A Definition of the Struggle:
The first thing you need in a struggle for world domination is an enemy. Why? Because if you don’t have an enemy it isn’t a struggle for world domination.
Traditionally, in struggles for world domination, the enemy is the people who don’t want to be dominated. But that just won’t work in our case because (duh) we are those people.
Our goal for world domination is preemptive domination. Since there are a bunch of people out there who are trying to dominate the world, if we don’t want to be dominated and we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives trying to keep those people from dominating us, we have to dominate with anti-domination first.
A lot of bleeding-heart liberals I meet tell me a domination of anti-domination isn’t possible, because that would still be domination. This is just one more way I’ve found that people fight so hard for open mindedness that they’re not even willing to believe that open-mindedness is the necessarily the right answer, and they respect everyone’s differences so much that they’re even willing to respect people’s needs to feel like they can tell other people what to do. And all I can say to that is: If you can’t even figure out what you’re struggling for, there’s probably a good reason you’re not winning!
A domination of anti-domination means a bunch of people who agree not to tell each other what to do, and agree to work together to prevent anyone else from telling anyone else what to do. In order for the anti-domination domination to be able to work together, first they have to agree on how the world works, because if they can’t, they’re going to come into conflict when they all try to use the same resources and prevent each other from using them as a result. If they can’t agree on how the world works, then the only way they could solve that problem would be by someone telling someone else what to do. Either that, or to fight each other. Either way, the anti-domination domination has ended before it even began.
I’ve spent two books telling you how the world works already—and more importantly, how other people have figured it out, and how you could figure it out too if you want—so lets just say I’ve got that part covered by now.
The next things we need in our struggle for anti-domination domination are to define why our enemies are our enemies and how we’re going to struggle against them. We are all members of the Homo sapiens species, so what makes our enemies different from us? Then, knowing why they are different from us, how are we going to turn that into strategies and tactics for defeating them?
Our enemies are imperialists. They are our enemies because they are imperialists. Why are they imperialists?
I think it’s safe to say that every imperialistic culture in the world today can trace its origins back to either Mesopotamian or Chinese agriculture. The other three confirmed original centers of agriculture were in the Americas, three of the possible original centers of agriculture were in Africa, and the other possible original center was on the island of Borneo, and those seven places have all been conquered by people who were using either Mesopotamian or Chinese agriculture.
The difference between our enemies and us are the information packages we’re each using. For some reason or another, the benefits-to-effort ratio that makes up their perception of the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA makes telling us what to do seem worth the effort to them. So why do they believe that?
There is one big reason imperialistic people, and especially Americans, believe that world conquest is a good idea. Thanks to our cultural ancestors stumbling into the most favorable combination of material resources 10,000 years ago, here in America we’ve enjoyed a 10,000-year winning streak. Americans as a group don’t know how to be anything other than imperialistic because world conquest has always worked for us. “We” are imperialists because we’ve never needed to learn how to do anything else!
From there, we can break that one big reason down into four smaller components. We can make a number of telling distinctions here. Imperialists can believe that imperialism is the best idea for purely Earthly reasons, or for religious reasons. They can believe that consciously or subconsciously. They can be telling us what to do for purely selfish reasons, or they can believe they are benefiting us by telling us what to do. And they can act upon their beliefs actively or passively. Those four pairs of possible combinations create a total of 16 variations, assuming that each person was affected by one or the other of each pair and not both to some degree or in different ways. So I’ll just talk about those four pairs individually, and you can see for yourself how different combinations apply to people. Regardless of how each of these applies to each individual, the end result is a whole bunch of people working together because they believe they have the right to tell everyone else what to do.
I don’t know how many versions of the history of the world I’ve told you by now to illustrate how different things affected it. Well now that you understand how each of those things contributed to the course of history, here’s all of those stories put together now, to illustrate the origins of imperialistic culture:
10,000 years ago, the Mesopotamians had the most favorable living conditions in the world, and the Chinese had a close second, in terms of enabling people to survive and reproduce effectively. As a result, they built up the two biggest population centers. As a result of that, they built up the two most physically powerful civilizations. They also developed the highest technological levels in their areas, they developed the most complex forms of government, they organized the largest political systems, they developed the most specialized labor, and they attracted the biggest trade routes to themselves (including some that connected them to each other, although they didn’t realize that at the time). The Mesopotamians developed writing eventually, and the Chinese either developed it also, or learned about it from the Mesopotamians through their trade routes and copied the idea. Each group also developed organized religion to help them maintain social stability.
People can’t live without having an impact on their environment. That means the two largest civilizations in the world necessarily had the biggest impacts on their environment. The physical economic system of the environment is governed by the Laws of Thermodynamics, which states that matter and energy always move from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration, and thereby become more evenly distributed throughout the world. The psychological economic system of humanity is governed by the Theory of Evolution, which states that 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, and personal energy efficiency is the most effective perceivable means for a person to preserve the survival of their DNA. The Laws of Thermodynamics and their effects on the physical economy of the world are completely counterintuitive to people, because life depends on high concentrations of matter and energy, which naturally makes us perceive high concentrations of energy to be good, but the physical world works exactly the opposite from that. For us to concentrate matter and energy in certain places always requires us to move more matter and energy around in the process. The net result of that process is always a greater amount of matter and energy being dissipated than being concentrated.
The two biggest examples of people of those two centers of agriculture defying the Laws of Thermodynamics and paying the price were the Mesopotamians’ over hunting of the local gazelle herds, and then over farming their land some thousands of years later. In both cases, atoms and energy were moving through the natural cycles of their environment in ways that were critical to maintaining those cycles. But the Mesopotamians didn’t realize that. In both cases they attempted to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them by producing as much food as possible and having as many children as possible. But that removed so many atoms from the natural cycles of their environments that those natural cycles broke down. In both cases, the end result was the environment producing less food for the people than it had before.
Now the Mesopotamians (and the Chinese, who would’ve been affected by the Laws of Thermodynamics in the same basic way) had a lot of people, the most physically powerful civilization, and not enough food to go around. Now the easiest way to get food was to conquer other people. Due to all the advantages they had built up as a result of their agriculture, conquering their neighbors was easy. That became their cultural background, that created their cultural values, and those things were etched permanently into the developing brains of their children.
Since then, imperialistic conquest has continued to be the most effective means for the descendants of those two cultures to preserve the survival of their DNA. That has been particularly true for the Mesopotamians, which is why their cultural descendants, the Europeans, have spread all over northern Africa, central Asia, North and South America, Australia, and various other places. The fact that all six habitable continents now have large populations of ancestral Europeans who have the highest material standards of living proves that they have indeed been the most successful at preserving the survival of their DNA.
Imperialism has been the most effective means for the imperialists to preserve the survival of their DNA for the past 10,000 years, and it has never been otherwise. They have never taught their children anything else because they have never had any reason to need to teach their children anything else. Individual people could make that choice, and some (including my own parents) have, but as a culture, social evolution beyond imperialism has never been necessary for them to preserve the survival of their DNA. Imperialism continues to be effective for them, so when they each do what they feel to be right, the majority of them continue to practice imperialism, and their culture continues to be imperialistic. Those feelings are a product of their natural instincts combined with their learned instincts. Their learned instincts are a product of their interpreting sensory input in the simplest way for their universal human brain structures to interpret it, which reinforces their natural perceptions of the world, as I explained in the molecular history of the 20th century.
Again, parents could choose to teach their children different cultural values, and some do, but that requires extra effort. For that additional expenditure of personal energy to seem worthwhile, the parents would have to perceive it to offer them some additional advantage to the preservation of their DNA. When you live in a culture that has had a 10,000 year winning streak for its imperialism, where no majority of people have ever needed to stop acting imperialistically in order to preserve the survival of their DNA more effectively than continuing to act imperialistically, you now have a culture where each individual has to act imperialistically in order to make a life for themselves among the other imperialistic people of that culture. So for that reason alone, no majority of people is ever going to teach their children otherwise.
For all intents and purposes the imperialistic cultures that the anti-imperialists are fighting against are gigantic evolutionary steamrollers that continue to flatten everything in their path. No amount of free will on anyone’s part makes a difference, because the majority of people of those cultures continue to use their free will within the parameters that created those evolutionary steamrollers in the first place. It is possible for individual people to think their ways out of those parameters, but as long as the other people keep winning, no majority of imperialistic people are ever going to abandon imperialism voluntarily, because no majority of imperialistic people will ever need to abandon imperialism voluntarily. As long as imperialism continues to benefit imperialists, no majority of imperialists will choose to abandon imperialism—simply because that choice would not benefit them.
If the imperialists are to be stopped, they are going to be stopped because someone is going to figure out how to do what no one has ever succeeded in doing in the past 10,000 years, which is to assemble a political force that is more powerful than the imperialists and that does whatever it takes to stop them.
Now for the four pairs of conditions that create imperialists’ perspectives. From this point on I will focus on imperialists that are descended from the Mesopotamians, since I live in a country that’s descended from Mesopotamian imperialism.
First, the imperialists can be imperialistic for Earthly reasons, or for religious reasons. These two are tightly woven. As I showed you in the last book, religion is more personally meaningful than science, and religion exists in every culture in the world. That makes religion an inescapable component of any cultural background. As with anything else that affects cultures, individual people can choose to reject religion absolutely, but no majority of people can be expected to reject religion absolutely. That means that the beliefs of that religion will form the cultural background of that culture, even for people who learn those religious cultural values but believe themselves to practice them in a secular manner. And as with anything else that affects cultures, when the majority of people act in a certain way, learning to act in that way becomes advantageous to people of that culture simply for the sake of carrying on their day-to-day lives.
Imperialism for Earthly reasons is the reason imperialism continues to be beneficial, and possible, in the present. An economic system is a system by which people combine energy and material resources to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people. Whoever combines the most energy with the most material resources can turn the most things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people, and thereby, make the most things happen in the world. That necessarily means making the most things happen that they perceive to preserve the survival of their DNA as effectively as possible. That’s how the Mesopotamians built the most physically powerful civilization and conquered their neighbors, and that’s how the Europeans followed in their footsteps and spread to every habitable continent in the world. By making more things happen in the physical world than anyone else could, they got what they wanted.
(Hence the reason politics is a product of economics. Making stuff happen depends on controlling the energy and resources you need to make it happen. “Making stuff happen” is also known as “politics”, and “controlling energy and resources” is also known as “economics”.)
In addition to these two reasons for imperialism being tightly woven because of religious values forming people’s cultural background whether they realize it or not, they are also tightly woven in another way. Religious imperialism is only possible through physical economics. A group of people who believed themselves to be the rightful rulers of the world but who lacked the physical economic base to conquer the world would just be some group of people who had strong opinions about something—all bark and no bite, as the saying goes.
Therefore, religious imperialism and economic imperialism can’t be separated from each other neatly. However, they can be separated from each other in the sense that some people’s goals for imperialism are religious while other people’s are economic. Religious imperialists also need to be successful economic imperialists, and economic imperialists as a culture, if not as individuals, are motivated by religious values, whether they realize it or not.
That brings me to the difference between conscious and subconscious motivations for imperialism. These can be divided neatly. Conscious motivation for imperialism leads to the person consciously choosing to be imperialistic, and to take action accordingly. Subconscious motivation for imperialism leads people to feel, for whatever reason, that their imperialistic actions are right. Subconsciously motivated imperialists can be consciously aware of the imperialism of others, but feel like acting in ways that support it, without realizing it. Or they can feel like acting in ways that support imperialism without being aware of the imperialism of others. Subconsciously motivated imperialists may depend on imperialism to define their sense of success in life, or they may not. Subconsciously motivated imperialists may be supporting imperialism by accident. If given the choice, they may or may not change their behavior.
The way that religious values shape people’s cultural background is a big example of subconscious motivation for imperialism. The United States was founded by Christians, and the majority of Americans are Christians. It’s pretty hard to grow up in America without learning some cultural values that originated from Christianity. It’s pretty hard to live in America as an adult without continuing to practice those values. If you’ve ever said “bless you” to someone when they sneeze, you’re practicing a Christian value. If you’ve ever voted for president, you’ve supported Christian values, because the United States has never had a president who wasn’t a Christian.
Even if you don’t consider yourself a Christian but you define your economic success by your ability to “go forth and tame the world”—or to pay someone else to do it for you—you’re being affected by a Christian value. No one can live without having an affect on the world, but Christians reinforced that fact of life as a religious value more than anyone else. Christianity originated in Mesopotamia where the living conditions were the most favorable in the world, so the sensory input people got from their surroundings was most easily interpreted by their universal brain structure to support having an effect on the environment, and ever since that has proven to be the most effective means for them to preserve the survival of their DNA. Which is why their original religious values continue to be passed on independently of the religion now.
(I must say though, a lot of what people generally consider to be Christian values are actually corruptions of Pagan values. Pagans invented Christmas trees, Yule logs, and Yuletide caroling. In fact, Pagans invented Christmas itself—although we call it Yule and celebrate it on the Winter Solstice in observation of the birth of the new year and the victory of light over darkness. When the Christians came along and tried to convert us, one thing they did was to tell us they had a holiday just like ours that they celebrated at almost the same time of the year, to observe—what else—a new birth and the victory of light over darkness. For that matter, Groundhog Day, Easter, May Day, and Halloween all began as Pagan holidays too. But our versions are cooler.)
Next, people can act imperialistically for selfish reasons or because they mistakenly believe themselves to know what’s best for other people. Imperialism for selfish reasons is not hard to recognize or to understand. Those imperialistic people are preserving the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them by engaging you in a competition they have high chances of winning. When they win, you lose.
Imperialism by people who think they’re benefiting those they conquer is a much trickier mess to unravel. There are two basic ways this can happen, and the two can overlap. First, consciously or subconsciously, or both, and for religious reasons or economic reasons, or both, they believe themselves to be superior to the other people, and assume that the fact that the other people aren’t like them proves that the other people just aren’t smart enough to act like them. As I said way back in the Introduction to the first book, cultural adaptation to available resources is a lot harder to recognize than material resources. So for economic imperialists, the fact that other people have fewer material resources seems to indicate that they are inferior. For religious imperialists the fact that they act strangely seems to indicate that they’re heathens or sinners or barbarians or savages or whatever, and their souls need to be saved. People can then act upon these beliefs intentionally, or simply by doing what they feel to be right.
The other basic way imperialists can believe they are benefiting the people they conquer is through their lack of understanding of environmental science. If they have something the other people want and arrange a trade that seems to be mutually beneficial to both parties, it can easily result in material resources—meaning matter and energy—being extracted from the other people’s environment and then not being replaced, with the inevitable result that the cycles of their environment break down. The imperialists might be completely unaware of this. Or they might be aware of it and wrongly assume that the other people are aware of it. Or they might be aware of it, realize the other people aren’t aware of it, proceed with the transaction anyway, let the other people learn their lesson the hard way, and call that a free trade agreement.
An environmentally unsustainable economy depends on imperialism to support it, because additional resources have to be fed into it from somewhere continuously. If you consider how much imperialism is committed by people who come from Christian cultural backgrounds and subconsciously practice those cultural values, or consciously practice them in secular ways, or both, who believe themselves to be superior to the other people, and who believe the Earth’s resources to be infinite, or at least, are completely unaware of the effects the Laws of Thermodynamics have on the physical economy of the world, they can honestly believe themselves to be benefiting the other people by paying them a certain number of dollars to cut down part of the Amazon rain forest or whatever they’re doing. Remember what I said in the last book about the worst kind of supervillain being a superhero whose perception of the world was completely misguided and who believed himself to be using his powers for good? A person who possesses the economic foundation to make imperialism possible can engage someone else in what seem to both parties to be mutually beneficial trade agreements, with the full intent of carrying out a mutually beneficial transaction, which turns out to be economically imperialistic, because all of these other factors are taking place outside his realm of his consciousness. Some of this information he’s acting upon subconsciously, and some of the information does not exist within his brain.
As for telling other people what to do, for whatever reason people do it, a person who doesn’t live in a certain area or environment can’t possibly know more about that area or environment than the people who do live there. They might know some things that the people who live there don’t know, but the people who live there know a lot of things that the people who don’t live there don’t know. I talked about this in the Inefficiency of Capitalism section of the Economics chapter, about what happens when administrators try to make decisions on behalf of workers—the worker knows things about his project that the administrator doesn’t, so when the administrator tries to make decisions about the project all on his own, inevitably he makes mistakes. Furthermore, people who don’t live in an area or environment aren’t affected by the decisions they make that affect that area or environment. I talked about that in the last book also, about how people who have to drink from the river that’s downhill from a copper mine (and its arsenic-laced debris) have a vested interest in mining the copper safely, but to someone who doesn’t have to drink from that river, not mining the copper safely makes it cheaper.
(For the record, I can get away with telling people what to do because I know how to do it. I don’t tell people what to do by making decisions for them, I tell people what to do by studying how the world works in universal terms, many of which are hard to recognize, so I can tell everyone that no matter where they live or what they’re trying to do, these are things that will affect them. Once I’ve done that, I have contributed everything to the situation I can, so at that point I leave it up to the other people to take what I have said and apply it to their situation, whatever it is.)
Finally, supporting imperialism actively or passively. I think I’ve pretty well covered this by now. If your goal is world conquest, you are actively imperialistic. If you simply live in an imperialistic culture, you have to lead an imperialistic lifestyle just to get along in that culture. You might willingly participate in that imperialistic culture, in which case you’re actively supporting it, or you might not (which is the case for me), in which case you’re just getting by as best you can until a better opportunity comes along (or you can create one, which is the case for me). In between supporting imperialism completely actively or completely passively, there are a virtually infinite number of combinations of supporting it for economic or religious reasons, supporting it consciously or subconsciously, and supporting it out of selfishness or out of misplaced benevolence.
Now, having shown you why the imperialists are imperialists, I need to show you why the anti-imperialists are anti-imperialists. There are two basic reasons.
First, there’s me and people like me. We are the ones who have realized that we live in an imperialistic culture, we identified the parameters that create that imperialism, and we have chosen to live outside them. But if it wasn’t for the other group of anti-imperialists, we would just be a group of people who had a different opinion from most about how people should live.
Before I can tell you how the main body of the anti-imperialists got to be the way they are, I have to take a detour. Now that I’ve shown you all the pieces of the puzzle that created the imperialist culture, I can show you how the same pieces fit together differently to create the anti-imperialism cultures.
Evolution is the adaptation to environmental pressure. In the first book I talked about cultural adaptation to available resources. In the second book I showed you the molecular history of the 20th century. Between the two you can see the process of social evolution playing out, as people rearrange their brain molecules into different patterns to deal with their changing situation, and whichever new brain molecule patterns work best in the new situations get passed around to the most people. Whatever brain molecule pattern people are using in a situation creates the sociological force that propels the society. As I showed you a little while ago, as long as living they way they’ve been living keeps proving beneficial to the majority of people in a society, the majority of people don’t choose to live differently, because that wouldn’t benefit them.
A religion is a political system, because it’s a system of ideas and values that brings people together and that leads them to act consistently, predictably, and as a unified group. Since a religion is a belief system, people who follow that religion are separated from people who don’t share their beliefs. Then when everyone acts upon their beliefs, the people who share beliefs as a result of their following the same religion will act in certain ways and not in other ways. That will distinguish them from the people who don’t follow their religion, don’t share their beliefs, and then act differently when they act upon their own beliefs. (I had to spell all that out for all the Pagans out there. I think it’s pretty obvious how Christianity functions as a political system.)
A religion is a political system, politics are a product of economics, and economics are a product of the environment. Do a lot of things seem to be coming together all of a sudden? Religion also creates cultural values.
Religions, political systems, economic systems, and cultural values are all social evolutions. They are all ways that people have found to act in certain situations that work the best. So why would imperialists and anti-imperialists act differently? Because they live in different conditions, and the social institutions that form their cultural backgrounds evolved in different conditions.
If you compare imperialistic cultures to anti-imperialistic cultures, the first thing you notice is that their economies are different. The imperialists had enough of an economic base to conquer other people, and the anti-imperialists didn’t. Or at the very least, the anti-imperialists don’t have an economic base that lets them conquer other people now. A lot of the Mexican immigrants we get here in the desert are descended from the Maya and the Aztecs. Their ancestors built great empires and conquered lots of people. And what the f*ck are these people now, but landscapers and housekeepers working here illegally for less than minimum wage?
At the opposite end of the anti-imperialist spectrum, you have people like the Yurok. You’ve probably never heard of the Yurok. There’s a reason for that: they just minded their own business. Two of my Native American cousins teach at a charter school for Native Americans, where they teach a Yurok version of history—you know, a version of history that’s actually personally meaningful to the kids who go to the school. The economic system the Yurok practiced consisted of everyone spreading out over the land so that their natural resource base would support them. I mean, duh. California is one of the most fertile areas of the world, which is why the Yurok lived among the tallest trees in the world, but unlike the Mesopotamians, they didn’t burn out their topsoil and turn the Redwood forest into a desert.
So imperialists and anti-imperialists started with different economies, and then they developed different perceptions of how economies were supposed to work. How did their differences in economies make that happen?
The Mesopotamians and the Chinese lived in the best growing conditions in the world. That let their populations grow the biggest. That means they grew the fastest. You remember what I said in the last book about The Limits to Growth, how as population sizes increase at an exponential rate, the collective effect the people have on their environment increases at an exponential rate? If the Mesopotamians’ and Chinese population sizes increased the most, that means they increased at the biggest exponential rate. The fact that the Mesopotamians over hunted their gazelle herds and then over farmed their land indicates that their population grew so fast that they f*cked up their environment before they could figure out what was going wrong or what to do about it. So just like the dumb thugs who lived across the river from Achmed the Great Mathematician and Theoretical Physicist, when their environmental resources were gone, the easiest way for them to get the things they needed was to conquer their neighbors. They succeeded at conquering their neighbors, so that course of action proved to be the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA. And a cultural background was born.
The Yurok had the same universal human brain structure the Mesopotamians did. They wanted resources just as much as the Mesopotamians did, but they didn’t have the same combination of resources the Mesopotamians did. So they developed a different economic system as a social evolution caused by adapting to a different environmental pressure. In this case, their population didn’t expand so fast that they burned out their environment before they realized what was happening, so they figured out how to spread out over the landscape so they wouldn’t burn out their environment.
Politics is a product of economics. People always act in whatever way they need to act to get the things they need. The fact that the imperialists and anti-imperialists have different economic systems means they have different political systems. Since their economic systems are incompatible, their political systems are also incompatible.
You remember what I said in the last book, about political systems being developed by people who had good working understandings of human behavior writing man-made laws that enough people felt like cooperating with to make the society function, but without realizing their understanding of human behavior was limited to the conditions under which they were founding their political systems? As the living conditions changed, the relationship between human behavior and the living conditions also changed, but they hadn’t anticipated that when they wrote their laws, so their political system wasn’t able to adapt. The closest thing they could do was to try to enforce their man-made laws more and more, to try to force human behavior to comply with the man-made laws now. And that never works, because either you end up with a fascist police state or a revolution.
Well that discrepancy between a working understanding of human behavior under certain living conditions and a universal understanding of human behavior is pivotal in the imperialist versus anti-imperialist struggle. Take the most innocuous motivation for imperialism of all—the subconscious, religious, passive, misguidedly beneficial motivation. Those imperialistic people still practice a different economic system from the anti-imperialists, so they practice a different political system also. They belong to a more physically powerful civilization, so they can make the most things happen in the world, and make them happen for their benefit. As a result, one way or another, they end up writing the laws the anti-imperialists have to live by. But the anti-imperialists practice a different economic system, so they practice a different political system. And the imperialists didn’t foresee that. So the imperialists’ political system ends up being incompatible with the anti-imperialists’ economic system. So when the anti-imperialists do what they have to do to get the things they need, they end up breaking the imperialists’ laws. And that only makes them look like criminals and savages, which just reinforces the imperialists’ beliefs that either the anti-imperialists are better off having the imperialists there to tell them what to do or that they deserve to be conquered.
For the Yurok and a lot of other Native American nations—like, all of them—the Colonial Americans destroyed their political systems by destroying their economic systems. The Yuroks’ economic system depended on everyone being spread out over the land so their natural resources would support them all. When the Colonial Americans forced the Yurok onto reservations, they packed them into communities where their populations were so dense that they couldn’t support themselves. So now they depended on the Colonial Americans to bring them the food they needed. The Colonial Americans also required each section of land to be owned by a specific person, instead of all the land belonging to the tribe, which was how it used to be. So now that the Yurok were being prevented from getting enough to live, a lot of them got the idea to try to make money by selling their individual pieces of land to the Colonial Americans—which was exactly what the Colonial Americans wanted all along. But by going though the motions of setting up reservations for them and then sneakily creating dismal economic conditions for them, they made it look like they were trying to help and it was really the stupid Indians’ fault that they didn’t have any land left. And now that individual Yuroks were selling their land off, it created conflict within their tribe by pitting them against each other and ultimately leaving each of them to fend for themselves, unable to trust or anticipate what the others were going to do. That destroyed their political system, and that prevented the anti-imperialists from being able to fight back effectively against the imperialists.
Obviously, there was a lot of active, conscious, selfish, economic imperialism devoted to setting up that economic ambush, but because it was perpetrated by Colonial Americans against Native Americans and done under the guise of trying to help them, people who practiced imperialism only religiously, subconsciously, passively, and out of misguided benevolence saw exactly what the active, conscious, selfish, economic imperialists wanted them to see—a bunch of Native people complaining about all their land being taken away but not even being smart enough to hang onto the land they still had. If the Natives were really that dumb, then the religious, subconscious, passive, misguided-benevolence imperialists could rest easy, knowing that the Natives had been conquered for their own good.
So this brings me to the main body of the anti-imperialists. I call them the main body of the anti-imperialists because they’re the ones who either haven’t been conquered yet or else are trying to break free. As a result of their social evolutions, those people’s communities are still composed of complete anti-imperialist sociological forces. The imperialists have more powerful imperialist sociological forces at work in their own communities, thanks to their more powerful economic foundations, which is why they’re conquering the anti-imperialists. But the existence of those complete anti-imperialist communities is the proof that it is possible for people to live differently from the imperialists, which is what keeps people like me who have consciously chosen to live outside the imperialistic parameters of our communities from being just a bunch of people who think we know a better way to live than the imperialists do.
The anti-imperialist cultures live the way they do because they adapted to different living conditions than the imperialist cultures. Now they have complete anti-imperialist cultures to show for it. That gives anti-imperialists like me who live in imperialist cultures the opportunity to compare imperialist cultures to anti-imperialist cultures, as opposed to having the opinion that people could and should live differently and then trying to invent an anti-imperialist culture completely from scratch, without having any way of proving whether or not our ideas are going to work. Now that we understand why our own cultures are imperialistic and other people’s aren’t, we have the choice to stop being imperialistic, instead of just doing whatever feels right to us, which is what most people of our cultures are doing. We also have the choice to use what we know to help the other anti-imperialists defend themselves—which is what I’m doing.
Now to complete the definition of how the anti-imperialists are different from the imperialists: We have a different economic system. It begins with a different perception of humanity’s proper relationship to the environment, and it leads to a different definition of “rightful ownership”. That leads to a different political system, different cultural values, and different religious and spiritual beliefs.
And all of them are incompatible with the imperialists’ versions of those things.
The economic system of the anti-imperialists can be best referred to as the Use-Value economic system. Use-Value economics have been used differently by different groups of people, but what all anti-imperialist cultures have in common is that they measure the value of goods and services according to how useful those things are. I’ve told you about a tribal economic system, in which the most fundamental law is “do whatever it takes to make your community function”.
Communism was an attempt at a Use-Value economic system that would re-create that basic tribal economic system. It didn’t work for a number of reasons, beginning with the fact that the Russians who tried to put it in place had been living under a monarchy for centuries and didn’t realize they didn’t have a sufficient cultural background to make the transition easily. Then they tried to make the transition in about 10 years and expected it to work, and couldn’t figure out why it didn’t. Human behavior was not complying with their man-made laws as well as they thought it was supposed to, so they kept trying harder and harder to force human behavior to comply with the man-made laws. And we all know where that leads…
Capitalism is fundamentally different from Use-Value economics because Capitalism measures the value of goods and services according to their value to the highest bidder. Alternately, Capitalists can set their prices and try to maximize their profits by mass-producing their products and trying to optimize the laws of supply and demand. But if you go the department store to buy a pair of shoes for $50, what else do you suppose that is but a personal auction where a dozen identical pairs of shoes are each being sold to the first person to bid $50?
Capitalism can’t produce a Use-Value economic system for a number of reasons. For one, it rewards deception. If you can distort a person’s perception of the situation, you can make them demand something more than they would otherwise, which creates a profit for you. I talked about a number of ways that’s done in The Inefficiency of Capitalism section.
For another, demand can only be adequately represented in a financial economic system if everyone gets the same amount of money. Otherwise, people who demand something but don’t have money to pay for it can’t have it—no matter how badly they need it. Socialism is a form of a Use-Value economic system, because under a Socialist economic system success is measured in the harmoniousness of the society.
Taken together, that makes Capitalism reward greed and promote inequality. Whoever can get the most from other people can make their demands most strongly felt. If, for instance, you demand a bunch of prime-time TV advertizment slots for your favorite political candidate and you have $100,000,000 to pay for it, you get what you want. If you demand a bunch of prime-time TV advertizement slots for your favorite political candidate, but you don’t have $100,000,000 to pay for it, too f*cking bad. Politics is a product of economics. If you control a disproportionally large amount of the economic system, you control a disproportionally large amount of the political system, because you can use your economic resources to control people’s actions in any number of ways—which I talked about in the last book.
Finally, how many dollars is the environment worth? It’s a thing that already exists, it exists independently of us, we all depend on it, but it’s indirectly useful to all of us without being directly useful to any of us. Under a Capitalist economy, the value of the environment can only be measured through its exploitation. Under a Use-Value economic system, the fact that the environment is useful just the way it is renders it valuable by definition.
The Use-Value economic system has some things in common with Capitalism. Money can be used in a Use-Value economic system. A Use-Value economic system rewards hard work—but doesn’t necessarily reward it in the form of money. Finally, a Use-Value economic system can’t be equitable because of people’s inescapable differences in abilities, skills, and available resources—but inequality isn’t the goal of the Use-Value economic system.
The economic system I outlined for Crusoe Island was a Use-Value economic system word for word. And that brings me to the differences in environmental pressures that differentiate Capitalism from Use-Value. The goal of the Capitalist economic system is to control more capital than anyone else, competitively. The most effective way to compete is to get more resources from wherever you can get them most easily. That means extracting resources from the environment and turning them into new capital. Granted, everyone has to do that no matter what economic system they use, but Capitalism reinforces it more than any other economic system. Why?
Because for the imperialistic people who began it, when sensory input reached their brains and combined with their universal human brain structure, the new brain-molecule pattern it created was the one that was the most similar to the brain-molecule pattern that already existed there. And that brain-molecule pattern was a product of those people’s monarchic cultural background. That was a product of the people falling into the sensory illusion of believing the kings who were descended from chiefs were still doing the jobs of chiefs. And that was a product of the sensory input that reached their universal human brain structures creating a new pattern that was most similar to the pattern that already existed. And that pattern was the tribal pattern they’d inherited from the monkeys and that had been developing ever since along with human intellect.
The goal of a Use-Value economic system is for the community to do the best they can with what they have, cooperatively. The inhabitants of Crusoe Island realized they were already stretching their environmental resources as thinly as they could, so they couldn’t afford to extract resources from their environment. In order to make the cycles of the environment continue to function, they had to leave the resources in the cycles and use them as part of the cycles.
Well, you remember what I said in The Limits to Growth section, about how we are stretching the environmental resources of the planet to their limits? A new environmental pressure is immanent. Our learning to live within the physical limitations of the planet—which we will do, whether we want to or not—will result in a fundamental change to our economic system, and therefore a fundamental change to our political system. Now that we can no longer afford to extract resources from the environment, we will have to learn to get along as best we can with the resources we have left. That means a Use-Value economic system, and that means a new political system along with it.
Heh, heh, heh…
Now that you can see all the things that have created the imperialists’ and the anti-imperialists’ information packages, you can see why their goals in life are so mutually exclusive. The imperialists have developed a perspective of the world that has worked so well for them for the past 10,000 years that they’ve made strong emotional connections to the idea that it works better than anyone else’s economic system, political system, religious beliefs, cultural background, or perception of humanity’s proper relationship to the environment, that they’re dumping all the scientific discoveries that conflict with those beliefs into anti-information packages. All that information either doesn’t resister in their consciousness at all, or it conflicts so much with everything they’ve believed all their lives that it has some little impact on them but the rest of the information in their information packages blots it out, so they don’t fathom the full meaning for it.
So how do you fight against imperialists whose most powerful weapon is weaponized ignorance? Well President Bush said it himself: This is a war of ideas. And then that stupid f*cking moron sent our military out to wage a war of ideas with bullets. I swear, if he wasn’t the president of the United States it would be beneath my dignity to engage him in a war of ideas. But he is, so oh well, here goes…
The revolution against weaponized ignorance will be fought with militarized education. And that’s what the rest of this book is about.
You know all those bumper stickers you see that say, “Imagine what the world could be like if schools got all the money they needed and the military had to hold a bake-sale whenever they wanted to buy a bomber”? Well you should’ve paid attention while you had the chance…
Education is the highest form of government because people always act upon whatever they believe to be true. And I give people the highest form of education there is. Which is why I’m King of the World. But you already knew that.