http://www.newbookforanewworld.org/books/42v1.zip

BOOK ONE:  THE QUEST   …………………………………………………………………………….……  17
Chapter 1:  Objective  …………………………………………………………………………..…………  19
Chapter 2:  Methodology  …………………………………………………………………………………  36
Chapter 3:  Wisdom is Where You Find It  ………………………………………………………………..  42

BOOK TWO: EVOLUTION  ……………………………………………………………………….…………  53
Chapter 4:  Human Instinct  ………………………………………………………………………………  55
Chapter 5: Astro-Quantum-Meta-Physics  ………………………………………………………………..  81
Chapter 6: The Evolution of Religion  ……………………………………………………………..……..  91
Chapter 7: A 20th Century Messiah  ……………………………………………………………………..  104
Chapter 8: The Evolution of Agriculture  ………………………………………………………………..  107
Chapter 9: The Evolution of Tribalism  ………………………………………………………………….  140
Chapter 10: The One Universal Ritual  ……………………………………………………………….…  164
Chapter 11: The Evolution of Emotion  …………………………………………………………………  184
Chapter 12: Instinctive Learning  …………………………………………………………………….….  264
Chapter 13:  The Evolution of Romantic Relationships  ……………………………………………..….  302
BOOK THREE:  THE PRESENT  …………………………………………………………………………….  331
Chapter 14:  Your Actions:  Cause and Effect  ………………………………………………….………  333
Chapter 15:  Death and Beyond  ………………………………………………………………..………..  356
Chapter 16:  The Journey of Life  ……………………………………………………………..…………  359
Chapter 17:  The One Universal Truth is Only Absolute for Now  ……………………………..……….  369
Chapter 18:  The Earth and its Finite Resources  ……………………………………………….……….  373
Chapter 19:  The Code to Humanity  …………………………………………………………………….  389

BOOK FOUR:  THE FUTURE  ……………………………………………………………………………….  407
Chapter 20:  The Choice to Evolve  ………………………………………………………………….…..  409
Chapter 21:  Post-Emotional-Ritual-Tribalism  …………………………………………………….……  432
Chapter 22:  “Mr. Roger’s Fight Club”  ……..……………………………………………………….….  447
Chapter 23:  The Conscientious Citizens of Earth  ……………………………………………………….  463
Chapter 24:  A Generation of Heroes  ……………………………………………………………………  487
Chapter 25:  The Constitution of the Human Race  ………………………………………………………  520
Chapter 42:  The Purpose of the Earth  …………………………………………………………………..  547

Afterword  …………………………………………………………………………………………………553
Appendix A:  Donald E. Brown’s List of Human Universals  ……………………………………………557
Appendix B: A Greeting to Missionaries  ………………………………………………………………..  559
Key References  ……………………………………………………………………………….…………..561

In the debate over evolution versus intelligent design being taught in public school, there is a hell of a lot that isn’t being said in favor of evolutionary science, because very few people know about it… yet.  Evolutionary science studies (among other things) what everyone in the world has in common and where their differences originated, and does it in a way that’s completely unbiased to any religion or culture.  That makes evolutionary science the ultimate weapon for civil rights activists and international peace activists, especially for those in countries with secular governments.

The Bible accomplishes a number of important psychological and sociological functions for its followers, including explaining (albeit unscientifically) what makes the universe work, what happens to people after they die, how people can make themselves happy, and how to get people to cooperate with each other.  What many people don’t realize is that the people of every other civilization in the world figured out the same things, because they’re evolutionarily equal members of the same species who have asked the same questions about life.  Beneath their aesthetic differences, every group of people in the world is just like every other group of people.   Unfortunately, most people just can’t see the forest for the trees.

In order to write a better book than the Bible, all I had to do was to use evolutionary science to show people the forest. I don’t have to tell anybody what to believe; I just have to show how people all over the world already believe in the same things.  I don’t have to tell anyone what to do; I just have to show how people all over the world are already trying to do the same things anyway.  If I can use evolutionary science to make everyone equal at last and bring about Peace on Earth, how can anyone who claims to represent Jesus disagree with it?

I titled my big reference book to life 42, because that’s what you get when the people of two 21st century civilizations stop fighting amongst themselves and start adding their best qualities together.  That, and anyone who can truly understand my sense of humor is already a Douglass Adams fan anyway.

But I realized that President Bush and the Christian fundamentalists would never take seriously a book that was supposed to be better than the Bible unless that book bore a certain title. So I applied for a copyright on the alternate title The Third Testament, just as a joke, because I thought those three words would make a funny title for a book about how evolutionary science can be used to bring about Peace on Earth and Good Will toward Men and Women.  I assumed some clerk at the Library of Congress was going to look at my application, chuckle a little, and stamp it DENIED.  So when I got my application back, you can just imagine my shock and awe when I discovered that the copyright had actually been awarded to me by the federal government under George W. Bush’s own administration!

Then I recorded the entire book as an audio book and posted it on my website for free download, at www.newbookforanewworld.org.

The problem with arms races is no matter how powerful of a weapon you build, your opponents will never stop looking for a weapon that can defeat it.  All the people who are trying to weaponize the Bible should’ve seen this coming.  What was I supposed to do?  Crash an airplane into a building?

I am invincible. Thanks to human evolution, I’ve harnessed a power that no military on Earth can defeat:  When I  throw a party, everyone’s invited.  Just leave your guns at home and come as you are.

Now let’s get this party started!

Back when I wrote this book, I assumed the first principles I was using were so obvious that official scientists must’ve discovered them already.  That joke was on me.  If you’d like to see how my approach to evolution led to my independent discovery of the first principle of evolutionary psychology, you’ll find the condensed version at the beginning of Volume II, and the extended academic version in my book The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity.

Obviously, in order to build a peaceful, sustainable global civilization we must build one that’s fair to everyone.  To do that, we must recognize that everyone on Earth has just as much right to be here as everyone else, that everyone has just as much right to their culture and their individuality as everyone else, and that everyone has just as good of reasons for their culture and their individuality as everyone else. That way no one will need to fight off the global civilization, because nobody will be threatened by it in the first place. So I’m taking over the world just to prove that global civilization is possible to build.

I’m just one person.  I can’t really take over the world all by myself.  But what I can do is to give everyone in the world everything they need to know to help build that global civilization themselves.  And that’s so simple I can do it just by writing one book (of which this is the first volume).  If a majority of voters around the world agree with what I say and begin demanding it from their government officials, and the only way for politicians to get elected anymore was to do what I say because I put into words what a majority of voters want, that would pretty well make me king of the world, wouldn’t it?

What would you rather have?  A big war?  (Oops, too late…)

About 20 years ago, scientists began searching for a universal brain structure of humanity.  They reasoned that in the same way that everyone in the world shares the same basic physical structure, everyone in the world would share the same basic brain structure also—simply because your brain structure is a part of your physical structure, it’s just invisible to the naked eye.
The scientists searched for the universal brain structure of humanity by combining every field of study that relates to humanity, including archeology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, biology, neurology, zoology, ecology, history, and linguistics, among others, to create as complete a picture as possible of the course of human evolution.

If everyone in the world shared the same basic brain structure, then people all over the world would share the same basic thought processes and would exhibit the same basic patterns of behavior.  By now, anthropolgists have visited and studied every culture on Earth.  The list of behavioral characteristics that exist in every single culture on Earth with no exceptions is nearly 400 items long.  (See Appendix A for a condensed version.)  If a characteristic of humanity exists in every single culture on Earth with no exceptions, that makes that characteristic a direct product of human evolution, because in every part of the world where human DNA exists, this characteristic also exists.  All that left was to use all those other fields of human sciences to figure out how it happened.  (The real story of how the field of human evolutionary science started is a lot more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea.)

A lot of the scientists began studying human evolution to try to figure out what it was about people’s brains that made things like environmental destruction and the nuclear arms race seem like such good ideas to so many people.  Their hope was that by discovering why people were creating these problems in the first place, they could help find ways to solve them.

The discoveries these scientists have made over the past 20 years have been monumental.  By now, enough is understood about humanity to bridge the differences that separate every group of people in the world.  That makes human evolutionary science the most direct route to world peace.

The biggest problem the scientists are facing now is figuring out how to make their discoveries understandable to the non-scientifically-minded public.   The scientists can’t solve global problems all by themselves; solving global problems depends on someone showing everyone how they can work together to solve them.

That’s where I got involved.  I basically reinvented the field of human evolutionary science all by myself, before I found out that these scientists beat me to it.  I started this book as the culmination of a three-generation-old tradition in my family, of using art, philosophy, and religion to make observations about people, and then using science to study what evidence exists to explain how the observed characteristics could’ve come about.

I don’t work as a scientist, but I was raised on science from the moment I learned to talk.  When I graduated from high school at the age of 16, I already had 14 years of scientific background, so I set out into the world to learn about things I didn’t already know how to do.

I’ve traveled and lived all over the United States, I’ve been homeless on the streets of a major U.S. city, I belonged to a street gang briefly, I’ve been engaged to a wealthy heiress, I’ve taught high school, I’m a commercial helicopter pilot and certified flight instructor, I’ve taught myself how to write novels, and I’ve worked in theatre for a long, long time.  (And that’s just the short version.)  I’ve got a Ph.D.’s worth of education in a field of study that doesn’t officially exist yet.  Namely, the practical study of human behavior and ways that small components of systems fit together to create something that seems to the untrained eye to be greater than the sum of its parts.

Theatre and fiction and two of the oldest studies of human behavior in the world.  Philosophy and religion are two others, and I have more than a passing familiarity with them. For 2,500 years, actors, directors, and writers have been making their livings by figuring out how to replicate human behavior accurately enough to make it believable to human audiences.  By now, thanks to Hollywood, everyone in the industrialized world is familiar with a working understanding of human behavior.

I began this project as an approach to conflict resolution through evolutionary self awareness.   Theatre artists use their understanding of human behavior to tell exciting stories by creating and resolving conflicts onstage.  To turn that into a conflict resolution strategy, all I had to do was to combine that working understanding of human behavior with fundamental principles of evolution to show how those principles of human behavior could be recognized in real life—that is, to unearth scientific principles behind that understanding of human behavior to show how theatre artists replicate human behavior and why it looks realistic. Theatre artists use this understanding of human behavior to create conflicts and then escalate them for all but about the last 5 minutes of any movie. If people could learn how to recognize how conflicts are created in real life, they could use that understanding of human behavior to defuse their conflicts instead.

After I wrote the first draft of this book, I started looking around to find out what else people had discovered about evolution.  It didn’t take me long to stumble upon this new scientific movement.  And sure enough, nothing any of these scientists had discovered contradicted anything I’d written in any meaningful way.  And my way of studying human evolution has the added benefit that I can actually win public support for it.

You can make my honorary Ph.D. out to Ezra Niesen.  That’s two Es and one S in my last name.  People make that mistake all the time.  You can mail it to…

Nah, just kidding.

Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Lao Tzu, the Buddha, and Dekanawidah, the Peacemaker of the Iroquois Nation, and others like them, were all great leaders.  They all figured out how civilizations could function, and lots of people were willing to cooperate with their ideas.
All of those six leaders had one thing in common:  they all realized that very often people’s immediate feelings run completely contrary to life in civilized society— that if everyone ran around doing whatever felt best to them at any given moment, civilization would disintegrate.  All of those great leaders found large groups of people who could see that problem, and all of those leaders found solutions to the problem that the people were willing to cooperate with.  All of those great leaders solved the problem in the same basic way: by teaching their followers to use intellect and force of will to consider the long-term effects of their actions before acting upon their immediate feelings.

The teachings of each of those leaders were recorded in books.  Each of those books became the foundation of a great civilization.  Naturally, each of those leaders taught his lessons in terms his own followers would understand.  That means that even though all the books teach the same lessons, they all phrase them differently, and none of them phrase them in terms that apply to the global community of the 21st century.

With this book, I do what none of those six great leaders could do.  I do for the entire human race what the Buddha did for the Buddhists, what Lao Tzu did for the Taoists, and what Jesus did for the Christians.  Do I think I’m so much better than all those great leaders?  Not at all.  I just have a couple things to work with that none of them had.  None of those leaders had any way of teaching lessons whose values could be measured equally by anyone anywhere in the world, and none of them had any way of spreading their messages over all the world more-or-less instantaneously. I can do what none of them could do because of two things:  modern science and the internet.
Let’s suppose for the sake of discussion that Jesus and the other five leaders understood what made people what they are.  The scientific term for “what made people what they are” is “evolution”.  The products of evolution can be studied scientifically now, but they couldn’t at the time that any of those leaders taught their followers how to live as civilized members of society.  If Jesus truly understood what made humans what they are, then he understood evolution, but he understood it 2,000 years before the science existed to explain it.

I know that a lot of people insist that evolution is only a theory.  And maybe they’re right.  Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that the Christian creation myth is absolutely true.  That means that in 2,005 years, Christianity has only managed to spread to about 30% of the world’s population, while science can, by definition, be measured equally by 100% of the world’s population.  Does that mean that Satan has managed to reach 100% of the population of the world and to affect 70% of them, and the Christian’s god has only managed to reach 30% of the people?

Of course not.  Obviously, when the Christian god created all the animals, all the plants, all the humans, all the rocks, mountains, oceans, continents, and everything else in the world, he must’ve created all their characteristics that can be measured now by anyone anywhere through modern science.  All of those scientifically measurable characteristics point to a course of development by which they came into existence, and we call that course of development “evolution”.  Over the course of this book, I take this thing called “evolution” and I use it to prove mathematically to the 70% of people in the world who don’t believe in Christian creationism that Jesus meant every word that he said.  So if I can write one book about “evolution” and prove to the entire human race that Jesus—and all those other great leaders—really did know what they were talking about, well, so much for the theory that evolution is only a theory!

Even if none of the great leaders understood “what made people what they are” in the same literal terms that scientists understand it now, they understood it well enough to teach their followers how to adapt their instincts to life in civilization. However those six great leaders understood “evolution”, they explained it in terms that their own followers would understand.  If any of those leaders were alive today, I have no doubt that any of them could teach the same things in 21st century terms. If any of the six great leaders were here to teach their lessons now, I’m willing to bet they would sound something like this book.

Anyway, back to the history of civilization:  Over the course of history, governments have continually improved and replaced governments that didn’t work as well, which is why democracy has replaced monarchy, theocracy, aristocracy, military dictatorship, Fascism, and Communism. All of those other forms of government broke down because they failed to account for the forces of human nature.  Democracy has succeeded so far because it accommodates human nature better than any of the other forms of government.   Literally, those other forms of government have declined and disappeared from the world because people don’t feel like using them anymore, because they feel like something is wrong with them.  When people feel like there’s something wrong with their government, even if they don’t know what that thing is, they’re going to stop cooperating with it.  Then either the civilization is going to replace that government with a government the people do feel like cooperating with, or the civilization is going to collapse and eventually the people will figure out how to build a new civilization with a new government they do feel like cooperating with.  Quite simply, democracy is reigning as the favored form of government in the world now because over the past few centuries lots of people have felt like instituting democracy in place of earlier forms of government.  However, democracy is still making one fundamental oversight, which is why, as many Americans would probably agree, our American democracy still doesn’t feel like it works as well as a lot of people think it should.
The one fatal oversight everyone is making is the force of evolution—the origin of everyone’s feelings.  Humans evolved in the wild for about 7,000,000 years.  Then about 10,000 years ago, humans began developing agriculture.  With the development of agriculture the first civilization was born, and humans left the original conditions of their evolution behind.  Writing was also invented in that first center of civilization, but not until 5,000 years later. Over the course of those 5,000 years, the people of that first agricultural civilization completely forgot that their ancestors had evolved in the wild—because without writing they had no way of recording the fact.  By the time they began recording their myths, legends, and history, they did so under the faulty assumption that agriculture was as old as the human race.  (For one obvious example, according to the Bible the first humans lived in the “Garden of Eden” rather in than the “Wilderness of Eden”.)  The people of the world’s first agricultural civilization were still motivated by 7,000,000 years of instincts that evolved in the wild.  That meant that their natural feelings didn’t apply to life in civilization, but no one could figure out why!

That first agricultural civilization of the world has been the direct ancestor of every dominant civilization of the world for all of human history.  It is the most direct ancestor of all Western civilization, including the United States.  For all of recorded history, human behavior has seemed an unsolvable mystery.  For all of recorded history, people of more-technologically advanced (agrarian) societies have also conquered people of less technologically advanced societies.  The agrarian people have done so under the faulty assumption that the fact that they conquered the other people proved that they must be better people than the people they conquered.  Since every human being on Earth is a member of the same species, for any group of people to be inherently superior to any other group of people is fundamentally impossible, simply because if such a difference existed, we wouldn’t all be the same species.  But as the dominant civilizations of the world spread around the world, the people of those civilizations brought with them the faulty ideas that they were better people than everyone else, and that everyone should live like them— even though human behavior remained such an unsolvable mystery to them and their civilizations have never worked as well as they thought they should!

Now a lot of people of the Western world are determined to build one global economy and culture.  The basic assumption these people seem to be making is that everyone in the world wants to live like Americans.  A lot of people of the world like the way they live and find that the American way of life undermines their cultures.  A lot of people feel that Americans don’t respect their cultures as much as they deserve.  If they did, why would Americans be trying so hard to turn everyone else into Americans?   This idea of cultural globalization is being carried out under the assumption that the American way of life is the best way for everyone to live, but a lot of people whose cultures are being replaced with the American way of life disagree.  The world is also full of weapons of mass destruction.  Does anyone see a problem here?

Obviously, the only way to build one sustainable global culture that everyone in the world can agree with and cooperate with, must be to construct it on a foundation that everyone on Earth is guaranteed to share.  The one most fundamental thing that all humans are guaranteed to have in common is human evolution.

In order to turn human evolution into a foundation for a global civilization, that understanding of evolution would have to be reached through modern objective scientific methods.  Science is the only approach to understanding the world that is equally measurable to people from all over the world, regardless of who they are or what they believe in.  Science is the only approach to interpreting the world that depends exclusively on observable evidence and not at all on faith, beliefs, or opinions of any kind.

Humans all evolved as the same species because the same set of biological laws affected our ancestors equally for all of human evolution.  All human behavior revolves around following those laws, and by now, that set of laws is written into our very DNA, because whoever didn’t feel like following those laws died out as a result.  For the sake of understanding human behavior, that set of laws is a code to humanity.  For the sake of building a peaceful, sustainable global civilization, that set of laws is a Constitution of the Human Race.  Those laws don’t need to be enforced upon us by any governmental body, and they can’t be anyway, because they’re the laws that make us what we are in the first place.

The Code to Humanity was my original title for this book, and The Constitution of the Human Race was the second, but I’ve come to realize that what I’ve written is much more than that.
I dubbed this book The Third Testament© because with it I do for the dominant civilization of the world what Jesus isn’t here to do now— Namely, show how the people of every civilization in the world have already figured out the things he taught his own followers.  Every civilization in the world that survives instead of destroying itself survives because its people establish: a code of behavior for individuals to live by to allow them to function as a society; ways for them to build healthy families and strong communities; some form of higher power for them to believe in; some way for them to survive their physical mortality; and a way to give their lives their own sense of purpose.  The ancient tradition of establishing a common ideology that does all of these things is the only way a civilization can be united, which is why every group of people that has built a stable civilization figured these things out thousands of years ago, and every civilization that doesn’t have these things isn’t stable, because these are all things that people everywhere need to make their lives feel complete. Unfortunately, the world has changed so much since any ancient tradition was established that no one ancient tradition suits the needs of the global community of the 21st century.  I ask you:  If Jesus was here now, would he try to bring about Peace on Earth by telling nearly a billion and a half Muslims that Mohammed lied to them?  Or would he do it by teaching his own followers that everyone has the ability to learn the things he taught them, even if they learned them from someone else?

By establishing similarities among ancient traditions, this book does all of the things I listed.  It is based on evolutionary science, so (obviously) it doesn’t conflict with modern science, and it applies equally to every human being on Earth by definition.  No person or group of people is excluded for any reason at all, and this book leaves everyone free to believe in any ancient traditions they want.  It is a philosophy of religious stature, but it is purely scientific.   It is not a religion in any conventional sense.

Is it sacrilegious of me to believe that I, a mortal human, could write a book that deserved to be called The Third Testament©?  I don’t think so.  There’s a story in the Bible I like, about a Christian whose wagon breaks an axle.  This guy has been a very faithful, devout Christian, so he decides that he will sit by the side of the road and pray for his axle to be fixed.  He sits there praying all day, but nothing happens.  He starts getting frustrated with his god.  That night, a good Samaritan comes along and asks the guy if he needs help.

“I don’t understand,” says the guy, “I’ve been a good Christian all my life, but I’ve sat here all day praying for my wagon to be fixed, and it hasn’t been.”

“Well,” says the Samaritan, “it seems to me that your god already gave you the hands and the intelligence you need to fix the wagon yourself.”

The way I see it, the fact that the world obviously needs a new set of rules in order to build a peaceful global civilization, and the fact that I have the resources and the ability to write that set of rules, make it my responsibility to do so.   When I realized that such a responsibility had fallen upon me, I knew I couldn’t turn away from it.

One of my objectives is to send copies of this book to the leader of every country in the world, the governor of every state in America, every major religious leader in the world, and every United Nations ambassador.  This book is the foundation for a culture that includes every human being on Earth by simple virtue of their membership in the Homo sapiens species.  Globalization is upon us whether anyone wants it or not, and in the end we will all be one culture one way or another.  By sending a copy of this book to every world leader, I give the ones who want to globalize a set of rules by which they can globalize peacefully, and for the ones who don’t want to globalize I give them what they need to preserve their own (and other people’s) cultures while being able to participate in the global community. By the time I’m done here, every world leader will have had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the contents of this book, and all the people of the world will be able to hold their leaders responsible for having done so.

Globalization will be carried out peacefully from now on.  There will be no more need for anyone to try to fight it off, because there will be no excuse anymore for anyone to threaten anyone else’s culture in the first place.  The ultimate goal of globalization is to build a global community—that is, a community the size of a planet in which people work together peacefully and cooperatively.  Globalization has been carried out under traditional Western cultural and economic imperialism to this point, simply because it was the Western imperialists who had the resources and the infrastructures that were needed to begin the process.  Unfortunately, those Western imperialists didn’t realize what they were getting themselves into until it was too late, and sure enough, this new politically correct Western conquest of the world has led us into a war.   That doesn’t mean that a global community can’t be built, it just means that it can’t be built the way the people who started it thought it could.  If a true global community is going to be built, where people cooperate instead of trying to conquer each other, it’s going to be built on what everyone in the community has in common already, and not on the continued misperception that one culture is better than all the others.

If you agree with what I’ve done here and how and why I’ve done it, feel free to send copies of this book to political, religious, and cultural leaders yourself, tell them about it, photocopy the cover of the book and send them that as an advertizement, tell bookstore owners about this book, donate copies of it to libraries, or whatever else you can think of.  I can create the catalyst for world peace all by myself, but world peace will only happen by everyone in the world helping to make it happen.  If you want to help make it happen, then a good place to start would be by letting your leaders know what you expect of them.

Just think about this for a moment:  If only 1% of Americans who voted in the 2004 election ordered a copy of this book at my website, www.newbookforanewworld.org, and addressed it to George W. Bush, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, the U.S. postal service would deliver to him over a million copies of the same book!  Think that would get anybody’s attention?

And then, what do you think he would do with a million copies of this book?  Throw them away?  Burn them?  Gee, that would look awfully funny, wouldn’t it?

Of course, because this book is based purely on modern science and not on any religion, political leaders can be held responsible for reading this new set of rules for the world and following them, without crossing the line between church and state.  If other people think they can beat that by shipping a million copies of the Bible to the White House, they’re welcome to try.

It is my ultimate objective to get this book translated into every language spoken on Earth, from French, German, Russian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, to Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Egyptian, and Farsi, to Finish, Dutch, Serbian, and Thai, to Spanish, Latvian, Khmer, Fijian, and Swahili, to Ebonics, Gaelic, Maori, and Aztec, to Navaho, Apache, Cherokee (in their own alphabet), Comanche, Cheyenne, Chinook, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, Salish, Lakota, Arapaho, Shoshone, Kiowa, Ojibwa, Penobscot, Klamath, Yurok, Coos, O’Odham, Havasupai, Zuni, Mi’kmaq, Passamoquody, Potawatomi, Nez Perce, Aleut, Athabaskan, Tlingit, Eyak, Tsimshian, Central Yupik, Upper Kushkokwim, Gwich’in, Deg Hit’an…  What are you looking at me like that for?  Those are all languages spoken right here in America!

Seriously though, the content of this book is older than any language on Earth and belongs to everyone.  If one peaceful global community is ever going to be built, don’t you think we should start by giving everyone their own copy of the blueprints?

So here’s the very first lesson in spiritual logic:  Because all humans belong to the same species, one way or another all humans place the same value on their own lives (yes, even suicidal people, people with terminal illnesses, and parents who sacrifice themselves to protect their children, these people just measure the value of their lives differently from most people, as I explain elsewhere).  All humans have abilities to use to satisfy themselves with their lives.  All humans always figure out how to make use of their available resources.  As a result, in any contained system, one way or another all humans always find a way to satisfy themselves with their lives.

That doesn’t mean that everyone always feels happy with their immediate circumstances on the most superficial level, but it does mean that one way or another everyone always satisfies themselves at the most fundamental level that they’re making the best of their situation.
In an age of global telecommunications, truly self-contained societies can only be studied by archeologists anymore, and the closest things to self-contained societies left in the world now can only be studied by intrepid anthropologists who venture out into the wilds of Africa, South America, southeast Asia, and some Pacific islands.  But one way or another we all will belong to a self-contained society eventually, because we have no other choice.  Our planet is only just so large and there’s no way for anyone to move off it permanently yet.

Cultural globalization through economic imperialism is more popular than cultural globalization through military conquest now, but it is still driving other cultures toward extinction.  Every culture on Earth has good qualities, but if the one dominant culture of the world succeeds in turning everyone into Americans, the good qualities of all the other cultures will be lost. In the face of this unrelenting Western imperialism, the only way for those other cultures to preserve their cultural identities would be to globalize actively and voluntarily first, to create one global culture that will value all of its member cultures, before the one dominant culture globalizes itself on its own terms.  If those individual cultures could globalize more efficiently and successfully than the one dominant culture could globalize on its own, then that one (formerly) dominant culture would have no practical alternative left than to join the new global culture.  All that the people of the individual cultures would have to do would be to figure out what commonalities unite them and build their global culture on that before the people of the one dominant culture could build it on Western economic imperialism.

All humans of all cultures belong to the same human race, so there can be only one answer to human life.  But there is a virtually infinite number of ways to arrive at that answer.  That distinction between the answer and the means of finding it is the difference that just made every political correctness advocate who read the phrase “there can be only one answer” say something like,  “What are you, a fascist?  Everyone has to find their own answer to life!”  Oh, please.  If you find an answer to life that you like and another person finds an answer to life that they like, you’ve both found the same damn thing, which is an answer to life that each of you is satisfied with.  If both of you are too blind to see that, don’t blame me for it.  If you’re so caught up in the aesthetic differences between your individual versions of the same answer that you can’t see they’re the exact same thing, don’t accuse me of being a fascist!  That’s exactly the problem with the world that I’ve come here to straighten out, because that’s exactly the problem that’s holding individuals and cultures apart.

Even to this day, the people of each culture generally approach members of other cultures with the assumption that their own culture is right, and the people of the other cultures just don’t know enough to be able to see that.  Well I’ve got news for you ladies and gentlemen:  The other people value their lives every bit as much as you value yours, and the only reason you can’t see how they could value their way of life as much as you value yours is because you don’t understand their way of life well enough to know any better.   Isn’t that interesting?

Here’s the second lesson of spiritual logic:  Human behavior appears chaotic at first glance, but as people who have been studying chaotic systems in recent years have discovered, even chaos has rules of its own. First of all, many seemingly chaotic systems are caused by the interaction of numerous simple systems.  Second, in seemingly chaotic systems patterns can repeat themselves on different scales.

Over the course of history people have come up with a lot of combinations of constants and variables to arrive at the same answer.  All that leaves for me to do is to assemble as many of those equations as I can find and apply the principles of chaos and the constants of evolution to find and solve for variables in these collected equations.

That first principle of chaos works somewhat more complicatedly than I’ll explain it here—which is why there’s an entire book following this introduction.  Looking at the different cultures of the world, two things are obvious.  One is that all cultures are made up of human beings who are evolutionarily equal.  The other is that the resources available to each culture are different.  There we have one constant and one variable to work with.

Now let’s back up about five centuries, to October 10th, 1492, the day before the cultural self-containment of the Americas ended forever.  Prior to Columbus’s discovery of the New World, the Europeans had discovered a meaning to life that they were satisfied with.  The Native Americans had also found a meaning to life that they were satisfied with, which is why their cultures survived instead of disintegrating.  (There you have an example of patterns repeating themselves on different scales: these Native American tribal cultures survived for the same reason that one globalized culture would be able to survive, because the people of the cultures could find the one most important thing they were looking for within the culture, which is why they didn’t leave that culture to search for the answer elsewhere.)

So far we have defined human life to be a constant value for all human beings, we have identified all humans as being evolutionarily equal, which is another constant, and we have identified a difference in the material resources available to the different cultures, which is a variable.  That means that all humans have the same evolutionary abilities on the average, they have different amounts of resources to work with, and somehow they combine those things to give their lives equal value.  As written, that’s a mathematical impossibility, because you can’t combine one constant with one variable to produce a constant.  There must be at least one more variable involved.  Let’s call that second variable cultural adaptation to available resources.  Now we have equal human abilities combining with differences in resources and differences in cultural adaptation resulting in an equal sense of value for each person to their own life.  Aha!  Mathematically it works now.  Unfortunately, in practice that second variable isn’t nearly as easy to recognize as the first.

Just because we live in the 21st century (by the Gregorian calendar), lets suppose that the answer to life is 21, although none of the numbers I use here represent any actual values.  Let’s also say that v = the answer to life and v = x.  Suppose that as of October 10th 1492 the Europeans had defined the answer to life as v and the Native Americans had defined it as x.    Suppose that both groups had arrived at their answer of 21 through the equation in which a = human ability, m = available material resources, and c = cultural adaptation to available resources.  A is a constant, so we will assign it a value if 1.  Suppose for the Europeans m = 6 but the Native Americans only had half the resources the Europeans did, so for them m = 3.  That means that in order to get amc = v = x, for the Europeans c =3.5 and for the Native Americans c = 7.  That means that the Europeans’ answer to life is 1 x 6 x 3.5 = 21, while the Native American answer to life is 1 x 3 x 7 = 21.

The Europeans didn’t recognize or appreciate the Native Americans’ greater cultural success at adapting their human lives to a lesser amount of available resources (and they probably wouldn’t’ve cared even if they did).  The Europeans could only recognize the Native Americans’ lesser amount of resources and assumed that their cultural adaptation to their available resources must be equal to their own.  Therefore, to the Europeans, the value of the Native Americans’ lives was only 1 x 3 x 3.5 = 10.5.  Therefore, the Europeans perceived the Native Americans’ lives to be worth less than their own, and so they used their advantages in material resources to crush the Native Americans’ culture.

The Native Americans who assimilated themselves into European culture had to accept lives only valued at 10.5 by that culture, while the Native Americans who accepted life on reservations where the available material resources were even less than what they had before might’ve ended up with an equation of 1 x 1 x 7 = 7.  Is it any wonder why the Native Americans resented the Europeans bringing their traditional way of life to an end?

If the two groups could’ve figured out how to combine their best qualities, between them they could’ve come up with an answer to life of 1 x 6 x 7 = 42, but that’s not what happened. However, there’s an invisible culture emerging in the world now, of people who are catching on to all of this, who realize their own lives are worth just as much as anyone else’s, that anyone else’s life is worth just as much as their own, and that different cultures have different qualities to offer. These people don’t want to keep fighting over aesthetic details, don’t want to keep crushing every culture they come into contact with, and many of these people do want to combine the best qualities of all the cultures they can find because they feel like the answer to life should be 42.

Unfortunately, these are the same people who keep insisting that everyone has to find their own answer to life.  In spite of their acceptance of each other’s differences in aesthetics—or even because of that acceptance—they are not unified by a common cultural identity.  That means that the traditional imperialist cultures can go right on conquering everything in sight, in spite of the fact that an increasing number of individuals oppose them.  The traditional imperialists are united by a common cultural identity in a way that the individual anti-imperialists aren’t, which allows them to organize themselves more effectively.  But if someone did figure out how to create one unified cultural identity for all the individuals and groups who wanted to cooperate with each other instead of conquering each other, and who wanted to build that one global culture on what they all have in common, then the days of cultural imperialism would be as good as over, wouldn’t they?

Heh, heh, heh…

If you’re one of those people in the world who just want to be yourself and get along with everyone else in the world, well keep on reading, because today is your lucky day.  I don’t think there’s a single idea anywhere in this book that I can say is uniquely mine.  You all helped to write this book, I just figured out how to put it into words.  I expect that a very large number of you are going to read all the way to the end of this book and feel like you didn’t learn a damn thing from it, because all I did was to tell you a bunch of stuff you already knew.  But the difference between you knowing the stuff for yourself and me telling it to you is that in order for me to tell it to you, I have to put it into words.  If someone else already knows the same things you do, and I put into words what they already know, that means that now both of you have the same set of words to talk about the things that you both already know.  That means you can stop accepting each other’s “differences” now that you can see that on a practical/non-aesthetic level you aren’t so different after all.  There’s your cultural identity, there’s the end to your cultural invisibility, and there’s the foundation for your one global culture.

If I put all of this into words that came from science, that would mean several more things.  First of all, the words couldn’t be condemned by any religious group as unfounded heresy.  Second, the words couldn’t be condemned by any secular government as religious ideology or superstition. Third, the words could be taught within the public school system.  Fourth, every political candidate in America could be held responsible for being familiar with the words, because after all, they are the words that express important secular ideas that you, their constituents, want to talk about.  Fifth, all of the words would have to be recognized in the American legal system. Isn’t this fun?

All humans came from the same culture, which is why all humans evolved as the same species—or I could just as easily say that all humans evolved as the same species because they all practiced the same original culture.  Every human being alive today is descended from a small group of people who lived in northeastern Africa about 60,000 years ago. As our common ancestors spread out of Africa and through the world, their cultures diverged to meet the needs of their habitats. Invariably, anything that any group of people decided to do they must’ve done because it felt the best to them under their circumstances, and all of those feelings were the product of the same evolution.

What else would people do?  Go out and do a bunch of things that felt like bad ideas?  Individuals might do that, or they might feel that ideas were good that other individuals wouldn’t.  But when you talk about collective decisions that have shaped the courses of cultures, no group of people is ever going to make any decision that would conflict with the forces of human evolution under their circumstances.  Over the course of history, groups of people have made decisions that seem positively terrible to us of the early 21st century, but at the time those people made those decisions, those decisions seemed to those people to be the best decisions they could make.  Ever hear the saying “Hindsight is always 20/20”?  How about “History is always written by the winners”?  There’s plenty of ways you can jump to conclusions that people should’ve known better in making some decision they did.  But if you jump to those conclusions, you won’t be able to understand how those people came up with their answer to life, will you?

Now that humans are once again becoming one culture, it’s plain to see that the only solid foundation for a global civilization is a return to the evolutionary foundation of all human culture.  This one evolutionary culture of humanity predates all government and religion.  The structure of this one culture is written in the genetic makeup of every human being on Earth.  By embracing and making active use of our humanity, the culture of Conscientious Humanity actively and intentionally recreates the conditions of our evolution.  We don’t live in the original conditions of our evolution, but all those evolutionary scientists have figured out enough about the conditions of our evolution that by compiling all their discoveries we can determine what basic ideas have made humanity what it is, and we can choose to live that way—hence the term Conscientious Humanity.  By choosing to live in the way that made all humans what they are, we create a culture that includes everyone on Earth by sheer virtue of their membership in the Homo sapiens species.  There’s your unified, self-contained, sustainable global culture.

To bring all this about would require us to change the entire world, start over again, and get it right this time.  That means a revolution.  The revolution begins with people believing in themselves, and ends by putting a stop to cultural imperialism.  It begins with individuals ceasing to define their lives at the expense of other people, and ends with those individuals expecting world leaders to do the same.  No one has to do anything violent, destructive, murderous, or illegal in between.  Does that sound like a deal?

If you’re one of the traditional imperialists, you might as well give up now.  Feel free to keep reading if you want, and at least you can find out exactly how and why this no-longer-invisible global culture is going to kick your imperial ass.  Now that we have a cultural identity to unite us as the one sustainable global culture, we are the dominant culture of the world, and you’re not. Nobody is going to conquer anybody anymore, because we, the new dominant culture of the world, already recognize that everyone in the world who just wants to get along with each other has already earned their place as an equally valuable member of our culture. For you of traditional Western imperialism, you have only two choices left.  You can either join us voluntarily, or you can resist us until we assimilate you.

How does it feel, hmm?  As they say, what goes around comes around…

If you’re a traditional imperialist and you keep on reading, you could discover that you want to be one of us and you just didn’t realize it until now. I’ve known plenty of good people in my time who practice imperialist traditions, but who only practice the traditions for aesthetic reasons, not for imperialist reasons.  These people just want to be themselves and get along with other people, and they happen to belong to cultures of traditional imperialism.  If you’re one of those people, you’re more than welcome to join us, and you don’t have to leave your cultural traditions behind, just your imperialist traditions.

The culture of Conscientious Humanity has no official membership.  The culture isn’t even a culture at all in the traditional sense.  It is a meta-culture that is based on the recognition of the equal value that each person gives their own life and respects the differences in the ways each person has arrived at that one answer—it is not a culture that continues to be divided by the assumption that each person has come up with a completely different answer.  It is a culture that has no political, religious, ideological, geographical, cultural, historical, linguistic, economic, racial, ethnic, sexual, or any other forms of boundaries at all.   Anyone can join at any time, so long as they meet five criteria.  They must belong to the Homo sapiens species (and I’m only saying that for now because currently there aren’t any aliens, artificially intelligent computers, or evolved animals among us that possess equitable intelligence to humans, so at some point even this criteria might have to be adjusted), they must embrace and make active use of their own humanity, they must want to get along with other people, they must respect other people’s aesthetic differences, and they must be willing to do all they can to avoid harming other people accidentally.

For anybody out there who ever watched Sesame Street as a child, joining the culture of Conscientious Humanity should not be a stretch.  You can just think of Conscientious Humanity as Sesame Street for adults. Just because the adult world is run by a bunch of lawyers, business executives, and politicians who don’t give a f*ck about being nice to each other and cooperating with each other doesn’t prove that Big Bird, Grover, Cookie Monster, Kermit the Frog, and Bert and Ernie have been lying to everyone all these years, it just proves that the well-dressed, respectable-looking people who make the world go ‘round weren’t paying attention.
I get to be the Count von Count of the adult world because I love to add up numbers late into the night and then laugh out loud.  Any questions?

A, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!!!!

People can build civilizations by working together much more efficiently than they can by fighting each other, simply because cooperation is more productive than conflict.  When two people cooperate, they combine whatever they have, and when they work against each other, they use whatever they have to destroy what the other person has.  Mathematically speaking, if I have 7 of something and you have 5 of something, together we have 12 of something, or 7 + 5 = 12.  If we fight against each other, each of us is going to end up with less than what we had before, and we end up with an equation that looks more like 7 – 5 = 2.  If each of us destroys 5 of whatever the other person has, now I only have 2 left of the 7 I started with, and you have 0 left of the 5 you started with.

Regardless of what you think of the political and economic situation of the world as of 2005, 60 years ago it was a lot worse.  By 1945 people all over the world had spent 6 years using whatever they had to destroy whatever other people had.  The two major cultures of the world were hell-bent on applying the 7 – 5 = 2 equation to each other’s soldiers, weapons, airplanes, ships, tanks, fortifications, military installations, airfields, shipyards, roads, bridges, factories, buildings, stockpiles of raw materials, power plants, food supplies, civilians, cities, and everything else they could possibly destroy.   By 1945 much of the world lay in ruins and didn’t even have an economy anymore in the conventional financial sense.  Does anybody of 2005 look back fondly on the good ol’ days of World War II?  I didn’t think so.

How do you construct a single, sustainable global civilization out of people whose natural feelings and immediate instincts don’t apply to life in a global civilization?  Simple.  Obviously, some type of feelings must apply to the things a single global civilization has to offer, or else nobody would feel like building a single global civilization, would they?  So all we have to do is to do what the people of every civilization have always done:  we found that civilization on ideas that all of its members feel like cooperating with.

Are you ready for the (introduction to the) universal code to humanity now?  Here it is:
Every human being on Earth has five important genetic traits in common.  Two are the instincts that motivate every animal on Earth, and the other three are the abilities that separate humans from animals.  The two instincts are survival and reproduction—if those instincts weren’t genetic in every animal on Earth, species wouldn’t survive and couldn’t evolve.  The three abilities are the ability to think in the abstract, the ability to perceive time as a dimension, and the ability to communicate abstract ideas to other humans.  Those three abilities form the basis for human intellect.

All human actions (other than involuntary physiological activities) result from human decisions.  No human ever undertakes any action without having decided to undertake it on some level.  Decisions can be conscious, completely subconscious, or they can be made for conscious reasons the person immediately forgets.    Regardless of the reason, all human action begins with some mental process.

All humans require energy to live.  To waste energy, therefore, contradicts the survival instinct.  In order to satisfy the survival instinct as well as possible, all humans must use their energy as efficiently as possible.  To do that, all humans make decisions that give them the most favorable ratio of perceivable benefit to effort required.

All humans have human intellect.  In order to best satisfy their instincts, all humans must use their human intellect.  Therefore, it is instinctive for humans to use their intellect to satisfy their instincts. Animals’ survival and reproductive instincts can only be stimulated by their situations (including their genetic predispositions and their life experiences), but humans have the unique ability to have their instincts stimulated by ideas.

All humans have unique genetic abilities. All humans are driven to use their abilities to their best potential to satisfy their instincts according to the needs of their situation.  Because all humans have the abilities to think in the abstract, to perceive time as a dimension, and to communicate ideas with other humans, a part of humans’ instincts to use their abilities to best satisfy their instincts includes imagining different situations in which they could use their abilities better.  That gives humans the ability to change their situation in order to make the best of a better situation.  Any animal (essentially) can only use their abilities to their best potential within the context of their present situation.

All human behavior is motivated by human emotions or “feelings”.  All human emotions originate from human instinct combined with human intellect.  In any situation, humans feel their instincts and the projection of those instincts into the abstract and/or through time.  People act to best satisfy their instincts by best satisfying their emotions.  Therefore, emotion and human instinct are synonymous.

The development of agriculture was an evolutionary inevitability.  As hunter-gathering humans realized that gatherable food grew out of their refuse dumps, over time their survival instincts and their human intellect caused them to perceive that they could find a more favorable ratio of benefit to effort required by planting food instead of hunting and gathering it, as measured in a very direct proportion of calories of edible food produced to calories of work required to produce that food.

Agriculture and its effects keep changing the world faster and faster—much faster than evolution can keep up with. For approximately the past 10,000 years people all over the world have built cultures that felt like the best ideas to them, based on their abilities to continually change their situations to better satisfy their instincts. If people continue to satisfy their immediate and short-term instincts without using their human intellect to consider the long term results, the short-term satisfaction of their instincts is going to spiral out of control.  They’re going to keep consuming resources to try to satisfy their instincts, and they’re going to keep changing the world to allow them to consume more resources, until there are no resources left and they’ve had to destroy every other group of people in the world to get to the last of the resources. Gee, does that sound familiar to anybody?

That short-sighted satisfaction of instincts also has two profound effects on children. Children’s brains continue to develop neurological pathways and connections until they’re about 18, which means that over the course of that development children learn new instincts that will become integral parts of their neural physiology and that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.   If the children are taught to attach good feelings to the faulty assumptions that the world’s resources are infinite, that they are entitled to consume as many resources as they can, and that their culture is better than everyone else’s, that emotional connection will become a part of their neural physiology—a biological part of their physical bodies.  For the rest of their lives, even if those people no longer think those things are literally true, they will feel that those things must be true and that any scientific argument to the contrary must be mistaken.

For all of recorded history, the people of the civilized world have realized that acting directly upon their (hunter-gatherer) emotional instincts causes no end of trouble in their civilizations.  In order to try to fix that, parents have taught their children different ways to act responsibly in their civilizations.  Some of those ways work, and some of those ways don’t work as well as people think they should.  Some of those ways teach children to make new emotional connections that conflict with their natural instincts, so the neurology of those children develops to attach both positive and negative emotions to the same things at the same time.  Just for one simple example, how many Americans do you think I’ll offend if I say that for all of human evolution people have greatly enjoyed f*cking?  Scientifically it’s true, so why should so many people feel it’s wrong for me to say so?

When these children are turned loose into civilization as adults, the problems they’ll create are just going to keep multiplying. First, they’ll take it for granted that their culture is better than everyone else’s and that they are entitled to as many resources as they can consume, no matter what anyone says to try to convince them otherwise.  Of course, since a lot of these children have learned instincts that conflict with their natural instincts, by the time they’re adults there is no way to satisfy their instincts, no matter what they do or how much they consume.

But wait, you haven’t heard the best part yet!  If you listened to political analysts talk about the 2004 presidential race, you kept hearing the phrase “sway the emotions of the voters”, which is what each candidate in a race has to do to win a majority of votes.  All emotions are either the products of evolutionary instincts or instincts/emotional attachments learned from cultures that were founded by people who were doing what felt best to their evolutionary instincts without realizing where their evolutionary instincts came from. Considering that recorded history began 5,000 years ago, scientific discoveries of the past 20 years face a tremendous challenge in overcoming cultural traditions, wouldn’t you say?  That means that even though people can attach the emotional meanings of their hunter-gatherer instincts to the circumstances of post-hunter-gatherer society, most people in the world are making those emotional connections to cultural beliefs that aren’t based on  contemporary intellectual understandings of the world.

You never hear the phrase “sway the intellects of the voters”, do you? Some voters vote purely or primarily based on their intellectual evaluations of the candidates, but those aren’t the people the candidates have to campaign to, are they?  Candidates could make all their positions known to the public without delivering powerful campaign speeches, but they could never win elections that way, could they?  On the bottom line, one way or another, making personal impressions that make voters feel like voting for them is what gets candidates elected.

That means the mightiest military and economic power the world has ever seen has the ability to build the space shuttle, the internet, and nuclear reactors, but it’s still governed by hunter-gatherer instincts!

For all you leaders of traditional organized religions out there, you have one more important thing in common.  You all preach ideologies that teach their followers to be responsible members of their societies and to get along with each other.  Unfortunately, many of you and many of your followers are still fighting over aesthetics, trying to force each other to accept your version of the truth.  Every religion in the world has some good ideas— because obviously if a religion didn’t have any good ideas at all, nobody would feel like practicing that religion, would they?

Religious intolerance ends today.  For 5,000 years you’ve been recording your various religious codes of conduct in books, and any time somebody does something that conflicts with your version of the right way to live, you point to your books and tell the person, “It says right here on page such-and-such that what you’re doing is wrong.”  You people have fought a lot of wars over whose book is right and killed each other all over the place, and I guess that’s your own damn fault for caring more about proving your own book is right than you care about following what it actually says in all of your books.

When your religious dogma runs into people who just want to do their own thing and get along with each other, but don’t have a book of their own to point to, whether we talk about pre-literate cultures of old or the formerly-invisible culture of today, your dogma is even less tolerant, because you assume that our lack of books proves that we don’t know what we’re doing.  Well, on behalf of Conscientious Humans everywhere, I’m here to tell you that period of history is over.  It lasted for 5,000 years, but today it’s over.

Now we have our own book.

So what are you going to do now, hmm?

Since this book was written by the genetic evolution of every human being on Earth, it doesn’t matter whether you’re the Pope or a Bushman of the Kalahari or you work the night shift at Krispy Kreme, we all came from the same place.  This book is for the global community of the 21st century what your various books have been for various groups of people at other points in history.  That is, this is a code of behavior for people to get along with each other that includes every human being on Earth, no matter who they are or where they come from.  It even includes every religious leader on Earth, so you religious leaders are more than welcome to join us.   It doesn’t even require you or anyone else to give up your religious traditions, just to reinterpret your traditions to life in the 21st century, where there are a lot more people from a lot more cultural and religious backgrounds to get along with.  But don’t worry, all of those people’s religious codes of behavior instruct them to get along with other people too, so all any of you have to do to join us is to put aside your aesthetic differences.  As long as you can live as responsible members of society and get along with other people like it tells you to do in your own books, you can join us and believe in anything you want.

To all you political leaders out there, did you think you had any hope of withstanding a force that just swept away 5,000 years of religious intolerance?  Ha, ha, ha, ha!  Look, it’s this simple:  Traditional politics are over. Every human being on Earth is basically a long-lost relative of every other human being on Earth. The Conscientious Humans of Earth are not going to live in fear of each other any more.  Every culture in the world has good qualities.  Some cultures have advantages in material resources; others have equally valuable advantages in things that just aren’t worth anything at the White man’s bank.  You cannot build a global culture/economy as long as you refuse to recognize the good qualities of “poorer” groups of people.  If you want to keep insisting that the answer to life is 21 even now that people have the opportunity to share their best cultural qualities with each other, if you want to keep on insisting that the Native Americans, the Africans, or anyone else only managed to come up with a 10 or 11 for an answer to life, that’s your problem.  By taking the best that all cultures have to offer, we, the Conscientious Humans of Earth, have come up with an answer to life of 42.  By your own subconscious system of mathematics, that makes our culture better than yours.  Sorry.

All you political leaders out there are more than welcome to cooperate with us too. For you leaders of the free world who don’t want to cooperate with us, well, you better start looking for a new job, because next election season you’re going to need one. We, the Conscientious Humans of Earth, are the new dominant culture of the world, and we have absolutely no use for world leaders who just want to prove their own culture is better than everyone else’s.

Before I conclude this introduction, I need to make a few disclaimers.  First, every culture in the world is based on various understandings of the world that are incomplete by today’s scientific standards, so over the course of this book I insult basically every ideology I’ve ever heard of—and I’ve heard of a lot.  Every culture in the world has some good ideas and some bad ideas.  Let me say that again:  Good ideas and bad ideas.   Over the course of the book I illustrate all the good ideas I’ve ever come across, but there is no one culture in the world today that has all the good ideas. With the War on Terrorism we have entered the fifth global conflict since 1914, four of which were supposed to be “The War to End All Wars”, so obviously nobody has built a culture with enough good ideas to be able to get along with all the other cultures yet, have they?  So in order to put everybody in their place, to get everybody to sit down and listen to what each other are saying for once, I have to do a generous amount of good-natured b*tch slapping.  But don’t worry.  By the end of the book I prove everything that everyone needs to know to finally be able to be themselves and to get along with each other.  Until then, just remember one thing:

“You can’t solve all the world’s problems if you can’t laugh at your own mistakes.”

For anybody out there who doesn’t approve of my presentation style and thinks it’s “unprofessional” or some bullsh*t, don’t worry, I’m smart enough and well-educated enough that I ought to have a PhD in Versatility of Thought by now.  And as a result, as you may have noticed, I’m the one writing this book and a bunch of official doctors aren’t.  It’s the young people of the world that I have to write this for, because they’re the ones who are going to have to figure out how to clean up this mess they’re inheriting from 10,000 years of globally dominant ill-conceived ideas.  Unfortunately, in order to get their attention now I have to compete against MTV and Nintendo.  There’s only two ways I’ve seen to grab anyone’s attention anymore, and blowing up buildings sure doesn’t grab people’s attention in a good way, does it?  So here’s the other way.  Don’t worry, everything in this book is just as true as it would be if I presented it any other way.  So for anybody who’s opposed to what I have to say here simply because of my disaffected-youth presentation style, that doesn’t prove that I don’t know what I’m talking about, it just proves that you’re refusing to help build a future that your kids are actually going to want.

Finally, a warning about my credibility.  It is not my goal to be right about everything.  It is my goal to get people to start asking questions and to start looking for answers.  All the facts that I give in this book aren’t necessarily as true as I make them out to be.  However, all of the facts I present are as close to true as I need them to be to get their main points across.  In science that’s called “an acceptable margin of error”.  For anybody who has a problem with that, congratulations on being more of a geek than I am, but you’re missing the point. Did humans start evolving 7 million years ago, 5 million years ago, or 9 million years ago?  Nobody can say exactly, so I say it was 7 million years ago just as a matter of convenience. Do the results of human evolution have a profound effect on the world that we live in?  Yes, very much so. If you think that whining about archeological dates is more important than achieving world peace, that’s your problem.  I’m sorry that you got picked on in gym class or whatever, but rather than trying to make a name for yourself now by being the person who prevented me from saving the world, why don’t you go find something useful to do with your life, like playing Dungeons and Dragons or collecting baseball cards or something?  The world’s full of people you can impress by devoting your life to memorizing meaningless statistics.  I am proud to say that I have far more important things to do.

Oh, one more thing.  For as long as I’ve been working on this book, I have had visions of scholarly philosophers in black robes and mortar boards gathered in the corridors of ivy-shrouded brick buildings of prestigious universities, staring at copies of this book saying, “But… but… but… you can’t prove the meaning of life by quoting Dr. Seuss, Star Trek, and Tupac Shakur!”

You wanna bet?

Heh, heh, heh…

I ought to warn you perhaps that the most important part of understanding what makes people what they are lies in how you come to that understanding.  For something as important as making sense of the world, it isn’t enough to know what the answers are; you also need to know why they’re the answers.  Obviously, for something as important as this, each person has to make sense of the world for themselves, and you can’t do that just by reading a book, no matter what book it is.

With my scientific background, the only answers that I could accept in my attempt to make sense of the world were objective, scientific ones reached through objective, scientific means.  That means that all of my answers and all of my means of searching for them are usable by everyone in the world.  No one can write a book that spells out completely all the answers to each individual’s personal quest, but to the extent that it is possible, that’s what I’ve done. The first section covers my scientific approach, and the other three sections cover the conclusions of my research.

Whatever you need to do to make my scientific approach personally meaningful to you is up to you.  All I can do with a book is to give you a map of landmarks you’ll find along the way.

For as long as humans have been defined as humans, they have searched for a definition for themselves.  In other words, humanity is defined by its search for its own definition.  That means that in order to truly understand what it means to be human, you have to search for the answer yourself.  In order to become the most fully realized human being you can be, you have to learn how to search as thoroughly as possible, and that’s what this book is really about.  If you skip the next three chapters, read to the end of the book, and think you understand everything because you’ve memorized all the conclusions I’ve reached without learning how to reach such monumental conclusions for yourself, you’ll have missed the whole point.

While the first three chapters are important, if you’d rather jump right into the real story now and come back and read the first three chapters at some other time, I think the book will make just as much sense either way.

Regardless of how individual people want to interpret the world or feel people should interpret the world, the world is full of people who all have their own opinions, and a lot of those opinions disagree.  We all live in the same physical universe, and the properties of that universe are equally measurable by everyone.  By definition, any form of subjective reality is not measurable by anyone other than the individual perceiving that version of reality.  This one scientifically measurable objective universe is the common ground that we all share.   What’s more, all the components of our brains that shape our subjective interpretations of objective reality exist within the objective universe, which means we can objectively study the sources of our subjectivity.  To ignore that opportunity would be a mistake.  This looks like it should be pretty obvious, but as you will see throughout the course of this book, people constantly have trouble distinguishing subjectivity from objectivity.