For about 40 years now, people have been abandoning tradition to do what they feel in their souls to be right.   These people are, on the whole, good people, and the things they do are, on the whole, good things.  Since these people are acting on their feelings, they don’t require great intellects to make their decisions.  Still, there has to be a reason these people are doing what they are doing, even if the people don’t consciously know what it is.

All kinds of academics have noticed this trend and intellectualized it up and down, but given that these intellectuals all received their doctorates from universities that have been accredited by the very establishment that the good, non-intellectual people have to rebel against in order to do what they feel to be right, studying this mysterious force of good from the outside can only lead people to understand it from the outside.  All the intellectualizing in the world will never mean anything to the non-intellectual people who are actually making it happen.

Obviously, in order to truly understand what these people were doing and why they were doing it, I had to become one of these people.  That wasn’t difficult, because I was raised as one of them.  All that left for me to do was to drop out of college.  It wasn’t even a conscious decision at the time I made it; I was just doing what felt right to me.

I have all the intellectual brains I could’ve ever needed to get a doctorate in anything I felt like, but obviously, there is no doctoral program for the only thing that could hold my interest, this unexplained force of good that people could feel but couldn’t define.  Over the course of history, people have been drawn to study scientifically mysterious forces of all forms: gravity, electricity, chemistry, and atomic physics, just to name a few.  I’ve done exactly the same thing, and I’ve done it in the only way it could be done directly.  Interestingly enough, over the course of my adventures I’ve accumulated enough education learning about different things to try to figure out why the world works the way it does that I should be a doctor of something by now: half a bachelor’s degree, a couple associate’s degrees, a commercial helicopter pilot’s license, and flight instructor certification.  But if nothing else, it’s been a hell of a lot more interesting than studying the same thing for eight years!

If I could find a scientific definition for the force of “good”, I could improve upon the force of good and make it even better.  If I could harness the force of good and industrialize it, I could mass-produce it.  If you harness the forces of electricity or atomic energy, you can build a power plant.  Does that mean it’s possible to build a goodness reactor?

Most importantly, perhaps, the people who choose to serve the forces of good instead of the forces of tradition are always at an intellectual disadvantage, because the forces of establishment and tradition have, by far, the most Glorious Money on their side.  Does that mean I should side with the forces of tradition that killed 180,000,000 people in the last century so that I too could earn as much Glorious Money as possible?  Should I let the rebels stand alone?

F*ck that…

As I once heard a young friend of mine explain so aptly to his parents when they asked him why he had to be such a rebel, “Luke Skywalker was a rebel.”  Of course, his parents inevitably tried to explain to him that Luke Skywalker was just a character in a movie.  They completely missed the point, but I understood it perfectly, because I could’ve told it to him if he hadn’t already figured it out on his own.  Luke Skywalker isn’t remotely “just” a character in a movie; he’s a legendary figure of the modern world who embodies admirable qualities.  He could’ve sided with the establishment of his fictional world, but instead (in his story) he did what he felt to be right, in spite of all the dangers and hardships he faced and in spite of his opponents’ best attempts to convert his loyalty to their side.  And he’s recognized as a mythical hero all over our real-life world now.

As people have discovered throughout history in numerous ways, the force of good is the most powerful force known to humankind. For 50 years of the Cold War, two superpowers stood poised to annihilate each other with the push of a button, but it never happened.  This potential nuclear force existed in the world, but it never succeeded in changing anything.  Scientifically speaking, there must have been some other force at work to oppose it.  According to Newtonian physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Even though this force of nuclear annihilation came into being, its effects were never felt by the world.  According to the Newtonian explanation, there must’ve been some other force that already existed in the world that must’ve been more powerful than nuclear annihilation, because nuclear annihilation never came about.  Good triumphed in the end, because the people who controlled all that nuclear energy never used it to blow each other to hell.  I’d say that’s good, wouldn’t you?

It’s obvious that if I could come up with a scientific definition of good and thereby level the field between the forces of good and the forces of tradition, good will have to triumph over tradition, and that will be good by definition.  Considering that tradition and all its Glorious Money has killed 180,000,000 people since 1900, I’d say that’s a good enough reason to side with whoever is trying to improve upon tradition, all by itself.

But this raises the question:  Where did tradition come from in the first place?  Did everybody get together and say, “Hey, this sounds like a terrible idea—let’s do it!”?  Or are traditions all a conspiracy devised by evil people to serve their own self-interest by brainwashing the masses?  I think it’s safe to say that both of those are laughable ideas.  Take, for instance, the American Revolution.  In the American Revolution the original government of the United States rebelled against the British Empire and won.  About two hundred years later, American citizens started rebelling against the U.S. government.  The Founding Fathers of the United States thought that what they were creating was good, so why did people eventually have to rebel against it?  Were the Founding Fathers deluded and only created something that was “less bad” than what they were rebelling against?  Or was the government they created good at the time but then it went wrong somewhere?  Or both?

If I want to harness the force of good so I can build this hypothetical goodness reactor in the world, I have to answer all these questions.

See this gigantic book in your hands?

Heh, heh, heh…

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I’ve found the ultimate solution in The Blank Slate, by Dr. Steven Pinker, one of many books by one of many academics who has come to all the same conclusions I have in his own way.  His book is very insightful and focuses on the basic premise of this book in excruciating detail, and includes a bibliography made up of 925 reference sources, by my count.  It doesn’t cover nearly as broad a scope as this book, but it includes a lot of research that I didn’t do myself or couldn’t’ve done myself (like neural imaging of brainwave patterns), and he does make a few connections that I hadn’t thought of.

The ultimate solution I’ve found isn’t in what Dr. Pinker did, but in what he didn’t do.  In spite of the immensity of that book’s insightfulness, the value of its conclusions, and its legitimacy within the scientific community, to the average non-intellectual, I imagine reading that book would be slightly less enjoyable than driving an ice pick into your forehead repeatedly.  I can summarize most of the book in one sentence:  “Scientists are making great advances in using modern science to discover the origins of human behavior, but a lot of people have a problem with that.”

By measuring the forces of human nature objectively, scientists are able to expand humanity’s perspective on itself, which allows people to put that new information to constructive use.  For instance, parents are more likely to abuse adopted children than they are to abuse their own biological children, for the basic evolutionary reason that their biological children carry the parents’ genes and adopted children don’t.  Does that mean that adoptive parents ought to be watched closely by the Department of Human Services?  Not quite.  Just because they are more likely to abuse their children, the great majority of parents don’t abuse their adopted children.  But now that people know this piece of information, they can decide how to use it.  If people didn’t know about it, the only course of action they could pursue would be to assume that parents don’t abuse adopted children more often than they do their biological children, so a bunch of adopted children would get abused by their stepparents, and nobody would ever realize it was a problem.

A lot of people for a lot of different reasons, mostly religious, political, traditional, and emotional, don’t want to believe that scientists can study people the way they study laboratory mice or any other species of animal in the world.  As a result, the progress of scientific study is faced with a constant battle for acceptance, scientists get denied governmental grants, politicians ban their research, centers for research get shut down by demonstrators, all kinds of things.  Usually it happens because scientists get misquoted, misinterpreted, and misrepresented by politicians, religious leaders, and the general public who can’t even grasp what the scientists are doing.
Here’s another good example.  It is a simple product of evolution that men are prone to seek out more sexual partners than women are, just because having children is a lot more work for women than it is for men.  Whether you look at humans or any other species of mammals, the females have good reason to be selective about their mates, and males… well, males don’t really care that much.  (Guys, am I right, or am I?)  Obviously in that interaction, in order for one side to get what it wants the other side has to lose.

The politically correct thing to do is to deny that fact of human nature, expect men to learn to be content with fewer sexual partners than they want, and accuse all rapists of being inherently wicked.  But where did that wickedness originate?  What do you do about it?  How do you correct it?    The way the government in America is set up at the moment, it recognizes that men might want to have sex more often than women do, but women have the right not to get raped.

Unfortunately, if all you do about it is to insist that men ought to know better and that anybody can be trained to accept anything at all just because people say they should, then it would be just as easy for a male-dominated society (like our own) to decide that women should just expect to get raped every so often and learn to live with that.  Anybody see a problem here yet?

So that’s what all the academics are up against, ultimately—people trying to force scientists to discover what the people want to believe, what religions have been preaching for hundreds or thousands of years, and what will earn votes for politicians. Unfortunately, science just doesn’t work that way.

That’s where me and my ultimate solution come in.  I have something on my side that the academics weren’t counting on:  the youth of America (and the young at heart).  The academics are running into all kinds of cultural obstacles that they just can’t overcome.  But the youth of America are the ones who create culture, and they don’t need any authority figures’ permission to do it.  For that matter, the more traditions they can upset and the more authority figures they can piss off in the process of inventing their new cultures, the better.   Have you ever heard of a bunch of middle-aged academics coming up with new styles of music, clothing, or art within the history of the recorded music industry?  Neither have I.  But the academics are the ones figuring out what’s going on in the world, and the youth of America are the ones who are trying to figure out what’s going on in the world, who feel like there must be an answer, and who would be willing to accept any answer as long as it worked, no matter who figured it out or how.

All it would take would be for someone to make sense of the world in a way that would satisfy everyone—that the scientists agreed with and the young people could understand.  There’s all the cultural acceptance for scientific discovery anyone will ever need.  It might take a decade or so to take root, but it’s the best idea anyone seems to have at the moment. So, ladies and gentlemen of the academic world, don’t worry about a thing; I’ve got it all covered…

ROCK AND ROLL IS HERE TO SAVE THE DAY!!!!!

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There are a lot of people who say, “God is love.”  That’s close, but falls rather short of the mark.  As I explain elsewhere in the book, “god” is hope for the future.  Love is a specific type of hope for the future, and a thing that lots of people hope to have in the future.

“God” is the force that powers the universe.  “God” is hope.  Does that mean that hope is the force that powers the universe?  From a strictly psychological/subjective standpoint it does.  Hope is the belief that things are going to turn out alright.  For children, as I explain elsewhere, the purest form of hope is the sense of hope that is (or isn’t) learned from their parents.  For adults, the purest form of hope is the belief that they have the ability and the resources to make things turn out alright.  When children and adults have hope, they’re satisfied with their lives, the world seems to make sense, and they’re willing to work a lot harder because they believe they can succeed at whatever they’re doing.

Over the course of writing this book, I’ve had to live through not one, but two Valentine’s Days working at jobs where they play commercial radio all day long.  So to all of you out there who are responsible for helping to fill up the airwaves with diamond engagement ring commercials, as the author of The Third Testament©, now I can say…

FEEL MY WRATH!!!!

Love is a specific and very popular type of hope for the future.  “God” is hope for the future, and is often confused with love.   Now lots of people try to convince everyone that love has to be bought at the jewelry store, or a ski resort, or wherever.  Obviously, that marketing tactic must work, because if it didn’t, people wouldn’t keep putting these simpleminded commercials on the radio, would they?

Now a lot of people in America honestly believe that hope can best be measured in dollars and material resources.  A lot of other people feel like there is no real hope left in the world, and their god has abandoned them—or was just a lie.  Well what do you expect?  If you try to buy love, hope, and god at the store, you put your love, hope, and god in the hands of the greedy motherf*cker who’s selling it to you!

Can a book by a simple carpenter restore “god”, love, and hope to the world and make everyone millionaires of the future economy?  I guess we’ll find out, eh?

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The most obvious question in how to go about looking for a universal formula for humanity is:  Can individuals be given fair consideration categorically?  My answer:  Yes, absolutely.  I know people are all different, but we do have things in common, so we do have somewhere to start.  We all belong to the same species, we all breathe the same air, and we all live on the same planet.  Just look at all those important things we have in common!

The next question is:  How can I safely draw conclusions categorically without stereotyping anyone and thereby corrupting my conclusions?  Obviously it is true that everyone is different, so it would be a mistake to stereotype people and conclude that all people behave a certain way because some, many, or most people behave that way.  To do that, I can use statistics.

Now the obvious question becomes:  How can I reduce everyone in the world to a statistic without compromising anyone’s individuality?  The obvious answer is:  I can only use statistics that apply to exactly 100% of people.  When a statistic applies to 100% of people—and by that I don’t mean almost 100% of people—individuality becomes irrelevant because that statistic is not affected by, and does not affect, individuality.

Another good question to ask is:  Are there any other ways I can use statistics?  The answer to that is:  Yes—very carefully.  Since this isn’t a mathematical formula in the literal numerical sense, I can’t depend on literal numbers for anything.  I can, however, look at relationships between numbers and trends in groups of numbers.  Unless any of those numbers are a constant 100% I can’t use them as conclusions, but I can use them to find a direction in which to look for conclusions.

Another way I can use statistics is by looking at things that could potentially affect exactly 100% of people.  If something doesn’t seem to affect 100% of people, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t affect 100% of people, that only means that it might not affect 100% of people.  It might affect 100% of people and just isn’t affecting some of them noticeably, or it might be affecting 100% of people but for some people those effects are being offset by some other factor.

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How else can I look for conclusive answers?  For one, I can study the behavior of people in different circumstances.  I can do that in two ways. Because I am trying to find a formula to explain the behavior of all people in all circumstances, it doesn’t really matter whether I study the same people’s behavior in different circumstances or different people’s behavior in different circumstances, because both approaches have problems to their scope.  The first would give me a larger amount of data about a smaller number of people, and the second would give me a smaller amount of data about a larger number of people.  Neither of those is going to give me all the data about all the people, so it doesn’t really matter which one I use.  Either way, there will be errors that I will have to correct for.

The other way that I can use the behavior of people in different situations is to support or refute hypotheses.  If I have assembled a body of data, I can watch people’s behavior to see how it corresponds with the behavior patterns the data indicates.  Theoretically (and this did turn out to work), as I assemble more and more valid data, I will be able to draw larger and larger conclusions.  Because the formula I’m looking for must be able to explain all human behavior, any human behavior that can’t be explained by the data I have assembled must indicate either that some of the data is faulty or that the data is incomplete (or both).  As long as data that I gain from watching individuals continues to prove useful in explaining other behavior of the same or other individuals, it continues to be a valuable method for collecting data.

One approach I can use to studying behavior in people is to divide people into groups based on characteristics.  That looks like stereotyping at first glance, but what it allows me to do is to study that characteristic and then move on to see if and/or how that characteristic appears in and/or affects other people. For instance, people who work in the same occupation presumably have similar aptitude for developing the skills that the occupation requires. Once I understand how that aptitude works and affects the things those people do, I can look to see if other people have that aptitude to a lesser degree or if it unique to those people.

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An excellent way to approach any academic undertaking is to build upon existing bodies of work in a particular field.  Unfortunately, since I had to invent my own field of study to find the answers I was looking for, there are no previously existing bodies of work in my field.  Luckily for me, people have been searching for one objective truth to the world since the dawn of humanity as we know it in a lot of different ways.  (For instance, the oldest archeological sites discovered in which people began treating the burying of their dead as an important event instead of simply as a disposal of bodies are older than the Homo sapiens species.)  That gives me immense amounts of work to refer to, if only in the abstract.

I must begin by assuming that all existing work is flawed, so I can’t depend on any of it, but I can use it to study where other people have gone astray in their searches, and I can use it as a guide to places I can look and what questions I can ask.

My goal is to find an evolutionary origin of human thought—by which I mean, mental activity.  People everywhere have always tried to figure out how to use the brains they have to get the things they need.  People aren’t stupid, so presumably every group of people has found part of what I’m looking for, it’s just that no group has found all of it.  Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that over the course of, say, the past 50,000 years people have thought about everything their brains have been capable of thinking about.  That simplifies my search immensely, because it makes the realm of human consciousness one gigantic algebraic equation in which I simply have to solve for variables.

To solve the equation, first I have to write it, and in order to do that, I have to accumulate all the ideas in the world into one place— in this case me, because I’m the one trying to solve the equation.  All the ideas in the world means all the ideas ever had by anyone.  Admittedly, at first glance that sounds absolutely impossible for any one person to do.  However, as it turns out there are a number of tools that can be used to make it possible, or at least less impossible.

First, the universal formula only needs to be absolute in the scientific sense, which is to say “absolute for now”.  Obviously, in order for any absolute truth to be absolute, it must account for all available empirical data, it must be able to be changed if new data is found to contradict the supposed truth, it must not limit or control the discovery of new data either to support or contradict it, and it must be able to be built upon as any of its component data or combinations of component data come to be understood more thoroughly.  In other words, to discover the one universal truth, I must account for the inescapable facts that it can only be written to explain the things people understand about the world now, it can’t be written to explain things that nobody understands yet, and it can’t pretend to explain anything as absolute beyond humans’ ability to measure it.  But that’s the whole reason science works—people keep studying science because they keep finding new things to investigate.  All science in any field today can only explain the things people have figured out about that field so far, and can’t explain the things nobody knows about yet. Most importantly perhaps, science can only explain things based on the data available at the time any given theory was written, and if credible data is discovered later to disprove the theories, the theories must be changed or abandoned.

Second, I must limit my search to evolutionary human thought.  Any further ideas derived from those evolutionary ideas will begin to diverge as they begin to involve more and more variables that the people having the further ideas didn’t account for.  In other words, to find the one answer, I must isolate evolutionary human thought, eliminate all thought that occurred after that, and construct a new system of thought completely from scratch, this time making sure to account for all variables.  That way, I can correct for the possibility (or likelihood) that the people who constructed any existing system of thought constructed it by interpreting evolutionary thought through their own subjectivity, and thereby reached conclusions they wrongly assume to be absolute.  It would be difficult for most people to do this without corrupting the process with their own subjective interpretations, I’m sure, but unlike most people, I was raised to take a scientific approach to the world, and I’m better at learning about science than most people.

Third, because so many people have devoted so much thought to the search for answers over time, at least the majority of, if not all, evolutionary thoughts will appear in multiple places. Evolutionary thoughts, therefore, can be recognized by recurring patterns in supposedly unrelated systems of thought.  Where similar patterns appear in unrelated systems, the existence of the evolutionary thought is supported.  Where a pattern in one system of thought contradicts a pattern in another system of thought, at least one thought pattern must not be a pure evolutionary thought, because pure evolutionary human thought must be universal.  For any premise that is contradicted, either the premise must be faulty, or the contradiction must be faulty (or both).  Any faulty thought must be a post-evolutionary thought that has been led astray by unaccounted-for variables.  If a premise is faulty, the evolutionary thought it is built upon can be discovered by correcting for the unaccounted-for variables.  If a contradiction is faulty, the premise is unaffected.

Fourth, in learning about any system of thought, its basic ideas are usually the ones you learn about first, or at least its basic ideas are contained in any introduction to the system of thought, for reasons I’ll assume are fairly obvious.  The basic ideas of any system of thought are that system of thought’s most direct links to evolutionary thought.

Fifth, because a lot of different people have had the same evolutionary ideas, that means that different systems of thought have a lot of commonalities, even if they don’t create immediately recognizable patterns.  This makes the search a lot simpler than if all systems of thought were based on completely original ideas.  For instance, all religions in the world give their followers some sense of purpose to their lives, some way to evade their inevitable deaths, and try to explain things about the world that no one truly understood when the religion first developed.  So evidently all those things are pretty important to people, wouldn’t you say?

Sixth, because a lot of different people have had the same evolutionary ideas, that means I can use the differences in the systems of thought that arose out of the evolutionary ideas to illustrate the variables and the effects that the differences in unaccounted-for variables had on those systems of thought.  For one example, nature-based religions arose from every culture in the world, because the same basic things affected the people who had those basic ideas.  The divergences in the developments of those religions helps illustrate, and is illustrated by, the differences in the places those religions were practiced.  Why did the Lakota tribes of the Great Plains see the buffalo as a sacred animal while the Aleuts of Alaska didn’t?  Because the Lakota depended on the buffalo for their lives, and the Aleuts had never even seen a buffalo!

Seventh, sound evolutionary ideas must resonate within the human consciousness and thereby endure.  Ideas that don’t work or don’t feel right to people are abandoned and forgotten.  Ideas that do endure spread to many people, and help create recurring patterns among different systems of thought.  (Like I said in the last chapter, good ideas are like viruses.)  That means that the ideas that are easiest for people to learn and remember must be evolutionary thought because those ideas are the easiest for people’s brains to think about, even if those people didn’t think of those ideas on their own.  Legends of old were written about heroes who displayed admirable human qualities, and they endured because those qualities were ones that many people aspired to—the heroes were role models.  Successful movies of today become modern legends for the same reasons— they too are written about heroes with admirable qualities who become memorable role models as a result. Movies succeed in part because they have admirable heroes, and people have the opportunity to admire the heroes because the movies are successful.

Eighth, nature left all on its own always functions perfectly.  If nature is left untouched by human behavior, it stays natural by definition.  Nature creates contexts for human behavior, but without humans there is no human behavior.  Therefore, the search for evolutionary human ideas can be confined to the realm of human experience because that’s where all evolutionary human ideas originate.

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Two of the oldest studies of human behavior don’t appear scientific at all at first glance, but like science they both depend on being insightful and accurate, so beneath the surface they actually are scientific in their own ways.   Theatre and fiction writing both turn an understanding of human behavior into art.  The better the artist understands human behavior, the more successful his art will be, because all theatre and all fiction depends on characters that human audiences can relate to in order to propel their stories.  Even aliens, androids, monsters, cartoons, and talking animals in movies and TV shows are created by human artists, are acted and directed by human artists, and are watched by human audiences.  If human audiences can’t relate to (supposedly) non-human main characters, they aren’t going to be interested in the movie, and the movie isn’t going to do very well.

Ever hear the saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense”?  That’s exactly my point:  you can’t make a living as an artist by confusing, annoying, or boring your audience.  In theatre and fiction the artistic medium is human behavior.  Just as painters don’t need to know the wavelengths of the light that each color of paint reflects in order to be able to paint, theatre artists and fiction writers don’t need to understand human behavior scientifically in order to create their art.  However, theatre and fiction succeed or fail because of the artist’s ability to convey human behavior that makes sense somehow to a human audience.   Therefore, successful theatre or fiction encapsulates human behavior that a large number of people agree to be realistic, even if none of those people know exactly why it’s realistic.

I started writing fiction when I was 9 and I started acting when I was 13.  I started college studying acting and I’ve worked in professional theatre for most of my adult life.  I started writing fiction intently my third year in college and have been doing so ever since.  I started writing this book based primarily on those two backgrounds, and as I’ve been working on it I’ve come across research by dozens of doctors of human sciences that agrees with everything I had to say.  So I guess that must be a good sign, eh?

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Since I basically re-invented this whole new movement in human sciences all on my own and came to all the same conclusions, there are numerous doctors of various things who have put together substantial and compelling scientific research  that back up my conclusions.

I could list every single source for every idea I’ve ever heard of in a bibliography and list a few hundred or a thousand sources, but what good would that really do anybody?  Who’s going to want to read a thousand books just to come up with all the same answers that I’ve come up with?

That’s why I limit my bibliography to the very best, most useful, most insightful books I’ve come across, and I refer to those books frequently and conspicuously.  For anyone who wants to reproduce my research, those are the best books to read.  If I was just another academic, a short bibliography wouldn’t look good, but I figure if I can come up with all the same conclusions that a bunch of academic people have come up with in a few very good academic books, and none of those books disagree with each other even though they were all written by different people independently of each other, then my conclusions are as good as bullet proof.  After all, all those academic people did use very long lists of reference books to reach their conclusions, and they reached the same conclusions I did.    That makes it all second-hand research for me to back up all the conclusions I already came to on my own anyway. There are thousands of references to back up what I say here, it’s just that those references are collected in the bibliographies of the few very good books that I refer to frequently and conspicuously.

I still say I invented this field of study all on my own.  These scientists have put together a parallel field of science where they search for and discover all the same things, but they go about it differently.  I have no problem drawing objective conclusions on things academic scientists wouldn’t dare to touch—or would handle with care, at best.  How do you use objective science to measure the significance of art, philosophy, religion, folklore, or metaphysics?  How can I use objective science to measure things that, by definition, can’t be measured with objective science?  For someone with an academic reputation to maintain it could be dangerous, but for me it turned out to be pretty easy…

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In the study of chaos, people are discovering all the time that patterns exist in the (supposed) chaos, if only you look hard enough.  Nobody likes dealing with chaos because it’s so unpredictable.  Historically, people have tried to control chaos by imposing their own order upon it.  That just plain doesn’t work, and is such a fundamentally flawed approach from a scientific standpoint that I’m not even going to discuss it further.  Other people have taken the approach of understanding the chaos that exists, and have made great advances in understanding all kinds of things that way.  In modern times, people have discovered mathematical formulas that can be used to predict things like migratory patterns of birds, traffic patterns in Tokyo, orbits of stars, and the activities of sub-atomic particles—all with the same formula!   (I don’t remember if that’s exactly right, but that’s the basic idea.)

Obviously, what I’m trying to do must be possible in principle, at least.  Just as obviously, if you assemble all the chaos that exists in the universe, it would just make one gigantic pattern anyway.  I see patterns nobody else can see everywhere I look.   I don’t know how I do what I do, or maybe I should say that I don’t know why nobody else can do it.  Let me tell you about mint chocolate chip ice cream…

Finally, I can say that I came up with one of my first methodical approaches when I was about 7 or 8.   I liked to play pretend when I was a kid (still do actually, that’s why I work in theatre).  I could watch TV and understand that the people on TV were just pretending too.  At the same time, however, they did such a believable job of it (to my 8-year-old mind, anyway), that I could forget that they were just pretending while I was watching them.  And I started to wonder:  these people are just doing what they’re doing and they don’t know that I’m watching them.  Does that mean someone else is watching me?

Further permutations of that original philosophical question arose over the years. People on TV can watch TV, so the people who don’t know I’m watching them are watching someone else who doesn’t know they’re being watched.  Does that mean that somebody else is watching the people who are watching me?  Where does it end?  As it so happened, as I would read years later in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters had that same basic idea.  (And in a much less film-entertainment-based way, a lot of Eastern religions believe something along those lines.)

Also, the people in the TV shows are just pretending, but they’re doing such a good job of it that I can’t tell.  What if I’m pretending but am doing such a good job that I can’t tell?  (Hey, I was only 8, I didn’t quite fully understand the TV industry at the time.)

Most TV shows don’t begin with the birth of the main character, but at some point during his life.  If I’m a character in a TV show, when did the show start, and what happened before that?  TV characters can remember things that happened to them before the show started, so have I only existed for part of my life and I just remember the rest of it now, even though it never happened?  Even if the show did begin when I was born, did the rest of the world exist before that?  Does the rest of the world even exist now, if it isn’t in the show?  Or for that matter, has the show even started, or do I not exist yet and what I’m doing now will just be something I’ll remember in the future?  It took me until I was about 15 or 16 to carry my reasoning that far.  There have been a number of Twilight Zone episodes that have asked similar questions.

My very first conscious methodical approach I think I concocted when I was about 5.  Maybe I was watching The Wizard of Oz or something, and Dorothy’s parents say something like, “There’s no such thing as the land of Oz.”  And what happens?  In the very next scene Dorothy gets whisked away to the land of Oz.  It happens all the time in stories, people say “There’s no such thing as ghosts/ monsters/ aliens/ elves/ goblins/ trolls/ dragons/ fairies/ Mr. Snuffleupagus/ Freddy Krueger/ whatever, and then whatever they’re disbelieving shows up right at that very moment.  So I figured I could save myself from that happening if I just believed in everything!  To this day, I still can’t completely convince myself that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

So now that I think of it, I basically began life believing that anything could be real, but wondering how to prove that anything was real.  No wonder I can best describe my life as one giant science experiment!

As you can see, my logic may seem harebrained at times and convoluted at others.  But as long as I can come up with an explanation that makes perfect sense by the end and that I can demonstrate based on science and everyday life, it doesn’t really matter how I came up with it, does it?
Most importantly, my methodology could work for anyone who wanted to use it.  If all I wanted was to tell you about the answer I found, this book would be over already.   I already told you the answer in the introduction, but it’s so simple it doesn’t even seem possible, does it?  That’s because the most important part of understanding the answer is how you go about searching for it.

That’s what the rest of the book is about.

Filed under: w: 42 Vol. I by Ezra
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Here’s one final part of my methodology that has been critical to this project:  I refuse to believe that the world is as boring and pointless as most “responsible” adults insist it’s supposed to be.  But then, what do all these “responsible” adults do after they succeed in supplying for all their own and their families’ needs, but go watch a bunch of movies and football games and reality TV shows and sh*t to make their lives more interesting?!?!

I find it makes life so much simpler if I just cut out all the middle men and be the movie I want to watch.  If you look at the Star Wars saga, or the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or just about any other movie, they’re all about the same thing:  a hero, or a small group of heroes, who realize their world is in danger, who realize they have the ability to save it, and who realize that if they don’t, no one will.

The only reason people aren’t that heroic in real life is because they choose not to be.  There’s plenty of danger to face in our world, but most “responsible” adults just sit around waiting for someone else to face it, saying it’s not their problem or their responsibility.  Then there are all the groups of  activists I’ve hooked up with in the final days of writing this book.  All of them do whatever they can to make a difference in the world.  Most of them wish they could do more.  A few of them vow to do whatever it takes.  “Whatever I could do” began with writing this book.

Well guess what.  Frodo, Aragorn, Luke Skywalker, and Han Solo saved their respective worlds by doing whatever it took to save them.  Obviously their worlds were different from ours, and “whatever it took” was different for them than it is for us.   But the fact remains:  In 500 years from now, if people make movies about people of today, those movies are going to be made about those of us who did whatever it took to make a difference in the world— not about the people who left it up to someone else.

Filed under: w: 42 Vol. I by Ezra
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