Anyone in the world is capable of being wise.  Anyone is capable of having good ideas, anyone is capable of learning good ideas, and anyone is capable of acting upon good ideas.  Does anybody who isn’t a White supremacist or other type of closed-minded elitist disagree?  I didn’t think so.  Look!  Even more things we all have in common!

If you encounter wisdom in a place you didn’t expect it, even if it’s the most unlikely of places, if you refuse to accept it, that doesn’t prove it isn’t wisdom, it just proves that you’re being ignorant.  For instance, I am just a simple carpenter of theatrical sets, but I’m writing a book about things that no doctor of anything  has ever figured out.  I could’ve been a doctor of something too, but then I would never have been able to write this book either. See what I mean?

As a certain wise person in a J.R.R. Tolkien novel once said, “Not all those who wander are lost.”  I suppose that the contra-positive of that statement is probably also true:  “Not all those who don’t wander aren’t lost.”  Gee, that’s an awful lot of negatives to put into one sentence.  What I mean is some people are lost and some people aren’t lost, and whether they’re wandering or standing still or sitting at a desk really has nothing to do with anything.

The score so far:  In the search for basic ideas from which to build the one universal formula, nobody has an advantage over anybody else.  Everybody is capable of basic evolutionary thought, and basic evolutionary thought is the only kind that is useful.  There we have our first statistic that is applicable to exactly 100% of people.  It doesn’t matter how many or what kind of letters or numbers or punctuation marks you can write around your name, because earning all those letters and numbers depends on post-basic-evolutionary thought, and post-basic-evolutionary thought is not only useless but counter-productive to the search for one universal formula.

That’s not to say that people who have letters and numbers don’t have anything useful to contribute, quite the contrary in most cases.  Many people have developed a great deal of wisdom over the course and/or as a result of earning their letters and numbers.  But it is not wisdom because of their letters and numbers, it is wisdom because they have been very careful to build it upon basic evolutionary thought.  Their letters and numbers don’t automatically grant them wisdom, but they don’t automatically preclude them from having it either. Their letters and numbers certainly don’t give them a monopoly on wisdom, but it is a good indication that they have devoted a lot of time to thought that might include wisdom.  (Yes, this is a lot of logic to try to sort through— aren’t you glad I’m the one writing this book and you aren’t?)

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Wise people are a good source of wisdom sometimes.  You’d think wise people should be a good source of wisdom all the time, but truly wise people are the ones who know that they’re not good sources of wisdom all the time.  Religious and spiritual leaders are good sources of wisdom, because they’re the people who generally know the most about their particular systems of thought.  Spiritual heroes or chiefs (see the Tribalism chapter), people who don’t go looking for followers but who end up attracting them anyway, are even better sources of wisdom in some ways.  They’re people for whom glory and power aren’t top priorities, they’re just people who are so successful at doing what they do that other people can recognize it and want to learn from them and/or put the heroes in charge.

Followers are not good sources of their own wisdom—that’s why they’re followers and not leaders or heroes.  However, they are a good measurement of how good the leaders’ and heroes’ ideas are.  Obviously, if nobody could attract followers, then nobody could be a leader, could they?  If leaders do attract followers, there must be a reason for it.  If one leader has good ideas and then another leader has even better ideas, the followers are going to start following the second leader instead.     In so doing, the followers contribute by helping to ensure that the best ideas are carried out.  Another way they can contribute is by helping to carry good ideas to other follower so that good ideas spread and followers continue to have choices of good ideas.  Another excellent contribution followers have made is to carry good ideas to me, so that I can find new directions to look for good ideas.

If there were no followers in the world, six billion people would all have to compete and/or figure out how to cooperate with each other to get what everyone needed.  That would be anarchy, and it would never work. I didn’t live in England in the late 1970s, but to look at how popular Anarchy in the UK, the Sex PistoLs’ most notorious song,  became, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea at the time.  If one band can attract that many followers with one controversial song, it sure doesn’t say much for the government they had! Unfourtunately, the long-term drawback to anarchy is that it could never last.  Government is inescapable.  As long as there are guns in the world, or even swords, somebody will always be telling somebody else what to do.  With democracy, at least we get to vote for those people.  And then hope our votes actually get counted…

Old people are good sources of wisdom oftentimes because they’ve had the opportunity to see first hand how ideas work or don’t work over long periods of time.  They’ve also had the chance to relate different ideas to each other, to judge which ideas are more important than other ideas, and which ideas are less important.  One drawback to dealing with old people is that they’ve also had the longest time to get set in their ways, even if their ways don’t work as well as they could—or the world has changed and their ways no longer work as well as they used to.

Young people are just the opposite.  They have a wisdom all of their own, because they’re the ones who are the least removed from basic thought.  They’ve had the least amount of time to stack bad ideas on top of each other.  They’re still in the process of building their foundations and trying to figure out, as everyone does, how to build the best houses they can.  The best way to build any kind of house is to start with a good foundation, not with a bad foundation.  Lots of people, in spite of their best efforts and intentions, live in giant Jenga towers built on bad foundations and young people are the least likely to have that problem.

Sometimes young people actually realize that they don’t know everything there is to know in the world (hey, I was that age once too).  While that youthful innocence/ignorance can lead them to make all kinds of decisions that, well, let’s just say “don’t turn out to be quite as good as the young people thought they were going to be”, that also means that, in addition to having the least amount of time to stack bad ideas on top of each other, the young people have also had the least amount of time to forget basic evolutionary ideas.  If you don’t look at what young people are literally doing but at the spirit of what they’re trying to do, you can learn a lot.  For instance, if your teenager goes out and gets into trouble all the time, does that mean he’s just trying to piss you off, or does that mean he feels like he’s missing something from his life?  Young people are the best at knowing what they want, the worst at knowing where to look for it, the worst at being able to recognize it when they see it, and the best at getting into trouble trying to find it.  But hey, we all need to get into trouble from time to time, because it keeps us from getting lazy.  Young people have the most time for that, so just like everyone else, they’re drawn to doing what they’re best at.
One other benefit to young people is that they learn the fastest, because they are by far the most in touch with what the world is like right now.  Out of everyone, they’re the only ones whose vision isn’t clouded by “the way things used to be”.  That’s not to say that everyone should forget about the past, that is to say that the future is going to happen whether anyone wants it to or not, and nobody can keep up with the future by clinging desperately to the past.

People in between those age ranges, say, between 20 and 60, give or take, in all fairness, are the least valuable as sources of independent wisdom.  (Remember, I am speaking of trends here, not stereotypes, and in case you need proof of that, I’m somewhere in that age range, and I’m the one writing this book, aren’t I?  So don’t take that too seriously…) You can’t really hold that against those people though, because if you look at those ages I mentioned, people between those ages are in the working-for-a-living part of their lives.  They generally have the least amount of time to think about things, because they’re the ones who carry the most responsibility for doing things.   But that in itself gives them a wisdom of their own, because it means they’re best at putting ideas into practice.  Let’s just hope they’re good ideas…

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Another good source of wisdom is in stories people tell.  As I’ve mentioned before, myths, legends, and fables of old were stories that were often told to illustrate good and bad qualities in people.   (They were also used to record history or explain pre-scientific hypotheses.)  Heroes of a story are heroes because they’re the people that you want to win.  You want them to win because they exemplify characteristics that you admire.  Villains are villains, and you want them to lose, because they exemplify despicable characteristics.

Modern storytelling works exactly the same way.  Books, plays, and especially movies all follow the pattern of heroes and heroic qualities versus villains and villainous qualities.  (I’ll use movies hereafter for my examples, but the same principles apply to all three.)  No hero character in any movie, even if he’s the vilest anti-hero ever, will ever reach the end of the movie without having developed at least one redeeming quality.  If somebody tried to make a movie like that, it would leave the audience emotionally unsatisfied.  Emotionally satisfied audiences means money for producers, producers understand that, and that’s how they stay in business.

How do I know all this?  Because the movie industry has developed a scientific formula for writing screenplays. (Don’t look so surprised!). You can read all about it in The Anatomy  of  a Screenplay,  by Dan Decker.   Quite simply, movies are made about events happening, and the best way to illustrate those events and their significance is through their effects on the main characters.  There are a fairly limited number of basic plot concepts you can use in a movie, no matter how many unexpected twists you throw in, but character concepts are infinite, which make the main characters arguably the most important part of the movie.

First you need main characters the audience will care about.  Then events need to start happening to the main characters so the audience will care about the outcome of the events.  Then the course of events needs to become so powerful that the main characters are carried along by it.  Then the course of events needs to start turning out so badly that the main characters are forced to make some drastic decision to try to keep themselves from being defeated utterly.  Finally, the conflict needs to be resolved in a manner the audience will find emotionally satisfying, even if all the heroes die.  To do that, you divide the plot line up into quarters, mark your quarter point, your turning point, and your lost point, etc., etc., and a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop, you have the outline for a screenplay.

Any movie can make lots of money in the first week with enough advertizing, but in order for the movie to stay in theaters or better still, become a classic, it needs to have heroes the audience will want to win.  In order for the audience to want them to win, there has to be something about the characters the audience can relate to.  As events of the movie unfold, the audience will react to those events according to the effects they have on the main characters.  For the audience to continue to want the heroes to win, the heroes have to react to those events in ways the audience will admire.  The audience doesn’t have to admire the heroes at first, they just have to admire them by the end of the movie.  The heroes start the movie either as ordinary people or as ordinary people with some extraordinary abilities.  If you try to make a movie where the hero starts out as an indestructible superhero, there’s no way you’ll ever be able to construct conflict that will personally affect that hero.  Then the audience won’t care about the events of the movie, nobody will recommend it to their friends, and the producers will lose money on it.

If the movie is successful, it will be because people went to see the movie, reacted favorably toward it, and that caused more people to go see it.  Because more and more people keep seeing the movie as time goes on, the admirable qualities of the heroes will become known to more and more people.  As more and more people see the movie and admire those qualities, that movie and those characters will become cultural landmarks that people can refer to.  That’s exactly how and why my friend was able to tell his parents, “Yeah, well Luke Skywalker was a rebel,” and expect them to understand what he meant (whether or not they actually did).

Where am I going with all this?  Right here for the moment:  Classic movies succeed because the people who write them figure out how to exemplify qualities that everyone can relate to.  Not some people, not most people, all people.  Movies that don’t do as well don’t because they appeal to smaller numbers of people—because they depend on their audiences understanding certain cultural references, they’re targeted to a certain age range or other demographic, or something of the sort.  For instance, the highest-budget comedies never come anywhere close to the highest budgets for action movies because comedies never do as well in foreign countries as action movies do.  Action movies are pretty self-explanatory, but comedies only work if the audiences get the jokes— which isn’t easy when you have to translate the movie into a different language and show it to an audience that isn’t as familiar with American culture.

Invariably, lots of people will not go see any given movie because they disapprove of, or are uninterested in, the way that the qualities of the characters are presented, the things that happen in the movie, or any number of other factors.  Other people won’t think they approve of the admirable qualities of the heroes because they approve of other qualities more and may not think those qualities are important enough to make a whole movie about, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t approve of the qualities themselves.

Take Fight Club, for instance.  Lots of people have seen that movie.  Lots of people have recommended it to their friends.  Why?  Because it was boring?  Because the heroes were dorks?  I think not.  People liked it and recommended it to their friends because Jack and Tyler are both driven by the pursuit of free will—a very popular ambition.  Jack is a dork at the beginning of the movie, he’s just an ordinary guy who feels like something is wrong with his life, so he can’t sleep.  He starts looking for a solution to his problems, and eventually he meets Tyler.  Tyler has a lot of ideas about how to find free will, so Jack tags along with him.  Over the course of their adventures together, Tyler figures out how to win their free will once and for all.  When Jack finds out Tyler’s plan, he thinks that he doesn’t want free will that badly, until Tyler proves to him that he really does.  Jack overcomes all of his obstacles in the movie and gets what he wants, even though at the beginning of the movie he was just an ordinary guy who never would’ve thought any of it was possible.  Tyler doesn’t seem so lucky by the end of the movie, but he does achieve his own goals.

See what I mean?  I can talk about characters in a movie and the way they heroically deal with their circumstances, and lots of people know what I’m talking about.  The movie has become a cultural landmark that people can cite in reference to the pursuit of free will.  The characters embody good characteristics, and anyone can agree that they’re good characteristics, even if that person hated the movie.

To put it another way:  Movies succeed because the heroes’ admirable qualities are built on basic evolutionary thought so everyone can relate to them.

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Music is another excellent source of wisdom and basic thought. I read a particularly insightful sentence some years ago in Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson.  It went something like:  “Oppressed people always write the most powerful music.”  It’s true.  Within the history of the recorded music industry, punk, rap, hip-hop, soul, blues, jazz, gospel, folk, country/western, metal, grunge, angry-women-with-guitars, and even rock ‘n’ roll itself, to name a few, were all invented by groups of people who were oppressed in some way— even if only in an abstract sense of being poor, disillusioned, or heartbroken.

The reason is fairly obvious:  Oppressed people have the most to sing about.  With the exceptions of a few things like disco and surfer rock, the great majority of memorable songs of even the cheesiest pop music always seem to be about protesting something, complaining about something, or overcoming something, including a lot of heartbreak or other relationship troubles, problems with authority, or just plain bad luck.

Oppressed groups of people can write the most powerful music about those things because they have the most of those things to deal with, and they can become very successful musicians as a result because everyone everywhere can identify with those things.  Or, as I have heard it said elsewhere:  “When you’re poor, you have to sing loud.” Consequently (although I had already discovered this point on my own) music is a great source for discovering basic evolutionary thought for the same reasons movies are—the most successful songs are ones that everyone can relate to, even if only some people like the song itself.

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Poetry is similar to music in many ways, but as a source of wisdom and basic evolutionary thought, I don’t consider it terribly reliable (unless I get to hear the poet read it personally).  While it is true that, like movies and music, poetry succeeds because people can relate to it, it isn’t presented in as much context and therefore people’s relation to it must be more abstract and subjective.  For the same reason, in dealing with music, I limited myself to music with lyrics.  One of the most important qualities of poetry is that it means different things to different people, and clearly that’s not what I’m looking for.   Words written on paper can be read any number of ways, and reading them differently can change their meaning.

In the case of a book, there are enough words there to create their own context.  In the case of a song, the singer interprets the words and presents them the way he or she thinks they sound best, and musicians surround them with music they think suits them best.  If the singer also wrote the lyrics, wrote the music, and/or performs the music that accompanies the lyrics, it makes the process of creation, interpretation, and performance that much more direct.  If the song succeeds, it does so because it has lyrics everyone can relate to and the singer’s performance and accompaniment support the ideas of the lyrics.  (I am talking about songs that have lyrics that listeners can understand.  If listeners can’t understand the lyrics, all bets are off.)  In the case of a movie, the context is created by the script, the directing, the acting, the sets, the lighting, the sound, the music, the costuming, the makeup, the hair, the props, the cinematography, etc., etc., etc.

Poetry and all art forms that don’t communicate information to their audiences through words depend on the way they make their audiences feel, and that is not dependable enough for my purposes.  While such art forms are just as important and legitimate as any other, the effect of pure aesthetics on people’s feelings gives me no anchor point from which I can objectively analyze the process.   (If you can figure out how to write a book to demonstrate conclusively the objective scientific meaning of orange, be my guest!)

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Another excellent source of wisdom from the entertainment industry is stand-up comedy.  The best comedians are very insightful people.  They’re the ones who can ask, “You ever wonder why…?”  or, “You know what I think…?”  The reason that type of comedy works so well is because those comedians can find things to talk about that everybody has wondered about, or things that everybody has taken for granted but suddenly realize are absurd when a comedian points them out, or things that everybody accepts as the way things have to be until a comedian comes up with a simple explanation or solution.  George Carlin, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and pretty much any other comic who achieves that magnitude of success becomes so successful because they can find things to talk about that everyone has already thought about.

These comics are so successful because they don’t have to set up their own material.  Their audiences already know what they’re talking about, so the comics just have to get up and deliver the punch lines.

As if to prove my point, during the California governor’s race of 2003, Bill Maher, formerly of Politically  Incorrect, delivered a joke that went something like this:  “I have two words to say about the California gubernatorial race:  ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger’.”   The audience exploded with laughter, cheers, and applause.  If you look at the wording of his line, it’s not even a joke.  Why would an entire audience react to a mere mention of the name of one of the candidates as if it was the funniest joke they’d heard all year?  Certainly not because of the wording of such a straightforward sentence, and the name is a name just like any other.  It was because the entire audience had already thought enough about the governor’s race that the name of one of the candidates became the punch line to a joke nobody even needed to tell.  That such a large number of people would all react in the same way to the mention of a name is indicative that all those people thought the same way on some level.  Obviously there can’t be any “laughing at political jokes” gene for humans, so the simple fact that everybody laughed at the joke doesn’t prove there was a basic evolutionary thought involved, but it does prove that for some reason a lot of people felt the same way about something.

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One way to watch how people act in different situations is to find different situations.  That sounds simple enough, but it’s even simpler than it sounds in some ways.  All I have to do is move from one place to another place that isn’t anything the same.  This is more noticeable in some places than in others, but it applies everywhere.  In any place, whatever factor has drawn the most people to that place governs the subjective-reality culture that evolves there.  I call that the pervading mentality of the place, but I could just as easily call it the ice cream politics of the place.  Everyone gets accustomed to dealing with that mentality, because that’s the mentality that “everyone” has, so anticipating it (or expecting it, or taking it for granted) is the easiest way for individual people to get along in their surroundings.

For instance, Boston was settled by some of the first European colonists in the early 1600s, and was settled by more Europeans as more waves came from whichever countries were the most destitute at any point in history.  As a result, Boston has a strong sense of history and ethnicity—Irish neighborhoods, Italian neighborhoods, and lots of Revolutionary War monuments.
Las Vegas was settled by the gambling industry, and southern California was settled by the entertainment industry.  Those two groups of people make up the most noticeable parts of their populations, and basically everyone who lives in those places either is those people or depends on those people for their livelihoods one way or another.  Down East Maine was settled by sailors, and everyone who lives there either owns a boat or knows somebody who does—and even the name “Down East” is a sailing term.   The Midwest is still the domain of farmers whose primary respite from working their asses off six days a week is to go to church on Sunday.  Portland, Oregon was settled by hippies some decades ago and is now being colonized by a lot of south California refugees, which means that even elitist snobs there have to pretend to be open-minded and environmentally conscious.   Salt Lake City and the rest of Utah was settled by Mormon pioneers, which means even the gay Pagans I knew there were more conservative than self-conscious Christians I’ve known in other places.  Phoenix and the rest of the southwestern desert were the last lands of the continental U.S. to be conquered, which doesn’t mean Native American cultures influence the Phoenix metropolis very much, but the Mexicans and bandits who were the first European-descendants to settle here because no other White people wanted to live here established an attitude of determination and ambition, and there’s negligible cultural history to hang onto.  In New Orleans people just do their own things the way they have always done and don’t really give a damn which country they belong to from one moment to the next. Washington DC has been settled by politicians,  Texas was settled by cowboys, and most of Florida has been settled by retirees.   And whatever you do, don’t mention Sherman in Savannah.

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Another valuable source of wisdom is historical figures.  What qualities made heroes and villains what they were?  What did those people do to accomplish whatever they’re remembered for?  Did they succeed?  Why or why not?

As many people of all different backgrounds say, in order to defeat your enemy, first you must understand him.  Some of the most valuable wisdom you can find comes from your enemies, because evaluating the admirable qualities of your enemies forces you to decide what it is about yourself that causes you to dislike these people in spite of their good qualities. Let me take the most extreme example of all.  (I like to use extreme examples, because if this code to humanity can’t explain extreme examples just as easily as it can explain any other examples, then the code isn’t universally applicable to everyone—and that would prove it didn’t work.)

Hitler.  What can we admire about Hitler?  First of all, he lived in a country that had fallen on desperate times, because the war debts the victors of World War I were forcing the Germans to pay absolutely crippled their economy, as any history book will tell you.  Second, he figured out how to solve those problems.  Third, he figured out how to get most of the people in the country to cooperate with him.  Fourth, in the end, he did accomplish what he set out to do, which was to improve the living conditions for Germany.  He didn’t accomplish what he did in an admirable way to put it lightly, and he didn’t even accomplish it in the way that he hoped to.  But what came about as a result of his rise to power?  Ever since then, the United Nations (supposedly) has done all it can to ensure that no country’s situation ever gets so desperate that another Hitler could arise.

What lessons can we learn from Hitler’s mistakes?  His biggest mistake must be that he completely refused to recognize any redeeming qualities at all in millions of people.  Basically everyone in the world hates Hitler to this day, and remembers him best for that one mistake.  Considering that basically all of humanity hates Hitler for that “quality” of his, that’s a pretty good indication that the “quality” contradicts humanity.  That means that in order to avoid making the same mistake, we must be able to recognize good qualities in any person, no matter how despicable that person is.  See why Hitler makes such a good example now?

A related mistake that I think bears mentioning was that in Nazi Germany, only governmentally sanctioned thought was allowed.  As anyone who has ever owned a Volkswagen can appreciate, Germans are well known for their ability to improve upon existing technology (for some cultural reason I’m not going to speculate at here).   Resulting from the Nazi party coming to power by the strength of the working classes, a lot of the intellectual elite of Germany were hunted by the commoners like so many witches.  As the events of World War II demonstrated, the Germans were able to improve upon existing technology then as now.  However, they suffered a serious deficiency in developing new technology, which they had inflicted upon themselves.  Even if they hadn’t killed a bunch of their own people who could’ve invented new technology to help them, and even if they hadn’t driven more of those people to flee and side with their enemies (Albert Einstein was from Germany, for instance), by limiting their intellectuals to governmentally-approved thought, they still would’ve skewed the statistics of the war against themselves.  I’m jumping ahead several chapters here, but it is the nature of all people to seek out the best use for their abilities, which means that simply by trying to limit the thought of the intellectuals, he would’ve driven them to relocate to somewhere where they would be allowed to think all they wanted.  The British and the Americans didn’t do that, so they ended up with a preponderance of the intellectuals of the day on their side.

In short, Hitler’s primary crime against humanity resulted from his decision that many people had no human qualities whatsoever and deserved to be systematically eliminated.  His downfall resulted from his attempt to control thought.

Here’s another villain I’m sure everybody’s going to love to hear me talk about:  Osama bin Ladin.  Since Mr. bin Ladin is the arch enemy of the United States right now, let’s suppose that means that he stands for everything the United States opposes, and he opposes everything the United States stands for.  I’ve never met him, but I have been listening to the news for the past several years, so I think that’s a fairly reasonable bet.  What better way to assess your own point of view than by comparing it to the point of view of someone who completely disagrees with it?  That tug of war between opposite points of view helping to move society forward is also (supposedly) the whole reason we have a two-party political system in America, isn’t it?

Of course, it is entirely possible that Mr. bin Ladin is simply the Charles Manson of the Middle East and he’s a total f*cking psychopath, but for the purposes of discussion, I assume that he’s perfectly sane.  I assume that this war, like most wars in history, isn’t entirely the fault of one side or the other, and that it could’ve been avoided if the two sides would’ve been willing to settle their differences by peaceful negotiations.  After all, if you truly want to end a war, you have to figure out why it began in the first place.  If the only way you can figure out to end a war is to bomb the f*ck out of your enemy until he has no more men left to fight with, all you’ve done is to end the war until he recruits more men.  If you want to stop a war instead of pausing it constantly, you have to solve the problem that started it in the first place, even if part of the problem is your own.

As I’ve said before, the only way for us to win this war is for all of civilization to evolve.  For the first time in history we are fighting a war against an enemy who has no country to invade or capitol city to capture, which means that the traditional ways of ending a war aren’t going to work this time around.  Before we can even try to win this war we have to figure out how we can win it.
So for the record, I’m not a terrorist sympathizer, but I might seem that way to some people just because I’m not an American sympathizer either.

Another valuable reason for admiring your enemies’ good qualities and thereby forcing yourself to determine why the person is your enemy in spite of his good qualities, is that in the process you might come to realize that the person isn’t doing anything  to make themselves your enemy, and that the person is your enemy simply because you don’t like them.  Here’s another favorite enemy of a lot of people:  Marilyn Manson.

Marilyn supposedly was the role model of the kids who committed the massacre at Columbine High school.  But that was a gross misinterpretation on their part.  Marilyn has never told anyone to kill anyone else or to shoot up their high school, his message has always been the same as mine:  be yourself, don’t act like a sheep, and don’t let people treat you like a sheep.  People who commit violence like that and listen to nihilistic music are attracted to the music for the same reason anyone is ever attracted to any kind of music—because it resonates with their spirits.  In the cases of people who commit suicide or go on murderous rampages, they do exactly what everyone else in the world does, which is to listen to music that creates a soundtrack to their life.  If the music pushes them over the edge, they were already seriously emotionally unhealthy anyway.

I think I’m qualified to say that, because I listen to a lot of evil-sounding music and so do a lot of people I know, but I’ve never wanted to kill people as a result, and nobody I’ve ever known has killed people as a result either.  I’ve never met anybody who listens to Marilyn Manson who thought the Columbine murderers were heroes or were carrying out orders, or anything of the sort.  For that matter, Hitler lived long before Marilyn Manson or even Black Sabbath, and he killed plenty of people without the influence of heavy metal. Charles Manson listened to the Beatles for god’s sake. Remember, kids, music doesn’t kill people, people kill people.

Anyway, back to Marilyn Manson, it came as no surprise to me to see his interview with Michael Moore in Bowling  for  Columbine, in which he explained everything I just said in his own words.  He didn’t feel responsible for what happened there, but he cancelled his upcoming concert in Denver anyway, just out of respect for all the grieving parents who thought  he was responsible.  Meanwhile, Charlton Heston, virtuous patriotic defender of the Constitution and the American way of life, and president of the National Rifle Association, refused to cancel an NRA rally in neighboring Denver just five days after the shoot-out.  Meanwhile, the largest rocket engine plant in America operates just outside of Denver, where a lot of the parents of the Columbine victims had gone to work that morning to build propellant systems that would be used in missiles.

Meanwhile, just one hour before the shoot-up at the high school, U.S. warplanes launched a bunch of missiles into a building in Kosovo, on the orders of the President of the United States, which had been thought to be a weapons manufacturing plant, but which turned out to be a school full of children. Isn’t it funny how the media forgot all about U.S. warplanes shooting up a school in a foreign country by order of the president an hour after it happened, and focused its attention for the next several years on two teenagers who shot up a school in America and listened to controversial music?

Did the media pounce all over the Columbine story because Americans care so much more about their own schools being shot up?  Or did Americans care so much more about their own schools being shot up because the media pounced all over it?  Were they quicker to blame a musician than they were to blame the president because the media pounced all over the story?  Or did the media pounce all over the story because the musician was so much more controversial than the president?  Are the blind leading the blind?  What has Marilyn been saying all this time about “quit being such a bunch of sheep”?

Who’s really setting the examples in the world, and who’s just writing the soundtrack?  Marilyn Manson didn’t become an international superstar by forcing  people to listen to his music, he became an international superstar by writing music that many people  could  identify  with.  Just a suggestion, but maybe people who want to solve the worlds’ problems should quit blaming him for them and start figuring out why his music appeals to so many people.

When you look into the eyes of your enemy, you never know what  you’re going to find looking back at you.

Here’s one other example of the eye of the enemy that I use frequently throughout this book:  Christianity.  I’m a Pagan.   Christianity has been the enemy of Paganism for two thousand years, and in that time a lot of Christians have resorted to a lot of dirty tricks to try to rid the world of my people.  I don’t believe in anything Christianity has to say, or at least, if I do agree with something Christianity has to say, it’s completely by coincidence.  Therefore, in demonstrating how complete my universal formula is, I explain it in Christian terms as much as possible.  Lots of people throughout history have come up with explanations for the world that were written for their own people and that their own people could understand.  So what better way to prove how universal my explanation is than to show how much of it was written by my supposed enemies?

That approach serves two other purposes.  First, since Christianity is the most successful religion in the world and is the dominant religion of the dominant culture of the world, then for the group of people who have the greatest amount of power to change the world, this book shouldn’t be difficult to grasp, should it?  If I explain as much of this book as possible in Jesus’s own teachings, and demonstrate how those teaching apply to the modern world, then all I’m really doing is reminding Christians of what they already believe in, aren’t I?  And of course, as we all know, that’s exactly what Jesus did in his own day.

Second, for the 2/3 of the world’s population who aren’t Christians, I’m demonstrating what the dominant religion of the dominant culture of the world believes in.  Whether those 2/3 of the people follow the teachings of Mohammed, Moses, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Dekanawidah, any other leader, or they just figure life out on their own as they go along, like I do, you just might be surprised at how much the dominant religion of the dominant culture of the world has in common with your own.  It’s no coincidence that human beings all over the world have figured out the same basic things about life, like “People can work together a lot better when they aren’t busy trying to kill each other”.  Is Christian culture supposed to be so much better than yours?  Or is yours supposed to be better than theirs?  But how can that be, if you both believe in the same things?  So if you can explain your own way of life, whatever it is, in the terms of the dominant religion of the world, the dominant religion of the world won’t be able to tell you you’re wrong, will they?

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The Bible is a book that most Americans are fairly familiar with, because it was the foundation of modern Western civilization.  There are three other books like it in the world, in which a single great leader taught his followers in a single book everything they needed to know to build a successful civilization.  Those were the Koran, the Tao te Ching, and the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Nation.  Of course, there are two books of the Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament.  I make a lot of general references to the Bible in this book because, as I’ve said, most of the people who make up the most powerful civilization in the world today have a general familiarity with it.

Unfortunately, the followers of three of the five great books of the world are in the middle of a giant war with each other right now.  With the end of the Cold War, Communism ceased to be the greatest obstacle to Western imperialism.  The next greatest obstacle was Western imperialism’s old nemesis, Islam.  Islam has been the greatest obstacle to Western imperialism since the First Crusade roughly 900 years ago, and with the end of the Cold War, what else should replace Communism as Western imperialism’s greatest obstacle?  Iran is currently undergoing a process of rejecting Western materialism and imperialism and returning to its Islamic foundations to try to recapture the strength of its people and its culture.  For many of the Islamic world, that makes Iran a model of righteousness.  And what did President George W. Bush, a fundamentalist Christian, have to say about that, but to label Iran one of the countries that constitutes the “axis of evil”?  And what did Osama bin Ladin, a militant Islamic fundamentalist do, but order his followers to destroy the World Trade Center once and for all?

I swear, it’s like driving a car with two little kids having a fight in the back seat.  WILL YOU TWO GROW UP?!?!?!?!?!  DON’T MAKE ME PULL THIS PLANET OVER!!!!!!

Seriously though, those three great books of the world are getting examined up and down by scholars who are far more intimately familiar with them than I’ll ever be, in the hopes of resolving the differences between those two (or three) groups of people.  So in making specific references to the five great books of the world, I focus on the two whose followers aren’t still trying to defeat each other in a 900 year old war.

For all you Jews, Christians, and Muslims out there, your three books on how to build healthy, sustainable, peaceful civilizations are good ideas in principle, but I hope you can understand if I don’t seem to pay much attention to you, because collectively you people aren’t being a whole lot of help right now.  In writing my own book about how to build a healthy, sustainable, peaceful civilization for the modern world, I hope you can understand why I focus primarily on the books of cultures that are actually succeeding somewhat at being healthy, sustainable, peaceful civilizations.

Don’t worry, everything you need to resolve the differences between Judeo/Christianity and Islam is contained in this book, but you’re all so wrapped up in trying to prove that you’re right and everyone else is wrong that I’m not going to waste my time trying to prove to you that I know what I’m talking about.  The world’s full of people who want to listen to what I have to say, and if you aren’t any of those people, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.  But you’ll catch on sooner or later.  If you really want peace among your people, it’s all right here.  You got yourselves into this mess, now you get yourselves out of it.

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Wisdom is all around us, if only you know how to recognize it and how to use it.  It follows that the entire code to humanity has already been discovered, and all I have to do is to compile it into one place.  Because the entire code is made up of “what people understand so far”, the wisdom to construct it must exist around us somewhere.  Whatever “wisdom” we haven’t discovered yet is a part of the “things we don’t understand yet” part of the code.  Therefore, the parts of the code that are understood can be understood by basically everyone, not just by great theoretical scientists.  Aren’t you lucky?!

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