Now suppose that a whole bunch of individuals who erase actors’ missed lines from existence and let their mayors get away with attempted to murder build an entire civilization.  How is that civilization going to work?   When you put together a whole bunch of brains that create information packages and anti-information packages, do you think they might use information and anti-information packages in dealing with each other too?  Do you think that agreeing on certain information and anti-information packages might turn out to be the most efficient way of dealing with each other?  Do you think that the information and anti-information packages they assemble to deal with certain situations might turn into cultural values?  Or to break this down into the simplest possible terms, do you think people’s natural way of thinking might also turn out to be the easiest way for them to talk to each other?

Fire up your bong or whatever you do when my stories start getting really surrealistic, and then hop in my time machine with me.  That’s Marty Stouffer from the Nature show sitting next to you.  I invited him along to be the narrator.  Ah, now here we are, somewhere in Mesopotamia 11,000 years ago.  Hit it, Marty…

Here in the Fertile Crescent, vast herds of gazelles graze on the plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.  If you look closely, off to the right you’ll see a group of hunter-gatherers crawling through the tall grass, sneaking up on the gazelles.  These Paleolithic people have learned to approach the gazelle herd from downwind, to keep the gazelles from catching their scent.  Their ancestors once had to hunt small animals with thrown rocks, or sneak up on larger game animals and attack them with clubs or stone knives.  More recently, their ancestors learned to build spears, which they could use to hunt larger game, both by hand and by throwing.  Later they invented spear throwers—devices shaped like long-handled ladles—which acted as levers to help them throw their spears harder and faster.  These Paleolithic hunters are now using bows and arrows, which extend their effective killing range even further.

The hunters decide to kill this gazelle, which is standing furthest from the herd.  They spread out into a semi-circle to surround it, still staying downwind of it, and sneak up on it.

Now one of the hunters gives a birdcall and they spring their ambush.  The hunter on one end of the semicircle shoots first.  His arrow only wounds the gazelle.  But when the gazelle turns and runs, he runs straight into the middle of the other hunters, whose arrows quickly bring him down. The two strongest hunters grab the gazelle by the antlers, and they drag him back their village.

Here in the hunters’ village, we can see the lives of typical Paleolithic Mesopotamian tribes people.  Since they live in the best growing conditions in the world, food is abundant enough here that they can build permanent settlements and lead sedentary lifestyles.  Here some women are weaving reeds into baskets.  Here some men are building stone scythes for cutting grasses.  There are some women bringing some emmer wheat back from the fields where it grows wild.  There a man stands looking at some old wheat stalks from last fall’s harvest, and is noticing how fresh wheat stalks are growing out of the refuse dump…

(Psst, now might be a good time to hit that bong again…)

This village is different from other hunter-gatherer villages in one unique way.  Their chieftain is a man named Achmed, a highly accomplished mathematician and theoretical physicist.  Here he is, talking to some of the younger men of the tribe as they clean gazelle hides to tan in the sun.
He tells them that when he was their age, there were a lot more gazelles.  As the years went by, he kept seeing fewer and fewer gazelles, and he wondered why.  Then one day he noticed that he was also seeing more and more people living on the plains, hunting the gazelles.  People eat gazelles, so the more people there were, the more gazelles they must be eating.  He went down to sit by the river and think about what that meant.

The more he thought about it, the more the pieces of the puzzle seemed to fit together.  Then he picked up a stick and began sketching the problem in the sand of the riverbank.  He reasoned that if more people were eating gazelles, the people must be coming from somewhere.  People come from women having babies.  The more babies a woman has, the more people there are to eat the gazelles.  If people eat gazelles faster than gazelles are born, eventually the people will eat all the gazelles, and there won’t be any gazelles left to hunt.

Achmed realized that could be a serious problem, because his people depended on the gazelle herds for so much of their food, clothing, and tools.  Then he reasoned that if the women of his tribe only had babies as fast as the gazelles had babies, the problem would be solved, because the gazelle population and the human population would be growing at the same rate.

But then Achmed realized that solution would be hard to use, because people live longer than gazelles.  Also, who was going to keep track of which woman was supposed to have a baby at which time?

Achmed thought about this some more, and sketched some further notations in the sand.  Before he knew it, he’d developed a highly complicated mathematical algorithm that predicted that if each woman only had three children, two of her children would probably grow up to get married and have children of their own.  As long as each woman only had two children who grew up to have children of their own, the population of his tribe would stay the same size, they would keep eating the same number of gazelles each year, and they wouldn’t have to worry about depleting the herds.

This discovery had a couple other valuable uses also.  For one, he realized that everything people used had to come from somewhere, so if people kept using more and more of anything, eventually they could run out.  That included birds, fish, and all the other animals they ate, trees, and even the wild emmer wheat.  He didn’t know where rocks came from, or how long it took to create them, but he figured that if his tribe stayed the same size forever, they probably wouldn’t run out of rocks either.

Another valuable thing that his complicated algorithm predicted was that raising children took a lot of work, so the more children parents had, the more work it would be to raise them.  If parents kept having more and more children, they would have to keep working harder and harder.

The solution to all these problems was for people to learn to be content with what they had.

Now Achmed is telling the young men of his tribe this so that when they have wives, they’ll remember to only have three children each.  If their wives want to have more than three children, they should tell them no.  If they want to have more than three children, they better not, and they better not try to make their wives have more children.  If each couple has more than two children who grow up to have children of their own, the tribe will eat up the gazelle herds too quickly.  He doesn’t know what will happen when people run out of gazelles to hunt, but he’s sure it won’t be good.

Finally, he tells the young men that on the other side of the river the women are having about six children each, and about four children are growing up to have children of their own.  He’s gone across the river to tell their chieftain about his highly complicated mathematical algorithm, and to warn them that if they keep increasing the population of their tribe each generation, eventually they’ll eat all their gazelles.  And then what will they do?

Achmed tells the young men that he’s afraid their neighbors are going to find out what happens when they run out of gazelles, because when he told their chieftain all this, their chieftain laughed and said that a daydreamer sitting by the riverside sketching people and gazelles in the sand didn’t prove anything.

Okay, now let’s all hop back into the time machine and travel to 100 years later, to see how this story turns out.

Son of a bitch, this doesn’t look good.  Achmed’s village is under siege.  And look at all those people on the other side of the river.  If the women of their tribe have each been raising four children to adulthood for the past hundred years, they’ve doubled their population of their tribe every generation, five times over by now.  Here, I’ll set up the camera.  Maybe you’d better tell everyone what happened, Marty…

There, on the other side of the riverbank, we can see that the village of the neighboring tribe has grown to thirty-two times its previous size, and that the tribe itself has grown to thirty-two times its size of a hundred years ago.  By now, the gazelle herds on the other side of the river have been all but wiped out.  When the people of the neighboring tribe could no longer find any gazelles to hunt on their side of the river, their next logical course of action would’ve been to come over to this side of the river to hunt.  The people of Achmed’s tribe would’ve seen their gazelle herds being threatened by all these additional people hunting the gazelles, and would’ve realized that the future of their food supply was being threatened.  By now, however, the neighboring tribe was thirty-two times the size of their own, so there wouldn’t’ve been much they could do to stop them.  They couldn’t fight them, because they were outnumbered thirty-two to one.  They probably tried diplomacy, but the neighboring tribe was hungry and wanted gazelle meat.  Eventually, the neighboring tribe might’ve realized that one way they could keep the gazelle herds from disappearing so quickly would be by taking advantage of their superior numbers, attacking Achmed’s tribe, killing them, and eliminating them as competition.

Alright, I’ve seen enough of this.  Everybody back in the time machine, let’s go home…

In the beginning, when the “hungry” idea entered people’s consciousnesses, on both sides of the river people’s brains brought out the “hunt gazelles” idea.  When the “horny” idea entered their consciousnesses, their brains brought out the “have sex” idea.  When the “children are hungry” idea entered their consciousnesses, their brains brought out the “hunt more gazelles” idea.

Then Achmed, the Paleolithic physicist, figured out what was going wrong, so he taught his people new ideas.  He could’ve done that in one of three ways, or combined them.  Whichever of those three choices he could’ve made, he’s always going to be faced with a benefits-to-effort ratio.  The more he teaches his people about their situation, the better they will be able to face it, but the more they’re going to have to be taught and the more information each of them is going to have to remember.

When the “hungry” idea entered the consciousness of Achmed’s people, they could still follow it with the “hunt gazelles” idea.  But when the “horny” idea entered their heads, he had to teach them to follow it with the “practice birth control” idea.  He could try to teach them to follow the “horny” idea with the “have sex” idea and then the “that will make more children” idea, the “we’ll have to hunt more gazelles” idea, and the “we’ll run out of gazelles” idea.  That gives his people the most information to work with, but it will also be the hardest approach to teaching them, and it will depend on them remembering the most.  When a tribesman is lying there in bed with a hard-on and his wife is lying there next to him ovulating, and their three children are sound asleep in the far corner of the hut, who really gives a f*ck about gazelles?

Alternately, he could teach his people to follow the “horny” idea with a “practice birth control” idea, and teach them to put “have sex” into an anti-information package.  Theoretically, Achmed could teach his people that using birth control was the only correct way to have sex, and drive the “have sex” idea so far down into their subconsciousness that they’d never think of it again.  But that couldn’t work perfectly, because “have sex” is the second most important idea in their subconsciousness, right after “stay alive”.  “Use birth control” is a lot further down on the hierarchy of their ideas.  At some point or another, horny men of Achmed’s tribe were bound to find themselves alone with willing women but without their gazelle-intestine condoms, so what were they going to do then?   This approach hasn’t even worked very well for Catholic priests, so why should it work for anyone else?

Alternately, Achmed could teach his people to follow the “horny” idea with the “use birth control” idea, and to follow that with the “…or Achmed (or the Ghost of Achmed) will kick your ass” idea.   But then, once again, married couples with three children are going to think they might be able to get away with it just this once, and unmarried couples are still going to get stuck without their gazelle intestine condoms every once in a while and take their chances.  Then eventually people are going to figure out that all this Achmed’s revenge business is just a superstition, and some counter-culture is going to grow up in his tribe where people say, “Dude, man, the Ghost of Achmed isn’t real, man.  That’s just some evil propaganda that your parents are teaching you to try to control your life, man.  Why are you letting them tell you what to think?  You’ve just got to do what feels natural, man.  If you feel like having sex without birth control, have sex without birth control, man…”

Or Achmed could try all three of these at once.  That would cover all his bases, but would take the most effort.  His people could teach their children about Achmed the Great Mathematician and Theoretical Physicist who had a vision while sitting down by the riverbank one day.  He knew a lot of important things, so now they remember them and teach them to their children, and as long as they do what Achmed said, things usually work out pretty well.  If you don’t do what Achmed said, you’ll probably get into trouble, as though the Ghost of Achmed had come back from the dead to teach you the errors of your ways.  As the children get older, their parents could teach them how people hunt gazelles and how they need gazelles to eat, but the gazelles only have babies so fast.  That’s why parents have to limit themselves to having three children per couple, because if they have more, they’ll have to start hunting gazelles faster than the gazelles can repopulate their herds, and eventually they’ll run out of gazelles.

If parents teach all that to their children beginning when they’re children are young, it’ll get built into their developing brains and stay with them for the rest of their lives. Then when young couples are out lying under the stars alone some night or married couples are lying there in bed with their three children sound asleep, at least some part of “use birth control”, “Ghost of Achmed will teach you the errors of your ways”, or “depopulate the gazelle herds” ideas will make it to their consciousnesses, and they’ll do whatever they have to do to keep their population to a size the local gazelle herds can support indefinitely.

But all this doesn’t make a difference in a hundred more years, because the tribe on the other side of the river, whose chieftain laughed at Achmed for daydreaming by the river bank drawing pictures in the sand, ate all their gazelles, built their population up to thirty-two times the size of Achmed’s tribe, and then came across the river looking for more gazelles, and wiped Achmed’s tribe out.

Four hundred years later, after the tribe from across the river ate all the gazelles in Mesopotamia, they discovered they could make emmer wheat grow out of the ground by planting its seeds.  Then over the next few thousand years they developed writing, metal working, specialized non-food-producing occupations, larger and larger political units, organized religion, etc., etc..  For 10,000 years there seemed to be no limit to how much they could accomplish, how many other people they could conquer, or how much they could beat the physical world into submission.

All this began back when the chieftain of the tribe from across the river laughed at Achmed and told him that drawing pictures in the sand didn’t prove anything.  While Achmed was busy teaching his people how to live within the limits of their environment by teaching them information and anti-information packages that contained all the things they needed to remember, the chieftain from across the river went right on teaching his people much more primitive cultural values.  Both sets of cultural values were based on the individual’s perception of preserving the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable.   Achmed tried to use cultural values to change people’s perceptions, while the other chieftain used his cultural values to reinforce people’s natural perceptions.

In the short term, the chieftain from across the river turned out to be right, because the women of his tribe had four children each who grew up to have children of their own, so after five generations, or…

2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2

…They outnumbered Achmed’s tribe by 32 to 1.  (If you don’t believe me, do the math yourself.)    So they went across the river and wiped Achmed’s tribe out.

Now, for 11,000 years, they’ve been searching the world for more gazelles to eat, and conquering everything and everyone that’s gotten in their way.  This most effective perceivable means of preserving the survival of their DNA has paid off very well.  When your tribe has an 11,000-year winning streak, building cultural values around it is pretty easy.  In two words:  Manifest Destiny.   If your people have had an 11,000 year winning streak, what else do you need to explain it besides, “We’re better than everyone else, and we deserve this,” or, if you’re feeling very philosophical, “This must be the way it’s supposed to be.”

Creating information packages like those necessarily creates anti-information packages to accompany them.  If you create an information package that says “we’re better than you”, you must simultaneously put the idea of “you’re equal to us” in an anti-information package, because you can’t believe both things at the same time.  Creating information packages in your consciousness can also create other information packages in your subconsciousness.  If you put the idea “we deserve to conquer the world” into your consciousness, you also put the idea, “you deserve to be conquered by us,” into an information package, even if you don’t realize you’re doing it.

Once a group of people has settled on an information package that works well for them under their living conditions, they teach it to their children as a cultural value.  Then it gets built into their children’s developing brains and becomes a permanent part of their neural circuitry.  If the people of your culture have been finding more gazelles to hunt for 11,000 years, then it’s always been easier to teach people to go preserve the survival of their DNA by finding more gazelles to hunt, than it has been to teach them to preserve the survival of their DNA by learning to be content with what they have and living within the limitations of their environment.  If parents raise their children teaching them, “there will always be more gazelles to hunt,” then simultaneously they’re teaching them, “you will never run out of gazelles to hunt,” and, “anyone who tells you you’re going to run out of gazelles to hunt must be lying.”

Now, 11,000 years after Achmed wrote his long-lost mathematical algorithm in the sand of a river bank, the people from across the river are finally running out of gazelles to hunt, just like he told them they would.  Achmed’s formula for preserving the survival of your DNA by learning to be content with what you have turned out to be right after all, but he didn’t have any way to prove it to anyone at the time.

But now, what happens when the descendants of those people from across the river turn on the radio and try to find somebody to listen to who seems to know what they’re talking about?  You can listen to those New Age hippy daydreamers over on National Public Radio who talk about a whole bunch of nonsense about human equality and environmentalism.  But when they talk about ideas like “grassland”, your brain follows that with ideas like “raise cattle” and “eat steak”, but these radio daydreamers start talking about some “national wildlife refuge” bullsh*t.  And human equality?  Yeah, sure all them damn niggers who keep marching through your streets and demanding civil rights and sh*t could be equal to you, and it’s a nice idea to think about when they talk about it on Sesame Street and all those shows for stupid little children, but if them damn niggers really were equal to you, why do they live in slums and keep killing each other in drive by shootings?  If they really were equal to you, they’d be smart enough to live like you, right?  And obviously that’s not happening.  So when one of those people tries to run for president, do you feel like voting for them is going to help preserve the survival of your DNA, or threaten it?  So on you surf up the radio dial, looking for Rush Limbaugh and his common sense attitude to life…

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
No Comments »

In his book, Dr. Goleman gives two important, real, historical examples of what can happen when groups of people develop information packages and anti-information packages and then try to apply them to real life.  In both cases, individual people started out with their own information and anti-information packages.  Then each of those individuals met up with lots of other individuals who each had their own information and anti-information packages.  These people were attracted to each other, and found they could work well together, because all of their information and anti-information packages were very similar.

The information and anti-information that everyone in the group agreed upon was automatically put into the information and anti-information packages of the group.  Wherever everyone’s information and anti-information packages didn’t agree with each other, one of two things happened.  If most people in the group perceived an idea to be information, it got added to the group information.  If most people in the group perceived an idea to be anti-information, it got added to the group’s anti-information.

In effect, these are both examples of a politics of ice cream situation in which the vanilla ice cream civil rights movement never took place.  Instead, each member of the group perceived that they could succeed at their own goals most effectively by cooperating with a group of people who each shared most of those goals.  Obviously, the social instinct is at work here.  In order to make the group function most effectively, everyone agreed with the general consensus of the group.   If everyone agreed that a certain idea was either true or false, that consensus was automatic.  If most people agreed that an idea was either true or false, everyone in the minority agreed with it, instead of disagreeing and causing conflict within the group.

Everyone who disagreed with the majority had a few different ways they could deal with their disagreement.  First, they could feel that they must be wrong because nobody else in the group seemed to agree with them, change their mind, and feel that the group must be right.  Second, they could feel that they were probably wrong because nobody else in the group seemed to agree with them, and feel that the group was probably right.  Third, they could feel that they were right and everyone else in the group was wrong, but not voice their disagreement for the sake of not disrupting the group, or for the sake of not losing their standing in the group.

Pursuing this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion leads to a conclusion that doesn’t seem logical at all.  Everyone joined these groups because they perceived that working with other people who shared their overall goals offered them the most effective means of succeeding.  However, at some point a majority of people in the group made a fundamental mistake.  The minority of people felt that they shouldn’t say anything for the sake of keeping the group working together.  So now instead of working together to achieve the common interests of everyone in the group as effectively as possible, this minority of people were working together to make mistakes as effectively as possible!

In his book The Politics of Experience, Dr. R.D. Laing talks about a concept he calls “I becomes we becomes they”.  I talked about this in various ways in my last book too.  These are perfect examples of it.  First individuals possess individual interests.  Then they join together to cooperate in pursuing their individual interests.  Then the group of people takes on its own identity and becomes an independent, invisible decision-making force.  Each individual perceives it to be more powerful than himself, even though the group is made up of individual people.

And finally, for anyone out there who’s still saying, “Dude, all reality is subjective, man,” when I show you how many people have died believing something must be true just because they felt it should be true, hopefully you’ll reconsider.

Richard Nixon (and if those two words already makes it sound like the story is going to end in disaster, don’t worry, I’m just getting started), while vice president to Dwight Eisenhower, made the suggestion that the U.S. should train and outfit a guerilla army of Cuban exiles who could invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro.  President Eisenhower liked the idea and put the plan into motion.

By the time John F. Kennedy was elected president, the CIA had a plan developed.  Two days after President Kennedy took office, the head of the CIA outlined their plan for him.  President Kennedy liked it and gave it the go-ahead.

In April, the highly developed plan was launched.  Fourteen hundred Cuban soldiers invaded Cuba to overthrow President Castro.  Fourteen hundred.  That’s it.  Some friends of mine live in an apartment complex that has more people than that.

By the second day, the invasion force of 1,400 soldiers was surrounded by a Cuban army of 20,000 soldiers.  Now, perhaps I should point out that ever since the American Civil War almost exactly 100 years before the Bay of Pigs invasion, it’s been generally agreed upon that in order for a military offensive to succeed, the attackers need to outnumber the defenders by about 3 to 1—not to be outnumbered by the defenders by about 14 to 1.  If the combined Cuban military had consisted of 500 people, the Bay of Pigs invasion would’ve stood a pretty good chance of success.  But instead, the fraction of the Cuban military that met the invasion was 40 times bigger than that.  And remember, this is an invasion plan that was developed by the CIA we’re talking about here.

By the third day it was over.  The surviving invaders had surrendered and were sitting in prison camps.

And that’s just the condensed version of what went wrong. No one in the president’s advisory committee thought to ask the State Department’s experts on Cuban affairs how much public support President Castro had.  They all assumed that an invasion would provoke a popular uprising, but any of their Cuba experts could’ve told them, based on their daily updates of affairs in Cuba, that the vast majority of Cubans supported their president.

The plan also included an escape route in case things went wrong with the invasion.  The invasion force was supposed to be able to retreat to the Escambray Mountains and hold out there. That contingency was drawn up when the invasion was planned to land on a different beachhead, before the invasion was moved to the Bay of Pigs.  The Escambray Mountains are 80 miles away from the Bay of Pigs, through dense swamps and jungles.  Anyone of today can buy an atlas of Cuba at the bookstore and see that for themselves.  But for some reason, when the CIA, the President of the United States, and his closest advisors were planning the invasion, none of them noticed that oversight.

What the hell kind of a well-developed plan was that????

In the last book, I talked about sensory illusions in aviation, like the Graveyard Spiral.  Dr. Irving Janis has studied group psychology and has compiled this list of sensory illusions that affect group decision-making:

Invulnerability:  If things seem to be going well for the group, everyone assumes that things will continue to go well for them.  No individual dares to threaten everyone else’s good feelings by suggesting that maybe the next thing isn’t going to go well just because everything has been going well so far.

Pool hall hustlers and Las Vegas casino gamblers use this illusion on individuals all the time.  If you play three games against someone, win two and lose the other just barely, and then he suggests betting five bucks on the next game, and wins just barely again, he might try to talk you into betting double or nothing on the next game.   You are playing pool, but he’s playing a much bigger game than that.  If he wins again just barely, he can make it look like if you play for double or nothing again, you’d still have a good chance of winning and breaking even.  If you play for double or nothing five games in a row and lose them all, now you’re down eighty bucks. Now you might be so desperate to win back your money that you can’t afford  to stop taking the bet.  And now you really are playing his game…

And for table dealers at Las Vegas casinos, the job is even easier, because they don’t have to play an active role in creating the illusion or maintaining it.  If you go in and start winning, and keep raising the stakes on your own, it doesn’t matter if or when you finally lose.  As far as it relates to you, the table dealer has an infinite amount of money on his side.  If you fall into this illusion and keep raising the stakes, it’s pretty well guaranteed that your luck is going to run out before the house runs out of money, so whenever your luck does run out, the house is going to clean up.  And even if you don’t fall into this illusion, or even if you do and quit while you’re ahead, as long as they bring enough people into the casino, it’s a statistical inevitability that some of them are going to fall into this illusion and lose, and the house is going to continue making money.  Hence the term “profitable gambling industry” instead of “gambling charitable organization”. Casinos stay open by making money, not by losing money.

Now what do you suppose would happen if a U.S. president decided that in order to make money without having to raise taxes he was going to form a presidential gambling advisory committee and go to Las Vegas and play poker for half a billion dollars a game?

Unanimity:  First, everyone seems to agree with the group, like I said.  Among the majority who create the dominant viewpoint of the group, the fact that everyone seems to agree with everything the group does just keeps convincing them more and more that they’re right.  The fact that everyone seems to agree helps to convince everyone that they’re going to succeed, because they’re all going to be working together, and nobody seems to see any reason they’re going to fail.

Of course, these things could be happening because minority members in the group don’t dare to speak up.  Or it could happen because majority members of the group subtly and subconsciously discourage anyone from disagreeing with them, because they feel that their ideas are risky but believe that they have to succeed, and that the best way to make them succeed is by getting everyone to work together.

People come out and say things like this all the time: “I’ve made my decision, and this is what we’re going to do.”  But considering that 80% of interpersonal communication is conducted non-verbally, how difficult would it be for someone who everyone recognized as the leader of the group to communicate that statement without ever putting it into words?

Suppressed Personal Doubts:  Like I said, if an individual disagrees with the group, he’ll naturally feel like he’s being forced to make a decision between attempting to preserve the survival of his DNA by cooperating with the group on something that he doesn’t think will work, or on alienating himself from the group.

If the group was working on something that related to their own immediate survival, this wouldn’t be a hard choice to make, because immediate survival is a higher instinct than the social instinct.  But what if the stakes were someone else’s survival, and not the survival of anyone in the group?  Like, a group of politicians deciding to send soldiers to invade a rival country, even though their strategy was completely ill conceived and had no chance of success, and they were sending the soldiers on a suicide mission?  Oh, and by the way, I am still talking about the Bay of Pigs invasion, not the Iraq invasion, in case you’re wondering…

Mindguards:  A mindguard is basically a bouncer who kicks out any dissenting ideas.  This could be an actual person who actively suppresses personal doubts in order to create the sense of unanimity among the group.  Alternately, it could be an invisible force that alters information slightly each time it passes through one of many people, as each person tries to interpret it according to the way it seems to fit best with the group’s goals and the information package they’re using to try to reach those goals.

You’ve heard of the party game “operator”, perhaps?  You get a bunch of people to sit in a circle.  Then one person whispers a message in the ear of the person sitting beside him.  The next person can ask him to repeat himself once, but once only, by saying “operator”.  (That’s something people had to say once upon a time, when telephone connections weren’t very good.)  Then that person has to repeat the message to the person sitting beside him.  After the message passes through 30 people or whatever, it sounds nothing like the original message.  If you start the game with a message like, “I like to pick daisies,” by the time it reaches the last person it can turn into something like, “Your mother washes socks in hell.”

In the last book I talked about the double filter problem in interpersonal communication. If I have an idea and I want to communicate it to you, first I have to put it into words that I think best communicate the idea.  Then you hear the words and interpret them according to whatever the words mean to you.  If I’m thinking of a loaf of pre-sliced sandwich bread and I try to put that idea into words by saying “loaf of bread” to you, and you’re from France, now you’re thinking of a baguette—a long, thin, unsliced loaf of bread with a dry crust, which is how they traditionally make bread in France.  Then if you say “bread” to a Mexican, now he’s thinking about a tortilla.  And we’re only talking about bread here; we’re not talking about how to invade another country.
There’s a funny joke I’ve heard that puts this scenario into words pretty well.  (Or at least, I think it does…)  I see things like this happen at my job all the time.

The owner of the company comes up with a new idea, so he types it up in a memo and sends it out to all his employees.

The workers in his factory take one look at it and tell their foreman, “This is sh*t and it stinks!”

The foreman tells his supervisor, “The workers tell me this has the odor of manure.”

The supervisor tells his manager, “The workers say this smells like fertilizer.”

The manager tells his director, “The workers say this bears the essence of something that makes plants grow.”

The director tells the vice president, “The workers say this seems like something that will make factories expand.”

The vice president tells the president, “The workers think it’s a great idea.”

The president tells the board of investors, “The workers love this idea, so let’s do it!”

At each stage, each person was telling the idea he had of the situation to another person by putting the idea into words that he thought the other person would understand.  Each person had a different perception of the world, however, which included different perceptions of what constituted a good idea, and of how people were supposed to talk.  As those two variables changed more and more the further they got from the people who had the original idea, the idea that was being transferred from one person to the next got further and further removed from the original idea.

This is just a joke, of course, but I think it makes a good illustration of something everyone has seen happen at some point in their lives.

Now, as you may remember, in my last book I told you about my friend the former army chaplain who said, “If you want to practice Christianity, follow the teachings of Jesus.  If you follow the teachings of Jesus as it’s been passed down to you by other people who follow him, you’re practicing Christianity several times removed.”

Whatdya think?  Hmm?…

Rationalizations:  Individuals do this all the time.  If you make a mistake, you try to find a good reason why something else made you fail.  If you’re about to do something that probably won’t work but that you’re depending on working, you try to find reasons to prove to yourself that it will work.

Sometimes this can actually work, and it actually helps people preserve the survival of their DNA.  In the last book I talked about stories of mothers who see their sons being crushed under the back ends of pickup trucks, who defy the laws of physics and lift the back ends of the trucks off their sons all by themselves with their bare hands.  The mother saves her son, so she preserves the survival of her DNA.  In the conditions of our evolution, a lot of the threats our ancestors faced were very direct physical ones—being buried in rockslides, mauled by lions, whatever.

Is this rationalization exactly?  I’m sure it could fall into various categories depending on the individual.  I’m willing to bet most of these mothers devote so little thought to what they’re doing that nobody has figured out how to categorize their decision-making processes reliably.  So just toke a little weed there or whatever you do, and let’s just pretend that I’m very perceptive to human behavior.

The mother sees her son being crushed to death under a truck.  The idea that leaps into her consciousness is “my son is being killed”.  That’s followed by the idea “he’s under that truck”, which is followed by the idea “I need to lift that truck”.  So the idea “the truck is very heavy” ends up way, way, way down on her list of priorities of things to think about—or maybe her brain turns it into anti-information.

Is this rationalization?  Considering that virtually no rational thought takes place between the time the mother sees her son being killed and the time she saves him, I think it could probably best be described as “the abandonment of rational thought.”  However, if you were to ask the mother later why she did what she did, she’d probably tell you, “Well, I saw my son being crushed under that truck, so I did what I could to try to save him.”  Even after the fact, the pieces of information she’s working with are the same ones that constituted her information package at the time she made the decision.  She still isn’t saying anything about, “The back end of that truck weighed half a ton.”  So even if this wasn’t rationalization at the time she made the decision, now that she’s talking about it afterwards, she’s explaining her perception of the situation that led to her decision by piecing together the information she thought was relevant to the situation, and disregarding—or not even noticing—information that didn’t seem relevant to her, despite how relevant it appears to anyone observing the situation from a distance.

Now let’s tell that story again, but let’s change a few words.  Let’s change “mother” to “politicians”.  Let’s change “son” to “soldiers”.  Let’s change “being crushed under a truck” to “invading a country”.

Now we have politicians plotting to send soldiers to invade a foreign country.  If the invasion succeeds, it will prove to be the most effective means for the politicians to preserve the survival of their DNA, by helping them win elections, overthrow a Communist government, and all the other things politicians care about.  Unfortunately, the defending military outnumbers the invasion force by about 140 to 1, and virtually nobody in the country wants to overthrow their government.  Like the mother seeing her son being crushed to death under a truck, these politicians are attempting a course of action that defies the laws of physics.  But in this case, that course of action is going to be carried out by other people’s sons in another country, so no amount of primal rage on their part is going to change anything.

A lot more rational thought—supposedly—is being put into the decision-making ahead of time, but the utter failure of their foolhardy plan still takes the politicians completely by surprise.  If you asked them afterwards, these politicians probably would’ve said the same things the mother would’ve said:  “Well, it just seemed like the right thing to do.”  One difference is that the mother succeeded, but the politicians got their asses kicked.  Another difference is that the mother’s explanation is understandable, while the politician’s explanation sounds like it’s supposed to be some kind of a joke.

If you consider the very realistic possibility that the American politicians put a few thoughts like, “Oh, they’re just stupid third-world peasants, and we’re Americans, so outnumbering our troops 140 to 1 won’t do them any good,” and, “We’re Americans and we know the best way for people to live, so all those oppressed people must want to overthrow their Communist dictator, so why bother asking the Cuba experts what things are like down there?”  suddenly, all the pieces fall into place.

And just in case I need to remind you, I am still talking about a war that politicians started over four decades ago.  If politicians are still making these same mistakes today, that’s hardly my fault, is it?

Ethical Blinders:  Once a group of people agrees that they are righteous and they know what they’re doing, that must prove that everything they’re doing must be good, right?  As in, “the ends justify the means”.  So it doesn’t matter if other people might have a problem with what the good and righteous decision-makers are doing, because those people just aren’t smart enough to understand what the good and righteous decision-makers are doing.  But don’t worry, they’ll understand in the end.

Well, the big problem with that is, every group of people in the world feels that they’re right about whatever they believe in.  So the fact that you feel that your group is right doesn’t prove sh*t.

As I said in the last book, the subjectivity of the other people creates the objective situation the decision-makers are dealing with.  Or as another saying goes, “the means create the ends”.  Once you start out with a situation where the ends seem to justify the means, between the time you put the plan into effect and the time it succeeds (or at least, is supposed to succeed), the situation changes, because all the people involved who don’t know what the ends are, are going to perceive that something important is happening that affects them, and they don’t know how it’s going to turn out, so they’ll start reacting to the unfolding events to try to make them turn out the best for them.

If, for instance, you have a great idea for how some other country’s government should work, and the easiest way you can see to help the people in that country set up that government is by invading the country and setting the government up for them, what do you think everybody else is going to do in the meantime?  All the people in that country just might say, “Holy sh*t, those imperialistic American a**holes are invading us!  We better do whatever we can to try to fight them off before they conquer us!”  And here at home a bunch of citizens are going to start protesting and saying, “What the f*ck is wrong with our government????  Why are we starting wars and invading other people’s countries and killing their people and getting our own soldiers killed????  This is a war crime!!!!  We’d better impeach you a**holes!!!!”

What?  I’m still talking about history here!

Stereotypes:  We’ve all heard about this one.  You get an idea in your head about what a group of people is supposed to be like, and then you make your decisions accordingly.  You might start out by making a few observations about a few members of the group and then apply those stereotypes to everyone in the group.  Or you might learn your stereotypes from someone else.  That person might’ve made that basic mistake, or they might be spreading propaganda about the people to warp your perception of them intentionally.  Blacks, Mexicans, Native Americans, Chinese, homosexuals, Irish, Italians, Jews, Arabs, Germans, Poles, Japanese, Vietnamese—every group of people that has ever had a derogatory term applied to them has been stereotyped.

Stereotypes can also be positive, but that doesn’t make them any less misleading.  Are Black people stupid lazy people who beat their wives and sell crack and collect welfare checks?  Or are they beautiful muscular, athletic people who are great dancers and have lots of soul?  Neither one, they’re people who do all same basic things every other group of people does.  If you move to a slum full of beautiful muscular athletic people who are great dancers and have lots of soul, you’d better not be surprised if some of them still want to rob your apartment.

I think I’ve pretty well covered this one by now:  We are great and mighty Americans.  Those stupid, dirty third-world peasants can’t possibly win a war against troops trained by the U.S., no matter how badly they outnumber us.  Communists are evil people, so their peasants must be waiting to overthrow their government the first chance they get.  Democracy and capitalism are the best forms of government and economy, so everyone must want them.  Et cetera, et cetera.

Still talking about Cuba here…

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
No Comments »

Dr. Richard Feynman was an atomic physicist who helped build the original atom bomb—to help make sure the Nazis didn’t build it first.  In high school he started developing his own version of calculus, which is still used by mathematicians today.  He was 23 when they invited him to help work on the atom bomb, and he already had his Ph.D..    He was a lot like me, because he was a guy with exceptional abilities and consequently an unusual perspective on the world, who had fun doing ordinary things and seeing what happened.  He wrote three autobiographical books about his adventures, from little anecdotes about learning Japanese or studying art or picking up women or playing pranks on people or agreeing to give a lecture at a university but on the one condition that they wouldn’t make him sign his name more than twelve times, to big things, like… helping investigate the space shuttle Challenger disaster.

You already know most of the story.  A politician decided he wanted something to happen, and nobody ever succeeded in making him understand that it wasn’t going to work.  Between the person who collected the information and the person who made the decision, either the information got watered down until it became completely different information, or else it got filtered out completely.

In this case, Ronald Reagan (yeah, another great way to start a story, isn’t it?) wanted the space shuttle Challenger to launch on a certain date.  Let’s see, if I look up January 1986 in the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, what do I find?

January 12 – STS-61-C: Space Shuttle Columbia is launched with the first Hispanic-American astronaut, Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz.

January 20 – The first federal Martin Luther King Day, honoring Martin Luther King Jr., is observed.

January 28 – STS-51-L: Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrates 73 seconds after launch, killing the crew of 6 astronauts and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.

Over the course of 16 days, the United States launched the first Hispanic astronaut into space, founded a national holiday observing the birth of the greatest African American leader in history, and launched the first civilian into space  (or at least, tried to).  And she wasn’t just any civilian, she was a woman schoolteacher.   Hmmm… In the latter half of January 1986, Blacks, Hispanics, women, schoolteachers, and civilians all made landmark achievements in U.S. history.  And they didn’t even make history by struggling against oppression and beating recognition out of their oppressors, which is how minority groups usually have to win recognition.  Within just over two weeks, a conservative president of the United States handed over historical recognition to Blacks, Hispanics, and women.  That’s got to be the first time in history something like that has ever happened.  What a coincidence!

Wow, 1986 sure got off to a good start.  Let me go back to the online encyclopedia and see what else happened that year…

Hmmm…  A new president in Uganda, the president of Haiti fled his country, Halley’s Comet passed by the Earth, a Soviet ocean liner ran aground off the coast of New Zealand…  Oh, my, look at this:

February 19 – The Soviet Union launches the Mir space station.

Oh, wow, that’s very interesting, I wonder what else happened that year.  Oh, look at this entry:

February 19 – After waiting 37 years, the United States Senate approves a treaty outlawing genocide.

Gee, what a coincidence!  After debating for 37 years on a law outlawing genocide, the U.S. Senate finally approved it on the exact same day the Soviets launched the Mir space station!   Look at all those Americans and Soviets making history at the exact same time!

Hmmm… with all that history-making going on in America, I wonder what the American media had to say about it?  I wonder if they got completely wrapped up in all the landmark achievements that were being made by Blacks and Hispanics and women and schoolteachers and ordinary civilians, and then this big victory against genocide…  And of course, most if not all major American media outlets are owned by Jews, so a federal law against genocide that was finally passed after 37 years would’ve been really  important to the people who call the shots on network TV news…  Gee, I wonder if the U.S. media would’ve gotten so preoccupied with all this American history being made that they would completely overlook the Soviet Union launching a space station into space, when the United States didn’t have one yet.  And I wonder if Ronald Reagan had anything to do with making all this stuff happen…

And of course, what happens when news anchors report history being made?  They put ideas into the consciousness of a whole lot of people, and those people’s brains pull a whole lot of other ideas out of their subconsciousness to go with them.  That sure is a whole lot of ideas about good things happening in America being dumped into the consciousnesses of the American public right around the time America’s mortal enemy was making history by doing something that no one on Earth had ever done before.  With all these great things happening in America, who really gives a f*ck about the Russians launching some space station thing into space?

On the one hand, all of this could’ve happened by coincidence.  On the other hand, President Reagan could’ve been flooding the American public with information packages that all added up to the idea “America is the greatest country ever”, which necessarily brings with it the subconscious information package “the Soviet Union isn’t the greatest country ever”.   And if America is the greatest country ever and the Soviet Union isn’t, then it doesn’t really matter whether or not the people in the Soviet space program succeed at something that no one else on Earth has ever done before, does it?

Oh, wait a second, but I came here to talk about the group psychology surrounding the Challenger disaster itself…

By setting a deadline by which the shuttle must launch, a variable was added into the design process of the shuttle that wouldn’t’ve been there otherwise.  Ordinarily, space shuttle engineers work with the goal of designing a space shuttle that can fly safely.  Once a politician got involved and gave them a schedule, now the engineers were trying to build a space shuttle that could fly safely by a certain date.   With that additional variable introduced into the process, potential conflict was introduced.  That potential conflict became real conflict when the engineers started running into problems they weren’t going to be able to solve in time to launch on schedule.

Ordinarily, the space shuttle engineers could’ve solved their problem by saying, “We thought we were going to be able to launch on this date, but now we’ve run into an unexpected setback, so f*ck you, we’re going be delayed two months.”  This time around, however, when they said, “This is sh*t and it stinks,” by the time their report reached the president, it got turned into, “It’s a great idea, let’s do it.”

Specifically, the O-rings in the shuttle were made out of rubber.  That rubber was going to be subjected to a hell of a lot of heat instantaneously when the engines were fired.  That heat was going to cause everything in the space shuttle to expand by thermal expansion.  In order to maintain the seal the O-rings were there to create, the O-rings were going to have to expand within millionths of a second.

Eventually, the scientists who were investigating the disaster traced the problem down to the O-rings.  The way the O-ring rubber was formulated, it would expand the way it was supposed expand most of the time.  But when its temperature dropped below a certain point, it stopped working.

The engineers knew this, and they tried to tell their managers or whoever about the problem.  But somewhere between them and President Reagan, somebody stopped caring.  The official NASA management estimate for the reliability of the O-rings put their chances of failure at about 1 in 100,000.  Based on his own analysis, Dr. Feynman predicted the failure rate at approximately 1 in 50.  Since 100,000 rockets hadn’t been launched, there really was no way anyone could determine a failure rate of 1 in 100,000.  On the other hand, by studying the numbers of O-rings that had come off of rockets and had suffered from erosion or non-disastrous blow-by—meaning, things that weren’t supposed to be happening to the O-rings, meaning, failures—their chances of failures came in at 1 in 50.

So why would the engineers who were studying spacecraft that had returned report a failure rate of 1 in 50, but the NASA management put the failure rate at 1 in 100,000?

But even the accident investigation committee was a group of people, so group psychology set in here too, and nobody dared to be more critical of NASA than anyone else.  Nobody except Dr. Feynman, that is.  Dr. Feynman disagreed with the official group report so strongly that he wrote his own report and insisted that it be filed as an appendix to the official report, or else he would take his name off the official report.  You can read it on the internet now if you want.   He shreds the NASA management up one side and down the other.  He concludes it like this:

If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate).

Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers.

In any event this has had very unfortunate consequences, the most serious of which is to encourage ordinary citizens to fly in such a dangerous machine, as if it had attained the safety of an ordinary airliner. The astronauts, like test pilots, should know their risks, and we honor them for their courage. Who can doubt that McAuliffe was equally a person of great courage, who was closer to an awareness of the true risk than NASA management would have us believe?

Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty of the projects. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
No Comments »

This is a paraphrase of a saying in 1984, a story of a futuristic society in which the world has been divided into three superpowers made up of the Soviet Union along with continental Europe and northern Africa; China and the rest of eastern Asia; and the combined Americas and British Empire.  Supposedly, these are all Socialistic societies, which were modeled after the Soviet Union and China as of 1948 when George Orwell wrote the book.  By extrapolating upon the way things were in the world at the time, this looked like the direction our future was heading.

As it turned out, the superpowers of 1984 had about as much to do with Socialism as the Soviet Union and China had to do with it as of 1948.  Rather than being societies where everyone was equal, they were societies in which small groups of people controlled all the resources, brainwashed the public into obeying them, and dragged dissenters away to secret prisons they would never be released from.

My god, why do you keep looking at me like that?  I’m not talking about current events!  I’m not even talking about history anymore.  Now I’m talking about fiction, for Christ’s sake!

Anyway, Winston, the main character, works for the Ministry of Truth.  He helps publish the state-run newspaper, and the only newspaper anyone’s allowed to read.  At some point during the story, someone realizes they’ve made a mistake in their predictions for the next month’s chocolate rationing.  So soldiers and police and government agents have to be sent out all over the country to round up all the newspapers that were printed that day, and they bring them back to the Ministry of Truth to be reprinted, and Winston and everyone else who works for the Ministry of Truth has to work 20 hour shifts for two weeks straight to reprint new versions of that day’s paper along with continuing to print the regular copies of the daily paper.  Then when the new papers for June 18th or whatever day it was are finished, the police and the military and all those government agents load them up on trucks and take the new papers back to everyone whose papers were confiscated.

The plan was that whoever controlled the information the public had access to also controlled how that information would affect their perceptions of the world.  Whoever controlled the flow of information also controlled the decisions people would be able to make based on that information.  By reprinting all the papers from June 18th to say that everyone’s chocolate rations for the following month were going to be decreased instead of increased, the government was spreading information packages that the government never made mistakes.  And just in case that wasn’t enough to convince everyone that the government was always right, at the same time the government would be distributing an information package about how the government had lots of soldiers and police and government agents who were ready to come haul away any sources of information that the government didn’t approve of, at a moment’s notice…

Something very similar to this happened in Germany and Japan following World War II. Japanese school officials downplayed the war seriously.  If the Japanese killed 300,000 people in Korea, the Japanese school officials would get their history textbooks printed to say something like, “Japanese soldiers killed over 6,000 people in Korea.”  Meanwhile, in Germany, the school officials omitted the war from their history books almost completely, and said something about, “It was a really big war,” and then moved on to 1946.  People had been having wars in Europe for centuries, so if German school children heard about another war, they could pretty well imagine what happened in this one.  Or so they thought…

In this case, there weren’t police and soldiers and government officials marching through the streets to drag away every piece of dissenting information they could find—newspapers and people alike. But a whole lot of people from the generation that lived through the war and then had children after it was over felt like they’d all just made the biggest mistakes of their lives, so they felt that the best way to move on was to not tell their children what had happened and let their children start over from scratch.

But then, some years later, German and Japanese children born after the war got to high school and started traveling abroad on foreign exchange programs.  They’d go to other countries to live for a year and go to high school there.  There they would learn about World War II, and all the millions of people the Germans and Japanese slaughtered.  Then they’d buy books about World War II in their host countries, and take them home and show them to their parents and teachers and say, “What the f*ck is this?!?!”

In the last book I told the story about the five guys who survive the hurricane in Florida, and then someone makes a TV movie about it, and suddenly five White guys turn into two White guys, a Black, an Asian, and a Hispanic, and suddenly they’re all different ages and have all different jobs, and their heroic police officer leader suddenly meets up with a completely fictitious woman who just so happens to be single and about his age, and I told you how all this is necessary to convey the meaning of the story in a two-hour movie.  Then earlier in this chapter I told you how all communication always involves some amount of artistic license, because no matter what words you say, your audience is never going to interpret your words exactly the way you meant them.

(For the record, this happens in science too, but not nearly as much as it happens anywhere else.  Scientists identified this problem long ago, and ever since then have been very careful to define every single word in their vocabulary as referring to one specific idea or another.  Essentially when anyone else communicates in words, they’re trying to paint a picture of an idea in the other person’s mind by anticipating what’s already in the other person’s mind well enough to get the picture the other person sees to come out pretty close to what they had in their own minds.  Scientists basically turn their brains into machine shops, and then send each other machine parts with specific instructions of how they’re supposed to be assembled.  I could’ve figured out how to write the last book in very specific scientific terms, but I realized there was no point to it, because it would’ve been boring as f*ck and you wouldn’t’ve read it.  So if you’d care to take my books to an official scientist and ask whether or not I’m conveying these scientific ideas adequately well, I’m willing to be that he’d tell you that I’m pretty close, and I’m only off by a fairly small margin of error.  I’m betting that margin of error is less than you’d care about.  So as long as a lot of people understand science a lot better than they did before, and official scientists can’t teach hardly any of those people to within a closer margin of error anyway, my mission will have been a success.  Anyway…)

Were the German and Japanese school officials trying to brainwash everyone in their countries into believing that World War II never happened?  Or were they trying to do the same thing the parents were trying to do, to get their countries moving in new directions by letting their kids start out with a blank slate?  The population of Germany was about 70 million people in 1939, and the land area is about the size of the state of Montana.  All told, Hitler is responsible for the deaths of about 45 million people.  And I suppose I should add that the population of the world during World War II was less than 3 billion people.  And when everyone else in the world ganged up on you and finally bombed your industrial superpower of Montana into submission, it made a real mess of the place.  So in 1954, if you drove out to the countryside with your six-year-old son and your four-year-old daughter, and they asked why there were so many bomb craters everywhere, what would you tell them?  Some vague response about, “Oh, there was a war and a bunch of things got blown up,” or something like, “Well, kids, right before you were born, an evil dictator figured out how to seize control of our government before anyone could figure out how to stop him, and then he started a war and killed about 50 million people, and we thought he knew what he was doing at first so we helped him, but by the time we realized he was insane everyone in the world was trying to kill us, so we all had to fight for our lives and keep on helping the evil dictator now because we didn’t know what else to do…”?  Yeah, good plan.  Now your kids are crying in the back seat of your car, feeling guilty for something they didn’t do and feeling like the whole world is out to get them.

What the f*ck are elementary school age children supposed to do with information like that? Having that information or not having it isn’t going to affect any decisions they’ll be able to make in elementary school.  Withholding that information from them gave them the chance to grow up with a sense of what the world was like now, not of what the world used to be like.  Maybe that information was withheld from them too much, or for too long. I don’t know exactly because I wasn’t there.  But today, Germany and Japan are models of peaceful countries, so evidently whatever they did worked out.

But what if the information people learned about in a situation like that did affect their decision-making as adults?  What if information like that was withheld from people for their entire lives?  What if a lot of them didn’t go away to foreign countries and learn from other people about what their country had done?  And what if they hadn’t been defeated in a huge war, so they hadn’t been beaten into submission, and they still posed a threat to other people?  Would adults who never learned the information of their past simply repeat the mistakes of their ancestors instead of evolving into a peaceful society?

Terrorism is the act of killing civilians in order to drive their group’s political decision-making through fear.  Genocide is the act of killing of people for who they are—not for anything they’ve done.  A weapon of mass destruction is a weapon that kills huge numbers of people indiscriminately.

One of my Native American cousins teaches humanities at a Native American high school.   So one time I asked him if history classes today were any different than they were when we’d been in school.

“A little bit,” he said.  “We are allowed to talk about the Massacre at Wounded Knee now, but we aren’t allowed to talk about it as part of a two hundred year campaign of genocide, which it was.”

As a public school teacher who’s certified by the State of California, he isn’t allowed to put the words “United States” and “genocide” into the same sentence.  He can say, “Genocide is the act of killing people because of who they are.  People from the United States killed a lot of Native Americans because of who they were.”  But he isn’t allowed to put the words any closer together than that.

One trick Colonial Americans used to get rid of Native Americans was to offer to trade good woolen blankets to Native Americans for whatever the Native Americans had to trade.  They’d trade lots of blankets to the Native Americans.  To the Native Americans, it looked like a great deal.  And it was a great deal.  For the Colonial Americans, anyway…

The blankets were infected with small pox.  These Native American traders took them home to their villages and traded them with the other people there.  Pretty soon, everyone in their tribe was dying of small pox.  It was the perfect trade for the Colonial Americans, because it saved them a whole lot of soldiers and bullets.

If you give a person a blanket that you know is infected with a terminal disease, specifically for the purpose of killing him and as many others of his people as possible, you are using a biological weapon.  You are using a weapon of mass destruction.

But wait a second!  Aren’t weapons of mass destruction supposed to be used by evil people from other countries?  Of course they are!  Of course that’s what you’re supposed to think!  It’s really easy to look at someone from another country who supposedly poses a threat to your country and say that his supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction and willingness to use them makes him a threat.  But when you’re looking back on your own country’s history, at what your own cultural ancestors did, suddenly it’s a whole different story, ain’t it?

Remember what I said in the last book, how the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to make the Japanese not dare to fight us any more?  And do you remember what I said, about how at least 200,000 Americans were expected to die in the forthcoming land invasion of Japan?   Well…

That 200,000 Americans dead number was the number released to the public, and the number people have been quoting ever since.  It’s also the number of people who died in Hiroshima instead.  In my last book it made a good reference to the fact that the worldwide AIDS epidemic kills as many people as the Hiroshima bomb did, every three weeks.

But was the land invasion or the atom bomb necessary to end the war?   Considering the Germans had already surrendered, and the Japanese were the only Axis power left in the war, and that the Soviet Union had announced that it would be joining in the war against Japan, and the United States was bringing most of its military over from Europe to fight the Japanese, and Japan was an island nation with a huge population that depended on importing a lot of supplies from elsewhere and would’ve been easy to surround with a naval blockade, and that the United States was already bombing military targets in Japan and would’ve been able to bomb them  a lot more if they had surrounded Japan with a naval blockade, and—oh yeah…

THE JAPANESE HAD ALREADY BEGUN TRYING TO NEGOTIATE A TRUCE THREE MONTHS BEFORE HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI WERE BOMBED…

…There are some people in the world who believe that the war could’ve ended differently.

I’ve got a lot more to say about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I’ll save it for the next book.  For now, let me just say that out of all the ways the Americans had to end the war, they decided to end the war by killing a whole lot of civilians in order to make the Japanese not dare to fight them anymore.  When Arabs kill lots of American civilians to try to drive American political decision-making through fear, or Palestinians kill Israeli civilians to try to drive Israeli political decision-making through fear, what’s that called?…

If a country is still a superpower, and its leaders use its public school system to blind its children to the mistakes their ancestors made, will those children grow up to repeat the mistakes of their country’s past?

I guess we’re going to find out, eh?

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
No Comments »

I think the title of this section pretty much says it all.  So I’ll just expand upon it a little bit.

In a democracy, leaders depend on winning votes from majorities of voters.  In competing against your opponents for public support, visionary leadership does not get you elected.  Pandering to the lowest common denominators is what gets you elected, because dumb people get to vote too.  If more voters care more about what kind of shirts the candidates are wearing than they do about the candidates’ foreign policies or whatever, guess who they’re going to vote for.

Now that so many people have devoted so much time and effort to figuring out how to win democratic elections by triggering favorable emotional responses in statistical majorities of our hunter-gatherer brains, visionary leadership of America is only possible when our country gets into so much trouble that statistical majorities of American voters finally realize that none of the other candidates have the slightest f*cking clue what to do about it anymore.  Statistical majorities of Americans only agree to daring new approaches to trying to solve problems after they’ve lost hope of anybody’s conventional solutions working anymore.

Forget about current events for a moment.  I’m sure you’re probably as sick of hearing about them as I am.  Let’s see how this graveyard spiral of politics worked out in a previous decade.

Vital Lies, Simple Truths was published in 1985.  Dr. Goleman spells out the fundamental problem of the Cold War on the very first page of the forward to the book.  The nuclear arms race was caused as much by the harnessing of nuclear energy as it was caused by the public’s failure to correctly perceive how big of a threat nuclear weapons were.  According to the theories on how to pursue the Cold War that were circulating in the Pentagon in the late ‘70s, and as Dr. Goleman paraphrases:

1:  In an age of overkill, with plentiful and redundant weaponry able to deliver ample megatonnage, no new weapons system offers a significant military advantage.

2:  However, if naïve groups—the American public, other than world leaders, for example—believe that the weapons matter militarily, then those weapons will be consequential psychologically and politically.

3:  Thus those among the inner circles of military strategists should act as though new weapon systems—such as the BMX missile, or SDI—actually matter militarily, so that they will matter psychologically.

…So by 1985, the United States was spending one million dollars every minute on maintaining and developing our nuclear weapons.

Like I said in the last book, the nuclear arms race seemed necessary because it fulfilled the reputation part of the Hobbesian cycle of aggression.  Everyone felt the need to maintain a reputation for themselves to help keep themselves safe, and everyone felt that everyone else must feel the same way.  If everyone on both sides thought to themselves, “Jesus Christ, this is f*cking stupid,” it still wouldn’t do anyone any good.  Until everyone realized that everyone else felt the same way, nobody had any way to realize that any other course of action could’ve kept everyone safe.

There are a whole lot of things that went wrong with everyone’s perceptions, and it will take me most of this book to cover them all—or even to try to cover them all.  If politicians started out by assuming they were smarter than their voters, and Americans and Soviets each assumed they were smarter than each other, then everyone involved went into the situation with an information package that said, “I think this is stupid” and, “I’m smarter than you”.  Subconsciously, that information package must also have contained the ideas “you probably don’t think this is stupid” and “so in order to keep myself safe from you, I’m going to have to do this stupid thing anyway”.

Well guess what.  Everyone in the world knows something important about life.  That includes your worst enemies.  In fact, your worst enemies probably know a lot of important things about life, which is how they’ve managed to pose such a threat to you and earn the title of your worst enemy.

So if your political strategy depends on you outsmarting everyone else in the world except for the people in your own group, and you assume that you can do this and that you have to do this because you’re smarter than everyone else, you’re f*cked, because there are a lot more people outside your group than there are inside your group, and on the whole, they are as smart as you are.  If everyone assumes that they must be smarter than everyone else, and everyone keeps trying to outsmart everyone else, then everyone is going to lose, because their plans are going to keep getting foiled by other people’s actions, but nobody’s going to understand why, because everyone’s going to assume their opponents aren’t supposed to be that smart.

In the last book, I said that I’m conquering the world by uniting it.  If this is the best plan anyone else can come up with to try to conquer the world, it shouldn’t be that hard at all…

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
No Comments »

1984, by George Orwell, and Anthem, by Ayn Rand, are two of many books about future dystopias that are based on the premise that people can be trained to accept absolutely anything.  In both of these stories, society has fallen under some sort of totalitarian control.  Certain words have been eliminated from the English language, so the ideas those words refer to have been eliminated from the public’s collective consciousness.  Both of those books are great illustrations of just how much it’s possible to control a population and the decisions they’re going to make by controlling the information the public has to work with.  However, both of those books stretch that premise beyond the bounds of scientific reality, because neither of those authors realized how much of human consciousness originates from that universal brain structure of humanity versus how much is learned from the outside.  Although to their credit, both of those books were written in the first half of the 20th century, and how closely those authors were able to predict the future based on the information they had to work with at the time is chilling.

But I’m going to disprove the possibility that people could be trained to forget ideas that originate within their universal human brain structure right now, and you’re going to help me.  I’m going to show you some words with missing letters, and you’re going to tell me the first words that come to mind based on the letters you see.  Ready?

B _ t c h
S l _ t
S _ x
T _ t
A s _
D _ c k
C _ n t
F _ _ k

What are those words?

Obviously, the words are Batch, Slot, Six, Tot, Asp, Duck, Cent, and Fork.  What did you think they were, you pervert?

If you’re like me, when you saw this test you immediately saw what the letters could spell, but then just to try to outsmart the test you figured out some other words they could spell. But that doesn’t matter, because you already know the words that first sprang to mind.

These words refer to ideas that are very important to you, and very important to everyone else in the world, and that have been very important to people as long as the human race has been around. Even if the words didn’t exist, you would still think about these ideas, and so would everyone else in the world.

Just about everyone in America has been taught not to use these words, because supposedly they refer to bad things—even though they’re things that everyone thinks about.  But because certain people have tried so hard to train us not to think about these words, we’ve all attached a lot more emotional meaning to these words than we have to most other words, so these words are permanently etched into all of our consciousnesses.

Suppose the next president of the United States was a Jehovah’s Witness, and he filled his whole cabinet with Jehovah’s Witnesses.  Then he decreed that the concept of “fucking” shall cease to exist in America, because the word “fuck” shall no longer be used by anyone.  Saying the word “fuck” will now be a federal offense, and will carry a sentence of 25 years to life in prison.  All movies, books, and magazines that contain the word “fuck” will be confiscated.  What the f*ck do you think would happen?

A huge counter-cultural movement would spring up, and people would say “fuck” just for the f*ck of it.  Maybe they’d form secret societies that would meet in basements of abandoned buildings at midnight where people would exhibit art, music, and poetry with the word “fuck” in it, and the pass phrase to get into these secret society meetings would be “Jesus fucking Christ”.  More likely, everyone would just accept that pretty much everyone still used the word, and nobody would rat anybody else out for it regardless of whether or not it was supposed to be wrong.  And you can be sure that there would be a blackmarket for movies, books, magazines, or anything else that contained the word “fuck”.  If artwork containing the word “fuck” was made very hard to get, that would make it a status symbol, and that would create a market for it among anyone who could afford to pay for it.  Basically, the word “fuck” would become the marijuana of the future.

By trying to abolish a word that refers to an idea that everyone in the world shares, you would just be calling more attention to the word, the idea, and the fact that you were trying to abolish them both.  Your economy would collapse before this public retraining program could be carried out, because every single person in the country would have to be watched every single minute of their lives.  That would be an awful lot of people who would have to devote their lives to doing this instead of doing anything else, and who everyone else would have to work to feed, clothe, house, and everything else.

Seizing control of the media and getting political, religious, and cultural leaders to cooperate 100% wouldn’t be sufficient.  That trick has been tried.  And even Mormons still think about sex.

On the other hand, doing the exact opposite of this hypothetical public retraining procedure is possible.  If you read my last book, you know about a whole lot of ideas that everyone carries in their universal human brain structure, whether people know words to refer to those ideas or not.  Everyone who read my last book now knows a lot of words to refer to ideas that everyone in the world has, they know the same set of words to refer to those ideas, and although my presentation style won’t work for everyone, everyone who read my last book understands enough about where those ideas came from that they can figure out other ways to present the same information to pull those ideas out of peoples’ subconsciousness.

For ideas that everyone thinks about but everyone has been taught not to talk about or think about, that isn’t hard at all, as I’ve already shown you.  However, when people are taught to believe certain things are true and their natural perceptions agree that they’re true even though they aren’t true, those culturally taught information packages reinforce their natural misperceptions of the world.  Teaching people to consume as many material commodities as possible is one example, because they can’t naturally perceive the effects their lives have on the environment, and they certainly can’t perceive the effects that everyone’s lives combined have on the environment.  So that’s where things get complicated…

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
No Comments »

How do you break this Graveyard Spiral of perception and information packages that get turned into political systems?  Simple. You add new information to people’s information packages.

If you just tell people stuff that their information packages already have categorized as anti-information, it won’t do any good.  You’ll just sound like some New Age hippy daydreamer talking about evolution and environmentalism and bullsh*t to Rush Limbaugh fans.  So you have to get more creative…

To communicate effectively with another person in any sense, you have to build upon what the other person already knows—or at least, accepts as true.  I’m doing that right now.  If I wrote this book using perfectly scientifically valid terms, it probably wouldn’t do you a damn bit of good, because you’d probably have no idea what all those words meant.  So instead I’m using words that you—and a lot of other people—do understand, to communicate ideas to you that are close enough to scientifically valid that learning the same ideas in more scientifically valid terms wouldn’t be worth the hassle to you.

There are lots of different ways to communicate, and we’re all better at some than we are at others.  But regardless of what form of communication you’re using, in order to add new ideas to another person’s information package, you have to figure out what that person’s information package already contains, and how to build upon it.

Artists do this all the time.  If you’ve ever seen a movie in your life, you’ve seen this done.
Suppose you’re watching a movie, and a character in that movie walks into a kitchen and walks past a blender.  If that blender shows up in the background of at least two shots, or it occupies a central place in the movie screen in just one shot, what you’ve just seen is called an establishing shot.  The director has just placed the “blender” idea into your mind so that he can build upon that idea later when the blender becomes important to the story.

How is the director going to build upon the original “blender” idea and make it important to the story?  That all depends on what kind of a movie you’re watching.  I can tell you up front that if a director is going to devote screen time to an establishing shot of a blender, you’re probably either watching a horror movie or a comedy—or at the very least, some kind of a movie that uses one of those basic principles.  One of the main artistic techniques in both horror and comedy is to start with simple, commonplace things that the audience sees all the time, and then make really unexpected things happen with them.  If it’s a comedy, the unexpected thing will have a happy ending, and if it’s a horror movie the unexpected thing will have a tragic ending.  Is the heroine’s cute four-year-old son going to put some tomatoes in the blender and turn it on without putting the top on it, and spray shredded tomatoes all over the kitchen?  Or is some guy in a mask about to show up and use the blender to cut the heroine’s face off?   Either way, between your previously existing idea of a blender, and the director’s previously establishing the idea that there’s a blender in this movie, now he’s added a new idea to your blender information package.

There are some people in the world who probably still wouldn’t make the connection, because they believe that blenders are devices that have been bestowed upon us by their god, and the homicidal maniac was clearly a servant of Satan, so there’s no way he would ever be allowed to use a blender to cut a woman’s face off, or that the woman was a single mother who had her son out of wedlock, so making a humorous movie about people like that was obviously a plot by a heathenistic movie director to subvert the loyalty of the public away from accepting the love of their lord and savior Jesus Christ into their hearts, and that isn’t funny at all… or whatever… but people like that probably wouldn’t’ve gone to see the movie anyway.  If, in the next presidential elections, there was a question on the ballot, “Do you think that a movie about a four year old spraying shredded tomatoes all over a kitchen by leaving the lid off of a blender would be funny?” the “Yes, that’s funny” candidate would probably win a majority of votes.

So:  What does your audience already understand, and what do they care about?  In other words, what do they already have in their information package?  I don’t know exactly what your situation is like or what your communications skills or abilities are, or who you’re trying to communicate with, so here’s how I’m adding information to your information package right now.

I started by assuming that most people in my audience interpret the world in one of four main ways:  scientifically, artistically, philosophically, or religiously—or some combination of those.  Pretty much anyone who would even attempt reading my books probably has a high school level education.  So I used a high school level understanding of science as a starting point.  Pretty much anyone in the industrialized world has seen movies, so that made another good point of reference.  Everyone in the world is a philosopher, because everyone tries to attach some kind of meaning to life events and things they observe in the world, even though some people do it a lot more than others.  So that made another good all-purpose reference.  Finally, religion or spirituality is a universal constant of humanity, so everyone has been exposed to it in some way or another, even if they don’t practice it themselves.  Since we have one dominant religion here in America, that makes another easy reference point.

So I started by telling four different intertwining stories of the world, all at the same time.  Back at the beginning, I assumed you were a high school drop out with a little bit of life experience, a little bit of worldliness, and an interest in learning more.  I know that assumption isn’t true for everyone, but even if you’re something other than that, as long as you have a little bit of life experience, a little bit of worldliness, and an interest in learning more, you can still pick up the story from wherever you’re coming from and understand what it means.

Writing this four-themed story of this code to humanity gives me another advantage in adding information to your information package.  I already know what’s written in your universal human brain structure subconscious information package.  And since I have a pretty good idea about what’s probably written in your conscious information package, I have a pretty good idea of what I have to work with to pull ideas out of your subconsciousness.

If you were a scientist, you would’ve cleared out a lot of space in your consciousness to install your scientific machine shop so that other scientists could send you scientific information parts with specific instructions on how to assemble them.  But since you probably haven’t done that, I’ve had to figure out how to turn the contents of your consciousness into my own machine shop, so that I can send you all the parts I want and you’ll know how to assemble them, even though my machine shop wouldn’t work as well for just anyone.  However, if I build the same basic machine shop in your consciousness as I build in the consciousness of everyone else who reads my books, then you can all send each other information parts and be able to tell how to fit them all together.

For instance, I knew right from the beginning that you want to understand what makes the universe work, some way to survive your physical mortality, some way to get along with other people, and some way to give your life a sense of meaning, because everyone on Earth wants all of those things.  You might not have realized that you wanted those things before, but you did know you wanted some things that eventually led to those ultimate conclusions.  By drawing those things out into your consciousness, and showing you why everyone else on Earth wants those things too, I’ve made you conscious of something everyone else has somewhere in their conscious or subconscious.  That means that now you can stop thinking that wanting those things makes you smarter than everyone else, and instead of thinking, “Building all these nuclear missiles is f*cking stupid, but everyone else thinks it’s a good idea, so we’re going to have to keep doing it,” without realizing that everyone else is thinking the same things, now you can use what you have in your consciousness to overcome problems between you and other people.

I also knew right from the beginning that writing a story of the world was the best way to convey those ideas, which is why people in every culture of the world have figured that trick out.  A story of the world is a way to control the past.  Any time anyone asks, “Why is the world like this?” they’re asking, “What happened in the past that made things the way they are in the present?”  By giving people an explanation of how the past created the present, whether that explanation is true or not, you put them on a path into the future.  As I said in the last book, it’s a fundamental principle of geometry that two points define a line.  It’s another fundamental principle of geometry that once you establish a line, you also establish all the other points along that line.  If you tell someone how the past created the present, you give the person a sense of how that course of development should continue to unfold to create the future.  If your explanation of the past wasn’t accurate, even if the person’s understanding of the present is accurate, the sense of how the course of events unfolded and will continue to unfold won’t be accurate either.  (And if you convince the person that your explanation of the past is absolutely true, you can even distort the person’s understanding of the present, which misguides their understanding of the future even further.)

A scientific theory is a set of conclusions drawn from observable evidence that can be used to make accurate predictions.  If you use a set of conclusions that can be used to make accurate predictions to show how the past created the present, then you show your audience where those conclusions lead from here.  If you try to explain the present by just making up a story about the past, you’re rolling the dice on where the people’s understanding of the past is going to lead them from here.  So I’m using your general background understanding of the world to do with literature what official scientists do with their very specific mental-machine-shop understanding of the world.  That makes my book empirically superior to the Bible because instead of just telling a story where I make stuff up about the past and hope for the best, I use scientific theories to tell the story of the past and show you where that chain of events leads from here.

By telling you the story of Achmed the Great Mathematician and Theoretical Physicist, I’ve taken control of the past in a small way.  Achmed wasn’t a real person (at least, not as far as I know), but he is the embodiment of an idea.  Lots of people figured out lots of different ways to interact with their environments over the course of history.  Some people decided it would be better to figure out how to live within the limitations of their environments and not eat the gazelles faster than the gazelles could reproduce, and other people decided they should use up the resources they had in their area and then go look for more.   The second group succeeded in preserving the survival of their DNA most effectively in the short term, but the first group succeeded in preserving the survival of their DNA most effectively in the long-term—or at least, they would’ve, if it hadn’t been for the second group.  Even if Achmed the Great Mathematician and Theoretical Physicist had been a real person, and had been the Albert Einstein of the stone age, and had figured out the secret to environmental sustainability before the agricultural graveyard spiral began, it still wouldn’t’ve done anyone any good in the long run, because his tribe still would’ve gotten wiped out by those dumb thugs from across the river who ate all their gazelles.   And of course, there were people like this throughout history; they just went by different names.

So if the story of Achmed stays with you, you’ll use birth control for the rest of your life except for when you’re trying to have your two kids, because in addition to all the other reasons you use birth control, now you’ll have a few more pieces of information in your subconsciousness.  Now you’ll have the “can’t have more than two children” idea and the “can’t eat up the gazelle herds” and the “Ghost of Achmed will kick my ass” ideas.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether Achmed was a real person or not.  There were real people who figured out the same things, and they met with the same fate he did.  Having a specific story to tell your children about how the world got to be the way it is will always be a more effective way to teach them then by telling them about a bunch of abstract ideas some scientists have figured out.  If you tell your four-year-old or six-year-old or whoever, “Well, son, scientists have determined that global environmental sustainability depends on people learning to live within the physical limitations of the Earth, but unfortunately, people haven’t been doing that…” while next door some Christian fundamentalist is telling his children, “The world is approaching the brink of glorious destruction because our Heavenly Father is angry at his children for leading lives of such decadence and sin and forsaking the word of his son Jesus Christ, so now he is exacting his divine retribution upon the evil sinners and is about to deliver his faithful followers to their eternal salvation…”  etc., etc., guess whose children are going to learn more about how the past created the present and what that chain of events predicts for the future?

I’m sure you’ve probably heard that old tale of the con artists who went to visit an emperor and offered to make him a fine robe out of invisible cloth.  So he paid them a ton of money and they spent a few weeks pantomiming sewing cloth into robes.  Then he went out to parade through the streets to show off his invisible robes.  Everyone who saw him perceived their emperor to be walking around in his underwear, but nobody dared to say anything because he was their emperor.  They all had the “don’t piss off the emperor” and “get in trouble” ideas in their consciousnesses, so they all put the “the emperor is walking around in his underwear” idea into their anti-information packages—or at least, they tried to, anyway.  But then the emperor walked by the kid who didn’t have “don’t piss off the emperor” and “get into trouble” ideas in his consciousness.  Maybe he was just too young to know any better, or maybe he was like me and Dr. Feynman and didn’t care what other people thought.  So he came out and said it:  “The emperor wears no clothes!”

Once one person said it, everyone who heard him finally realized that someone else was thinking the same thing they were thinking.  So they started admitting what they were thinking, and suddenly realized that everyone was thinking the same thing.

In effect, the kid who declared that the emperor was wearing no clothes set off a human consciousness bomb, because he triggered a cascade effect that spread at an exponential rate, as each person he affected, affected several more people.  Everyone had the same idea in their consciousness, so as soon as each person heard someone else admit to having the idea, suddenly they realized they all had something in common.  Now there was safety in numbers, they could use this information to help them function as a community, etc., etc..

Once upon a time, a lot of people thought that figuring out how to split uranium and plutonium atoms and building nuclear missiles would solve all the world’s problems.  How pathetic.  By deducing what information each person carries in their subconsciousness and figuring out how to bring it to everyone’s consciousness and make them realize that they all share the same ideas, I can build my own human consciousness bomb.  If everyone says, “Hey, building all these nuclear weapons is f*cking stupid, let’s think of something else,” then I’ve harnessed a force more powerful than atomic energy.

And that’s why I’m king of the world.

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
No Comments »

Remember how I’ve said that movies really are like real life, because if they weren’t nobody would understand them?  The same goes for death.  In a realistic, believable, well-written, well-directed, well-acted movie, anything that a character does, he does in the attempt to preserve the survival of his DNA by the most effective means perceivable.  That’s true whether he’s living his daily life, he’s achieving his objectives, or he knows that he’s about to die.

A few good movies full of gruesome carnage that spring to mind are American History X, Requiem for a Dream, Reservoir Dogs, Saving Private Ryan, and Schindler’s List.  All of those movies are haunting and heart wrenching because people in them give very credible performances of people struggling with every fiber of their being to survive in completely hopeless situations.  Whether you talk about Jews stripping naked and marching into gas chambers at gunpoint just so they can stay alive a few minutes longer than they could if they refused and were shot where they stood, or you talk about soldiers packed aboard landing barges trying to dive for cover even though there is nowhere to take cover when they get strafed by German fighter planes, or you talk about a Black guy getting beaten up by a White supremacist with a gun and then laying down in the street on his stomach, opening his mouth and putting his teeth on the curb so that the White supremacist can stomp on the back of his head, break his jaw, and knock out all his teeth because his only other alternative is to get his brains blown out right then and there, or you talk about… well, I think you get the idea.  In all of those movies, people do what people do in real life, which is to keep on trying to make the best of their situation, no matter how hopeless it gets, right up to their very last dying breath.

A less obvious example came from a Swedish film I saw called Songs from the Second Floor.  The movie was creepy because it followed the basic structure of any zombies-taking-over-the-world movie, but it made the leap from reality as we know it to inescapable horror in a lot fewer steps.  Basically, this movie was about an ordinary city full of ordinary people with ordinary problems who were being driven completely insane because no matter what they did their problems just kept getting worse, and nobody had any idea what to do anymore.  Or, to put it another way, it followed the same basic structure as a Spike Lee movie about inner city gangstas being stomped down no matter what they did to try to get ahead in the world, except this movie was about the exact same things happening to older middle-class White people who all finally realized they were losing at the rat race but couldn’t think of anything else to do.

One of the main characters burns down his business because it’s failing and there’s noting left he can do to save it.  Earlier he defaulted on a loan that his friend Ole had given him because Ole died and had no relatives to inherit his estate.  But then Ole’s ghost comes back to haunt him, and just follows him around wherever he goes.  The guy keeps apologizing to Ole and begging him to leave him alone, but he never does.  The movie ends with the guy standing out in a field outside of town, shouting, “Ole, I’m sorry!  You work so hard to put a bit of food on the table and have a little enjoyment… I didn’t know what else to do!”

Like so many other characters in the movie, this guy tried everything he could think of, but he lost everything that he used to define himself as a human being.  He was only living in the biological sense anymore, just a walking empty shell that used to be a man.  Kind of like somebody turned into a zombie by a mysterious comet passing overhead.  Or like somebody turning into a zombie by freebasing a whole bunch of coke…

Another movie I saw that illustrated how many ways the slender thread of life can be woven to make it endure as long as possible, was Sick, the autobiographical documentary about Robert Flannigan, the longest surviving cystic fibrosis patient.  Cystic fibrosis is an incurable terminal disease caused by inherited genes.  It causes patients’ lungs to produce waaaaaay  too much mucous, so that their lungs keep filling up with more and more of it, until they finally drown in it.  Cystic fibrosis patients live in constant pain, and very few of them live past the age of 25.  This guy lived to be 44.

Bob Flannigan fought against the constant pain he lived in by masochistically inflicting even more pain on himself.  He even pounded nails through his dick with a hammer—without anesthetics, perhaps I should add.  The logic behind it was quite straightforward, although hard to grasp by anyone who didn’t live in so much constant pain.  By inflicting more pain on himself he built up his resistance to pain, and he gave himself the ability to reduce the pain he lived in by ceasing to inflict it on himself.

Bob counseled a lot of cystic fibrosis patients about living with the disease, including a bunch of kids who went to a summer camp and a young lady who requested to meet him through the Make a Wish Foundation.  One question that people—especially cystic fibrosis patients—kept asking him was:  “What’s the point of spending your whole life living in constant pain that just keeps getting worse until it finally kills you?”  So this one’s for him, his fellow CF patients, and everyone else with a terminal disease:

In Nazi Germany, you would all be dead by now, because in order to try to make their society as energy efficient as possible, they executed people with disabilities.  Those people couldn’t produce as much work as everyone else, so the Nazis eliminated them to keep them from consuming resources and to save everyone else from having to carry their weight.  In hunter-gatherer society where everyone had to be able to provide for themselves, things weren’t terribly different, except that very often disabled people would either execute themselves or else their health would deteriorate rapidly and they wouldn’t live very long.  Luckily, we don’t live in either of those conditions.

Those laws of energy efficiency and economics remain, however, whether you suffer from a terminal illness or not:  If you don’t contribute anything to your community and expect everyone else to carry your weight, you are nothing but a parasite.  If you want to live—and this applies to everyone—you have to earn it.

Do we have to measure productivity in the same material terms the Nazis did?  Of course not.   Remember my hypothetical “Don’t Dream It, Be It” improvisational community theatre company?  That worked by everyone contributing whatever they had to create  something.  Whatever that thing was going to be, nobody could tell, but whatever it became would be whatever they created.

So it goes with the rest of the world.  If you want to live, you better work for it, and if you don’t work for it, don’t expect everyone else to carry your weight.  So figure out whatever you do have to offer the world and contribute that.  Whatever civilization we will build as a result, no one can tell, but whatever it becomes will be what everyone helped to create.

To answer the question, the point of living in constant pain that just keeps getting worse until it finally kills you is: If you have a terminal illness, it means you have the ability to produce something extremely  important that nobody else can produce.  You produce an example of how much is possible for one person to endure, and how much one person can accomplish in life in spite of the obstacles they face.  Out of everyone, you have to do the most work at adapting your life to fit your living conditions, which means you develop the most strength of character, or the most spirit, or whatever you want to call it.  Compared to you, most people in the world are wusses, but without you, those people could never realize that they were wusses, because they would have nothing to compare their wussy lives to.  By making the best life you can for yourself, you help the people around you make the best lives for themselves they can, because you prove to them how much is possible in life.  By developing so much spirit, you will make a strong impression on the people around you, and as a result, you can have as much affect on the world in 25 years as other people have on the world in 75 years.  For all of those reasons, your life is just as important as everyone else’s—if you decide to make it that important.

Thanks, Bob.

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
No Comments »

Jesus was a guy who was a model of righteousness.  He possessed extraordinary powers that he used to make things okay for ordinary people, and in the 20th century he appealed to a large audience.

Superman was a guy who was a model of righteousness.  He possessed extraordinary powers that he used to make things okay for ordinary people, and in the 20th century he appealed to a large audience.

Does anyone see a pattern here?

A universal constant of humanity is a desire to feel like everything is going to be alright.  Or to put it another way, a universal constant of humanity is to feel like you’re preserving the survival of your DNA by the most effective means available.

This is an important manifestation 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.  Ordinarily, when people have the choice between two courses of action, they pick the one they perceive to preserve the survival of their DNA most directly.  But sometimes things just aren’t that simple.  So they figure out a different trick…

Suppose you live in a certain way that works pretty well.  If you’re satisfied with it, it means you feel that it offers you a pretty effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA.  But that doesn’t mean it offers you the most effective perceivable means of preserving the survival of your DNA.  Suppose you can imagine a way that you could preserve the survival of your DNA more effectively, but doing that thing would be a risk. To get to the point of preserving the survival of your DNA better than whatever you’re doing now, you would have to take your chances on doing something that could preserve the survival of your DNA a lot worse than whatever you’re doing now.  If you take the chance and lose, you’re going to threaten the survival of your DNA, not improve it.  For instance, if you were… oh, I don’t know… a Jewish slave living in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, and were getting kicked around by Roman centurions all the time, you’d have your choice between sitting there and taking it and making the best of your situation, or rising up and trying to drive the Romans out of Israel once and for all.  If you could drive the Romans out, you could preserve the survival of your DNA a lot better than what you’re doing now; but if you get killed in the attempt, you’re not going to preserve the survival of your DNA at all.

Or suppose that you live in a way that preserves the survival of your DNA pretty well, but as a result of your living in conditions that your emotional instincts didn’t evolve to deal with, you feel (that is, perceive) that living in some other way would offer you a more effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA, even though you can see intellectually that it probably wouldn’t.  Suppose you make a comfortable living selling acoustical ceiling tile in Akron, Ohio, but you’ve always fantasized about being a pirate who sails the high seas in a three-masted ship, just because it appeals to your senses of aesthetics and adventure.  Considering the life of a pirate versus the life of an acoustic ceiling tile salesman, selling that acoustic ceiling tile probably does offer you the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA objectively speaking, even though it doesn’t always feel that way.  And not only that, even if you did want to be a pirate badly enough that you really were willing to pick up a cutlass and a flintlock pistol and sing “Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum,” with Long John Silver, you can’t, because 18th century pirates don’t exist anymore.

In either case, you have one situation that preserves the survival of your DNA pretty well, you can perceive another situation could offer you a better means of preserving the survival of your DNA, but for whatever reason you don’t dare to (or can’t) pursue that course of action.  The situation you have isn’t acceptable, because even though it works pretty well overall, you still have this nagging feeling that you should be doing something differently.  So go back to the statement:  “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’t fix the situation by changing your behavior, what else can you change?

Your perception.

That’s exactly what those ancient proto-humans did when they invented religion.  They gave themselves an escape clause to life to give them a way to overcome the inescapable threat of their physical mortality.  They couldn’t escape the threat by changing their physical mortality, so instead they changed their perception of their physical mortality.

So back to that original idea that people want to feel like everything is going to be alright.  If people don’t know that everything is going to be alright, the next best thing is to believe that somebody has the power to make things alright somehow. That’s a pretty all-encompassing description for what you get out of the deal if you follow Jesus, isn’t it?  So forget about Jesus for the moment.  Let’s talk about comic book heroes.

What’s the difference between Superman and Batman—or Spiderman, or the Incredible Hulk, or any of the other comic book heroes who’ve been turned into movies in the past few years?  You can see it in the comic books, and you can especially see it in the movies.

Superman is pretty much an ordinary guy as his alter ego, who can turn into a virtually indestructible superhero.  He’s immune to bullets, he doesn’t age, he has x-ray vision, he can shoot heat-rays out of his eyes, he can hold up bridges underneath trains to keep them from crashing into ravines, he can fly faster than a jet, he can fly out into space, he can even fly around the Earth so fast that he can turn back time.  Any time anything goes wrong anywhere in the world, Superman can always save the day.  He has a steady girlfriend, too.  Oh, and he came from another world, somewhere out in space, by the way.

Batman, on the other hand, is a prince of darkness.  He’s a mortal human from Earth, who sits up in his castle, all by himself, haunted by his past.  He doesn’t have any superpowers; he gets his superhero abilities from a bunch of cool inventions and exceptional human abilities.  Batman’s romances never work out.  In every Batman movie, he gets beaten up by the badguys by direct physical force, just like any action movie hero.  Then, after he wins, he returns to his castle to sit there by himself in the dark of the night, still haunted by the ghosts of his past.

Spiderman is just a kid who got bitten by a spider.  Unlike Batman, his superpowers are all his own, but they’re nowhere near Superman’s powers.  Spiderman is a dork as his alter ego, he’s clumsy, he’s always broke, he tries to go to school, but he doesn’t fit in very well there.  When he goes out to fight crime and save the day, he finally feels like his life is working out, but when he comes home, he’s stuck right back where he was with all his ordinary problems. Like Batman, Spiderman always gets beaten up in his movies by direct physical force.    Spiderman has a girlfriend, but he knows that having her for a girlfriend puts her into serious danger all the time, because unlike Superman, he can’t protect her from everything in entire world.

If you pay much attention to the comic book industry, Superman has been declining in popularity a lot lately.  Superman became a household hero back during the Great Depression, when a lot of people had a lot of problems and didn’t know what to do about them.  A lot of people wished that someone could just come along and make them all go away.   The Superman movies were made in the ‘80s, during the climactic years of the Cold War, when lots of people had lots of problems they couldn’t solve, and wished that someone could just make them go away.

Batman and Spiderman came along a lot later.  The Batman movies were made in the ‘90s, after the Cold War was over.  The Spiderman movies were made in the ‘00s (or whatever the f*ck they’re calling this decade).  During the Batman years, the most tangible threat to America was crack, street gangs, and organized crime.  During the Spiderman years, the most tangible threat to America is powerful villains who can inflict lots and lots of destruction on cities.  And lo and behold, here come new superheroes to fight those kinds of problems.

Remember what I’ve said about successful movies being made about people the audience can relate to who face meaningful conflicts?  During the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, Superman’s audience faced a sh*tload of conflict.  Batman and Spiderman’s audiences didn’t face nearly as much conflict.  Superman’s audience faced so much conflict that they couldn’t really afford to concern themselves with personal problems terribly much.  Batman and Spiderman’s audiences didn’t face nearly as much conflict as Superman’s audience, so they could afford to concern themselves with personal problems.  So what kind of superheroes did they get?  During the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, they got an average Joe who could solve any problem in the world, including outrunning nuclear missiles and pushing them off course so they shot harmlessly out into space.  Then after the Cold War was over, the audiences got superheroes who had lot of personal problems, just like they did, and who could do some cool stuff to solve problems in the world, but were nowhere near invincible.

You remember what I said in the last book about the most successful professional artists figuring out how to turn other people’s feelings into art?  Superman’s audiences faced problems nobody knew how to solve.  Batman and Spiderman’s audiences faced problems they could imagine being able to solve, even though it would be extremely hard.

To put all of this together, the trend you can see is:  As the real-life conflict facing the world decreased, the superpowers superheroes got to meet the conflicts in their movies decreased, and the conflicts they faced as their alter egos increased.  The superheroes’ proportion of conflicts versus abilities to use to overcome the conflicts has remained fairly constant, but as the problems facing the real-life world decreased, the levels of superabilities and movie conflicts have decreased.   As people’s belief in their own abilities to solve the problems they faced increased, their sense of dependence on superheroes who could come save the day for them decreased.

As a result, it would not be difficult to put Batman and Spiderman into a movie together and create conflict that would be equally meaningful to both of them.  If you tried putting Superman into the movie with them, it would suck.  Conflict that is meaningful to Batman and Spiderman wouldn’t bother Superman a bit; and conflict that was meaningful to Superman would slaughter Batman and Spiderman.

Recently, in order to try to revive his superhero career, the creators of the Superman comics have been reducing his abilities and saddling him with more personal problems, so now he suddenly has more in common with Batman and Spiderman than he traditionally has.

Anyway, back to Jesus Christ, Superhero.  Once upon a time, there were some people who faced a lot of threats that they couldn’t see any way to protect themselves from, so to make themselves feel better, they came up with a legend of an ordinary-seeming guy who had an infinite supply of powers that he could use to protect the righteous and virtuous people of the world and make all their problems go away.  What?  Oh, no, sorry, I’m still talking about Superman here.   But, ah, do you notice any similarities yet?

My point is, even if the Bible is the official word of the Christians’ god, the words of the Bible were still written down by humans to be read by humans, who, for all intents and purposes (meaning their genetic evolution) were just like the humans who wrote and read the Superman comic books.  A lot of people of today insist that the existence of the Bible proves that Jesus must’ve been everything the Bible says he was.  But the existence of the Bible doesn’t prove anything, except that people of 2,000 years ago told stories about heroes who could solve the problems the people faced, just like people in the 20th century did.  If 1/3 of the world’s population today fell in love with Superman comic books and told their children stories about Superman for the next 2,008 years, by the year 4016, would it really matter that Superman was never a real person?

There’s just one drawback to that argument, which is that Jesus had powers that Superman didn’t.  The Cro-Magnons of 60,000 years ago began burying their dead ritualistically.  When people start burying their dead with offerings of things that were valuable to the person in life, it suggests that for some reason the people burying their dead companion think he still needs these things.   That suggests that the people believe that biological death isn’t the end to life.  Biological death has been the single biggest tangible problem people have faced for at least as long as modern humans have existed.   Superman didn’t have any powers to help solve that problem, but Jesus did.  So is it any wonder that a hero who had powers to solve that single biggest problem of humanity should remain so popular for so long?  Just like superheroes of the modern world, Jesus had the powers he needed to overcome the conflict his audience faced.

My other point is, as the problems people face have changed, their legendary heroes and their heroes’ abilities have changed.  The problems facing humanity during the Great Depression, the ‘80s, the ‘90s, and today, were not the same problems that faced Jesus’s followers.  As people’s problems have changed and their perception on the world has changed, their heroes have changed.  If Jesus returned right now to solve all the world’s problems, would he be as invincible as Superman?  Or would he be more human and have fewer powers, like Batman and Spiderman?   Would his ability to solve problems consist of instantly wiping them away like Superman could, or would it consist of helping people to solve their own problems?

Think about it…

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
No Comments »

I’ve had an idea for a story rattling around in the back of my mind for years.  Among Star Trek fans, some like to dress up and act like Klingons.  There are so many of these people that while other people are going to Renaissance faires and Civil War reenactments, these Star Trek fans go to monthly Klingon conventions.  (This is the real-life background to the story so far; I haven’t started making anything up yet.)  These people wear Klingon uniforms and armor, fight each other with Klingon weapons, and eat imitations of Klingon food.  The Klingons on Star Trek even had their own language that someone made up, and you can buy Klingon-English dictionaries, where you can learn to speak Klingon.

The story begins with a bunch of people from all over the world flying across the ocean, on their way to an international Klingon convention.  Then a nuclear war breaks out, and most of the world’s population is annihilated.  The plane crashes into the ocean, but the passengers escape and land on a deserted island.  They have everything they need on the island, and the island escaped the nuclear war perfectly intact.  The survivors on this island set up a village.  There’s just one catch:  The only language all of these Klingon reenactors speak in common is Klingon.

Nobody ever comes to rescue them.  As the years go by, they settle in to life on the island more and more, and build their village up to a town.  Since the island is isolated from the rest of the world and they have no way off it, essentially, it’s now a country.  Where the official language is Klingon.

You remember what I said in the last book about native languages being lost by the third generation of immigrants living in America?  The people who first settled on Klingon Island would speak Klingon because they had to.  To everyone it would feel like a foreign language, but if they were all such hard-core Klingon enthusiasts that they all spoke Klingon fluently, for everyone to speak the language that everyone was already fluent in would be a lot easier than trying to teach some of the people English or whatever other real-life language.

Suppose the settlers of Klingon Island happened to be fairly evenly divided between men and women (by some coincidence).  A lot of those people would hook up with romantic partners who spoke their own native language, so they wouldn’t have to speak Klingon all the time.  Those people’s children would grow up learning English or whatever at home, but they would learn Klingon outside of the home, because that’s what most people in their community would speak in talking to each other.  To the children of the settlers of Klingon Island, who grew up learning both languages, Klingon would be a lot more useful.  That means the second generation on Klingon Island wouldn’t feel like Klingon was a foreign language, and they would be a lot more inclined to speak it because it was a lot more useful than English.  So when parents talked to their kids in English, the kids would feel like answering in Klingon, because while they understand both languages, the only difference between the two as far as they’re concerned is that one is a lot more useful than the other.  That’s exactly what happens in a lot of families of foreign immigrants living in America, except the parents are speaking Spanish or Vietnamese or Italian or something, and their kids answer them in English.

The second generation on Klingon Island would grow up speaking Klingon to each other, and would speak it at home just like they spoke it everywhere else.  As a result, their kids wouldn’t learn the first generation’s native language.  By the third generation on Klingon Island, the native languages of the original settlers would be old-fashioned traditions from the old world.  Those languages would be foreign languages now, and Klingon would be the native language of the third generation.

Like so many scenarios I propose in these books, this sounds absurd.  So how could it be possible?

This fictional alien language becomes the official language of real-life humans on Earth because the people in the country agree that it’s the language they’re going to speak to each other.  That choice isn’t one they made actively, because everyone involved just did whatever worked best for them, which turned out to be what worked best for everyone else too.  At first, a fictional language of an alien race became the official language of this country because there was no other language that would’ve worked as well.  Then, if the people built a school in their town, where children would go to be taught things they would need to know as grown-ups, that school would teach them how to read and write in Klingon, because out of all the languages that could be taught in school, that one would be the most useful to everyone in the town.

Like a language, the United Nations is not a physical object.  The United Nations is an idea that we have all agreed upon.  The United Nations is a thing that exists in the world now because everyone in the world agrees that it exists—or at least, is aware that most people in the world agree it exists.  Where did that agreement come from?

For thousands of years, countries had been making treaties, forging alliances, and fighting wars against each other individually.  The people who founded the United Nations founded it because collectively they realized there had to be a better way to conduct international affairs, and, having lived through World War II and facing the threat of a nuclear war, collectively they realized that they’d better find a new way to conduct international affairs.  So these people agreed upon the United Nations.

To the people who lived around the time the United Nations was founded, it was a new way of doing things that worked better than the old way of doing things.  Those people grew up accustomed to things being done a certain way, but that way obviously didn’t work anymore.  Now these people found a new way to do things that, one way or another, worked better for each of them, so they agreed to do things in a new way that worked better for all of them.

The United Nations was not as personally meaningful or directly important to anyone as a language—nobody had to learn any “United Nations language”—so the transition from absence-of-United-Nations to presence-of-United-Nations was made in just two generations.  Kids who were in school when the United Nations was formed, and all the kids who were born after that—beginning with the baby boomers—grew up learning about this new agreement that existed in the world called the United Nations.  They never knew of things being done any other way, and the former ways of doing things didn’t work as well anyway.  So now we’ve all agreed to do things this way.

Like the adoption of Klingon as the official language of Klingon Island, the United Nations is an agreement that people made, not because they collectively preferred it over another idea that would’ve worked almost as well, but because out of all the ideas they had to choose from, this one worked way better than any other.  While the formation of the United Nations was a much bigger undertaking than speaking a language that was foreign to everyone on an island but everyone on the island understood, it was, in the same way, instinctive for everyone involved to do whatever worked best for them—meaning, whatever all of them perceived to offer the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA.  One way or another, doing this new thing worked best for everyone, so everyone agreed to do it, and this new way of doing things became the way things were done now.

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
No Comments »