The basic problem that people who mistake their subjective interpretation of reality for objective reality create is that they can’t possibly see eye to eye with anyone else.  Worse, if another person mistakes their own subjective interpretation of reality for objective reality, then the two people get another step further removed from being able to agree on a reality.  Worse still, since both are assuming their own subjective reality is right, it’s very possible that neither person even recognizes the problem!

This problem has taken on particular significance in the past century.  Over the course of the past 90 years, we have had World War I, followed by the Great Depression, followed by World War II, followed by the Cold War, followed by the War on Terrorism.  Five global conflicts in the past 90 years, two of which were characterized by worldwide violence, two of which were characterized by the threat of worldwide violence, and one of which came about as the result of worldwide violence, was characterized by worldwide poverty, and which ended with more worldwide violence.  In between, there have been two brief periods of peace, each of which lasted about 10 years.  In other words, of the past 90 years, 20 have been characterized by general peace, and 70 have been characterized by global conflict.

This is bullsh*t!

By definition, all conflict results from someone not having something they want.  The end of the Cold War was supposed to bring with it the end of global conflict, because democracy and free trade would reign supreme and everyone in the world could finally be happy.  As became all too evident on the fateful morning of September 11th 2001, everyone in the world isn’t happy.  I’m not just talking about the fact that terrorists could’ve committed an act of war against the United States, I’m also talking about the fact that Americans responded so vehemently, trying to fight fire with fire.  Obviously we have to protect ourselves and the free world as a whole, but there’s a difference between protecting ourselves and smiting our enemies down with great wrath and vengeance trying to wash out blood with blood.  All the revenge in the world will never change the course of history.

Ladies and gentlemen of the free democratic world where everyone is supposed to be happy, do you realize that the political objectives of the War on Terrorism depend on our own governments making us live in fear every bit as much as the terrorists want us to live in fear?  If we choose to participate in the fifth global conflict of the past 90 years, we’ve lost already, because global conflict no longer depends on large armies or nuclear stockpiles.  The war of terror is a war unlike any other in American history, and it can never be won through any amount of military superiority, because the terrorists are using a weapon that Americans have never encountered before.  The terrorists have figured out how to harness parts of our own human spirits and turn them against us.  All they need to do now to destroy the free democratic world where everyone is supposed to be happy, is to make us (and by that I mean “us”) live in fear.  Now our government is trying to fight a war against them, and lo and behold the government is playing right into their hands, trying to make us live in fear too.  Like I said, if we try to fight on these terms, we’ve already lost.

As long as everyone in the free world goes on seeking revenge, there will always be conflict.  As long as Americans try to protect themselves by forcing everyone else in the world to live in fear of us, someone will always be trying to get even with us by making us live in fear of them.  All the terrorists have to do to win is to keep people fearful, unsatisfied, and unhappy.  If the people of the free democratic world where everyone is supposed to be happy make their happiness depend on getting even with the terrorists, then in order for the terrorists to win, all they have to do is to evade capture and to continue to pose a threat.  We (or, “we”) of the free democratic world where everyone is supposed to be happy would have to completely erase terrorism from the world in order to win.  Winning on those terms is impossible, because fear, the greatest weapon of the enemy, will always exist within every single one of us (“us”).  In order to defeat that, we would have to erase the very idea of terrorism from the world.

So how do we win the War on Terror when the greatest weapon of the enemy exists within every single one of “us”?  It’s really not that difficult.  All someone would have to do would be to build an even better weapon.

Ah, but what happens when the terrorists turn around and build an even better weapon than that?  Well, someone on our side could figure out how to build a weapon that was even better than that one.  Or, to save a lot of time and hassle, someone on our side could just figure out how to build the biggest possible weapon right now, a weapon that was so big it would end war once and for all, by erasing conflict from the world altogether and making war completely obsolete.

Have you ever heard the saying “The pen is mightier than the sword”?  And you see this gigantic book I’ve written?

Heh, heh, heh…

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Conflict is nothing new to the world.  People have been figuring out new and better ways to win conflicts ever since the invention of the club.  In east Asia there has been a lot of conflict throughout history.  Considering that 2/3 of the world’s population lives in Asia and that China was the second center of agricultural civilization, the greatest number of people has been able to devote one of the greatest amounts of time to figuring out how to fight conflicts and how to win conflicts.  In sheer numbers of man-hours devoted to the study of conflict, 2/3 of the world’s population times 9,000 years far exceeds anything any other culture could come up with.   Because 2/3 of the world’s population lives in Asia, they’ve also had the greatest reason to figure out how to stop conflict.

It only stands to reason, therefore, that the most highly developed forms of martial arts should’ve originated in Asia.  Prior to World War II, American soldiers and sailors stationed in the Pacific who met up with Japanese soldiers were routinely infuriated by the fact that they could never out-fight these tiny little guys in bar-room brawls.  That was because the Americans were trying to box, wrestle, and brawl against soldiers from a land where peasants had to learn how to use their bare hands and simple farming tools to out-fight heavily armed Samurai!  The Americans and all their superior muscle mass couldn’t even begin to fathom what they’d run up against!

If an opponent charges at you with a knife, the karate solution would be to block the knife and then kick and punch the attacker into oblivion.  The ju-jitsu solution would be to block the knife, grab your opponent, and then contort his body in all kinds of directions that it wasn’t meant to bend until he had too many dislocated joints and broken bones to be able to kill you any more.  Either of those solutions requires you to exert enough violent force against your attacker to stop his violent force, and then to exert additional violent force against him to defeat him.

Aikido is more creative, because it doesn’t depend on initiating or stopping violent force, but on re-directing it.  The aikido solution begins with an objective re-definition of the situation.  In this case, the attacker is not charging at you with a knife.  He is charging in a certain direction at a certain speed, and he expects you to still be standing in the path of his knife by the time he reaches you.  It is not your responsibility to still be there when he arrives.  If you step out of the way, your enemy can go right on charging in that direction and at that speed forever if he wants to. However, since it is more likely that he will stop running in that direction and come running at you again, it is usually within your interests to prevent him from doing that.

If you step out of the way but stick your foot out to trip him as he runs past, or grab his wrist and push on his shoulder just right to make him fall on his face, that’s his own damn fault for running at you with a knife in the first place!  So, with a minimal amount of effort on your part, you simply get out of the way and let your enemy defeat himself with his own violence!

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Terrorism and aikido are just two examples of conflict and resolution to conflict.  Asians and everyone else in the world have figured out all kinds of ways to eliminate conflict.  The solutions that succeed best in the long run are the ones that eliminate conflict without creating new conflict.

The idea that global democracy and free trade would bring ever lasting joy and happiness to the world was based on the assumption that everyone in the world wanted the American Dream—that they all wanted the 1 x 6 x 3.5 = 21 equation for finding the meaning to life.  Obviously some people in the world don’t want the American Dream and they’re willing to kill a lot of people to keep it from being forced upon them.  Obviously in this world where everyone is supposed to be happy now, somebody still wants something they don’t have.  Now they’ve figured out how to make a lot of other people want something they don’t have.  Is there something wrong with these people, or is there something wrong with the American Dream?  Or both?

Obviously, conflict is still being created somehow, so for some reason the worldwide American Dream isn’t perfect.  The American Dream is very popular with a lot of people, so presumably it’s a big step in the right direction, but it isn’t the ultimate solution to conflict.

So what is the ultimate solution to conflict?  How does a civilization win the War on Terror when the greatest weapon of the enemy—fear—exists within the minds of every single one of its citizens? As long as the terrorists make us as a culture live in fear, they win.  It doesn’t matter if they never kill another person ever again.  As long as terrorists might be out there somewhere, they might kill somebody, and as long as that happens, we still live in fear and they still win.  In order for us to ever win, as a culture we have to evolve beyond fear.

The American Dream doesn’t do that.  We have the American Dream and we’re still afraid.  We tried to buy freedom from fear by exporting the American Dream all over the world and that didn’t work, because obviously somebody wasn’t willing to sell us safety for what we were offering to pay for it.  So what do we do now?

A lot of cultures over history have tried to eliminate conflict in ways that are crude by today’s standards.  Some of them tried to make other people understand that “swords and guns are dangerous, and we have lots of swords and guns, so do what we say.”  Other people have tried approaches that have worked better, by teaching people various forms of self-control, such as by promising them some form of meta-physical reward for acting in certain ways, or by threatening them with meta-physical punishment for acting in other ways.  Unfortunately, since most of those approaches were invented in previous centuries, they are based on a lot of traditional beliefs that have since been disproven by the advances of science. Some people used to believe the world was flat.  That was disproven.  Some people used to believe the sun revolved around the Earth.  That was disproven.  Trying to convince people to eliminate conflict by believing in things that simply aren’t true is only going to create a new kind of conflict.

Any conflict resolution strategy that has survived for any length of time has survived because it worked at least partially.  Obviously, conflict resolution strategies that didn’t work at all would be abandoned and forgotten.  Every culture in the world has its own strategy for conflict resolution, because obviously, if a culture couldn’t resolve its conflicts its people couldn’t function as a community and the culture would disintegrate.  That means there are a bunch of partial equations for conflict resolution I can sort through to identify constants and solve for variables.  That takes up most of the rest of the book.

We can start by asking the Asian martial artists how to resolve conflict. Any number of them would be glad to tell you that the best way to avoid conflict is by not provoking conflict in the first place.  You tread as lightly upon the world as possible, and live your life without inviting conflict.  If you can avoid getting in a fight in the first place, you’ve already won.  If someone tries to kill you anyway, you get out of the way.  Your enemy can only defeat you if you do what he wants you to do—in the case of the knife fight, that means standing still so your enemy can impale you.  As long as you don’t do what your enemy wants you to do, he can’t win.  If that doesn’t work, you can try turning his violence against him and let him defeat himself with his own violence. If he doesn’t incapacitate himself that way, at some point he’s probably going to realize that trying to defeat you is turning into more effort than it’s worth, because all his efforts to hurt you are only hurting himself. If that still doesn’t work, you can resort to enough direct violence to defeat your enemy and leave him feeling like he’s been defeated by a better person than he.  You prevent him from defeating you, hopefully well enough to make him realize that trying again would be futile, and then you get on with your life without sinking to his level trying to get even.

Is the equivalent possible as a way of life for societies?  Can societies live in a way that eliminates conflict without creating more conflict?  Certainly. People have been figuring out how to do that for at least the length of recorded history.  Again, the Asians have been able to— and have needed to— devote the greatest amount of man-hours to figuring this one out.  Unfortunately, in spite of all their practice, their conflict resolution strategies still aren’t perfect, because there is still a lot of conflict in Asia.  So where have their strategies gone wrong?  Could a strategy be constructed that could work for everyone everywhere in the world for all time?  In order for our culture to evolve beyond fear, it has to change permanently, and a strategy that only works temporarily won’t make that happen.

In order for such a thing to be able to work for anyone anywhere in the world for all time—or at least for as far as anyone of today can foresee—that strategy would have to be written in universal terms that would mean the same thing to everyone, regardless of their backgrounds or beliefs, and that wouldn’t change their meanings over time.

Objective science, by definition, can be measured equally by anyone, in any part of the world, at any time, regardless of their beliefs.  All science is ultimately mathematics, and mathematics is often called the universal language. In the search for life on other planets, for instance, scientists realize that they will have to conduct communications with intelligent alien life mathematically.  One plus one will always equal two, no matter what corner of the galaxy you live in or what language you speak.

Luckily, humans have a lot more in common with each other than they do with aliens.  Because every human being lives on Earth and is a member of the same species, we are guaranteed to have a lot more in common with each other than we do with members of a different species from a different planet. Once again we’re in luck, because scientists have been studying our evolution and our planet very intently, and their discoveries in those fields apply equally to everyone.

All mathematics is ultimately logic.  Every number is ultimately a unit of mathematical logic.  When you add units of logic together you perform a logical operation on two separate units of logic and combine them to create a larger unit of logic.  When you subtract, you combine two units of logic through a different logical process to create a smaller unit of logic, and so on.
Therefore, it must be possible to write a universal language that functions as a system of mathematics but doesn’t use any numbers.  In order to write such a non-numerical system of mathematics, it would have to be based on an objective science whose discoveries were so comprehensive that the logic could be extracted directly from the science without the use of traditional numbers, and then through a series of logical steps the logic could be broken down into units which would function as theoretical numbers, even though they wouldn’t be numbers in the traditional sense.

Artists do this sort of thing all the time.  Red paint reflects light waves of a certain wavelength.  Yellow paint reflects light waves of a different wavelength.  If you mix the two together, you create orange paint, which reflects light waves of a wavelength that is different from either of the other two.  Does every painter know the mathematical value of the wavelength of the light that each of his paints reflects, and does he decide what wavelength of light he wants to reflect when he mixes paint together?  Of course not.  And yet, among painters red and yellow are units of logic that can be combined to create a new unit of logic called orange.  While numbers exist to measure those units of logic, painters can use those units of logic without using the literal numbers.

When Ludwig von Beethoven wrote his Ninth Symphony, he wrote it for a nine-octave piano keyboard, even though piano keyboards only had seven octaves at the time. It didn’t matter to Mr. Beethoven of course, because he was already deaf by then anyway. Full-size piano keyboards have nine octaves now, because people had to start building nine-octave pianos in order to play his Ninth Symphony.  In a way, Beethoven invented the nine-octave piano even though he never built a piano in his life.  So I’m sure that if I invent a system of theoretical mathematics that works, someone will figure out how to use some actual numbers in it.

I call this system of theoretical mathematics spiritual logic.  It is the logic of what makes people what they are, and it is broken down into units of logic that serve as the mathematics of evolution and the universal language of humanity.

After our great cultural revolution in which our civilization mathematically eliminates fear, why will the answer to human life be 42?  Because it’s a theoretical number that works as well as any.
(And yes, all you Douglass Adams fans out there, I know 42 is supposed to be the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Well keep on reading, cuz you ain’t seen nothing yet…)

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Personally, I have had trouble dealing with people all my life for a number of reasons.  I think it’s safe to say that one of those reasons has to do with the way I was raised compared to the way “everyone else” was raised.  For instance, the fact that I come from one of the 20% of non-dysfunctional families in America meant I started out with a fundamentally different concept of how people ought to interact with each other from 80% of the people I meet.  Add to that the fact that my family is what you could call overly-functional, that we’re so functional that at family gatherings everyone (but me) gets so wrapped up in standing around being considerate of each other and agreeing with each other at least in principle, that it takes gruesome amounts of time for anything to actually get done.  Add to that the facts that we look and act like a cross between the Addams Family and the Grateful Dead family, and that we’re an assortment of artists and engineers from just about every corner of humanity, and it’s pretty safe to say that my family is slightly less diverse than the United Nations and sickeningly more unified.

As you might imagine, that has given all of us a very distorted perception of what passes for reality for “everyone else”.  Since whatever subjective reality is best agreed upon by the majority of people becomes the de facto subjective reality of the masses, that democratically elected semi-official cultural subjective reality is completely alien to me.

Of course, considering that the subjective reality of the masses has brought us 70 years of global conflict in the past 90 years, I’m in no hurry to join that subjective reality anyway. Unfortunately, since the people who do belong to that reality affect me and the planet that I live on, and do all they can to try to drag me into their subjective reality, if I want to evade that subjective reality, I have to figure out how to stay out of its way. Other people have tried to fight off the encroaching subjective reality of the world, but all they’ve done is to create more conflict in the process.  Since the people who practice that subjective reality never stop trying to drag me into it, unless I want to spend my whole life running from it, I have to figure out how to turn their own force back upon them.

Because I’m just one person and the subjective reality of the world is the only way of life most people in the world have ever known, I can’t create a new subjective reality for the world simply by telling everyone, “Hey, your subjective reality is stupid, cut it out.”  First all the people of the world will resort to a playground-mentality shouting match of,“Yuh-huh/ Nuh-uh!”   Then they’ll demand to know what makes me think I’m so special that I should know a better way than they do.  Then they’ll insist that my way doesn’t amount to anything special anyway because it’s just my opinion of how the world should work, and ultimately that’s just a new subjective reality.

Trust me, I’ve tried this…

While it is true in principle that my reality is subjective, the fact remains that my way of looking at the world is based entirely on modern objective science, logic, and mathematics, and most people’s aren’t.  Even though my way of looking at the world is ultimately subjective, because it’s more objective than anyone else’s way, it has to be better, because it leaves the least amount of room for disagreement and conflict.  One plus one will always equal two, and there’s nothing anyone can do to change that, no matter how they feel about it, and no matter what they do to try to convince anyone that it should be otherwise.

Unfortunately, trying to convince the world that my subjective reality is better than theirs would require everyone else to un-learn their own emotional attachment to the only reality they’ve ever known and have faith in their intellectual ability to decide that they’ve been wrong all this time.  That’s much easier said than done.

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The good news is that over the course of my adventures I’ve met a lot of people who have the same basic problem I do.  There are a lot of people in the world who just want to do their own thing and get along with each other.  Unfortunately, that’s such a revolutionary concept to the world that there is no established culture for people who just want to be themselves.  How do you establish a culture for people who all want to be unique?  Well, you begin by asking what all these people have in common.  To start with, they all belong to the same species, and they all live on the same planet…

In the Western world, groups of people have been forming cultures based on individuality for about 40 years now.  Those cultures are gaining momentum, and are gaining social and political power as a result of their rising popularity.  However, in spite of their collective value of individuality, they remain disorganized by that same individuality.  Opposed to these people are long-standing traditions of well-organized people who have accumulated a lot of followers and a lot of resources over the course of thousands of years.  Most of those traditions were originated by groups of people who just wanted to do things their own way and get along with each other.  The people of thousands of years ago were not globally conscious, and as their descendants have come into contact with each other, their cultures have come into conflict.

Did all these ancient traditions suddenly stop valuing harmony between people when they met up with strangers from distant lands?  Is this new culture of people just a bunch of punks and rebels who want to piss off their parents?  Or is this new culture a group of globally conscious people who value harmony as much as the older traditions claim to, and who simply want to rise above the problems of the old cultures?

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Dr. R.D. Laing explains this underlying problem of traditional subjective reality in his book The Politics of Experience.

Basically (although I’m putting it into different terms here) if 51% of people decide that chocolate ice cream is the best kind, that makes chocolate ice cream the best kind, even though objectively speaking there is no best flavor of ice cream.  Even if you don’t believe that chocolate ice cream is the best kind, you’re out-voted, and to insist that vanilla ice cream was the best kind would only get you into trouble. If your friend agrees with you that vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate, but neither of you realize the other thinks that, neither of you is going to want to be the first to admit it and risk getting into trouble, so both of you will go on saying that chocolate ice cream is the best, even though neither of you believe that.  But if the only flavors included in this culturally-divisive taste-test were chocolate and vanilla, then chocolate becomes the de facto “best” flavor of ice cream on no objective or comprehensive basis at all, but on the basis of 51% of people thinking it’s better than vanilla.

Of course, some of you are going to say, “I wouldn’t care what everyone else thought, if I thought that vanilla was the best, I would say so.”  Well I’m not talking about you personally, I’m talking about patterns in societies—sociological forces.  Just because you would admit to disagreeing with the majority doesn’t mean everyone who disagrees with the majority is going to admit it, so your minority opinion is going to seem an even greater minority.  Because the majority insists that one thing is true and the minority insists that something else is true, at the societal level, the level that’s going to have the most influence on the perception of the most people, the minority opinion is just plain wrong.

That’s what you and your minority opinion are up against, and all you have working in your favor is the satisfaction of saying what you think. Opposed to you will be all the people who prefer chocolate ice cream, plus all the people who prefer vanilla but pretend to prefer chocolate for the sake of staying out of trouble.  Because the majority still prefers chocolate, even if everyone who prefers vanilla joined your vanilla revolution, you’d still be a minority, and ultimately you wouldn’t change a thing.  All the people who prefer vanilla but side with the people who prefer chocolate are going to make their own lives simpler by eliminating conflict with the chocolate majority for the simple price of denying their taste in ice cream.

Dr. Laing wrote his explanation in the mid-60s, in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war protests, the sexual revolution, and the second women’s liberation movement, when America was a much different place than it is now because those four cultural revolutions hadn’t succeeded yet, so hadn’t transformed our society from what it was then into the society we live in now.  All of those revolutions succeeded eventually because the less-powerful groups of people that started them were able to affect the course of our culture.  They did that by figuring out how to live more efficiently as a society by eliminating conflict by expanding their societal perception of the world.

In effect, those revolutionaries changed our cultural values from “Chocolate ice cream is the best,” to say, “Some people think chocolate ice cream is better, and some people think vanilla ice cream is better”.  The people of this hypothetical vanilla ice cream civil rights movement figured out how to conduct their struggle for vanilla ice cream rights more efficiently by eliminating conflict by changing their tactic from trying to prove that vanilla ice cream was better to insisting that they be given the freedom to believe vanilla was better.  If 49% of the population believes that they should be given the freedom to think vanilla ice cream was better, and at least 2% of the chocolate-eating population agrees with them, even if for no other reason than because they find it easier to agree with this new argument than to hang onto their former cultural value and the conflict it’s now bringing with it, the struggle now becomes one in which 49% of people insist that chocolate ice cream is better, and 51% of people believe that people should be given the freedom of choice between chocolate and vanilla.  A critical mass of people have reached a higher level of consciousness by figuring out how to live more efficiently by eliminating a source of conflict from their world.   As a result, they change the dominant viewpoint of their society and their society progresses.

But enough about you, let’s talk about me now.  If I know of 31 flavors of ice cream and I think mint chocolate chip ice cream is the best, not only do I disagree with everyone in the society, no one else in the society even knows what mint chocolate chip ice cream is.  Because of that, not only will the conclusions that either of us has reached be inconceivable to the other, so will the basis of our respective studies be inconceivable to the other.  That is, if you don’t know what mint chocolate chip ice cream is, you can’t see why I think it’s best, and you can’t even see how I could think it’s best.   I can’t imagine how you could think chocolate ice cream was the best if you’ve only had two flavors to choose from, because I can’t even understand how you could live with only two flavors of ice cream, let alone what decisions that difference would lead you to make.  Your ignorance to mint-chocolate-chip ice cream will affect me and my life, but you and your overwhelming majority have no need to agree that my point of view is even valid.  And even if I could give somebody in this increasingly-farcical totalitarian ice cream society a spoonful of mint chocolate chip ice cream to try, and even if they would give me an honest answer about how much they liked it, how could they decide whether it was better than chocolate if they’d been eating chocolate all their life?

(You think this explanation sounds confusing?  The Beatles paraphrased Dr. Laing in the first two lines of I am the Walrus, that’s how absurd his explanation sounded!  See why I’m using this one instead?)

Even if I come along to try to change the dominant viewpoint of the society after the vanilla ice cream civil rights movement has succeeded, and even if I change my argument to “People should be allowed to like any kind of ice cream they want”, if the entire realm of ice cream consciousness of this world only includes chocolate and vanilla, I’m still going to be running face-first into insurmountable conflict with my new argument.  If 90% of the people of this new progressive two-flavor ice cream society are standing around patting themselves on the backs for being so open minded that they have been able to bridge the gap between chocolate and vanilla, 10% of people go on insisting that chocolate is better, and 0% of the people are aware that 29 more flavors of ice cream exist in the world, how am I ever supposed to convince anyone of my point of view?

A few people, no doubt, will be able to extrapolate upon the concept that because people should be given their choice between two flavors of ice cream they personally know about, people should be given the choice to like any other kind of ice cream that exists.  Most people probably won’t know what to think, because they’ll still be trying—or not even trying—to wrap their heads around the idea that 29 more flavors of ice cream could exist.

Some people of this supposedly-open-minded ice cream society will be sure to insist that people should only be given their choice between chocolate and vanilla, and will completely overlook how much better their society has become since they resolved the dispute between chocolate and vanilla.  What if some of these unknown flavors of ice cream could turn their children into monsters?  What if some of these unknown flavors of ice cream could pose a threat to their national security?  The people making those arguments have an advantage within the two-ice-cream-flavor society, because their arguments only depend on people being able to relate to the two specific flavors of ice cream that everyone in the society is familiar with.  My argument depends on people with a limited perspective of ice cream flavors being able to expand upon that perspective to encompass the abstract concept of ice cream itself.

Suppose I’ve traveled far and wide and visited many different societies that all have different sets of ice cream flavors.  Some have more flavors than others, some have many flavors, but none have all the flavors.  Suppose that of the 31 flavors in the world I’ve only tried 20, and I’ve only ever met other people who have tried 8 other flavors.  There are still 3 flavors of ice cream that I have heard of but have no familiarity with.  However, suppose that everywhere I go, people have all agreed that ice cream is good.  Suppose that everywhere I go people have been bridging differences between ice cream flavors within their own societies.  Suppose there are other people in the world who are familiar with ice cream flavors beyond those of their own society.  Suppose those people on the whole agree that there are other flavors of ice cream that are good.  Suppose that because of that familiarity there are more people who are able to grasp the concept of ice cream itself.

Suppose there are other people in the world who travel among societies and bring their own ice cream with them to let people of other societies try.  Suppose there are people in the world who are trying to bridge differences between individual flavors of different societies.  All of that makes my argument that “People should be allowed to like any flavor of ice cream” a whole lot easier to make.

In other words, if I tried making my argument that “All ice cream is good” in medieval Europe, I would’ve been burned as a heretic.  Luckily, we live in the 21st century, where global travel, telecommunications, and cultural blending have made people aware of a lot more than just two flavors of ice cream, especially here in America.

Of course, people don’t care about ice cream flavors that much in real life, do they?  In real life people are far too busy arguing about sensible things like which religion is the best, or which color of people are the best, or which of two political parties has all the answers.  Granted, the world has changed a great deal in nearly four decades since Dr. Laing wrote that book, but not as much as you might think.  Even if the majority of people now believe that there are so many different flavors of ice cream in the world that no one could ever comprehensively proclaim all ice cream to be good, the majority of people have still created a de facto subjective reality by agreeing on that.   See what I mean?

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If you compare the lists of ingredients between any flavors of ice cream, you will notice that the great majority of the things that make up ice cream are identical.  All ice cream is the same except for its differences in flavors.    If everyone in the world focuses on ice cream flavors, no one can ever come to a conclusive agreement.  On the other hand, if you stop concentrating on ice cream flavors and start looking at ingredients, you will be amazed at how much any flavor of ice cream has in common with any other flavor of ice cream. The differences in flavors are only superficial.  If you focus exclusively on ice cream flavors you won’t be able to see the forest for the trees, if you’ll pardon my mixing of metaphors.

For me to make sense of people for my own sake, first I had to figure out what things were different between them, and what things were the same.  That was relatively easy.  Unfortunately, that distinction could only give me an image of people in three-dimensional space—it would only allow me to see what a person was this very moment.  Obviously, people are not mere landmarks; their existences are series of events in space-time.  To know what a person was at this very moment told me nothing about why the person was like that or what they might do next.  In order to be able to truly understand people, I had to understand human behavior.  In order to figure out what people are and what they might do because of it, I had to figure out why they were that way in the first place.

In my family of artists and engineers, intellect and feelings have worked together for generations.  A lot of people I’ve met who are trying to leave tradition behind equate intellect with establishment, and believe the only way they can reject the establishment and do what feels right is to reject intellect itself.  My family has never had that problem.  When my grandparents lived near Los Angeles they liked to vacation in the forests of northern California.  It was just a matter of time before they decided that the only logical thing to do would be to move there so essentially they could be on vacation all the time.  By the time the 1960s rolled around, the concept that people should just be themselves, try to get along with each other, do what made them happy, and quit living their lives around earning as much Glorious Money as possible was old news in my family.

This longstanding family tradition of proto-spiritual logic has given me my completely alien perspective on cultural subjective reality.  That brings with it an unexpected benefit, in that it absolves me of any need to believe that any part of anyone’s cultural subjective reality must be true.  I have absolutely no emotional connection to any part of that subjective reality, and therefore no subconscious need to prove that any part of it must be right.  I can look at the traditional subjective reality of the dominant cultures of the world and see that their version of reality killed something on the order of 180,000,000 people in the in the 20th century, and I can look at my reality and see that it didn’t.  If I had to prove that the reality of the masses had been a bad idea from the word go, it wouldn’t bother me in the least.

Because my formula for understanding people had to be based on measurable logic and objective science, it couldn’t contradict science or itself, and consequently it wouldn’t have to depend on faith.  It wouldn’t contradict human nature, because its purpose was to define human nature.  Because it wouldn’t contradict science, logic, or human nature, and it would’ve been constructed in everyday life, it could be used by anyone who was looking for something to believe in—as so many people in the world are— who didn’t want to be forced to trade in their understanding of the world for abstract faith.   On the other hand, because it is a scientific philosophy and not a religious one, it doesn’t require anyone to stop following a religion to be able to use it either.  (However, if a person’s religion prevents them from accepting modern science, it will prevent them from using it, but there’s nothing I can do about that.)

Although this is a laughable concept in the political world of 2005, if one objective philosophy could be constructed that would explain the behavior of everyone in the world regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, or anything else, everyone would be left with no other choice but to realize that they all had important things in common, and that they weren’t so different from each other after all.

I began this project long ago for my own personal use, but the further I got into it, the more I realized how many other people could benefit from it.  I’ve spent my whole life trying to evade civilization as much as possible, drifting this way and that, and now I suddenly realize that I’m sitting here looking at a mathematical formula that could change the world forever.  I’ve met a lot of good people in my travels who are all trying to help change the world.  But I never thought I was going to be the one to figure out how to unite them all.  What can I say?  Sometimes you find your path in life, and sometimes your path finds you…

I’m not the first person to have ever wanted to unite the world; I’m just the first to have figured out how to do it scientifically.  John Lennon imagined all the people sharing all the world, and I could certainly live with that.  There’s no way it could happen right this minute, but it could happen.  There are certainly enough people in the world who agree with me.

Good ideas are like viruses—they’ll find a way to spread and multiply, whether anyone wants them to or not.   If I can explain what makes people what they are in the universal language of humanity, publish it in a book, and spread it around the world, then one way or another world peace is inevitable.

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Best of all, if there was one universal objective formula that people could use to understand what makes them and everyone else what they are, they could stop worrying about those things and focus their attentions on other things.   Let me put it this way:

There’s a story from the Bible about a guy who builds his house on the sand.  It’s easy to build, but the foundation is weak and the whole house gets washed away the next time the river rises.  His neighbor built his house on a rock.  He had to work his ass off to do it, but after the flood came his house was the one that was still standing. I’ve built enough foundations for enough houses in real life that I think I can appreciate that story more than most people.  Now that I’ve accomplished what I’ve set out to do, I’ve finally finished my spiritual house.  And now I sit here on my rock watching billions of people arguing over whose patch of sand is the best, and killing each other to take each other’s sand in the hopes that it will be better than the sand they already own.  It comes in different colors, textures, and mineral compositions, some sand is better than other sand, some of it has gravel and stone in it, and some of it might even have oil under it, but sand is still sand.

That’s hardly to say that I’m the only person to have ever built on a rock.  That is to say, that in the course of building on my rock my engineering nature has driven me to develop a recipe for concrete—that is, a formula for turning sand and gravel into rock.  (Artificial metamorphic rock, to be specific.)   And now that I have it, I think I ought to share it, just because that’s the kind of thing neighbors do for each other where I’m from.  Everyone has to build their own house, and building a house is a lot of hard work no matter what kind of foundation you use (as I have also done in real life).

Everyone always builds the best house they can think of.  A lot of people have had to build houses without knowing how to build on rock, or without being able to find rock, or without having the time to build on rock.  Some people have even tried building on rock only to discover afterwards that the rock wasn’t as solid as they thought it was. Some of those people have gone on living in those houses anyway, and some have torn them down to start over.  Some of those people end up building their new houses on sand because they can’t find a new rock.

There are a lot of important parts and aspects to a house besides the foundation.  Houses can be built that are good in all respects except for the fact that they’re built on sand.  The foundation is the part of the house that keeps the rest of it from falling down, but it would be elitist for anyone to say that’s the only part of the house that’s worth anything.  The foundation won’t keep you warm or dry, for instance, and you can’t cook food on it.  My own metaphorical house isn’t all that much to speak of.  It serves its purpose, and serves it well, even though it looks like Dr. Frankenstein’s castle.  But one thing I can say for it is that I made sure it got the most indestructible foundation ever built!

Even if I gave everyone a map to good rock and instructions on how to build on rock, I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t abandon their current houses and take the time to start over, and a lot more people just wouldn’t want to part with the houses they’ve worked so hard to build already.  Good houses can be renovated though, and good foundations can be built under good houses (and I’ve even done that in real life) to save them from having to be torn down.

I’ve built my house now and I’m done, and I’m not building anyone else’s houses for them.  But if my formula for rock works as well for anyone else as it has for me, I’m sure somebody could find it useful, either for building new houses on rock or for strengthening the foundations of the houses they’ve already built.

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Another important use I’ve found for developing an objective understanding of humanity has come from dealing with computer engineers.  Sometime within this century (and those are extremely conservative estimates according to people who are in the business of knowing about things like this—see The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil) artificial intelligence will progress to the point that questions will begin to arise like: When have computers become intelligent enough to be entitled to civil rights?  And that’s just the beginning.  Another good question is:  How much control of our lives should we allow AI computers to take?  I think a fairly safe answer to the first question is:  When they have become equal to humans.  But that raises the question:  What exactly is a human?  Never before in history has anything been similar enough to a human to make such a distinction necessary.  The closest precedent anyone could draw upon, I think, would be the controversy over slavery in America.  That wasn’t even a very difficult distinction to make, because the slaves were just as biologically human as anyone else.  But for as simple a distinction as it was to make, 600,000 people died fighting over the controversy in just four years (which, compared to the population of the United and Confederate States as of 1860, would be the equivalent of over 5,000,000 Americans being killed in a war today).  That was followed by a hundred years of racial segregation, and even now, 140 years after slavery was abolished, Blacks still don’t have equality to Whites in a lot of ways.  Before we have to start going through that whole process again with something that isn’t even biologically alive, I think it would behoove us to figure out what exactly a human is ahead of time.

Another good question that raises is:  Is there any other artificial force in our society that is taking control of humans already without our noticing it?  And there is.  Bureaucratic organization was a great invention because it allows people to cooperate efficiently, whether it’s a religious organization, a government, or a business.    But somewhere along the way, as I’m sure we’re all familiar with, the bureaucracy becomes so efficient that the people stop controlling the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy starts controlling the people.

How does it do that? To be sure, any given bureaucracy exists to manipulate some aspect of humanity, whether it’s your right to vote, your taxes, your money, your car insurance, whatever.  It is able to do that most effectively by finding a way to make mathematical predictions about people based on statistics.  People don’t like being treated like statistics, but the bureaucratic structure has no way of recognizing them as anything else.  The people who operate the bureaucratic structure might be able to manipulate the bureaucracy to fit your needs as an individual, but more often than not it seems, the people who make up the bureaucracy just hand you some weak excuse about “I’m sorry sir, but that’s our policy and there’s nothing I can do about it.”  As I’m sure we all realize, if you put enough bureaucracies together, all the aspects of everyone’s lives could be controlled bureaucratically, and everyone would be reduced to statistics.
That has a simple enough solution though.  All somebody has to do is to figure out how to make individual people function more efficiently as individuals than as statistics.  If individuals could apply the efficiency of bureaucracies to themselves to make their individual lives function more efficiently than the bureaucracies that were trying to turn them into statistics, the tables would be turned!  A system of objective spiritual logic would do just that.

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As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French philosopher, postulated, if humanity could reach a critical mass of higher consciousness it would be elevated to a higher level of being.  That’s exactly what happened—to a small extent—in the hypothetical ice cream society when the majority of people agreed to stop arguing over whether chocolate or vanilla was better and agree that people should be allowed to choose between chocolate or vanilla.  It follows, unfortunately, that if humanity reached a critical mass of lower consciousness, it would be reduced to a lower level of being.  Considering all the things there are in the world that are trying to reduce us all to statistics, I don’t think the course of the future is working to our advantage at the moment.

To build an atom bomb, you start with some weapons-grade uranium or plutonium.  Both of those are radioactive because they’re very large atoms, which means their outermost neutrons have weak bonds. Neutrons that break loose from atoms can collide with the nuclei of other atoms and break them. That breaking of nuclei will release a lot of energy and free up more neutrons that can break more nuclei, and so on, setting off a chain reaction—or a cascade effect, as it’s called.  When you accumulate a critical mass of material, it becomes a mathematical inevitability that a cascade effect will begin.  (I’m being intentionally vague on this topic as a matter of principle, so I hope you don’t mind.)

When they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the bomb builders had placed something less than a critical mass of uranium-235 at each end of a tube.  Explosive charges went off, drove the masses into each other, formed the critical mass, and the rest is history.  By setting off the reaction in roughly fifty pounds of uranium, they produced the explosive force of 15,000 tons of TNT.  About 70,000 people were killed instantly, and a total of 200,000 people died in all.  200,000!  These days, it takes the world-wide AIDS epidemic three whole weeks to kill that many people!  (According to the official report, it was also  the low estimate for the number of Americans that were expected to die in the forthcoming invasion of Japan to try to end the war the “polite” way.)
What would happen if there was a critical mass of people in the world who wanted to get along with each other and stop bombing each others’ cities for a change, and they just needed a triggering mechanism to bring them all together?  And what would happen if I could figure out how to build that triggering mechanism?

Well, I guess we’re going to find out, hmm?

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