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Introduction  ……………………………………………………………………………………………    563

BOOK FIVE:  FURTHER DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE…………………………………………..………      573
Chapter 26: The Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior and
Theory of Evolutionary Relativity  ……………………………………………………………  575
Chapter 27:  More Amusing Emotional Situations  ……………………………………………………  608
Chapter 28:  The Power of Intention  …………………………………………………………………… 690
Chapter 29:  The Evolution of Economics  ……………………………………………………………..  802
Chapter 30:  The Evolution of Civilization  ……………………………………………………………. 913
Chapter 31:  Evolution and the Laws of Thermodynamics  ………………………………………….. 1,010

Afterword  ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 1,115
Key References  ……………………………………………………………………………….……….. 1,120

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I’m still taking over the world as a practical joke.

It’s just taking longer than I thought it would.

A lot of things have changed since I published the last book.  Our global political system has gotten worse, our global environment has gotten worse, more advances have been made in human evolutionary science, and I’ve met a lot of people who are involved these things in various ways.

I’m still taking over the world as a practical joke, because our entire global civilization is a practical joke.  Unfortunately, most people don’t have nearly as good a sense of humor as I do, so the global civilization joke has gotten a lot less funny since the last book.  So what do you think I should do about that?  Fight fire with fire?  To hell with that (no pun intended—okay, yes it was).  I’ve found that the best way to fight a fire is with water.

Prepare yourselves for another round of good-natured b*tch-slapping.  If it seems less good-natured that it was before, that’s because everyone else has gotten a lot further out of line.  And by “the line” I mean all that survival and reproduction business, which people keep trying to advance by making their economic and political systems ever more self-destructive.  Hey, I didn’t write the rules.  It’s not my fault so many people think they can get away with breaking them.  Hence I have to do a great deal more b*tch slapping in this book than I did in the last one to try to get everyone back into line.

So my taking-over-the-world practical joke gets a lot more absurd in this book.  I’m writing it by putting together a bunch of science and ideas people have had over the course of history that comply with that science.  If you think all this science and these science-compliant ideas stop being funny, it’s probably because you’ve attached so much emotional significance to the idea that some other idea was actually supposed to work.

I meet a lot of people like this.  People who think I’m supposed to be embarrassed by using the word socialism in conversation.  Or people who think I should be amazed by how many things they figured out about life by smoking some weeeeed and staring at their lava lamp for half an hour last night, or by reading some book that was written by some guy in some other century, or whatever, and how can you possibly measure something as profound as that scientifically?  So now I’m supposed to take these people seriously and consider them my peers and I’m not allowed to think I know more about something than they do.  Mental communism all the way.

The big question is:  Do you know how to make your civilization comply with fundamental laws of physics, or don’t you?  So far, our global civilization is a big joke where the punch line is something like, “Those stupid monkeys tried building a sustainable global civilization in a way that wasn’t physically possible, and they couldn’t figure out why it all went to hell.”  So in order for anyone to write a better punch line than that, he’d have to be the biggest joker in the world.

So here I am.

Now here’s six other practical jokes that are taking place all around us.

Joke #1:  The U.S. Constitution disproves itself.  We’re supposed to have a secular government of, by, and for the people.  Unfortunately, our secular government was founded by Christians in the 18th century.  The Laws of Thermodynamics and the Theory of Evolution hadn’t been discovered by that point in time, and they’ve been recognized by scientists for about 150 years as the fundamental laws of physics and biology.  Thanks to the Founding Fathers sharing the same religious and cultural background, they made certain assumptions about the world that simply aren’t valid, and they founded our secular government on ideas that contradict fundamental laws of science.

Well, when you pit your political system against fundamental laws of the universe, it’s a pretty safe bet that the universe is going to win.  So anyone who assumes that adhering closely to the U.S. Constitution is going to fix everything is walking into a trap.

Joke #2:  Literal adherence to the Bible is self-destructive.  In the last book I told you how a lot of people assume that the world’s resources are supposed to be infinite, just because it says so in the Bible, and any scientists who disagree are just imagining things.  So literal adherence to the Bible is environmentally self-destructive.  But you already knew that.

Here’s where it gets worse:  People who adhere literally to the Bible equate a total global apocalypse with eternal salvation.  In other words, these people perceive the battle of Armageddon to be the best thing that could ever happen to them.  Well, you can’t have total global apocalypses and all-consuming worldwide wars without billions of people getting killed.  And if Christian fundamentalists perceive this to be the path to eternal salvation, what else are they going to do besides try to help make it happen?  They sure as hell aren’t going to try to stop it.

So the president of the United States belongs to a global suicide cult.

Joke #3:  The fundamental law of biology directly contradicts the fundamental law of physics.  The fundamental law of biology is energy efficiency.  But that only refers to personal energy efficiency.  That’s why inventing more and more machines to do more and more work for us is such a popular idea.  But the fundamental law of physics is that environmental energy is finite.  We don’t have instincts for environmental  energy efficiency, because for the 7,000,000 years it took us to evolve, we never had any way of using up all the energy in the environment.
So if all those people who are opposed to organized religion just “do whatever they feel to be right”, they’ll destroy themselves anyway.

Joke #4: One major founding event in the field of human evolutionary science happened in the summer of 1987 at a secret meeting in Budapest among scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain.  This was during the height of the Cold War.  By studying what everyone in the world had in common, where their differences originated, and why the threat of self-destruction seemed to make so much sense to so many of our species, these scientists hoped to help avert World War III.  The field of human evolutionary science started, literally, as the Science of How to Not Have a War with Each Other.

When I started this project, I assumed that since evolutionary science was so useful, there must be some other people out there somewhere who trying to win support for it, so I volunteered for the most extreme end of that.  Then late in 2006 I discovered that even after 20 years and all the discoveries that have been made, there is only one graduate program in evolutionary psychology in the entire United States.  It’s at the University of California at Santa Barbara.  They don’t even have an official budget.  To fund the program, they have to pursue it as an interdisciplinary study among a bunch of departments that do have budgets.

So I’ve been a global activist movement of one this entire time without realizing it.  I volunteered for the most extreme end of a movement that didn’t actually exist.  So a lot of people assume I’m just a lunatic.  That joke is on me.

But considering that the whole point of public education is to teach kids things they’re going to need to know as adults, don’t you think they ought to be learning something about the Science of How to Not Have Wars with Each Other?

Joke #5:  Traditionally, science has been considered politically neutral, but it never has been.  Science is the pursuit of information.  If scientists leave that information in the hands of politically-minded people who don’t (and probably can’t) fathom its full meaning, that is a political choice in itself.

The field of evolutionary psychology is the search for a universal brain structure of humanity.  It has been accepted among evolutionary scientists for over 30 years that all animal behavior—and consequently, all human behavior—is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.

If scientists discover a universal brain structure of humanity, and then don’t actively distribute that information to everyone in terms that everyone can understand, that is a very big political decision, with inevitable consequences.   If they leave their science in the hands of a small group of well educated, materially wealthy, and politically powerful people, their own science already shows them what’s going to happen next—or at least, it would if only they’d care to pay attention to it.  Namely, these well-educated, materially wealthy, politically powerful people use it as just another resource to help them preserve the survival of their own DNA by manipulating other people.  And that just makes our economic and political inequality worse, and that just makes all the social problems facing the world worse.

To choose to leave human evolutionary science in the hands of politically-minded people who can’t fully grasp its meaning is to choose suicide.  And if Mr. Spock was here, I’d think he’d tell you that’s not very logical.

Joke #6:  The majority of activists in America who are trying to solve big social problems seem to be completely emotionally allergic to science.  These people accept as a matter of faith that there’s more to life than science can measure.  But that only proves how little they know about science.
Once upon a time it was true that there was more to life than science could measure, but that was only because science hadn’t progressed far enough by that point.  Some people made the mistake of assuming that there wasn’t more to life than science could measure, and these so-called progressive activists have been fighting back against those people ever since.  But they’re making the faulty assumption that just because some people were wrong in believing there couldn’t be more to life than science could measure proves that everyone who says that all of life can be understood scientifically must be wrong. And that sounds awfully closed-minded to me.  In fact, that sounds like intellectual discrimination.

Over the course of writing the last book, I met up with a lot of people who were so open-minded that they couldn’t even accept all my scientific evidence that proved that everything they believed was true.  Since then, I’ve met up with a whole lot more of those people.

Let’s look at what that term means: “progressive activist”.  “Someone who makes things happen to move society forward.”

If you reject science, you reject observable evidence.  If you then try to build a political or philosophical ideology on anything other than observable evidence, whatever ideology you come up with is going to contradict observable evidence.  That means that somebody out there is going to be able to observe something about the world that your ideology doesn’t explain.  Well the world is already full of ideologies like those.  So if you just invent another one, in what sense are you moving society forward?

If your ideology leaves room for fundamental disagreement, then the only way for your ideology to prove victorious over your competition is for you to attract more people to your ideology than your competitors have, and defeat them in a might-makes-right showdown.  Well people have been settling differences between ideologies by might makes right for as long as humans have had ideologies, so if you just invent a new way of doing that, again, in what sense are you moving society forward?

If you’re an activist, that means you’re trying to make something new happen in society.  That means you’re badly outnumbered.  If you were in the majority, that new thing you were trying to make happen wouldn’t be new anymore, and it would already be happening, so you wouldn’t be called an activist, you’d be called a go-along-with-everyone-elsist or something like that.  Well if your new minority ideology has all the same fundamental problems that every other well-established ideology has, why should anyone give up their old ideology that doesn’t work just to try a new ideology they can already see won’t work?  And if you can’t attract a lot of people to your new ideology, you aren’t going to make anything new happen in society.  And if you can’t make anything new happen in society because you insist on trying to use a fundamentally flawed ideology, then you’re not really an activist at all, are you?

Joke #7:  Human evolutionary scientists study how people think, but they can’t for the life of them figure out how to attract more people’s support to their science.

Oh, and you thought the activists were a joke…

The way I see it, there are four main ways people form their ideologies:  scientifically, artistically, philosophically, and religiously.  Art, philosophy, and religion all offer people emotional components, and science doesn’t.  What these emotional components are, how they work, and why people feel they’re important are all understood scientifically.   And still, scientists can’t figure out how to make science compete as an ideology against art, religion, or philosophy.  If I was one of those scientists, maybe I’d try looking at my own science to try to figure out what was going wrong, but then, what the hell do I know, I’m just a stupid college dropout.

First of all, everyone in the world has some kind of ideology.  Everyone in the world is a philosopher.  Everyone in the world learns about the world by developing a perspective on the world to make sense of how it works.  Developing a working sense of cause and effect is critical to people’s ability to interact with the world and to provide for their basic necessities.

Some people think about things a lot harder than others, and some people aren’t what most people would consider philosophers at all.  But anyone who is capable of providing for their basic necessities has developed a sense of cause and effect that works within the context of their own life, or in other words, as far as they can tell.

So in order for science to compete against philosophy as an ideology, it has to be able to answer every question anyone has ever asked about life.  If you try to present science as an ideology that should shape people’s perception of the world, they’re immediately going to compare it to whatever philosophical cause-and-effect ideology they’re using.  If science doesn’t seem to be able to answer every question that their current ideology seems to them to answer, then science is going to seem flawed or incomplete as far as they can tell.  Therefore, they aren’t going to abandon the ideology that they believe works to adopt whatever new ideas you’re trying to teach them about.

A religion is basically a pre-packaged philosophical ideology that people adopt because doing so seems to be easier than developing an ideology on their own.  Religion has the added benefit of assigning everyone in a society the same basic perspective on the world so that the members of the society can agree on how the world is supposed to work and how they can work together to make their society function.

Every religion in the world offers its followers the same four things:  An explanation for what makes the universe work, ways for people to escape their physical mortality, ways for people to build strong families and healthy communities, and ways for people to make themselves feel satisfied with their lives.  If science can’t offer people all of these things also, people are going to reject it as a flawed or incomplete ideology.  That’s why I used science to spell all those things out in the last book.

The Bible is a story of the world and reference book to life.  Every culture in the world has an equivalent.  That story of the world and reference source to life is how the people of a culture establish a common point of reference to use in interacting with the world and with each other. That ought to be a big clue that science will never be to compete as an ideology if it doesn’t offer people the same thing.

Here in America we used to use the Bible as our common point of reference.  Even if you weren’t a Christian you had to use the Bible as your reference point anyway to be able to function in society, just because most other people used it.  Most people followed it religiously, so everyone expected everyone else to follow it at least superficially.  But now we’ve got a bunch of other stories of the world competing against it, which is why every presidential election we have anymore practically pushes us to the brink of civil war.  If half of American voters can’t understand what the hell the other half are voting for, why, how it’s supposed to benefit them, or why they’re supposed to think it should, and vice versa, your democracy has run into a serious problem.  If half of your voters perceive the other half of the voters and everything they believe in as a threat to their safety, how badly do you think they’re going to want to be ruled by the leaders those people elect?

Well, you could always ask the Iraqis how well a democracy made up of three groups of people who hate each works.

Every story that ever become a legend or a box-office smash has the exact same plot.  A hero, or a small group of heroes, faces an overwhelming threat to their survival and/or reproduction, and has to use their abilities to their fullest potential to overcome the threat.  First you introduce your protagonists, conflicts arise, then events start happening, then the course of events grows so strong that it carries the protagonists along with it, then events become so dire that the protagonists have to risk everything before they’re defeated utterly, then all conflicts are resolved in a manner the audience will find emotionally satisfying.  That’s how you write an emotionally satisfying story.  The Bible isn’t scientifically accurate, but it is artistically complete.  Hence its popularity.

That’s why I’m using the same formula in writing these books.

All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.  That means that in order for scientists to convince people to adopt science as their ideology, they must find a way to make people perceive that doing so offers them the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA.  But have evolutionary scientists figured this out?  No.

Science is not being pursued in a vacuum.  Science is being pursued in a conflict situation.  The goals of other people are mutually exclusive to the pursuit of science.  In a conflict situation, whoever best adapts to their changing situation gets to survive.  That’s evolution in its purest form.  But have evolutionary scientists figured this out?  No.

If you attempt to pursue science but you reject your own science in attempting to succeed at your own goals, whether you realize you’re doing it or not, you’re attempting to invoke supernatural powers to solve your problems for you.  If you have observable evidence to show you why you’re having problems and how your problems could be solved, but you refuse to use that evidence to solve your problems, depending instead upon some unknown force whose existence is contraindicated by the observable evidence itself, that is the definition of dependence on a supernatural force.  And if you depend on supernatural forces to help you succeed at whatever you’re doing, then strictly speaking, you’re not a scientist.   The question that raises is:  What exactly are you?

So you see what I’m up against?  In order to write a better punch line to our global civilization joke than, “The stupid monkeys killed themselves,” I have to figure out how to tell a bigger joke than all this.

To help me do that, I have to make one slight alteration to the approach I used in the last book.  In the last book, I said that all human behavior is the product of the individual’s attempt to pursue the most favorable ratio of perceivable benefit to effort required.  Those benefits always had something to do with survival, safety, reproduction, social, self-gratification, self-actualization, self-fulfillment, and fulfillment squared.  That suited the purposes of the last book, because the last book was about how to understand your own decision-making, and how to recognize those same principles at work in other people.

This book reverses that process.  In this book, I focus on how to recognize principles of human behavior at work in other people, and then how to recognize them at work within yourself.  In this book, the magic phrase is, “all human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.”

“The most favorable ratio of perceivable benefit to effort required,” and, “The attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her” are synonymous.  The benefits in the last book were always something from that list of eight items.  Those eight items are things that the survival of people’s DNA have always depended on.  The most favorable ratio of benefit to effort means the most effective way to do any of those things.

In the first book I took a philosophical approach to human behavior.  In this book I take a scientific approach.  Since the last book was about how individuals, including yourself, make decisions, if I’d said “All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her,” a lot of people would’ve said, “No it doesn’t—I don’t even perceive the existence of my DNA!”  Well of course you don’t—or at least, not consciously—which is why I had to use a different term.

I stretched that explanation for human behavior as far as I could into other people’s behavior and the behaviors of groups.  But when you start talking about complicated systems of other people’s behavior, it gets really awkward.  So to fill in the gaps now, in this book I switch to a more direct explanation.  That more direct explanation applies to you too, and I don’t think it will take you very long to see how.

Since I published the last book, a lot of people have started talking about our global environmental unsustainability joke quickly approaching a point of no return.   By now it’s fairly unanimously agreed upon among environmental scientists that civilization as we’ve known it won’t exist in the 22nd century, because the resources it would require don’t exist.  Either we can make the transition to a new way of life by choice, or we can wait until the world does it for us.  About the only thing left to be determined is whether we’re going to turn into a global civilization where people learn to be content with what they have, ride bicycles everywhere, and grow their own vegetables, or we’re going to turn into a global community of post-apocalyptic regional warlords where people fight over everything all the time, or we’re going to destroy the environment to the point where it won’t support us at all anymore, and our species is going to become completely extinct. I think the simplest complete extinction prediction I’ve heard is that if the greenhouse effect gets completely out of control, forests all over the world could either die or get so dry that they all burn down in a gigantic forest fire.  If all the plants die, there will be noting left to eat and nothing left to turn our carbon dioxide back into oxygen.

In the last book I showed you how people can control their own destines by adapting to their living conditions and changing their cultural values to fit their new situation.  So remember that, because it’s going to be important in this book.  Whether or not all the things I said about the future evolution of society come true exactly the way I explained them wasn’t the point.  The point was that by understanding more about humanity and our living conditions, we can develop social institutions that work better than the ones we have now.  In this book I’m going to talk a lot more about how our situation is changing, and show why we are going to have to develop new social institutions to deal with it.

Another thing that has changed since the last book has taken me by surprise.  I started writing the last book about the system of spiritual logic that has been developing in my family for generations, and then I found out about the parallel field of human evolutionary science that scientists had started more recently as another interdisciplinary study of human behavior.  Both begin by asking, “What observations have people made about life, and what observable evidence is there to support those observations?”  The scientists’ way of doing it works great among ivory tower academics.  Among the Niesen family, it’s implicitly understood that everybody knows something important about life, and if you try to make yourself look important by wrapping your discoveries up in a bunch of fancy terms that only a few people can understand, it isn’t going to do you much good in the long run.  Meaningful social change depends on the general public being able to understand why the old way of doing things doesn’t work very well anymore, what has to be changed, and how making the change is going to benefit them.  As an old friend of mine once asked, “Do you want to have a little revolution, or a big revolution?”

As I’ve said, the study of human evolutionary science began during the height of the Cold War, when the threat of global nuclear annihilation and the extinction of our species seemed to make a lot of sense to a lot of people.  When your own extinction seems like a good idea to many members of your species, something is obviously going seriously wrong with your evolution!  So these scientists began the field of human evolutionary science as the Science of How to Not Have a War with Each Other.

How to Not Have a War with Each Other, What Everyone in the World has in Common, and How to Recognize their Differences are such simple concepts that they’re taught to preschoolers on Sesame Street.  So obviously, kids don’t need to know about biology or DNA or evolution to be able to learn things like that.

So that raises the question:  If preschoolers can learn this stuff, why isn’t it being taught in public school?  The Republicans will never support it, because their main voter base still believes that evolution is bullsh*t, and learning about it will turn people into homosexual drug addict child molesting Communists or something.  But what about the Democrats?  Last I knew we still had a secular government of, by, and for the people, so personally, I’d think the Science of How to Keep Your Children from Getting Drafted ought to be pretty goddamn important.

Science is the pursuit of information.  When people have information, they get the choice in how to use it.  If they don’t have the information, they don’t get that choice.  Could it be that this stuff isn’t being taught to the public because our political or economic systems can’t withstand the public learning the full meaning of human equality?  Could it be that our political and economic systems depend on Whites, Hispanics, Blacks, Arabs, and Indigenous people living in fear of each other and mistrusting each other?  Could it be that the people who control our education system are afraid of what might happen if everyone in the world suddenly realized how much they had in common with each other, set aside their differences, and agreed to work together toward their mutual goals?  Do our political and economic systems really depend on war, racism, sexism, and homophobia?

Maybe that sounds paranoid of me, but in the famous words of Sherlock Holmes, “When you’ve eliminated all the likely possibilities, whatever possibility remains, however unlikely, must be the solution.”  Preschoolers can learn this stuff, so that doesn’t explain why it isn’t being taught in school.  We have a secular government of, by, and for the people, so that doesn’t explain it.  What else is left?

If our political and economic systems do depend on people not learning how to keep from having wars with each other, then the sooner we get rid of those political and economic systems, the better off we’ll all be.  Under political and economic systems like that, unless you’re one of the people who call the shots, you’re a commodity.  If you seem to be getting ahead because someone else is getting trampled on, well just wait, because your turn is coming.  When there’s nothing left of those people to trample on, someone else is going to get trampled on, and sooner or later, it’s going to be you.  In the famous words of the Reverend Martin Niemoller, “When they came for the homosexuals, I did not speak up because I wasn’t a homosexual.  When they came for the Socialists, I did not speak up because I wasn’t a Socialist.  When they came for the Jews I did not speak up because I was not a Jew.  When they came for me, there was no one left to speak up.”

As the Founding Fathers of the United States put it, effective government is only possible through the consent of the governed.  A majority of Americans already wish there was a third party to choose from in America.  If our government has grown so far removed from serving the interests of the people already that I can write silly books about how much better the interests of the people could be served if our government would teach people a working understanding of science, and suddenly a whole lot of people stop consenting to be governed by the government we have now, that’s hardly my problem, is it?  Either our government officials are going to take the hint, figure out how to adapt to the changing situation and the new information the public has gotten hold of, and figure out how to make our government effective again, or…

Whether our current government officials figure out how to construct a political system people will consent to being governed by, or someone else does it for them, either way, someone is going to make that political system work by doing what I say, because I put into words what a majority of people want.

I don’t call myself King of the World for nothing, you know.

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One other important thing has changed since I wrote the last book.

World War III began on Sunday, July 16th, 2006.

Suddenly, my story got a lot easier to tell.

When Newt Gingrich announced on national television that he intended to urge Congress to react to the increasing world-wide armed opposition America is facing and declare World War III, he raised the stakes in the struggle between religious fundamentalist lunatics and everyone else to its highest point yet.

The Republicans’ strongest supporters are eagerly awaiting the final battle for the fate of the world, and so are most of America’s worst enemies.  When Mr. Gingrich announced his intentions and his intentions would be easy to carry out, he threatened everyone the United States would declare World War III against.  Now those people could be expected to react accordingly even before the declaration was made official.  As a result of those people reacting to the unofficial declaration of World War III, the official declaration would be that much easier to make.  Mr. Gingrich was trying to write a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Luckily, I saw this coming years ago, and was already waiting for it.  Mr. Gingrich seemed to think that declaring World War III was the most dramatic thing anyone could ever do.  Unfortunately for him, it’s only the second most dramatic thing anyone could do.  And I’ve already done the first.

By simple virtue of their membership in the Homo sapiens species, everyone on Earth is guaranteed (or at least, can be expected) to want to survive, be safe, feel safe, have relationships, have sex, have families, make friends, be respected, feel good, use their abilities to make lives for themselves, and use their abilities as much as possible to make lives for themselves.

That sounds like basic common sense to many people.  The difference between being able to predict these things scientifically based on human evolution and being able to observe them in any other way is that by being able to predict them scientifically a person can see that they apply to every single person on Earth without exception.  (Or technically, there could be some people some of these things don’t apply to as a result of rare genetic mutations, and some people who are affected by all of these things but don’t act upon some of them, but for all intents and purposes, all of these are characteristics of the species Homo sapiens.)

From a humanitarian standpoint, the scientists have discovered a universal language of humanity that allows anyone, from any part of the world, to talk to anyone else, from any other part of the world, about things that both people are guaranteed to feel are important.

From an organizational standpoint, the scientists have discovered a set of rules that everyone agreed to follow at the moment they joined the Homo sapiens species.  To anyone who understands that set of rules, it’s clear to see that no group of people can remain a cooperative group indefinitely by trying to force any of its members to break those rules.  Any social structure, from a romantic partnership up to the global community, that denies some of its members basic opportunities to make their lives feel complete forces those people to fight back against the social structure.

From a personal empowerment standpoint, this is a working understanding of the science that allows people to use statistical predictions to control other people’s behavior.  People are naturally attracted to things that make them feel good and avoid things that make them feel bad.  Currently, this science is a resource that’s controlled by a small group of people (such as advertisers and politicians), who use it to control other people’s behavior by creating conditions that make people feel either good or bad.  If that same understanding of human behavior was spread to everyone, then everyone could understand the origins of their own good and bad feelings, and find ways to satisfy them on their own.

From a legal standpoint, these universal evolutionary laws are a Universal Bill of Human Rights, which wasn’t written by any person, which doesn’t depend on anyone to enforce, which applies equally to everyone, and which no one can change or corrupt.   This Evolutionary Bill of Human Rights consists of all the basic things Homo sapiens are guaranteed to need to feel like their lives are complete.  Any social structure that attempts to deny these things to any of its people oppresses it people by definition.  This Evolutionary Bill of Human Rights is enforced by the simple fact that any time people’s Evolutionary Human Rights are violated, those people will resist (even if only indirectly) with the ultimate result that the society will be destabilized.

From a political standpoint, that set of evolutionary laws is the Constitution of the Human Race, because it is the set of laws that all human behavior revolves around.  Virtually every functional community in the modern world has some form of constitution that spells out what each of its members can expect from the others.  These universal evolutionary laws are the Constitution of the global community of the 21st century.   As with the Evolutionary Bill of Human Rights, the Constitution of the Human Race was not written by anyone, does not depend on anyone to enforce, applies equally to everyone, and is impossible for anyone to change, escape, or corrupt.
With an understanding of these universal evolutionary laws, citizens can prevent government officials from denying they exist.  Under a secular government, citizens equipped with an understanding of evolutionary laws can prevent anyone from pretending they shouldn’t be recognized in court or public schools, and can hold political leaders accountable for knowing them.

The Bible has been successful as a foundation for a civilization because it’s a reference book to life and a story of the world.  Every civilization on Earth has a reference source to life and a story of the world. My reference book to life is a new story of the world that scientists, artists, philosophers, religious leaders, and progressive activists from all over the world have been trying to help tell for decades.

So in protest of intelligent design, Christian fundamentalism, President Bush, and the prospects of Armageddon being used as a political tool, I took out my copyright on the alternate title The Third Testament©.

Then I recorded the entire book as an audio book and posted it on my website for free download. Now that the scientists have done all they’ve done to discover a universal understanding of humanity, I’m seeing to it that it gets distributed universally to humanity.

Since religious fundamentalists want an ultimate duel for the fate of the world, that’s exactly what I’m giving them—only I’m giving it to them on my terms, before they can start it on their own terms.  If I show everyone how to recognize what they have in common with everyone else in the world and how they can overcome their differences, then everyone else can bring about Peace on Earth in spite of the religious fundamentalists.  Then the only way for the religious fundamentalists to get the battle of Armageddon they so desperately want would be by starting it themselves.  And I think the Bible is pretty specific about whose side the people who start the battle of Armageddon are on…

I’ve met a lot of moderate Christians and other progressively-minded religious people who are trying to oppose religious fundamentalism and integrate their religions with modern science, who don’t even realize—yet—just how much science exists to support their beliefs that people can and should get along with each other and work toward Peace on Earth.  Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Dekanawidah, and every other great leader in history has done the exact same job:  Teach Homo sapiens how to build functional civilizations by using intellect and force of will to consider the long-term effects of their actions before acting upon their immediate feelings.

Every civilization that has ever survived but didn’t have a single great leader has survived because multiple leaders figured out how to do the same job collectively.  If scientists are finally figuring out how to do on a global scale what all those leaders taught their followers to do, it would seem that the final phase of an important process has been reached. That would seem to imply that we’d better pay attention and figure out how to complete it.

Simultaneously, I’m proving it is possible for one book to serve as the foundation for a peaceful, sustainable global civilization, just like the Christian fundamentalists thought—but it’s not the book they’ve been using.   Or at least, not the way they’ve been using it.  The Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, the Tao Te Ching, and every other book that has ever served as the foundation for a religion essentially is just a different version of the same book:  a book that builds upon what a certain group of Homo sapiens already understood about the world to teach them how to build functional communities.  So many great leaders have figured out the exact same trick over the course of history that all there was left for me to do was to imitate it.

The progress of science depends on people knowing the right questions to ask and daring to ask them.  To this point, Christian fundamentalists have done a lot to prevent both of those things from happening.  But if I dare to challenge religious fundamentalism in a way no one imagined possible, then if, for instance, concerned parents listen to the book and then ask their children’s biology teachers to listen to it and tell them whether or not I know what I’m talking about, then people are daring to ask the right questions. Problem solved.

If a lot of college students listen to the book and hear how much use evolution can be in civil rights and preventing the draft from being reinstated, and then start asking their human sciences professors whether or not I know what I’m talking about, they’re bound to attract a lot of support for evolution.

Even if the only people I can reach are rebellious teenagers who are too young to vote but are old enough to see they’re inheriting a world full of problems they never voted for, and they come listen to the book just because it infuriates so many adults who are causing the problems in the first place, and they start asking their biology teachers whether or not I know what I’m talking about, I still give them everything they need to counter-hijack their futures back from the Christian fundamentalists all by themselves.

In short, any problem that religious fundamentalists choose to create in order to win a political advantage by promising to solve, evolutionary science already offers an easier, more practical, and more humane solution for, which now includes their attempting to start the battle of Armageddon. If they want to try to summon the Second Coming of Christ by starting the final battle for the fate of the world, they’ll have no one but themselves to blame if a lot of their opponents start reading a book called The Third Testament© to learn how to stop them.

I am able to out maneuver the religious fundamentalists at every step because I speak the universal language of human evolution, while they confine their perspectives on the world to ancient religious dogmas.  Now I’m teaching that universal language to anyone who wants to learn it. Regardless of whether the Christian fundamentalists choose to stick to the evolution versus intelligent design debate, or declare World War III, or anything in between, anyone who learns the universal language of humanity will be equipped to solve the problems the religious fundamentalists are creating better than the religious fundamentalists themselves can solve them.  Anyone who speaks the universal language of humanity will be able to find solutions that everyone in the world can potentially agree with and feel like cooperating with, rather than confining their potential supporters to a specific group of people who follow an ancient religious tradition.

Within three days of my posting my audio book on my site, about a hundred other people were posting it on their websites.  That was in April of 2006.  By this point, there’s no way to tell how many copies people have made, or where they all are.

I never put a gun to any Christian fundamentalists’ heads and told them to try to win elections by starting World War III.  They made that decision of their own free will.  It’s not my fault if their new political strategy turns into the biggest joke in history.

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When I wrote the last book, I assumed that everything I was saying was so obvious that official scientists must already know about it, so all there was left for me to do was to explain it to the public.  Looking back on it now, however, it seems that either I’ve made a number of contributions to the field, or that I’ve re-discovered a number of important landmarks on my own from a different direction.

Science is the study of observable evidence.  A scientific theory is a logical conclusion drawn from observable evidence that can be used to make accurate predictions.  But in my case there’s a catch…

If you were the only person who could see, and everyone else in the world was congenitally blind, where would you look for observable evidence to prove that rainbows exist?  You couldn’t say, “Look up there in the sky, it’s right there in front of you.”  You couldn’t tell people about light rays passing through water droplets suspended in the atmosphere, because nobody would know what a light ray was.  People would know what heat rays were, because they could feel them coming off the sun, but those wouldn’t feel any different from heat rays that came off a radiator.  Why would the ones that came out of the sky have some special property that affected some mysterious organ of your body and gave you additional information about the world, while the ones that people used to heat their homes in the winter didn’t?

Painting turns visual imagery into art. People who have great sensitivity to visual imagery make better painters than people who have average sensitivity to visual imagery.  People who practice painting for years improve upon their visual sensitivity.  People who work among painters for years learn techniques for replicating visual imagery on canvass that people who don’t work as painters don’t learn.

Now take that last paragraph and replace the word “painting” with “theatre” and the term “visual imagery” with “human behavior”.

Theatre turns human behavior into art. People who have great sensitivity to human behavior make better theatre artists than people who have average sensitivity to human behavior.  People who practice theatre for years improve upon their sensitivity to human behavior.  People who work among theatre artists for years learn techniques for replicating human behavior that people who don’t work as theatre artists don’t learn.

Thanks to Hollywood, everyone in the industrialized world has seen human behavior replicated by theatre artists so many times that explaining how it’s done is very easy.  That’s how I wrote the last book.

So here’s the surprise beginning to this book:

The fine points of human behavior that I discussed in the last book are observable evidence to theatre artists because of theatre artists’ collective perceptivity to human behavior.  By explaining how theatre artists replicate human behavior on stage, that perceptivity was fairly easy to render observable to the general public.  By drawing logical conclusions from that observable evidence, I was able to use it to make accurate predictions about basically the entire realm of human behavior.

All of this should be perfectly obvious to any run-of-the-mill scientific and artistic genius who’s worked in theatre most of his adult life.  The catch is, as far as I can tell, scientists haven’t yet figured out how theatre artists replicate human behavior in terms scientists can consider observable evidence.  So I spent the last book singing songs about rainbows, only to discover afterwards that the people who seemed to be experts in the field are congenitally blind.

Scientifically speaking, I guess I used something other than observable evidence to draw logical conclusions that can be used to make accurate predictions.  That means that the last book is one gigantic scientific theory that works for everyone except scientists.

(Okay, technically the last book wasn’t a scientific theory that works for literally everyone except scientists.  It wouldn’t work for religious fundamentalists who don’t believe in evolution, either.)
For anyone who is willing to believe that science works pretty well most of the time but there are still some things that scientists haven’t yet recognized as scientifically valid despite considerable evidence to support them, the last book does function as a gigantic scientific theory.

So I guess I’ll start this book by explaining how I wrote the last book.  For scientists, it might be something approaching observable evidence.  For everyone else, it’s a lesson in how techniques of storytelling can be combined with scientific principles to understand the ever-unfolding story of the world.

There is so much I could’ve said in this chapter that I published a full-length version separately, in my book The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity.   That’s a denser, more-or-less academic presentation for people with something more than a high school level understanding of evolution and psychology.

The Bible is a story of the world, and so is this book.  Unlike the Bible, by the end of this book (meaning the volume after this one) I show everyone how I wrote this book so you can write your own story of the world and get it to correspond well enough with other people’s stories of the world that you can work together and get along with each other.  Ideally, instead of being a few different religions and philosophies made up of lots of people each who disagree with each other and fight over stuff all the time, you’ll be billions of different religions and philosophies consisting of one member each, who can agree with each other and cooperate, while maintaining your individuality.

If all goes well, by the time I’m done saying what I have to say I will have rendered myself superfluous to writing the continuing story of the world.  But that’s going to take at least one more volume after this one…

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In the last book, I talked about how human behavior is well enough understood that it can be used as a theoretical system of mathematics.  My theoretical system of mathematics was derived from the Theory of Evolutionary Relativity.  The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity was the basis of the entire first volume of this book.

I discovered the Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior and Theory of Evolutionary Relativity by combining the contents of two books about science with some basic principles of theatre.  One rule of theatre says that no one ever does anything for no reason.  Another says that people always expend their energy in whatever way seems to give them the best chances of succeeding at their goals.

In Why God Won’t Go Away, Dr. Andrew Newberg and Dr. Eugene D’Aquili show how the five fundamental components of evolutionary psychology—the instincts to survive and reproduce, and the abilities to imagine, remember, and communicate—created every aspect of religion.  In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Dr. Jared Diamond uses the energy efficiency of food production to tell the agricultural history of the world.

Soon after I read Guns, Germs, and Steel, I figured out how to tell the entire history of human behavior in terms of energy efficiency.  In order to do that, I had to establish what exactly the energy that was being used efficiently was acting upon.  With that, I discovered the first principle of evolutionary psychology independently.  I called it spiritual logic, and my first principle was: “People always act to give themselves the most favorable ratio of perceivable benefit to effort required.”  Separately, I had defined all benefits as relating in one way or another to survival or reproduction.  The official first principle of evolutionary psychology says: “All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.”

I was working at my job when I figured this out.  I think it was about 11:00 on a Wednesday morning.  I know it was early February of 2004.  Someone had a radio on, playing a commercial radio station.  I’d been working at that job for a few weeks, being assaulted by radio commercials for 40 hours a week.  That morning, I was sanding some theatre scenery with an orbital sander, which isn’t very interesting work. Then yet another commercial came on for someone’s brand-new super-duper pickup truck that was supposed to change the way people think about pickup trucks… or whatever.  So I got to racking my brains, trying to figure out:  Everyone thinks radio commercials are so stupid, what effect could they possibly have on people’s brains that would make them profitable to put on the radio?

Then the Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior and Theory of Evolutionary Relativity hit me, within seconds of each other.  (Or so it seems to me now—it might’ve been as much as two minutes.)  I just about dropped the sander and ran home to start writing them down.

It was soon after that I realized the hole in Dr. Diamond’s logic that all cultures are the product of evolutionarily equal humans making the best use of their resources.   That literal statement is true, but the wording is ambiguous.  The most obvious way to interpret it can’t possibly be true, because that would require all cultures to be the product of evolutionarily equal humans making the best use of their available resources and nothing else.  So how would people from a less materially wealthy culture make up the difference to make themselves feel equally satisfied with their lives?  That was obvious:  By developing energy-efficient shortcuts to making themselves feel satisfied with their lives—or by retaining those energy efficient shortcuts while people of more materially wealthy groups forgot them.  Thus I discovered my amc = v equation, which showed that cultural values are a critical part of the human biological economy.  That showed that the sharing and learning of other people’s cultural values gave us the opportunity for essentially free economic development.  It also showed why conquered people whose cultures have been destroyed and who still have less material wealth than their oppressors have such a hard time getting back on their feet and participating in their oppressors’ economies.

Since Dr. Newberg and Dr. D’Aquili showed how the five fundamental units of evolutionary psychology had created every aspect of religion, Dr. Diamond had used energy efficiency to tell the history of the world, and I’d figured out how to connect energy efficiency to the five fundamental units of evolutionary psychology, I could write a scientific book about the entire history of the world, and use science to replicate the emotional impact of religion to make it memorable.

Like I said, I assumed all this was so obvious that official scientists must’ve thought of it already.

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I talked about this enough in the last book that I don’t need to remind you about it.  There are just a few things I need to clarify.

I started with the five fundamental units of evolutionary psychology, which Dr. Newberg and Dr. D’Aquili had shown to be the source of all human thought, as far as religion was concerned.  I tried to figure out if those fundamental units could be the source of all human thought as far as everything was concerned.  But how could I measure the interaction of components of thoughts?

That wasn’t hard.  I could cross-reference thought with human behavior.  So who had discovered an all-encompassing pattern of human behavior?

There were two I’d heard of.  One was the Five Human Motivators, which I’d learned in my small business management class when I was getting my Building Construction degree.  I had been working on a scene in a futuristic novel where the heroine was telling a couple of the heroes how advertizers were predicting human behavior and turning everyone into mindless consumer robots. I knew those five backwards and forwards.   The other cross-reference I thought of was the Maslow Hierarchy of Human Needs, which I had learned all about in my Flight Instructor training, which I’d just finished two months before.

How could I be sure that the Five Human Motivators and Maslow Hierarchy of Human Needs were all encompassing?  That was easy.  Advertizing and education both depend on getting and holding people’s attention. Consider the means, motive, and opportunity that advertizers have had to find ways of getting and holding people’s attention, and what was the likelihood that they’d overlooked anything?

By establishing the origins of people’s thoughts and the entire range of behavior it produced, I found I could replicate the entire range of human emotion that would motivate the behavior.

The next question was, what, apart from the genetic origins of human thought, would affect emotions and resulting behavior?

I had taught myself to write novels by reading lots of books and working in theatre.  A simple and all-encompassing list of outside factors that affect human behavior was easy too:  abilities, skills, resources, personal history, and cultural background.  Every author must know that.

This gave me 18 points of reference:  instincts for survival and reproduction, abilities to imagine, remember, and communicate, motivations for survival, safety, reproduction, social, self-gratification, self-actualization, and self-fulfillment, the additional motivation for fulfillment of self-fulfillment that I added, and the outside factors of abilities, skills, resources, personal history, and cultural background.

These 18 points, and various combinations of them, are recurring themes in religion, philosophy, literature, and any other large bodies of work that examine human behavior.

As this relates to science, obviously all of these would be critical to human evolution.  As Dr. Newberg and Dr. D’Aquili had already demonstrated, once you can establish that, it isn’t necessary to identify the parts of the brain evolutionary components of thought originate from.  If those components of thought were critical to evolution, the fact that humans did evolve living among those factors is proof that something, somewhere in our brains works in whatever way it needs to work to make us think about those things.

In the last book I compared these recurring themes among studies of human behavior to algebraic equations with multiple variables.  To solve all those equations, I just had to invent my own system of theoretical mathematics.  That analogy served its purpose, because pretty much everyone who has been to high school has at least heard of algebra, equations, and variables.

What I was really thinking of was a part of Neal Stevenson’s book Cryptonomicon.  One of the characters is a mathematical genius who works on breaking enemy codes during World War II.  Early in the book Mr. Stevenson talks about the character’s mathematical ability as it relates to code breaking by saying that if a person was to walk though a large city with irregular-sized city blocks, and someone was to keep track of how long the person spent walking on sidewalks, how much time they spent crossing streets, and when they switched from walking on a sidewalk to walking on a street and back, you would get an irregular pattern.  If you kept records like that for thousands of people who walked through the city at random, you would get a whole bunch of patterns.  Most people would look at all those thousands of patterns, shrug their shoulders, and forget about them.  But the hero of this story would immediately see that some of the patterns overlapped with each other in some places.  Then he would spread the patterns out all over the room and stay up all night staring at them and sketching his own patterns on paper.  Then in the morning he would hand you a street map of London.

I’d just done the same thing, in a different context.

Scientists and mathematicians had already found a way to deal with multiple irregular patterns and find consistent regular patterns among them, and then break them down to figure out how the interaction of simple systems created the complex patterns.  It’s called chaos theory, or alternately, systems theory.  I can’t honestly say that I invented systems theory independently, because I learned about it indirectly from a few different places.  In flight school I learned how all of weather was caused by the transfer of heat through the atmosphere, and how the sun shining on the Earth, the rotation of the Earth, geography, the freezing and thawing of water, and a few other minor things, all made energy move through the atmosphere in ways that interacted with each other.  Then Dr. Newberg and Dr. D’Aquili had just shown how two instincts and three mental abilities interacted with each other to create all of religion, and Dr. Diamond showed how the interaction of geological factors interacted with universal characteristics of our species to create the history of agricultural civilization.

In effect, in both books these scientists factored individuality and free will out of human behavior altogether.  Dr. Newberg and Dr. D’Aquili showed how all of religion was a product of an interaction of five fundamental thought patterns of human brains, which the people attached to those brains act differently upon depending on their living conditions.  Dr. Diamond showed how universal human motivations can be factored out of the differences among cultures that shaped world history, and in retrospect we can see that the agricultural history of the world was the product of differences in geography, over which effectively identical members of a species were spread.

Scientists and mathematicians have developed a system of codes for drawing systems diagrams, in the same basic way that computer programmers invent programming languages and musicians use musical notation.  There is no way a person could draw a traditional systems diagram for all of human behavior, to show a universal pattern of what interacts with what and how in every situation.  But theatre artists have figured out their own ways to draw systems diagrams of human behavior.  Every play or movie you’ve ever seen is a systems diagram of human behavior.  The artists don’t draw it on paper; they draw it in your mind.  They show you what interacts with what.  You could draw a traditional systems diagram for any scene in a play or movie, and every entry in the diagram would be one of these 18 factors.

So even though I can’t say I invented systems theory completely independently, at least I can say that I seem to be the first to have thought of applying systems theory to religion, philosophy, and literature all at the same time to derive a collective definition of the essence of human existence.
The Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is so obvious that I print it on the front cover of all my books.  The Ultimate Question was the hard part.

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The one thing I don’t have yet in my systems diagram of human behavior is something to connect the points to each other.

The basic premise is that what people call emotional or spiritual energy functions as the dark matter of human evolutionary behavior.  It is a force that can’t be observed directly, but can be observed indirectly in a number of ways.  Either it is a literal form of energy that we have no way of observing directly; or else it doesn’t literally exist but it acts like it exists, and our perception of it is fundamental to our brain structure.

This elusive spiritual/ emotional energy is the primary medium of theatre, and an entire industry of people have been studying how it affects human behavior for roughly 2,500 years.  Two of the most well known examples of this mysterious spiritual/emotional energy are easy to demonstrate.

First, people who work at stressful jobs often suffer from weakened immune systems.  They suffer from these weakened immune systems because they divert energy away from maintaining them to cope with their stress.  In theory, the amount of energy they’re diverting from their immune systems could be measured in calories.  But that doesn’t answer the question:  Where is the energy going?  It can be observed that these people have to expend physical energy to force themselves to stay at their jobs.  That implies that some form of physical energy must be pushing them away from their jobs, because otherwise the energy expenditure equation doesn’t balance.  Energy can never be created or destroyed, so obviously some energy isn’t accounted for here.  So where does this energy come from?  And in what direction is it pushing the person?

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. refers to this spiritual/emotional energy directly in his I Have a Dream speech.  He says, “We must meet physical force with soul force.”

Suppose a Civil Rights protestor was marching down a street carrying a sign.  At the other end of the street was a policeman with a fire hose.  The policeman turns the fire hose on the protestor and knocks him off his feet.  The energy that the protestor was expending to march down the street gave him force in a certain direction.  The policeman with the fire hose used a greater amount of energy to exert a greater among of force in the opposite direction, which overpowered those of the protestor.  That knocked the protestor off his feet.

The Civil Rights movement was won with soul force because the protestors didn’t give up.  The energy, force, and momentum exerted against the protestor stopped him from marching down the street, but it didn’t stop him from wanting to march down the street.  So as soon as he got another chance on another day, he did it again.  No matter how much physical force the segregationists used, it was never enough to make the Civil Rights protestors stop wanting their civil rights.

It is conceivable that with a certain amount of physical force the segregationists could’ve changed the protestors’ minds.  You see this in domestic abuse cases all the time.  A person could beat another person so severely that the other person stopped thinking that a certain course of action was a good idea.  That’s exactly what the segregationists with their clubs, fire hoses, and attack dogs tried to do to the Civil Rights protestors.  But they just couldn’t beat them severely enough to win.

Now we’re talking about a sufficient amount of physical force being applied to a person to change the course of the person’s life.  In theory, you could measure the force that was moving the person’s life in the first place by measuring the amount of force you could apply to the person with a club, and then measuring the number of times you had to beat the person with the club to change the course of the person’s life.  But again that raises the questions:  What force was the physical force counteracting?   And in which direction was that force propelling the person’s life originally?

You could measure the direction this spiritual/ emotional energy was pushing the person with what I call a spiritual vector.  Spiritual vectors are scientifically invisible, because they could only be drawn in what’s known as mathematical space.

You could draw a graph to compare every aspect of human behavior to every other aspect of human behavior, all at the same time, except for the fact that it would require hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of intersecting axes, each in its own dimension.  Mathematicians can contemplate what that means because they’ve figured out ways to draw graphs that shouldn’t be able to exist in three-dimensional space.  But even if it was possible to find a way to draw a graph that represented millions of intersecting dimensions, how would you plot points on it?  How do you assign a numerical value to love?  What number do you use to measure how much a person hates brussel sprouts?  And how do you develop a universal scale to compare everyone’s love or hatred of brussel sprouts to each other?

Here’s a crash course in how theatre artists draw spiritual vectors:  (I’ll refer to it in terms of movies, so you can go watch some movies and see it happen for yourself.)

The writer has characters in mind when he writes the script.  When the director and the actors each read the script, they figure out what each character is like based on the time and place the movie is set, each character’s occupation, age, relation to other characters in the movie, and whatever other background information they’re given on the character.  Then they get more clues from the things the character talks about, the words he uses, the way he talks to other characters, and so on.

Once the director and actors have figured out as much about each character as they can from the script, they build up the characters from there.  The director looks at the whole script, the story that’s being told, the setting, and what he knows about each character in the movie, to get more clues about what each character needs to be like to tell the story.  Then he tells each actor his additional information for each part.

Each actor takes all of this information and figures out how to bring it all together and embody it all in a single character.  To do that, he has to fill in some additional details himself.
The storyline of the movie is told by the characters in the movie being pitted against each other in conflicts.  At all times, every character in the movie wants something he doesn’t have.  In order to get it, he has to interact with the other characters and his surroundings in the movie.
The conflict is caused by each character having goals that are mutually exclusive to the goals of at least one other character.  Over the course of the movie, conflicts that arise may be resolved, but they are always replaced by bigger conflicts.

Each character has a goal for the entire movie.  This is called his super-objective.  This is his reason for participating in the storyline; the thing that he wants that puts him into conflict with other characters.  Conflicts are always threats to characters’ super-objectives.
In each scene, each character has a scene objective.  This is his reason for participating in the scene; what he wants to get out of the scene.  This puts him into conflict with the other characters.  The character’s scene objective is always a part of his attempt to achieve his super objective.

Dialogue is then divided up into units of intentions, or beats.  With each line of dialogue, each character is attempting to get another character to act differently than that character was going to act, and to do something that will contribute to the first character’s scene objective and consequently his super objective.  A beat is the thing the character is trying to do with that unit of dialogue. An exchange of dialogue among characters on stage is always an emotional fencing match on some level or another—even if only very subtly.

To a lot of people who aren’t theatre artists, it always sounds draconian of me to say that all of these things are always happening to every character in every shot in every movie.  It’s obvious that they happen sometimes.  It seems like they don’t happen sometimes only because sometimes they’re very subtle.

Every character is always in a state of conflict with every other character in the scene simply because they’re unique individuals.  They each have different goals they’re trying to achieve, each of them has different abilities, skills, and resources to work with, and they each have different feelings.   The conflict is created by the simple fact that each character is always trying to achieve his own goal, but each character needs something from at least one other character.

Even if a man and a woman are madly in love with each other, they still have different goals, simply because they’re different people.  If each of them is trying to achieve their own goal and needs the other’s help, that means in order for the woman to get the man to help her achieve her goal, she has to divert him from trying to achieve his own goal.  Meanwhile, the man is trying to do the same thing to her.

The more compatible their goals are, the less conflict there will be in the relationship.  This is not to say that some relationships have conflict and some don’t; this is to say that every relationship lies at some point on the same spectrum.   Some relationships seem to have conflict in them while others don’t, because in some relationships each person perceives that the benefits of the relationship are well worth the conflict, while in other relationships the benefits are barely worth the conflict.  When the benefits of the relationship stop being worth the conflict to one of the characters, that character tries to break off the relationship.  And remember, I am talking about movies here…

Now I can give you an example of how all this fits together in a classic tale of a small band of heroes who waged a desperate struggle to save the free world from the forces of evil.

In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Sam’s super-objective is very simple:  Help Frodo destroy the One Ring of Power.  Frodo’s super-objective is more abstract:  Destroy the One Ring of Power before it destroys him.   Aragorn’s super-objective is even more abstract:  Protect the free world from the forces of Mordor.

Each of those characters’ actions for the entire trilogy revolves around trying to accomplish those goals.  In Sam’s case, the course of action he has to undertake is very straightforward:  Get Frodo and the Ring from the Shire to the Mountain of Fire safely.  Frodo’s course of action is less straightforward:  Get the Ring to the Mountain of Fire and throw it in, while constantly struggling to keep himself from falling under its control.  Aragorn’s course of action is even less straightforward:  Help Frodo get the Ring to the Mountain of Fire as much as possible, kill a lot of badguys, forge an alliance to defend the free world from the badguys, fight a huge war to drive the badguys out of the human lands, lead a hopeless counterattack against the badguys to distract them from catching Frodo, and finally claim his place as the rightful heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Gondor.

Along the way, all of these characters interact with other characters, but their goal in all of those interactions is to get themselves closer to accomplishing their super-objectives.  Sam makes a lot of seemingly idle talk to keep his own and Frodo’s spirits up.  Frodo talks to a lot of people to try to find out more about what he has to do and how he has to do it.  Aragorn slips in some romance-time with Arwen when he gets a few spare moments, because her super objective is to marry him.  She also wants to help save the free world, but even that’s a pre-requisite to marrying Aragorn, because she can’t marry him if they get conquered by the forces of Mordor and killed or thrown in a dungeon.  He wants to marry her too, but that gets in the way of his super-objective for the story.  So even when they are together, he’s preoccupied with thinking about everything he has to do to save the free world, and she knows that he won’t marry her until he saves the free world, because he won’t stop fighting the forces of evil until the world is safe.

Even if the two characters are friends and are cooperating with each other in a scene, like Sam and Frodo usually were, the emotional duel is still taking place, very subtly.  Each character has a different super-objective, which means that each character has a different reason for talking to the other character.  Each character is trying to do something, and what they’re trying to do is different from what the other character is trying to do.  That means that each character is trying to get the other character to do something different from what the other character is trying to do.  Even if they have the same scene objective, they have the same scene objectives for different reasons—because it helps them accomplish their different super-objectives.

In the case of Aragorn and Arwen, Arwen would’ve been happy to marry Aragorn under any conditions, but Aragorn knew he had to save the free world and getting married before that would just be too much of a distraction.  Since Arwen wanted to marry him, but she knew he wouldn’t marry her until after he saved the free world, she knew that the easiest way to get him to marry her was to help him save the free world.  They both got what they wanted in the end, but his super-objective was very complicated, and her super-objective depended on his, so she had to use a very indirect approach to her super-objective.

In a scene of two strangers talking to each other on the street—probably the most innocuous scene imaginable—each character is talking to the other because he needs to get something from the other character, or because he’s trying to get the other character to think differently or act differently.

Even if all you do is to ask someone what time it is, you’re trying to get the person to do something different from what he was planning on doing—because he wasn’t planning on telling you the time.  Whatever amount of effort he expends in telling you the time is effort he was intending to expend on doing what he was trying to do—like, walk down the street.  There isn’t much conflict in this situation, but there is still conflict.  And this is probably the simplest thing you could ever ask someone.

If two characters agree to cooperate with each other, they’ve negotiated a trade.  There is still conflict in the scene, but it’s been obscured by the effects of their cooperation.  Each character has a super-objective that’s different from the other character’s super-objective.  If the two characters agree to help each other, they each agree to do something other than pursue their own super-objective—namely, help the other character pursue their super-objective.  Each of them makes a net profit on the agreement, which makes it mutually beneficial, and therefore the definition of cooperation.  But each character made their net profit by making a smaller compromise on their super-objective.  That means they each had to sacrifice something to cooperate with the other character, even if there was no way imaginable that either character could succeed at their objective without making the sacrifice.  Hence the reason the mutual net benefits of the cooperation in the scene eclipses the conflict, because each character requires the net profit to succeed at their own super-objective.  But that still doesn’t change the fact that each of them sacrificed something when they made the compromise—by definition of compromise.

If you were to direct a movie scene where two men meet in a gay bar and agree to have a one-night stand together, you could water down the conflict in the scene by making their super-objectives so similar to each other that it wouldn’t be possible to make the scene interesting enough for any audience to want to watch.  You could make their super-objectives identical as far as the movie was concerned.  That would eliminate all conflict from the movie, and that would make the movie cease to have a plot.  But if you were to go to the extent of making a movie that accounted for every minute of each characters’ lifetime, which would take your audience members two lifetimes to watch, the watered down conflict in the gay bar scene would still emerge, because these are still two different people.

Even if their super-objectives in the two-lifetime movie were identical, their perceptions of how to pursue their super-objectives are created by two different combinations of abilities, skills, resources, personal history, and cultural background.  That difference in perception is going to change their perceptions of how they can achieve their identical super-objectives.  That’s going to make them different super-objectives in practice, because even though the super-objectives themselves are identical, the characters who perceive possible ways to achieve their super-objectives and therefore, how they need to act to achieve their super-objectives, are different.  So over the course of a two-lifetime movie, their identical super-objectives would be undone by their basic human uniqueness.  That would create conflict, and therefore a plot, no matter how slight.
When you compare this to evolutionary psychology, the parallels to this point are obvious.  In real life, everyone’s super-objective is to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.  But even though every member of our species has identical super-objectives, in practice those super-objectives are all unique, because each person who acts upon their super-objective is unique.

If you walk up to a stranger on the street tomorrow and ask him the time, you will see all of this happen.

The other person didn’t want to tell you the time.  His goal was to walk down the street.  In order for you to get him to tell you the time, you have to divert him from achieving his own goal.  To do that, you have to figure out a way to make telling you the time seem like a better idea than not telling you the time.  So you pick your words and your tone of voice according to which you think will be the most likely to get him to tell you the time.

If this was the entire movie, your movie would consist of one scene, made up of one sentence and one beat from you, and one sentence and one beat from the other person.  Your super objective, your scene objective, and your beat would all be contained in your question, “Do you know what time it is?”

Your success or failure depends on the other person’s reaction.  He could say, “Yes, it’s 2:35,” or, “No, I don’t have a watch,” or, “Sorry, I’m in a hurry,” or, “Don’t talk to me like that.”

If the person has a watch, your finding out the time depends on your making telling you the time feel like a greater priority to the other person than walking down the street.  That depends on how much effort it will take him to tell you the time, how much of a hurry he’s in, and how you ask him.  If telling you the time only depends on his looking down at his watch and saying a few words, it isn’t difficult to get him to tell you the time.  But that doesn’t prove there was no conflict involved, only that there was minimal conflict involved.

This artistic technique creates realistic behavior because this is how real life works.  Real life doesn’t seem like a movie only because people don’t interact in small, well-defined groups, their super-objectives don’t always bring them into big, dramatic conflicts, and their conflicts aren’t all resolved at the same time.  The entire world, and all of world history, has been made up of zillions of movies all intertwining with each other.

To replicate all of this believably, the actor has to figure out how his character would have to think to make the character act in a way that told the story.  To do that, the actor uses whatever he knows about who the character is and how he lives, and develops a feeling for who the character is.

When the actor gets into character, he makes himself feel like his character.  His feeling for who his character is is a highly developed emotional state that makes all the things the character does feel like the right things to do.

In real life, your emotional state makes you feel like certain things are the right things to do, and you do whatever you feel to be the right thing to do.  The actor has simply reverse engineered that process.  By looking at what the character does, he figures out how to get into an emotional state that makes doing all of those things feel like the right things to do.

Of course, the character’s emotional state is changing all the time.  That means that getting into character depends on the actor making himself feel like someone whose emotional states would change over the course of the movie, and then make the character’s actions seem like the best ideas.

However an individual actor does it, by developing a feeling for who the character is that causes the character to feel whatever way he feels at any given moment of the movie that makes doing whatever the character does feel like the best ideas to him, the actor creates a gigantic systems diagram for who his character is.  All the things that make the character who he is interact to make the character believe that each of his actions offers him the greatest probability of success at his goals.

When a professional-level actor says he is getting into character, he could just as easily say that he’s replacing the systems diagram he uses for dealing with his own life with the systems diagram his character uses for dealing with life.  Of course, most artistic geniuses are not also scientific geniuses, so they’re not consciously aware that they’re doing this.  They’re just aware that they make themselves feel like their characters, that they’ve used a very highly developed process of developing a sense of who their character is, that by acting upon their sense of who the character is they deliver believable performances, and whatever else the actor knows about all of this.  But I think it’s safe to say that most actors have never even heard of systems diagrams.

This is not to say that the actor has to fill in the details for each block of his character’s systems diagram as well as he has filled in his own in his own life.  He isn’t replicating his character’s entire life; he’s only replicating a couple of hours of it.

This is to say that the blocks in the character’s systems diagram have to exist.  Then they can be filled in as necessary, as they relate to the movie.  Then the actor can make all the right things interact with each other to replicate his character’s thought processes.  Without the complete systems diagram, he can’t.

The story begins with each character being propelled through life by their spiritual vector.  Then their spiritual vectors bump into each other when the characters start interacting with each other.  Every time two spiritual vectors bump into each other, they both change courses.  With each line of dialogue in the play or movie, at least one person’s spiritual vector changes course.   It is common that more than one character’s spiritual vector will change course with a line of dialogue; it is also common that a character’s spiritual vector will change course more than once with a line of dialogue; and it is common that more than one character’s spiritual vector will change more than once during a line of dialogue.  These changes of the courses of characters’ lives are the results of the other characters playing their beats, to try to get each other to act differently than they would’ve acted otherwise.

A play or movie begins with each character doing whatever they’re doing, in pursuit of the most favorable ratio of perceivable benefit to effort required.  When characters talk to each other, they learn new information from each other, and are affected by the other character’s emotional communication.  Both of those things alter the character’s perception of the situation, which in turn alters what they do to try to provide for their needs, by changing their needs, changing their perception of their needs, or changing their perception of their ability to provide for their needs.  The art of theatre is the art of weaving characters’ spiritual vectors around each other.

In any scene in any play with two or more characters onstage, emotional energy is being passed around among them.  This is how actors create realistic scenes, in spite of the fact that spiritual/emotional energy is scientifically invisible.

A standard rehearsal technique among actors is for one actor to direct emotional energy at another actor, the second actor to catch the energy, process it, turn it into another form of emotional energy, and then direct it either back at the first actor or at a third actor.  Numerous theatre games have been built up around this basic principle, and this scientifically invisible thing that actors toss back and forth around the stage is as tangible to them as a rubber ball.

In scientific terms it’s pretty obvious what is happening here.  The first actor doesn’t project an actual form of energy at the second actor; he simply directs energy into his emotional communication, with his facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures, body language, and choice of words.  That emotional communication interacts with the second actor’s subconsciousness and sends a wave of energy through his body according to whatever emotional effect the first actor’s emotional communication had on him.  The second actor then processes that emotional energy, turns it into something else, and directs it at another actor.

Every character, in every scene, in every movie, is in a constant state of conflict up until the very ending of the movie.  Each character needs something from at least one other character in the movie.  He interacts with all the characters in the movie to try to get what he needs.  Every character is always in a conflict with at least one other character in the movie, in which each of their personal objectives are mutually exclusive.  In order for one to succeed, the other must be defeated.

Each character has an objective he tries to achieve over the course of the movie, and an objective he tries to achieve in each scene.  His scene objective is always an attempt to help accomplish his super-objective.  Over the course of the movie, minor conflicts may be resolved, but they are always replaced by bigger conflicts.  Conflicts are always threats to characters’ super-objectives.

Now here’s where the theatre systems theory of human behavior diverges from evolutionary psychology as it has been practiced to this point.  The spiritual/emotional energy that’s passed around in a scene functions as a form of energy, and even though it’s scientifically invisible, it’s simple enough to translate between one and the other.  But now the question is:  Where did the spiritual/emotional energy that each of the characters started the movie with come from?

In theatre terms, every single sensory input is a form of energy.  That form of energy interacts with each person’s unique brain differently, but it interacts with each person’s universal brain structure in the same basic ways.   That gives human behavior an infinite range of possibilities, within certain parameters.

These sensory input virtual forms of energy could be expressed as kilogram meters squared per second squared (kgm2/s2), or joules, in which the meters are measured theoretically as vectors in mathematical space.    This is only an analogy, but I’m using it to illustrate that where people naturally perceive spiritual/emotional energy to exist, and where scientists consider spiritual/emotional energy to be an illusion, theatre artists have developed an understanding of how spiritual/emotional energy motivates human behavior, which is made up of five components that are analogous one for one to the definition of energy used in classical physics. If energy works a certain way in physics, and something else affects human behavior in the same basic way, what else should people perceive that thing to be but some sort of mysterious life energy?

Since people depend on food energy to live, it’s usually most convenient to refer to units of energy as they relate to people in terms of calories—that is, the energy content of their food.  Basically, calories and joules are two different units of measuring energy that were discovered by two different people and that were established as the traditional units of measurement in two different contexts before anyone realized that they were just two different versions of the same thing and figured out how to convert from one to the other.  They’re still used in their traditional contexts now, like liters and gallons or feet and meters.   You can measure food energy in joules instead of measuring it in calories, but most people have never heard of that being done.

The joules I’m talking about here refer to kinetic energy—the energy of motion.  Calories originally measured heat, but when you heat water (or anything else) it makes the water molecules move faster, which gives them more kinetic energy.  That means you could convert from the calories of food energy a person has to expend to force himself to stay at a stressful job to discover the amount of kinetic energy that was pushing him away from his job.

The only problem is, spiritual/emotional energy is scientifically invisible, so at this point I’m talking about theoretical physics.  Spiritual/emotional energy is a form of energy that acts as if it exists, even though no one has figured out how to measure it scientifically.

The “direction” of a person’s life doesn’t refer to the passage of time, or to directions in three-dimensional space.  It refers to directions in mathematical space, where every aspect of the person’s life is measured on one of an unknown number of intersecting dimensions.

To understand how the spiritual energy you get from your sensory inputs affects the way you think and act, you need to know five basic things.

How hard does the energy push you?

What direction does it push you?

How long does the energy itself push you?  (By that I mean, how long do you see or hear the thing?)

How long does your the memory of the energy push you?

How far do you change the course of your life as a result?

Every sensory input changes the course of your life.  Most things that happen in your life change your life so little that you don’t even notice.  But the big things that change your life in ways you do notice work the same way, just on a different scale.  We’re talking about two points on the same spectrum again.

If you feel hungry in an hour from now, that will change the course of your life, because that hunger will make you think about different things and make different decisions than you would make if you weren’t hungry.   Your feeling of hunger will change your emotional state, and that will make you think some choices are good ideas and not notice other choices.

If you eat a sandwich and satisfy your hunger, the hunger will stop affecting the way you think and act, so it will stop changing the course of your life.  You could say that compared to your entire life, or even compared to this one day, your getting hungry doesn’t change the course of your life because you knew you were going to get hungry at some point.  But for the few minutes you did spend eating the sandwich, your hunger did change the course of your life.   You spent those few minutes eating that sandwich because you were hungry.  If you weren’t hungry, you would’ve spent those few minutes doing something else.

Now we can look at the five things to see how spiritual energy works.

How hard did your hunger push you?  Not very hard.  You felt hungry because you were running low on food energy, so you decided to use some of your remaining food energy to make yourself more food to replace your food energy.  You decided to take action to adapt to the new situation.

What direction did your hunger push you?  In the direction of eating whatever you could eat that you thought would satisfy your hunger.  You took action and used your available resources to adapt to the new situation.

How long did your hunger affect you?  As long as it took to eat the sandwich.  You reacted to the sensory input for a certain length of time.

How long did you remember being hungry afterwards?  You probably didn’t remember it.  You didn’t to continue to react to the sensory input after the sensory input was gone.

How much did you change your life as a result of being hungry?  You ate a sandwich and went back to whatever you’d been doing before you got hungry.

Now suppose you’re a peasant farmer.  Tomorrow, if someone comes and evicts you from your farm, that will change your life also.   Let’s start by asking the five questions again.

How hard did losing your farm push you?  Very hard, because you lost everything.  That big change in your situation forces you to make big changes in the decisions you make.  Now that you’re losing your farm, you’re no longer physically capable of acting upon a lot of decisions you would’ve made otherwise—like, how you’re going to get your food next year.

What direction did losing your farm push you?  If you joined a militia of dispossessed farmers, it pushed you in the direction of waging armed resistance against the people who took your farm.   Once again you took action and used your available resources to adapt to the new situation.  In this case, your available resources included an army made up of your neighbors who had lost their farms also, which you were welcome to join, and which seemed to you to be the most effective way to try to defend yourself.

How long did losing your farm affect you?  Only for a few days, while you were packing up to move out.  You reacted to the sensory input for a certain length of time.

How long did the memory of losing your farm affect you?  For the rest of your life.

How much did you change your life as a result of losing your farm?   About as much as it was possible to change your life.  Now that you’re no longer in physical possession of your farm, it isn’t physically possible for you to carry on with the life you were leading, until you get your farm back.

After you lost your farm, you had to make a new life for yourself, living in different surroundings and doing different things.  If you joined the militia you switched from leading the life of a farmer to leading the life of a soldier.   Instead of spending your days working on your farm and growing food, you started spending your days hiding in the forest and fighting battles.  Then you win your revolution and destroy your government, or you get killed in battle, or you get captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp, or whatever.  Exactly what happens to you isn’t the point; the point is, what happens to you as a result of being a soldier is going to be a lot different from what would’ve happened to you as a farmer.

By acting differently now, you affect your surroundings differently.  You make different things happen in the world as a result of changing your own life.  The next time something happens around you and you react to it, the thing that happens can happen as a result of your previous actions.  Now you’re helping to create the surroundings that you will react to in the future.

From this we can see that the five basic things that changed your life when you were eating the sandwich were the same five basic things that changed your life when you lost your farm.

Since your farm was everything to you, when you lost it, it pushed you very hard.  It made you think a lot differently, it made much different things seem like good and bad ideas to you, and it made you act a lot differently.

Now we can see that whatever direction losing your farm pushed you, it pushed you very hard in that direction. Instead of joining the militia you could’ve committed suicide, or you could’ve started drinking 20 bottles of whiskey every day to try to make yourself feel better, or you could’ve fled to another country to try to make a new life for yourself there, or you could’ve moved to a city slum and gotten a sh*tty job in a factory.  But after something that big happens to you, whatever choice you make is going to be a very big choice.

The actual event of losing your farm only consisted of the time that passed from your being told to leave your farm, to your moving off of your farm.  That makes you spend your days packing up your belongings, instead of whatever you would’ve done those days.  In the same way you spent a few minutes eating a sandwich because you were hungry, but wouldn’t have spent those minutes eating the sandwich if you weren’t hungry, you spent your time packing up your belongings because you had been forced to vacate your farm.  The difference here is that after that time passes, you can’t go back to doing what you were doing before, so you can’t forget losing your farm the way you can forget eating a sandwich.

The memory of losing your farm will stay with you for the rest of your life.  Every day for the rest of your life, you will know that if you hadn’t lost your farm, you would be spending that day on your farm, and working on your farm, just like you always had done.

Now we can look at how much you changed your life as a result of these things.

To do that, you just have to compare what you’re doing today to what you would be doing if you still had your farm.  If you still had your farm, you would still be farming.  Today you’re drinking 20 bottles of whiskey, or you’re working at a sh*tty factory job, or you’re living and working in another country, or you’re hiding in the forest fighting a guerilla war.

Now we can compare how you’re living now to the way someone else in the same situation is living now, but who has a different history.

If the other person has worked in a sh*tty factory his whole life, he probably doesn’t like his job either, but he doesn’t have anything else to compare his job to.  That’s the big difference between you and him.  You know that you used to have a farm, and that if you still had your farm, you would be working there and making a better living.  So you’re going to hate your factory job a lot more than the other person.

The alternatives aren’t much different.  You could drink 20 bottles of whiskey today and hate the people who took your farm.  You could work in another country today and hate the people who took your farm.  You could hide in the forest waging a guerilla war today, and hate the people who took your farm.

As sensory inputs affect people’s lives, the people react to those sensory inputs by changing their surroundings.  Those new surroundings create the next batch of sensory input.  When the people react emotionally to the second round of sensory input and change their lives to some extent or another, they’re reacting in part to the surroundings they’ve created.

This spiritual/emotional energy exerts psychological force on the person’s decision-making. When they take action upon their decisions, they create the surroundings that create the sensory input that affects other people, or else they create the sensory input for other people directly with their actions, including their verbal and emotional communication.  People’s perceptions and consequent actions are always affected by the sensory input coming from their surroundings, which includes the other people in their surroundings.

Even unrealistic characters have to be believable to the audience in some way.  To make aliens, robots, elves, dragons, or ghosts believable to human audience members, those unrealistic characters still have to use emotional communication the audience members can understand.  Most of people’s perception of what qualifies as a sentient being derives from their real-life experience with the only sentient beings humans have ever encountered—namely, other humans.   That applies to both our own memories we’ve developed over the courses of our own lives, and to our subconscious expectations that formed over the course of our evolution.  Most of our understanding of emotional communication we’ve either learned or evolved from dealing with humans and other animals. (The exceptions to these things might be some science fiction fans who have devoted a lot of thought to how sentient computers would act differently from humans.)

That means that in order to portray sentient beings, theatre artists have no other point of reference besides humans to relate them to that their audiences will be able to understand.  Even if an actor played a robot who used no emotional communication whatsoever, that robot character would still have to talk in some ways as opposed to other ways, and use some body language as opposed to other body language, and use some facial expressions as opposed to other facial expressions.  Acting choices still need to be made, in other words, because even a blank facial expression is a facial expression.  Whether the character intended for humans in the story to react emotionally to his words, body language, and facial expressions or not, the human audience who is watching the movie will react emotionally to whatever those things seem to indicate to them.  The writers, directors, and actors know this will happen, which is why they choose emotional communication for emotionless characters that will lead the audience to make emotional connections to the sensory stimulation that will help them understand the rest of the story instead of distracting them from it.

In other words, when an actor plays an emotionless character, he has to play the character as if the character is communicating emotionally, because to do otherwise would confuse the audience.  The actor has to make his acting choices based on the emotional effects his facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language will have on the audience, even though those things are irrelevant to the character.  The actor will do this to evoke an emotional response from the audience members that will contribute to the rest of the story—meaning the emotional response all the artists working together are evoking from the audience.

The actor playing the emotionless character doesn’t have to portray emotional communication that would be realistic for a human, but he does have to portray emotional communication that makes the audience feel the way he wants them to feel about the character—which is the same way they would feel if a human used that emotional communication, even though a human wouldn’t use that emotional communication in real life.  If the emotionless character acts strangely compared to people in real life, the audience will feel strangely about him—which is exactly what the actor wanted.  Of course, the fact that a human is playing the part proves that it is possible for humans to act that way, but at the same time, the fact that the actor found a way to act that seemed strange to the audience proves that people don’t usually act that way.  Mr. Spock and Mr. Data in Star Trek are perfect examples of this, so is C3PO in Star Wars, and you can see variations of this in Star Wars, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, and any other movie with strange alien, strange robot, or strange monster characters.

Every voluntary action anyone ever takes is always affected by the combined emotional attachments they’ve made to all their sensory inputs that are currently in effect.  As science has worked to this point, the effects of those sensory inputs could only be studied piecemeal, because spiritual/emotional energy can’t be directly observed scientifically.  However, everyone feels this energy to exist, and they have used it to tell stories to create mental models that replicate the world in terms other people can understand, ever since the beginning of spoken language.

This brings me to the final piece of the puzzle:  How energy flowing through a person’s brain creates their decision-making.  So far we have defined the environmental pressure that creates the sensory input that causes the psychological effect (kilogram-meters), the duration of the psychological effect (seconds), the duration of the memory of the sensory input (seconds), and the person’s physical response that creates his new environment (meters) to give us kgm2/s2.  The one last thing we need is to define how the total amount of electricity flowing through the person’s brain makes the jump from emotional effect to physical output.

All life depends on energy.  Energy efficiency is our single most fundamental survival instinct.  The attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her necessarily means the most energy efficient perceivable means of preserving the survival of his or her DNA.

Now back we come to the question I began with:  If a person works at a stressful job and suffers from a reduced immune system due to diverting energy away from his immune system to deal with the stress, where does all his energy go?

His feeling of wanting to leave his job isn’t created by a physical force pushing him away, but by a physical force pulling him away.  Specifically, all of the emotional connections he’s made to the total number of sensory inputs remaining in effect in his brain make him perceive a path of least resistance in life, even if only subconsciously.  Whatever decision adds up to the most effective perceivable means of preserving the survival of his DNA, makes him perceive that course of action to be the most energy efficient.  If a conflicting set of sensory input makes him perceive consciously that another course of action is the most effective means of preserving the survival of his DNA, he will feel a lot of personal conflict without knowing why.  Now he has to expend additional physical energy to push himself in the direction he consciously wants his life to go, in order to escape being pulled in the direction he’s trying to make his life go subconsciously.  He is naturally drawn to the path of least resistance that he’s found subconsciously, so to avoid being drawn into it, he has to expend physical energy consciously, or at some less-profound level of subconsciousness, to outwit his subconsciousness and make the course of action he consciously wants to pursue seem to himself to be the path of least resistance.

In effect, within his own mind and his own life he has created the equivalent of a governmental subsidy for a failing industry, where people pay higher taxes to keep from getting laid off from their jobs.  What he’s doing seems economically viable to him because he’s only partially aware of what he’s doing.  But then he feels physically exhausted without knowing why.

Alternately, he might be fully aware of these two conflicting choices, but he goes on expending the extra energy to force himself to stay at his job because he knows he can’t afford to quit.  If anything, this situation is even worse.  If he knows of two choices and knows that the one he prefers won’t work, but still can’t fully commit himself to the other choice without his psychological government subsidy, he’s still in conflict with himself.  That means he’s still trying to figure out a way to make some other choice work.  That could be a way to make his preferred choice work, or some other choice he could make to escape his job.

There are many alternatives people are consciously aware of that seem like they might work, if only this person could figure out how.  There are also several very simple solutions that we aren’t supposed to think about, but that worked well for our ancestors throughout the course of our evolution.  Killing his boss is an option.  Armed robbery is an option.  And so on.  If he still has to consciously force himself to expend energy to make his conscious choice feel like the most effective means of preserving the survival of his DNA, then he’s still being drawn in the direction of another choice that feels to be a more energy efficient means of preserving the survival of his DNA.

However you look at it, the combination of the person’s universal human brain structure, unique brain makeup, life experiences, and sensory input gives the person an emotional state.  That emotional state makes him feel like certain courses of action are the best idea and make him feel like acting upon them.  That directs a lot of energy through his brain and body to make him do those things.  If he knows he can’t do those things and that he has to do something else instead, in order to be able to do that other thing, he has to move more energy through his brain and body to block the other energy and push himself in the direction of doing what he knows he has to do.  That will take a lot of energy and leave him physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausted.
There are all kinds of ways you could argue this point back and forth in the case of one individual.  So let’s take it to the next level and see what happens there.

A sociological force is made up of the individual decisions that the majority of the members of a group make. Let’s look at what happens to a group of people in that situation. From what I’ve said so far, there are several conclusions we can draw, all of which are proven accurate by other existing information.

First, if the majority of people perceive working at their stressful jobs to be the most energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA simply because any other choice would be an even less energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA, the majority of people will keep working at their jobs, even though they don’t want to.

Second, even though most people will keep working at their jobs, some people will take their chances on trying to find better solutions.  This will happen because some people will perceive that some other course of action will be the most energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA.  Young, healthy men in particular are the most likely to perceive that violence is the most energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA.  So among a large group of people who are forced to work at stressful jobs, there will be a high crime rate among young men.

Third, if a sufficient number of people perceived a sufficient level of rebelliousness had been reached within the group, violent revolution would quickly follow.  Everyone’s perception of what constitutes this critical mass of rebelliousness would be different, but it would create a positive feedback loop.  As more people perceived a violent revolution could succeed, more people would perceive that enough other people believed a violent revolution could succeed to make it succeed. So the rebelliousness within the group would grow at an exponential rate.  This would probably start with young men who already perceived violence to be the most energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA (even if they were mistaken at first).  Then they would be joined by other group members who had a lot at stake, such as parents whose children were threatened by high rates of child mortality, and other adults who couldn’t even afford to have children.  From there it would snowball.  Leaders would soon arise within the group who would have ideas for how to make the revolution succeed.  Other people would support the revolutionaries with food, clothing, weapons, equipment, medical care, and serving in the other usual home front capacities.

Fourth, if the people had been forced to work at their stressful jobs long enough, by another group of people who was so much more powerful than them hardly anyone but some healthy young men dared to fight back, the critical mass of willingness for a violent revolution would never be reached.  However, that wouldn’t prevent a critical mass of desire for a revolution from arising, and lingering.  As long as the majority of group members believed that no type of resistance could succeed, they wouldn’t resist.  Instead, they would go on waiting for an opportunity to resist, and they would condition themselves mentally to keep working at their stressful jobs and waiting for a chance to fight back.  Eventually, a lot of them would learn that working at their stressful jobs while waiting for a chance to fight back was the most energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA.  That would be closer to what they subconsciously—or consciously—wanted, so making this choice would seem to be a more energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA than forcing themselves to go on working at stressful jobs with no end in sight.  Over time they would develop a vast array of ways to condition themselves mentally to accept their living conditions until they had a good opportunity to fight back.   For a few examples, the oppressed people might be more religious than their oppressors, sing louder, create more powerful music, dance better, be more poetic, have goofier senses of humor, and have stronger senses of community.    All of those are ways to trigger self-gratification artificially, and the stronger sense of community is also a more tightly woven economic system in which people work together more closely for their mutual interests.

Fifth, among this invisible critical mass of rebelliousness leaders could still arise, if they could find ways to make a revolution succeed.  Since the people had developed so many strategies for helping themselves cope with hardship at their stressful jobs, those same strategies would serve them well for enduring the hardship of the revolution.   Before the revolution they had figured out better ways to make working at their stressful jobs seem like the path of least resistance than by their mental government subsidizing of that choice.  During the revolution, they could use those same basic strategies to make continuing the revolution instead of giving up seem like the most energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA. People who are more religious than their oppressors, sing louder, create more powerful music, dance better, are more poetic, have goofier senses of humor, and have stronger senses of community, also fight a lot harder.

Hence Dr. King could stand up in front of hundreds of thousands of people, say, “We must defeat physical force with soul force,” and be almost drowned out by cheers from all those hundreds of thousands of people who knew exactly what he was talking about, in spite of the fact that what he was talking about was scientifically invisible, and in spite of how many fire hoses the segregationists had used to try to make Civil Rights demonstrators stop marching down their streets.

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Some time after I finished the last book I met a physicist at a party.  He was talking to someone about the What the #$*! Do We Know?! movie.  The person he was talking to liked it, but he hated it, and said that every physicist he knew who saw it hated it too.  He had the same problem with it I did; only for him it was a lot more personal.  According to the movie, human consciousness is the most fundamental unit of reality.  I thought that was bullsh*t for the reasons I gave the last book, and he agreed.  He said that the reason people can get away with that explanation so easily is because physicists can’t come up with a better explanation that the public can understand.  In his words, “They’re invoking human consciousness as a supernatural force, and when you start invoking supernatural forces, you’re no longer talking about science.”

Basically, the pursuit of subatomic physics has reached the boundaries of consciousness, where physicists have broken the universe down into such small components that their own consciousness— including their methods of observation—makes up such a large proportion of the observation process that nobody can figure out how to separate their own consciousness from their observations well enough to yield useful data anymore.  Essentially, back in the beginning, they asked, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?”  Now they’ve identified exactly which tree is going to fall and they know everything there is to know about the tree and the ground it’s going to land on, but they still can’t determine whether or not it’s going to make a noise if they aren’t there when it falls.  I don’t know quite how good of an analogy that is, but I think that’s the general idea.  Basically, physicists have pushed the boundaries of physics to the point that humans don’t possess the mental equipment they would need to go any further.  Or even if they haven’t reached that point yet, they’re bound to reach it eventually.

The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity presents the same problem.  If I define all human behavior by the efficient expenditure of energy, it functions as a scientific theory, even though the components it’s made of don’t officially qualify as science.  If I define all human behavior as the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her, then essentially I disprove free will.  If the theory disproves free will, then it renders itself useless, because it prevents anyone from being able to decide how to use it.

As my physicist friend said, there’s a warning among subatomic physicists:  “Don’t try to make sense of any of this, or you’ll dig yourself into a hole that no one has ever climbed out of.”  I’d heard that saying before.  Long ago the field of subatomic physics reached the point where physicists could use their science to generate numbers, and they could use the numbers to make accurate predictions and build nuclear power plants that worked and things like that, but what the numbers actually meant was so far removed from anything our consciousness was equipped to deal with that I guess some physicists have actually driven themselves insane trying make subatomic physics make sense to them.

So I’ve basically discovered the same problem applied to evolution.  In the last book I showed you observable evidence that disproved your free will in four different ways.  Now I’ll use the effective preservation of DNA explanation to do it again.  Watch this:

All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.  If you can see two possible choices, and one of them obviously offers you a more effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA, there is no choice to make.  You’ll do whatever you perceive to preserve the survival of your DNA most effectively.  If I offered you a job and told you I could either pay you eight dollars an hour or ten dollars an hour, and it made no difference to me or anyone else, and you could think about it for as long as you wanted, you’d take the ten dollars an hour.  You wouldn’t be making a choice, and therefore you wouldn’t be using free will.  The only reason you’d take eight dollars an hour would be if you thought there was some sort of catch I wasn’t telling you about.  And I can already predict why you’d make that choice, so it still isn’t free will.

If you can see two possible choices and they both look equally attractive at first, and you have to think about them both before you choose one, you still aren’t using free will.  Suppose I offer you the choice between doing a job for eight dollars an hour with benefits, or ten dollars an hour without benefits.  The only thing that’s changed here is that at first you can’t perceive which one offers you the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA, so you have to think about it until you do perceive one or the other to offer you the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA.  And once you do that, you choose the one that you perceive to offer you the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA.  So you still aren’t using free will.

You still don’t believe me though, do you?  I’m sure that after reading the first book a few of you out there even burned yourselves with cigarette lighters or hit yourselves in the heads with boards or did things that were equally stupid, just to prove you could make that choice.  Hopefully some of you have been applying your free will to your lives more than you were before.  But that still doesn’t prove anything, because I made that happen by placing information into your brain, and now that’s affecting your decision-making process, and that proves… oh, forget it.

My point is, you don’t possess the mental equipment that believing in your own lack of free will would require, so it’s pointless to write a scientific theory that disproves your free will, because it wouldn’t mean anything to you.

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Charles Darwin had a theory of “progressive money”.  By that he meant philanthropy—rather than spending money on yourself, spending it for the benefit of people who need it more than you do.
Today, when a lot of people think of Charles Darwin, they think of so-called “social Darwinism” and “survival of the fittest” as an excuse for cutthroat capitalist imperialism.  That’s because in his book The Origin of Species, he showed how genetic inheritance, genetic variation, and natural selection combine to make evolution happen.  That was immediately seized upon by imperially minded people of the day as a justification for beating everyone else down. Charles Darwin spent the rest of his life trying in vain to get people to quit acting like stupid monkeys and pay attention to what he really said.  People still don’t seem to be paying much attention to him, do they?

Altruism, Charles Darwin’s definition of philanthropy, and their importance, are direct products of the evolutionary mathematics of energy efficiency.  The three most fundamental components of the survival instinct are physiological survival, physical safety, and social interaction.  For a person whose personal survival needs are well supplied for, who has a great surplus of resources, and who uses his intellect to imagine abstract ideas, the next logical step (whether he makes it consciously or not) is to advance his own survival by sharing his resources to benefit his social community.

From the most pessimistic standpoint possible, in the modern world philanthropy is crucial to advancing one’s own evolutionary interests.  If humans continue to live by their most primal instincts of survival of the fittest, and neglect to use their intellect to advance socially in spite of the fact that human intellect continues to be used to build more and more powerful weapons, eventually blind adherence to the law of survival of the fittest combined with the ever-increasing means to prevent other people’s survival will annihilate the human species.

If large numbers of people are left to die—or are killed—because supposedly they are less fit to survive than anyone else, surely most of those people will die fighting to survive.  That means fighting for the resources they need to live, fighting against the people who are threatening them, and fighting by the most effective means available to them.  Now that humans have devoted so much intellect to building weapons that kill other humans with ever greater efficiency, the doomed people are guaranteed to try to get hold of those weapons in order to kill their enemies as efficiently as possible. Those doomed people will continue struggling to the very last to satisfy their own instincts by the same evolutionary mathematics of energy efficiency that have always governed human behavior.

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