I know the anti-war movement started on college campuses back during Vietnam.  But that was then.  This is now.

As a friend of mine once pointed out to me, “College kids are basically useless as activists.”

The problem with campus activism today is that college kids go to college to learn how to middle and upper class.  But here in America, middle and upper class lifestyles are not environmentally sustainable.  By now, all of the activist causes are connected in one way or another to our lack of environmental sustainability. So how hard are college kids actually going to struggle to solve the problems that their very own economic system is causing?

Mr. Friedman said something that goes right along with that.  You know how cultural values take three generations to be created or lost?  And you know how World War II ended about 60 years ago?  The generation of kids who are in college right now are the third generation to be born since the end of the war.  So all the “we’ve got to struggle for a living” cultural values that the Vietnam-era college kids had at least learned from their parents who grew up in the Great Depression and fought in World War II, and that people all over the world have been learning ever since time began, are now gone for good.  In their place kids have learned the “we’re invincible” cultural values that come with having been the most economically wealthy country in the world for the past three generations.  Which is why the Chinese and Indians, who still know how to work hard for a living, are rushing up behind us now and American kids don’t see them coming.

Well in the same way, not only has the current generation of college kids never had to face the draft, their parents never had to face the draft either.  A person who was born in 1960 is now 48.  The Americans would’ve pulled out of Vietnam when that person was 13.  If he or she waited until they were 30 to have their first kid, their kid would be 18 right now.

…Not that I’m suggesting that we should get into a huge war every generation so we can reinstate the draft and force our kids to face meaningful life experiences on pain of death.  But if all our college kids have grown up in households where no one ever had to face any meaningful threats to their survival and safety, what did you think we were going to end up with but a country full of college age wimps who think that going to the bar and drinking beer on a Friday night constitutes meaningful life experience?

A friend of mine read the first volume of these books and told another friend about it.  Her friend loved it too and bought a copy.  Her friend was also secretary of the Young Democrats of America at the university near where I live.

So I checked out the Young Democrats of America website, to see what they were about.  They have a long list of things they stand for, from peace to civil rights to environmentalism to feminism to gay rights to marijuana rights.  Are you noticing a pattern here?  Like, all the same things I’ve been talking about for almost 2 1/2 books now?

So I got the idea to go to a couple of their meetings.  This was in 2006, in the summer before the elections.  The Iraq war was a disaster, not enough people were volunteering for the army or marines anymore to keep up with the demand for troops, so they were stop-lossing everyone, which was also known as the backdoor draft.  Then it looked like a war with Iran was looming on the horizon too.  So a lot of people were starting to wonder if the draft was going to be reinstated.
On top of that, a lot of people were talking about impeaching President Bush, but we had a huge Republican majority in Congress.  In order to get enough Democrats in to impeach him, we’d have to elect 6 new Democrat senators and 15 new Democrat representatives, which a lot of people were saying would be such a huge victory it was almost inconceivable.

Now, back when I was in college, if you wanted to attract a lot of support for something, all you had to do was to use the words peace and civil rights and you’d have more volunteers than you knew what to do with.  I figured that today if you put the words peace, civil rights, prevent the draft from being reinstated,  evolution, and f*ck up President Bush’s life all together, that would be even better.

In a war of ideas, a university is a military base waiting to be occupied.  All it takes is for some dedicated group of people to learn the right questions to ask and to start asking them.  They get to spend four years surrounded by libraries, professors, and other students who care about the same things and can learn more about them.  A person who wants to change America and who is enrolled in a university and who knows the right questions to ask is in the perfect place to do it.  He doesn’t have to eat all the ideas he’s fed, he can start asking questions about things he wants to know and drag the answers out of his professors.  And then make everyone else at the university hear them too.  Then a lot of Christian fundamentalists would try to argue with them, and fan the flames of the controversy.  But that wouldn’t do them any good, because all over the university students would be learning how all the pieces of the world fit together at last, and all the conservatives would have on their side would be a collection of ancient myths.  They might as well try to disprove science by pointing to stories of Zeus and Apollo and Athena, or to copies of Romeo and Juliet or Alice in Wonderland or The Cat in the Hat, for that matter.  It would be a desperate and bloody ideological battle at first, but in the end they could massacre the Christian fundamentalists!

But it was no good.  It was everything my friend warned me about.  Instead of being Democrat college professors who did all they could to try to try to discredit me, they were Democrat college students who thanked me politely for my interest in their group and then ignored me.
I shouldn’t’ve been surprised.  I knew I was committing a serious breach of class loyalty the moment I walked into the room.  Those middle class kids were so well dressed and well groomed and well manicured and… soft looking.  I haven’t been surrounded by such an absence of character-developing experience since I dropped out of college.

Since I’ve brought it up, if anyone really wants to solve the problem of American college kids being so unmotivated in so many different ways, I suggest that you find some people here in America who are still motivated and send them to college.  We have plenty of these people in America.  They’re called lower class people.  Granted, academic culture and teaching methods are biased toward middle class people and are not very accommodating to lower-class people—which is why I dropped out of college—so you’d have to fix that to get a lot of lower class people to come to college.  Either that or start requiring everyone to learn Chinese in school.  One way or the other, you’d better think of something.

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The Union of Concerned Scientists is a great idea.  They’re a group of about 70,000 scientists and 130,000 supporters who have taken to activism to try to raise public interest in science and to convince our government officials that obeying the laws of physical reality is important.
Unfortunately, in practice the Union of Concerned Scientists are basically college activists 20 years later.  They write letters, sign petitions, and get laws passed.  But how hard are any of them really going to struggle to put an end to the economy that makes their jobs possible?
This offers me a great opportunity to illustrate the difference between what I’m doing and what other people are doing.

Once you accept that 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, it renders all government inherently untrustworthy.  As just about any activist I hang out with will tell you, writing letters won’t fix that.   If you do seem to accomplish anything, all you’ve done is to convince the politicians to fix the situation enough to get people to stop writing them letters.  That’s the benefit to effort ratio once again, or the politicians taking advantage of people’s attempts to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them by altering their perception of the situation, instead of altering the situation itself.

When I realized that the most fundamental law of evolutionary psychology rendered it physically impossible to build a government that was immune to corruption, I started learning how to be an Anarchist.  (Not that it was difficult for me.)   After all, Anarchists have been studying this particular problem and trying to find a way around it for about 150 years.  The Anarchist movement as it stands now has problems of its own, so it can’t solve the fundamental problem either.  So I started out by basically reinventing the Anarchist movement on my own in the first book, building my own version up from evolutionary psychology itself. If I spell out how the global Anarchist movement can destroy Capitalism on a global scale once and for all, someone is bound to pay attention.

A lot of scientists either work at universities or for big corporations.  That means they depend on politicians and Capitalists to fund their research.   But that’s completely contradictory to their own goals.  Our economic and political systems are completely suicidal. It is possible for our economic and political systems to evolve into sustainable economic and political systems, but that would depend on a majority of people agreeing to radically alter their society into something that at first glance looks nothing like their own.  So while it is conceivable  that society could be altered sufficiently without a revolution, in practice it’s completely unrealistic, for the simple reason that it’s easier for Capitalists and politicians to convince the public that we should keep the political and economic systems we have.  There’s that perception of benefits to efforts once again.

I don’t have that problem.  I have other challenges to overcome, but at least I’ve found challenges to overcome that aren’t mutually exclusive to my goals.  It’s inevitable that a lot of the members of the Union of Concerned Scientists depend on politicians and Capitalists for their funding, and people who control lots of material resources don’t fund revolutions against themselves.  So no matter what the Union of Concerned Scientists tries to do, they will always be acting within the boundaries of what their sponsors consider to be acceptable.

It could be argued that it is possible to change our political and economic systems from within.  You would do that by acting within the bounds of what your sponsors, or lords, or masters, or whoever, considered to be acceptable, pushing the bounds of the realm of human consciousness ever outwards, getting the public on your side, and forcing your sponsors/ lords/ masters/ whoever to adapt to the changing situation.  That was the main strategy of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement.

Dr. King was able to succeed that way because humanity had not yet reached the physical limitations of the Earth.  For as radical as the Civil Rights Movement was, it wasn’t a fundamental challenge to the existence of the economic and political systems of the time, it was just a challenge to certain people being oppressed by them.  Since Dr. King wasn’t posing a direct challenge to Capitalism itself, as far as the Capitalists were concerned, all he was creating was a new demand for something.  Since the Capitalists were all competing against each other, some of them took advantage of the Civil Rights Movement and turned it against their competitors to benefit themselves.  Since we had not yet reached the physical limitations of the Earth, the Capitalists were not united by a common interest.

Now that we are reaching the physical limitations of the Earth, the Capitalists have a much smaller realm of possibility within which to act.  As our population continues to increase at an exponential rate, and our available resources continue to diminish at an exponential rate, the Capitalists are going to be faced with an ever increasing number of people who will be willing to fight ever more desperately for resources.  As the saying goes, in order for the rich to stay rich, the poor have to stay poor.  I’ve already shown you how our changing environmental economy and the cultural values of other people has lead us into the 14 early warning signs of Fascism, and now with the 9/11 conspiracy I’ve shown you how people in the commercial media competing against each other has led them to stop reporting world events and start writing their own legends.  Now here’s another example of conflict escalating to the point that defeats the whole purpose of the conflict.

The Capitalists might not want to cooperate with each other, but in the end, if the global environmental economy starts breaking down completely and they’re surrounded by people who are so desperate for resources that they just don’t care anymore which Capitalists they have to kill to get them, the Capitalists will have no choice left but to cooperate with each other a lot, compete against each other a little just out of habit, and compete against everyone else even more.  That’s all a product of the changing conditions of the world changing the perceptions of everyone involved to the most effective perceivable means of preserving the survival of their DNA.  The more energy people are willing to expend fighting the Capitalists collectively, the more energy the Capitalists will have to devote to fighting those people off, and consequently, the less energy the Capitalists will have left over to use in competing against each other.  The Capitalists’ collective cultural values combined with the physical limitations of the Earth will create a Fascistic political system without any individual needing to be the dictator.

That brings me to our next difference, and probably the most important one of all.  All the observable evidence indicates that global disaster is inevitable within the 21st century.  People’s emotional instincts that create their natural perceptions of the world evolved during our species’ colonization phase of the global environment.  Now our global environmental economy is changing, but our emotional instincts and our natural perceptions aren’t.  That means that for people to continue to pursue the most effective means perceivable of preserving the survival of their DNA is completely incompatible with the physical limitations of the Earth.  But our economic system rewards people controlling supplies of energy and material resource—capital—rather than distributing energy and material resources as necessary to make society function.  That would necessarily mean distributing energy and material resources as necessary to keep everyone alive, and that would necessarily mean making the global environment work in a way that can keep everyone alive.  But that would also be Socialism.

When you put all the numbers together, that’s what they mean.  But for some reason the Union of Concerned Scientists continue to participate willingly in a Capitalist economy.  There are only a few possible things that can mean, and none of them are good. It could mean that they’re unwilling to assemble all the evidence and accept what it indicates, because it indicates something that isn’t favorable to them.  It could also mean that they’re depending on the intervention of some outside force that has no observable evidence to support its existence to make their economic system continue to function.  But that’s the definition of a supernatural force.  If these scientists are unwilling to consider objectively the complete body of evidence that has been collected in the study of how the world works, or they depend on the intervention of supernatural forces to make the world work the way they feel it should, then technically they’re not scientists at all.  They’re just people who know a lot of facts about science, who have official academic credentials that call them scientists, and who have job titles that call them scientists, but who still don’t understand how science actually works.

And that goes a long, long, long way toward explaining the origins of all the resistance I’ve faced from bleeding heart liberals who say that science can’t really prove anything because it’s just some ideas a few people had, and that all reality is subjective, and that anyone who tries to use science to tell people what to do is trying to be Chairman Mao.  If scientists obviously don’t live up to their own ideals, why should anyone else believe their ideals could actually work?  If scientists keep handing over all their work to the enemy, by presenting it in official academic terms that only a few academically educated people can understand, why should progressive activists trust scientists?  And if scientists don’t seem to be contributing anything helpful to society, why should anyone see any benefit in anyone studying science?

So these bleeding heart liberals try to figure out their own solutions, and they’re all bullsh*t, and they’re never going to work.  Things like, “Well, a lot of the problems facing the world seem to be caused by people being culturally conditioned to depend on science to be the answer to everything, and that obviously isn’t working, so I think we’d all be better off to just learn to trust our feelings.”  But now they’re talking about trying to solve their problems by depending on emotions that didn’t evolve to deal with our living conditions to guide them, and they’re turning their backs on the most fundamental problem of all, that a lot of how the physical world functions is completely counter-intuitive to our perceptions.

So it’s fair to say that all these bleeding heart liberals are a bunch of intellectual peasants compared to the scientists.  But it’s equally fair to say that at least these bleeding heart liberal intellectual peasants are using what they’ve observed about the world to try to solve problems facing us, which is more than the scientists can say for themselves.  So really, who’s smarter than who, hmm?

The dumbest person on Earth is a genius who chooses not to use his abilities to make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep everyone alive.  If the people who are controlling how the chemical reaction of the global environment works are willing to sacrifice people’s lives to make their economy function, how long do you think it’s going to take before they decide it’s your turn?  And if a bunch of people decide they’d better fight back while they still have the chance and they see you collaborating with the enemy, why should they spare you?

Among the people I deal with, there’s a lot of talk about how after the revolution all the useless people are going to be banished to a prison colony.  Or maybe just executed outright.  There’s a lot of debate about how all that would be done, but the one thing that’s universal is that useless people are defined as those who expect other people to support them and give back nothing in return.  In the last book I told you about cheating and the cheater detection mechanism.  So my advice to any scientists out there is to go back and read your own science again until you understand why so many anti-Capitalist revolutionaries believe you are the problem.

And that brings me to our next difference.  Contrary to what scientists are traditionally lead to believe, academic formality is not synonymous with political neutrality.  I talked about this in the last book, but it bears repeating.

Academic formality makes science inaccessible to the majority of people, and reserves it for those who have high levels of academic education. A small group of academically educated and materially wealthy people learning about their discoveries can’t possibly lead to anything other than the social, economic, and political inequality between the two groups becoming ever more inequitable.

True political neutrality depends on the immediate democratization of any scientific discoveries that affect everyone directly.  That necessarily means scientists learning how to explain their discoveries in whatever terms they need to be explained in order to make them personally meaningful to people.

Radical democracy is the definition of Anarchism.  Traditionally people have said that Anarchism is the opposition to all government.  That’s a little misleading because Anarchism is the opposition to all forms of authority, because all forms of authority are forms of government, whether people refer to them as governments or not.

If you say that the goal of Anarchism is to abolish all forms of authoritarian government, then that makes it equally true that the goal of Anarchism is to make everyone a political unit of one.  That makes the entire world the United Nations.  If you, as president of your political unit of one, meet up with someone else who’s president of their political unit of one, what are you going to do?  Neither one of you has any authority over the other, so neither of you can tell the other what to do.  That means that in order to deal with each other in a way that will turn out mutually beneficial, you have to treat each other as equals.  That means respecting each other.  That means cooperation, honor, and responsibility.  That means the six parts of tribal discipline I talked about so much in the first book.

Anarchism is the definition of political neutrality.  If you don’t treat everyone as an independent political unit of one, you aren’t treating them politically neutrally.  If you do treat everyone as an independent political unit of one, then you are treating them politically neutrally, but you’re also treating them Anarchistically.  This is true for the simple reason that Anarchists define political success by human equality.

Capitalists define economic success, and consequently political success, by their control of capital.  If scientists attempt political neutrality by presenting their discoveries in terms that only a few people who already control a lot of capital can understand, then all they’ve done is to give those people more capital.  Inevitably, those Capitalists will then use that scientific capital to generate profits so they can control more capital.

As I’ve said so many times already, trying to win a war of ideas with bullets is futile.  But trying to win a war of ideas with ideas alone is futile also.  If you can’t turn your ideas into action, you can’t possibly make your ideas personally meaningful to the enemy  or to anyone else.  A war of ideas will be won by whoever can move matter and energy in the direction of their goals.  If you don’t turn your ideas into actions, all you’re doing is expressing your opinions about something and then leaving the enemy free to ignore you.

The problem with turning ideas into actions in order to win a war of ideas is that unless you’re on the side of the people who write the laws, you’re breaking the law.  Revolutions are illegal, because that’s the easiest way for the people the revolutions would be waged against to prevent them from happening.  If you serve in the military and you try to turn your ideas of human equality into action by refusing to get on the plane, you risk being thrown in prison.  If you rescue helpless animals from mink coat farms, you get branded America’s number one domestic terrorist threat.  Whatever.

The last big difference between me and the Union of Concerned Scientists is so absurd it makes an amusing end to the story.  As you know, the population of the world is increasing at an exponential rate, each person is consuming material resources at an exponential rate, and each person is producing pollution at an exponential rate, which means humanity’s impact on the global environment is increasing at a triply exponential rate.  And what is the Union of Concerned Scientists doing about it?  As they so proudly proclaim on their website, they focus on solving one problem at a time!  Because, they say, that’s how progress is made!

Now, I could comment on the fact that the scientists’ own science indicates that solving one problem at a time isn’t going to work, but that would just be too obvious.  So instead I’ll quote that English bloke from the last book—or maybe I should say he was a chap, because he spoke with a Queen’s English accent and was Minister of Something Really Important:

“If you’re making a problem worse faster than you’re making it better, you’re not solving the problem.”

…Which is why I started from the very beginning and figured out how to start with atomic physics and build up to the functional outline of a chemical reaction for the entire world that included the entire realm of human behavior.  And I did it all by myself, in my spare time from my regular job.

So I’ve just got to say…

Seventy thousand scientists all working together, and they couldn’t think of that trick????  What the f*ck is wrong with these people????

So in conclusion, when I wrote to the Union of Concerned Scientists, told them about what I was doing, and offered to join their group, they never even wrote back to me.  I wasn’t really surprised.

Still, I can’t help but wonder:  Having put this much work into these books by now, how much more could I accomplish if I had seventy thousand scientists on my side?
Oh well.  I guess a few million Anarchists will have to do…

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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And now for the main event in the anti-Capitalist movement in America:  The protest of the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization meeting.

Most of what got reported in the commercial media was bullsh*t. If you believe in a bunch of superstitious crap about human behavior being motivated by a supernatural force of good—which unfortunately, most Americans do—there was a lot to misunderstand about what happened there.

At one point, President Clinton gave a speech, saying, “For those who came here to peacefully make their point, I welcome them here because I want them to be integrated into the longer term debate.  For those who came here to break windows and hurt small businesses, or stop people from going to meetings and having their say, I condemn them.”

Okay…  So if you want them to be integrated into the debate, why weren’t they invited into the meeting?

That was the core of the protest.  Who did, and who didn’t, deserve to be admitted to the meeting was determined according to the Capitalist definition of “rightful ownership”.  Those who physically possessed large amounts of material resources were admitted, and those who didn’t, weren’t.  The people who controlled the most material resources were the ones the police were there to defend.

But once you reject the Capitalist definition of “rightful ownership” you completely invalidate the entire premise of the meeting.  Once you decide that the Earth and all of its resources are the rightful property of everyone, you reject the idea that some people should be admitted to the meeting while other people should be left outside to try to participate in the debate by protesting in the street.

So the people who were left out of the meeting did find a way to participate in the debate.  And they shut the WTO meeting down.  Hey, if you want to force everyone to participate in your competitive economy so badly, you’ve got no one but yourself to blame if you lose.

Breaking the Spell is a movie about the WTO protests that’s available on DVD.  It was made by Anarchists who were out in the streets among the protestors.  If you want a real version of the story, as told by people who recognize everyone as an independent political unit of one, watch that movie.  But be careful when you look into the eye of your enemy.  You just might find that he has a well-reasoned point of view.

A friend of mine from elementary school was there too, and I heard a lot about it from him when I saw him the following summer.

Progressive activism could only succeed perfectly pacifistically if human behavior was motivated by a force of pure good.  Pacifism worked for Mahatma Gandhi because no one had ever waged a completely pacifistic revolution before, so the British had no idea what the f*ck to do about it.  And no matter what they did about it, or how Mahatma Gandhi waged it, there was always the lingering possibility that the Indians would get desperate enough to start resorting to violence.  Mahatma Gandhi had already united them as a revolutionary force, so the only thing they were missing now was the guns.  The British were outnumbered about a hundred to one, or something like that, so if the revolution went on too long, or the British were too brutal in trying to put it down, the Indians could’ve smashed them.  Plus, the Indians were proving to everyone else how brutal the British already were, by showing that they would resort to violence against pacifistic demonstrators.

After the Indian revolution, the psychological arms race between the oppressors and the oppressed was on.  Oppressors started learning from the mistakes of the British, so that the next time someone tried a pacifistic revolution like that, it wouldn’t work.

Then along came Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement.  In the Civil Rights Movement, the oppressors’ goal was the same as oppressors’ goals always are:  to oppress people.  The oppressors have found an effective way to preserve the survival of their DNA that the revolutionaries are threatening.  Oppressors didn’t pay attention to Sesame Street.  When pacifistic demonstrators bring to their attention the fact that they’re oppressing people, they don’t say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and learn from their mistakes.  Oppressors will not stop oppressing people until the oppressed people make oppression cease to be an option to the oppressors.  In other words, the oppressors will always oppress people until the oppressed people make oppression stop being the most effective means the oppressors perceive to preserve the survival of their DNA, and make some other choice start being the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA.  Until then, oppressors don’t negotiate with revolutionaries who don’t pose a threat them.

That means that progressive activism is only possible because the oppressors are made to perceive there is a danger that the revolutionaries will not limit themselves to pacifism.  Hence the reason Malcolm X made the success of the Civil Rights Movement possible, because he and the Black Panthers were always lurking in the background, offering the Civil Rights protestors another choice if pacifism didn’t work.

Now we have a context to talk about what the Anarchists were doing at the WTO meeting…

The Battle of Seattle was the first battle of the anti-Capitalist revolution waged on American soil… well, United States soil, anyway.   A lot of protestors had a lot of different opinions about the right way to protest, so there was a lot of conflict within the protest.  This has been worked out after Seattle, because now whenever a big Capitalist meeting is held in a city, whoever organizes the protest divides the city up into three zones.  One is for strictly passive protestors, one is for passive civil disobedience, and one is for protestors who want to fight in self-defense.

The strictly pacifistic protestors are essentially useless.  They carry signs and chant slogans and show their support for the protest.  On the one hand, they do show how much support the other protestors have and raise public awareness… and all the other things hippies have been doing for 40 f*cking years.   But at the same time, they’re just validating the oppressors’ political system by giving the oppressors something to show on the evening news about all the nice protestors who came out to exercise their freedom of speech and voice their opinions… which the oppressors promptly ignored.

The pacifistic civil disobedience zones are basically Mahatma Gandhi’s revolution 70 years later.  Protestors bodily block the oppressors from doing what they’re trying to do, and let the oppressors remove them any way they can think of.  Any way the oppressors can think of means violently, because that’s the only way the protestors are leaving.

In the movie it shows a showdown in one intersection, where a few rows of protestors are sitting in the street across an intersection, blocking traffic.  They’re bundled up in hoods, masks, and goggles, sitting with their backs to the police and their arms linked together.  The police warn them multiple times to get out of the street, and the protestors won’t move.

So the police move in, start jabbing people in the backs with their riot clubs, and start shooting pepper spray in people’s eyes.  They pull people’s goggles off, wrestle them down, hold their heads steady, and pull people’s eyes open so other cops can spray them.

At another intersection, some of the protestors appealed to the cops’ sympathy, telling them how much they respect them, telling them they can see that the cops feel the same way they do, telling the cops they don’t have to be on that side and they’re welcome to come over to the protestors’ side if they want, thanking them for remembering that the protestors were human beings, and telling them that when they go home tonight to remember to be proud for doing their jobs.  One chick even went out wearing a belly-dancing outfit and shimmied a lot of skin around to remind the cops she was a human just like them.  You can see a lot of the cops in that video looking at each other and trying to convince themselves they’re on the right side.

That was psychological warfare plain and simple.  They don’t show in the movie how that showdown turned out, but if at some point someone blew a whistle, within moments all those protestors would’ve been crawling, writhing, screaming on the ground, getting whacked with clubs and pepper spray in their eyes.  And then a lot of the cops would’ve wondered for weeks afterwards how doing that to those protestors proved they were on the right side.

Then there was the self-defense strategy…

The self-defense strategy has evolved since Seattle.  Basically what it amounts to now is, protestors block the oppressors bodily by occupying intersections or whatever, and refusing to leave.  If the police resort to violence to try to move them, the protestors fight back.  They will also blockade the street with whatever they can.  They will also vandalize and loot oppressors’ property if other protestors start vandalizing and looting it first.

That sounds kind of strange, and there’s still ongoing debate about the role of preemptive vandalism and looting.

In Seattle, they used preemptive vandalism and looting. Tactical vandalism has a psychological value. People walk down the same city streets day after day and year after year, seeing the same shop windows and the same corporate logos, and they take it for granted that’s what the street—and by extension, the world they live in—is supposed to look like.  So a bunch of Anarchists brought hammers to the protest and smashed a lot of windows.

Suddenly, a lot of people started seeing things they’d never seen before:  Smashed windows.  And smashed corporate logos.   Now the people who saw that had a broader perspective on the world.  Now shop windows and corporate logos wasn’t the only way it was possible for the world to be.  There were other ways it was possible for the world to be.

Tactical looting has an economic value.  As one of the Anarchists explains in an interview, at one point, they smashed the windows of a Nike store.  A lot of people who couldn’t afford shoes ran in and looted a bunch of shoes.  The resources of the Earth are the rightful property of everyone, and now people who couldn’t afford them otherwise had new shoes.  That’s Use-Value economics in action.

In big citywide protests against Capitalist meetings, protest organizers, and especially Anarchists groups, find out before the protest which businesses are sponsoring the meeting.  And then, before the protests, they find out where those businesses are.   Anarchists don’t vandalize and loot indiscriminately, they vandalize and loot tactically.  The fact that they don’t believe in laws doesn’t require them to believe in theft and destruction instead.  They believe in everyone minding their own business, which is exactly what they’re doing.  If you pay to support the oppressors’ big meeting, financial damage will be inflicted on you.   Profit margins are the lifeblood of a corporation.  To fight a corporation effectively, you must attack where it is vulnerable.  That means bleeding it of its profits.

The problem with preemptive looting and vandalism is that it’s vanguardism.  Anarchism is supposed to be a people’s revolution.  For a few people to loot and vandalize preemptively is for those few people to appoint themselves a revolutionary elite who drive everyone else on to revolution.  That’s how the Communists started the Russian revolution, and obviously it didn’t work in the long run.  The people weren’t prepared to build a new society in the aftermath of the revolution, which put the revolutionary elite who had figured out a way to build a new society after the revolution, in control of the post-revolutionary political system, because they were the only ones with a plan, while everyone else was standing around wondering what to do now.

As you recall, those few people who organized the protest my dad went to tried to turn it into a riot.  That was vanguardism too.  My dad realized it wasn’t a people’s revolution, which is why no one looked like they personally wanted to participate in it, but they were each going along with it because they wanted to protest and that’s how the protest looked like it was going to be carried out.  So my dad stood in the middle of the crowd and started a people’s revolution against the vanguard revolutionaries.  And he won, because once the people saw they had another choice, they all made the other choice and joined in something they wanted to be a part of.

Hence the reason the new Anarchist strategy to looting and vandalizing is to wait until other people start it.  Then of course, the next question is, how many other people start it?    And the answer to that is, just the group generally.

If looting and vandalizing somehow becomes the will of the people, Anarchists are ready to participate.  They probably brought spray-paint and hammers and slingshots and all kinds of stuff to loot and vandalize with.

Generally, Anarchist support for looting and vandalism is focused on identified tactical targets, but any corporate targets that are first attacked by other protestors are viable.  Vandalism and looting that other people start against privately owned small businesses isn’t supported by Anarchists, because small privately owned businesses aren’t considered a threat to anyone.

Then there’s the question of what happens if the only people around are Anarchists who came ready to vandalize and loot?  Then tactical looting and vandalism is on.

Basically the new vandalism and looting strategy that’s evolved since Seattle says that a few people looting and vandalizing and using the rest of the protest as cover isn’t a people’s revolution, it’s a few people having their own revolution.  But there is a lot of debate back and forth.

My point is, whatever conclusion you may have jumped to about the fact that you aren’t an Anarchist and other people are proves they must not be as smart as you, is total bullsh*t.

I think one of the spokespersons for the Anarchists said it best at the very end of the movie, and my Elementary School Anarchist friend said it too.  If you limit yourself to protesting in ways the oppressors approve of, you’re basically allowing the oppressors to sexually violate you, because you’re allowing them to control what you do with your own body during the protest.

And that all comes back to what I keep saying, that if you choose to oppress people, you choose to accept the consequences when they choose to defend themselves by whatever means seem to them to offer them the best chances of winning.  Trying to make them feel that they don’t have control over their own bodies only works until they outsmart your psychological illusion.  If you choose to oppress people, it is inevitable that they will use their own bodies in whatever way they see fit to defend themselves.   You can’t make the conflict any more primal than that, because any other animal in the animal kingdom would do the same.  And if you’re a politician and you chose not to learn enough about biology to be able to understand that, too goddamn bad.

Then came the Miami Massacre…

In November 2003, the Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting was held in Miami.

In the Miami area there are a lot of minorities—Black Americans, Haitians, and Hispanics.  The Free Trade Area of the Americas already wasn’t doing any of them any good.  The local tomato farm workers were getting paid about 40 cents per bushel basket of tomatoes they picked, which was the same price they were getting paid back in 1980.  For one of them to make 50 bucks, they had to harvest 2 tons of tomatoes.  A lot of housing was getting torn down in Overton, a working class neighborhood near Miami, and getting replaced with new housing no one who lived there could afford.

So a bunch of these people decided they were going to march 115 miles into downtown Miami for the FTAA meeting and make themselves heard.  You know, integrate themselves into the debate, just like President Clinton said they were supposed to do.

And when they got to Miami, what did they find, but that the arms race had escalated since Seattle.

There were about 8,000 riot police guarding the city.  Now in addition to their clubs, pepper spray, and tear gas canisters, they also had paintball guns with teargas balls, and tasers.

Now a whole bunch of things that were fundamental to protesting had been outlawed.  Like, it was against the law for people to congregate in groups larger than 7.  I heard about some other things that had been outlawed from some people I know who were there, like, dancing, singing, playing music, public displays of affection, nudity, carrying signs with handles…  Basically, anything pacifists could use for psychological defenses to prove to the police that they were real people instead of robots.  Signs with handles were outlawed because sign handles can be used as clubs or thrown.

This time around, the demonstrators had decided to limit themselves to pacifistic demonstrations and pacifistic civil disobedience, in the hopes that now that the Seattle demonstration had proven they could shut down an entire city, everyone could step back and deal with each other more reasonably.  And since they were limiting themselves to civil disobedience, the police shouldn’t’ve needed all their new weapons. Right?

Wrong.

The cops came ready for a fight.

First came the tasers, which the cops treated like new toys.  Then the teargas paintball guns.  Then the rubber bullets and the shotgun beanbags.

The cops promised the protestors that they wouldn’t interfere with the protests if the protestors weren’t violent.  But then, evidently, when the protesters remained peaceful and didn’t give the cops the excuse to break up the protests, the cops decided that the protesters looked like they were going to be violent, so they would start marching down the streets, driving the protestors ahead of them.  But there were a lot more protestors in the streets than there were cops, so the cops could march faster than the protesters.  So they started shoving protesters ahead of them faster than the protesters could retreat.  Then some of the protesters would shove back to try to keep from getting crushed into the people in front of them.  And then the cops had the excuse they needed to beat the protesters to the ground.

There were a lot of reporters from corporate media outlets embedded with the police, just like they were embedded with the military in Iraq.  Some reporters didn’t embed with the police, because they wanted to report from the other side.  The police said they couldn’t guarantee the safety of any reporters who weren’t embedded with them.  And then unembedded reporters started getting beaten, arrested, their cameras stolen, and getting shot in the face with shotgun beanbags.  That especially happened a lot to reporters who had just videoed excessive police violence against protesters.

In Overton, the working class town next door to Miami where a lot of the demonstrators were camped in vacant lots, a lot of the residents had been told by the police that if they mugged the reporters and stole their cameras, they wouldn’t do anything about it.

In all, 283 protesters were arrested, but all of them were released without being sentenced.
None of that made the evening news.  The embedded news reporters praised the heroic police for maintaining their professionalism and fearlessly stopping the violent protestors time and time again.  Miami was such a successful exercise that it was sure to become the model around the world for defending big Capitalist meetings in the future.

Like I said, what makes you think police brutality isn’t already a part of the cost-to-benefit ratio for enforcing social stability?

This is what democracy looks like.

The protesters won the Battle of Seattle, because the World Trade Organization was shut down.   Strangely enough, they won the Miami Massacre too, because the Free Trade Area of the Americas was shut down too.  These aren’t permanent victories, because the Capitalists just keep thinking up new names for their big evil organizations.  The Group of 8 industrialized nations and the World Economic Forum are still going strong and meet every year.

The protestors won the Miami Massacre because their victory didn’t depend on physically shutting down the meeting.  The goal of the protestors was to prove that Capitalism depends on police enforcement for its survival.

As the saying goes, the best measure of success is how the enemy reacts to you.  These days, the Capitalists hold their meetings in countries where there is no freedom of speech, like Qatar, in the Middle East, so protesting is flat out against the law.  Or they hold them way off at the edges of the Earth, in places with small populations and that few activists can afford to travel to, like in Alberta, Canada.   Or they hold them in big cities where lots of activists protest, and surround their meetings with 8,000 riot police, and prove to everyone in the city what a lie their definition of democracy is.  If they really are so interested in democracy, why do they depend on so many riot police to keep the public from getting into their meetings?

Another big debate going on among activists, and especially Anarchists, right now is, where do we go from here?  Right now, the Capitalists are holding the activists to a standoff.  They’ve found ways to keep having their meetings, so what can the activists use to fight against their new tactics?
You had to ask, didn’t you?

Heh, heh, heh…

Oh, but first, here are a few simple suggestions I have for how they could democratize their meetings:

First, contact the main organizers of the protest, and have them pick one activist representative to send in for every representative at the meeting.

Second, broadcast the meeting live on the radio and the internet, and make the minutes and transcript of the meeting available to the public immediately after the meeting.

Third, equip the front line of the riot police with hollow plastic, rubberized riot clubs that will be strong enough not to break, but soft and light enough not to cause any serious damage—basically, wiffle bats.  Order them to resort to violence only in self-defense, and to resort to force only against anyone who tries to physically prevent the meeting from taking place.   If everyone agrees to resort to violence only in self-defense, there’s nothing for anyone to fight about.  If anyone does physically resist the police, the police’s first reaction will be to remind everyone they’re not supposed to be to be physically opposing the police.  The police are not the ones making the decisions inside the meeting, so resorting to violence against them isn’t going to solve anything.  Violence against heavily armed police is only going to lead to escalating violence, and put everyone in danger except for the people who are making the decisions inside the meeting.  So arm the police as lightly as possible for them to be able to carry out their duties, and give them the backup they need to keep themselves safe if anyone tries anything stupid.

If you have a problem with this, what are you afraid of?  Too much democracy breaking out?

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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Are you ready for the ultimate weapon for smashing oppression?

You’re holding it in your hands.

The oppressors have one giant weapon on their side:  They keep the public so misinformed about science.

That helps keeps activists from being able to work together effectively, by keeping them arguing amongst themselves over opinions.  It also keeps them from being able to recognize whether or not, and why or why not, the oppressors’ plans are going to work, and from being able to recognize the same things about their own plans.

My whole point for writing such a long chapter was to show you how you can recognize what you have in common with other activists, even with ones you thought were your enemy, if only you learn enough about the scientific laws of the world that you’re all trying to cooperate with, to know how to meet the other people on common ground.

Oppression begins with education, because the oppressors teach the public what they want them to learn in order to keep everyone acting in ways that will maintain their system of oppression.

So if you want to smash oppression, start by smashing the oppressive education system.

This is so simple you can do it at any high school in America.  All you have to do is to get a physics teacher and a biology teacher in a room together to answer some questions publicly.  A chemistry teacher and a psychology teacher wouldn’t hurt either.  You could do this in an interview for a student newspaper, or at a PTA meeting, or at a public assembly.

Question #1:  Is it true, or isn’t it true, that people require energy to live?

(It is true.  Any biologist or psychologist who tells you it isn’t true jeopardizes his academic reputation.)

Question #2:  Is it true, or isn’t it true that our entire global environment is one giant chemical reaction?

(It’s true.  Meteors enter the Earth’s atmosphere occasionally and molecules in the upper atmosphere might drift off into space, but for all intents and purposes it is a closed environment.  The fact that we have oceans and an atmosphere means that water and air travel all around the globe, which makes the entire environment of the Earth interconnected.)

Question #3:  Is it true, or isn’t it true, that the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics indicate that it isn’t physically possible for an infinite supply of energy to exist anywhere in the universe?

(It’s true.  Technically, the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics state that the amount of energy in the universe is finite and entropy tends to increase.  When energy moves from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration, some of the energy always radiates out into space, where it can’t be reclaimed.  The literal wording of the first two laws of thermodynamics says all of that, just not in terms that are immediately recognizable to the public.)

Question #4:  Oil and natural gas are fossil fuels.  Is it true, or isn’t it true, that the energy stored in them entered the global environment as sunlight?

(It’s true.)

Question #5:  Is it true, or isn’t it true, that we are burning fossil fuels faster than new fossil fuels are being created?

(It’s true.)

Question #6:  Is it true, or isn’t it true, that an economy depends on energy to function?

(It’s true.)

Question #7:  Here in America, we measure economic success by economic growth.  Is it true, or isn’t it true, that unlimited economic growth would depend on an unlimited supply of energy?

(It’s true.)

Question #8:  So to sum up, people require energy to live, we are making energy leave our global environment faster than it’s being added to our global environment, and we intend to be able to keep this up forever.  Have I understood you correctly?

(You have.)

Question #9:  Is there any scientific reason to believe that such a thing could be possible?

(There isn’t.)

Question #10:  Bearing in mind we have a secular government here in America, barring divine intervention, is there any conceivable way that this scientifically impossible economic system you’ve described to us could survive indefinitely on its present course?

(There isn’t.)

Question #11:  Is it true, or isn’t it true, that the purpose of public education is to teach children things they’re going to need to know as adults?

(It’s true.)

Question #12:  Thank you for answering my questions.  I only have two more and you don’t have to answer either of them if you don’t want to.  First of all, without being taught these things, how were we supposed to solve this problem?

Question #13:  Second, here in America our politicians continue to tell us that economic growth is economic success, in spite of the fact that it is scientifically impossible for the economic system you have just described to us to continue indefinitely.  Can you think of any reason why our elected government officials are not taking immediate and decisive action to solve this problem?

That’s the basic idea.  You’ve seen how I do this over the course of these books. You can apply this to anything, from origins of cultures to origins of religions to gender differences to economic systems to political systems to the population explosion.  The energy crisis is the easiest ideological target to seek and destroy, but also the most important.

The two things you depend on to succeed at this tactic is to find people who knows how to answer the questions, and to prove your point by only asking them yes or no questions.

Finding someone who knows how to answer questions more complicated than this won’t be easy because this is such a new branch of science.  Also, a lot of the things I’ve talked about are caused by the interactions among various things simultaneously.  Those don’t lend themselves well to unraveling by sequential questioning like this, because they depend on laying out a lot of information all at the same time.

By asking only yes or no questions up until the very end, you leave the witnesses no room to insert their opinions.  By asking very specific questions step by step, you make it clear that you’re not inserting your opinions or conjecture either.

You start by asking questions your audience can understand, based on whatever they know about the world, and building up from there, piece by piece.  With your questions, you assemble the pieces of the puzzle in your audiences’ minds.  With the yes or no answers from the scientists, you make the pieces stick there.

There are two lines of communication taking place here.  The first is between you and the interviewee.  The second is between you and the audience.  You’re asking the questions to your interviewee, but you’re asking them for the sake of your audience.

That line of communication between you and your audience is the critical one.  It isn’t sufficient to extract the information from your interviewee; you must extract it from him in a way that makes it inescapably clear that neither you nor your interviewee were inserting your own conjectures or opinions.  You are seeking and destroying the ideology that a majority of Americans believe in.  In order to succeed, you must make it obvious to them that if they asked the same questions, they would get the same answers.

Then you let your audience wrestle with this in their own minds.  No matter what they do, or what they want to believe is true, these are the facts, and there is no escaping them.  From there, you force them to move on to the next question:  What are we going to do now?

By asking questions that allow the scientists to offer their own input at the end, you give them the opportunity to offer their own perspective, after you have already focused everyone’s attention on the topic you want to talk about.  I know of a lot of scientists who would like the opportunity to tell people more about science than they are, if only they could figure out how.

To use this ideological seek-and-destroy tactic on more complicated lines of reasoning, you can find sympathetic experts, show them my work ahead of time, and get them to make their own special presentations.  That way, you can communicate to your audience that the expert already agrees with you and you’re not just making something up and then trying to prove it.  Also, this way the expert can lay out all the information himself and then show the audience what it all means.  He can do that himself a lot more effectively than you could do it by asking him yes or no questions.

Convincing the experts of what you’re talking about will be a lot easier than convincing the audience of it.  And the audience is the real target.

It is crucial that you start by asking the scientists simple questions that only require yes or no answers.  If you give your audience the opportunity to misunderstand something they don’t want to believe, they will take it.  Also, the oppressors will seize upon any potential misunderstanding you leave in your line of questioning and use it to make you appear to the public like you’re making mistakes.

You can expect your audience—a lot of them, anyway—to grasp at every single thing they possibly can to try to discredit you.  And when they do, their critical line of communication will be between themselves and the rest of the audience.  Their victory doesn’t depend on proving to everyone that you don’t know what you’re talking about.  Their victory depends on seeming to prove to everyone that you don’t know what you’re talking about.  If an enemy can make your audience feel like you don’t know what you’re talking about, he wins a political victory, regardless of whether anything he’s saying is true or not.  So deny him that opportunity right from the start.

If you leave any room for debate at all, the enemy will undermine your position.  The majority of Americans don’t agree with you, because all this science contradicts so much of what they believe to be true.  If you offer the enemy the luxury of debating you, regardless of how little he knows about science, you give the audience the choice of who to believe.  Naturally, they’re going to believe the person who agrees with what they already believe.

It might seem hypocritical at first glance that I’ve spent so much time telling you that winning the war of ideas depends on empowering everyone by giving them choices, only to tell you now that winning the war of ideas depends on denying your audience the choice of who to listen to.  And that’s exactly why Anarchists have been crippling themselves with political correctness.   Giving people the choice to continue being oppressed by the enemy or not to continue being oppressed by the enemy undermines the enemy’s position.  But giving people the choice to believe in anything they want does not imbue them with magical powers that will make everything turn out all right.
Making things turn out all right for the people you’re trying to help, and for yourself as a result, depends on giving people what they need to make informed decisions.  If you only make a superficial presentation of your side of the story, you haven’t given them what they need to make informed decisions yet, because their pre-existing ideology is personally meaningful to them, and all you’ve done is to tell them about some ideas that contradict it.  If that’s all you do, what do you think they’re going to do besides ignore your new ideas that contradict their pre-existing ideology?

Since their pre-existing, personally meaningful ideology isn’t compatible with physical reality, unless you challenge their current ideology by making your side of the story equally meaningful to them, you have accomplished exactly nothing.  You haven’t given them a choice, because as far as they can tell, all you’ve done is to disagree with what they feel to be true.  Neither have you given them what they need to make informed decisions, because currently they are not making informed decisions, and you have done nothing to change that.  The people will continue to participate in their suicidal economic system.  That does not prove that you have succeeded in giving them a choice and that they have chosen suicide.  That proves that you have failed to empower them by giving them what they need to make informed decisions.

You may be tempted to argue that at this point I’m trying to tell people what they want.  Not at all.  All of us, like all other animals in the world, have instincts for survival.  If you asked everyone in the world if they wanted to die, it is inconceivable that a majority of people would say yes.  In fact, I think it’s safe to say that the fact that we have a population explosion at all, instead of a worldwide epidemic of mass suicide, is all the proof you need that the majority of people want to live.

Therefore, it is inconceivable that the majority of people in the world right now are participating in a suicidal economic system truly by choice.  Therefore, the only alternative that leaves is that they are making that choice only as a result of not having the information they need to make informed decisions.  So like it or not, giving them that information depends on effectively challenging their current beliefs and systematically seeking and destroying their invalid ideologies.

That means that if people do not start acting differently as a result of your actions, you have failed at your mission.  If you have failed at your mission, go back and figure out why.  The first place to look is at whether or not you succeeded at making your side of the story as personally meaningful to the people as their pre-existing ideology.

Seeking and destroying faulty ideology is not easy.  If you’re progressively minded enough to be reading the third volume of my book, you’re probably squirming in your seat right now at the words “faulty ideology”.  How could you or I or anyone else possibly know so much to be able to judge someone else’s ideology as faulty?  And you sure as hell can’t change people’s ideologies just by telling them they’re faulty.  People have been trying to do that to each other for all of recorded history, and it has never worked.  Here come the Chairman Mao accusations again…

But you’re forgetting something.  One critical difference between me and Chairman Mao (and certainly not the only one) is that Chairman Mao wasn’t the Grand Dragon of Emotional Aikido.
That’s precisely why you have to conduct your interviews of the scientific experts without leaving any room for either of you to insert your own opinions or speculations, without leaving room for your audience to believe you’ve done so, and without leaving room for anyone in the audience to debate you.  You carry out your mission by presenting the facts and making everyone understand that if they asked the same questions, they would get the same answers.  You force the enemy to face the facts, and you leave him nowhere to run.

Then you leave everyone on their own to decide who to listen to.  You leave everyone on their own to wrestle with their own faulty ideology.  You aren’t destroying their ideology; you’re simply giving them what they need to destroy it themselves.  They want to survive, and any other way they try to fit the pieces of the world together is a threat to them.  The only way out is a global cooperative localized organic agricultural economy, in which we learn to live within the physical limitations of the Earth, including the limitations of the energy that’s being supplied by the sun.  You already knew that.  But instead of trying to tell everyone that and to force them to believe you, all you have to do is to force them to face the basic facts that add up to that conclusion.  You don’t have to do anything after that, because those simple facts don’t add up to anything else.  You let the other person wrestle with their current ideology and these simple facts until they figure out a way to live that doesn’t pose an inevitable threat to them.   By the time they’re done, they’re going to believe in global cooperative localized organic agriculture, and they’re going to have done to their ideology whatever they need to do to it to make it stop being faulty.  If they’re Americans, it’s pretty well guaranteed that by the time they’re done, they’ll have destroyed their previous ideology.  Inevitably, their new ideology will bear some superficial resemblances to their old ideology, but in practice it will be a new ideology.  Suddenly the Christian god commanded his children to go forth and build a global cooperative localized organic agricultural economy.  Whatever.

I’ve been hearing lately that conservatives are complaining about what they call the liberal bias on college campuses in America.  That’s just fuel for the fire.  Of course, it’s the enemy who are building the fire.  But the bigger the fire they build, the more spectacular it will be when you put it out with water.

Conservativism, liberalism, and college activism are all bullsh*t, so any conservatives who complain about what you’re doing are just giving you an easy target.  So take advantage of it.
College campuses seem to have a liberal bias because they’re institutes for higher learning.  Conservatives believe in ancient superstitions.  The more people learn about the world, the more they learn that the conservatives’ ancient superstitions aren’t true.  So the only way conservatives can possibly make college campuses seem politically balanced to them would be by preventing people from learning more about how the world works and force everyone to learn less.
The only way conservatives can get any help at this at state universities or governmentally accredited schools would be by convincing government officials to admit publicly that we don’t have a secular government.  At the very best, government officials could issue orders in private that the conservatives’ wishes be carried out, but that would require them to sign their names to government documents that authorize the undermining of public education.  So if your public education starts getting undermined, you know the first place to look…

What can I say?  You win a war by attacking wherever the enemy is most vulnerable.  If the enemy wants to wave one of his most vulnerable points in front of everyone’s faces, he better expect it to be attacked.  The more conservatives kick and scream, the more publicity they create for you.  And the dumber you can make them look.

And with that, I can finally say that you are no longer maggots.  You are marines.  Now it’s time to go forth and engage the enemy on the field of glorious battle.

…With squirt guns.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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Atheism is the use of scientific method to develop philosophical ideology, through the use of observable evidence that produces universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable patterns of cause and effect.   It serves the evolutionary role of religion, but it is different from religion in one fundamental way.  A lot of people assume that Atheists just worship science as a religion, and in all other regards science and gods are interchangeable.  That isn’t even remotely true.
In effect, religion and Atheism both tell a story of the world.  Each story is made up of five parts: the beginning, the past, the present, the future, and the ending.

A religious story is written beginning with the present.  The reason is obvious:  That’s the easiest part of the story to write.

People’s highest priority in life has always been to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.  That means traditionally, people have perceived that the most important part of the story of the world has been the part where they preserve the survival of their DNA as effectively as possible.  So traditionally, the ending of the story is the next part people write.  If you expect to live forever in some sort of an afterlife, preserving the survival of your DNA as effectively as possible is exactly how the story ends.

Now that people have developed two points of reference in the story, two points defines a line.  The next part of the religious story of the world people write is the beginning.  They write that part by comparing the present to the ending of the story, and then extrapolating to figure out how a story with that middle and that ending must’ve begun.

The next step in writing the story is to fill in the past.  Now the people are interpolating to try to figure out how the story must’ve moved from the beginning to the present.

That leaves the future.  That part of the story isn’t written yet.  That part of the story—or at least, some of it—will unfold over the course of the people’s lives.  The people themselves will help tell some of that part of the story.  Now that they have defined all the other parts along the route from the beginning to the end of the story, they have defined what has to happen in the future part of the story to move it from the present to the ending.  And naturally, they feel that helping to move their religious story from the present to the ending is the right thing to do, and that trying to move it in any other direction is wrong.

The problem with a religious story of the world is obvious:  It’s supposed to be a story of the real world, and the people who are using the story are using it to help write the final part of the story.  But three of the four parts they’re starting with are completely fictitious!   So for all intents and purposes, people who use religious stories to define their sense of right and wrong and to decide what course of action they should take in life, are trying to turn the future of the world into a work of fiction that’s loosely based on a true story.

The Atheistic version of the story of the world, in its strictest terms, is written the same way science is studied.

People begin with the present, because as usual, that’s the easiest part of the story to write.
The next step in science is to study how the components of the world interact in the present and then reverse engineer to see how the past created the present.  Now you have two points of reference that are both extracted directly from the physical world.

The next easiest part of the Atheistic story of the world to write is the beginning.  That’s simply a matter of backtracking from the two points of reference to see where they lead.  That’s the basic idea anyway, although it isn’t literally the case in the Atheistic story of the world because lots of different scientists are studying lots of different parts of the world.  The point is, by integrating all the evidence of how the past created the present, we get the Big Bang, the formation of the sun, the formation of the Earth, the origins of life, and evolution.

In strict scientific terms, the next part of the story of the world to write would be the future, to see what the chain of events that has led from the beginning to the past to the present indicates will happen next.  Then the last part of the story to be written would be the ending, by seeing how that chain of events concludes.

This is where the Atheistic story of the world stops being strictly scientific.  We are talking about people who want to survive and reproduce just as badly as religious people do, after all.  Naturally, Atheists want the story of the world to end with their being able to survive and reproduce as effectively as possible.

At this point, the Atheistic story of the world becomes an attempt at a universal scientific theory, and Atheists become engineers of their lives.  The next step in writing the story of the world is to see what the chain of events of the first three parts of the story indicate for the last two parts.  Then Atheists decide whether they like that ending or not.  If they don’t, they think up an ending they would like, and then they determine what they would have to do to alter the chain of events to write a new version of the future that would lead them to the ending they wanted.  There are plenty of endings that people can imagine that aren’t physically possible.  If Atheists discover that the ending they wanted can’t happen, they abandon that ending of the story, look for a new one they like, and see if and how they could make that ending happen.

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A supernatural force is a force that people believe in despite of the fact that no observable evidence has been found to support its existence.  Belief in supernatural forces raises a number of fundamental problems in the physical world.

First of all, the fact that no observable evidence has been found to support the existence of supernatural forces means the evidence can’t be challenged.  The fact that the existence of supernatural forces is impossible to prove means their existence is also impossible to disprove.

That leads to the further problem that if you believe in—meaning attach strong positive emotions to—entities or forces in the world whose existence is impossible to prove or disprove, you render your perception of the world and your decision-making process immune to rational discussion, debate, or analysis.  You are using your ideology as an attempt at a universal scientific theory, but you’re using an ideology that won’t produce accurate predictions, and then you are blocking anyone who has a problem with it from questioning it.  You are using a limited understanding of the world to try to make predictions, and then you are holding this unquestionable supernatural force in reserve to prove that you were right when things go your way, and—inevitably—to prevent anyone from questioning you when things go wrong.

If you insist that the freedom of religion grants you the right to believe in anything you want, you are insisting that you have the right to make stuff up and prevent anyone from disagreeing with you.  Your inability to accurately predict the effects of your actions almost inevitably will have harmful effects on other people—meaning it will threaten their ability to preserve the survival of their DNA.  If you are using your freedom of religion to absolve yourself of the need to make accurate predictions and the need to accept responsibility for the negative effects they have on other people’s lives, then you are using your freedom of religion as a license to be insane.  Then you are trying to use your license to insanity to prevent anyone from taking action to solve the root cause of the problems you’re creating—namely, your flawed perception of the world.

A lot of people insist that the freedom of religion gives them the freedom to attach whatever emotional meaning they want to their life experiences.  It’s inconceivable that anyone could ever be prevented from doing that, whether they did it for religious reasons or for any other reasons. These people are trying, in their own way, to adapt their religious beliefs to full scientific compliance.  They recognize that every single thing in the entire world was created by the force that created them, so they believe that they should study everything in the entire world and how each of the things interact to make the physical universe work the way it does.  That certainly is a good and honest attempt by religious people to solve problems in the world instead of continuing to create them.

There’s just one problem with it:  Your perception of the world is affected by numerous layers of subconsciousness.  Unless you’re a doctor of psychology or something like that, you can’t possibly practice a traditional religion, make strong emotional connections to beliefs in imaginary supernatural powers, and then interact with the world in a way that will be completely unaffected by your beliefs in supernatural powers.  Unless you very specifically deconstruct your belief in the supernatural, it will still affect your perception of the world and your consequent actions subconsciously.

You can see this happening among a lot of Christian activists who are trying to solve problems in the world.  If they agree with me 100% that there are a lot of problems in the world and that if we don’t solve them we’re going to be in serious trouble, but they believe that they have some supernatural force looking over their shoulder to make everything turn out all right, they aren’t going to work hard enough to solve the problems, and then they’re going to say that the fact they couldn’t solve them proves that they weren’t supposed to be solved.  In other words, if you believe that some supernatural force is going to solve 50% of the problem for you, you aren’t going to take 100% of the responsibility for solving it; you’re only going to take 50% responsibility.  You’re going to leave the other 50% up to some imaginary force to solve for you.  And then when that doesn’t work, you’re going to say that whatever happened was the will of your deity.

Of course, when you talk about trends that affect people, some people are affected more than others.  Some people are escaping this trend, some are escaping from it partway and are assuming that they’re escaping from it completely, and some are only telling themselves and other people that they’re escaping from it but aren’t even trying to escape.  But a lot of progressively minded people are trying to escape from it, and as always, the most effective way to play an active role in solving a problem is to learn what the problem is and how it affects you.

In the first book I talked a lot about the Intangible Mass of Cosmic Grooviness.  I also talked about the story of the Christian whose wagon broke an axle, who prayed to his god to fix it, and who couldn’t understand why that didn’t work.  The Intangible Mass of Cosmic Grooviness is the solution to that problem applied to supernatural forces.

As I defined it, the IMCG is a mysterious force at work in the universe that makes things happen for reasons people can’t understand.  You can invoke the IMCG to help you if, and only if, you learn everything there is to learn about your situation and then act upon that information to make the best of your situation.  If you do that, the IMCG might help you out and make things turn out better for you than you thought they could.  Then again, it might not.  But one thing is guaranteed:  If you don’t try to make the best of your situation, the IMCG won’t help you.

As I also have shown you, every religion in the world believes in some manifestation of the IMCG.

By very carefully defining what under what conditions the IMCG will and won’t help you, I have deconstructed the psychologically misleading effects of traditional religious supernatural powers and reconstructed supernatural powers in a purely Atheistic manner.

Science is the ongoing study of the world.  By definition, there are forces at work in the world that we don’t understand yet.

BUT…

There are a lot of forces at work in the world that we do understand, and the interaction of the forces we do understand creates a very solid chain of events that leads from the beginning of the universe to the past and present.  That chain of events predicts immanent disaster on our present course, but it also shows us a way to escape disaster by altering our present course.

The part of the universe that remains unknown to us doesn’t affect us as much or as often as the parts of the universe we do understand—which is why it has been so easy to study some of those things and not the others.  Those rare effects of the unknown parts of the universe are the stuff that miracles are made of.

The relationship between the known and the unknown create an obvious trend in the universe:  Things that affect us greatly and often push us a long way in one direction, and things that affect us rarely push us a small way in another direction.  If you depend on trying to invoke the mysterious miraculous forces of the universe to the point of ignoring the forces that you understand well and that affect you greatly and often (if not constantly), you are asking for disaster.  Whatever force created the universe gave you the intelligence you needed to study the universe and this relationship, realize the problems that come with it, and decide how to act upon that information.  So like I said way back at the beginning of the first book, the force that created the universe has already given you the hands and the intelligence you need to fix your own wagon.

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If you try to build a political or economic system on the belief in invisible, unprovable forces, that can only work if everyone in the society believes in them.  If everyone in the society believes in these supernatural forces, accounting for them politically, legally, and economically is critical to establishing social stability, because if you try to use a political ideology that ignores fundamental things that everyone in your society perceives to be true about the world, they’re never going to cooperate with it, because they’ll never believe your political ideology is going to work.  A supernaturally based political ideology, like all other political ideologies, is an attempt at a universal theory that will accurately predict the outcomes of any course of action your people choose.  If the people in your society perceive that your supposedly scientific theory is incomplete or fundamentally flawed, they aren’t going to believe that your political ideology will produce accurate results, and therefore they won’t see any point in using it.  If they don’t see any point in using it, the only way you’ll be able to get them to use it is by force.  And then they’re going to fight back against you every chance they get—which is the complete opposite of social stability.

If you try to build a political or economic system on supernatural forces that only some people in the society believe in, as far as everyone else in the society will be able to tell, the first group of people are just making stuff up and expecting you to agree with them.  This creates four basic problems.

First of all, since the people who don’t believe in the supernatural forces don’t believe in them, they won’t be able to anticipate how the people who do believe in them are going to act upon that belief.  That’s the antithesis of social stability right there.

Second, if you live your life around one story of the world that’s 80% fictitious, and someone else in your society lives their life around a different story of the world that’s 80% fictitious, then 80% of what each of you perceive to be true about the world is going to conflict, and inevitably the actions you take in life to try to move your story from the present to the ending are going to conflict.  Again, that’s the definition of social instability and everything that comes with it.

Third, the people’s inclusion of supernatural forces in their perception of the world inevitably is going to lead them to make decisions that don’t comply with the observable evidence.  If the evidence indicates that one thing is true about the world and they should pursue a certain course of action to deal with their situation, but they’re adding fictitious variables to that decision-making process, their perception of the situation is going to be fictitious, and so is their perception of the best way to deal with it.

To an Atheist, 2 + 2 = 4.  When a Christian adds two and two together, he also adds in the love of his savior Jesus Christ and everything else that goes along with his traditional story of the world.  So what does the Christian get when he adds two and two together?  Whatever it is, it sure as hell isn’t four.

That example is simplified to the point of absurdity, but it serves its purpose.  When an Atheist combines two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, he gets a water molecule.  When a Christian combines two atoms of hydrogen with one atom of oxygen and the love of his savior Jesus Christ, what does he think he’s creating?  And what further action is he going to take on that belief?  Whatever he’s creating isn’t water.  Maybe it’s holy water, but even if it is, the properties of that holy water are not going to be different from the properties of any other water in any measurable way.

Now here’s where this example turns direly practical:  The entire global environment is one gigantic chemical reaction.  If an Atheist studies how that chemical reaction works, what he sees is what he gets.  If a Christian studies the same chemical reaction, and every time he adds 2 plus 2, or combines two atoms of hydrogen with one atom of water, he also adds in the love of his savior Jesus Christ, the results of his study are going to be completely useless for accurately predicting anything.

Fourth, if the majority of people in a society believe in a fictitious story of the world and act upon their perceptions of the world, they can force everyone else to cooperate with their political system, even if those people are Atheists whose story of the world is capable of making accurate predictions.  That majority of people create the sociological forces that propel the society, even if the destination those people are trying to propel it to is completely fictional.

This is exactly what we’ve had in America to this point.  If everyone in the society believes in the same story of the world, it doesn’t matter if the story is 80% fictitious.  If 90% or 80% or 70% or any other large majority of people in your society believe in a fictional story of the world, when that large majority then acts upon what they believe to be true about the world, as a sociological force they will be unstoppable.  They will elect government officials according to that belief, they will pass laws according to that belief, they will interact with their environmental economy according to that belief, they will film movies and TV shows according to that belief, they will report the evening news according to that belief, and they will operate the public education system according to that belief.

Here in America, any politician who wants to win elections has no choice but to construct political ideology that’s compatible with Christian ideology, even though Christian ideology isn’t compatible with the laws of physics.  Those politicians then pass laws that uphold the majority religious perception of right and wrong, and oppress everyone else, despite the fact that as members of the same species we all have equally valid reasons for being who we are.   Then we get laws against things like gay marriage, even though there is no observable evidence to indicate that gay marriage is wrong, and the majority’s reasons for perceiving it to be wrong are completely fictitious. (On the contrary, gays, like everyone else, are Homo sapiens who are attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them, and they aren’t causing any harm to anyone else, which factors the word “wrong” out of any scientifically valid decision-making process.)  Then the public also creates an economic system where their collective perceptions of supply and demand are fictitious, so in order to get a job, buy food, and otherwise survive in an economic system like that, you have no choice but to work and otherwise conduct your economic transactions according to what the majority believes to be true about the world, just to survive and keep yourself safe.  You alternative is to move as far away from civilization as you can get and start growing your own food organically, and have nothing to fight back with when land developers decide they want to pave over your farm and build a Wal-Mart on it.

This leads to two important conclusions:

First of all, here in America we’re supposed to have a secular government, but not one single time in history have we elected an Atheist for president.  Every single president that has ever been elected in America has been a Christian.  Bill Clinton was probably the furthest removed from that, and he was either an Agnostic-friendly Christian or a Christian-oriented Agnostic.  That means that the secular government of the mightiest economic and military power the world has ever seen has never once been presided over by a person who was even capable of conducting his personal life in a secular fashion, free from belief in supernatural forces.  So now that our economy and political system are breaking down, people all over the world perceive us to be the biggest threat to global security, the environment is trying to kill us, and nobody knows why it’s happening or what to do about it, all I can say is:

What the f*ck did you expect?

The second conclusion is much simpler, but much more profound:  Under a political system founded on a religious story of the world, the very act of studying science is an act of political dissent.  Throughout these books I’ve been telling you things that conflict with what the U.S. Constitution says we’re supposed to believe.

So if I end up in prison, you’ll know why.

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To this point I’ve talked about supernatural forces as though they’re all religious in nature.  Traditionally they have been, but they don’t need to be.

A supernatural force, as I said, is a force that exists beyond the reach of empirical observation, which people believe to affect the world in ways they can’t predict or scientifically define.  As long as those qualifications are met, you are talking about a supernatural force, regardless of people’s reasons for believing in it.

The U.S. Constitution is founded on the belief that people are inherently good.  The Founding Fathers believed that for religious reasons, and they didn’t have enough evidence available to construct a political ideology on any other explanation for human behavior.  So they tried to apply that religious belief in a secular manner in writing the Constitution.  Now, anyone who has grown up in America and takes it for granted that our form of government is a good idea is depending on a supernatural force of good to make our political system function.  And it isn’t working.

(Granted, people can believe in a supernatural force of good for their own religious reasons.  The original belief in the supernatural force of good was also religious in origin.  But if you grew up like I did, being taught that the United States has the best form of government anyone has ever thought of, you depend, for secular reasons, on the intervention of a supernatural force of good to make the U.S. Constitution work in the way it’s supposed to work.  And when it doesn’t work, you don’t know why or what to do about it.  And the whole reason you believe in a secular supernatural force of good is because no one ever taught you enough about the evidence that exists in the world to notice the discrepancy or to see any way to solve it.  You assumed you were being taught those things because you trusted your teachers and because the whole point of public education is to teach kids things they’re going to need to know as adults.  By seeming to do that but neglecting to actually do it, your teachers—and the government that employs them—wrote an anti-information package into your brain.)

The U.S. Constitution worked well for a foundation for a civilization for a long time because the Founding Fathers understood a lot about human behavior.  But in the last book I told you how any political ideology that’s more than a few years old is founded on an incomplete understanding of human behavior—and by that I mean an understanding of human behavior that shows how the past created the present and that can be used to make accurate predictions about where that chain of events leads from here.  Every existing political ideology worked well in the conditions in which it was founded—which is why people decided to use it in the first place—but that was only an understanding of human behavior within those living conditions.   As the living conditions of the society change, the relationship between human behavior and the living conditions also changes.  When that happens, your political ideology stops yielding accurate predictions about the results of people’s actions, that leads to social instability, that leads to a police state to try to force everyone to keep cooperating with the political system, and then everything that follows from that.

The U.S. Constitution served us well from the birth of our nation through the Civil War through two world wars through the Great Depression through the Civil Rights Movement through the Vietnam War through the end of the Cold War.

Did you notice how many times the word “war” appeared in that sentence?   And lest I need remind you, the birth of our nation followed close on the heels of the Revolutionary War, the growth of our nation depended on our winning a 200-year-long war against the Native Americans, and the only reason the Civil Rights Movement didn’t turn into a violent conflict was because of Dr. King—it sure as hell wasn’t because of Malcolm X or because of the White southerners who kept trying to stop the Civil Rights Movement with clubs, fire hoses, and attack dogs.

So what is this supernatural force of “good” that has carried us through all these conflicts but which is abandoning us now?  As I defined it in the first book, “good” means “whatever makes your society function”.   The people of every culture in the world have discovered that they can eliminate a lot of conflict from their societies by teaching people, and especially children, that acting in whatever way people need to act to make their society function—meaning maintain social stability, for all the reasons social stability is important—is good, and acting in any way that detracts from that is evil.

So what has been the critical change in our living conditions that has made the Founding Fathers’ understanding of human behavior stop working, and the political ideology they founded stop yielding accurate predictions?  From the end of the Revolutionary War to the end of the Cold War Americans faced constant threats from outside forces.  First it was the British twice, then it was the Native Americans, then it was the Germans, then the Germans again and the Japanese, then it was the Russians.  Along the way there were also Mexicans, Confederates rebels (or Union Yankees, depending on where you live), Spaniards, poverty, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Black protestors.

So what did Americans do?  They worked together to keep themselves safe from outside forces, just like people have always done.   The Founding Fathers believed in a supernatural force of good, and as long as we were threatened by outside forces, that seemingly-supernatural force of good seemed to remain in effect, because we kept cooperating to protect ourselves from outside threats, we kept winning, and we kept assuming that proved the force of good was on our side.
The Founding Fathers didn’t realize it, but that supernatural force of good they believed in was being created by a combination of Americans’ common  goals, Americans’ common cultural values, and the outside threats other people were posing.  (That is, even if the “threats” they posed were threats to our cultural values that said we were the rightful owners of everything we could conquer.)  Collectively, Americans wanted the same basic things, they had been taught to believe they should work together, and they were threatened by people whose goals were mutually exclusive to their own.  By writing the Constitution with the assumption that this supernatural force of good existed, the Founding Fathers founded a political system that depended on all three of those things remaining in place forever.

Over the course of American history we’ve had a number of internal conflicts, but every country has those.  At those times, some Americans ceased to have the same goals as other Americans.  At some of those times some Americans had different cultural values as other Americans.  But most of the time, the people on both sides of the conflict still shared some goals and values, and the goals and values they shared still outweighed the goals and values that divided them.  So we settled our differences like civilized people.  The survival of our country was never threatened, so as far as anyone could tell, that supernatural force of good remained in effect.

That even applies to the Civil Rights Movement, which was probably the second largest threat to the survival of our political system in our country’s history.  America was founded by White men, the most politically powerful of whom owned slaves.  The Founding Fathers and the majority of Americans at the time had the same values and the same goals, and that was enough for the foundation of a political system.  But Dr. King and his followers didn’t share the same values as the Founding Fathers, and the overall goals of the Founding Fathers (or most of them, anyway) were mutually exclusive to the goals of Dr. King and his followers.  But Dr. King still had some of the same values and some of the same goals, so he never saw that it should be necessary for the Blacks to set up their own independent country here in America.  It was Malcolm X who tried that.

The big exception to the three-part recipe for the seemingly supernatural force of good making America function, of course, was the Civil War.  That was the one time in our history that the differences between the goals and cultural values of two groups of Americans broke our country apart.  At that time, the differences between the goals and values of the two sides outweighed the goals and values they still shared plus the threat posed by outside forces.  So the Confederates decided they would be better off on their own.  But what happened then?  The force of good prevailed that time because the North won the war.  We define good as whatever keeps our society functioning; keeping our society functioning depends on keeping our society in one piece; and keeping our society in one piece is exactly what the Northerners were fighting for.  But they didn’t win because they had a supernatural force of good on their side, they won the same way anyone ever wins a war—by directing physical force against their enemies more effectively than their enemies directed physical force against them.

But finally, about 200 years after the Constitution was written, the Cold War ended.  And with it, the supernatural force of good the Founding Fathers depended on to keep America intact, and that had seemed to do the job for 200 years, ceased to exist.

Over the course of two centuries, people had come to America from all over the world, bringing their different cultural values with them.  Other people had developed their own cultural values here in America.  Although we still have a lot of cultural values in common, we have a lot fewer cultural values in common than the European colonists who founded our country had.

Over the course of two centuries, Americans had developed different goals also.  We’ve always had different goals, but at least our differing goals have fit together well enough to keep from creating a lot of conflict.  Today we still have a lot of goals in common, but we have more differences now, and our differences don’t fit together as well.  That creates more conflict.

And finally, for the first time in our history, there was no outside force that posed a threat to our entire country.  That was the deathblow to the supernatural force of good that seemed to be making our country function.  Now that we no longer collectively perceived a need to cooperate with each other for our mutual protection, collectively we perceived ourselves to be able to afford to work for our individual goals.  We have a lot of conflicting goals now, along with conflicting cultural values, so each of us working toward our own goals has created a lot of conflict within our own country, and that supernatural force of good is no longer intervening.

Even if we still had the same cultural values and compatible goals we had back when the United States was founded, the removal of that outside threat would still have removed our need to cooperate with each other for our mutual protection.  With our shared cultural values and compatible goals we could’ve survived the end of an outside threat temporarily, but the removal of that outside threat would’ve let the conflicts among our goals grow.  Then our conflicting goals would’ve been the death-stroke to the supernatural force of good the survival of our political system depended upon.  As any Socialist or Communist would be glad to tell you now, the existence of the Soviet Union kept the Capitalists to a relatively civilized competition, because if they’d practiced outrightly oppressive competition, they would’ve driven a lot of people over to the side of the Communists.  But now that the Soviet Union is gone, the Capitalists have switched from civilized to oppressive competition, because there’s nothing left to stop them from getting away with it.

This is not the first, but the second time Americans have lived through an era of an empire collapsing from within due to the conflicting goals of its members.  The first was the American Revolution, remember?  The British Empire was the undisputed superpower of our part of the world anyway, so they could tax us as much as they wanted and there was nothing we could do about it.  The British had already driven the French out of North America, and the Spanish colonies were way down in the Caribbean and South America.  There were various Native American nations that could help us a little, but the British had already established alliances with some Native Americans too, which was how they’d driven the French out of North America in the first place.  And no matter how many alliances with Native Americans we could’ve made, that still wouldn’t’ve changed the fact that they didn’t have a combination of material resources that would let them compete with the British—which is, you know, the whole reason we were colonizing their land in the first place.  So what did the death stroke to the British Empire in the thirteen colonies turn out to be?  Internal conflict caused by the incompatible goals of its members.

At the end of the Cold War, America was the mightiest military and economic superpower the world had ever seen.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the last major outside threat to America vanished, and was not replaced by another one.

As Tom Friedman showed in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, with the end of the Cold War the driving sociological force of America became globalization—Capitalist imperialism, in other words.  For ten years there was nothing else to oppose it.  So what happened?  Americans went right on attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.  Now that they didn’t have to work together anymore to keep themselves safe from the Russians, they could afford to turn on each other.

Now the greedy, self-obsessed Capitalist aristocrats could afford to divide and conquer and start treating their own people like serfs—just like the British aristocrats did.   This is not to say that Capitalist aristocrats weren’t trying to manipulate everyone else for their personal benefit all along, but it is to say that for the first 200 years of American history they had to be subtle about it, or at least, subtle enough to avoid provoking a revolution (if you can call institutionalized slavery and racial segregation “subtlety”).  For the 50 years of the Cold War especially, the American Capitalists couldn’t afford to oppress other Americans directly.  For 70 years the Soviet Union served as the balance of power our own political system depended upon.  How many AK47s do you think the Soviets would’ve smuggled into America if Malcolm X had asked for them?

So what do we have now?  Our political system is no longer of, by, and for the people, now it’s of, by, and for whoever controls enough material wealth to bribe politicians and buy out TV networks.  For 200 years we depended on human behavior to be motivated by some sort of supernatural force of good, and we were wrong, so now we face problems we didn’t expect and that we have nothing in place to deal with.  We have a two-party political system where the winner takes all.  Democrats and Republicans only need to come in first in a two-contestant race, and they can’t win without Capitalist aristocrats funding their campaigns.  So both parties have to sell their Capitalist sponsors whatever laws they want, and then only need to appear marginally better than the other candidate as far as the voters can tell.

Like I said, under a political system built on beliefs in supernatural forces, the act of studying science is an act of political insurrection.  So what the hell? I might as well wave my fist in the air and shout in a silly voice, “The workers control the means of production!  You have nothing to lose but your chains!”

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Throughout the first book I danced along a line of scientific reason and religious tolerance, saying that one religion works just as well as any other, as long as the followers of any religion conscientiously separate the things that are known about the world from their beliefs about things that can’t possibly be known about the world, and from their emotional attachments to things that aren’t known about the world yet but are possible to discover scientifically.

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, doesn’t waste his time on subtlety like that.  His book covers pretty much everything Atheists have to say about the role of religion in the modern world.  As he says in the epilogue to the paperback edition, “If there’s another book out there that takes a harder swing at religion, I don’t know about it.”  So I sent him a copy of my Volume I.

So as usual, here’s a general overview of what he has to say, and if you’re interested in learning more, that’s where you can find it.

He starts with the basic criticism of religion that I’ve heard a lot of Atheists make.  Religion is made possible by the fear of death.  It serves a lot of other purposes too, but those purposes could all be served independently of religion.

When the younger tribespeople brought the body of their dead friend back to their camp to ask the wise old proto-human what happened to him, their fear of death was exactly what they were acting upon.  So the wise old proto-human thought of something to tell them so they’d stop worrying.  That’s simple enough.  So it’s no surprise that religion and spirituality are universal constants of humanity.

Now I think it’s worth asking:  If the people wondered about something else later, and hadn’t already established a religion to answer the question of what happened to people after they died, would they invent a religion then to answer the new question?  Or would they look harder at the world around them before they invented their own answer?   Or would they make up a myth about it to answer the question that didn’t need to connect directly to any other myth?

Why does the sun rise in the east and set in the west?  Is it because some almighty entity wills it to be so?  If you believe that, that’s an answer to the question.  Once you establish the idea of an almighty entity that wills things to be so, you automatically make that the easiest answer for everything.  So your desire to feel like the world makes sense has now become an obstacle to your creative thought.

Maybe the Earth is round, and the sun is a big ball of fire that circles around it.  That isn’t true, but it’s closer to the truth than the almighty entity explanation.  That’s not to say that a person who believed in an almighty entity couldn’t conclude that the Earth was round and the sun was a big ball of fire that circled it because an almighty entity willed it to be so.  But that is to say that once you decide that an almighty entity willed something to be so, any answer you come up with will work just as well as any other.

If you invoke the will of an almighty entity to move the sun across the sky, you could get away with believing the Earth is flat.  Since an almighty entity is making the sun move in the first place, you don’t need to experiment with different explanations to try to find the best way to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.  Since the world looks flat to you, and you’ve decided that an infinitely powerful force is making the sun move, you’ve granted yourself the luxury of believing the rest of the pieces of the puzzle fit together in whatever way they need to to make the simplest explanation you could see be the right one.

If it sounds like I’ve just told you President Bush’s explanation for everything, that’s a big reason Mr. Harris and I are writing our books.

What if the sun is a god who rides through the sky in a golden chariot drawn by lions?  That’s the ancient Greek myth of Apollo, the sun god.  Does he need to do anything else?  Or when you see the sun rise are you just going to wave and say, “Hi, Apollo, how are you this morning?”  If you’re here and he’s there, do you need to have anything more to do with each other than that?  He makes the sun shine on you, and if he makes it shine too brightly, he could ruin your crops, or make you die of dehydration in the desert.  But he’s a god and you’re just a mortal, so he can do things like that.  So maybe you’ll believe that he’s going to do what he wants and you just have to learn to live your life around whatever he’s going to do.  Or maybe you’ll try praying to him to get him to make the sun shine on your crops just the right amount.  Some people did one and some people did the other.  The point is, by inventing this myth without attaching it to your beliefs about death, you haven’t connected the entity that controls the sun to your life or death in all circumstances.   So whatever you believe to be true about the sun is not going to be as all-pervasive to your perception of the world as your beliefs about death.

After a religion is founded as an escape clause to life, there are two basic routes it can take.  Mr. Harris focuses on one of them, because he’s focusing on the way religion affects us here in America, and only one of them affects us here in America.  So to be fair, I’ll tell you the other route first, because it does apply to other people in the world.  Not to mention, it’s a lot simpler.

I’ve heard a lot about Native Americans, and their general history, culture, and beliefs, for a number of reasons.  For one, I’m related to some.  For another, I live on their traditional land, so the way I see it, I’d better try to get a sense of who these people are and why they disagree with Colonial Americans about so many things.  For another, they’re indigenous people, like my own ancestors were the indigenous people of the British Isles, but my ancestors were conquered by the Christians long before the Native Americans were, so Native Americans’ cultures (the ones that survived, anyway) are a lot more intact than ours was, which is why I and a lot of other Pagans find that learning about other indigenous people’s cultures helps us to reconstruct our own.  And finally, the simple fact that they’re people who believe something different from what Colonial Americans believe, and they live right here among us, makes it a good place to find new ideas that Colonial Americans hadn’t thought of.  And as usual, the more you learn about anything, including the more perspectives on a situation you learn about, the more choices of action you give yourself.

I should add that a lot of Native Americans, and people in general, are skeptical to science because they assume it’s just going to be turned into another way for Colonial Americans to try to prove they know so much about the world that the stupid savages deserved to be conquered.  Well political correctness won’t solve that problem, and fashionable ignorance definitely  won’t solve it.  Native Americans and their supporters are correct in saying that any kind of science that people claim to prove that a certain ethnic group is dumber than another ethnic group, or that certain people deserved to be conquered is wrong, but that won’t prevent your enemies from trying to use it against you anyway.  This is a war of ideas we’re in, and if you ever want to win the war, you’re going to do it by systematically seeking and destroying every single part of the enemy’s ideology.

So:  How does a group of people create a religion as an escape clause to life, and then keep from turning into the United States?

I’ve heard a lot of sayings Native American leaders made while they were being conquered by the Colonial Americans, about Christians waging wars against people for not believing in the right god.  They say, basically, “We only wage wars over Earthly concerns.  We don’t wage wars over matters of the Great Spirit.  We leave those things up to him.”

You remember that extensive network of trading routes I told you about in the last book?  In northern California, some Native Americans believed that if they walked past a rock lying in the trail without picking it up and moving it off the trail, they would go to their version of hell.  They turned keeping their trails clear into a part of their religious morality.  They taught their people to feel that doing what people needed to do to make their society function was right, and not doing what they needed to do to make their society function was wrong.

Quite simply, if you figure out enough about how the world works to keep your people alive, and you don’t destroy your environment, it doesn’t matter why you believe the world works the way it does.  Indigenous people were not inherently smarter or dumber than anyone else; they were Homo sapiens just like everyone else.  They were right about some things they figured out, and they were wrong about other things, just like everyone else was.

The difference between indigenous people and imperial people is that the indigenous people never developed to a technological or economic level that let them move energy and matter around in their environment so fast that they could destroy their environment before they even realized what was happening.  It was their technological level, not their religion, that made them environmental saints.  The only way they had to destroy their environment was so slow that they would recognize the mistake they were making before it was too late to change their minds, and turn back while they still could.  If you have to cut down trees with a stone axe, and then use a stone axe to cut the tree up into firewood, canoes, tent poles, spears, and whatever else you need, you’re never going to have time to cut down your entire forest, because in the meantime you also have to use stone tools to catch your food, make your clothes, raise a family, and all the other things people do.  And doing all of those things with stone tools is harder than doing them with metal tools.  So if you tried to cut down your entire forest with a stone axe, you’d have to devote your entire life to it, and then you’d starve to death and you wouldn’t have kids.  So the people who survived would be the ones who thought of something else to spend their time doing.

There were exceptions to this, like the people of Easter Island who cut down their entire forest and turned their island into a grassland.  But the simple fact that so much of North and South America had forests on them when the Colonial Americans came proves that most indigenous people who lived in forests didn’t  make that mistake.

So the alternate version of religion that Mr. Harris doesn’t talk about, and that unfortunately doesn’t apply to us here in America, is that if you create a religion as an escape clause to life, then figure out everything else about the world that you need to figure out to make a life for yourself, and then weave it all together to create a cohesive story of how the world works that will be easy to remember, but you never separate yourself from the natural cycles of the world so much that you have time to, or can afford to, imagine things are true about the world that contradict the evidence you can see all around you, what you end up with is an escape clause to life that isn’t scientific but is similar enough to science that it leads people to perceive the world in ways that are scientifically valid, or mostly scientifically valid at least, and that only differ from science superficially.  As I’ve said, a religious ideology is an attempt to write a scientific theory for the entire world, because it’s an attempt to figure out a pattern of cause and effect that will make accurate predictions about everything in the world.  That means that anyone who creates a religion that does yield accurate predictions about everything that can be observed in the world, has succeeded in discovering an all-inclusive scientific theory for everything in the world.  Then they’ve attached a few beliefs about things that can’t be measured scientifically, to answer a few more questions they had to answer to make their ideology feel complete to them.  So technically, that makes their religion not a science, but something that’s similar enough to science that it functions as a science within the living conditions of the people who discovered it.  But their goal was not to study science anyway.  Their goal was to discover a cohesive and all-encompassing ideology that would yield accurate predictions about everything they could observe.  And that’s exactly what they did.

So here’s the first scientific argument that destroys any argument imperial people try to make that knowing more about science proves they’re smarter than everyone else:  Every culture of people in the world has a creation myth, and every culture’s creation myth is scientifically invalid.  If you’re a Colonial American and you think that Native Americans are stupid for having a scientifically invalid creation myth, the only thing that their having a scientifically invalid creation myth proves is that they’re people just like you.  Scientifically invalid creation myths are a universal constant of humanity.  That makes having scientifically invalid creation myths an important thing in its own way, but not for reasons you thought it was.  Scientifically invalid creation myths are yet another piece of common ground that everyone in the world shares.

Now here’s the second and more complicated scientific argument against science being proof of ethnic intellectual superiority: If you really want to talk about who knows more about how the world works than who, start by looking at who’s destroying the world faster than who.  If you’re using science to kill yourself, you obviously don’t understand sh*t about science, because healthy people don’t try to kill themselves.  Entire countries of healthy people definitely don’t try to kill themselves.  If you are using science in a way that the science itself says is going to kill you, then you are obviously not acting upon what the science indicates to be true.  One possible explanation is that you’re insane, which disproves the possibility that you benefited anyone by conquering them, or that you’re smarter than anyone else.  The only other possible explanation is that you’re depending on something else intervening to prevent the science from working the way the science says it’s going to work.  And if you do that, whatever you’re practicing is not science.  And really, no matter what you call it, believing in things that aren’t true to the point of killing yourself is a form of insanity.

Having explained all of that, it makes a good point of reference to show you how the other version of religion, which Mr. Harris devotes his book to, turned from a practical solution to a particular problem into a gigantic cultural graveyard spiral.

To start with, this second group of religious people want a religion that will work just like the one the indigenous religious people wanted:  A cohesive and all-encompassing ideology that yields accurate predictions about everything they can observe in the world.  Back when they were indigenous hunter-gatherers too, their religions would’ve worked just like everyone else’s.

But then their ancestors settled in Mesopotamia, or China, or some other part of the world that had excellent growing conditions, and they developed agriculture.  They broke themselves free of the natural cycles of the world to the point that as societies now they could afford to imagine things were true about the world that weren’t actually true.  Some individuals had the time to imagine these things, many other individuals didn’t have time to notice that the evidence they could observe all around them indicated that they weren’t true, and for everyone involved the relevant evidence became a lot harder or impossible to recognize because by farming they were having bigger and more complicated effects on their environment than they were before.  So now the people could change their environments so fast that by the time the results caught up with them it would be too late to undo the damage they’d done, but they were also so much more physically powerful than the people around them that they could force other people to suffer the results.  If farmers burned out their topsoil, they didn’t need to figure out why, because they could just go conquer their hunter-gatherer neighbors and take their topsoil—along with the rest of their land.  So they could afford to believe in the first thing they noticed about the world, and to be so arrogant as to believe that the fact they believed it to be true proved that it must be true, and that supernatural forces were intervening by any amount necessary to make the other pieces of the puzzle fit together.

If they were the most physically powerful civilization in the area, there were no consequences for believing in things that weren’t true, because nobody could conquer them.  Since no one could conquer them, they had no need to outsmart anyone.  Since they knew how to produce their own food more efficiently than the environment could produce it for them, they could conquer their environment too… at least, temporarily.  That meant there was no need for them to expend the effort to figure out a more complete way to fit together all the pieces of evidence they could observe, if that way wasn’t the most obvious.  So they could afford to believe the Earth was flat and that they were superior to everyone else, and leave it up to the almighty power that created the world to fill in the holes in their logic.

In fact, using the explanations for the world that seemed the most obvious would benefit them now that they were the most physically powerful group of people in the area, because using the explanation for the world that was the easiest for everyone to understand created social stability.  It created political stability by getting everyone to agree that what they were doing was going to work.  It created economic stability by getting everyone to agree that what they were doing was going to produce the most favorable ratio of benefit-to-effort.  Ultimately, it created evolutionary stability (in the short term, at least) by keeping everyone surviving and reproducing as effectively as possible.  I’ve got a lot more to say about the importance of evolutionary stability later in the chapter.  The point is, as the most physically powerful group of people in their area, the easiest way for them to conquer everyone else was to get all their people to cooperate with each other.  That meant that collectively, the most effective means for everyone to preserve the survival of their DNA was to be dumber than everyone else around them.  If you invented an ideology that pandered to the lowest common denominator, you could get all of your people to work together and overwhelm everyone else with brute force.  And that’s exactly what we have in America right now.    If you tried to create an ideology that was hard for a lot of people to understand, and then you made your political and economic decisions based on that, you would get a lot of social upheaval.  Al Gore tried to get elected president by proving to everyone how smart he was, and it didn’t do him any good, because George W. beat him with fashionable dumbness.  (Or at least, George W. came close enough to winning that no one could sort out the mess in time.  Whatever really happened in the 2000 elections, it was not a decisive victory for Al Gore.)  If you use an ideology that’s hard for a lot of people to understand, and create a lot of social upheaval within your group, you can’t conquer everyone else as easily, and the people you’re conquering can fight back a lot more effectively.  Like I said, this is exactly what we have in America right now.
So here’s where it all went wrong:  We started out with a religious escape clause to life, just like everyone had.  We were afraid of something happening, so we invented a way to feel like we could escape it.   Then in order to help remember other important things, we wove everything we needed to remember together into one cohesive and all-encompassing ideology.  But at the center of that ideology was something we’d made up.

Making up a story about what was going to happen to you after you die didn’t affect anything in the world, apart from making you stop being afraid of dying.  But then people attached their morality to their story about what would happen to them after they died.  That worked in the short run by creating a tangible threat that would befall people if they broke the rules.  This was the easiest way to enforce your morality, because you were teaching everyone that they were being watched by someone who could punish them, all the time.

But now that you’ve taught people to connect the idea of doing certain things in the physical world with the idea of what’s going to happen to them after they die, you’ve introduced fictional information to their information packages.  That means that now fictional information is going to go into their decision-making process.

There’s a saying among scientists:  “Garbage in, garbage out.”  It refers to the fact that if you use the wrong information in a calculation, you’re going to get the wrong answer.  So there’s no point in using information if you aren’t sure that it’s right.  So it goes for any decision you make in life.  If you make your decisions based on fictional information, like that Santa Claus can see you when your sleeping and knows when you’re awake, or that if you drive your car recklessly and plunge it off a bridge Superman will save you, or whatever, you’re going to take action that doesn’t correspond with how the physical world actually works.

An indigenous fisherman who moves rocks out of trails on fear of going to hell isn’t taking any actions that conflict with the way the world actually works in any meaningful way.  The rock being moved off the trail is not going to affect anything else.  And the fisherman who moved the rock is still standing out in the middle of the same forest he’s lived in all his life, where he can watch how the world works all around him.  He doesn’t have a technological level that enables him to conquer anyone else or the environment easily, so he can survive and reproduce most effectively by being smart, instead of dumb.  That means using his intelligence and thinking about things until he figures out the easiest way for all the pieces of a puzzle to fit together, instead of jumping at the first thing that springs to mind and assuming that must prove it’s right.  It could be possible for someone else to brainwash him into believing that the world works differently than it really does, but considering that he has direct access to the world, and has for his entire life, it would require so much effort for someone to brainwash him that way that it’s inconceivable that it would ever happen (or at most, it happened very rarely).  Hence the Native Americans’ saying that they fight wars over Earthly matters and leave matters of the Great Spirit up to him to decide.

The trick is that with the development of agriculture in Mesopotamia, China, and everywhere else it was developed independently, the farmers gained everything they needed to completely destroy their balance with the natural world—but without realizing it.  This was a very delicate balance, which didn’t take much to throw off.  All that was needed was for people to learn how to produce food a lot more efficiently than the environment could produce it.  When they started cultivating fields, they started destroying the natural cycles of the environment.  And when they started using all that food to feed a lot more children—meaning have a lot more children—they put events into motion that would affect the environment at an exponential rate, but only generation by generation.

Now that the people are no longer standing in forests that they’ve lived in all their lives, and they have to work so hard to earn their livings, just so they can support more people who don’t live in the same forests all their lives and who sit around writing fictional stories for how the world works, it’s a lot easier for the people who invent the stories to teach them to the peasants who produce the food.  Now their stories aren’t producing accurate results, but it’s taking so long for the effects of their actions to reach them that they have no way of telling that the events that are befalling them now were set into motion by their own actions—or their ancestors’ actions. So when they burn out their topsoil and turn their farmland to desert, they make up another story about how the almighty power they believe in must be punishing them for something.  And then they go conquer someone else’s land and over farm that too.

Now, 10,000 years later, we have city planning commissioners adding 2 plus 2 plus the love of their Savior Jesus Christ, and not getting 4 for an answer, so they can’t figure out why their cities are facing water shortages.  Or why their cities are getting destroyed by hurricanes.  Or whatever.
But here’s the next problem:  The meaning of my very own words “people not taking actions that correspond with the way the physical world actually works”.  Religious people always ask, “But how do you know our actions don’t correspond with the way the physical world actually works?”
Since the people’s religion is built around the belief in an entity that decides the fates of their souls after their deaths, they have placed the existence of this entity safely on the other side of the wall of death.  Since it isn’t possible for us to observe what does or doesn’t happen in the afterlife with any degree of reliability, these religious people have completely insulated their religious entities from critical scrutiny.  By definition, the existence of these entities is not provable, which means they aren’t disprovable  either.

Another big wall of unobservability is what happened before the universe began, and another is how the story of the world will end.  So inevitably, religious people populate these places with their imaginary entities too, and there’s nothing anyone can do to prove they’re just making stuff up.  So when they ask, “how do you know our actions don’t correspond with the way the physical world actually works?” they’ve asked a question that isn’t physically possible for you to answer conclusively.  They know this.  And they use that to their advantage.

Now what do we have?   A complete discontinuity in the way we perceive the world.  Or at least, a complete discontinuity in the way we’re allowed to perceive the world in social settings.

Since people have built so much up around their beliefs in what happens to them after they die, and made such strong emotional attachments to their beliefs, and have been doing this at least since the beginning of recorded history and probably longer, now everything in the world falls into one of two categories:  things people believe in for religious reasons, and everything else.

Anything that falls in the everything else category you can discuss as rational people.  How often should you change the oil in your car?   What’s the ratio of the radius of a circle to its circumference?  What’s the gestation time for a baby elephant?  What was Harrison Ford’s first movie role?  What day did Ronald Reagan die?  How much should you water your tomato plants?  What’s the best life insurance policy to get?  Whatever.  The answers to some of those questions are so objective and straightforward they can be looked up in an encyclopedia.  Even the ones that don’t have a single definitive answer leave room for rational discussion.

On the other hand, all the things in the world that fall into the category of religious beliefs aren’t open to rational discussion.  But is that any surprise?  These people are already making strong emotional attachments to imaginary ideas.  The biggest reason you can’t discuss these things rationally is because it’s already too late to discuss them rationally.

Now, for the sake trying to maintain social stability, people’s religious beliefs are insulated from question in polite conversation, in the same way that the entities that serve as the foundations of these beliefs are insulated from critical examination.  Now people say things like, “Well, that’s his religious belief, so you just have to respect it.”  Have to, according to who, exactly?  According to the person’s imaginary almighty entity?  Or according to the majority of people in the society who believe that chocolate ice cream is the best?  Or, rather, agree that the person’s religious beliefs should be respected either because they share them or because they prefer to maintain social stability than to question them?

Now we’ve created this sociological force that supposedly renders laws of physics inoperable under certain conditions.  This sociological force is intended by those who use it to ingrain this division into the minds of each individual person—although it works on some people a lot better than on others.  You, and I, and everyone else in America, are supposed to separate everything in our minds into the categories of “religious beliefs” and “everything else”.   If we do, we (supposedly) invalidate the laws of physics in certain situations ourselves, without needing to have that invalidation forced upon us by our peers.

This division within our minds creates two separate information packages for dealing with reality.  Even if we don’t fall subject to this psychological division personally, we are forced to use two separate information packages in talking with other people to define what we are and aren’t allowed to talk about.  And why?  Because people who have made strong emotional attachments to imaginary ideas will feel personally offended if you question them.

If I say to you, “I’m in Arizona right now,” and then tell you, “I’m in West Virginia right now,” both of those statements can’t possibly be true at the same time under any conditions.  So you would say something like, “Make up your mind—which state are you in?”

But if you were a religious person and you said, “I believe our young people should be encouraged to learn about science,” and then say, “I don’t believe our young people should learn about evolution,” which one is it?  Evolution is science.  You can’t teach people about science without teaching them about evolution.  You can teach them about some science without teaching them about evolution, but that’s not what you said.  You said, “I believe our young people should be encouraged to learn about science.”  The only way you can exclude evolution from that statement is by believing that evolution isn’t science.  Evolution is studied in the same way all other science is studied, and anyone who studies evolution would tell you they’re studying science.  If you were just one person who decided that evolution wasn’t science, I or anyone else could say, “Bullsh*t, evolution is science.”  But if you’ve adopted a religious ideology that’s been concocted over the course of thousands of years, by people building up a lot of ideas around the idea of an almighty entity who decides the fates of everyone’s souls after their deaths, and you’ve made strong emotional attachments to these ideas, and one of those ideas is a creation myth that contradicts evolution, suddenly I’m not allowed to argue with you.  If I try, you’re going to say something like, “Well I don’t care what all those scientists say, that’s what I believe.”  And then someone else might come to your defense and say, “He’s entitled to his beliefs.”

But that still doesn’t address the real question:  Why are you entitled to your beliefs?  I’ve already told you the answer:  social stability, in some form or another.   But all of biology is chemistry, and all of chemistry is physics, and in almost 150 years that scientists have been studying biology since the discovery of the Theory of Evolution not a single scientific discovery has been made that any part of biology is not a chemical reaction.  Your unwillingness to recognize a certain branch of science as a science does not prove that it’s not a science, or that the discoveries of this science don’t comply with the same physical laws that govern the rest of the universe, any more than my belief that I’m in two different states at the same time proves that it’s possible for me to be.  The only difference between your statements and mine were that yours evoked that special information package, and mine didn’t.

Now consider this:  What happens if I give you two conflicting pieces of information that you need to act upon?  How are you going to act upon it?

Suppose I was throwing a party.  I told you, “The party is in north Phoenix.”  But then I told you, “The party is in south Phoenix.”  What are you going to do?  You can’t go to both places at the same time.  The obvious thing to do would be to ask me which one it was.  But remember, I belong to the religion that says that it’s possible for a person to be in two places at once, so you’re not allowed to tell me it isn’t possible for a person to be in two places at once, because I will be personally offended.  You realize that I’m either going to be in north Phoenix feeling like I’m in south Phoenix, or I’m going to be in south Phoenix feeling like I’m in north Phoenix.  But that still doesn’t get you any closer to figuring out where my party is going to be.

The next most obvious solution would be to not bother trying to go to my party.  Really, why the f*ck would you want to be friends with someone who believed that it was possible for a person to be in two places at once, and who would get personally offended if you disagreed?

But now suppose that I was elected president, and I said that in order to pay off the national debt, all Americans were going to have to work at two jobs at the same time.  If you don’t, you’ll go to prison.  How are you supposed to act upon information like that?

That’s a silly example.  So let’s be really serious now and talk about death.  Suppose, as president, I said, “All human life is sacred, so abortion, stem cell research, and euthanasia are all murder.”  Then suppose I said, “Now let’s execute convicted murderers and invade Iraq.”  The most obvious way for you to react would be for you to ask, “What the f*ck?  Is all life sacred, or isn’t it?”  But you’re not allowed to do that, because everything I believe to be true is part of my religious beliefs, and if you question them I will be personally offended.

The next most obvious thing for you to do would be to reason that I believed all human life was sacred in general, but there were some situations in which killing people was justified.  So now the next most obvious thing for you to do would be to ask me to clarify under what conditions I believe killing people is justified.  But that’s another religious belief of mine, so you already know that if you ask I’ll be personally offended and I won’t answer the question anyway.

So now you know that I believe that killing people is justified under certain conditions, but I won’t tell you which conditions those are, or how I make my decision.  You really don’t like having me for president anymore, because you have no way of telling when I’m about to start another war.  You really want to get rid of me.  So now maybe you’re getting really curious about when I believe killing people is justified…

Oh, and by the way, that example was completely hypothetical.  If it bears any resemblance to President Bush, that isn’t my fault.

Now look around you and see how often things like this happen and no one seems to notice.
Suppose you turned on the news this evening and they covered three stories.  The first was about 4 U.S. marines getting killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq.  The second was about some scientists using the Hubble space telescope, who discovered that a comet was going to be passing by the Earth in three months from now.  The third was about the Pope beginning a campaign to promote family values.  In the first story there was an interview with a marine captain who was the commanding officer in the area, who made some remarks about insurgent activity in the area.  In the second story they played part of an interview with one of the astronomers who made the discovery.  In the third, the reporter includes footage of a press conference with a spokesman for “the Vatican”.

What about each of these news stories do you believe to be true, and why?

First of all, you believe that all of these stories are at least mostly true, because they’re being reported by Tom Brokaw or whoever, and you know that he’s been an evening news anchorman for 45 years or something.  Over the years that you’ve watched him on the evening news, you find that he’s given you a good account of the day’s news, and you know that he has a reputation to maintain among professional reporters, so he doesn’t just completely make sh*t up.

Each of the stories is told to you by reporters on the scene, and they’re accompanied by film footage.  Those things could be fabricated, but that would be difficult.  And why would any of these minor stories be worth the trouble of telling just as a hoax?

The story about the comet passing by the Earth isn’t hard to verify.  You can’t look through the Hubble space telescope yourself, but there are other people who can, so any of them could confirm or refute the story.  Also, if everyone is supposed to be able to see the comet in three months from now, why would the professional astronomer want to get on national TV and lie about something like that?

The four marines getting killed in Iraq wouldn’t be as easy of a story to confirm.  You can see the captain of the dead marines had something to say about insurgent activity in the area, and about how the dead marines were all brave men.  You know that he’s not really telling you about what the situation is like over there, he’s telling you what his commanders told him to tell you about the war.   The interview with him is mostly a military PR campaign.  But it does confirm that four marines were killed, which was the topic of the story.  There’s probably no way you’ll ever be able to confirm that personally, but there are other people who could confirm it independently.

For the first story to a small extent, and for the second story to a larger extent, you believe the things you’re told, not because you personally confirm the stories, but because you know you could confirm the stories.  So you react emotionally to the idea of confirming the stories as though you had confirmed the stories, even though you haven’t really.  But that doesn’t matter, because you know you could confirm the stories.

The same goes for the Pope’s campaign to promote family values.  There’s camera footage of the Pope and there’s a live reporter, so there’s no doubt that the Pope is campaigning to promote family values.  The footage of the press conference is basically the same thing as an interview; the spokesman just didn’t have time for separate interviews with each of the reporters at the press conference.

But does anyone ever ask the Pope where he got his information? We all know the answer.  He got his information from the Bible.  But the journalistic standards of 2,000 years ago were not what they are today.  Did Mary ever go see an obstetrician?  Have we seen the records?  Or do we assume she was a virgin because she f*cked some dude, got knocked up, and didn’t want to admit it?

As it turns out, it’s not even that complicated.  If you Google search for “Bible translation Greek young woman virgin”, like I just did, you’ll find a Wikipedia encyclopedia entry that begins:

Judaism reads the verse in Isaiah 7:14 as:

“Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign: behold, the young woman [ha-almah] shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanu-el”.[1]

Judaism affirms that [ha-almah] (“young woman”) does not refer to a virgin and that had the Tanakh intended to refer to such, the specific Hebrew word for virgin [bethulah] would have been used.

A little below that, the entry says:

The name itself, meaning “God [is] with us”, Judaism argues while noble, does not imply a divine nature of the boy.

Then:

The Christian interpretation of Immanuel in Isaiah 7:14 is based on the following scriptures in the Christian New Testament where the conception and birth of Jesus Christ are described:

(Matthew 1:20–23 KJV)… (21) And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins. (22) Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, (23) Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

And later:

On translating the Greek Textus Receptus of Matthew 1:23, there is little problem in translating the Greek word “parthenos” as “virgin” which is the usual Greek word for virgin.

And then:

This has resulted in variations between Bible translations, with some translations using “young woman” as does the New English Translation or NET Bible:

Isaiah 7:14 “For this reason the sovereign master himself will give you a confirming sign. Look, this young woman is about to conceive and will give birth to a son. You, young woman, will name him Immanuel.”

And a number of translations using the word “virgin” as does the King James Bible:

Isaiah 7:14 “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”

When you put all of the pieces together, you can see that the reason Christians believe Mary was a virgin is because for one reason or another, the scholars who translated the Bible from Hebrew to Greek wrote down the wrong word.  Maybe they did it on purpose, because they wanted to change the story.  But that’s not acceptable journalism by 21st century standards.  Inventing stories and calling them facts is what tabloid writers do for their livings.  Maybe the scholars did it by mistake, because they weren’t perfectly fluent in both languages, or because they got distracted, and then they didn’t go back and proofread their work well enough to catch the mistake.  That’s not acceptable journalism either.

But really, all that is beside the point.  If we’re going to talk about what does or doesn’t constitute acceptable journalism, you must remember that we’re talking about words that Isaiah wrote a few hundred years before the event actually took place.  So it was never acceptable journalism to begin with.

The Wikipedia encyclopedia, on the other hand, is acceptable journalism, because it is open to critical scrutiny.  We can unravel this journalistic error now because we have the ability to compare different versions of the Bible to each other.  Now anyone who speaks Hebrew can confirm what the Hebrew version says, and anyone who speaks Greek can confirm what the Greek version says.  And, by the way, the Wikipedia encyclopedia is an example of Anarchistic Use-Value economics in action.

So here you are, watching the evening news, listening to the Vatican spokesman telling you about the Pope’s new campaign to promote family values.  You’re free to sit there in your living room, watching the footage of the Pope and say, “What the f*ck is wrong with you?!?!?  Your religion is bullsh*t!!!!”

But a lot of other people are going to sit there and say, “Oh, wow, what a wonderful thing for him to do.”  These people are going to feel like the Pope is doing something good, because they agree with the family values he’s campaigning to promote.  But they’re going to completely overlook the fact that they learned their family values from Catholics in the first place!   The reason they feel that what the Pope is doing is right is because they were taught to feel that what he was doing was right by the Pope’s own followers.

Then, is the news reporter ever going to say anything about, “The Bible is not a very reliable document.”?   Of course not.  So many people have created the division between information packages in their minds that the news reporters don’t dare to challenge what their viewers believe to be true.  This is a commercial news-broadcasting network, after all.  That means the people who make the decisions about how the company will be operated and what news will be broadcast are concerned primarily with selling a product people will feel like buying, and with reporting events that are actually taking place in the world only secondarily.

Then what do you think happens when you fill a country up with people who all make this separation in their minds and help enforce it on each other?   How do you win elections in that country?  How do you convince a majority of those people that you know what the f*ck you’re doing?

So now to answer the question: “But how do you know our actions don’t correspond with the way the physical world actually works?”  This does present a challenge to the war of ideas, because people are imagining their own ideas and then claiming that the fact that you can’t disprove them proves they must be true.  And it is true that you can’t disprove the unprovable.  But you can come close:

Every religion in the world is identical to yours, because every religion in the world was created to serve the needs of Homo sapiens who are evolutionarily equal to you, and therefore have asked the same questions about life.

None of their religions yield accurate predictions, because, as you agree, all of their religions are built around imaginary beliefs.

You’re acting just like them.

So check yourself:  Are you sure you’re not falling into the same trap they are?

That’s the basic idea, whatever you have to do to it to make it personally meaningful to whoever you’re talking to.  It won’t work on everyone, unfortunately, but that’s as close as anyone can get.

Mr. Harris takes this basic premise and builds upon it for his whole book.  He uses a philosophical approach to belief, perception, consciousness, and action, pretty much like I used back in Volume I.  He gives a lot of examples of ways this has played out over the course of history, and is continuing to play out in the modern world.  He also talks about philosophical traditions that didn’t fall into this trap because their founders didn’t make the fatal error of placing any part of the philosophy beyond the reach of critical scrutiny.

If you can survive reading my books, Mr. Harris’s book is no trouble at all.  It’s a lot shorter and simpler than mine because he starts out by assuming that his readers are capable of a fair amount of critical thought.  I’m not taking my chances on that, which is why I’m nailing human behavior all the way down to atomic physics, to leave people who disagree with me nowhere to run.

Like so many other people whose work I reference, Mr. Harris an expert at a particular field, but he doesn’t share my breadth of background.  But if you go read his book now, knowing what you know now about evolutionary psychology, emotional communication, the origins of religions and cultures, information and anti-information packagers, and everything else, you’ll probably get twice as much out of Mr. Harris’s book as he expected you to.

Mr. Harris titled his book The End of Faith because the point he makes is one of the main points I’m here to make, which is that we will never, ever be safe as long as we believe in, and act upon, fictional beliefs we assume are true.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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There are a few important reasons Atheism doesn’t attract much public support, especially here in America.

First of all, ironically, to religious people Atheists seem mentally ill.  Since Atheism doesn’t include an easy escape route from death, religious people assume Atheists must be mentally ill, because they don’t want to escape death.  Back in the Life’s Journey and Death and Beyond chapters, I showed you how much observable evidence there is to use to find your own escape route from death that doesn’t require you to construct any beliefs about what happens to you after you die, or to take any actions according to your imagined beliefs.

What these religious people have failed to understand is that accepting your inevitable death is not the same thing as wanting to die.  Atheists are rational people, not suicidal people.

What makes this even more ironic is that by their very act of learning to accept their inevitable deaths instead of jumping to the first idea that springs to mind and assuming that the fact they feel it to be true proves that it must be true, Atheists are following the teachings of Jesus even more closely than Christians are.  They aren’t following his teachings literally, but then, seeing how journalistically reliable the Bible is, there’s no guarantee that anyone is following Jesus’s teachings literally.  But as far as following the spirit of his teachings is concerned, namely, that people should use intellect and force of will to consider the long-term effects of their actions before acting upon their immediate feelings, that’s exactly what Atheists are doing.

And speaking of following the spirit of Jesus’s teachings, I think it’s worth noting here that no Atheist has ever invaded anyone else’s country and forced them to accept the love of their Savior at gunpoint.  It’s easy to leave matters of the Great Spirit up to the Great Spirit when you don’t even believe in a Great Spirit.  And if the Great Spirit has never given you any confirmable proof of his existence, maybe it’s because he doesn’t want you to try to act on his behalf, because he knows you’ll just f*ck it all up.

That brings me to another critical obstacle to Atheism winning public support here in America.  A lot of Atheists turn to Atheism because they’re ex-Christians who feel like they’ve been lied to.  But these people aren’t Atheists so much as they’re Anti-Christians.

There are two basic ways to practice Atheism.  The first is the one I’ve been talking about all through these books:  By using a scientific approach to construct an ideology for yourself using all available observable evidence.

The other is to insist that anything that can’t be proven scientifically must not exist.  But regardless of what people call that, it isn’t Atheism at all.  If you insist that anything that can’t be observed must not exist, you’re attaching supernatural powers to human perception.  You are attempting to force anything that can’t be observed not to exist. But if you believe yourself to be able to control what is or isn’t true about the world through your belief in imaginary ideas, it doesn’t matter whether you call yourself religious or not.

Finally, a big obstacle to Atheists winning public support is their demeaning view of religion— and people’s perception  of their demeaning view of religion.  This is a hard problem to solve, because it’s a big gray area that offers no distinct solution.

First of all, how accepting of religion can Atheists really be?  If they embraced all religions, they wouldn’t be Atheists.  That would mean they wouldn’t be upholding Atheist values, which as I’ve shown you, are indeed valuable.

On the other hand, there are some conditions under which religion and science are not merely compatible but functionally  identical.  If a group of people live in certain living conditions, study the evidence around them to the furthest extent of their technological level, and develop an understanding of the world that lets them make accurate predictions, that is the definition of science.  If they then attach religious significance to their beliefs, that doesn’t change the fact that their beliefs function as a science within their living conditions.  What it does change is that the emotional connections they’ve made to imaginary ideas that proved useful to hold their ideas together into a coherent package will prove an obstacle to adapting their beliefs if their situation changes.  That will mean they’ll stop yielding accurate predictions, and therefore will stop functioning as a science.

Hence my reasons for trying to clear up that misunderstanding.  While it is true in a sense that Atheists reject the existence of supernatural powers, it is also true in a much greater sense that the degree  to which Atheists reject the existence of supernatural powers is directly proportional to the degree to which the people who believe in those supernatural powers threaten other people as a result of their beliefs.  No Atheist is ever going to conquer a village of indigenous fishermen just to tell to stop believing that imaginary forces will punish them if they don’t move rocks out of their paths.  On the other hand, United States presidents who believe in imaginary things and who control stockpiles of nuclear missiles threaten everyone, so they’re fair game for any amount of force Atheists can muster against them.  For everyone else, the degree to which Atheists reject their beliefs in the supernatural depends on where on that continuum they fall.

But there’s one catch to Atheist sympathy for traditional beliefs that functioned as science in the conditions those beliefs developed.  Outside of those conditions, those beliefs stop yielding accurate predictions, and therefore start threatening other people.  No one in America lives in the conditions their functionally scientific religious beliefs were developed in, so no one can act upon their religious beliefs and produce the results their traditional beliefs predict.

If a Christian, a Jew, a Pagan, and a Native American each throw a styrofoam plate in the garbage, the styrofoam plates the Pagan and the Native American threw away are not going to biodegrade any faster than the plates the Christian and the Jew threw away, no matter how closely connected to the Earth Mother the Pagan and the Native American feel they are.  The religious beliefs that led them to learn to feel that way were developed back when they didn’t have styrofoam plates.  They learned to feel like they were connected to the Earth Mother, and by acting upon that feeling with the things they had at the time, they succeeded in living harmoniously with her.  Whether by choice or not, the Pagan and the Native American no longer live in the conditions their religious beliefs were developed in, so now they’re capable of making all the same mistakes the Christian and the Jew are.

Second, how much of Atheists’ demeaning of religion is just pre-emptive self-defense?   A lot of religious people try to force their religions on everyone else, and insist that if you don’t practice a religion it just proves you’re not as smart as them, or don’t know as much about life as they do, or whatever.  And Atheists know that religious people are going to do this.  If Atheists see religious people coming and know the religious people are going to push, they push back, without waiting around for the religious people to push first.  This is a Hobbesian cycle of aggression.  If they already know what’s coming and they get in the first blow, they warn their opponents to keep their distance.

Third, how much of Atheists’ cultural identity do religious people perceive as a threat to their own cultural identity?  Atheists (in general) don’t care about anyone else’s beliefs.  They don’t believe in supernatural powers because they find it’s easier to live their lives without believing in supernatural powers.  They don’t care about the beliefs other people live their lives by, they only care about the effects other people’s beliefs have on the world.

So as you can see, to indigenous fishermen who move rocks out of paths, Atheist cultural values are not a threat.  Atheist cultural values only become a threat to religious people when the religious people’s own pursuit of their cultural values proves mutually exclusive to Atheist cultural values.  But there’s the catch.

Many religious people perceive that their own religious beliefs are right to the point that they prove that all dissenting beliefs are wrong.  Some religious people do this more than others, and do it more obviously than others, but some who don’t seem to do it still do it very subtly, and even unconsciously.  If you’re a religious person and you don’t agree to an ideological truce, and you don’t act in a way that complies with the physical world we live in, then Atheism is a threat to you.  That’s only because Atheists are fighting in self-defense.  But if you believe that what you’re doing is right, and don’t see how it could be a threat to them, then when they fight back against you, it will seem like an unprovoked attack.

A lot of religious people believe they know what’s best for Atheists—and everyone else—so even though they believe they aren’t threatening Atheists, they can see why Atheists would perceive it as a threat.  But that can only lead to the conclusion that the Atheists just aren’t smart enough to know any better.  So now when the Atheists fight back against you, it doesn’t seem like an unprovoked attack, but an attack of ignorant self-defense, and ultimately just as unwarranted.

So in short, if your religious beliefs require you to push your religion on other people, either by thought or by deed, Atheists will always be a threat to you, because they won’t submit to your religious beliefs.  Instead, they will try to prevent you from fulfilling your religious duty.
In the war of ideas between Atheism and religion, just as in any other war of ideas, you can’t expect to win unless you understand what your ideas are, where they came from, why they seem like good ideas to you, what your enemies’ ideas are, where they came from, and why they seem like good ideas to them.  Once you do that, you can see how your ideas are similar to theirs, and how they’re different.  Then you lay siege to the other side.  You surround them, leave them nowhere to run, and then offer them an ideological truce.  For whoever accepts the truce, the problem is solved.  For whoever doesn’t accept the truce, you proceed to systematically seek and destroy every single part of their ideology, by attacking their most vulnerable positions and laying waste to their greatest strengths as quickly as possible.

But a war of ideas is unlike any other kind of war that’s ever been fought.  In a war of ideas, you don’t measure your victory in terms of how many people you can defeat, but in terms of how many people you can call a truce with.

We of the Globalization 4.0 revolution are trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea.  To choose not to make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep everyone alive is to choose death.  There is no compromising with the laws of physics.  Therefore, there is nothing to be gained by trying to call a truce with people who want to try to compromise with the laws of physics.  Hence the reason it’s crucial to learn what our ideas are, what the enemy’s ideas are, how our ideas are the same, and why they’re different.  Because the only reason a lot of our enemies are our enemies is because they don’t realize they’re trying to compromise with the laws of physics.  They are our enemies because they don’t know how to be our friends, even though they want to be.  Fighting against people who want to be your friends is useless, if you can render fighting them unnecessary by teaching them what they need to know to be your friends.  Hence the reason the highest priority in a war of ideas must always be to call a truce with whoever will agree to it.

It is inevitable that some people will defend their ideologies to their very ideological deaths.  With the amount of diversity there is in the human race, it is inevitable that there are some people who are like that.  If we had forever to break down their ideological defenses, we could do that.  But we don’t have forever, so we don’t have that choice. Instead, the threats the religious fundamentalists choose to pose to us must be contained, eliminated, and overcome as efficiently as possible.

But in the war of ideas between Atheism and religion, or any other war of ideas, or any other war at all, the most efficient way to eliminate a threat is to call a truce with whoever is willing to accept it.

Filed under: y: 42 Vol. III by Ezra
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