We’ve made enough jumps between biology, chemistry, and physics, at enough strategic points now, that we can say we have a functional outline of a chemical formula for the global environment.  Any time any biological process happens, it happens as a result of genes replicating themselves, it happens in a stable chemical reaction of all the genes in the world interacting with each other and replicating themselves, matter and energy always move from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration more than they move from areas of low concentration to areas of high concentration, energy is always added to the global environment at a constant rate, and keeping the chemical reaction of the global environment stable—meaning sustainable—depends on not making energy leave the global environment faster than it’s added.

Now we can write a chemical formula for an elephant, and for the entire global environment.  Now the question is:  How do you write a chemical formula for Romeo and Juliet?

What I mean by that is, how do you make the jump from biology to psychology?  Neurologists can study the ways chemicals and electricity flow through people’s brains, and those chemicals are products of biology.  You could write a chemical formula for a person’s brain.  But once again, that chemical formula would be so complicated it wouldn’t be useful to anyone.  So how do you break psychology down into units that are of manageable size, that encompass the entire realm of human behavior?

This has been another big puzzle scientists have been grappling with for decades.

Dr. E. O. Wilson founded the field of what he called sociobiology in the early ‘80s.   Later, Dr. Leda Cosmides and Dr. John Tooby adapted it a little and called it evolutionary psychology.  In 1987, Dr. Ervin Laszlo founded the Club of Budapest, which was an international group of scientists like the Club of Rome, who met in Budapest to study how evolutionary psychology was affecting humanity on a global scale.  How the Mind Works, by Dr. Steven Pinker, is a very long, and very thorough introductory book to evolutionary psychology.

I’ve told you that our genes created our brains.  The study of evolutionary psychology is the study of how our genes created our brains.  Specifically, why our species evolved the way it did, and how our brains evolved as a result.

I’ve told you how Dr. Dawkins discovered with his Selfish Gene Theory that all animal behavior helps the individual animals survive or reproduce in some way or another, and how the animals’ genes created their brains to make doing those things seem like the best ideas to the animals.

When Dr. Wilson applied the Selfish Gene Theory to human behavior, he discovered the first principle of evolutionary psychology: All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA (or genes) by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.

With this discovery, he assembled all the edge pieces of another jigsaw puzzle.  Now we can see that any time we talk about human behavior, we’re talking about people attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.

Unfortunately, that’s hard for a lot of people to understand, because that seems to imply that people perceive the existence of their DNA, which they don’t naturally.  That isn’t what it says, but that’s how most people interpret it.

My grandmother was no scientist, but she was a philosopher.  She figured out most of what Dr. Wilson figured out, in simpler terms, long before:

Everyone always does the best they can to try to provide for their needs.

The one thing she didn’t figure out was that people’s needs always relate to survival and reproduction in one way or another.

At this point people always ask, “But what about Hitler?”  “What about President Bush?”

If you’re doing that, you’re projecting your own perceptions onto the other person and expecting them to share them—which they don’t.

At the moment anyone makes any decision, they always believe it’s the best decision they can make under their circumstances.  On the most fundamental level, they believe that what they’re doing is right, even if in a lot of ways they feel that what they’re doing is wrong.

When a person does the best they can to try to provide for their needs, their ability to do that is limited by their perception of their needs, their perception of how their needs can be provided for, and their perception of their capability to provide for their needs.

If you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth and you believe in a lot of religious superstitions that say that wealthy White heterosexual Christian men are smarter than everyone else and know what’s best for everyone, you don’t grow up to be a very worldly person.  You can get elected president that way, but that doesn’t prove you know very much about how the world actually works.   If you grow up a spoiled brat and then figure out how to get hold of our entire federal government, what else are you going do with it but treat it like a new toy?

If you’re also a religious fundamentalist, that’s even worse.  Now you’re a spoiled brat who’s head of the government of the most powerful country on Earth, who’s deathly afraid of Pagans, Atheists, Muslims, homosexuals, feminists, environmentalists, Native Americans, Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, and every other minority in America, and who looks down on all those people, assuming they’re inferior to yourself.  Then you act accordingly.

People act upon their perceptions to try to survive and reproduce in whatever way seems best to them.  Most of that process has already been figured out by other people.  The one big piece that’s missing is how people’s perceptions work.

Evolutionary psychologists have discovered a lot of important things, like the origins of agriculture and religions, like I told you about already, also the origins of things like cultures, gender differences, violence, morality, and art.   I talk about all of these things in various places in my other books—especially the long version—so I won’t bother going into them all here.

One of the most important things evolutionary psychologists have discovered is that we don’t live in the conditions our brains evolved in.  Our brains, like any other part of any other animal, are very highly adapted to deal with life in the conditions we evolved in.  But paradoxically, our having this particular body part led us to remove ourselves from the conditions of our evolution.

Soon after the evolution of human intellect 60,000 years ago, our brains stopped evolving.  They had evolved genetically to the point that they made genetic evolution obsolete.  Evolution is the cumulative adaptation to environmental pressures.  But now whenever something in our environment changes, we don’t have to wait around for generations for our genes—and consequently, our brains—to evolve to deal with the new living conditions.  Human intellect has given us the ability to learn about our new living conditions personally and adapt our own behavior.  But things we learn now don’t get imprinted in our genes.

Now we live in the space age, but we still have brains that evolved in the stone age.   The people who lived in the stone age—as some people in the world still do—were people just like us.  We got from the stone age to the space age by adding ideas together, generation after generation.  The people who lived 40,000 years ago had all the intelligence they needed to build the space shuttle.  The only reason they couldn’t do it was because they hadn’t figured out how.

Even if it wasn’t for our ability to adapt to living in a new environment faster by learning than by genetic evolution, we still couldn’t evolve genetically to fit our changing environments.  Evolution happens slowly for any species, because genetic mutations are very rare.  On top of that, evolution happens because of mutations or new combinations of genes being passed down from generation to generation.  Our generations are spaced about 20 years apart or so, which makes us the slowest evolving species in the world.  Many plants and animals have a generation cycle of one year, and they still take thousands of generations to adapt to changes in their environments.  We developed agriculture about 500 generations ago.

After the evolution of human intellect, we still evolved a little bit to make our new intellect work better.  But that was long before the development of agriculture.

Since the development of agriculture, our living conditions have been changing too quickly for evolution to keep up with.   We can’t talk about the presence of agriculture versus the absence of agriculture as a change in our living conditions, because the age of agriculture encompasses everything from the first stone age farmers up to the biotech industry.  The Old Testament was written about 250 generations ago.  Jesus lived about 100 generations ago.  Columbus discovered America about 25 generations ago.  The United States was founded about 10 generations ago.   Airplanes were invented about 5 generations ago.  So think of how much our living conditions have changed in between each of those events, and then think of how many thousands of generations didn’t happen between those events, and you’ll get a sense of how much genetic evolution hasn’t taken place to adapt us genetically to our changing environment.

As I’ve said, human intellect gave humans the ability to out-smart every other species in the world.  Humans could change their hunting tactics faster than any other species could evolve defenses against them.

In Mesopotamia there were a lot of gazelles.  The people who settled there over hunted them and depleted the herds.  If the people were any other species, when they ran out of food, a lot of them would’ve died.  But they didn’t.  With their intellects, once again they did something no other animals could do.

The Mesopotamians were also gathering edible plants and bringing them back to their villages.  When they started running out of animals to hunt, they had to gather more plants.  Eventually they figured out the connection between throwing their food scraps away and edible plants growing out of their refuse dumps.  So they learned how to farm.

When people learned how to farm, they completely changed their relationship to the environment.  Now instead of being controlled by the food production of the environment, they began controlling the food production of the environment.  They didn’t realize what was going to happen as a result of what they were doing, they were just doing their best to try to provide for their needs.  They’d figured out a new way to get food that worked better than any other way they had.

People’s instincts evolved to deal with life in the conditions of our evolution.  People’s instincts create their emotions.  Their emotions give them a big part of their perceptions.

Now that the people had removed themselves from the conditions their brains evolved to deal with, their perceptions of the world began to be thrown off.  They still perceived the world the way their ancestors did, but now that they had removed themselves from the conditions of their evolution without realizing it, a lot of things they perceived to be true about the world weren’t true anymore.  Now when people acted upon their emotional instincts, their behavior didn’t fit very well to their living conditions.

A lot of times when people acted upon their emotional instincts they ended up acting against their own interests.  If you’ve ever gotten angry and punched, kicked, or thrown some possession of yours and broken it, you’ve acted against your own interests—but it seemed like the best idea to you at the time.  Some people murder their wives, their best friends, and their children before they realize what they’re doing.  Things like this created a lot of problems in early agricultural societies, and no one knew why.

The first group of people in the world to develop agriculture was also the first group of people in the world to develop writing.   But it took them 5,000 more years to develop writing.  By the time people first figured out how to keep written records of their history, their own ancestors’ development of agriculture was long gone from their cultural memory.  So they didn’t write it down.

Instead, they wrote the Old Testament, with the Book of Genesis and the myth of Adam and Eve.   They had no idea their ancestors had evolved in Africa, and then over hunted the gazelle herds of Mesopotamia, so they tried inventing a history for themselves.

Now that lots of people were living together in permanent settlements, but were still motivated by mysterious emotional instincts that caused lots of problems in their groups when people acted upon their immediate feelings, they tried to figure out where those feelings came from, and how to solve the problem.

Violence was one example.  In every species of large mammal, males compete against each other with violence to mate with females, which helps the strongest and healthiest genes get passed down to the next generation.  Violence worked pretty well for people back when they lived in small groups and caught most of their food by hunting animals with spears, because living that way required a whole lot of violence, most of which was directed at their prey.  But for men competing against other men it didn’t work so well anymore.  In every other species of large animal, males rarely fight each other to the death over mates.  But now that humans had used their intelligence to figure out how to build better weapons, they could fight each other to the death— or, more likely, use their intelligence and their weapons together to plot against each other and murder each other.

From duels to the death and murder, it’s easy for more people to get involved, use weapons, and plot against each other.  Then violence escalates into war.  Humans are the only species of animals that have invented war, for the specific goal of killing each other as efficiently as possible.

(…Or so it seemed for a long time.  If you read Dr. Paul Erlich’s book Human Natures, he tells about a group of chimpanzees some biologists discovered in Africa who had invented war.  If anything, that’s even worse, because that makes war just one more thing we have in common with chimpanzees.)

With these social problems in the first agricultural civilization, and many more like them, for people to make their agrarian societies function instead of self-destructing depended on getting people to cooperate with each other.  That depended on getting them to not act upon their immediate feelings.   The oldest and wisest members of the group understood that violence leads to war, and that other small problems led to big problems in the future.  Those problems were big threats to people’s survival and reproduction.

So the oldest and wisest members of the group figured out the idea of morality.  If they taught the other members of the group to feel that acting upon their immediate feelings was bad, and acting in the way people needed to act to prevent the group from self-destructing was good, that solved a lot of problems.

Every group of people in the world had already discovered the concept of morality.  But the first Mesopotamian farmers had left the living conditions their brains evolved in behind.  That meant the Mesopotamians were having more internal problems than anyone else now, which meant they needed more morality to solve them.  So they invented the idea of a force of pure good, which people were supposed to follow, and a force of pure evil, which was the source of temptation that led people to act in ways that would destroy their groups.  The threat of eternal paradise or eternal suffering and damnation, were, in effect, metaphors for what the oldest and wisest people had learned the hard way, that made those lessons personally meaningful and easier to remember for the younger people.

Today, and especially in America, we have 5,000 years of recorded history, most of which was written by Christians and Jews.  They’ve made all kinds of faulty assumptions, like that humans were inherently good and were only tempted to commit evil, that they were the only people who had discovered morality, and the fact that they conquered the world proved they were better than everyone else.

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The other most important thing that evolutionary psychologists have figured out has been how consciousness and subconsciousness interact to create people’s perceptions of the world.  Two good books you can read about this are Vital Lies, Simple Truths, and Emotional Intelligence, both by Dr. Daniel Goleman.

If you were walking through a jungle and got attacked by a tiger, and he slashed open your arm with his claws, you would barely feel it.

At that moment in time, your survival would be threatened by two things:  your bleeding injury, and the big ferocious tiger that was attacking you.  One of those things would be a much bigger threat to your survival than the other.  If you stopped to try to bandage your wound, you would get eaten by the tiger.  So to save yourself the trouble of trying to decide what to do, your subconsciousness edits the lesser threat out of your consciousness, so you focus your attention on the tiger and don’t notice your bleeding injury until after you’re safe from the tiger.

A lot of people assume that the reason you don’t feel your injuries is because you dump a lot of adrenaline into your blood.  That isn’t the root cause; that’s just the easiest thing to notice.  When your senses send signals to your brain that your brain recognizes as a big threat to you, your brain releases a bunch of chemicals to make your body work differently, one of which is adrenaline.   That includes making your brain work differently, to make you think about certain things and not think about other things.

Once upon a time it didn’t work that way.  Some people’s subconsciousness edited their bleeding injuries out of their consciousness, and others didn’t.  So some people stopped and tried to care for their injuries while they were still being attacked by tigers.  We aren’t descended from those people, because they all got eaten.  We inherited our genes from the other people.  That’s how evolution has always worked.

There are a lot of ways your subconsciousness edits information out of your consciousness so that you focus on the things that are most important to your survival and reproduction.  This is where our not living in the conditions our brains evolved in causes a lot of problems.

An obvious one was the Cold War.  Why was it so easy for so many people to ignore the fact that the Americans and Soviets were pointing all those nuclear missiles at each other, and carry on their lives for decades as though nothing was wrong, even though no one was ever more than half an hour away from nuclear annihilation?  The nuclear arms race was a big problem, but it was abstract, it lasted a long time, and it was so big nobody knew what to do about it, so everyone got accustomed to it and stopped worrying about it, because worrying about it wouldn’t do them any good.

Another obvious one is completely mundane.  When you get in the habit of doing something the same way every time, like locking the front door when you leave the house in the morning, or driving home from work in the afternoon, you start doing that subconsciously, because you’ve gone through the motions so many times that conscious thought is no longer necessary.  I don’t know how many times I’ve left for work in the morning and halfway to my job wondered if I put the milk away, because I couldn’t remember having done it.  But I’ve never forgotten.

Some examples are a lot more complicated.  Some time back in the ‘70s, a lady came home one night to find a guy with a knife waiting for her in her apartment.  She ran through her apartment building screaming for help for half an hour, 45 people heard her, and nobody called the police.  She was stabbed 17 times and died.  (I don’t remember if those are the exact numbers, but they’re somewhere close.)  A lot of psychologists repeated scenarios like this as experiments to try to figure out what happened.

They discovered two things.

First, that the situation was so unexpected that people usually found it easiest to ignore—meaning edit out of their consciousness.

Second, when they tried versions of this experiment among groups of people, what everyone else in the group did about it formed a huge part of each person’s perception of the situation.  They either edited the event out of their consciousness or didn’t according to how everyone else responded to it.  Since everyone in the group was doing that, usually nobody acted and everyone edited the event out of their consciousness.  Like, if a group of people all boarded a subway car at a station, to find it empty except for one guy lying face down on the floor, usually everyone ignored him.  But if one person—usually a participant in the experiment who’d been planted in the crowd—tried to help the guy, suddenly everyone wanted to help him.

You can probably see a pretty direct relation of this to Capitalism.   If people practice a suicidal economic system but no one knows what else to do—or the few people who do think of something else all get silenced—the public will remain mentally sedated.  Since there’s an overwhelming problem facing the people and no one else seems to be trying to fix it, it’s easiest for most people to edit it out of their consciousness and carry on with their lives.  That’s exactly the problem the anti-nuke movement had to overcome.

Some types of subconscious editing of your consciousness are simple, but very important, and so deeply embedded in your subconsciousness that when I tell you about them suddenly it seems so obvious that I must be making it all up. Then a lot of people start saying things like, “Why do you have to devote a whole branch of science to studying that?”

I’ve already told you how every decision you ever make in life begins with your asking, “Based on what I know about the world, if I do this, what will happen?”  Sometimes you do that consciously, but you always do it subconsciously.   This is where that question fits into all of human behavior, rather than simply to religion.

A specific, and perhaps the most important example of subconscious decision-making is, every time you see a person, you ask yourself, “Based on what I know about this person, are they going to try to kill me?”  And various other related questions—fight you, rob you, whatever.

You can see this in the way you (or anyone else) act around people you see frequently but never talk to.  If you see the same person regularly at your grocery store or your bus stop or wherever, you start to feel like you know them.  You probably feel more relaxed around them than you do around people you’ve never seen before.  If you start talking to them at some point, you probably both talk to each other like you’ve known each other a long time.

But you have no idea who the person is or what they’re really like.  You’ve never talked to them before.  You feel like you know them, but you don’t know any information about them, apart from things you can see directly—how tall they are, what color their hair is, whatever.

What you know about the person is that you’ve seen them a hundred times and they’ve never tried to kill you.  That is an extremely important piece of information.   Subconsciously, you have discovered that it’s safe for you to trust that person more than you could trust someone you’ve never seen before.

Here in America, most people have no reason to wonder if people they see are going to try to kill them, because people usually don’t try to kill people.  Whether someone is going to try to kill you or not is an important piece of information in the chimpanzee world.  It’s also an important piece of information to a lot of people who don’t live in America, and it’s even an important piece of information for some people who do live in America.

This relates to various activist movements in three important ways.

First of all, it’s been a big mystery how to get people to trust each other.  Chimpanzees are communal animals just like humans are.  But chimpanzees live in groups that are small enough that each member can know each other member personally.  They live in groups of that size because that’s how many chimpanzees their environments can support.  Without the use of human intellect, they settle into their communal groups—meaning political and economic systems—just by spending time around each other, without being able to talk to each other.   (They make verbal noises to communicate emotion to each other, but humans do that too.)

People used to live in groups that were small enough for each member to know each other member personally, but most people don’t anymore.  Most people in the world used their human intellect to help them survive and reproduce, produced a lot more food, had a lot more babies, and filled the world up with so many people that now we live in cities of thousands or millions of people.

In a city like that, people see so many people so often that they can’t keep track of them all.  Most of the people you see but don’t talk to on any given day probably are people you’ve never seen before—or else, people you can’t remember if you’ve seen before.

Packing so many people so closely together that their chimpanzee trust instincts don’t work any more means you have a whole lot of people who don’t trust each other packed closely together.  A group of people like that won’t hold together by their social instincts, but if the city is built around some important natural resource (which just about every city in the world is) then all those people are going to want to live there anyway.

Hence a big reason we have laws, governments, and punishment, and hence the reason most people (correctly) believe that a city without those things wouldn’t function.   We have cities without effective laws, governments, and punishments already—they’re called inner cities.

The second relationship this has to general progressive activism is that feeling that you know your neighbors doesn’t prove that you know them.   Your chimpanzee instincts are good for keeping track of whether or not a person is likely to try to beat you up and steal your banana.   But it tells you nothing about how (or to what extent) the person uses their own human intellect.  Some guy you see every day at your bus stop might dress like an oppressed worker, and look like someone who belongs to the Industrial Workers of the World, but there was no IWW when your chimpanzee trust instincts evolved.   That guy you feel like you know so well might be a White supremacist Republican who beats his wife, supports the Patriot Act, buys season tickets to the NASCAR races, and keeps a dozen loaded assault rifles in his basement in case gay Mexican crack addicts try to rob his house and molest his children.   You feel like you can trust him, but if he found out you were an anti-Capitalist revolutionary, he’d probably call the FBI and tell them there was a terrorist at his bus stop.

Hence another reason most people feel like they need laws to keep them safe from people they don’t know personally.

The third relationship this has to progressive activism is, if you saw 100 people every day, which included 75 people you’d never seen before, and everyone knew there were no laws, most people probably would get along with each other pretty well.  Even without the laws they would still feel that the best way to survive and reproduce would be to mind their own business.  However, it’s a fundamental principle of zoology (which is what Dr. Dawkins has his Ph.D. in) that any time all of the animals of a group start acting a certain way, they create the opportunity for some group members to get ahead by cheating.  Those who cheat improve their chances of survival and reproduction by taking advantage of the other members’ predictable behavior, outsmarting them, and coming out ahead.  Capitalists do this all the time, when they figure out how to make money by taking advantage of loopholes in laws, or otherwise using their high concentrations of money to corrupt political systems in ways most people never thought of.

If you saw 75 people every day who you’d never seen before and didn’t expect to see again, and there were no laws to protect you, some of them would try to mug you.  They would have better chances of getting away with it, because you wouldn’t expect it and there wouldn’t be any laws to stop them.  Or else everyone would have to stay on their guard all the time, which is what people have to do in inner cities.  So once again, people see laws as a preferable solution to that.

Hence another reason most people feel like they need laws to keep them safe from strangers.  Our large population size has made our chimpanzee trust instincts stop working.  Social instability is the result.  To keep every neighborhood in every city from being ruled by militias, vigilantes, gangs, and warlords, people made big social agreements to re-stabilize their societies.  We call them laws, governments, and punishments.

Just because I hear this argument all the time, I guess I better take a moment to shut it down.  A lot of people always tell me, “Well I’m an Anarchist, I didn’t agree to these big social agreements, and neither did anyone else in America.  They were forced on us.  So that must prove the Theory of Evolution is wrong.”

For every characteristic of every animal species, most of the members are fairly similar to each other, while some are remarkably different.  Most men in America are around 6’ tall, but a few men in America are 8’ tall.  Most men weigh about 170 pounds, but a few men weigh 500 pounds.  Most people are heterosexual, but a few people are homosexual.  Most people believe in using whatever social agreements have been established already by other people, and a few people believe in getting rid of them all.

If you want to try to use this argument, you’re the exception that proves the rule.  Let me ask you:  If you compare the number of Anarchists in America to the number of people in America, do you notice how many people aren’t Anarchists?  Most people in America don’t like our government, but most of them still think that laws are a pretty good idea.  And if a small group of people tries to tell everyone else that we shouldn’t have laws, do you notice how everyone else thinks that so-called Anarchists are trying to tell everyone else what to believe and what to do?  And then you don’t attract much public support and your revolution doesn’t win?

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What all of these subconscious effects on our perceptions of the world mean is that most of what we perceive about the world, we perceive—and act upon—subconsciously.  Usually, the things we notice are the most important things, but not always.

I’ve given you one example so far of a big blind spot in our perception that has led to humanity spreading through the world the same way any other animal species spreads through an environment, under the illusion that our being able to invent tools and build cities made us different from other animals.

Ultimately, our perceptions of the world are limited by the things we don’t notice.  But because we don’t notice them, we don’t even notice that we don’t notice them.  Until we notice how much we don’t notice, we can’t start noticing more.  That means we can’t perceive more, and that means we can’t act differently.  If our not noticing certain things leads us to act in ways that cause problems, we can’t solve the problem until we notice what we aren’t noticing.

The easiest way to show you how all this works and where things go wrong is to start with childhood development.

You learn by making emotional attachments to ideas.  That’s how your chimpanzee instincts find answers to all the subconscious, “Based on what I know about the world, if I do this, what will happen?” questions.

Over the course of your life, as you learn from life experiences, you build up a bigger and bigger store of information.  Chimpanzees and other vertebrate animals all do this.  Humans do it a lot more.

This is how you develop your sense of cause and effect that you use to deal with the world.  If you’re hungry you need to know the best place to go look for food.  If you go out hunting and don’t catch anything, you’ve wasted energy that you need to live, and that you could’ve put to better use doing something else.  Meanwhile, someone who was born with better learning genes has already found his meal.

Children learn the same basic way adults do, but they learn much more profoundly because their brains are still growing and developing.  Things you learn as a child get built into your developing neural circuitry.  For the rest of your life, you feel like these things are true.  If you learn as an adult that they aren’t true, you will still feel like they’re supposed to be true.

I’m sure everyone has heard about children who grow up in abusive families growing up to have abusive families as adults.  Boys who grow up in abusive households abuse their wives and children as adults.  Girls who grow up in abusive households hook up with men who abuse them, and might even try abusing them back in their own ways, and might abuse their children too.

That’s an example of this.  As children these people learned to feel like families abuse each other, so when they grew up and had families of their own, they didn’t know any other way to treat them.  Some people learn how not to abuse their families.  But a lot of people don’t.

Now here’s that same principle applied to a different situation.   Suppose some parents had to work all the time—or at least, felt like they had to work all the time.  When they come home they don’t have time to spend with their kids, or else they’re too tired.  So they buy their kids a TV and an X-Box, and the kids sit there in front of them mesmerized for hours.  What do you suppose those kids are going to get out of their childhood development?

The whole point of the advertizing industry is to make people feel perpetually unsatisfied with their lives.  If parents get so caught up in working all the time so they can buy more stuff that they let their kids be raised by TV commercials, what do you think is going to get built into the kids’ developing neurology but a perpetual feeling that their lives are missing something?  So then when they grow up they’re going to feel like they have to work all the time, so they can buy more stuff, just like their parents did.

It’s a perfect Capitalist perpetual motion machine.  The Capitalists have succeeded in turning children’s brains into their own capital, because they’ve turned the kids’ brains into things they can use to make profits.

Meanwhile, these people have no idea how to live without a Capitalist economic system to supply them with all the things they feel like they need.  So when you tell them that their economic system is completely suicidal, they look at you with blank expressions and say, “Well what else are we supposed to do?”  Or else they start recycling their aluminum cans and carrying on their consumer lifestyles and wondering why global warming isn’t being solved.  Or they laugh at you and call you a tree-hugging Communist.  Or maybe they vote for a politician who promises to combat the environmental crisis by cutting down more forests and making room for more solar power stations.

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You organize information in your brain into what are technically called schemas, but what I call information packages.   You organize other information into what are called lacunas, but what I call anti-information packages.

You use information packages to give yourself a mental blueprint (or schematic) of what a situation is supposed to be like.  You do this by connecting ideas to other ideas, so that when you perceive some clues that pull one idea into your consciousness, that pulls some other ideas into your consciousness along with it to prepare you for what you expect to happen.

You use anti-information packages to dispose of ideas that don’t fit with the rest of the information.  In order for you to be able to develop an understanding of your situation and use your sense of cause and effect to pursue a clear course of action to survive and reproduce as best you can, you need for all of the information in your information package to fit together.  If most of the information in your information package fits with everything else, but one piece doesn’t, it’s often easier to reject the piece of information that conflicts with the rest and dump it into a subconscious anti-information package—where it becomes one of the things you don’t notice.

Over the course of our evolution, this would’ve worked pretty well.  If you consider the number of things you perceive about your surroundings at any time, and you consider how many things people have perceived about their surroundings every minute and every day of their lives, for the past 7,000,000 years, and you consider how many times people probably misunderstood things along the way, you can get an idea of how important this was.

For one example, you can see a lot more clearly in the center of your vision than you can in your peripheral vision.  Your peripheral vision is good for noticing big things or things that change suddenly, but if something in your peripheral vision catches your attention that way, what else do you do, but look directly at it—meaning put it in the center of your vision?

The way we perceive the world is never perfect, but it works pretty well most of the time.  If you assumed that everything you misperceived was what it appeared to you, you would drive yourself insane.  You wouldn’t be able to develop a functional sense of cause and effect for dealing with the world, because you would think that unexpected things were constantly happening, but you could never figure out why.  It wouldn’t be because the world really worked in a way that wasn’t predictable, but because you’d think there were some sort of ghosts or phantoms or something always hovering at the edges of your peripheral vision, which would always disappear when you tried to look directly at them.   You wouldn’t be able to function in the world that way, because you’d constantly be distracted by your own sensory misunderstandings.

This is how stage magic and optical illusions work.  An optical illusion is a collection of sensory inputs that you can’t look at all at the same time and make them make sense in your brain.  Likewise, a stage magician very dramatically shows you a collection of sensory cues that don’t all fit together.  These things seem strange to us because they scramble things up in our brains.  But we sort them all out in the end when we figure out the optical illusion or when we learn that stage magicians are very good at tricking our eyes.

This causes problems when big, real conflicts of sensory inputs get edited out of people’s consciousness.  Then you get all manner of psychological defense mechanisms.  Denial is the simplest because you just block the information out of your mind.  With more complicated ones like rationalization and compensation, the person uses physical or conscious mental actions to distract himself from the sensory input.

A simple example of how this can happen is a kid who gets picked on a lot by other kids, who grows up to be antisocial.  Everyone is born wanting to make friends, although some people are born wanting to make more friends than others.  If a person gets picked on a lot, one way they can keep themselves from getting picked on is to stop trying to make friends.  Then they could hide all of that from themselves and decide they didn’t want to make friends with people because they preferred being alone.

The question is, prefer being alone compared to what?   Obviously, that’s compared to all the success they’ve had at trying to make friends, because that’s the only practice in social interaction they have to compare it to.

If they compare it to the idea of making friends though, often it’s a different story.  A lot of people who prefer being alone lead lonely lives.

In this case, the person had two basic pieces of sensory input to work with:  His instinctive feeling of wanting to make friends, and his experience at getting into trouble for trying to make friends.  One way he could make those two sensory inputs fit together is to repress one of them.  If he doesn’t have much success in making friends and decides he didn’t want to make many friends anyway, then he can feel like he’s living the way he does by choice.

Now the person acts in a way that works well in his living conditions.  In his living conditions, making friends wasn’t an option he had.  When he tried to make friends, he got into trouble.  Now he doesn’t try to make friends and doesn’t get into trouble.

This is not to say that the person lives in living conditions where making friends absolutely is not an option.  This is to say that he lives in conditions where he was never able to find a way to make it an option, and the best solution he found to the problem was to repress the idea.  Maybe there were ways he could’ve made friends, but he never thought of them.  Now that he’s decided he doesn’t want to make friends he still isn’t going to think of them.  The end result is that a way does exist for him to make friends, like he wanted to do, but he contents himself with being alone anyway.

This is where people who believe that simplistic self-obsessed superstitions are better than science always say that I can’t tell a person that they live in conditions where making friends is not an option and that they have to make the best of their situation by repressing the idea.  It’s easy to believe that the universal solution for everything is for everyone to do what they feel to be right when you’re happy with your life.  But what if a person has a lot of conflicting emotions that they just can’t sort out?  And what if they wish that someone could tell them something that would help them?  Does your revolutionary political ideology say that we should force those people to be unhappy?  And how do you plan on attracting enough support to a revolution like that to be able to win?

That’s why child psychologists and people like that figure out how people’s feelings work.  That way, for all those people out there who have a lot of conflicting feelings they can’t sort out and who wish someone could tell them something that would help, psychologists can figure out something to tell them.  My parents did this for about 20 years.

If you couldn’t get your car started, what would you do?  Meditate?  Become an alcoholic?  Become a Jehovah’s Witness?  Molest little boys?  Those are things a lot of people do when they have a lot of conflicting feelings they just can’t make sense of.  Or would you call someone who knew a lot about cars and ask them for advice on how to diagnose the problem and fix it?

Just because your brain is a lot more complicated than a car doesn’t prove it must have magical properties.

The trick to figuring out whether a person was born not wanting to make many friends or has learned not to want to make many friends in order to make the best of a bad situation, is how happy the person feels.  One person can’t tell another person how many friends that person is supposed to want to have.  But a person can tell how lonely he feels himself.  If a person prefers being alone but feels lonely, that’s a big clue that they prefer being alone compared to any other choice they’ve found, but that they don’t want to be alone.

Dr. Goleman gives a more extreme example of the same problem in Vital Lies, Simple Truths.  A woman who was abused as a little girl honestly believed her parents had tried to kill her on multiple occasions because they loved her so much.  The basic sensory inputs she had were her own desire for her parents to love her (which every child is born with) and their actions that were completely inconsistent with expressing love for her.  So she blocked out the part of her emotions their actions caused that she didn’t want to feel, and convinced herself that trying to strangle her and throwing knives at her was how they expressed their love for her.  By dumping part of her sensory inputs into an anti-information package, she made all the other sensory inputs fit together in a way that let her carry on with her life.

By editing her consciousness and subconsciousness like this, the lady had been able to act upon what she believed to be true and function in the situation she lived in.  Acting like her abusive parents loved her instead of fighting back kept her from getting abused even more.

You see this in abused children all the time.  To other people they seem to act strangely.  That’s because they’ve gotten very good at not noticing certain things about the world.  When they act upon their perceptions, they act a lot differently than other people expect them to, because the other people’s perceptions include the things the abused child has shut out.  Then the other people decide according to their own perceptions what would be an appropriate way to act, without realizing the other person is using a different perception.

There are lots of ways abused children can do this, but that’s the basic idea behind it.

The end result is that abused children get very highly adapted to thinking in whatever way they need to think to be able to act in the way they need to act to survive at home, but it gives them a lot of problems interacting with people socially outside their homes.

For people to think in the way they need to think in order to act in the way they need to act to keep themselves alive and reproducing has always been important to us.  Here you can see a clue to why people from different parts of the world seem to think a lot differently: because they live in different environments where they needed to do different things to survive and reproduce.  To make the best of their living conditions they’ve learned different versions of what is and isn’t important to pay attention to, compared people who live somewhere else.

Without having any way to conduct an experiment to test this, I would have to guess that hunter-gatherers abuse their children a lot less than people of agricultural societies.  For one, people who live in agricultural societies have a lot more feelings that don’t fit well with their surroundings, so a lot of parents would direct their anger at people who couldn’t do anything about it—namely, their children.  Also, our relative material affluence makes raising healthy children much less necessary to our own and our children’s survival and reproduction.  If you go work all day at a job you hate, come home, drink beer, watch TV, and yell at your kids, you can survive just fine in America and your kids can grow up to get jobs and drink beer and watch TV too.  On the other hand, if you have to hunt wild animals every day, build your own house, and make your own clothes, tools, and weapons out of sticks, rocks, and other things you can find in the forest, you can’t afford to be emotionally unhealthy, and neither can your children.  That is, whatever way your children learn to think and act at home has to serve them well for the way they’ll need to think and act to provide for themselves as adults.

This basic trick we’ve evolved for altering our own perceptions of the world to make us act in whatever way enables us to function best in our living conditions keeps getting more and more out of control the longer we ignore it and don’t address the problem.  Hence the reason it was so easy for so many people to ignore the nuclear arms race.  If the information in your information package was “tranquil life in the suburbs”, “happy family”, “high-paying job”, and “global nuclear annihilation”, the easiest way for you to make your life make sense was to dump the global nuclear annihilation idea into an anti-information package.

But then the anti-nuke movement came along and put the global nuclear annihilation idea back into people’s consciousness, along with a “something you can do about it” idea.  Now people had an information package that they could use to help them survive and reproduce, so they could keep the information in their consciousness and act upon it.

Likewise, if you were sitting in your apartment and were engrossed in your favorite TV show, or were wrapped up in your Friday night poker game with your buddies, and suddenly from out in the hall you heard a woman scream, “Help, help, help!  A man with a knife is chasing me!”  the easiest way for you to make that fit with all the other information in your information package might be “disturbance out in the hall”, or “the neighbors must’ve turned their TV up too loud,” or “someone else probably called the police already”.  Then you dump the idea into an anti-information package and get back to your TV show or your poker game.

Now let’s go back to kid who grew up in the abusive household.  Suppose she grows up, has two kids of her own, and doesn’t abuse them.  But then she goes to a restaurant with you one night.  The restaurant is crowded and noisy.  In order to make yourself heard, you have to raise your voice.  She suddenly gets really uncomfortable.  (I’ve done this experiment word for word—not on purpose, but because my friend didn’t realize her choice of restaurant was going to lead to this.)

When you raised your voice at your friend in the restaurant, you were attaching the “noisy restaurant” idea to the “need to talk louder” idea.  But when she heard the “person talking at me loudly” idea, she connected that to the “danger” idea, and the “about to get beaten” idea and the “better not raise my voice” idea and the “wish I could leave” idea, and whatever else came with it.

You can’t stick labels on people’s ideas like items in a grocery store—which is why psychologists don’t do it.    These ideas might be similar from one person to another, but they’re not perfectly interchangeable.  What you can do though—which is how psychologists use this—is, if a person seems to be acting strangely in a situation, see if you can tell what kind of a situation the person’s behavior would fit into.  That gives you an idea of how the person perceives the situation, and why they perceive it differently from the way you perceive it.

You probably can’t do this with one person in one situation, because the person won’t give you enough information to figure out what situation they’re reacting to.  But if you know the person well, and especially if you’ve seen them act this way multiple times, you can make a pretty good guess.

If you see a lot of different people each act the same way in similar situations, and you know that their perceptions are all greatly influenced by the same things, once again you can make a good guess.   If 20 people were all raised by TV commercials, and they all look at you the same way when you say “suicidal economic system”, it’s a pretty safe bet that they all have a “Capitalism is the best idea ever” idea in their information packages, and now the best way they can find to connect the suicidal economic system idea to the other information in their information packages is to connect it to a “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” idea, or “trying to draw attention to herself” idea, or “doesn’t know anything” idea, or “not very smart” idea, or “Communist” idea, or “unpatriotic” idea, or “terrorist” idea, or “recycle aluminum cans” idea, or “vote for politicians who promise to solve the problem” idea, or “cut down more forests and build more solar power stations” idea, or whatever.  Obviously they won’t all be acting on exactly the same information packages, so you can’t figure out people’s information packages in groups as well as you can for individuals, but it does at least give you somewhere to start at figuring out why something that seems obvious to you seems completely incomprehensible to them.

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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People always say that I can’t solve complicated problems by making them sound so simple.  People like Josef Stalin tried that and it didn’t work, so that must prove it’s impossible.  Or they point out that I keep saying that other people’s solutions are too simplistic, so why are my simple solutions to complicated problems any better?

It is true that some people who are emotionally unhealthy were born with certain parts of their brains not working correctly.  That is a complicated problem that has a complicated cause.  But even that appearance of complexity leads to an overly simplistic solution.  If complicated problems seem to have complicated causes, think how much money pharmaceuticals manufacturers can make by telling people they need to feed their children more drugs.

The simple origins of complicated emotional health problems that I’ve been telling you about seem to a lot of people like they can’t be true because it requires emotionally healthy people to compare themselves to emotionally unhealthy people.  If you look at the things that are the easiest to see, you see an emotionally healthy person and an emotionally unhealthy person.  Since the emotionally unhealthy person is a lot different from you (assuming you are the emotionally healthy person), you want to believe there must be a complicated reason for it.

Very often, the reason is very simple.  The emotionally unhealthy person was born with the same brain structure you have.  The only difference between you and them is how you learned how to use it.  Hence the reason it’s so easy to believe that emotionally unhealthy people must have complicated reasons for their problems.  Once you accept that their brains work just like yours, you accept that you could’ve ended up in their place just as easily.  And that’s exactly right.

A lot of emotional un-health, or other unusual mental conditions, are caused by people using the same brain structure everyone else has in an unusual way.  They learned to use their brain structure that way because they lived in unusual conditions.  They, like you and everyone else in the world, figured out how to make the best of the situation they found themselves in.  Now they perceive the world in an unusual way, and now they act upon their perceptions in an unusual way.

As you can see, once you learn how the universal human brain structure creates both emotional health and un-health, you see that emotional health and emotional un-health are just two different points on the same spectrum.

From there, it’s only one more step to see that people who are supposed to be the enemies of your country don’t live on the completely psychotic side of the world after all.  They’re people just like you, who have learned to use their universal human brain structure to make the best of their situation, just like you.  The only difference between you and them is that they live in different conditions than you, so they’ve learned to perceive the world differently from you, so they act differently from you.

Once again, you and your country’s mortal enemies are just two different points on the same spectrum.   It’s easy to believe that there must be complicated reasons for their complicated differences, because it makes it a lot easier to believe that you have good reasons for being enemies.

This is yet another example of the fundamental difference between science and politics.   You can’t learn how the world works by looking at the things that exist, but only by looking at how those things interact with each other.  The things that exist are the easiest to see, which makes them the easiest things for politicians to point at to prove how smart they supposedly are, and win the votes of the majority of the population who are kept ignorant of science.   And then all you end up with are political systems that never work the way people thought they would.

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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Once you start deconstructing people’s subconsciousness, you have to figure out what to do next based on the person and the situation.  After all, you’re not doing this for the sake of turning the other person’s brain into your personal capital, but out of mutual aid, for the sake of helping them to notice information—and consequently choices—that they wouldn’t notice otherwise.

If the person doesn’t want to listen to your advice, there’s really nothing you can do to change their perception.  You can, however, try to act differently around the person (if possible), now that you can tell what situation they feel like they’re in.

If the person is trying to figure out what’s going wrong with their life, you can tell them as much about what you’ve noticed as they’re willing to listen to.  You do have to do this cooperatively, because they don’t realize they’re doing this, and you’re basically telling them that their brain doesn’t work well enough.  You could tell them what situations you think they’re reacting to, what you saw happen (or what you meant by something they misinterpreted), and why you think they misunderstood.  You could tell them about choices you can see they have (or that they seem to you to have) in the situation that they don’t seem to have noticed.  Whatever.

If the person acting upon what they believe to be true is obstructing you or someone else from doing something, or obstructing the person from succeeding at something they claim to be succeeding at, and that they want everyone else to believe they’re succeeding at, that’s a problem.   This is another problem I’ve seen that’s bogging down the general progressive activist movement.

There’s a saying in the military for this:  “Check yourself”.  Why do you feel like what you’re doing is supposed to succeed, versus why isn’t it succeeding?   There’s an equivalent in aviation too.  You get trained to self-diagnose your mental state and figure out why you’re thinking the way you’re thinking, and how you should be thinking instead, to keep yourself from making stupid mistakes.

So check yourself.  How is matter and energy moving through the world as a result of your actions?   Are you winning, or not?  If you’re not, do you feel like you’re winning?  If you feel like you’re winning even though you’re not, why do you feel that way?

I’ve met a lot of activists who talk about how much they’re accomplishing.  Then I ask what seem to me like obvious questions:  “Really?  If you’re accomplishing so much, why do the world’s problems keep getting worse?”  Then they start telling me about new levels of consciousness dawning upon the world and birthing pains of the new society and people needing to get in touch with their feelings, and why do we need civilization anyway, and a whole bunch of other things to evade talking about the inescapable fact that matter and energy are not moving through the world in a way that’s consistent with their victory.

Here progressive activists are crippling themselves with their open-mindedness.  It is self-evident that you can’t build a non-oppressive political system without including everyone, because a political system that excludes anyone is oppressive by definition.  But by trying to fit everyone’s beliefs, ideas, and feelings into a single political system by sticking them all together as though they’re what they appear to be on the surface, you create a political system that, at best, is so bulky it can’t compete against world governments.  At worst it turns out to be self-contradictory and drives away public support by making you look like you have no idea what you’re doing (which you don’t).  Then you get sensitive New Age vegan peace activists sitting around talking about how environmental sustainability will prevail after the total global collapse of civilization, and when I try to use science to show them that billions of people would get killed that way, but people can use science to solve the problem without anyone getting killed, they accuse me of trying to be Chairman Mao.

To solve this problem with information and anti-information packages, activists will need to start critically appraising their own plans, and should start critically appraising each other’s plans and offering constructive criticism.  Remember, you’re talking about how to make plans more successful, not about why they won’t succeed.  That’s not to say that you have to find a way to make all plans succeed, but that is to say that every idea has the potential to be used in some way or another.

Also, don’t be afraid to critically appraise each other’s mental states—but only if you know each other enough to do it well.

I’m sure you all realize that a lot of activists are casualties of Capitalist psychological warfare.  There’s a saying among Native Americans:  “You can’t decolonize your land until you decolonize your mind.”

A lot of activists have figured out the basic idea behind this, but haven’t figured out how it works well enough to solve the problem.  Yes, we all know that in order for the revolution to succeed everyone has to get in touch with their feelings, and that in the post-revolutionary society, everyone will be encouraged to get in touch with their feelings, instead of being discouraged from it like they are in Capitalist society.  But if you get so caught up in getting in touch with your feelings, and get so caught up in the idea that getting in touch with your feelings is going to make you win, that you never get around to making matter and energy move through the world in a way that makes you win, your so-called revolutionary political movement has turned into just another mass psychological defense mechanism.

The general progressive activist movement is made up of a lot of feminists, homosexuals, Pagans, and other minorities.  As minorities you’ve been subjected to a lot of emotional aggression over the courses of your lives.  Knowing that the current way of doing things doesn’t work is a necessary start of any revolution.  However, if your childhood has left you with perpetual feelings of needing to prove that you can think for yourself, or of needing to belong to a group, or needing to make people respect you as an individual, or needing to feel like you have control over your life, or needing to experience life for yourself, or needing to feel like you have the right to your own emotions, or whatever, watch out.  You probably developed those lasting feelings long before you learned about your activist movement.  If your actions are not making matter and energy move through the world in a way that’s making your movement win, check yourself.  The first thing you better check is your lasting childhood feelings.

If you have lasting childhood feelings that you’re trying to satisfy by participating in your activist movement, you’ve probably fallen into a trap.  You felt these powerful feelings because in some way or another they felt like threats to your ability to survive and reproduce.  Now you’ve surrounded yourself with people who won’t tell you your feelings are wrong, and you get to rebel in the biggest way possible against the social systems that made you feel that way.  But subconsciously, the victory of your activist movement is not your highest priority in life.

This lasting feeling of yours affects your perception of the world and makes you want to make the feeling go away.  You take action accordingly.  But you don’t realize it.   That feeling has given you a sense of “choices that seem like good ideas”, and those choices are not the victory of your activist movement.  They might be similar to the victory of your activist movement, but they aren’t the same thing.  You just think they are.

You think you are participating in a group activist movement, but you are actually a make-people-respect-my-individuality (or whatever) movement of one.  You’re not struggling for what you think you’re struggling for, and that’s a big reason you’re not winning.  Either you’re using the right struggle for the wrong goal, or the wrong struggle for the right goal.

You are not noticing a lot of other choices you would have if it wasn’t for this feeling, because none of those choices would help make the feeling go away.  Since making the feeling go away is one of your highest goals in life, to the way you perceive the world, actions you could take that wouldn’t help make the feeling go away are not choices.  Since they wouldn’t help make your bad feeling go away, they don’t seem relevant to you.  So they become some of the things you don’t notice.

Another problem this probably creates for you is in dealing with other activists.  If your perception of choices you can make is confined to things you can do to try to make your bad feelings go away, you probably get into a lot of disagreements with other activists.  When someone else comes up with an idea for something you could do that wouldn’t contribute to making your bad feeling go away, either you’re not interested in doing it or you try to come up with reasons why it won’t work.  Whatever your situation is, if the things you can do to make your bad feelings go away are not consistent with the things you can do to make your activist movement win, it probably causes a lot of internal conflicts in your groups that detract from your success.  Of course, other people can have lasting bad feelings they’re trying to make go away too.

I don’t know how many emotionally maimed people I’ve met who call themselves Anarchists.  They love to prove they can think for themselves, or that they’re individuals, or that they’re intelligent, or that they have the right to their emotions, or that they have the right to experience life for themselves, or whatever.  Those things overlap a great deal with Anarchist values, so for them to do those things in the name of Anarchism works well most of the time.  But then the moment I start talking about science, they perceive it as a threat to their ability to think for themselves, to be individuals, to impress everyone with how smart they are, to develop their intuition, or whatever.  Then these so-called Anarchists start trying to discourage me from thinking about science because these discoveries aren’t compatible with their political ideology.  But if the success of Anarchism depends on discouraging people from thinking about things that certain people don’t approve of, Anarchism has already been defeated.

Two- and three-year-old boys have a habit of playing with their dicks whenever they feel emotionally insecure.  These days I meet men in their 30s and 40s who feel emotionally insecure whenever I start talking about how much I know about science and how useful it is in solving the problems they (supposedly) are trying to solve.  And they immediately start playing with their dicks.  Not literally, but they start clutching at whatever they find closest to hand to help them stop feeling insecure.  They think they’re being original when they drag out all the same bullshit arguments against science that Christian fundamentalists always use (with a few words changed), without even bothering to learn enough about science to be able to make arguments that are even relevant to science, and instead argue against their completely misinformed idea that they refer to as science even though it has nothing to do with science.  Then they try to impress me with how that proves they know so much more about science than I do.  Then they tell me about the QRS people who live in the jungles of Bolivia who discovered something about life that completely contradicts the three sentences I got out of my mouth before they interrupted me, and how that proves the Theory of Evolution must be wrong.  Or they tell me about what Peter Kropotkin had to say about evolution in Mutual Aid, and why can’t evolution work that way?  However they do it, they’re hearing whatever they want to hear, assuming that’s what I must’ve meant, telling me that’s what I meant, and then coming back at me with arguments that have no relation to actual science.  But if you listen to the words these people say, the tone of voice they say them in, and the direction it always moves the conversation, they’re really trying to prove they can think for themselves, or that they’re smart, or that they’re individuals, or whatever.  So really, with the literal words they’re saying they seem to be talking about science, but it’s really a conversation about how smart they are, or how much they can think for themselves, or about them being entitled to their own opinions, or whatever.  Then I ask them if they know so much about how to have a revolution, in what sense exactly does ten people coming to their weekly meetings in the midst of a metropolitan area of 5 million people constitute victory?  And then it just goes downhill from there…

Maybe there’s nothing you can do about internal conflicts like this in your groups or your personal lives.  But maybe my telling you about this will help you sort your life out.

Speaking as a third generation anti-Capitalist, on behalf of your grandchildren, I can say don’t worry, people in the post-revolutionary society being encouraged to get in touch with their feelings solves a whole lot of problems.  If you have a lust for adventure, are emotionally well balanced, and encourage your kids to do their own things, you can end up with a world full of people like me and my family.  I’ve been friends with doctors of physics and biology, and I’ve been friends with wanted felons.   I’ve been homeless, I’ve belonged to a street gang, I’ve been an artist, a construction worker, I’ve taught high school, I’ve got eight years of post-secondary education in four different fields, I’m licensed as a commercial helicopter pilot and certified as a flight instructor, I’ve traveled all over America, I’ve helped set up two punk theatre companies, I’ve climbed mountains, I stared down three dozen riot police all by myself one night just for fun, I’ve written about a dozen books, and now I’m helping to pioneer the most complicated branch of science ever and simultaneously turning it into a global anti-Capitalist revolution.   I’ve done all of this just because I saw I had choices, and I made them.  And compared to the rest of my family, what I’ve done in life isn’t all that remarkable.

There’s really nothing to it but to do it.  But to do it, you have to not be raised to believe that a sedentary and mentally sedated life is the best way to live, and you have to not get stuck with lasting bad feelings that you spend the rest of your life trying to escape.

There are a lot more ways to get in touch with your feelings than most progressive activists want to believe.  I practically eat broken glass for breakfast and drink gasoline to wash it down.  When I discovered that all the science we have now points to the United States government being the biggest threat to the future of the world, that the people who were doing the most to try to solve the problem are being branded terrorists and thrown in prison, and that if I tried to help them win I would probably be accused of being the next Osama bin Ladin, well, I’ve faced worse threats than that just for recreation.

By understanding how people’s brains work, you can put that knowledge to constructive use.  You can unlock more free will than people realized they had.  You can raise your children to stay in touch with their feelings in the first place, instead of trying to back up and tack it on as adults as an afterthought.  You can communicate information to people effectively, and give them what they need to make informed decisions.  You put all of that together, and you have a political and economic system built on personal empowerment.   If everyone feels satisfied with their lives, they don’t need to oppress each other to try to take from other people what they need to make their lives feel complete, and they don’t need police to keep them safe from each other.

And if Capitalists understand this much about how people’s brains work—which they do—you know what they’re going to do with the information.

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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One final point I need to make about evolutionary psychology is going to have a gigantic impact on the future of the world.  I told you how we misinterpret a lot of things about the world because we don’t live in the conditions our brains evolved in, but it was our brains that made us leave the conditions of our evolution behind.  That’s about to happen again in the 21st century, in a much bigger way.

Any time you introduce a new species to an environment, its population size increases until it’s limited by predators, food availability, disease, or the radical alteration of the environment caused by the species itself.  The entire Earth is the environment of our species—because we live all over the Earth.  Thanks to weapons, agriculture, and medicine, we’ve eliminated the first three limitations to our population size—which is why our population size keeps growing.

That leaves radical alteration to the environment.  When another species limits its population size by radical alteration of its environment, it means it eats all the food available.  First the species goes through a population explosion, and then when all the food is gone, most of the animals die.  The few survivors eat the food the environment produces as fast as the environment can produce it, so the environment never returns to what it was before.

The lifecycle of the species in the new environment can be divided into two phases:  the colonization phase and the sustainability phase.  The colonization phase is the time in which the population of the species expands to fill the carrying capacity of the environment.  The sustainability phase is the time the species lives at the carrying capacity of the environment—whatever that carrying capacity turns out to be.

It has taken our species 7 million years to complete the colonization phase of our environment.  Our brains evolved during our colonization phase.  In this century, we are going to move into our sustainability phase, one way or the other.  The only choice we have left is how we make the transition.

Lots of people are talking about this already, but they don’t realize how big of a problem it’s going to be.  We naturally perceive the world to be a lot bigger than ourselves, so any one of us shouldn’t have much impact on it.   For 7 million years that was close enough to true that everyone assumed it was true.  Some groups of indigenous people have learned to live sustainably with their environments, but they don’t know how to do that with the entire world any more than anyone else does.

As a species, we don’t have instincts for global environmentalism.  We have instincts that contradict global environmentalism.  And within this century, our species—or most of it, at least—is either going to live or die by our global environmentalism or lack of it.   So we are now in another transition where a whole lot of things we naturally perceive to be true about the world aren’t true anymore.

If I said that the planetary biology movement is the Manhattan Project of the Peace, Environmentalism, and Human Rights movements, if anything it would be an understatement.

You know how education activists keep saying, “It will be a great day when schools get all the funding they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to pay for a bomber”?  They were even more right than they realized.

Making a transition to environmental sustainability without most of the human race getting killed is going to require the education equivalent of World War III.   But instead of having the most powerful education system in the world to try to make the transition, America has the most powerful military in the world.

Oh well.  That’s why we’re revolutionaries.

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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Gender and sexuality are two easy ways for Capitalists to divide and conquer the public, to prevent large groups of people from effectively resisting political and economic inequality.   Hence the reason anti-Capitalist revolutionaries usually include feminism and gay rights in their political movements.

The study of the evolution of gender differences among humans began with Charles Darwin.  Since men and women both belong to the same species, both live in the same places, and both eat the same food, the differences between them can’t be attributed to any of those things.  The only possibility that leaves is that all differences between men and women must be the result of their different means of reproducing.

Dr. Steven Pinker, in his book The Blank Slate, shows how scientists who study human evolution have traced all the differences between men and women all the way down to that fundamental difference in approaches to reproduction.

Women produce a few large sex cells and incubate them when they’re fertilized.  It takes women nine months of pregnancy plus eighteen years of motherhood (or thereabouts) to reproduce effectively.

Men, on the other hand, produce millions of small and highly mobile sex cells, and can shoot them off in about ten seconds.

Effective reproduction depends on children being conceived, being born, and growing up to adulthood, when they can have children of their own.  One way to do that is by quality of reproduction— producing large sex cells, incubating them, and caring for the children personally, which is what women do.  The other way to do it is by quantity of reproduction— conceiving lots of children, leaving them up to other people to raise, and betting that some of them will grow up to adulthood, which is what men can do.

As you can see, the study of the evolutionary origins of gender differences works the same way as the study of the agricultural history of the world—by studying how human DNA moves through the world.

Since men and women have to do different things to reproduce effectively, their brains have evolved to make doing those things seem like good ideas to them.   This is a big example of evolutionary psychology, and a good example of how much evolutionary psychologists have figured out about people.

In order to reproduce effectively, women have to be more selective about their mates than men do.  Since women have to be pregnant for nine months in order to reproduce, and men don’t, it isn’t physically possible for women to reproduce as many times in their lives as it is for men.

Since women have to be more selective about their mates, men have to compete against other men to mate with women.  The fact that men, like the males of all other species of large mammals, have so much more upper body strength than women do indicates that, like the males of all other large mammal species, men have competed against each other violently for the vast majority of human evolution.  For one male to make another male run away, or otherwise render him physically incapable of mating with a female, is the simplest, most straightforward way for the first male to give himself the opportunity to mate with the female—whether we’re talking about other animals, humans, or our pre-human ancestors who lived during the 99% of human evolution that led from the animal kingdom up to modern humans.   Physical competition contributes to natural selection, by making the strongest, healthiest males the most successful at passing their genes on to the next generation.

It could be argued that natural selection favored stronger men just because stronger men could hunt and fight off predators more effectively than weaker men.  But the other clue is that men are so much more prone to violence toward other men than women are prone to violence toward other women.  Taken together, the men who were the best at violence had the most children, just like the males of every other species of large mammal.

For men, a part of spreading their DNA effectively includes providing for their children. For most of evolution the strongest, healthiest men have been best able to provide for their children.   It also means that the strongest, healthiest men produce the strongest, healthiest children by their genes alone.

Women, like the females of all other large mammal species, want to mate with the men that will be best able to provide for their children.  This is why violent competition has played such a big role in mating, among humans and all other large mammals, because seeing who wins the competition is how the female tells who the strongest male is.

Here’s where relationships get tricky.  As you may have noticed, men and women’s brains make them perceive spreading their own DNA effectively seem like a good idea.  That says nothing about spreading each other’s DNA effectively.

This is how evolution has always worked.  Whoever spreads their own DNA most effectively has the most children, and therefore, passes the most of their DNA on to the next generation.  With it, they pass on the genes (meaning DNA) that made them think that whatever they did to pass on their DNA so effectively was a good idea.  After the billions of generations that have lived since life evolved on Earth, we are descended from people—and animals—who spread their own DNA more effectively than anyone else.  Amidst all that DNA are the genes that give us the instincts to spread our own DNA the same way.

Healthy men in their peak reproductive years generally like to have sex at least once a week.   Women only ovulate once a month.  So how did the two halves of a species end up with completely different reproduction schedules?

The only way those numbers fit together is that for most of human evolution, men must’ve been trying to have sex with four women per month, on the average, and for one week out of the month, each woman must’ve had four men competing to try to have sex with her.

Since men reproduce through violent competition (or at least, have for roughly 7 million years), that means that the strongest, healthiest men, who are best able to compete for women, are also the youngest.  That means that for men, spreading their DNA most effectively means taking full advantage of that window of opportunity.  That means that in order for men to reproduce as effectively as possible, young men naturally want to have lots of sex with lots of women.  Does that ring a bell?

An effective way for a man to spread his DNA would be to beget as many children as he could provide for.  But an even more effective way would be to beget as many children as he could provide for and then beget even more children, in the hopes that those children could survive on their own.

That means that the most effective way for a woman to spread her DNA would be to reproduce with the strongest, healthiest male, and then get him to help her raise the children.  But if the man wasn’t up for that, the second most effective way for a woman to spread her DNA would be by mating with the strongest, healthiest male, and then finding another man to help her raise the children.

For most of evolution, and even to this day, it has been a lot easier for women to keep track of which children are theirs, than it has been for men.  Part of a man’s ability to spread his DNA includes providing for his own children.  If a woman mates with the strongest, healthiest male, and then finds another man to help her raise the child, the second man’s ability to spread his DNA is seriously undermined, because now he’s devoting his time and effort to providing for a child who carries another man’s DNA.

As a result, part of a man’s ability to spread his DNA effectively depends on his being jealous, protective, and territorial of his mate.  Part of a woman’s ability to spread her DNA depends on her being more forgiving of her man shacking up with other women, as long as he sticks around and keeps putting food on her table. Sound familiar?

The most effective way for women to spread their DNA has always been to combine their genes with the genes of the strongest, healthiest males.  The most effective way for the strongest, healthiest males to spread their DNA has always been to mate with as many women as possible.  The most effective way for men who aren’t the strongest and healthiest to spread their DNA has been to mate with fewer women, stay faithful to them, and help them raise the kids—even the ones the women had from other men.

As a result, socially dominant alpha males attract the most women, and can afford to treat them like disposable sex objects.  Women are naturally attracted to socially dominant alpha males who seem like great partners at first but end up treating women like disposable sex objects.  This also means that men who don’t treat women like disposable sex objects have never done very well at attracting women or at spreading their DNA, because over the course of evolution, socially dominant alpha males have had sex with the most women and have impregnated the most women, and those sensitive New-Age guys have devoted a lot of their energy to raising children who carry the DNA of self-obsessed alpha males.  In genetic evolution, it is literally true that nice guys finish last.

Women compete against each other too, but they don’t have to resort to violence.  Even though women are more forgiving to their men for shacking up with other women, to each woman, all the other women that her man shacks up with threaten the survival of her DNA.  Part of a woman’s most effective means of spreading her DNA consists of keeping a man providing for her children.  The fewer other children a man has to provide for, the more he can provide for her children.  The more women a man mates with and the more children he has, the more thinly his efforts are going to be spread.  That means that one thing women can do to spread their DNA more effectively is to discourage men from being unfaithful to them, either in mating with other women, or in providing for their other children.  Another thing women can do is to make other women less appealing to men, so that men either won’t mate with them, or will abandon them after they have.  That part of women’s ability to spread their DNA includes spreading rumors, gossip, and lies, in order to undermine other women’s appeal.   Does that sound familiar?

For all of human evolution prior to the domestication of animals beginning roughly 10,000 years ago, all work energy was supplied by human muscles.  That means that for men the most effective means to spread their DNA included using their upper body strength to kill animals, cut down trees, and otherwise collect material resources.  That means that men’s ability to reproduce has depended on their ability to make things happen in the physical world through force of muscle and the use of intelligence to produce readily tangible results.

Compared to what women have had to do for most of evolution, men’s jobs were easy.  Prior to about 5,000 years ago, there was not a single metal tool anywhere on Earth.  That means that for the 2.8 million years leading up to the development of metal working, every woman on Earth had to raise her children in the stone age, and for roughly 4 million years before that, our ancestors didn’t even use stone tools.  For the 7 million years leading up to the development of writing, every woman on Earth had to raise her children without being able to read any books about how to do it. Prior to about 60,000 years ago, spoken language didn’t even exist, so women couldn’t even trade advice on raising children with their friends.  And still, for all of that time, women raised healthy children by figuring out connections between what emotions their children were showing, what their children needed to be healthy, and what natural resources they could use to give their children what they needed.  This means that women’s ability to spread their DNA has depended on women being more emotionally sensitive than men, and knowing a lot more about people and the world than men have needed to, although they knew it in much more abstract, intangible terms.

One important conclusion that follows from this is that men’s use of intellect for immediately tangible results has meant that the things men traditionally use their intelligence for can readily be put into words.  The things women traditionally have used their intelligence for aren’t readily tangible and are much, much older than spoken language.  Just because women possess abilities that have never been adequately defined in words doesn’t mean those abilities don’t exist; it just means that those abilities are older than words.

Another important conclusion that can be drawn here is that in the modern world where so much work is done by machines, men’s upper body strength isn’t the asset that it traditionally has been.  Over the course of history, men have invented more and more labor-saving machines to help them get more and more work done with less and less muscle power.  By now, women can operate power tools and heavy equipment just as easily as men can, which means that women can provide everything they need for themselves.  That has made men feel trapped in a recession in evolution’s reproductive economic system, because the abilities they have to trade aren’t worth as much to women as they used to be.  That’s left a lot of men feeling rather… impotent, so to make up for it they’ve done all kinds of things to put women down to where they feel women belong in society.

Men and women each communicate in terms that seem most appropriate to them, which means that when they talk to each other, they don’t talk in the same terms.  Have you ever gotten into an argument with your man or woman that you just could not sort out because your partner kept talking about stuff that had nothing to do with what you were talking about, and just wouldn’t pay attention to what you were saying?  There’s a reason for that.  It’s because you weren’t talking about the same things.  Men’s ability to spread their DNA revolves around finding tangible solutions to problems, so men naturally focus on solving problems.  Women’s ability to spread their DNA depends on being able to communicate emotionally with her children, and on keeping a strong emotional bond with a man to help her raise her children.  Women naturally focus on maintaining emotional harmony in the relationship, which makes emotional harmony seem a lot more important to women than it does to men.

This means that women can sense problems in relationships more easily than men can.  This means that a lot of times, to women, men seem emotionally insensitive, because they aren’t as sensitive as women.   That means that a lot of times women will try to solve problems in relationships that the men haven’t even noticed yet.

Sometimes, to men, women seem to be inventing problems, because to the men these so-called “problems” aren’t problems.  In that case, the woman’s emotional sensitivity could be leading her astray, because the relationship problems aren’t nearly as big as she thinks they are, because they’re only affecting her—they aren’t affecting the man also and he’s just ignoring them, which is what the woman would naturally assume was happening.

Other times, it means that women will seem to nag men about things the men don’t really care about.  But in that case, the woman could be doing a very manly thing in her own way, by using her abilities to solve problems.

Disagreements in relationships can easily spiral out of control, if the man and the woman can’t even agree on what they’re disagreeing about.  Ultimately, a relationship exists because the man and the woman share an emotional connection to each other.  If they keep having disagreements they can’t resolve, their feelings for each other are going to change, their relationship is going to change, and eventually their relationship is going to end, and neither of them are ever going to know why.

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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The belief that rape is motivated purely by violence and not at all by sex, is a complete myth.

The myth was born of the feminist and environmentalist movements of the 1960s, in which people began deciding that everything natural was good.  Rape isn’t good; therefore, rape can’t be natural.  Q.E.D.

Homicide is also natural.  If everything natural was good, murder would be legalized.  But much to the contrary, murder—and rape—exists in every single civilization in the world, with no exceptions, and they are also outlawed in every single civilization in the world, with no exceptions.  Rape is natural, but so is the belief that rape isn’t good.

The scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to rape as a means of reproduction.  For any man who couldn’t find a willing woman to reproduce with, the most effective way for him to preserve the survival of his DNA would be by force.  I think I can make it obvious with two simple observations that pretty much everyone over the age of 14 has made.

First, men like to have sex more often than women do.  Obviously, that means that in order for one side to get what they want, the other side has to lose.

Second, men have always used violence to get what they want.

If the myth that rape is purely an act of violence was true, that would make sex not only the one thing that collectively men want more than anything else but also the one magical thing that no man anywhere on Earth, at any point in history, had ever once used violence to get.

Rape is purely an act of violence and has nothing to do with sex as far as the woman is concerned.  If she wanted to have sex, it wouldn’t be rape.  But since she doesn’t, she’s being forced into it by violence.

One problem with teaching the public that rape isn’t motivated by sex is that some women who believe that myth are going to act on their faulty perceptions and get themselves into dangerous situations they could’ve avoided.   Another is that if you try to solve the problem by teaching men about rape solely from the woman’s perspective and pretending that the man’s perspective doesn’t exist, a lot of men are going to think you don’t know what you’re talking about and completely ignore what you’re trying to teach them.

So how do you like that?  The government could solve just about every relationship problem in America, if only they’d teach kids where their problems came from in the first place.

Of course, one by-product of that would be a country full of feminists armed to the teeth with all the man-science they’ll ever need to explain their side of the story in terms that men can’t pretend not to understand.

Filed under: g: Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution by Ezra
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One apparent hole in my chain of logic seems to be how homosexuals could perceive themselves to be spreading their DNA as effectively as possible.  Well let’s look at some things heterosexuals do.

A guy who puts on a condom before he has sex with his girlfriend who he has no intention of ever having children with, is preserving the survival of his DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him.

A man and a woman who get married even though one of them is completely infertile are preserving the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.

A man and a woman who get married in their 50s, after both of them are past their reproductive years, are preserving the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.

None of these types of heterosexual relationships would be worth much in the conditions of our evolution, because none of them lead to reproduction.  But we don’t live in the conditions of our evolution, so all bets on what constitutes appropriate behavior are off.

The preservation of the individual’s DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her applies not only to reproduction, but also to survival.   All the effort that a person doesn’t devote to having and raising children is effort that he or she can devote to making a life for him- or herself.

All of these examples of heterosexual and homosexual behavior that involve reproductive activity but don’t lead to literal reproduction are examples of ways different parts of our brains were created by different genes.  Usually when people act upon the collective feelings the different parts of their brains give them, they have children, which is why our population size keeps growing.  But there are other ways people can do all of the things they need to do to satisfy their feelings without having children.  Whether people look for those ways intentionally or stumble into them by accident, the end result is that the person acted upon all the feelings their brains gave them and didn’t have children.

As far as human behavior is concerned, homosexuality is just birth control that’s 100% effective.

A lot of people say that homosexuality is unnatural.  Under a secular government, that argument is completely meaningless.  Everything humans do is a product of human evolution in one way or another, so everything humans do is natural.  Under a secular government, the only way to prove that homosexuality was unnatural would be to prove the existence of Satan, or somebody like him, which no one has done yet.  That’s the problem with believing in things that are, by definition, unprovable.

Homosexuals have figured out a few relationship tricks that heterosexuals haven’t.  By having relationships with people of their own gender, homosexuals escape all the gender differences relationship drama.  By eliminating that conflict from their lives, they free up energy to use to make lives for themselves by doing all the other things that everyone does.  They still preserve the survival of their own DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them, by making the best lives they can for themselves.  If having children in a heterosexual relationship isn’t something they perceive themselves able to do, then it doesn’t have anything to do with preserving the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.

I have one lesbian friend who’s a model.  If she was to go out with men, she’d spend her whole life being treated like a status symbol.  That doesn’t offer her the most effective perceivable means of preserving the survival of her DNA, because she was able to perceive a better solution.  To escape being a status symbol but still be able to have emotionally intimate relationships with people, she goes out with women who are more emotionally sensitive, and therefore, not as superficial.

It isn’t all that hard for lesbians to pass on their DNA to a future generation.  There are of plenty of lesbians for whom the most effective way they can perceive to preserve the survival of their DNA is to cut men and their relationship drama out of the deal altogether, live with a woman, and then get artificially impregnated.

Another gay friend of mine came up with a way to reproduce that I kind of like.  He and his partner got married, and at some point his sister offered to have a kid with his partner.  Biologically, the kid would be my friend’s niece or nephew, who he would adopt as his own.  The one major flaw in that plan is that my friend’s partner is gay, and I guess maybe his sister is a real naturalist… if you know what I mean.    So instead, my friend offered me an open invitation to knock up his sister for them, if they decide to do this, because they like my DNA just fine.

Right now, and for the foreseeable future, overpopulation is one of the biggest threats to our species.  Homosexuals who don’t have children are doing more to preserve the survival of their DNA than a lot of heterosexual couples are, by helping to fight overpopulation.  One of my cousins is gay, and he doesn’t want to have kids.  His sister has kids though, so by not having kids of his own, he’s helping his nieces to survive.

Ultimately, if religious fundamentalists want to use biology to prove what is or isn’t natural for people to do, they have to look at all the biology, from evolutionary instincts all the way up to the effects humanity is having on the global environment.   To do anything less isn’t science—and therefore isn’t biology.   It’s propaganda.

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