A lot of progressively minded people I meet tell me people shouldn’t think about science, because that won’t save the world; people need to experience the mystery and magic of life, not learn that all of life is a giant chemical reaction.

There are just two problems with that.

First of all, you’re confusing science with some illustration in an antique textbook, of serious-looking White men with square ‘50s hairdos, wearing white lab coats and horn-rimmed glasses, mixing chemicals in beakers.  You probably feel that if everyone learns about science they’ll all turn into academic geeks with no personalities or creativity anymore.   But looking at a picture, assuming it represents an entire group of people, and making a strong emotional attachment to the idea that the entire group of people must be like that doesn’t make you an expert at science, it only makes you an expert at stereotyping people.  Just to use myself for an example, at various times I’ve been an actor, a director, a set carpenter, and a sculptor, I’ve taught myself how to write novels, I like to paint and dance, and I’ve helped set up two punk theatre companies.  So obviously your stereotype was wrong.  Get over it.

Second, if you think that saving the world depends on discouraging people from learning about science, then you are trying to control other people’s access to information, in order to get them to think the way you want them to think and act the way you want them to act.

Forget about the fact that’s propaganda.  Forget about the fact it’s authoritarian.  What happens if people learn what you don’t want them to know about from somewhere else?  Then they will know things you don’t want them to know, they won’t think the way you want them to think, and they won’t act the way you want them to act.  Now you’ve defeated your own attempts at a cohesive political force, all by yourself.

Let me tell you a little something about science…

The entire world is one gigantic work of art.  The world’s appearance was created by a very specific and very complicated process.

Each individual thing in the world is a work of art, because the appearance of each individual thing was created by a very specific and very complicated process.

The entire world is a perfect work of engineering.  It works the way it works for very specific and very complicated reasons.

Each individual thing in the world is a perfect work of engineering, because each individual thing works the way it works for very specific and very complicated reasons.

Every living thing is a long lost relative of every other living thing.  You, a cat, a mosquito, and a dandelion are all related to each other.  You’re related to the AIDS virus also.

Every person is a work of art.  Each person got to be the way they are by a very specific and very complicated process.

This moment of your life was created by every moment of your life that came before it.  In this moment of your life, you are helping to create every moment of the rest of your life.  The same is true for every other moment of your life.

This moment of your life was created by every moment that has happened since the world began.  The likelihood of your existence was incomprehensibly small.  20 million years ago, a certain sperm was swimming in a certain part of a male monkey’s testicle, which made it the first to reach a certain female monkey’s egg.  If that hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t’ve been born.  The same is true for every sperm that fertilized every egg in your entire ancestry.  And that’s not even considering all the other things that happened to make every one of your ancestors meet their mates in the first place.

But that incomprehensibly small likelihood of your existence doesn’t make you special, because the same is true for everyone else in the world.

The entire world is one gigantic chemical reaction.  Everything is connected to everything else.

Every single thing people do—paintings, music, styles of food, architecture, romance, philosophy, literature, mathematics, agriculture, education, the Olympic Games, and whatever you were doing an hour ago—is all a part of that gigantic chemical reaction.

That chemical reaction began about 3 1/2 billion years ago in some muddy water.

In a hundred years from now, it could all be gone.

All of this sounds like typical philosophy for progressively minded people.  But it’s not.  All of this is science.  All of this was discovered by the objective study of observable evidence.  There are still things that scientists haven’t discovered yet and pieces of puzzles they haven’t figured out yet.  But those are just details and technicalities anymore.

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The entire realm of objective human knowledge now fits within a framework of laws of physics, chemistry, and biology.  That’s not to say that everything in the world has been discovered, but that is to say that all the millions of objective observations that have been made interact with each other in consistent patterns.

If you think you can discover some objective evidence about the world that will fall outside the consistent patterns scientists have discovered, you’re more than welcome to try.  But first you’ll need to build a more powerful telescope, or microscope, or computer than anyone has ever built before, because all the things that have been studied with the telescopes, microscopes, and computers we have now, fall into consistent patterns.

Take snowflakes for example.  Science can’t prove directly that all snowflakes are unique, but religion can’t do that either.  To prove that all snowflakes were unique by direct observation would require someone to take a photograph of every single snowflake that has ever fallen in the history of the world, and obviously that hasn’t been done.  But by studying a lot of snowflakes you can figure out how snowflakes form and why they form the way they do.  And from that, you can prove why it isn’t possible for two identical snowflakes to form.

Specifically, water molecules freeze in different patterns according to the temperatures at which they freeze. The temperature, pressure, and air currents in the atmosphere vary from place to place and change from time to time.  The slight variation in temperatures between two points an inch apart, or at the same point from one second to the next, can be enough to make water molecules freeze in different patterns.  Each snowflake forms while it’s falling through those ever-changing temperatures, and each snowflake gets moved around through different temperatures by the changing air pressures and currents.  Now we can say that all snowflakes are unique because by studying some snowflakes and how they formed, we’ve discovered that no two snowflakes can ever form in identical atmospheric conditions.

Science is that, applied to everything in the known universe.  This is why I can say that there’s nothing left we can learn about the world that will fundamentally change our understanding of it.  By discovering how patterns like this created all the things we know a lot about, we can see from the little we know about everything else that the same patterns created them, just in ways we haven’t figured out yet.  The parts of the world we don’t understand yet are small parts of large patterns.  The little we do know about everything are the most critical things—like, that everything in the world is made up of atoms, which interact with each other according to well established laws of chemistry, and that all of life is governed by evolution.  The only thing left to figure out is specifically how those big patterns affect everything on Earth.

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A lot of progressively minded people always ask me, “But why do we even need science when we have religion and philosophy?  Science can’t give everyone’s lives meaning.  And you can’t preserve the beauty of the diversity of humanity by forcing everyone to think the same way.”

First of all, religion and philosophy don’t give people’s lives meaning either; people give their lives meaning.  And you can’t talk about the so-called “beauty” of human diversity without talking about all the wars that have been fought, slaves who have been captured, and genocide that’s been committed between people of different countries, religions, and cultures.  Ultimately, all of those things happened because the two groups of people had opposing points of view that they couldn’t figure out how to resolve.  You could say that they could’ve just taken the time to learn more about each other before jumping to the conclusion that their own point of view was right and the other group’s was wrong.  That’s absolutely true.  And that process of learning is exactly what science is.

A lot of people always say, “But science can’t possibly explain everything about the world that my religion or philosophy explains.”

By making that argument, you are implicitly claiming to know everything there is to know about science, which you obviously don’t.

Your religion or philosophy is only capable of explaining things people have observed.  All the things no one has ever observed are things no one knows about.  But the moment you observe something, you produce some observable evidence.  Even if the thing you observe isn’t observable to anyone else, the fact that you did observe it and that you believe your idea to be true are pieces of observable evidence.  Once you do that, the thing becomes something that can be studied scientifically.

Science and religion have basically been the race between the tortoise and the hare.  Some people cared more about feeling like they knew everything in the world, so they figured out what they could figure out, and then they said their god was responsible for the rest.  Other people were more patient, so they didn’t take that shortcut and instead studied the world slowly and methodically.  And as a result, they have now discovered consistent patterns that stretch from the way electrons orbit protons and neutrons, to the beginning of the universe, to the formation of stars, to the origins of life on Earth, and from there all the way up to the redwood forest, the greenhouse effect, Thai restaurants, nose piercings, and kissing.  There are no major gaps left in that chain of cause and effect, nothing left that anyone needs to guess at, and nothing anyone needs to invoke supernatural powers to explain.

A relatively small number of physical laws interacting with each other, created huge numbers of gigantic, complicated patterns that created everything in the entire universe.  By studying things that people could see, hear, smell, taste, and touch in the world around them, we’ve now discovered how those patterns work, and especially how they affect us here on Earth.   It’s taken a huge amount of study to discover how a fairly small amount of physical laws has created a huge amount of diversity in the world.

Compared to that, religion and philosophy are just reality for lazy people.

Where did you think you were ever going to learn this much about science?  On commercial television?  In public school?

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Scientists are very curious people, and some of them are very good at figuring things out.  They figured all of this out by looking not at the things in the universe, but at how all the things interact with each other.  By doing that, they uncovered the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology that were making those interactions happen.

When most people open the hood of a car, they see an engine.  When a mechanic opens the hood of a car, he sees a radiator, a water pump, radiator hoses, a thermostat, a fan, belts, a battery, battery cables, an alternator, a distributor, spark plugs, spark plug wires, an air filter, a fuel filter, a fuel pump, a starter, etc., etc., and an engine.  Inside the engine, hidden from view, is a crank shaft, a cam shaft, cylinders, pistons, piston rings, valves, etc., etc..  To most people, a car works because it has an engine.  To a mechanic, a car works because of how all the parts of the engine interact with each other.  For an engine to run properly, all the different parts of the engine don’t need to simply exist, but also to push, pull, and rotate each other correctly, and make electricity, liquids, gasses, and heat flow in certain ways, as opposed to any other ways.   There are a fairly small number of ways all those parts can interact with each other to make the car work.  There is a much larger number of ways for all those parts to interact with each other to make the car not work.

Planetary biology is the same thing, applied to the entire world.

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Two big obstacles to planetary biology have been that biology is an extremely complicated form of chemistry, and psychology is an extremely complicated form of biology.

A lot of people say that the fact that making the jump from chemistry to biology and biology to psychology is so difficult proves there’s more to life than chemistry.  But that isn’t true.  All that proves is that it’s hard for our brains to process all that information.  Arguing that something must not be true just because we can’t perceive it is a completely humanocentric view of the world.   Change a few words around and you’re arguing that the Earth must be flat just because one person can’t see the entire Earth at the same time.

A lot of people argue that it would be better if people didn’t try to study biology as chemistry, because it’s so hard that most people can’t do it.  People have found a lot of other ways to think about life, so why don’t we just use those instead?

Simply put, trying to dumb down reality to make it easily understandable to the ignorant masses doesn’t work.   America might be ruled by the will of the majority, but the universe isn’t.  The universe works in one way, and one way only, because anything else would require the laws of physics to change spontaneously in different ways for different people.  That’s humanocentricism once again.

If the laws of physics seem to change for different people, that raises the question:  What’s making them change?   What lies behind the changing effects you’re seeing?   Once you observe that laws of physics seem to change, you have some observable evidence you can use to study how those effects change.

Scientists have already done all of that for everything in the known universe—and certainly as it affects us here on Earth.  By this point, behind every effect that changes, laws that cause those effects and never themselves change have been discovered.  A process that never changes is the definition of a scientific law.

The problem with non-scientific means of studying the universe is that our natural perceptions evolved to make us perceive the world the way that made us survive and reproduce best in the conditions of our evolution.  Eagles can see a lot further than people can, and cats can see in the dark a lot better than people can, because each species’ eyesight evolved in whatever way worked best for the way they lived.  And so far I’m only talking about physiology.

When you start studying how subjectivity affects psychology, you start discovering bigger and more abstract misperceptions.  Like, 58% of people believing themselves to be above average.  That’s a big clue that over the course of our evolution, high self-esteem was more helpful to people than accurately comparing themselves to their peers.  It’s also a big clue that you can’t figure out how the entire universe works by intuition alone.

If you try to force a piece of a jigsaw puzzle into a place it doesn’t belong because that seems to you to be easier than finding the piece that actually does fit in that place, it will come back to haunt you, because that one wrong fit will make other pieces not fit.

So it goes for the entire universe.  If you make a wrong fit just because it seems like making that fit is easier than figuring out the right fit, it always comes back to haunt you.  One way or another, something you build on your wrong fit will lead you to two conclusions that are mutually exclusive, or to a conclusion that obviously is physically impossible.

For instance, if you decide that people are inherently good just because most people believe that people are inherently good and it’s easier to get them to listen to you by telling them that, and you like to believe that people are inherently good, sooner or later you’ll run into a situation that inherent human goodness can’t explain.   Americans believe themselves to be inherently good, and the Soviets believed themselves to be inherently good.  So how exactly did inherent human goodness produce the nuclear arms race?

At the time anyone makes any decision, they always feel at the most fundamental level that it’s the best decision they can make—because if they didn’t, they would make a different decision.  How did inherent human goodness create our world history of wars, conquests, slavery, genocide, Crusades, Inquisitions, and witch-hunts?  Every group of people who have ever fought a war against anyone else felt that their own side was right and the other side was wrong.  Either one side was inherently good and the other side wasn’t, or they were both inherently good and a lot of inherently good people killed each other.  Americans fought against the British in the American Revolution and the War of 1812, and were allies of the British in World War I and World War II.  Does that mean that British people are inherently good 50% of the time?

You could say that people are inherently good but sometimes they make mistakes.  But World War II lasted six years and killed over 50 million people.  Why did it take so long for everyone to realize their mistake?  Why didn’t the inherently good people who were fighting it look around them after they killed, say, one million people, and say, “Oh my gosh, what are we doing here?  We just killed a million people!”

You could say that people are inherently good except for a few evil people who start wars.  But if a few people aren’t inherently good, then no one is inherently good.  The fact that a few people are not inherently good proves that goodness is not an inherent quality of the human race.

You could say that people are inherently good in their own ways.  But now you’ve rendered your argument completely meaningless.  Now you’ve defined everything that people do as being inherently good, including killing a million people.

You could say that people are inherently good but are tempted by forces of evil.  Now you’ve relieved all responsibility from people for starting wars and transferred all the blame to a supernatural force that people have no control over.  But people obviously do have the choice whether or not to start wars.  The Americans and Soviets decided not to let the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan escalate into World War III.

You started out with an explanation of human behavior that was easy to get people to believe and that you wanted to be true.  You ended up with an explanation of human behavior that’s completely useless for explaining why wars start and how we can prevent them in the future.  How many more wars do you think people should have to fight just so you can go on believing what you want to believe?

It is true that explanations of how the universe works that are easy to understand are a lot more popular than ones that are hard to understand.  The world will not be safe until the ignorant masses become the educated masses.  That depends on someone finding a way to teach a version of science that’s simple enough for everyone to understand—as opposed to simplifying science to the point that it ceases to be science.

Thinking, believing, or feeling there must be more to life than chemistry, doesn’t prove you’re smart.  It just proves you can afford to be dumb.  The average Third-World peasant farmer knows more about biology than the average American, because peasant farmers spend all day working with plants and animals.  That means the average peasant farmer knows more about how the world works than the average American does, but the biggest decisions that have the most effect on the world are made by Americans.  That’s a serious problem.

If you’d prefer the peasant farmer version of this book, you’re welcome to read my book Zapatista University.  But if you care more about proving how smart you are than you care about solving problems in the world, that book is so simple you probably won’t be able to understand it.

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1968 was the year Dr. Aurelio Pecci brought together a group of scientists from all over the world to a meeting in Rome, to start studying the environment and humanity’s impact on it on a global scale.  In 1987, Dr. Ervin Laszlo brought together another group of scientists from all over the world to meeting in Budapest, to start studying the evolutionary origins of human consciousness, to try to figure out what it was about Homo sapiens’ brains that was making the environmental crisis and the threat of a global nuclear holocaust seem like such good ideas to so many people.   The field of science that has built up around those two projects—which I call planetary biology—is basically the Manhattan Project of the peace, environmental, and human rights movements.  But as we all know, Capitalism is opposed to all of those things, which is why this scientific movement hasn’t gone very far, in spite of all the discoveries the scientists have made.

Luckily, in my family we’ve been working on a parallel project for three generations—so we got a generation’s head start over all these official scientists.  My dad could’ve been a member of the Club of Rome easily enough, but 1968 was the year Dr. King was assassinated.  On the one hand these scientists were saying that radical social change would be necessary to adapt humanity to living within the physical limitations of the Earth.  On the other hand, the greatest American activist of the 20th century had just made a whole bunch of radical social change happen.  My dad realized then what these ivory tower academics are discovering the hard way now:  That radical social change happens in the streets.  It happens because someone figures out how to explain to a lot of people—and hopefully a majority of people—why the old way of doing things doesn’t work anymore, how things are going to have to be done differently now, and why doing things differently is going to benefit them.

So my dad set out on a life of adventure—which is to say, he carried on the life of adventure my grandparents had started.  He kept up with advances in science over the years, and raised my brother and me the same way.   From the time I first learned to talk, I was raised on physics, chemistry, biology, evolution, mathematics, statistics, and systems theory.  I don’t work as a scientist, because by the time I graduated from high school at the age of 16, I already had 14 years of scientific background.  So I set out on a life of adventure too.

In all I have eight years of post-secondary education, and I’ve compiled the products of my education into a 1.2 million word thesis—the three volumes of my book 42—Evolutionary Science and its uses in Everyday Life, Civil Rights, and World Peace.  The only reason I’m not a doctor of what I do is because when you pioneer your own field of study, there’s no one waiting at the end of it to award you a Ph.D. for it.

So all my not being an official scientist really means is that Capitalists can’t use my professional reputation to hold me hostage, and I don’t depend on them to fund my research.

If you read books from the early days of the Peace, Environmental, and Human Rights Manhattan Project, you can see the scientists who were writing them were optimistic.  Although it would be a lot of hard work, we could solve all the major problems facing our planet and our species.  But if you read the books they’re writing these days, you can see they’re getting increasingly desperate to get people to listen to them.  We can still solve all the major problems facing our planet and our species, but it’s going to be a lot harder now, and our window of opportunity is closing fast.

Luckily, in my family we’ve been anti-authoritarian do-it-yourselfer peace, environmental, and human rights activists for three generations also.  We support governments to the extent that they’re social structures that make peace, human rights, and environmental sustainability possible.  But if they don’t, well then, we’ll just have to think of something else.

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The entire universe is its own economic system.  Matter and energy flow through the universe in certain ways, and not in other ways.

Life has its own economic system.  All life depends on matter and energy flowing in certain ways, and not in other ways.

The problem is that those two economic systems are completely opposed to each other.

The economic system of life exists inside the economic system of the universe.  The economic system of life makes matter and energy move in the opposite directions of the economic system of the universe.  The economic system of life counteracts the economic system of the universe, but only in a small way.  The economic system of the universe is going to win in the end.

Here on Earth, if there were no people, the environment would’ve kept right on working the way it’s always worked.   Virtually all of the energy that powers the economic system of life on Earth comes from the sun (plus a little geothermal energy from under the Earth’s crust).  The sun is going to burn out eventually, and when it does, life on Earth will end.  But you can’t talk about the economic system of life on Earth ending without talking about the death of our sun.  So even though the economic system of the universe and the economic system of life are completely opposed to each other, before people came along they weren’t pushing against each other very hard!

We naturally perceive the economic system of life, and we don’t naturally perceive the economic system of the universe.   That means that when we act upon what we naturally feel to be true, we act against the economic system of the universe without realizing it.

All animals do that.  But humans have an ability that no other species on Earth has: human intellect.  No other species in the world could destroy the global environment because every species’ effect on the world is balanced by other species.

Human intellect gives us the ability to outsmart all other species on the planet.  We outsmarted animals with weapons and hunting tactics.  We outsmarted plants and fungus with tools and agriculture.  We outsmarted viruses and bacteria with medicine and sanitation.  Now our population size isn’t being limited by predators, food availability, or disease.  Our population keeps growing, we keep inventing new things, and our impact on the world keeps growing, because there’s nothing on Earth that can counteract our impact on the world.  We could counteract it ourselves, but we aren’t doing that yet.

Capitalism is just a highly developed version of the economic system of life.  We know instinctively how the economic system of life works, and Capitalism is just more of that economic system—meaning laws and cultural values that have been established to reinforce the economic system of life, and which discourage or prevent people from trying to cooperate with the economic system of the universe.

A lot of people say that the fact that Capitalism has been the easiest economic system to get people to cooperate with proves that it’s the best economic system to use.  It is true that the Capitalist economy is the easiest to apply to any situation.  But it is also true that any economic system that valued people or the environment over profits was an economic system that cooperated better with the economic system of the universe.  People who used those economic systems used them because one way or another they’d figured out how to cooperate with the economy of the universe within their living conditions.

Really, to say that Capitalism is the economic system that’s easiest to get people to cooperate with is only to say that it’s easier to destroy people’s living conditions and cultural values than it is to preserve them.  If you destroy people’s environments or drive them off their land so the habits they’ve developed from hundreds or thousands of years of practice at cooperating with the economic system of the universe don’t work anymore and each person is left to fend for themselves, then Capitalism is the easiest economic system to get everyone to cooperate with.

Of course, some groups of people never developed higher economic systems, or lost them so long ago they’ve been completely forgotten.  In Europe, Capitalism was an improvement over monarchy, because really, monarchy was a Capitalist economic system where only one person was allowed to be a Capitalist.  The Europeans were the cultural heirs to thousands of years of kingdoms and empires that began in Mesopotamia.  They were also the most economically, and therefore politically, powerful group of people in the world.

Basically, the Europeans discovered an economic system that worked better than the one they’d been using for thousands of years, and then they thought they were doing all the so-called “savages” in the world a favor by dragging them down to a European level of cultural development.

That’s the general idea, anyway.

This is why Capitalism seems like such a great idea to so many people—even workers who are being exploited by Capitalists and who would be better off with a different economic system.  That’s why it’s so easy for Capitalists to make lots of people feel like anti-Capitalist revolutionaries don’t know what they’re talking about—because understanding anti-Capitalism requires a lot more education than understanding Capitalism.  (I am talking about understanding Capitalism as the idea behind an economic system, not understanding Capitalism as a political system.)

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The fundamental problem with the concept of Capitalism itself is that it’s a completely humanocentric economic system based on the trading of goods and services.  That means that goods and services are not economically valuable until they are traded.  (Or at least, they have the potential to be traded.)   A forest is valuable for any number of reasons, beginning with the service it provides of turning carbon dioxide into oxygen.  But nothing needs to be traded from one person to another to make that happen.  That renders a healthy forest invisible to the Capitalist economic system.  Until someone decides to cut it down, that is.

Currently, the impact humanity is having on the global environment is about 20% more than the world can sustain.  That means that all of the resources in the world are needed by somebody—including our descendants who haven’t been born yet, who need them to keep the global environment working.   Every single thing in the world is valuable for something, because it’s a part of some natural cycle of the environment.  If we change our economic system sufficiently to make it recognize everything in the world as inherently valuable, we would no longer have a Capitalist economic system.  We would have a Use-Value economic system.

The economy is a product of the environment.  In the 21st century, humanity’s economic relationship to the global environment is going to change forever.  The only choice we have in the matter is how it’s going to change.

Politics is a product of economics.  Our economic relationship to the environment changing forever in this century is necessarily going to require—or cause—our political systems to change forever.   The anti-Capitalist movement is a revolution now.  But soon enough, it will be a tidal wave.

Unfortunately, a revolutionary anti-Capitalist tidal wave would be a disaster if nobody figures out how to win the revolution.   At the very best it’ll turn into, “They’ve got the guns but we’ve got the numbers,” and the global revolution will turn into a global riot.  And once all the office buildings in the world are burning, what do we do then?  In the post-revolutionary society, whose political ideology do we use to solve the problems the Capitalists were causing?

Solving global problems will depend on people all over the world figuring out how to solve their local problems and working together to solve global problems.  That depends on solving local problems in ways that all the solutions will fit together and make solving global problems possible.   That depends on getting information to people who need it, and on fighting off the Capitalists far enough to give people the space they need to start solving their local problems.

Anyone who learns what I know can act as the intellectual military of the anti-Capitalist revolution.   You can mount a sustained, full frontal assault on Capitalism easily, because you have the laws of physics on your side.  In order for the Capitalists to win, they have to hide physical reality from everyone.  They’re doing a good job of that in America at the moment.  They can put advertizements on TV, politicians can make a lot of empty promises, they can corrupt the public school system to try to prevent anyone from learning what’s going wrong with the world, and they can use our police and our military to try to make everyone accept the Capitalist version of the truth at gunpoint.  All you need to fight against all of that are some books you can check out from your local public library.  If they try to pit their political system against fundamental laws of the universe, the universe is going to win in the end.

In the 22nd century, we will not have a Capitalist economy.  The question is:  Will we still have a civilization?

If Capitalism destroys itself without anyone figuring out a new economic system to replace it with, Capitalism will be replaced by regional warlordism, which is the kind of economy people always end up with when more complicated economies break down for good.  If Hurricane Katrina happened all over the world, our food distribution infrastructures would all break down, just like they did in New Orleans.  Then we’d have a world full of hungry people with guns.  A human economic system is “how people get the things they need to live”.   In a world full of hungry people with guns, the ones who get the most to eat will be the ones with the most guns.  And what do you call that besides regional warlordism?

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All that leaves is how to use science as an offensive political weapon.

Science as a body of information and as a system of thought has never been able to function as anything resembling a political system before for two reasons.

First, until recently, science hasn’t been complete enough as a body of information that scientists could claim to know as much about the world as politicians claim to know.  The politicians were lying about how much they knew, of course, because politicians’ careers depend on their appearing to know everything, even though they don’t.  Scientists’ careers, on the other hand, depend on their not lying about how much they know.   So if a politician claims to know everything and a scientist doesn’t claim to know everything, to anyone who doesn’t understand what science is and how it works, it sounds like the politician has a much better idea of what he’s doing.

Second, we have a global environmental crisis on our hands that keeps getting worse and that is going to lead to inevitable disaster on our present course.  Science as a system of thought doesn’t attach artificial meaning to how its information should be used.  However, it is understood scientifically that people want to survive and reproduce, along with some other basic desires that are universal to humanity.  It is also understood that global environmental disaster will make those things impossible for most people.  Science all by itself can’t save the world, and scientists can’t tell people how they should live.  However, it has been determined scientifically that some ideas for how people can live can be disastrous, it has been determined scientifically that the most politically powerful people in the world are choosing to live that way, and it has been determined scientifically that the choices those people are making are threatening everyone else in the world.

What I’m teaching you about in this book is science as a martial art.  As the legend goes (which is historically accurate to a point, at least), karate was invented in Japan (or Okinawa, or China), by some monks who figured out a way that peasants could defend themselves from heavily armed samurai using their bare hands and simple farming tools.  Capitalism is the empire of the 21st century, and a lot of peasants are trying to figure out how to defend themselves from it.

Politically weaponized science is a martial art of the mind.  I don’t need to teach you a lot of scientific information, I just need to teach you about the system of thought and the critical points where the information fits together.  I can’t turn you into a scientist with one book, but the politicians and business people you’re trying to defend yourselves from aren’t scientists either.  They’re using might makes right against you, and you don’t have enough might to beat them.  But just as with a farmer defending himself from a samurai, you don’t need might if you know how to recognize your enemy’s weakest points and attack them as efficiently as possible.

The first thing you need to know is how to tell the difference between someone talking about fake science and someone talking about real science.   There are two easy ways to do that.

The first is the easier of the two to use.  Listen to the way the person is talking.  Does his tone of voice make you feel like asking questions, or does it make you feel like not asking questions?

When a scientist talks about science, he isn’t afraid of you asking questions.  If he’s talking about well-established scientific discoveries, he already knows there aren’t any questions you can ask that will prove him wrong.  If he’s talking about a new hypothesis and there are questions you could ask that would prove him wrong, people asking questions that hypotheses can’t explain is a critical part of the progress of science.  Either way, the scientist has nothing of importance to lose, and a great deal to gain, by your asking questions.

As far as the science relates to you, the scientist will recognize that you’re better off asking questions than not asking questions.  If there’s some part of it you can’t understand, you won’t be able to learn the science or put it to use.  So if you ask questions to clarify what the scientist means, again he benefits, because now you know more about science than you did before.  Scientists everywhere are trying to attract public support to science, and by asking questions to help yourself better understand what he’s talking about, you’re doing exactly that.

You have to be careful how you ask your questions.  The simplest way to avoid accidentally derailing your own learning process is to be open minded to the possibility that the scientist could know what he’s talking about, that he could know a lot more about the topic than you do, and that you could benefit from learning about it.  If you ask your questions with the attitude that any answer the scientist gives will be wrong, with your tone of voice you’ll make it difficult for him to figure out what he needs to say and how he needs to say it to get you to understand what he’s talking about.  With all those extra things you’ve forced him to think about to try to answer your question, whatever answer he gives won’t sound as good.  It’ll sound confused and will be harder for other people to understand.  Religious fundamentalists use this trick all the time.  A lot of so-called progressive activists frequently use it against me.

If the person’s tone of voice makes you feel like not asking questions, definitely ask questions.  If the person is talking about science in a way that makes you feel like not asking questions, it means he’s trying to hide something.  He’s trying to keep you from thinking about something, or he’s trying to keep you from saying something, or both.  If he’s afraid of you asking questions about science, he’s not a scientist.

It doesn’t matter how the person is talking.  If the end result is your not feeling like asking questions, that’s the clue you need to watch for.

One way for a politician to keep you from feeling like asking questions is to make you react to his emotional state.  For instance, if he’s angry or intimidating, and that makes you afraid to ask questions, he’s made you feel like not asking questions.  There are films of Hitler at the Nuremburg rally, shaking his fist and shouting angrily.  That’s a perfect example of someone who made people afraid to question him.

Another way for a politician to make you feel like not asking questions is to use an emotional state that gets you to sympathize with him.  President Bush does this all the time.  He acts really friendly and really stupid.  The easiest way for you to get along with someone like that would be for you to act stupid too.  The easiest way for you to act stupid would be for you to be stupid.  If your friend was stupid and you asked him a lot of questions he didn’t know how to answer, it would make him look stupid, and that would damage your friendship.  The easiest way for you to get along with a friendly, but stupid person is to talk to him on his level.  You decide most or all of this subconsciously.  Then you focus on questions you think the other person can answer and forget questions you think the person can’t answer.  I’ll tell you how the psychological machinery behind that works later in the book.  For now, suffice it to say that President Bush’s stupidity is contagious.  He constantly weaves this psychological illusion around himself that’s turned all of Washington D.C. into a black hole of intelligence.

Listening to a person’s tone of voice is easy, but tones of voice can be misunderstood.  The second science martial arts technique is more difficult to use, but more effective if you can use it.  It can be used after you’ve identified a politician by his tone of voice, it can be used independently if you can’t tell whether a person is a politician or a scientist, and it can be used on people who seem to be scientists to see if they’re really scientists or if they’re politicians who are good at impersonating scientists.

This is the technique of first principles.   In science, a first principle is a founding idea of an area of study.  This could be an entire branch of science or just some small part of a branch of science.

A first principle is a rule that, one way or another, has been found to apply to everything in an area of science.  This gives you a frame of reference.  When you are talking about something in that area of science, you automatically know that this rule applies to it.

Acid rain is a good example of this.  A first principle of biology is that plants and animals need healthy cells in order to be healthy.  A first principle of biochemistry is that cells need a certain pH to be healthy.  If scientists find that acid rain is falling on a forest, it means a lot of water with the wrong pH is entering the environment.  The scientists don’t even need to look out the window to know that the forest’s environment is being harmed.

Earlier I told you how scientists figured out how snowflakes form.  They figured out how the creation process of snowflakes could create a thousand unique snowflakes, and the only creation process that could create a thousand unique snowflakes would also make every snowflake in the world unique.

A first principle of the formation of snowflakes is the freezing of water vapor.  If the water vapor in a cloud doesn’t freeze, you won’t get snow, you’ll get rain.  That means that every single part of the formation of snowflakes depends on freezing temperatures.  That means that if you’re talking about snowflakes, you’re talking about freezing temperatures.  If you’re not talking about freezing temperatures, you’re not talking about snowflakes.

Now suppose you hear a politician talking about his big plan for combating the economic problems the greenhouse effect is causing.  As the governor of your state, he’s going to make water vapor freeze at 38º, and then that’s going to benefit the local skiing industry and the tourism industry and it’ll create a lot of jobs and they’ll be able to invest so-and-so an amount of money in the public schools and such-and-such an amount of money in your public library system, etc., etc..  He can make himself look smart by overwhelming everyone with all his plans and statistics.  Then a lot people who feel like the governor is smart are going to ask a bunch of little questions to clarify or debate minor points.  Then his big plan is going to be spread all over the commercial media.  Then more people are going to hear about it, and they’re going to think the governor is really smart because he has such a big plan.

By knowing one little piece of information, you can destroy his entire political strategy, without knowing anything about economics or the skiing industry.  Water doesn’t freeze at 38º.  By knowing that, you can disprove everything he said would happen as a result of water freezing at 38º.

This example sounds ridiculous, but I’m just using it to illustrate the idea.  Politicians do things like this all the time.  The only reason they get away with it is because the public doesn’t know enough about the first principles politicians keep promising to violate.

The rest of this book is about how to attack first principles as the weak points in Capitalist ideology, and how to make sure you cooperate with first principles in the post-revolutionary society.  This is not to say that you can build the entire post-revolutionary society on first principles alone, but it is to say that if you don’t cooperate with first principles, whatever post-revolutionary society you try to build won’t work.

Equally importantly, since Capitalism doesn’t cooperate with first principles, first principles are all you need to destroy the foundation of Capitalism—as opposed to wasting your efforts on trying to destroy its individual manifestations one at a time.

Some activists are wondering how the revolution can succeed without getting absorbed by the Capitalists.  As the revolution gains popularity, politicians are going to join the revolution to win votes, they’ll try to take it over, and they’ll water it down to try to win votes from people outside the revolution.  Meanwhile, Capitalists are going to start selling things to the revolutionaries for a profit.  Meanwhile, a lot of people will join the revolution just because it’s popular, and the revolution will turn into just another fashion statement.  So what can anyone do to prevent all of that?

Once again, science is the perfect solution.  If you learn what environmental sustainability depends upon and how to recognize whether or not someone is doing it, you have a revolution that’s immune to co-optation—because the Capitalists can’t co-opt the laws of physics.  By knowing how to use first principles to destroy Capitalist ideology, you can destroy it anywhere you find it.  It isn’t possible for a person to cooperate with all the first principles I have to tell you about in this book and still be a Capitalist.

By learning enough about science to destroy Capitalist ideology structurally, you learn how to do something else that’s crucial to the revolution.  Now you don’t have to depend on your tone of voice to convince people you know what you’re talking about.  Now you can stop being a grassroots politician and become a grassroots political ninja.

Environmental unsustainability is a crime against humanity.  But most of the actions people take today won’t have any noticeable effects until decades from now.  Basically, environmental unsustainability is the perfect crime, because by the time the victims are born, their assailants will already be dead.  That’s an exaggeration of sorts, but that’s the basic idea.

If a person attached timers to 10,000 nuclear missiles that would launch them all off in a hundred years from now and start a global nuclear war, and then he was caught, it wouldn’t be difficult to accuse him of 6 billion counts of attempted murder.  Environmental unsustainability is just a different kind of global time bomb.

Once you learn how much of a threat global environmental unsustainability is and why Capitalism isn’t environmentally sustainable, your success no longer depends on your maintaining any particular attitude to the revolution.  The revolution is just something that is, not something you need to feel any particular way about.  You can take any attitude you want, at any time, and it won’t change your revolution. There is no amount of violence Capitalists can inflict on people to make their economic system survive.  Once you understand that, you can be Gandhi, Lenin, and Peewee Herman all at the same time.  You can use any amount of civil disobedience and any amount of direct action you need, and laugh at the Capitalists all the while.  Once you understand that there is no action the Capitalists can take to make their economic system survive, the only question it leaves is which actions you can take that will be the most effective at destroying it.

A global political movement made up of people each of whom can be Gandhi, Lenin, and Peewee Herman at any time, is a political movement that’s impossible to out-manipulate.  If you depend on an attitude to make your revolution succeed, you limit your choices to the ones you’ll be able to think of while you have that attitude, and that will seem to other people to correspond to that attitude.  If the success of your revolution depends on a certain strategy that’s consistent with a certain attitude, you make your revolution predictable.  That will let people who are good at manipulating other people predict what you’re going to do and to manipulate it to their own advantage.

On the other hand, for a revolution whose success depends on a set of external conditions being met, the only thing that’s predictable is the ending.  What people can do to get from the beginning to the end is a wide-open field.

Some people are better at civil disobedience, some people are better at direct action, and some people are better at laughing at the Capitalists.  Right now the Capitalists are under siege from all sides by people each doing whatever they’re best at.  But people each doing whatever they’re best at makes the revolution predictable in its own way.  If everyone in the revolution learns how to be John Lennon, Ché Guevara, and Groucho Marx all at the same time, it will make the revolution more cohesive for the revolutionaries and less predictable for the Capitalists.   Everyone can still do whatever they’re best at as long as it works, but any time the Capitalists try to outsmart one tactic, whoever was using it can abandon it temporarily and join some other group that was using a different tactic.

With a little strategic education, you can make the anti-Capitalist revolution stop being a political movement and make it a personal empowerment movement that brings with it political results.  Because what else do you call a revolution made up of people who can all be Dr. King, Malcolm X, and Charlie Chaplin all at the same time, except a revolution of people who each have the greatest possible number of choices in life?

Ultimately, the revolution that needs to happen to solve the problems the Capitalists are causing and make the transition to global environmental sustainability, is not a political revolution, but a revolution of human consciousness.   It’s not a struggle between Capitalism versus anti-Capitalism; it’s a struggle between personal manipulation versus personal empowerment.

Personal empowerment means people being able to provide for themselves. People being able to provide for themselves depends on informed decision-making.  Informed decision-making depends on information.

Revolution begins with education.

It’s time for everyone to get educated.

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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To start with, here’s an example of what scientists have discovered, as it relates to people.

Dr. Jared Diamond figured out how to write a physical, chemical, and biological history of civilization, which he tells in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel.  This is a completely different version of history than we learned in public school.

Humans are made of atoms, food is made of atoms, and everything else in the world is made of atoms.   But we can’t see atoms.  To us, people, food, and everything else in the world look like different things.  So we naturally think of them as different things.  But people, food, and everything else in the world are only different things in the sense that they’re different combinations of about 100 kinds of atoms.  The atoms are only different from each other because they’re made up of different combinations of protons, neutrons, and electrons, each of which which are the same from one atom to another.   So when I say that what sounds like anti-Capitalist ideology coming from me is really atomic physics, that’s what I mean.

Molecules contain energy in the molecular bonds between their atoms.  Chemical reactions either absorb or give off energy, as a result of molecular bonds being created or broken.  When plants absorb sunlight through their leaves and nutrients through their leaves and roots, they use the sunlight energy to create new molecular bonds, to turn the nutrient atoms into bigger molecules.  Firewood, food, and fossil fuels are all made up of big molecules, which are broken when firewood and fossil fuels are burned and food is digested, which is why they all give off energy.   You get energy from the food you eat because you’re eating sunlight.

The food cycle of an environment is the process by which atoms and energy move through the environment.  In healthy environments, the atoms and energy keep moving at consistent rates, which is why the environment sustains itself instead of breaking down.  Plants absorb sunlight and nutrients, herbivores eat plants, carnivores eat herbivores, and carnivores eventually die and are eaten by bugs, worms, and bacteria, which break the dead animals down into the soil nutrients that are eaten by plants.  All the energy that cycles through the environment came from the sun (unless the environment also involves geothermal energy).

Atoms and energy move back and forth between people and the environment.  Atoms and energy move from each person to the environment at a fairly consistent rate.  If atoms and energy don’t move from the environment to people at an equal rate, it means the people aren’t getting enough to eat, which is more commonly known as a famine.  When a woman gets pregnant, she needs to eat more.  By eating more, she uses her digestive system and her uterus to turn topsoil nutrients into a baby.  We are all made out of topsoil nutrients, because our bodies are all made out of the food we’ve eaten.

A lot of people think it’s wrong to think of people as being made out of dirt, so they say we shouldn’t use science to try to figure out how the world works.  But just because you don’t like thinking about a certain thing doesn’t prove you have the power to make the world work differently than it does.  Voluntary ignorance is not personal empowerment; it just gives you the illusion of personal empowerment.  You can’t save the world by hiding your head in the sand.  Your body, including your brain, is made of nutrients that came from the food you ate.  The nutrients in your food came from the dirt.  Get over it.

A lot of people say that they agree that people’s bodies came from the dirt, but what about their minds?  What about their spirits?  What about their souls?  Those aren’t made out of dirt, so that must prove that human consciousness originates on some invisible plane of existence.

People who make that argument are trying to use their own ignorance of science to prove that they’re experts at science.   You are able to perceive your mind, your spirit, and your soul because of your brain, and your brain is made out of dirt.  Everything you’re able to think about, you’re able to think about because of your brain, and your brain is made out of dirt.

Your brain is an organ, just like every other organ of your body.  Just like every other organ of your body, your brain does certain things, and thinking is what your brain does.  Your brain is the most complicated organ of your body, which has made it the hardest to figure out, but just because something is hard to figure out doesn’t prove that supernatural powers must be causing it.

Back in the days of the Bubonic Plague in Europe, people didn’t have microscopes, so they had no way of knowing that plagues were caused by germs.  They thought plagues were caused by evil spirits.  But that doesn’t prove the Bubonic Plague was caused by evil spirits, that only proves that people thought it was caused by evil spirits because they didn’t know it was caused by germs.

So once again, voluntary ignorance is not personal empowerment.  Just because something is hard to figure out doesn’t prove that the simple version you want to believe in must be true.

That brings me to Dr. Diamond’s history of the world.  The world wasn’t conquered by Europeans, or Whites, or Christians.  The world was conquered by the people who were the most successful at turning topsoil nutrients into people.  Those people turned out to be Europeans, Whites, and Christians.  It’s easy to assume that their conquering the world had something to do with them being Europeans, Whites, and Christians, but it doesn’t.  Those are just the easiest things for people to see—as opposed the atoms the people and their food were made of, or all the chemical reactions that were involved.

10,000 years ago, people were spread out over all the habitable land in the world, with the exception of some islands they hadn’t reached yet.  The people were—as people still are—evolutionarily equal members of the same species.  That meant that no group of people was superior or inferior to any other group because of who they were.

In Mesopotamia at the time, the environment was the most favorable for people of any in the world.  It made matter and energy move around in ways that people could best take advantage of.  The environment in Mesopotamia produced more food that people could eat than any other environment in the world, along with providing sufficient drinking water and hospitable weather.

The environment in Mesopotamia had the highest food productivity in the world because it was the easiest place in the world for food plants to grow.  That also made it the easiest place in the world for people to figure out how to grow their own plants, because once people figured out how to plant seeds, it didn’t really matter what they did after that.  Through trial and error they figured out a lot of things they could do to help the plants grow, and produce more food as a result.  Since the plants grew so well in the environment all by themselves, the Mesopotamians could afford to make more mistakes than anyone else in their learning process—which let them learn faster.

To cut a long story short, the people of Mesopotamia developed agriculture before anyone else in the world not because of any personal advantage, but because they lived in the most favorable growing conditions in the world.  If those people settled somewhere else and any other group of people settled in Mesopotamia, it still would’ve been the people who settled in Mesopotamia who were the first to develop agriculture.

Homo sapiens are a constant.  The environment was the variable.  The people who settled in Mesopotamia adapted to living in their environment, just like the people who settled in every other part of their world adapted to living in their environments.  Ultimately, it wasn’t the Mesopotamians who developed agriculture; it was the interaction between Homo sapiens and the environment in Mesopotamia that caused the development of agriculture.

Here you can see an example of the comparative method of scientific observation.  Agriculture was developed independently in at least four other places on Earth and possibly as many as eight.  Paleo-botanists had found enough remains of plants from each of those places to figure out what their environments were like at the times agriculture was developed.  So Dr. Diamond compared the nine environments to each other, and discovered that they all had a lot of characteristics in common.   Out of all the environmental conditions Dr. Diamond discovered that contributed to making plants grow well enough that the people who lived there figured out how to farm them, Mesopotamia had the most.

The basic environmental requirements for the development of agriculture were hot summers and wet winters, which creates hardier plants than in any other environment, and a higher proportion of annual plants.   Annual plants grow from seeds in the spring, over the course of a few months produce a lot of seeds, leaves, roots, and stalks that people can eat, and then they die and are replaced by a new crop of plants the following year, which produce a lot more food.

The human population in an original center of agriculture had to have exceeded what the wild environment could sustain.  Farming is the act of replacing a wild environment with an artificial environment, where people intentionally grow food-producing plants.  That means farming necessarily produces more human food than a wild environment does.  But prior to the development of agriculture, humans and their pre-human ancestors had lived by hunting and gathering in wild environments ever since life began.  As long as people could still produce enough food by hunting and gathering in their wild environments, no one would had any reason to think of a completely different means of food production, or have any reason to want to try it.  If they already knew how to produce enough food to live, why should they go to the trouble of trying to invent a new one?  The development of agriculture changed the way we live, but no one of the time had any way of knowing that, or imagining how it would change people’s lives, because life in the wild was the only life anyone had ever known.

Also, the environment had to produce enough food that the people could live in sedentary villages year-round.  That means first the evironment produced a lot of food, then the people built permanent settlements, then they built up their population sizes, and then their population sizes grew so big that the environment no longer produced enough food for all the people who lived in it.  This is true for a number of reasons.

First, farming is the year-round intentional manipulation of a landscape, so it isn’t physically possible for nomads to farm—because nomads don’t live in the same area year-round, by definition.

Second, the development of agriculture depends on the development of tools for harvesting plants, and of facilities for storing the produce.   Nomads couldn’t develop as many specialized tools as sedentary people, because they had to be able to carry all their belongings with them when they travelled.  They couldn’t develop specialized storage facilities either because nomadic people have no use for permanent buildings.

Third, farming depends on people planting seeds in the spring and harvesting their crops in the fall.  If the people don’t have enough food stored from the previous year, and can’t collect enough wild food, to sustain themselves in the meantime, they can’t develop agriculture, because they’ll starve to death before their crops come in—which means they’ll have no motivation in the first place to try devoting their efforts to a method of food production that won’t pay off for six months.  Nomads can’t carry a year’s supply of food with them when they travel—or rather, if they could accumulate a year’s supply of food, they wouldn’t need to be nomads in the first place.

If you’re interested in learning more about the agricultural history of the world, you can find it in my book Zapatista University—which is written for peasant farmers with negligible scientific background but who spend their lives working with plants and animals.  Of course, you could also read Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Farming let people produce a lot more food.  With all that food, Mesopotamian women were able to turn soil nutrients into babies a lot faster than women in any other part of the world.  So Mesopotamians built up the biggest and densest populations.

With all those people, the Mesopotamians had the most people to think of new ideas.  By producing all that food, they could also support some people who didn’t have to farm full time, so those people could devote their time to other things.  That included full-time political leaders, bureaucrats, inventors, craftsmen, religious leaders, and soldiers.  Each of those new occupations made new things happen in the society that hadn’t been happening before.

That let the Mesopotamians invent a lot of things other groups of people didn’t invent.  That included bigger governmental structures, to organize all those people and keep them working together.  They invented writing, to keep track of everyone’s taxes.  They also invented more technology, and metallurgy in particular, which helped them grow more food, build bigger civilizations, and conquer their neighbors more easily.

The most people, the biggest political organizations, and the most technology meant the biggest and most powerful armies in the world.  What happened next was inevitable.

Then, not being able to see the connections between people, food, and everything else in the world, came back to haunt the Mesopotamians.   Farming changed the environment, because it changed the type and number of plants that were growing in the environment.  If you plow a wild field and plant wheat in it, you’ve turned it into an environment where only one species of plant grows.  That isn’t a very healthy environment, because all the plants in the new environment are trying to use the same soil nutrients.  You no longer have a variety of plants fertilizing each other and protecting the topsoil from erosion with their root systems.

Since the Mesopotamians were the first farmers in the world, they had no way of knowing that over farming was possible.  They turned their topsoil into people until they used up all the nutrients in their soil.  Meanwhile they lost a lot of topsoil to erosion, and their fields were salinized by their irrigation.  So they burned out their farmland and turned the most favorable environment in the world into a desert.

The environment around the Mediterranean Sea was a lot like the environment in Mesopotamia, so Mesopotamian agriculture spread into Europe pretty quickly.  When the Mesopotamians destroyed their environment, their economy, and their political systems, the Europeans started building the biggest populations, biggest political structures, and biggest armies.

From there, as they say, the rest is history.  The White European Christians conquered the world by very straightforward processes of turning a lot of soil nutrients into people, and using their advantages in population size and technological level to direct more physical force at other people than anyone else could direct at them.  They killed their rivals, used all their rivals’ resources for themselves, and filled the world up with their own genes, which is how animals have always competed against each other.

Imperialistic people love to find out about things like this, and say that the fact they conquered the world proves they’re fulfilling their roles in the world by survival of the fittest.  But that’s just an example of people who don’t understand what science is not looking at all the evidence.  It’s easy to say you’re fulfilling your part in the natural cycles of the world by conquering everyone else by survival of the fittest when you’re winning.  But the simple piece of evidence that people don’t like being conquered proves that human behavior isn’t as simple as everyone learning to accept survival of the fittest as their political system.  One ability people have is the ability to cooperate with others for their mutual protection.  Another ability people have is the ability to think of these things ahead of time and realize that conquering people is only going to result in people fighting back.  And as anti-Capitalist revolutionaries, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

On the other hand, learning about things like this gives us the choice to act differently.  A lot of people assume that intellect makes us a lot different from the other animals because we can build computers and space shuttles.  But when you look at the way we’re using all the things we invent, you can see that all we’ve done is to find new ways to act just like any other animal species.  Even now that we’ve gone from historical agricultural imperialism to modern globalization, that still hasn’t changed.

This is an example of how the economic system of life is so natural to us that if we act upon what we feel to be true about the world we create a lot of problems and can’t figure out where they’re all coming from.   That makes it easy for people to point their fingers at other people, or supernatural powers, or the environment, and say that everything that’s going wrong is someone else’s fault.

Everyone naturally has a gigantic blind spot to the effects of their own actions.  By learning about blind spots like this, we can learn to see through them.  Once we learn to see through them, we can stop being ruled by them, because we give ourselves the choice to act differently.  We can use our intellects to decide what kind of a world we want to live in, and then figure out what we’ll have to do to make it happen.  This is why anti-Capitalism depends on so much more education than Capitalism.  If we want to be civilized people, first we have to learn how to stop acting like animals.

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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