes.

As for spaying and neutering pets, that’s a little different from de-toeing cats.  You could say that getting them fixed constitutes sexual maiming and prevents them from experiencing part of their natural life.  However, every generation of animals has more offspring than the environment can support.  Then those that are the healthiest and best suited to their living conditions survive—that’s how evolution works.  If you choose to allow your pet to engage in his or her natural sex life, then you choose to condemn some of his or her children to death.  The fact that we have animal shelters where stray and unwanted animals are taken proves that we have reached our environmental limitations for domestic cats and dogs.  Sterilizing cats and dogs will become animal cruelty when all the animal shelters in America go out of business because there are no more stray or unwanted animals anywhere in the country.  Not before then.

The question of pets and animal rights comes down to:  Are the animals benefiting by being your pets?  Or are you keeping them for your own emotional satisfaction?  Out of all the conditions your animal could possibly live in within their area, are you giving them the best?  If you aren’t giving them the best out of all the conditions they could live in, are you giving them the best you can give them, given your available resources?    If you answered no to either of the last two questions, the animals’ well being is obviously not a high priority for you.  That makes it animal cruelty.

I can’t possibly anticipate every human-animal living arrangement, and neither can anyone else.  If your animal seems happy in his living conditions, it’s safe to assume everything’s all right.  If your animal doesn’t seem happy but your living conditions are only temporary and you’ll have better living conditions for the animal within the foreseeable future, you’re doing the best you can.   If you’ve had a run of bad luck and you can’t give your animal as good of living conditions as you used to but you’re still giving your animal the best living conditions you can, you’re still doing the best you can.  If you rescue an animal from the pound or take in a stray, just about any living conditions you could give him are better than what he had before.

Now here’s the catch.  If you buy an animal at the store, you aren’t helping any animals in the long run.  It seems like you’re giving an animal better living conditions than he had, and for that particular animal you’re right.  But the people who sold you the animal are going to take action, in one way or another, to breed another animal to replace the one you bought.  In the long run you haven’t rescued any animals from captivity.  You are making a conscious decision that will lead someone else to make a conscious decision to bring another animal into the world and keep it in captivity.  So ultimately, you’re not rescuing any animals from captivity, you’re funding the keeping of animals in captivity.

So ultimately, all the animals you see in pet stores are hostages.  If you pay to get them out, their keepers will just take more hostages.  About the best thing you can do to help animal hostages is to boycott the pet-retail industry and let the current hostages die in captivity.  Pet retailers keep animal hostages because it’s profitable.  If you make it stop being profitable, they’ll stop taking hostages.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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Since I’ve been talking about the animal rights movement, and I always show how everything I talk about applies to the people on the extreme ends of any topic just like it applies to everyone else, I can’t possibly leave the subject of animal rights without talking about the Animal Liberation Front.  ALF volunteers, after all, are Homo sapiens attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them, just like everyone else.

But rather than my talking about them, let’s see what they have to say for themselves.  The following is a communiqué they sent to Earth First! Journal in 2005, about an action they had just staged.  A lot of people might wonder why I should pass something like this along to you, and might think I’m condoning criminal activity.  But these are Homo sapiens who are trying to tell their side of the story, why they’ve done what they’ve done, and why they perceive it to be right.  If the success of your political system depends on preventing  certain people from saying what they have to say, or preventing other people from listening to them, then obviously there’s something fundamentally wrong with your political system, because obviously there are some situations that your political system isn’t capable of dealing with.

Animal Liberation Front Raids University of Iowa

Releases 401 Animals & Destroys Labs

The following communiqué was received anonymously from the Animal Liberation Front (ALF).
The ALF is claiming responsibility for the liberation of 401 animals from the University of Iowa (UI) in the early hours of November 14. All animals on the third floor of the UI psychology department—88 mice and 313 rats—were removed, examined, treated by a sympathetic veterinarian and placed in loving homes.
Additionally, two animal labs and three vivisectors’ offices were entered, and all contents relating to animal research were destroyed.

Specifically, these are:

Fourth Floor, Spence Labs: Vivisector Ed Wasserman’s lab entered. Dozens of computers and devices used in experiments on live pigeons were destroyed.

Basement, Spence Labs: Lab of vivisector Mark Blumburg and others entered. Surgical equipment and small animal stereotaxic devices, as well as “shock boxes” and other instruments of torture were destroyed.

Fourth Floor, Seashore Hall: Primate researcher Joshua Rodefer’s office entered. Computer disks, hard drives, paperwork and photos showing Rodefer’s work (confining drug-addicted primates in small glass boxes) removed. The remaining paperwork detailing his monstrous work addicting primates and rats to narcotics was soaked in acid, and the computer was destroyed.

First Floor, Seashore Hall: Primate researcher Amy Poremba’s office entered. Computers destroyed, documents removed, and the remainder soaked in acid.

This raid was carried out to halt the barbaric research of the UI psychology department’s seven primary animal researchers: professors Amy Poremba, John Freeman, Mark Blumburg, Kim Johnson, Scott Robinson, Joshua Rodefer and Ed Wasserman.

This was not thoughtless vandalism, but a methodical effort to cripple the UI psychology department’s animal research. Only equipment in rooms where animals were confined and tortured was targeted. Only computers belonging to or used in the work of vivisectors were destroyed. Only documents of animal researchers were doused in acid. The acid was a deliberately chosen, paper-dissolving agent.

Our goal is total abolition of all animal exploitation, achieved in the short term by delivering the 401 animals from UI’s chamber of hell—and in the extended term, by shutting down the labs through the erasing of research and equipment used in the barbaric practice of vivisection. The entire raid was a careful and deliberate five-pronged assault on UI’s animal research.

Behind the laboratory doors, we found drug-addicted rats, rats subjected to stress experiments involving loud noise, rats undergoing thirst experiments, unanesthetized rats with protruding surgical staples and oozing wounds, and mice and rats affixed with grotesque head implants. Inside the labs of UI’s psychology department, we found a bloody torture chamber showcasing the cruelest whims of our Earth’s sickest minds. Professors Freeman, Poremba, Rodefer, Johnson, Robinson, Blumburg and Wasserman are monsters. Tonight, 401 animals are spared their reach.
Our deepest sadness is reserved for the animals on the fourth floor kept from our arms, those we were unable to save, including hundreds of mice, rats, pigeons, guinea pigs and eight primates.

No animals were released into the wild. All 401 were placed in comfortable, loving homes.
We acted as operatives not only of compassion, but good science. Animal research is not only cruel but hazardous—as data derived from animal models is not applicable to humans and therefore dangerous.

Our bypassing of UI’s sophisticated, key card-access, four-walled security system (perimeter, elevator, corridor, animal room) should be interpreted as a two-fold message:

•Our utter seriousness in achieving animal liberation.

•If you torture animals, we will not be stopped from liberating them.

On the ears of these monsters who know only profit and blood, who hide behind unjust laws, our breath has been wasted. Justice for the victims of vivisection will not be achieved by the blows of boycott or protest—but by our sledgehammers to laboratory doors.

Let this message be clear to all who victimize the innocent: We’re watching. And by ax, drill or crowbar—we’re coming through your door.

Stop or be stopped.

Communiqué Addendum

The continuation of vivisection is maintained only insofar as it remains outside public sight and scrutiny. The ongoing research uncovered at UI’s psychology department is of such a sadistic nature as to be inexcusable by all but the sickest minds. UI code requires that all animals be kept behind the locked doors of windowless rooms, and most often on floors locked to the public. UI has tagged this raid as mere vandalism and denied an animal liberation motive, despite numerous slogans left painted at the site, to divert attention from its animal research. We confiscated paperwork from UI’s seven primary researchers to give the public a glimpse into the sickness kept from their eyes.

Professor Freeman: Drills holes into the skulls of rats and affixes head implants in neurology experiments involving “electrical brain stimulation.” Rats removed from his lab were grossly disfigured by surgically implanted devices on the skull.

All animals in his lab were rescued.

Professor Johnson: Exposes rats to a series of “chronic stressors” including loud noise and strobe lights for the aim of “experimentally induced depression.” Also performs experiments involving the withholding of water from rats.

All animals in his lab were rescued.

Professor Blumburg: Subjects infant rats to prolonged cold exposure. Famously deranged mind on record as stating that the cries of animals in labs are an automatic response and convey no more emotion than a sneeze.

All animals in his lab were rescued.

Professor Poremba: Currently confines eight rhesus monkeys in the northeast corner of the psychology building’s fourth floor, subjecting them to numerous stressors including reward/punishment experiments. Places primates in a “behavioral conditioning box,” also known as a “shock box,” where primates are subjected to shock experiments. Inside her office, we found pieces of primate brain encased in glass and blueprints to the building.

Professor Rodefer: Addicts primates and rats to cocaine, methamphetamine and PCP in redundant drug experiments. His drug possession license, filed with the Drug Enforcement Administration, stipulates that the drugs be kept in a locked safe in the building’s basement. However, two stashes of narcotics were found in his fourth floor office, including in the inside pocket of a jacket, suggesting that he is himself addicted to the drugs that he has for years forced on animals.

I really liked this article, because there are so many, many valuable lessons to be learned from it.

First, if that biology professor honestly believes that the cries of suffering animals are reflexes that don’t convey any emotion at all, he obviously doesn’t have a f*cking clue how evolution works.  If animals don’t have emotions, where the f*ck does he think human emotions evolved from?  I have a lot more to say about this in the next chapter, but basically, everything evolves in small steps, not in giant steps.  When you start omitting pieces of evidence that are inconvenient for you, you aren’t talking about science anymore; you’re talking about propaganda.  So why the f*ck is he a biology professor at all?

Now let’s apply a little behavioral and evolutionary psychology to the person who wrote this communiqué.  Start at the beginning.  The actions described in the article, and the act of writing the article and sending it to Earth First! Journal are both acts committed by a Homo sapiens in the attempt to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.   That’s ironic, since if the author of this article heard me say that, he or she would probably tell me they didn’t do it for preserving the survival of their own DNA at all, they did it for the sake of preserving the survival of the laboratory animals’ DNA.  And that’s one reason this is such an educational article.  Let’s consider each of those two actions separately.

So the next question is how did this person perceive that rescuing these animals was the most effective means to preserve the survival of his or her DNA?   Go to the eight motivations.

The person’s survival and personal safety obviously weren’t at risk here, so those are out.

What about reproduction?  Did the person perceive these rats and mice to be part of their family?  I have some cousins who are adopted, who I perceive to be members of my family.  I perceive pets to be members of my family.  There’s that tricky word perception again.  If this person perceived these mice and rats to be members of their family, that’s all it takes.

As it turns out, a mouse’s DNA is about 75% identical to the DNA of a human.  The person was attempting to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her, and he or she rescued 401 animals whose DNA was 75% identical to his or hers.  So it can be argued that this person was protecting members of his or her family.  I doubt a judge would agree, but the person’s belief is not completely unfounded.

What about social?  Did the person recognize these mice and rats as important members of his or her community?  Well, mice and rats were created by the same global environment that created us, and we are all members of the global environmental community.  That’s obvious.

Did rescuing these mice and rats make the person feel good?  Obviously it did.

Did rescuing the mice and rats help the person put their abilities to use, put them to use as much as possible, and put all of their abilities to use as much as possible?  The person obviously perceived the mice and rats to be either family members or important community members.  This person obviously measures their success in life at least in part by their ability to protect animals.  He or she had the ability to open the cages to rescue the animals, so that was the use of an ability to make a life for him or herself.  But not only that, the person had to use a whole bunch of other abilities around that basic ability, because in order to open the cages and let the animals out, first he or she had to break into a highly secured building—and then carry all the animals out afterwards.

Now, how did the five external factors affect the person’s decision-making?

The person had the basic abilities to use to get what they wanted, as I’ve said already.

Another ability the person had was some sort of ability to empathize with the animals.  If the person had an ability to perceive there was a problem here and to think of a solution, but everyone else involved didn’t, that would’ve led the person to make different decisions than anyone else expected.

They either had the skills and resources they needed to make the raid already, or else they got them.

Another resource they needed was the opportunity to make the raid.  They obviously had that.

Personal history and cultural background obviously played some part in the person’s decision-making.  He or she could’ve made the decision based solely on an extreme ability to empathize with animals, but the fact that he or she was part of a team, thought to write the communiqué to the Earth First! Journal, knew how to write in animal rights dialect, and knew about the Animal Liberation Front or the Earth First! Journal at all, all indicate that he or she had some personal history and cultural background involved.

As for writing this communiqué and sending it to the Earth First! Journal, let’s use an abbreviated version and ignore everything that doesn’t apply.

Membership in a community implies cooperation, and cooperation depends on communication.  He or she presumably wrote the communiqué to the Earth First! Journal to communicate with other members of the animal rights community.

Self-gratification is obvious.

The act of doing something specific to achieve an important goal, to whatever level of the person’s ability the action represents, indicates that the person felt the need  to do that thing to achieve the goal.  So this was in part self-actualization, self-fulfillment, or fulfillment squared.

As I’ve already outlined, the person had the ability, the skill, and the resources he or she needed to write the article.  He or she had the personal history and cultural background to have learned that doing all these things was possible, and was important.

The next thing this illustrates is a common saying among Anarchists:  “Direct action gets the goods.”

Globalization 4.0 is a revolutionary struggle.  Not to put too fine a point on it, no one has ever won a war without infantry.  I can sit here and write books about how society should function differently, other people can write books, people can talk about it, write letters to newspapers, write to their senators, representatives, and governors, discuss it on internet message boards, whatever.  But so far all anyone has done is to voice their opinions about something.  So far, the enemy is free to ignore you.  The only way you can get beyond that point is to decide what you want to happen in the world and then make it happen.

But there’s a catch:  Revolutions are illegal!  That’s because the people who are in power like being in power, so they write the laws to make sure they stay in power.  That means that anything anyone can do to threaten their power is outlawed—or at least, that’s the safest way to bet, anyway.

That brings me to my next point.  As you will notice, no one was injured or killed in the raid.  The raiders carried out their mission without any direct contact with the enemy.

There’s a whole set of cultural values surrounding the Animal Liberation Front.  The Animal Liberation Front has no membership, no hierarchy, no structure, and no leadership.  It’s an Anarchistic movement.  That means it’s a set of ideas someone, or some group of people, had, they spread those ideas around, and lots of people heard about them.  Then a lot of people started cooperating with those ideas without anyone needing to be in control of them.

Animal Liberation Front volunteers value the lives of all animals, including people.  Typically, they scope out their targets for a long time before their missions, to make sure they can pull them off without direct contact with the enemy.  That means they don’t need to hurt or kill anyone to rescue the animals.  If you do hurt or kill anyone over the course of your mission, whoever you are and whatever you’re doing, you do not represent the Animal Liberation Front, and anyone who knows anything about the Animal Liberation Front will know that.

And finally, if you get arrested on an Animal Liberation Front mission, your name will find its way around a lot of Anarchist political prisoner support groups, and whoever feels like it will write you letters, send you money donations, whatever.  As the saying among political prisoner support groups goes, “They’re in there for us, so we’re out here for them,” or, “They’re in there so we don’t have to be.”  But if you hurt or kill anyone on your mission, or you get caught on your mission and rat out your comrades, you’re on your own.

And that brings me to my next point.  The FBI lists the Animal Liberation Front as America’s number one domestic terrorist threat.  Timothy McVeigh is old news.  The domestic equivalent of Al Qaeda today is a mysterious group of people who eat tofu and rescue animals.   I’m not kidding.  You can read all about it on the FBI’s website.

Now, one big problem with the War on Terror is that there are many different definitions of terrorism out there, and different law enforcement agencies each use different definitions.  So basically, no one has any way of knowing if or when we’ve won the War on Terror, because nobody can agree on who we’re fighting against.  Now this might sound like a dumb question, but if we’re going to go to all the trouble of waging a war, wouldn’t it be a good idea to figure out who the badguys are first, or at least, how to recognize them, so we can make sure we’re fighting against the right people?

A lot of definitions of terrorism refer to people killing, injuring, or threatening to kill or injure civilians.  The Animal Liberation Front comes nowhere close to that.  Even if you wanted to try to get out on the technicality that at the moment you kill or injure anyone you cease to belong to the Animal Liberation Front, that still doesn’t help you, because no one has ever been injured or killed on an Animal Liberation Front mission, botched, aborted, or otherwise.

Some definitions of terrorism refer to the illegal damage or destruction of private or public property for the purpose of driving people’s political decision-making through fear.  The Animal Liberation Front qualifies under that definition, but so do a lot of other people.  That definition renders every street gang in America a terrorist organization, because they spray-paint their gang symbols on public or private property around their neighborhoods to mark their territory.  A lot of political activist groups could be labeled terrorist organizations for putting up posters, or playing pranks, or using civil disobedience if minor vandalism is involved.  You remember the Midnight Peace Symbol Revolution from the last book, which you started by going out and vandalizing public property by drawing on the sidewalks with chalk?  You probably didn’t realize it at the time, but you founded a terrorist organization!

Now consider this:  A general definition of terrorism is people who use institutionalized fear to drive other people’s decision-making.  Forget about the fact that our inequitable economy depends on institutionalized fear to maintain political stability.  I told you Capitalism was terrorism in the last book.  Everyone knows that.  But how many times have you seen a commercial on TV where they show a situation where something bad happens to someone and give you some kind of a message about “You don’t want this to happen to you, do you?”  Lately, I’ve been hearing commercials on the radio at work for someone’s new cell phone service where they have less dropped calls than any of their competitors.  And in these commercials they always have an intense conversation happening between two people when the call drops and both people are left thinking the other hung up, and now their lives are completely ruined.  Or car commercials where they say things like, “You don’t want your friends to see you driving around town in an unfashionable car, do you?”  Or, “You don’t want your computer to crash, do you?  So buy our new and improved computer.”  Or shoes, or jeans, or fabric softener, or car stereos, health insurance, or home security systems, or whatever.  What the f*ck do you call all of that besides institutionalized fear?

This leads me to a big example of why evolutionary science, and science in general is so controversial and so counterintuitive.  A lot of what non-scientifically-minded people perceive about the world, they perceive in relation to themselves, without realizing it.   If you were surprised as a kid to learn that stars are all roughly the same size as the sun, and some are even bigger, you know what I’m talking about.  Looking back on it now as an adult, you might be tempted to say, “Stars aren’t as all as big as the sun.  Some are a lot smaller and some are a lot bigger.”  And if that’s the case, go outside and look at the sun again, and go outside out a clear night and look up at the stars again.  What you see in the night sky are a lot of little pinpoints of light, and what you see in the daylight is a big yellow circle.  And that’s what you saw as a kid, and you had no reason to suspect they were anything other than a bunch of teeny little points of light and a big yellow circle.  Compared to that relationship in size, stars aren’t about the same size as the sun.  You had no reason to believe that the sun and every other star were gigantic compared to the Earth either—not even remotely the same size—because you were looking at the Earth from maybe 3 feet away, and you were looking at the sun from 93,000,000 miles away.   What a difference a lifetime of learning makes, eh?

If two things that are identical seem different to you because you have a different relation to each of them, so you give them two different names, at what point in the middle does it stop being one thing and start being the other?  Whatever point that would be would be completely arbitrary, because the thing itself is not different.  The only difference is that you used one word to refer to it in one context, and a different word to refer to it in a different context, without realizing they were the same thing.  You never realized there could be contexts in the middle, so you never came up with words for that.

If you got on a spaceship and flew to another planet in another solar system, what would you call the big bright thing up in the sky?  Would it be the sun, because now you were close to it?  Or would it be a star because you knew it wasn’t the same sun you saw back on Earth?  If you did call it the sun because it was star your new planet revolved around, as you flew toward the star and into its solar system, at what point would it stop being a star and start being a sun?  Would you go by your distance from it, how bright it was, how large it looked, or whether you were inside or outside of its solar system?

Whatever point you picked to make this transition in using two different words for the exact same thing, it would be completely arbitrary.  That means that someone else’s point of transition would also be completely arbitrary, which means it’s pretty unlikely you would both pick the same point.
Now suppose you’re talking about the thing to someone who has no idea that what looks to him to be two different things is actually the exact same thing seen from two different points of view.  If he has no idea they’re the exact same thing, he’s going to perceive them as two different things, which means he’s going to feel like they’re supposed to be two different things.  And if other people he knows refer to them by the same two words he uses, he’s going to assume that proves he’s right in thinking they’re two different things.

Now take that basic problem between suns and stars and apply it to the world around us, and tell adults about something that strange, and try to win elections that way.  Not so simple now, is it?
If a person fights a war against the established government of his country by gathering together a band of peasants, giving them rifles (or bows, or muskets, or whatever hand-held weapons people of the time used), hiding out in the hills or mountains or swamps or jungles or deep forests, and fighting their enemies with a bunch of little skirmishes, ambushes, and raids, are those people called guerillas or freedom-fighters?  It all depends on how whose side they’re on.  If they’re friendly to you and their government is opposed to you, they’re freedom fighters.  If they’re opposed to you and their government is friendly to you, they’re guerillas.  Granted, the mainstream media in America is going to tell you that before you get the chance to figure it out for yourself, but most people would’ve fallen for that illusion anyway.  That’s just another example of how deciding ahead of time that a person is either right or wrong, even if you only do it subconsciously by contextual clues of whether they’re trying to kill people you like or hate, creates information and anti-information packages in your brain, which then affect your perception of the world.

One of these things is not like the others:  Geronimo, Ho Chi Mihn, George Washington, Ché Guevara.  They were all leaders of small bands of men who fought against the established governments of their countries using small weapons, hiding in remote unsettled areas, and fighting skirmishes, raids, and ambushes.  (Or at least, a lot of their followers fought that way, and all of those things were central to their strategies.)  Out of those four people, George Washington was not just a freedom fighter but a patriot.  The others were guerillas, rebels, and renegades.  One was a savage who lived in the godforsaken desert and was the last warrior chief to fight against the U.S. government here in the continental United States, and the other two were Communists.  But all four of them fought the same way, and they were all fighting for the same cause—the liberation of their people.  So why do you use different words to refer to them within your own mind?

(And since it’s come up, I’d just like to point out that Anarchists never fall into this particular illusion.  Anyone who fights a guerilla war for the liberation of their people is a freedom fighter.  Now it is true that Anarchists generally hate all governments, which automatically puts all guerilla freedom fighters on the Anarchists’ side, and that point of view comes with its own information and anti-information packages.  But you don’t have to be an Anarchist to understand this simple little point:  If people are willing to fight guerilla wars against the established governments of their countries, and pit a few people armed with small weapons against the standing military of their country, it’s a pretty safe bet that the guerillas have something pretty goddamned important at stake.)

I’m using this example of guerillas, rebels, renegades, freedom fighters, patriots, the Animal Liberation Front, and the FBI for a very specific reason.  The Animal Liberation Front volunteers, in this raid and many others like them, fought for what they believed in by destroying property but without killing or injuring any people.  Have you ever heard of the Boston Tea Party?

Sometime before the American Revolution, some Americans (actually they were British colonists back then) protested the new British tea tax by sneaking aboard a British tea ship in Boston Harbor one night, and dumping all the tea overboard.  They destroyed a lot of property and they did it without killing or injuring anyone.  When you learn about them in history class, they’re called patriots, but according to the definition of terrorism the FBI is applying to the Animal Liberation Front, the people responsible for the Boston Tea Party were terrorists.

There’s a saying about perspectives I’ve heard that goes something like this:  “The rabbit runs faster than the fox.  The fox is only running for his dinner.  The rabbit is running for his life.”
So here we run into the conflict between Capitalism and Use-Value economics once again, and their conflict in definitions of rightful ownership.  The mice and rats that the Animal Liberation Front liberated here all valued their lives implicitly.  The only reason they weren’t running for their lives was because they couldn’t, because humans had trapped them in cages.  So other humans decided to even the score and do the running on behalf of the mice and rats.

What were the laboratory animals being used for before their liberation?  The report by the Animal Liberation Front volunteer is anything but unbiased, but biased though it may be, it sounds like it was a lot closer to a tea tax or a dinner than it was to saving anyone’s life.  If that’s true, then under the Use-Value economic system the animals were more entitled to their lives than the researchers were entitled to experimenting on them.  Under the Capitalist economic system, those animals were the rightful property of the researchers, for no other reason than because the animals were not capable of defending themselves or even speaking on their own behalf.  So people who oppose Capitalist oppression liberated them, fair and square.  It’s a safe bet that freedom fighters who are willing to fight guerilla wars against the established governments and standing militaries of their countries are fighting for something important, and it’s a safe bet that laboratory mice only stay in their cages because they can’t chew through the metal bars.  To every laboratory animal, every Animal Liberation Front volunteer is George Washington.  If you assume every Animal Liberation Front volunteer must be Ché Guevara, it’s only because your judgment is clouded by subjectivity.

As I said earlier in this chapter, ending animal experimentation won’t make the transition from Capitalism to the Use Value economic system happen all by itself, but it is one step in that direction.  There is no conclusive way to define a proper relationship between humans and animals, but there is one thing that is conclusive:  As long as humans have such a one-sided relationship with animals, we don’t have a Use-Value economic system.  And as I’m sure you remember, the Use-Value economic system is the economic system of the equilibrium state we must achieve if we are ever to learn to live within the physical limitations of the Earth.  As long as we practice an economic system where profits are made by exploiting the helpless, we are not in an equilibrium state, and therefore we are not living within the physical limitations of the Earth.  No matter how much people feel like an equilibrium state is a good idea, as long as they practice an economic system that rewards oppression, we don’t have an economy that’s compatible with the physical limitations of the Earth.  And not only that, the people who say they believe in equilibrium but practice Capitalism anyway, obviously are not working with information packages that will lead them to taking actions that will ever make the transition happen.    Global equilibrium begins within the minds of each individual person, and the Animal Liberation Front are fighting against just one of many ways Capitalists are failing to make that happen.

Finally, I’d just like to say that if anyone out there is still looking for these Animal Liberation Front volunteers, don’t bother checking the biology or psychology departments of the university.

In the same way that the laboratory animals shared 75% of their DNA with the humans who rescued them, which makes it 75% true that the Animal Liberation Front volunteers were rescuing members of their families, it is also true, despite what this ALF volunteer believed, that animal testing can yield results that are applicable to humans.  This is yet another way that people misunderstand what scientists do.

If you’ve worked in a career for 20 years and you got 6 or 8 years of education in that field before hand, it’s inevitable that you know a lot of stuff about your job that anyone who doesn’t share your experience doesn’t know.  And by the way, I’m not talking about scientists yet, I’m talking about any job.

Anyway, the Animal Liberation Front volunteer who wrote this communiqué obviously doesn’t understand very well how psychological experimentation on animals actually works, because they claimed that these experiments were unscientific and not merely useless but dangerous.   But on the contrary, psychological experimentation on animals is scientific, and not only useful, but helpful, if you know how to conduct the experimentation and how to apply the results—which these scientists probably did, and the author of this communiqué obviously didn’t.

But on the other hand, if you’re an animal researcher and you’re getting up to give me a standing ovation, sit the f*ck down.  I’d just like to say that on the 14th of November, 2004, the night this raid took place, I was unemployed and in the midst of writing the first volume of these books.  The closest I’ve ever come to animal experimentation is owning cats.  I’ve figured out everything I’ve figured out, including the Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior and the Theory of Evolutionary Relativity by being observant, paying attention to what’s going on around me, the people I meet, movies and stage plays I watch, and books I read, and being really, really f*cking good at it.  But I’ve contacted several university professors by now, and with the exception of one who referred me to a couple of other university professors, not one of them has ever lifted a goddamned finger to try to help me.  And why?  It obviously can’t be because of their passion for moving science forward in spite of any obstacle.  So what would that insurmountable obstacle be?  In the end, I would have to guess that it has something to do with my being more valuable to the Capitalist economy hammering nails for a living and throwing 40 hours of my life in the garbage every week than I am working at a university.  Someone at the University of Iowa—or some university somewhere—could’ve hired me, shut down their animal research lab, and replaced it with a theatre department, but they chose not to.  And still here I sit, four years later.  I never held a gun to any university professor’s head and told them to force me to fry bologna just so I could add a little affordable variety to my diet.  So if an unexpected consequence of your economic system turns out to be Animal Liberation Front volunteers destroying your labs and liberating your animals, and you come to me looking for pity, you’re come to the wrong f*cking place.
But enough about me.  This section is about the Homo sapiens who make up the Animal Liberation Front.  Here’s another article from the Earth First! Journal, about another Animal Liberation Front volunteer.  I think that having said all I have to say about the Animal Liberation Front, this article is pretty self-explanatory.  So with that, I’ll end this section with another ALF volunteer’s own words, as printed in the January/February 2006 edition of Earth First! Journal.

Statement to the Court

By Peter Young

On September 2, Peter Young pleaded guilty to two counts under the Animal Free Enterprise Terrorism Act relating to the release of more than 8,000 mink from fur farms.  On November 8 he was sentenced to two years in prison…  For more information, visit www.supportpeter.com.

The Following is Young’s statement to the court at his sentencing.  As Young did a lot of improvisation, what follows is an approximation based on his notes and the memory of supporters in the courtroom.

This is the customary time when the defendant expresses regret for the crimes they committed.  So let me do that, because I am not without my regrets.  I am here today be sentenced for my participation in releasing mink from six fur farms.  I regret that it was only six.  I’m also here today to be sentenced for my participation in the freeing of 8,000 mink from those farms.  I regret that it was only 8,000.  It is my understanding that of those six farms, only two of them have since shut down.  I regret that it was only two.

More than anything, I regret my restraint—because whatever damage I did to those businesses, if those farms were left standing and one animal was left behind, then it wasn’t enough.

I don’t wish to validate this proceeding by begging for mercy or appealing to the conscience of the court, because I know that if this system had a conscience, I would not be here, and in my place would be all the butchers, vivisectors, and fur farmers in the world.

Just as I will remain unbowed before this court—which would see me imprisoned for an act of conscience—I will also deny the fur farmers in the room the pleasure of seeing me bow down before them.  To those people whose sheds I may have visited in 1997, let me tell you for the first time:  It was a pleasure to raid your farms and free those animals you held captive.  It is those animals I answer to, not you or this court.  I will forever mark those nights on your property as the most rewarding experience of my life.

And to those farmers or other savages who may read my words and smile at my fate, just remember:  We have put more of you into bankruptcy than you have put liberators in prison.  Don’t forget that.

Let me thank everyone in the courtroom who came to support me today.  It is my last wish before prison that each of you drive to a nearby fur farm tonight, tear down its fence, and open every cage.

That’s all.

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There have always been peace activists, I’m sure, for as long as there have been wars.  Jesus said, “Turn the other cheek,” and wars are really nothing but a whole bunch of people trying to get what they want through violence.  Moses said, “Justice shall be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” and by that he was trying to teach people not to resort to violence for retribution, which a lot of people were doing at the time.  Like I said, war is a whole lot of people resorting to violence.  So that makes Moses a peace activist, and that takes us all the way back to the beginning of recorded history.

I don’t think you can say that peace activism became a peace movement until Mahatma Gandhi led the Indian Revolution.  He used peace instead of war to make something happen that wouldn’t’ve happened otherwise.  In his case, he literally used peace to move the British government out of his country.  He didn’t use peace to stop a war, but he did use peace to prevent a war from starting in the first place.

Here in America a few decades later, Dr. King used peace to wage a revolution that traditionally would’ve been waged with violence.  Once again, he used peace to prevent a war from starting in the first place.

The peace movement became known as such during the Vietnam War when people all over America actively  pitted peace against war, and succeeded in using peace to move enough things around in the world to make the war stop happening.  I’m sure everyone has heard all about that.

The peace movement since the Vietnam War and up to the present is what I came here to tell you about.  Ever since Vietnam, every time the United States has engaged in military action against anyone, peace protestors immediately take to the streets.

Some people protest because they don’t want to have to fight and risk getting killed.  A lot of other people protest because they don’t want anyone to have to fight.  And when a large number of people fight, we aren’t talking about the risk of anyone getting killed anymore, we’re talking about the inevitability that some people are going to get killed.

These people play their part as a sociological force, but they don’t play it all that well.  So far, all you have is a peace movement made up of bleeding heart liberals, who keep whining and complaining that we ought to feel sorry for everyone, including the terrorists.

Right now we’re in the biggest war we’ve been in since Vietnam.  But Vietnam was way bigger than the war we’re in right now, especially in terms of American casualties.  So one argument I’ve heard against the current peace movement is that it’s just a bunch of bleeding heart liberals overreacting every time the U.S. gets into a military conflict, and saying that every military conflict is going to be the next Vietnam.

Well a big reason the Vietnam War got to be so big was because people didn’t start protesting until it got that big.  Ever since then, the peace movement has been a threat to politicians’ careers every time they start a war.   Vietnam isn’t going to happen again precisely because peace protestors say that every military conflict could turn into the next Vietnam and they react as if it’s going to be the next Vietnam.

A lot of people who oppose the peace movement say that it’s disrespectful to our military personnel who are risking everything for our country.  A lot of people who oppose the peace movement love to ask demonstrators, “If you think we should pull out of Iraq immediately, what’s your exit strategy?”  Then they assume that the fact the demonstrators don’t have an exit strategy proves they don’t know what they’re talking about.  A lot of people who oppose the peace movement say, “Support our troops!”  And a lot of peace protestors say, “What do you think we’re doing?”

Peace protestors are supporting our troops by protesting for peace specifically so that politicians can’t get away with using military action to help them win elections, and inevitably sacrificing the lives of military personnel in the process.  The peace protestors’ exit strategy is:  Make war more costly to politicians’ careers than peace, so they will figure out an exit strategy ASAP and won’t be so quick to start the next military engagement.

Now here’s where the peace movement shifts from touchy-feely superficial appearances to cold hard science.  Making people feel like wars aren’t necessary is a good start, but the only way it can succeed in the long run is if people also solve the problems that make people feel like fighting wars in the first place.

Flower power worked in the Vietnam War because our economic systems were so far removed from each other.  We were one of the superpowers in the world, and they were a little country of rice farmers.  The supposed value of the war to us was completely psychological—to help stop the spread of Communism.  But apart from that, what effect could the form of government practiced by a few rice farmers on the other side of the world, ever possibly have on us?  We sacrificed 58,000 American lives for an ideal that had no practical value at all.  There really wasn’t a whole lot anyone had to do, or think about, or figure out, to make that war seem like a bad idea to a lot of people.

Now, to be fair, I should say that the politicians who were calling the shots in America during the Vietnam War mostly had been service age during World War II and the Korean War.  We got involved in World War II when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, so we can say we were fighting in self-defense.  Korea happened less than ten years after the end of World War II, and China sided with the North Koreans, so even though that was a war against Communism, we can say it was similar enough to World War II and that World War II had been recent enough that the people calling the shots and a lot of the voters misinterpreted it and overreacted.  It could be argued that the Americans were trying to prevent Korea from becoming the next Japan, especially since the Communists in Korea had China on their side. The politicians might’ve thought they were waging a war against Communism to prevent Vietnam from becoming the next Japan—or some general purpose along those lines—but a lot of the service-age Americans at the time could only see the United States waging a war against a bunch of poor rice farmers for the sake of a political ideal that served no practical purpose.

But that was then.  This is now.  As I showed you in the last book, peace depends on environmental sustainability.  In the first book I showed you how the three motives for violence create the Hobbesian cycle of aggression.  But what creates the three motives for violence?
When you choose to start a war, you choose to risk your life. (Or at least, the lives of some of your people, and for the time being let’s pretend that you give a f*ck about the lives of your people.)  So why does risking your life suddenly seem like a good idea?

The motive for fighting in self-defense is obvious.  But it takes two sides to have a war.  If neither side started the war, the other side wouldn’t need to fight in self-defense.

If you’re fighting for profit, it means you’re not leading an environmentally sustainable lifestyle.  There are two ways that can happen.  The first is obvious:  You’ve already pushed yourselves beyond the physical limitations of your environment and you need what the other people have to stay alive. In that case, your people are faced with famine, so instead of fighting each other over food you all decide to work together and fight someone else.  You’re choosing to risk your lives by starting a war, because not starting the war poses an even bigger risk to your lives.

The other is the way the Europeans conquered the world.  If you can imagine what you could do if you had what the other people have in addition to what you already have, and you don’t perceive the other people to pose that much of a threat to you, then the profit you stand to gain in the war could seem to be worth the risk.  That’s still environmental unsustainability though, because instead of learning to live within the physical limitations of your environment, you’re not learning to live within the physical limitations of your environment.  It could be argued that conquering other people is not synonymous with trying to live beyond the physical limitations of the Earth.  But we’re not talking about just any old species living on the Earth; we’re talking about our own species living on the Earth.  Once you define environmental sustainability as learning to live within the physical limitations of your environmental economy, if you imagine a way you and your people could live if you had your own environmental economy plus someone else’s environmental economy, and then take action accordingly, you obviously have not learned to live within the physical limitations of your environmental economy.

Violence for reputation is pretty simple.  Violence for reputation is pre-emptive violence for self-defense or for profit, so that no one will dare to threaten you with violence in the first place, or so that no one will dare to try to defend themselves against your violence.  But if no one attacks anyone else, you don’t need violence for pre-emptive self-defense any more than you need it for direct self-defense.  And if everyone learns to live within the physical limitations of their environments, then no one needs violence for direct profit or for a reputation to discourage anyone else from fighting in self-defense against violence for profit.  And if no one needs a reputation, then no one needs a reputation to compete against anyone else’s reputation.
So as you can see, the peace movement and the environmental movement are inseparable.  Everyone working on Globalization 4.0 already knows that.    A lot of other people don’t.  That includes a lot of people who consider themselves peace activists.

Of course, in a world with an increasing population and diminishing resources, peace through Capitalism isn’t possible.  Capital-ism depends on the control of capital, and capital depends on natural resources.  It isn’t physically possible for anyone to control ever-increasing supplies of capital on a finite-sized planet.  You might say that Capitalism could be used as a stepping stone between the Globalization 3.0 economy and the Globalization 4.0 economy.  But that would require people to stop measuring their economic success in terms of how much capital they control, and start measuring it in terms of how the capital was being used to make the physical economy of the world work in a way that can keep everyone alive.  But that would be so fundamentally different from the economy we have now that it would no longer be Capitalism.

That economic system has already been thought of.  It’s called the Use-Value economic system.
It could be argued that Capitalists should control how their capital is used to make the chemical reaction of the world work in a way that can keep everyone alive, just to make sure their investments aren’t going to waste.  But that won’t work, because there’s at least one, and more likely two, parts of the chemical reaction of the world that you haven’t fixed yet.  If you control something that’s critical to making the chemical reaction of the world work in a way that can keep everyone alive, then you control the people who depend on that part of the chemical reaction to stay alive, because you could choose to stop making that part of the chemical reaction keep those people alive.  That isn’t peace, that’s slavery.  People always fight back against people who try to enslave them.  You should know that already.

The other problem it creates is that it gives you the opportunity to control those people.  If you have that opportunity and never use it, you can’t expect those people to trust you anyway.  But if you have that power over people and you do use it, they’ll fight back even harder.  And even if you don’t do that personally, it’s inevitable that other people will.  And if you (or someone else) can control whether or not part of the chemical reaction of the environment can keep certain people alive, and you choose to use that to control the people, to what end could you possibly control those people but to your own benefit?  And if you had to force the people to act to your benefit upon threat of death, then it’s a pretty safe bet that you aren’t forcing them to act toward their own benefit.

The only way to solve that problem is to relinquish control of the capital and of the authority it gives you over the people who need it.  Making sure the capital won’t go to waste depends on educating the people who are going to be using it how to use it sustainably.

Next we have violence among religious fundamentalists.  That is, violence among people for imaginary reasons that have nothing to do with the physical economy of the world.

This seems pretty simple at first glance.  If you can make people believe there’s a prophet—oops, I mean, profit—to be gained or there’s a threat to defend themselves against, you can make violence seem like a good idea to them.  That includes real profits to gain and real threats to defend themselves from for which you tell the people imaginary reasons.  Manifest Destiny was an imaginary reason.  Supposedly, the European Americans were conquering America because the Christian god willed it to be so.   In reality, the European Americans conquered America because they inherited the most favorable combination of material resources from the Mesopotamians.  The profit that Manifest Destiny produced was real, even though the reasons the European Americans believed it produced results were completely imaginary.

On the other hand, if you can make your people believe that if they kill Americans they’ll live forever in eternal paradise and get 72 virgins out of the deal, then you’re offering your followers a completely imaginary profit.  But if they believe this thing you’re talking about to be real, then it’s still a profit as far as they can tell, so they’ll act upon that belief accordingly.  If Americans really did pose some threat to them, you can combine a real self-defense for real or imaginary reasons with a completely imaginary profit. On the other hand, if you belong to the Ku Klux Klan and you convince your followers that Blacks and homosexuals are a threat to them and that if they murder them they’ll be rewarded in the afterlife, now you’ve combined an imaginary threat with an imaginary profit.

For religious fundamentalists, reputation is real.  If your neighbors learn that you kill people for doing certain things, they’ll try to avoid doing those things to protect themselves, even if your reasons for killing people for them are completely insane—oops, I mean imaginary.

For some religious fundamentalists there’s an imaginary part to reputation also.  If you kill people to prove your worthiness to your god, then you’re building an imaginary reputation for yourself.
You could build an imaginary reputation for yourself if you believed that acting in certain ways was supposed to make your evil enemies fear you.  This is rather complicated and, I must admit, rather pointless, but it’s pretty easy to see how some people could believe in it.  You could believe that acting in a certain way will prove your loyalty to your god and that he will strike fear into the hearts of your enemies, or that your enemies are supposed to know that you’re proving your loyalty to your god and fear you for that.  Basically, you’re using a fear ritual and then expecting your enemies to participate in your ritual.  If you actually did something fearsome, then you might strike fear into the hearts of your enemies, but not for the imaginary reasons you believed.  If you don’t strike fear into the hearts of your enemies, then that must prove how wicked, or stupid, your enemies are, because they weren’t affected by your ritual and they weren’t affected by your god.

Now here’s the catch to violence being used by religious fundamentalists.  As I explain in the Atheism chapter, when it comes to religion, there are only two kinds of people:  Atheists and religious fundamentalists.  That might seem awfully absolute of me to say, but consider this:  An Atheist doesn’t depend on any supernatural forces at all to act on his behalf.  That means he takes 100% responsibility for his actions.  If you believe that you can get away with taking less than 100% responsibility for your actions because some supernatural force is going to intervene on your behalf and make up the difference, then you’re a religious fundamentalist.  You believe something to be true about the world that has no observable evidence to support it, and you are acting upon that belief expecting your actions to succeed, in spite of the fact that they contradict the observable evidence.  The results of your actions will comply with the observable evidence, but won’t make sense to you because the observable evidence plus the things you were imagining plus your actions should’ve resulted in something else.  And now that they haven’t, you have to imagine a reason for that.  Now you’ve turned your entire life into a fairy tale.  And now that we’re stretching the global environment to its limits, your fairytale life can only turn into a downward spiral that ends in disaster.  All the things you thought were supposed to work ended up not working, and the results were always bad, because war, famine, death, and pestilence, not to mention hurricanes, kept ravaging the world more and more.  And the only way you can explain why the things that you imagined were supposed to work resulted in disaster is because the force of good that you imagine you serve wills it to be so for some imaginary reason.  In a world where we’re stretching our environment to its breaking point, if you don’t take 100% responsibility for your actions, the results won’t be better than you expected them to be, they’ll be worse.  So why would the force of good that you believe yourself to serve make that happen to you?  Now you have to imagine a reason for that, because that’s the only way you can keep your imaginary forces in your perception of the world.

Now here’s the next twist.  Some people who call themselves Atheists are religious fundamentalists, and some people who consider themselves religious people are Atheists for all intents and purposes.

In the first book I told you about the Intangible Mass of Cosmic Grooviness.  That’s a supernatural force that works perfectly Atheistically.  That is, the only way to invoke it is by taking 100% responsibility for your actions.  It might help you if you help yourself.  But if you believe that taking 100% responsibility for your actions will make the IMCG help you, it won’t help you, because now you aren’t taking 100% responsibility for your actions.  Now you’re depending on supernatural forces to intervene on your behalf and make you succeed.  That’s the definition of not taking 100% responsibility for your actions.

If you are a religious person and whatever supernatural force you follow works exactly the same way the IMCG works, then for all intents and purposes, you’re an Atheist.  You practice your religion for the same reason I practice Paganism—because it’s a cool tradition that your ancestors practiced and that gives you a sense of history.

I’ve met people who consider themselves Atheists but who still depended on supernatural powers to make their actions succeed.  The results were the same:  Things went wrong and then they had to invent reasons why so that they could go on believing that what they thought was supposed to work should’ve worked.

I’ve known people who believe in what they call Evolutionary Law, or Social Darwinism.  It could also go by Libertarianism or Anarcho-Capitalism.  The basic idea is survival of the fittest.  Supposedly, we should disband all government and labor unions and then let everyone fend for themselves and see what happens.  Supposedly, the strong will survive.

The only problem with that is that every single thing people do in life is a product of evolution, including building governments and trade unions through which they can band together for their mutual protection from others.  If you want to talk about survival of the fittest, you have to talk about people’s ability to band together with others for their mutual interests as a form of fitness, not to mention every other ability people have.

This is an ideology practiced by a lot of Capitalist pigs to justify their positioning in the economic hierarchy.  They then turn around and accuse all the people who are complaining about their place in the economic hierarchy of not knowing their place in the world, and of hanging onto superstitions that said they were supposed to be somewhere else.  But if we were to disband all government and trade unions and then turn everyone loose to fend for themselves, all we would get for it would be to relive the past 10,000 years all over again—only this time with assault rifles and nuclear weapons.

Literally, these people who call themselves Atheists are trying to invoke the Theory of Evolution as a supernatural force.  What a bunch of morons.  The Theory of Evolution does not say that the world works in a certain way and that everyone else is supposed to learn to accept it.  The Theory of Evolution says that the world works in a certain way and you better learn to accept it.  All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.  It is not the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of your DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them, or to you, or to anyone else.  If you believe that it should be, and that there must be something wrong with anyone who doesn’t agree with you, you’re just making sh*t up.  And that means you’ve ceased to be an Atheist.

Next we have war for political reasons.  I’ve already talked about wars being used to win elections for politicians.  Everyone knows that story.

Now consider this:  Fighting a war requires capital.  The Capitalists are the ones who control capital.  If you’ve ever heard of the military industrial complex, you know that companies like Halliburton are war profiteers, who make tons of money manufacturing military equipment.  War creates a demand for military equipment, so war is profitable for the military industrial complex.
But that’s still too obvious.  Consider this:

Being a politician is a full-time occupation, and running successful political campaigns requires capital.  For those two big reasons, people who actually have to work for a living don’t get elected to government offices.  That means that, here in America at least, the people who decide to start wars are all Capitalists.

Fighting wars creates a job market.  And who do you suppose the Capitalists get to fill that job market beside people who make their livings by selling their labor?  So wars are started by Capitalists, but they’re fought by Labor.

But that’s still too obvious.  Consider this:

As I’ve said, global environmental unsustainability makes World War III inescapable.  If we break the global environment to the point that we no longer have enough material resources to keep everyone alive, people are going to have to start fighting each other for them to stay alive.  That could make World War III a global civil war between Labor and Capital.  But that would take an awful lot of organizing among Labor that doesn’t currently exist.

If people get desperate enough for material resources that they’re willing to fight wars for them, most likely people are going to use the political structures they already have in place to do it.  That means countries fighting countries.   That means Labor fighting Labor.  If you want to keep Labor all over the world from joining together for their common goals and starting a global civil war against the Capitalists, what better way to do that than to start wars ahead of time to kill off some Labor and make Labor from different countries hate each other?  If they hate each other, they won’t trust each other and won’t be able to work together.

Now here’s where the bad takes a turn for the even worse.  If I was to line a bunch of people up against a wall and put a pistol in your hand, how many of those people would you be willing to kill for a tank of gas for your SUV?  If the fate of the world comes down to people fighting wars over resources, who the f*ck do you think is going to get most of those resources but the Capitalists who don’t fight the wars?   If the Capitalists can use their capital to fund political races and spread propaganda to Labor to make Labor think the people in another country are a threat to them and that Labor has something to gain by fighting a war against them, the Capitalists get to keep their economic system without having to do the dirty work that has to be done to make it happen, they can get rid of some Labor, and they can make Labor in their own country hate Labor in the other country, all at the same time!  As in, the rich get richer and the poor get drafted.

All of this is elementary to the Globalization 4.0 side of the peace movement.  Ending war is a lot harder now than it was back in Vietnam.  I know Bill Gates seems awfully generous, but there’s a good reason he doesn’t aspire to be lower class.

As I said, if you want to defeat the enemy, identify his weakest points and attack.

You know how military recruiters go into high schools to recruit kids to join the military when they graduate?   They have a well-developed strategy for recruiting kids as efficiently as possible, which starts with going into high schools in poor areas where people don’t have many prospects for the future.  To kids who live in trailer parks, tours of duty in the military sound a lot more appealing than they do to kids who live in suburbs.  Then the military recruiters basically sell the military recruitment to the kids by telling them just about anything they want to hear.  These military recruiters are sales people, plain and simply.  Their goal is to get you to sign your name on the dotted line.  They don’t give a f*ck about you—but they’re really good at acting like they do, at least long enough to get you to sign your name.

Some friends of mine figured out a good way to oppose this.  They call it the Arizona Counter Recruitment Coalition.  They print up fliers and some other things and go into the same high schools military recruiters go to.  My friends get permission from the high school administrators, which is never difficult.  And if possible, they visit on the same day military recruiters are going to be there and they set up tables right beside the military recruiters, or do whatever the military recruiters are doing.

There my friends recruit kids not to join the military, by telling them all the things about the military that military recruiters don’t tell them.  Military recruiters use a lot of dirty tricks to get kids to join, like promising them they can get into certain occupations, only to let the kids discover that when they join they get sent wherever their superiors want them.  Telling them that military vets have better job prospects when they get out, even though they don’t.  Telling them that after they sign their enlistment papers it’s too late to change their minds, which is a lie.

A lot of kids at poor high schools join the military because that’s the only way they can see out of their poor neighborhoods.  The military recruiters know that, which is why they go those high schools.  So my friends asked the kids what they wanted at their high schools.  They said they wished some college recruiters would come to their schools.  College recruiters hardly ever came to their schools, because just like the military recruiters, they went to the schools where they were going to have the best chances at recruiting people.  So my friends started calling up some colleges and telling their recruiters that they knew some high schools where the kids wished someone would come try to recruit them for something besides combat duty in Iraq…

The Counter Recruitment Coalition had a membership of about 8 people at its high water mark, and by the end it was down to 3.  But by that point President Bush had f*cked everything up so badly that he was pretty much doing my friends’ job for them, because nobody  wanted to join the military anymore. But in the 2 or 3 years they were active, 8 people handed out about 15,000 counter-recruitment fliers.  And they met an awful lot of kids who were glad they were there.
Wars are fought because people choose to fight them.  If Capitalists want to fight wars, whether to support their economy, or for their direct profit, or for religious beliefs veiled as cultural values, or for ideological goals that serve no practical purpose, or for political goals they keep secret from everyone else, the only way they can do it is by recruiting Labor to go fight for them.  Since the things they want they don’t need desperately enough to go fight for themselves, the only way war can prove profitable to them is if they can get someone else to risk their lives.  At every poor high school in the United States there are military recruiters.  And there are a lot more parents than there are military recruiters.  Two or three people visiting a high school once every month or two is all it takes to practically cripple the military recruiters there.  If you hand out controversial information about something to rebellious teenagers, a lot of them are going to talk about it.  If you give them web addresses they can visit to learn more, a lot of them will do that.  Then who knows what will happen next?  Maybe some of those kids will take matters into their own hands and start handing out your fliers for you.

This is another example of the plague-of-locusts economic system.  If the enemy is doing one thing and you give everyone involved a choice between doing that or doing something that serves their interests better, you put events into motion that nobody needs to control.  Everyone is going to attempt to preserve the survival of their DNA no matter what they do.  If you offer them a more effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA than anything the enemy is offering, you change their perception of the situation.  The rest is inevitable.  If you equalize everyone’s perception of the situation, the political system that results will truly be a political system of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The one thing I had to suggest to my friends that could make their counter-recruitment drive even more successful was to recruit people not merely to not join the military, but to join the Earth’s Army of Peace.  Not that the Earth’s Army of Peace is an actual military or a collective entity of any sort.  My point was, two big tactics I can remember military recruiters using on teenagers from my high school days was offering them the feeling of belonging to a group, and offering the feeling of being men who face challenges and take risks.  So by recruiting teenagers to join the Earth’s Army of Peace, they would be counteracting both of those tactics by giving the teenagers the sense that by not joining the military they were joining something even bigger, and they were facing even more important challenges.

My friends didn’t like the idea, mainly because I couldn’t figure out how to explain it in terms they could understand.  They told me all the same things limp-wristed bleeding heart liberals always tell me, which is that I can’t tell people what to do, I have to let people figure out life on their own, and if they offered kids a membership in some big group that was supposed to protect them the kids wouldn’t learn how to be independent.

That’s a great ideal, but it doesn’t change the fundamental fact that the military recruiters are still using highly developed psychological tactics to lure kids into joining the military and then shipping them off to fight a war.  If you want to defeat the military recruiters, you have to actively and effectively counteract their tactics.  If you don’t feel like doing that, then obviously your primary goal is not to defeat the military recruiters, it’s something else.  Here they’d gone to such great lengths to outwit the military recruiters, but when it came down to human psychology, they weren’t willing to believe that the recruiters’ highly developed psychological tactics actually worked, because it conflicted with they way their political ideology said the world was supposed to work. All I can say is:  if the success of your political ideology depends on abandoning people to their deaths, don’t accuse me of trying to be Chairman Mao.

The Earth’s Army of Peace movement is simple.  It’s just four words that express a basic idea.  With just a few more words, you can explain a lot more about it.  It’s active conscientious objector status.  It doesn’t depend on the military to make it official.  In fact, you don’t even have to belong to the military to claim active conscientious objector status.  For that matter, it isn’t official with anyone else either, except whoever collectively agrees that they belong to this idea called the Earth’s Army of Peace.

The way conscientious objector status works now, either you belong to the military, or you belong to nothing.  The way the Earth’s Army of Peace works, either you belong to the military, or you belong to something else that’s actively  opposed  to war.  All you have to do is to make that one slight adjustment to people’s perception of what not joining the military means, and then leave it up to them to do whatever they think is best.

This is why I can say that the military of the Kingdom of Earth is completely invisible, because all you have to do to join is to choose to join.  But there’s no one to sign up with, so there’s no way for anyone to keep track of where our military is or how big it is.

Like I’ve said, all this is elementary to the Globalization 4.0 movement.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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Iraq Veterans Against the War is a group of Iraq vets who… well, I guess the name pretty much says it all.  It’s a national organization, they have a website with all kinds of information for active duty service men and women and veterans on everything from how to file for conscientious objector status to how to get medical treatment.  They have speaking tours and events, and at one point they were getting so many requests for guest speakers that they couldn’t cover them all.

So here’s another group of Homo sapiens who are attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them. I don’t think it requires a whole lot of explanation.  War is a pretty obvious threat to people’s survival, safety, reproduction, and communities, so they put their abilities to use in solving the problem, and that feels good to them.

And with that, here’s their story in their own words.  You can find this on their website, along with a bunch of links to find out more about any of these topics.

First of all, 10 reasons they oppose the war:

1.  The Iraq war is based on lies and deception.

The Bush Administration planned for an attack against Iraq before September 11th, 2001. They used the false pretense of an imminent nuclear, chemical and biological weapons threat to deceive Congress into rationalizing this unnecessary conflict. They hide our casualties of war by banning the filming of our fallen’s caskets when they arrive home, and when they refuse to allow the media into Walter Reed Hospital and other Veterans Administration facilities which are overflowing with maimed and traumatized veterans.

2. The Iraq war violates international law.

The United States assaulted and occupied Iraq without the consent of the UN Security Council. In doing so they violated the same body of laws they accused Iraq of breaching.

3. Corporate profiteering is driving the war in Iraq.

From privately contracted soldiers and linguists to no-bid reconstruction contracts and multinational oil negotiations, those who benefit the most in this conflict are those who suffer the least. The United States has chosen a path that directly contradicts President Eisenhower’s farewell warning regarding the military industrial complex. As long as those in power are not held accountable, they will continue…

4. Overwhelming civilian casualties are a daily occurrence in Iraq.

Despite attempts in training and technological sophistication, large-scale civilian death is both a direct and indirect result of United States aggression in Iraq.  Even the most conservative estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths number over 100,000. Currently over 100 civilians die every day in Baghdad alone.

5. Soldiers have the right to refuse illegal war.

All in service to this country swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. However, they are prosecuted if they object to serve in a war they see as illegal under our Constitution. As such, our brothers and sisters are paying the price for political incompetence, forced to fight in a war instead of having been sufficiently trained to carry out the task of nation-building.

6. Service members are facing serious health consequences due to our Government’s negligence.

Many of our troops have already been deployed to Iraq for two, three, and even four tours of duty averaging eleven months each.  Combat stress, exhaustion, and bearing witness to the horrors of war contribute to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a serious set of symptoms that can lead to depression, illness, violent behavior, and even suicide. Additionally, depleted uranium, Lariam, insufficient body armor and infectious diseases are just a few of the health risks which accompany an immorally planned and incompetently executed war. Finally, upon a soldier’s release, the Veterans Administration is far too under-funded to fully deal with the magnitude of veterans in need.

7. The war in Iraq is tearing our families apart.

The use of stop-loss on active duty troops and the unnecessarily lengthy and repeat active tours by Guard and Reserve troops place enough strain on our military families, even without being forced to sacrifice their loved ones for this ongoing political experiment in the Middle East

8. The Iraq war is robbing us of funding sorely needed here at home.

$5.8 billion per month is spent on a war which could have aided the victims of Hurricane Katrina, gone to impoverished schools, the construction of hospitals and health care systems, tax cut initiatives, and a host of domestic programs that have all been gutted in the wake of the war in Iraq.

9. The war dehumanizes Iraqis and denies them their right to self-determination.

Iraqis are subjected to humiliating and violent checkpoints, searches and home raids on a daily basis.  The current Iraqi government is in place solely because of the U.S. military occupation.  The Iraqi government doesn’t have the popular support of the Iraqi people, nor does it have power or authority.  For many Iraqis the current government is seen as a puppet regime for the U.S. occupation.  It is undemocratic and in violation of Iraq’s own right to self-governance.

10. Our military is being exhausted by repeated deployments, involuntary extensions, and activations of the Reserve and National Guard.

The majority of troops in Iraq right now are there for at least their second tour.  Deployments to Iraq are becoming longer and many of our service members are facing involuntary extensions and recalls to active duty.  Longstanding policies to limit the duration and frequency of deployments for our part-time National Guard troops are now being overturned to allow for repeated, back-to-back tours in Iraq.  These repeated, extended combat tours are taking a huge toll on our troops, their families, and their communities.

And now, their reasons for calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq:

1. The reasons and rationale given for the invasion were fraudulent.

There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq during the time of the invasion according to US officials and former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix. The idea that Al Qaeda and the 9/11 terrorist attacks were connected to Saddam Hussein and the Baath party were proven false in the 9/11 Commission Report. Members of the Bush Administration have admitted that they “misspoke” in the run up to the war.

2. The presence of the US military is not preventing sectarian violence.

The US occupation of Iraq has proven to be unable to prevent sectarian violence and halt an escalation towards a civil war. Despite having an average of 140,000 troops in country since the occupation began, internal violence and attacks against civilians and Iraqi security forces have been on a steady incline.

3. The occupation is a primary motivation for the insurgency and global religious extremism.

The insurgency can be broken down into many individually named factions with various goals, beliefs, and techniques. However, our membership of veterans believe that the occupation of Iraq is the primary thing encouraging the insurgency and giving it legitimacy in the eyes of many Iraqis. Likewise, other people of the Islamic faith are encouraged to resist America ’s policies internationally based on how they perceive our military operations in the Middle East.

4. We can no longer afford to fight this war of choice.

The financial burden is destroying our domestic programs that could be used to protect us from natural disasters, provide medical programs, or help improve education. We are jeopardizing the US economy and putting strains on the budgets of important government agencies like the Veterans Affairs Department.

5. National security is compromised.

Funds that could be used to protect our ports and transportation are being stripped away while our National Guard units are on constant deployments instead of being used to protect and defend us here at home.

6. The world is becoming more dangerous.

International terrorist attacks have increased and it has become more dangerous for Americans to travel abroad. Approval for US policy has decreased and the dislike of Americans has increased.

7. Our national “moral authority” is being undermined.

The US has lost credibility to much of the world as the defender of liberty and freedom and our national identity is eroding. We can no longer deploy our armed forces for peace keeping measures with the good faith of the international community. We need to regain the respect and faith of the global community. This begins by withdrawing our troops from Iraq and helping the Iraqi people rebuild their country and society.

8. The majority of American citizens, Iraqi citizens and US military would like to see an immediate end to the war in Iraq.

If we are truly a democracy and we aim to create a democracy in Iraq our leaders will represent the will of the citizens and lead according to their wishes.

9. The military is broken.

We are abusing the small population of armed service members with multiple deployments while using inadequate vehicles and equipment. Less than one half of a percent of the American population is serving in the active armed forces, which is the least amount in the last century. Only 25% of the troops in Iraq are there for their first tour, while 50% are there on their second tour, and the remaining 25% are there three times or more. We continue to involuntarily extend soldiers with Stop-Loss, recall them repeatedly for additional service using the Individual Ready Reserve, and send soldiers with diagnosed medical problems into combat.

Sergeant Kevin Benderman served one tour of duty in Iraq and when he came home he filed for conscientious objector status and refused to return.  He ended up doing 15 months in prison.
Now Sergeant Benderman has a book and a DVD out.  Here’s the beginning of his story, as told by his wife.  They’re Christians, obviously, but when it comes to things like “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, really what is there for anyone to argue about?  I don’t know what they think about evolution or what I’m doing, but for whatever it’s worth, the Bendermans are such good Christians that they earned their place in a book called The Third Testament© not by believing in evolution, but by practicing Christianity in way that’s helping everyone—and consequently themselves—survive and reproduce.

(I think Ms. Benderman made a few typos here, but I left everything as she wrote it.)

One Soldier’s Fight to Legalize Morality

by Monica Benderman

Hinesville, Georgia, Thursday, July 7, 2005–On July 28, 2005, in a small non-descript courtroom on Ft. Stewart, Georgia, a Court Martial is scheduled to begin. Again. One Army NCO who decided that he had no choice but to make a conscious choice NOT to return to war is being put on trial for caring about humanity.

This soldier fulfilled his commitment, he kept his promise to his enlisted contract, and when ordered to deploy to Iraq at the start of the invasion, he went, not because he wanted to “kill Iraqis” or “destroy terrorist cells,” but because he wanted the soldiers he served with to come home safely.

He returned knowing that war is wrong, the most dehumanizing creation of humanity that exists. He saw war destroy civilians, innocent men, women and children. He saw war destroy homes, relationships and a country. He saw this not only in the country that was invaded, but he saw this happening to the invading country as well – and he knew that the only way to save those soldiers was for people to no longer participate in war. Sgt. Kevin Benderman is a Conscientious Objector to war, and the Army is mad.

Sgt. Kevin Benderman, after serving one tour of duty in Iraq, filed for Conscientious Objector status, his Constitutional right. His commander refused to accept his application and one called him a coward. One chaplain was ashamed of his lack of moral fortitude, another, of higher rank, testified to the true sincerity of Sgt. Benderman’s beliefs, in writing. A military intelligence officer decided that he knew matters of the soul better than a man of God, and recommended to deny the CO claim. Five commissioned officers who had never met Sgt. Benderman agreed with the “intelligent officer” and the claim was denied, twice.

More than two weeks after my husband was placed in the Rear Detachment unit here at Ft. Stewart, charges of Missing Movement and Desertion were filed against him, even though he has never missed a single day of duty in almost ten years. At the first Courts Martial proceedings, the investigative hearing was over turned. According to the judge’s decision, the presiding officer had shown implied bias toward Sgt. Benderman, and a new hearing was ordered. As the session adjourned, the same command that brought the first charges were marching up the aisle in the courtroom to file a new charge, Larceny, against Sgt. Benderman.

The command that brought the charge, had erroneously ordered combat pay to be paid to Sgt. Benderman, along with 7 other soldiers in their unit. Rather than accept their responsibility for the error, these leaders chose to punish Sgt. Benderman for the mistake, and have yet to discipline any of the remaining soldiers for the officers’ gaffe.

The new investigating officer strongly recommended dismissing this larceny charge, but the convening authority, Ft. Stewart’s garrison commander, pressed on and filed the charges anyway, along with desertion and missing movement. The Courts Martial is scheduled to begin on July 28. The games began in January.

At the conclusion of the first hearing, I returned to the courtroom briefly for some things I had forgotten. The lights were dimmed, and no one was there. This small dark room, vintage WW II, had a reverent calm. Desks and chairs sat waiting, slightly turned, empty jurist panel, attorney’s podium – the stage had been set. I look back on it now, and the feeling is strangely surreal.
Last week we learned that the United States Supreme Court allows itself to keep the Ten Commandments hanging on the walls of its chambers, as a testimony to another form of law. The guardian of the Constitution of our country, presiding over the human rights of our people, maintains that the Ten Commandments, religious context aside, represent a form of law that is powerful enough to occupy a place in its chambers.

In a small, quiet courtroom, on the Ft. Stewart military installation, the stage is set. One soldier who, after firsthand experience with the destructive force of war, decided to take the Ten Commandments at their word – “Thou Shall Not Kill” – and use the rights given to him to declare his conscious objection to war, to no longer be in a position to voluntarily have to kill another human being, is now on trial for not wanting to kill.

The Army has removed itself so completely from its moral responsibility, that its representatives are willing to openly demand, in a court of law, that they be allowed to regain “positive control over this soldier” by finding him guilty of crimes he did not commit, and put him in jail – a prisoner of conscience, for daring to obey a moral law.

It is “hard work” to face the truth, and it is scary when people who are not afraid to face it begin to speak out. Someone once said that my husband’s case is a question of morality over legality. I pray that this country has not gone so far over the edge that the two are so distinctly different that we can tell them apart.

A sixteen year old in New York, was charged with involuntary manslaughter yesterday for stabbing another teen in the chest twice, over a computer game. There is no question of why. He broke a law – a legal, MORAL law – “Thou Shall Not Kill.”

After seeing war firsthand, Sgt. Kevin Benderman chose to follow a legal, MORAL law – “Thou Shall Not Kill.” A form of law significant enough to be represented on the walls of our Supreme Court. The US Army cannot let him go. I have to ask – “WHY?”

Lieutenant Ehren Watada served in the army, and was the first commissioned officer to refuse deployment.  He was trained for combat duty in Iraq, and in preparation for deployment he started studying the area, its people, their history, their culture, and the history of the war, in order to prepare himself and the men he would be leading as best he could for the mission they were going to be carrying out.

Over the course of researching all this, he discovered pretty much what everyone else I’ve talked about here has said:  that the war was started on false accusations.  That was a serious problem to him, because when he joined the military, he, like everyone else who joins the military, swore to uphold the Constitution.  By starting an illegal war, President Bush was violating the Constitution.  That meant that if Lt. Watadah carried out his orders, he too would be violating the Constitution.

Lt. Watadah tells most of his story on his website in audio and video files.  But here’s the timeline of his story surrounding his attempt to refuse duty in Iraq:

Jan 2006     Lt. Watada submits a letter of resignation to his battalion commander.  He is told he will be transferred out of the unit but then ordered to deploy with the unit on its 30-day Mission Readiness Exercise.  Initially told to reconsider his decision, he is informed in April, 2006 of procedural mistakes in the resignation.

Lt. Watada is offered a “safe” position within the Battalion HQ, one recently vacated by a lieutenant allowed to leave the unit.  Having never claimed CO – conscientious objector — status, he declines the offer.   Lt. Watada is then ordered to move immediately to that position.  He is denied a 2-week leave granted to all others within his unit and informed that he will face legal proceedings if he does not change his decision by the time the unit returns from leave.

May 2006     A second letter is submitted, and the resignation is denied due to the unit’s “stop-loss” designation, which requires all members to remain on active duty for the full duration of the unit’s deployment.  Lt. Watada offers to deploy to Afghanistan; the request is denied.

Jun 7, 2006     At a press conference held in a church near Ft. Lewis, Watada announces he will not comply with deployment orders to Iraq.

Jun 22, 2006     Lt. Watada fails to board the plane for Iraq with the Third Stryker Brigade of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Infantry Division.  He is confined temporarily to base quarters, officially counseled, and notified of a pending investigation.

Lt. Watada faced 6 years in prison—2 for failing to deploy and 4 for speaking out against the war while serving in the military.  But his trial was a tricky business for a lot of people, because by going to trial for refusing to deploy in order to uphold his sworn duty to defend the U.S. Constitution, he was putting the war itself on trial.  There were only two ways the trial could be ruled:  either the war was constitutional and he was breaking his orders, or he was upholding his sworn duty to defend the Constitution and the war was illegal.  And he had all the evidence he needed to prove that he was right.

So it came as no surprise when the army prosecutors made their own procedural errors and a mistrial was declared.  Lt. Watada was let off of his charges and discharged from the military.

Pat Tillman played football for Arizona State University, so his story has been big news where I live.  After he graduated, he went to play in the NFL for the Arizona Cardinals.  But he left his football career to volunteer for the army in 2002, along with his brother Kevin, who gave up his chances at a career in professional baseball.

They served together in the rangers in the Iraq invasion.  Later Pat was redeployed to Afghanistan.

Like everyone else whose story I’m relaying here, Pat was critical of the Iraq war and the Bush administration.  He’d made plans with Dr. Noam Chomsky to meet after he got back from Afghanistan.  If you’ve never heard of him, Dr. Chomsky is an author who’s critical of just about everything.  So for anyone who has heard of Noam Chomsky, it’s pretty obvious where that was headed…

But then on April 22, 2004, while out on patrol, Pat’s unit got in a firefight.  Pat got killed by friendly fire.

This is where his story started getting really controversial.  As it turns out, the whole battle was friendly fire, because Pat’s unit had engaged an allied unit.  Evidently, a roadside bomb… or some kind of bomb… went off between them and they each though they were under attack by the other.  So the story goes, anyway.

Then Pat was shot by someone from his own unit.  Three times in the head.

Then his comrades burned his uniform and body armor to try to keep anyone from finding out he’d been killed by an American.

Then the military officials involved all started covering everything up.  Within days his commanding officers knew he’d been killed by friendly fire.  But his citation for the Silver Star, Purple Heart, and posthumous promotion to Corporal reported that he’d been killed in a battle everyone knew never took place, and the report was approved by his commanding officers. His death by friendly fire wasn’t revealed to his family until weeks after his memorial service.
So at best Corporal Tillman was a celebrity serving in the military, who was critical of the military and had big plans to become a lot more critical as soon as he got out, who was killed by someone on his own side, in a battle that was started by accident, and whose death was immediately covered up.  The other possibility, which no one can prove, but that depends on a lot less coincidences and mistakes all happening at the same time, was that it was murder.

And with that, here’s what his brother Kevin had to say about it when he got out of the military:

After Pat’s Birthday

By Kevin Tillman

It is Pat’s birthday on Nov. 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How, once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice … until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a 5-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping bumper stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a 5-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of habeas corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity.

Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.

I know I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating.  A war of ideas can’t be won by bullets; it can only be won by weaponized education.  I’ve said that the military of the Kingdom of Earth is completely invisible.  But I’ve also said that no one has ever won a war without infantry, and that revolutions are illegal, which is why the success of the revolution depends on people like the Animal Liberation Front who dump tea in Boston Harbor—oops, I mean liberate animals—without killing or injuring anyone, who are not only willing to break the laws of mortal men, but to be branded as terrorists, to turn ideas into actions, in order to make the ideas personally meaningful to the enemy.

But something else that’s critical to the success of the revolution are people who know first hand why we’re fighting a war of ideas with ideas, because they’ve seen first hand what happens when you fight wars with bullets.  These people understand better than anyone else why fighting with anything other than ideas doesn’t work.  And in their own ways, they all took risks and made sacrifices to defend what they stood for.  All of these veterans swore to defend Americans from those who threaten us.  But the people who are threatening us didn’t turn out to be who we thought they were going to be.

After September 11th, I considered joining the military too.  I figured I was too old, but maybe if I volunteered for something really complicated—namely helicopter pilot—and did well enough on the entrance exams, they’d take me anyway.  But considering the way I get along with authority, I figured I’d be a Second Lieutenant for the rest of my life.  And most importantly, ever since Vietnam politicians have been calling the shots and winning elections, and I really didn’t want to spend eight years being President Bush’s pawn.  So I tried volunteering to fight the terrorists as a civilian, since that was who the terrorists were attacking anyway.  And you know how well that worked out for me.

But there is one thing I can still do.  These people whose stories I’ve relayed here all volunteered to defend my right to free speech, so the least I can do is to use my right to free speech to help them tell their own stories.  Ideas can’t be communicated without speech, and a war of ideas can’t be waged without free speech—at least, not by civilians it can’t.  So all these people who have done all they can to defend everyone’s free speech are the people who make it possible for anyone  to win a war of ideas.

You can’t win a war without infantry, but you can’t win a war without officers either.  The military of the Kingdom of Earth is completely invisible, so how officers are appointed is anyone’s guess.  But for my own part, I refer to any military vets who are participating in the war of ideas by using ideas against our current government by their military ranks, whether anyone is officially supposed to do that or not.  The way I see it, if you had to leave a military run by mortal men to defend higher laws that those mortal men weren’t defending, all that proves is that you’re part of a more important army than anything your mortal commanders could think of.   What the world really needs is an Army of Peace.  And that’s exactly what the army of the Kingdom of Earth is.

I think this would be a good time to remind everyone that the Kingdom of Earth isn’t anything of my creation, it’s a thing that people all over the world have been trying to create in various ways, without realizing that other people were also trying to create it in other ways, or how all their efforts fit together.  I call it Globalization 4.0, or a global revolution, or a war of ideas, or world conquest, or whatever fits best with whatever I’ve been talking about, but really all it is a bunch of people who are each doing what they can to try to create a world where people don’t have to fight each other anymore.

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I’m sure we all know the basic background to the Civil Rights Movement.  First we had slavery, then we had the Civil War, then we had Reconstruction, then we had sharecropping and segregation, then we had the desegregation of schools, the bus boycott, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers, Dr. King and Malcolm X’s assassinations, and then a whole bunch of people trying to following Dr. King and Malcolm X’s footsteps, but none able to fill their shoes.  Now we have Jesse Jackson.

Now here are some details that most people haven’t heard about…

The Abolition of White Democracy  by Professor Joel Olson is a good book on the history of race relations in America since the end of the Civil War.    It’s basically a real-life version of my story of Rex and his toy empire, and it shows a lot of patterns that apply to the relations between any two groups when one is a majority and the other a minority.

First of all, slavery was an 8,000-year old tradition by the time the Europeans came to the Americas.  Slavery in the Americas began with indentured servitude, under which materially wealthy Americans would pay for the ocean passage for Irish peasants.  Then the Irish would have to work for the Americans for three years to pay them back.  Naturally, these materially wealthy Americans were doing this to make a profit, so the amount of work they were getting out of their indentured servants was way the hell more than their passage aboard the ship had cost.

There was just one problem.  The Irish looked just like all the other White settlers, so it was really easy for them to run away.  So those materially wealthy Americans looked for another way to get a lot of work out of people as cheaply as they could.

These materially wealthy Americans tried enslaving Native Americans.  They were conquering the people’s lands after all, so they needed something to do with all the Native Americans.  But that didn’t work because the Native Americans were never very cooperative.  I’m guessing maybe they hated the White conquerors too much to be willing to work for them, or maybe they had too much of a problem being forced to work on the land they used to live on, or maybe they were too familiar with local geography so they could escape really easily, or maybe they had too much practice at fighting Whites already and were able to organize escapes too easily, or maybe all of the above.  Whatever the case, enslaving Native Americans just didn’t work very well.

So the slave owners tried something else.  They started buying their slaves from African slave traders.  That gave them something no one had ever had before in European history.  They racialized slavery.  Now they made one race the slaves and another race the slave owners, so now you could tell who was supposed to be a slave and who wasn’t just by looking at them.

Racializing slavery also created something else new.  Not all Whites owned slaves.  Now that slavery had been racialized, the materially wealthy White slave owners had created something completely artificial that White workers could earn without the slave owners having to pay them for.  Now the White workers could work for the sake of proving that they weren’t slaves.  By creating a racial social tier of slaves, they also created a racial social tier of non-slaves.  Membership in the White workers’ tier meant that no matter what, there would always be someone below you that you could look down upon, but there would also be people above you that you could look up to.

This created a sensory illusion that the slave-owners took advantage of.  The White workers and the Black workers were all workers, which meant they had a lot in common.  But the White slave-owners looked  more like the White workers.   Out of the three groups, two were mortal enemies.  Karl Marx and Fredreich Engles published The Communist Manifesto just 13 years before the American Civil War started.  If the White workers had banded together with the Black workers, the workers could’ve won.

Instead, the White workers fell for the sensory illusion.  The easiest way for them to identify with people from another group was the same way it’s been easiest for anyone to identify with anyone for all of human evolution—by who looked  like them.  That solidified the Whites as one group and the Blacks as another group.  That made it really easy to tell who was crossing over to collaborate with the other group.  And that made it really easy to expose that person as a traitor to their side.  So that discouraged anyone from collaborating with the other side in a big way.

Despite what they teach you in history class, the 13th Amendment didn’t free a single slave.  It specified that all the slaves in states that were in open rebellion against the United States were freed.  But at the time the 13th Amendment was written, those states all belonged to a different country, so the U.S. Constitution didn’t apply to them, and neither did Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.  Maryland and Delaware were also slave states, but they stayed with the Union.  So Abraham Lincoln didn’t free their slaves with the 13th Amendment, for fear he’d drive them over to the Confederates’ side.  Washington D.C. is bordered by Virginia to the south and Maryland to the north, and General Lee had been trying to capture Washington ever since the war began.  If Maryland had joined the Confederates, Washington D.C. would’ve been surrounded by the Confederates automatically.

My point is, the 13th Amendment illustrates all too clearly that President Lincoln faced the same basic problem that General Lee faced.   General Lee was smart enough to figure out what an advantage rifles gave to defenders, but he knew that most of his men weren’t, so in order to keep his army functioning, he had to try winning with the old battlefield tactics.  If he’d told them to fight defensively only, the Confederate soldiers would’ve felt like he was a coward.  They wouldn’t’ve felt like cowards, and they wouldn’t’ve wanted to fight like cowards, so morale would’ve suffered, there would’ve been a lot of conflict within the ranks, people would’ve disobeyed orders, and sooner or later someone would try to replace him or get him replaced.  So General Lee had to fight in a way that his men felt would succeed.

President Lincoln’s version of this problem was that no matter how kind-hearted he was, he obviously had good reason to believe that the slave owners in Delaware and Maryland cared more about owning slaves, and therefore owning cheap labor, than they cared about the Union.  This makes it pretty clear that it was President Lincoln, and not the Northerners as a whole, who cared so much about freeing the slaves.  The Capitalist aristocrats cared about what Capitalists have always cared about—the control of Capital.  Even when it’s human capital, and even when it means joining an armed rebellion against their own country.  How else can it be that President Lincoln, who we all remember so well for having freed the slaves, in his historical act of freeing all the slaves, didn’t actually dare to free a single one of them?

(And that raises the further question:  Why don’t they teach anyone about this in public school?  Maybe because our politicians don’t want our kids to learn about this historical proof that Capitalists are a threat to national security?)

Even after the Civil War, slavery was only nominally ended. Now the Blacks had to rent their farmland from White landowners and pay for it out of their crops—hence the term sharecropping.  They weren’t slaves anymore, now they were serfs with a few more token rights than serfs had in Medieval Europe.  They could go to school and learn how to read now, but thanks to segregation they couldn’t go to as good of schools as the Whites did.  And of course, the Whites did all they could to prevent them from voting, like trying to reserve the right to vote for property owners, giving people literacy tests, and making them pay voting fees.  (When things like that happen to Black voters in the old Confederacy today, it’s called “voter disenfranchisement”.)
So Blacks were legally free now but they still lived in forced poverty.  You saw what happened in the African village when it took all the work energy the people had just to survive from one day to the next.  Now the Whites were forcing the Blacks to expend all the work energy they had just to stay alive from one day to the next.  If the Whites could keep the Blacks underrepresented in elections, they could keep them politically powerless, or close to it.  If they could prevent them from getting good educations they could keep most of them from ever learning how to do anything but farm.  Then they would never be a match for the Whites politically or economically, so they could never threaten their cultural and societal dominance.

The cultural tradition of Whites hating Blacks wasn’t something that could be outlawed.  Sociologically it was the Whites’ cultural background by now, and as individuals it was their personal belief.  So now our political system said that Blacks were equal to Whites, but the Whites themselves still said Blacks were inferior.

Before the Civil War, White workers were separated from the Black workers by that line of slavery.  The White workers could identify themselves as non-slaves, and therefore had two things in common with the Capitalists just by virtue of their membership in the White race: their skin color and their free status.  That guaranteed them that no matter what, there would always be another group below them in the social hierarchy.  So given the choice, which other group did they want to make the best impression on?  The one below them?  Or the one above them?

The emancipation of the slaves did nothing to change that.  There were still the same three groups in the south: the White land owners, the White workers, and the Black workers.  They still had the same social hierarchy.  The White landowners still thought themselves superior and thought the Blacks a threat, and the White workers were still trying to make the best impression on the White landowners.  Depending on how you want to look at it—and I’m sure it affected some people one way and some the other—being a White worker gave you one of two things.  Either it gave you the chance to work for the sake of earning the completely artificial, imaginary currency of proving you weren’t an untrustworthy Black worker, or it gave you the chance to prove your loyalty to the White land owners.  But in order to prove your loyalty to the White land owners, you had to work extra hard, and you had to help oppress the Blacks.  After the war, White slave-owners racializing slavery so long ago still created an artificial motivation for the White workers to work harder, not for the sake of earning more money, but for the sake of earning the artificial currency of membership in the non-slave—now non-Black-worker—group.

The forced poverty and political marginalization of the Blacks reinforced this, in spite of what the Constitution said.  The Whites perceived the Blacks as a threat and acted accordingly, so the Blacks perceived the Whites as a threat.  That only made the Whites continue to perceive the Blacks as a threat, and the cycle continued.  The Blacks were uneducated, that that made them seem dumber and less cultured than the Whites—also known as “less human”.

This is yet another example of Capitalists using divide and conquer tactics against Labor to eliminate Labor as competition before they even get the chance to compete.  To paraphrase Professor Olson:  Black is a culture.  White is an economic system.

This racialized economic system still exists today.  It’s particularly noticeable in the old Confederacy, but you can find it all over America.  And Capitalists are still profiting from it.  If Whites still see Blacks as dumb, uncultured criminals, and the people who own media outlets help to propagate that stereotype, then Whites are going to continue to feel threatened by Blacks, and are going to continue to keep themselves safe from them.  In so doing, they’re going to act just the same way the White slave owners of centuries past wanted them to act, to oppress the Blacks.  And if the Whites continue to oppress Blacks with their actions, even if they don’t mean to and don’t realize they’re doing it, then the Blacks will still perceive the Whites as a threat and will act accordingly.

Here in the desert, this is exactly what’s happening now between Whites and Mexicans.
This racialized three-tier socio-economic hierarchy is a lot more than skin deep now.  Now Blackness has become not just a race but a culture.  Now everyone is free (but some more than others) to try to move up in the socio-economic hierarchy.  All over America now, the White landowner, White worker, and Black worker tiers are pretty much synonymous with upper class, middle class, and lower class.  If you act Black, everyone in America is pretty well guaranteed to see you as lower class.  And if you act Black, it’s a pretty safe bet that there’s a reason you’re trying to fit in with what everyone perceives to be the lower class.  There are any number of ways that people can act upon their perceptions of someone else as lower class, and there are any number of reasons people can want to identify with what everyone else perceives to be the lower class.  But I think Tom Friedman put it best in The World Is Flat.  He said something along the lines of:  “Class isn’t an economic level, but a state of mind.  The biggest difference between lower class and middle class is not their income.  The biggest difference is that middle class people have hope for the future and lower class people don’t.”

I think there’s something to be said for that, although not quite in the way he meant it.  A lot of lower class people are lower class because they’ve given up.  That would explain why a lot of people act Black because they want to identify with what everyone else perceives to be the lower class.  But in the town I grew up in, most people were lower class according to the IRS, but none of them acted Black.  Granted, we didn’t have MTV back then, so nobody had any exposure to Black culture.  But that’s not the point. The point is, they acted like White workers who were trying to make the best impressions on White landowners.  Some were trying harder than other, and some weren’t trying very hard at all.  But the crucial part was:  Maintaining their cultural identity did not depend on maintaining hostility toward the White landowner culture.

In other places people define cultural boundaries in other ways.  In England they use accents:  Queen’s English versus Cockney.  Which group do you try to sound more like?

Anyway, here in America, everyone is free (more or less) to try to climb up the socio-economic hierarchy.  But if you want to do it, you have to act White.  If you act Black, a lot of people are going to think a whole lot less of you and not offer you jobs and call the police when they see you walking down their street, or whatever.  That’s even true for White people who act Black now, but it’s even more true for Black people who act Black.  Also for non-White and non-Black people who act Black.  White skin still helps you act White without your doing anything; Black skin helps keep you Black without your doing anything.  Of course, the clothing style and hairstyle you pick out for yourself contributes to other people’s perception of your cultural group also.  And if you’re dark-skinned but not Black, then you’re somewhere in between White and Black.  You’re not automatically White or automatically Black, but you’re somewhere on the continuum between the two.  You can act like a White worker or you can act like a Black worker or you can act like a White landowner.  Here in America those are your choices.

Whichever one you act most like will determine the information package you pull out of the subconsciousness of the people you meet.  That will determine what they expect you to act like, and what they’ll notice most about you.  If you confirm their expectations about you, they’ll remember that strongly, and if you don’t confirm their expectations, they won’t remember that as strongly.  Of course, these cultural traits aren’t determined by skin color anymore; now skin color is just one trait among many—but a very important trait for some people.

Finally we get to the life of Dr. King.  There are two important things that few people ever learn about him because they aren’t taught in public school and the mainstream media never mentions them.

The first is that Dr. King was the good cop of the Civil Rights Movement.  Malcolm X was the bad cop.  The Civil Rights Movement as we’ve known it owes a lot to Malcolm X, because he offered Blacks a choice.  If Dr. King had been in it on his own, the Civil Rights Movement wouldn’t be what we remember it as.  By himself he would’ve just been some guy who had a lot of opinions that a lot of people agreed with.  In strictly Capitalistic terms, he was creating a demand for something, so the sensible Capitalist thing to do would’ve been to cash in on it and offer people what they wanted.  But if that was all the Civil Rights Movement had behind it, it would still be owned by the Capitalists, because its success still would’ve depended on Capitalists offering everyone else what they were demanding.  If their demands became more than the Capitalists were willing to part with, the Capitalists could still defeat them by refusing to supply for their demands.  Meanwhile, the Capitalists could also undercut the Civil Rights Movement by offering people the superficial appearance of supplying for their demands, even though they had divorced that appearance from its original content.  Go to any mall in America now and you’ll see what I mean.  Capitalists buy and sell Blackness now, along with every other symbol of rebelliousness that’s ever been invented.

Now enter Malcolm X.  Malcolm X, to a large extent, took the decision of whether or not to cooperate with Dr. King out of the Whites’ hands.  Between Dr. King and Malcolm X, the Whites were now trapped between a rock and a hard place.  Malcolm X gave the Blacks another choice in how to empower themselves to get what they wanted, and forced the Whites to realize the Blacks had another choice—just like the No Borders movement is giving Mexicans an alternative to the die-in-the-desert economy and the Arizona Counter Recruitment Coalition offers kids alternatives to joining the military.  Now that Blacks had the choice between Dr. King’s version of Civil Rights and Malcolm X’s version, the Whites no longer had the choice of whether to help Dr. King or not to help him.  Now their choice had been reduced to giving Dr. King what he wanted, or take their chances on Malcolm X taking what he wanted.  Once again, by giving everyone a choice, and everyone then making a choice, Malcolm X created a political system that was truly of the people.  Everyone involved was attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.  When Malcolm X joined the Civil Rights Movement in his own way, he made the Blacks perceive a backup plan for preserving the survival of their DNA, and he made the Whites perceive that the Blacks perceived that they now had a back-up plan.  By giving the Blacks more choices in ways to preserve the survival of their DNA, he gave their oppressors fewer choices.  When the Blacks acted within their new range of possibilities and the Whites acted within their new range of possibilities, the Blacks won more than they would’ve if both sides had acted within their previous ranges of possibilities.

The other important thing that few people know about the life of Dr. King was that toward the end he was becoming a Socialist.  Everyone in America has heard his I Have a Dream speech, and considers that the high point of his life.  Then James Earl Ray shot him.  But that wasn’t until five years later.

Before he died, Dr. King started drafting what he called the Economic Bill of Rights.  He intended that to be a step taken by the government to guarantee an acceptable minimum standard of living for Americans.  And as we all know, our government is the embodiment of the agreement made among the people to work together to provide for their common interests and to work together to protect themselves from those who would harm them.  That makes a government of, by, and for the people the foundation of any socialist society.

There are two important lessons that can be learned from the history of the Civil Rights Movement before I move on to the Civil Rights Movement of today.

The first is that Blacks won the right to vote before women did.  When women were struggling for the right to vote, a big argument they made was that letting women vote would give White voters a big advantage over Black voters.  If the women really wanted to challenge White male dominance, they could’ve joined forces with the Blacks instead.  But instead they broke their potential big revolution into a bunch of small revolutions competing with each other.  Naturally, the people of the Globalization 4.0 movement have learned from this mistake—or at least, are trying to—and develop a political ideology that’s universally inclusive so they can work together, or at the very least, keep from working against each other.

The second is:  Watch how conservatives talk about Dr. King today, and it’s a perfect lesson in how childhood development and cultural background shape information and anti-information packages.  On Dr. King Day of 2007, I remember hearing or reading something about how much President Bush was praising Dr. King’s contributions to America.  President Bush, as you will recall, is a conservative.  That means he prefers hanging onto old ideas over adapting to new ideas.  40 years ago, conservatives, especially ones from southern states like Texas, thought all them damn niggers marching down their streets must be a sign of the end of the world.  So what did they do?  They fought tooth and nail to make them stop, so they could make their society continue to function the way they were used to it functioning.  They called out the riot police and brought out their attack dogs and turned on their fire hoses.

But it didn’t work.  So now something new was happening in society, despite the best efforts of the conservatives to prevent it.

That was then.  This is now.   If President Bush had been governor of Texas 40 years ago, what do you think he would’ve done if Dr. King came to Austin and given a speech in front of the state capitol building?  Called out the National Guard?

But if you asked President Bush about it now, what would he say?  Well first of all he’d never admit to the possibility that he, as a conservative, would’ve been a racist back when the south was still segregated and the majority of voters were White racists.  But would he even realize the contradiction in what he was saying?  Of course not, because he believes that evolution is bullsh*t, which includes evolutionary mechanisms of childhood development, and for that matter, the anti-information package he would be using right then and there while he was talking to you.  He would assure you that his god would’ve guided him to do the right thing then as now.
Even if he was willing to admit that he would’ve been a racist, and even if he could imagine the possibility that he could be a racist if he had been born in another time, his biggest blind spot of all would be his not noticing that conservativism itself is a gigantic anti-information package.  Forty years ago, President Bush would’ve fought Dr. King tooth and nail because he was trying to preserve the conservative values Dr. King was threatening.  Now he’s conserving cultural values today by praising Dr. King because Dr. King created the cultural values we have now.

So my question is:  Why the f*ck did anyone ever elect President Bush to be the leader of our country when he’s nothing but a f*cking follower?

And of course, the same goes for all conservatives.  If it didn’t apply to them, they wouldn’t be conservatives, would they?

And by the way, do you think President Bush ever praised Dr. King’s Socialist values, or said anything about his Economic Bill of Rights?  Of course not.

Today, the Civil Rights Movement has split into two main branches.

The first is what looks at first glance to be the direct descendant of Dr. King’s movement.  And the reason it looks that way is because it’s made up of conservative followers of Dr. King, still trying to follow where he had led them as of 40 years ago, and making a few minor improvements of their own.  I must say, it’s sad to see.

In 2006, before the elections, I was walking out of a grocery story one day when a Black guy who was standing outside asked me if I would like to sign some petitions he had.  He had about a dozen, for all kinds of different things, from smokers’ rights to the environment.  I signed them all… until I got to the last one.  That one was for a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.  I just about threw that one back in his face.

So there he was, a Black man trying to prevent other people’s civil rights from being recognized.
The conservative side of the modern Civil Rights Movement isn’t going to get much further.  I can say that because they’re trying to act like Whites so they can get ahead in a civilization that isn’t going to get much further.

Blacks as a culture aren’t so much “progressive” as they are “a different culture from the Whites, who are trying to get ahead in the world”.  They’re conservatives for the same reason any group of materially poor people is more conservative than people who have more material wealth: because as individuals or as groups, the less economic safety net you have, the fewer chances you can afford to take.  With all their Black soul I’m sure they can win a lot of popular support by making people feel like they’re right.  But no matter how far they get this way, they’re still opposing fundamental laws of the universe.  A suicidal economic system is still a suicidal economic system, no matter what group of people are using it.

It doesn’t help that the Civil Rights Movement began in Black churches.   The conservative followers of Dr. King still depend on religion to give them their sense of how the world works.  That means they’re still trying to pit religious faith against religious faith.  They can win simple emotional aikido duels that way, and they can even attract enough followers to win victories by plain old might-makes-right.   But they still aren’t fighting in a way that’s ever going to let them win, because victory through might-makes-right can only be maintained through a constant input of energy from the victors.  As long as your enemies believe they’re right, they’ll never stop looking for a way to fight back.  So even if the conservative Civil Rights activists were using an economic system that could survive the laws of physics, they still couldn’t get very far, because the further they push, the harder their opponents will push back.

That brings me to the Globalization 4.0 side of the Civil Rights Movement…

Anarchism is the embodiment of the Civil Rights Movement.  One of the highest priorities of the Anarchist movement is to systematically seek and destroy all forms of authoritarianism.

Anarchism had been around for a century before Dr. King got his start.  So if he’d lived, there were a lot more ideas he could’ve found out about and put to use, or at the very least, a lot more ideas he could’ve rediscovered on his own.

Anarchism is different from the conservative Civil Rights Movement in two main ways.  First of all, it’s the Civil Rights Movement applied to everyone in the entire world.  Second, it doesn’t depend on any governmental apparatus at all for its success.

Anyone’s lack of civil rights is caused by someone else wielding the power, in one way or another, to prevent that person from exercising their civil rights.  So if you eliminate the source of that person’s power, what will remain are the other person’s civil rights.

The Globalization 4.0 Civil Rights Movement doesn’t depend on governmental apparatus for its success for the simple reason that any people’s movement that depends on governmental apparatus for its success is not a people’s movement.  If your civil rights depend on the government to protect them, what you have are not civil rights, they’re governmental rights, or something like that.  Or you could say that you don’t have civil rights, the government  has your civil rights.  And that’s still a form of authoritarianism, because you’re giving government officials the choice in whether or not to protect your civil rights.

The Globalization 4.0 Civil Rights Movement is waged in two main directions.  First of all, education of both the oppressors and the oppressed.  As Prof. Olson points out in his book, democracy all by itself is not an end to oppression; it’s just the concealment of oppression.  If a majority of voters believes themselves to be superior to the minority and votes accordingly, all you’ve done is to democratize your oppression.  Now you can say that the government isn’t oppressing the minority people anymore, because they’ve given them the right to vote.  And if their problems still aren’t getting solved, it must be the people’s fault—because they really are inferior just like the majority said all along.

Solving that problem depends on educating everyone about the situation and how it affects them.  Things like human equality and why the two groups seem so different from each other.  I’ve written almost a million words on the topic of human equality by now, so let’s just pretend I’ve got this one covered.

Second, the empowerment of the oppressed.  I’ve given you three examples of that in this chapter so far.  That means giving the people choices, or helping them find choices, or whatever, as long as they end up with a choice of actions they can pursue to benefit themselves in the end.  A lot of times oppressed people need help getting started, but once you show them one way out of their situation, they’ll start thinking of lots more.  Oppressed people aren’t stupid, but it’s really easy for people who are stuck in a seemingly hopeless situation to get so focused on doing what they have to do to survive that they miss out on opportunities to break out of their ruts.

Empowering oppressed people says nothing what so ever about empowering them in a way their oppressors will approve of.  If you are empowering the oppressed people in any meaningful way at all, their oppressors are guaranteed not to approve of it.  If their oppressors do approve of it, you’re not empowering the oppressed people; you’re only giving them the feeling of empowerment, while obviously leaving the oppressors in control of the situation. If you don’t threaten the oppressors, you aren’t truly empowering the oppressed.

Hence my reason for saying earlier in this chapter that solving problems facing the world is almost guaranteed to require breaking a lot of laws.  The laws are written by the oppressors, after all, so you can assume they’re written to help propagate their oppression.

The Globalization 4.0 Civil Rights Movement is a movement for racial equality, gender equality, sexuality equality, economic equality, religious equality, and political equality.  Anything that makes people unequal is a valid target.

Well guess what.  Capitalism depends on inequality.  Capitalism is inherently authoritarian.  I’ve already told you this part.  Once you define a certain thing as your “own”, you give yourself control over how the thing can and can’t be used, and you prevent anyone else from deciding how the thing will or won’t be used.  You can then use your control of the thing to control the actions of the people who need it.

Maintaining an economic system built on inequality depends on supporting a lot of non-food producing people who can devote all their labor to enforcing that inequality.  Namely, police. I’ve already told you that part too.

In a world with an increasing population, diminishing material resources, and a suicidal economic system, which is what we have now, anyone who controls material resources that other people need to live can be expected to use the material resources for their own benefit.  Likewise, they can be expected to use the control those material resources give them over other people for their own benefit.  And if you control other people, you eliminate their civil rights.

So consider this alternative:  If you teach everyone how to be economically self sufficient, which I talked about in the last book, you solve the problem of people being able to control other people through their control of material resources.  If you make everyone economically independent, then you make everyone an economic system of one.  You then empower everyone to join in whatever larger economic group they perceive best benefits them.  I laid out that basic idea with my consumer-driven serfdom economy of my mythical town of the Empire of Niesen in the first book.  This isn’t perfect, because farmers depend on their land for their economic security, so they can’t move anywhere that suits them, and labor learns certain job skills and not other job skills, so they can’t just choose to do any job.  But to the extent that it is possible to make everyone economically independent, that’s the basic idea.  If everyone is economically independent, you can’t have an oppressive economic system, because people aren’t going to choose to oppress themselves.

Also, if you teach everyone why our current economic system can’t possibly survive—namely, because it defies the laws of physics—and you teach everyone how to build an economic system that can physically survive, you’ve solved the problem of our suicidal economic system.  Or at least, you’ve taken the first step toward solving it.  Because guess what:  Nobody participates in a suicidal economic system that requires them to kill themselves!  Think about it.  The only reason anyone would want to participate in a suicidal economic system is because they have the power to make that economic system work in a way that will make other people die, not themselves.  So when I compare Capitalism to Fascism, I hope you can see why I’m not exaggerating.

Solving the problem of our suicidal economy depends on everyone learning how to be economically self-sufficient.  Until then, workers won’t wield enough power to solve it, and the Capitalists who do wield enough power to solve it won’t have any reason to solve it.  They’ll just go right on doing what they’ve always done, and try to get ahead in their competitive economy by competing against the people who are easiest to beat.

It’s inconceivable that global environmental sustainability can be achieved literally Anarchistically, because making the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep everyone alive will depend on a lot of worldwide coordination.  That will depend on a decision-making body that can make the necessary decisions fast enough.  But that decision-making body can never be built without everyone learning to be economically self-sufficient, and learning enough about how the physical world works to understand why this decision-making body is being created, after you’ve done so much to systematically seek and destroy authoritarian power structures.  The Communists in the Soviet Union tried appointing a centralized decision-making body, and that failed for a lot of reasons.  The decision-making body would have to understand how the physical world actually works, which the Communists didn’t.  The people who made up the decision-making body would also have to know how to be Anarchists, so they would know how to wield the power they needed  to be entrusted with without using it to oppress anyone.  The Communists obviously didn’t do that.  The people of the decision-making body would have to educate everyone about everything they were doing, if that hadn’t been done already.  They would have to make all of their work available to the public, and they would have to teach everyone a working understanding of what they were doing and how they were doing it.  The goal of this decision-making body would be to coordinate everyone’s cooperation.  In all likelihood they would wield some amount of authoritarian power as a byproduct  of their need to coordinate people’s cooperation as efficiently as it needed  to be coordinated to prevent global environmental catastrophe.  Once again, the Communists didn’t do this.  Finally, the decision-making body would need to make accurate predictions in solving the problem.  If the decision-making body can’t make accurate predictions, then there’s no point in having it.  The Communists didn’t do this either.  Neither did the Capitalists, for that matter.  We already have a decision-making body that can’t make accurate predictions.  It’s called the U.S. government.

As you can see, the Civil Rights Movement is inseparable from the environmental and peace movements.  If you have a war, you violate people’s civil rights by definition.  If you practice a suicidal economy, it’s inevitable that people’s civil rights are going to be violated.

All of this is elementary to the Globalization 4.0 movement.

Before I end this section, here’s an update on the Civil Rights Movement in South Africa—also known as the anti-apartheid movement.  Courtesy of my South African friends.

The White apartheid was a racialized economic system, which worked pretty much the same as the racialized economic system of the old Confederacy during segregation.  The Whites maintained their political power by enforcing poverty on the Blacks.

Now that apartheid has ended in South Africa, according to my friends, the only thing that’s changed is the color of the managers.  Blacks have the same legal rights as Whites now, but the economic system as it existed under apartheid was left intact.  That is, Blacks have the right to own businesses or whatever now, but there was no redistribution of resources.  They kept their definition of “rightful ownership”, so the Whites still control the economy, and by extension, the political system—only unofficially now.

They’ve done this by putting a wall of Black people who are really good at PR between themselves and the rest of the Blacks—just like Capitalist pigs here in America hire phone operators who are really good at being polite to answer all your phone calls and make you feel like everything that’s gone wrong with your internet service is your fault.  The end result is that they still have economic apartheid at least, but the Blacks can’t call it that anymore, because now it’s being enforced by other Blacks who work for the Whites, not by the Whites themselves.

So there’s yet another example of Capitalists who aren’t competing for the sake of encouraging innovation but for the sake of winning the competition and eliminating their competitors.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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The anti-corporate movement is different from the anti-Capitalist movement in one specific way.  The anti-corporate movement is a part of the anti-Capitalist movement that focuses on one specific cause of problems and other problems closely related to that.

You remember what I said back in the first book about how corporations fulfill all five of the criteria necessary to qualify as a life form?  In order to qualify as a life form, a thing must: behave in a manner conducive to self-preservation; grow and reproduce; transfer energy systematically; react to stimuli; and be distinctly different from its surrounding environment. If you consider the artificial environment of the marketplace to be the natural environment of the corporation, then a corporation does all of these things.

If you prefer a different definition of life, evolution depends on variation, replication, and selection.  That’s how the genes that create us evolve, so by extension, anything that does all of those things creates a life form.  As Dr. Richard Dawkins discovered back in 1976, ideas are transmitted from person to person, change over time, and adapt to new situations.  That means that ideas fulfill the variation, replication, and selection qualifications, and that makes ideas a life form whose environment is our brains.  I’ll talk more about that later in the book.  For now my point is, that definition of life also proves that a corporation is a life form, because a corporation is a collection of ideas that are really good at helping to propagate each other.

As corporations are recognized by the American legal system, a corporation is nothing but an agreement among people, but it’s granted independent entity-hood by the government.  Then, as each person who works for the corporation acts to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them—by going to work every morning and doing their jobs—they make the corporation function.  And by each of them contributing their part to it, collectively they make the corporation function as an artificial life form whose goal is to make profits.  Not to serve people but to make profits.  The corporation is not capable of recognizing people as anything other than a means to move money from one place to another, because in creating this artificial life form, nobody thought—or even knew how—to write in a definition of how to serve the needs of humanity.

Well guess what. Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution deals with how corporations are to be set up.  It states, “corporations are entitled to all the rights of people…” and then spells out some more rights corporations are entitled to.  So under the U.S. Constitution, corporations have more rights than people do.  They say we have a government of, by, and for the people, but if corporations have more rights than people do, is it any surprise that corporations are taking over?

You just might say that the Founding Fathers f*cked up in a big way here.  This is what happens when people who believe in supernatural forces try to set up secular governments.  The Founding Fathers were using a fictitious history of the world to give them their sense of cause and effect that led from the beginning of the world up the present day, and then they tried to use that imaginary chain of cause and effect to predict how events were going to unfold in the future.  And it didn’t f*ckin’ work, did it?

To be fair, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution long before the Theory of Evolution, the Laws of Thermodynamics, or the Big Bang were discovered, so they had no way of knowing in secular terms how the world began and how it got from there to the present day.  So they did what everyone has always done and tried to figure it out themselves.  But now that we can recognize that they had fundamental errors in their understanding of how the world worked, and we can see that those fairly simple mistakes they made in the past are causing big problems for us now, we can choose to take action to solve the problem.

The words “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”, and “corporations are entitled to all the same rights as people plus…” cannot possibly both exist in the same document and make that document self-consistent.  It’s pretty obvious the Founding Fathers intended us to have a government of, by, and for the people.  But it’s also pretty obvious that they believed in a Christian version of human behavior, that everyone is inherently good and is only tempted to commit evil, or something along those lines.

Well people aren’t inherently good.  And the Founding Fathers accidentally wrote a gigantic loophole into the Constitution that self-interested people are taking advantage of now.  The result is that America does not work the way the Founding Fathers intended it, because we’ve become a corporate aristocracy.  The Founding Fathers spent eight years waging a war against invisible decision-making forces that ruled their lives and that they had no control over, and what do we have now but a bunch of new invisible decision-making forces that rule our lives and that we have no control over?

The Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment to give Americans the right to keep and maintain firearms to defend themselves, their families, and their property against thieves and corrupt governments.  But there is no bullet that can kill a corporation.  If you walked into a corporation’s shareholder’s meeting with an Uzi and mowed every last one of them down, the corporation would still exist.  All the people who made the corporation function would be dead, but the corporation would survive.  More people would come along and take the places of the old shareholders and executives and would pick up right where they left off.
It is true that people make the decisions for corporations.  Hypothetically, those people can make any decisions they want.  But the goal of a corporation is not to serve humanity; the goal of a corporation is to make a profit.  If the corporation makes a profit, it succeeds.  If it doesn’t make a profit, it fails, by the very definition of “corporation”.

Since a corporation is an entity that possesses more rights than a person, and it functions by the collective input of different people, there is no real-life person who can possibly oversee all of the actions of the corporation.  That’s especially true in the case of multinational mega-corporations, which work by the collective input of a whole lot of different people.  The result of each person performing their stated job can only be expected to be that the corporation makes as much profit as possible—which is the goal of the corporation in the first place—regardless of what any individual feels the artificial entity should do.

Since the corporation’s goal is defined as the making of profit, naturally all the rules that govern the corporation are written for the sake of the achievement of that goal.  It could be assumed that everyone in the corporation meant well, but then the people who wrote the rules for the corporation would be making the same mistakes the Founding Fathers did.  If each person performs their stated job, under the rules that were written for the sake of the corporation making as much profit as possible, what you end up with is an artificial entity that makes as much profit as possible—not one that serves humanity.

Within the corporation’s rules that are written for the sake of the corporation making as much profit as possible, there are rules governing what people can do, or are supposed to do, if the corporation isn’t making as much profit as possible.  So once again, if the self-interested, not-inherently-good-after-all people who make the decisions for the corporation each act according to what they perceive to be the most effective means available to them—namely, doing their jobs, as opposed to not doing them—what you end up with is, once again, an independent entity that acts to make as much profit as possible.

The rights of citizens are protected by governments, not by corporations.  Environmental laws are enforced by governments, not by corporations.  Any law that limits that activity of a corporation is an obstacle to the artificial entity making as much profit as possible, by definition.

This means that anyone who works for a corporation and acts in a way that protects citizens’ rights and the environment is not doing so because of anything that exists within the corporation, but because of the external threat posed by the government.  Since the goal of the corporation is to make as much profit as possible and the external laws of the government are an impediment to that, for each person to perform their job and make as much profit as possible for the corporation puts them into conflict with the law.  The laws that limit a corporation’s actions don’t exist to facilitate the corporation’s service to humanity, by definition.  Well as we all know, anyone’s goal in a conflict is to win the conflict, not to cooperate with your opponent.  So corporations that exist to make profits and governments that exist to serve the needs of their people are continuously pitted against each other, by definition.

And now multi-national corporations are moving capital across international borders ever more efficiently, and thereby dissolving the power of governments, but the borders aren’t being opened to let the workers who sell their labor move freely across the borders.  So in the endless struggle between corporations that exist to make profits and governments that exist to serve the interests of their people, who’s winning?

Evolution is defined as the adaptation to environmental pressures.  Genetic evolution, technological evolution, and social evolution all work by adaptation to environmental pressure.  Genetic evolution is always governed by ever-greater energy efficiency within the organism’s living conditions.  That ever-greater efficiency results in ever-more-effective preservation of the organism’s DNA, simply because the equipment the organism uses to preserve the survival of his DNA requires energy to operate.  I’ve said all this before.

Traditionally, technological evolution has always moved in the direction of ever-greater personal energy efficiency.  Ever-greater personal energy efficiency naturally seems to us to be the most effective means of preserving the survival of our DNA, and traditionally, it has been.  But ever-more-efficient use of personal energy through the development of technology has always depended on ever-greater use of environmental energy.  Using ever-more-advanced technology requires us to make ever more chemical reactions happen.  And thanks to the Laws of Thermodynamics, that always means more energy radiating off the Earth and being lost to our planetary environment forever.

Now that we’re moving from our species’ colonization phase to its sustainability phase, the most effective means of preserving the survival of our DNA is no longer synonymous with personal energy efficiency.  But we still naturally perceive it to be.  Now the most effective means for us to preserve the survival of our DNA is to use our environmental energy ever more efficiently.  That necessarily means depending on environmental energy ever less.  And that necessarily means making the transition back to a localized organic agricultural economy.

Social evolution is basically a form of technological evolution, with the one difference being that the “technology” is invisible, because it’s an agreement or other type of collective behavior among a group of people.  But it follows the same pattern of ever-greater personal energy efficiency leading to ever-more-effective preservation of people’s DNA.  But that still only applies to life in the colonization phase of our species, which is where our perceptions of the world evolved.  Now that we’re moving into our species’ sustainability phase, the ever-greater preservation of our DNA necessarily means ever less dependence on environmental energy.  And that means ever-greater use of personal energy.  But once again, making this transition depends on educating people to make them perceive the new discrepancy between personal energy efficiency and the effective preservation of their DNA.

Human behavior itself is a constant adaptation to environmental pressures.  Every decision you ever make in your life you make for the sake of preserving the survival of your DNA by the most effective means perceivable to you.  As your situation changes, your perception of your situation changes—that is, provided you’re perceiving the situation correctly.  And as your perception of the situation changes, your perception of the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA in that situation also changes.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution and the laws governing the operation of corporations, they lived in different conditions than we do. First of all, they still seemed to have an infinite supply of material resources available, because they didn’t anticipate the effects of exponential population growth or industrialization.  Back when they wrote the Constitution, they were still living in our species’ colonization phase, which meant that ever greater personal energy efficiency was still synonymous with ever more effective means for people to preserve the survival of their DNA.  Also, they perceived the operation of the world itself differently than we do now—namely, incorrectly—because they lacked the science we have now.

So here’s what all that means for corporations:  When the Founding Fathers wrote the laws governing the operation of corporations, they wrote them according to their living conditions at the time and their faulty understanding of how the world worked.  Part of the Founding Fathers’ living conditions, which created part of their understanding of how the world worked, was how people acted at the time.  In the late 18th century, everyone who owned a corporation also had Christian values and various other background values.  These values affected their decision-making, which limited them to making certain choices.  But those values were external to both the structure of a corporation and the political system the Founding Fathers founded.  Quite simply, there were certain things people could do that the Founding Fathers had no way of outlawing, because nobody had thought of doing those things yet.  People who own corporations today, however, have different cultural values and 200 more years of practice at cheating and finding loopholes in the laws the Founding Fathers wrote.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the laws governing corporations, they created an environmental pressure by creating an agreement among people.  Now, as people adapt to the environmental pressure the Founding Fathers created based on their faulty understanding of the world and their living conditions at the time, when people who work for corporations adapt their behavior to their environmental pressures (meaning act to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them by doing their jobs according to the laws that govern corporations), they are not acting in ways that are compatible with the world we actually live in.

And here’s why:  Corporations are a vehicle of Capitalism.  The making of “profit” means the control of an increased amount of energy and material resources.  That means that the success of a corporation, and Capitalism itself, depends on sustained economic growth.  But sustained economic growth isn’t sustainable on a finite-sized planet.  Endless economic growth would depend on an infinite supply of resources, and it isn’t physically possible for an infinite supply of resource to exist.  When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they assumed that the world’s resources were infinite, and they were wrong.  So when they laid the foundation for an economic system they thought would serve people well, it turned out not to work nearly as well as they thought it would.

Then the Founding Fathers went so far as to write laws for creating independent entities that would serve as vehicles for their imaginary economic system.  And then they imbued those independent entities with more rights than people had.

Since our economic system was founded on beliefs about the world that were faulty in a number of ways, the vehicles of that economic system can’t possibly function in a way that’s consistent with physical reality.  The survival of these vehicles—these artificial non-human entities—depends on an infinite supply of resources that can’t physically exist, because one way or another making profits always depends on combining matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people, by definition.  If these artificial entities cease to generate profits, they cease to fulfill their purpose for existing.  That makes them failures, by definition.  That creates a new environmental pressure for the people who each make part of the decisions that make the artificial entity function.  Now the most effective means for them to preserve the survival of their DNA is to operate the bureaucratic apparatus that was built into the artificial entity to be used in the event that the artificial entity ceased to make a profit, to make it start generating profit again.

But feeding resources into the artificial entity simply for the sake of keeping it alive necessarily means taking those resources either from the environment or from people—neither of which we can afford any longer.  That necessarily pits the survival of the corporation against the survival of the people who need the resources.  That causes two big problems:

First of all, processing the resources through the corporate machinery just to keep the corporation alive, and then selling them back to the people, would add additional chemical reactions to the process— additional steps to the food chain, in other words, or you could say trickle-through economics.  The Laws of Thermodynamics will make energy radiate off the Earth forever at every step of the way.  Adding in more steps just to keep the artificial entity alive leaves less resources for the real-life people to use.

Second, as I’ve said before, if you put the control of resources that people need to live in the hands of someone else, then for all intents and purposes you’re turned the people who need those resources into slaves.  The person who controls the resources may or may not use them to force the people who need them into slavery.  But if a lot of people are put in control of resources that other people need to live, it is inevitable that some people will use their control of the resources to manipulate the people who need them.  In addition, the very act of putting someone in control of the resources other people need to live creates the master-slave relationship, and the people who are being turned into slaves can be expected to fight back, regardless of whether the master-figure tried to use them as slaves or even intended to use them as slaves.
The Founding Fathers created a monster.  And the Capitalists are choosing to serve it.

Corporations as they exist now are a relic left over from our species’ colonization phase.  As we move into our sustainability phase we will move into a new environmental economy, by definition.  That new environmental economy will create a new human economy.  That new human economy will necessarily create a new political system.

Corporations in their current form can be considered as nothing other than artificial life forms that prey on humans.  They must be exterminated.

It could be said that the people who operate corporations could choose to operate them differently now.  There are four components involved here:  the environmental economy, the Homo sapiens who operate the corporations, those people’s perception of the world, and the laws that govern the operation of the corporations.

The environmental economy of the world is non-negotiable.  The laws of physics are merciless and remorseless.  There is nothing we can change about the environmental economy that will make corporations function differently.

The Homo sapiens who control the corporations are a constant.  They will always act to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.  That fundamental law of human behavior can’t be changed to make corporations function differently.

The people who control the corporations could be educated in how the world works, how the global environment is changing, and how people will have to start acting differently to live within the physical limitations of the world.

And of course, the laws governing the operation of corporations could be rewritten.

It could be said that all people need to do is to educate the people who operate the corporations to make them perceive the world correctly.  That would change one environmental pressure, that necessarily would change the behavior of the people who make the decisions for the corporation, and that would change the actions of the corporation itself.  This is how Frank Robinson wrote his own set of standards—voluntarily—for how pilots would be certified to fly his helicopters.  Mr. Friedman’s book is full of examples of people who operate corporations doing this also.

The problems with depending exclusively on people who make decisions for corporations to control their own behavior voluntarily, is that if they’re controlling their behavior voluntarily, they still control how they behave.  If they can choose to act in a way that benefits humanity and there’s nothing else in the situation that affects them, then they can still choose not to benefit humanity, just as easily.

The man-made laws that govern the operation of corporations are another environmental pressure.  This one is controlled by the people that a valid government serves.  That government is the embodiment of the agreement made among the people to work together to protect their mutual interests from those who would threaten them.  Since the goals of a corporation contradict the goals of government (which is why governmental laws limit corporate behavior instead of facilitate it—or at least, are supposed to), to the people a government protects, a corporation is a threat.  So by the people changing the laws that govern the operation of a corporation, the people would be creating a second environmental pressure.

You could just as easily call the federal government the People’s Corporation.  The People’s Corporation defines its economy as the entire global environment, including the entire realm of human behavior.  It defines its economic success by its maintenance of the well being of society.   That means that the People’s Corporation is competition to all other corporations.  And as every Capitalist knows, competition is good for the economy because it drives innovation.  So innovate motherf*cker, innovate!

It could be said that people who control corporations could change the goals of their corporations to suit the needs of the changing environmental economy.  And hypothetically that’s possible.  There’s just one catch.  In order for a corporation to serve people’s needs in the new environmental economy, its owners would have to redefine their economy to include the global environment itself, including the entire realm of human behavior and the effects of the Laws of Thermodynamics.  They would have to redefine economic success by making society function better than it does now.  That would necessarily mean taking action to make empirical improvements on people’s ability to preserve the survival of their DNA. And that would necessarily mean taking specific and decisive action to help make our transition to a global localized organic agricultural economy.

So here’s the catch:  If you do all that to your corporation, you’ll no longer be practicing Capitalism.  You’ll be practicing a Use-Value economic system.  Capitalists define their economic success by their ability to combine matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people, according to the laws of supply and demand.  We define our economic success by our ability to combine matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people according to the physical limitations of the Earth.  Then we define our personal demand accordingly.  Capitalists measure their economic success by having more.  We measure our economic success by needing less.  The entire global environment is useful to people just the way it is.  In fact, if we had less of a human economy and more of a global environment, the global environment probably would be even more useful to us.  But people don’t naturally perceive that.  We’ve learned  to perceive it.  Capitalists combine matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people by extracting resources from the environment.  We combine matter and energy to turn thing that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people by moving things around in our own brains, to make our brains more useful to us, by making ourselves perceive the importance of not extracting resources from the global environment.

And like everything else I talk about in this chapter, all this is elementary to Globalization 4.0.
Geez, and you thought we were just a bunch of Anarchists kicking and screaming and complaining that the world ain’t fair?

Pathetic.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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