Escalating the struggle now depends on our
cooperating on more complicated things.

So now we are faced with the question grassroots movements always run into:

How do we build solidarity
within our movement
and with people who are not yet in our movement?

* * *

Every social or political struggle that makes long-term changes in a society
is fundamentally a struggle to establish
a new way of thinking as the
basis for decision making in the society.

We are out here tonight because
we don’t think the way the 1% wants us to think.

* * *

I think we all agree that the way of thinking we’re trying to establish is one that’s
empowering to everyone and that
won’t marginalize women or minorities.

Well a lot of psychologists and other scientists have been
searching for the same thing since
1968.

Most people haven’t heard much about it because—guess what—
the 1% have been doing a lot to black them out this whole time.

1968 was the year the global environmental crisis was discovered.

Some of the pioneers of global environmental science realized that
the problem started because
people misunderstood some important things that were
happening in the world.

So solving the problem would depend on
establishing a new way of thinking as the
basis for decision making in the U.S. and every other country.

* * *

These aren’t the only people who have been searching for a unifying philosophy.

Throughout history, all over the world,
people have tried to find common ground between
different groups of people.

In my family, my grandparents started studying this stuff almost 80 years ago.

* * *

The 1% does a lot to disempower the 99% by
spreading a lot of disinformation.

One way they do that is by making some ideas seem
way more complicated than they really are.

Another way is to focus people’s attention on their
differences with other groups of people.

That has turned into a lot of unproductive debate within the Occupy movement.

Sometimes people use different words to talk about the same ideas and end up
disagreeing with each other that way.

Other times people focus on two different parts of a situation,
and each assumes their own point of view covers the whole situation.

Then they get bogged down arguing over details
when they’ve never even agreed on an interpretation of the situation in the first place,
so they’re not even talking about the same thing.

* * *

First of all, philosophy.

That’s a word that’s been made to seem a lot more complicated than it really is.

A philosophy is just a bunch of ideas people have connected to each other.

Each one of us has developed a personal philosophy over the course of our lives,
whether we realized it or not.

That’s how you connect ideas together to try to figure out what you should do.

* * *

Wherever you have ideas connected together,
you have a philosophy.

A group of people who have common interests has an
underlying philosophy.

Because our ideas connect to each other through our
common interests.

So for us to develop our solidarity now
doesn’t depend on our
deciding on a philosophy, but on
identifying the philosophy we already have.

* * *

Secular is another word that a lot of people misunderstand.

As in secular government.

Secular is not really complicated.

We do it here every day.

That means we make our decisions on
reliable information instead of on
strong opinions.

* * *

Democracy and secularism are inseparable.

People voting for stuff and the majority rules
isn’t what we’re here for.

That’s just an easy way for majorities to marginalize minorities.

Democracy is an agreement that
the majority rules
except when people in minority positions in a disagreement
can prove their side is right.

The idea is that
if reliable evidence shows that the minority group’s side in the argument is right,
the majproty group will admit it and change their minds.

But sometimes that still takes a lot of debate.

* * *

Science is another word that has been made to sound
a lot more complicated than it really is.

Science is simply the search for reliable information.

Any one person’s perception of a situation is subjective,
so it’s not reliable.

Science is just a trick for
eliminating all the sources of error that people’s subjectivity causes.

By understanding where subjectivity leads us astray,
you can make sure not to make those mistakes.

Then you find reliable information by
finding information that always stays the same.

We all know how to do this.

* * *

Imagine going to a doctor for some tests.

He tells you they show you have a terminal disease.

What five questions would you want to ask him before you would believe him?

What symptoms did he see in your tests? (Observablitiy)

Do all of the symptoms indicate the disease, or do only some of them indicate it and some indicate something else? (Self consistency)

Do these symptoms always indicate this disease, or do they indicate it sometimes and sometimes they indicate something else. (Universality)

Would another doctor get the same results? (Reproducibility)

Could you and the two doctors discuss the results to clarify your understanding of the situation? (Debatability)

* * *

Science is that, applied to controlled experiments.

Secularism is that, applied to real life,
where you can’t do controlled experiments
and you just have to figure stuff out as you go along.

* * *

Now this brings us to science philosophy.

Once again, that sounds complicated, but it’s not really.

This is yet another thing we all know how to do.

* * *

Scientific experiments depend on measurements.

You make scientific discoveries by figuring out
how much of one thing interacts with
how much of another to produce
how much of a result.

A scientific discovery is
the discovery of a pattern where
the numbers always fit together the same way.

Running is different from walking because
you go faster
and you burn more calories.

* * *

Nobody needed to do a controlled experiment to discover that
running always makes you go faster than walking.

But it did take controlled experimentation to
prove the relationship to calories.

But now that controlled experimentation has proved that,
you don’t need to do a controlled experiment to know that
if you go running you will burn more calories than if you walk.

Someone discovered a reliable pattern,
and you have internalized it
and made it part of your perception of the world.

That’s all science philosophy is.

* * *

Another word that sounds more complicated than it really is is metaphysics.

People use that word a lot to refer to mysterious stuff.

Every philosophy has a metaphysics.

Those are the ideas that you consider to be absolute,
which is your starting point for developing further ideas.

* * *

Math is the metaphysics of science.

You can use numbers to represent things,
or you can use numbers completely in the abstract,
and the math always works the same way.

So you take your measurements,
and you look for patterns among the numbers.

Basically
you’re looking for
mathematical equations
underlying the patterns,
and then that gives you clues for
how the physical properties of the thing you’re studying
make those mathematical equations happen.

Like, what is it about running that makes you burn more calories than walking?

* * *

Now this runs into religious philosophy.

Religion is yet another way the 1% keeps people ignorant.

Not because religion has to conflict with science,
but because it can conflict with science,
and that’s what the 1% focus people’s attention on.

A religion is a philosophy that
assumes the existence of forces at work in the world
that are beyond human understanding.

A fundamentalist religion assumes these forces will
always be beyond human understanding.

A progressive religion recognizes that
there are forces in the world that are beyond human understanding now,
but they don’t have to stay that way forever.

Some of the forces in the world might be forever beyond our understanding,
but either way we should try to figure out as much about the world as we can.

* * *

In fact, some psychologists have studied religion,
since it’s something people all over the world feel is important.

They’ve found that every religion answers the same four basic questions:

What makes the universe work?

What happens to people after they die?

How people can make themselves happy? And…

How can people get along with each other?

These seem like ideas because they’re things people thought of.

But the fact that people all over the world have thought of the same ideas means
they’re not so much ideas,
as inherent parts of humanity.

Psychologists and anthrologists have found hundreds of things like that.

* * *

In education psychology
there are a couple of principles of learning that have
big effects on how people learn.

One is the principle of primacy.

When people learn new ideas,
they tend to remember the version they heard first the best.

The other is the principle of effect.

People also tend to remember the ideas that have the
biggest emotional impact on them.

This leads to a couple more problems with people getting along with each other.

People tend to feel their own interpretation of a situation is the main truth,
and everyone else’s interpretation could be right,
but they’re not as real.

* * *

Some obvious problems this leads to are
racism, cultural racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and any other kind of discrimination.

One of the biggest problems we’re running into within the Occupy movement is
conflicts among political ideologies.

In the U.S., we’re taught about democracy starting on the first day of kindergarten,
when they teach us to say the Pledge of Alegiance.

We learn about Capitalism from the time we learn about
people earning money and spending it to buy what they want.

A lot of Christians and Muslims teach their children about monarchy
long before they start kindergarten,
where the righteous people are supposed to rule the unrighteous people.

Then people interpret other ideologies they hear about later as just ideas other people had.

They don’t notice that their own ideology is just an ideology too.

* * *

Every ideology,
whether it’s religious, political, or anything else,
is a set of ideas people developed in a certain situation.

But then, a lot of times when people get into a different situation,
they try to adapt their old ideas to the new situation.

Instead of looking for
who has already been in that situation and
what ideas they developed, and how.

Then when their old ideas don’t work,
they still keep trying to use them,
assuming that nobody else’s ideas would work any better.

* * *

I heard somebody here point out that
the people who talk in general assemblies are
mostly White men.

Has anyone noticed the irony that
the two people that people here quote the most are
Mahatmah Gandhi and Dr. King, and
neither of them were White?

* * *

There’s a straightforward reason that White men talk the most that
wouldn’t go away even in a group where
nobody felt that any category of people was supposed to talk the most.

People talk by making sounds with their mouths that make other people think of ideas.

But you can only make one word with your mouth at a time.

That creates limits on the ideas you can communicate by talking.

Basically, White men talk the most because
they’ve developed the most simplistic ideas.

You can get out of that trap, but it’s not easy.

I’m an artist from a multi-racial family,
so I’ve noticed this,
but I don’t think most White men have.

* * *

Women think about lots of ideas all at once,
so it’s not as easy for them to express their ideas in words.

Especially not when they’re trying to debate stuff with
men who talk about simplistic ideas.

This is why the majority of biologists and the majority of psychologists are women,
because those are the two most complicated fields of science,
which depend on people thinking about lots of things all at once.

* * *

Meanwhile,
the majority of musical genres that have started in the U.S.
since the beginning of the recorded music industry
were invented by minorities.

Because dominant groups of people don’t get much practice at
thinking about the world in broad terms,
because they get used to getting what they want when they want it.

People from oppressed groups get a lot more practice at
being patient and thinking about life
in order to make their feelings fit together.

* * *

The point is, wherever people in one situation have done one thing,
people in a different situation have probably done an equivalent.

Learning to recognize the limitations of your own perceptions
and to recognize when someone else knows more about something than you do
is the first step in broadening your horizons.

* * *

So far we have secularism
as an approach that doesn’t marginalize anyone,
we have common ground among people’s personal philosophies as the
overall goals we’re trying to reach,
and we have large bodies of ideas in between that people have developed
trying to get from one to the other.

This is where the environmental science philosophy movement
weaves into what we’re trying to do here.

* * *

The reason science exists in the first place is because
none of us can know everything all the time.

Science is the search for reliable information that we didn’t already know about.

But you can’t just memorize a bunch of stuff.

That doesn’t help you make decisions.

What we need is a way to see how all the reliable information fits together.

* * *

The reason we have different fields of science is because of
gaps in our perceptions of the world.

The different fields of science are divided up according to
how we perceive information fits into different categories.

That’s partly practical, but partly the result of limitations of our perceptions.

For instance,
chemistry is the study of chemicals,
and biology is the study of living things.

But living things are made up of chemicals.

In every single cell of your body there are
thousands of chemical reactions happening every second.

So part of the reason for differentiating between chemistry and biology is because
you want to focus your attention on two different things.

But the other part is because
nobody can keep track of
thousands of chemical reactions happening all at once.

* * *

The soluion to this is what scientists call first principles.

A first principle is a rule that has been proven to apply universally to an area of study.

Math is a first principle, because it always works the same way.

Gravity is a first principle, because it always affects us.

The big difference between math and gravity is that
math can be done in the abstract,
but gravity always depends on two objects interacting with each other.

You can’t measure gravity without measuring its effects on things.

That means math is an absolute truth that exists independently of anything else.

Gravity might work differently in a different universe,
but then again it might not.

We have no way of knowing.

But it always works the same way in our universe,
so as far as we’re concerned it’s an absolute truth.

* * *

A first principle is a discovery that is made scientifically,
but it’s really a philosophical discovery.

It’s a discovery of a way to interpret information that leads to reliable results.

We can’t keep track of thousands of chemical reactions that all happen at the same time.

But can we find an overall pattern to what all those chemical reactions are doing
so we can figure out what’s going on?

So a big part of environmental science has been the search for
first principles that connect one branch of science to another,
and then to all other fields of study.

The goal is the unification of knowledge.

* * *

Environmental science depends on four first principles.

These are all mathematical patterns, so they’re absolute.

They prove the main underlying ideas of the Occupy movement.

Now a lot of people in the Occupy movement are saying they want
better education for less money.

Well getting better education for less money just depends on
reorganizing a lot of information.

For instance,
the illusion that White men are better than everyone else gets
thinner and thinner every year.

So using the education system to get people to keep believing that keeps costing
more and more money every year.

More generally,
the 1% keep trying to get us to believe in certain ideas,
even though we’re surrounded by a growing body of evidence that
those ideas aren’t true.

So getting people to not notice the truth keeps costing us more and more.

* * *

The reason the 1% have gotten so rich is because they’re very good at Capitalism.

Capitalism, as an ideology, began in England about 350 years ago.

Now here in the U.S. we have the Constitution.

The Constitution is the foundation of a set of laws that supports Capitalism.

Who can tell us what year the Constitution was written?

1787.

* * *

In 1787
none of the first principles that environmental science depends on
had been discovered.

So we have an economic system,
and laws that support that economic system,
that were invented by people who had
fundamental misunderstandings about how the world works.

So the continuation of the economic system that
the 1% have used to get rich
depends on people staying ignorant.

They keep saying they have a better economic and political plan than anyone else,
and there’s a growing number of people in the country who can see their plan isn’t working.

* * *

The first first principle is the First Law of Thermodynamics.

This was discovered in 1868.

Can anyone tell us what that is?

Matter and energy can never be created or destroyed, they can only change form.

This was discovered as a law of physics.

As a mathematical law we can say this is a recognition of the fact that
if you start with a finite amount of stuff,
and more suff can’t form spontaneously out of nothing,
you will always have a finite amount of stuff.

Well the Earth and the Sun are finite in size.

That means there’s a limit to the amount of matter and energy in the world.

* * *

That’s where we get non-renewable resources.

You can’t drill oil forever, because
even if the entire Earth was one big blob of oil,
we’d still use it up eventually.

* * *

Second is the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

This was also discovered in 1868.

Can anyone tell us what that is?

As a physical law it says that disorder tends to increase.

As a mathematical law that means
the more changes you add to a group of things,
the more different results you get.

This is the source of both diversity and destruction.

* * *

The more musicians you have thinking about music,
the more different musical styles you get.

And the same for cultures and everything else.

* * *

But this is also why destroying things is so much easier than creating them.

We all have these bodies that have all these different parts to them,
and we need all of our parts to fit together in a certain way.

If you got blown up with dynamite tomorrow,
all your parts would basically get moved around at random.

That would probably make you less healthy instead of it making you more healthy.

* * *

This is why some resources are renewable if we use them at sustainable rates.

If you go out into the ocean in a fishing trawler
and you catch fish as fast as you can,
you’re going to catch the fish faster than they reproduce.

Then eventually you’re going to run out of fish.

More generally,
if you go into the environment and change stuff basically at random,
you’re going to make the cycles of life that the environment depends on break down.

That’s why the sustainable use of renewable resources depends on our
finding out what’s happening in the environment and
figuring out what we can do the the environment
without throwing its cycles out of balance.

* * *

The third first principle is the Theory of Evolution.

Charles Darwin released this to the public in 1859.

Can anyone tell us about that?

This is really just the two sides of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
running into each other.

Evolution is the result of relication, variation, and selection.

This was discovered as a biological law,
but it also applies to chemical reactions, computer programs, and ideas.

* * *

You start with a living thing, like a bird.

Then that thing has multiple children—
That’s the replication.

The children inhereit their parents’ characteristics in different combinations—
That’s the variation.

Then some of those children grow up to have children of their own
while others die without having children—
That’s the selection.

What you end up with is
the characteristics that are the best suited to the environment
being passed on from generation to generation.

As the environment changes,
the characteristics that are best suited to the environment change.

* * *

Well the same thing happens with ideas.

We have lots of different ideas.

So that’s the replication and variation.

Then we try to figure out which ideas would be the best to use in the situation we’re in.

That’s one selection.

Then we use the ideas and see which ones work best that way.

That’s selection again.

* * *

THis means that humanity can evolve through its ideas.

Democracy is a perfect example of that.

That’s an idea that so many people have found works so well that we’re never going to give it up.

Most people in the world feel that self determination is better than
feudalism, serfdom, indentured servitude, or slavery.

Before the United States was founded,
Europe had been ruled by monarchies for thousands of years.

After the United States was founded,
and people got to see what democracy looked like,
almost all the monarchies in the world got overthrown in about a hundred years.

Well we’re in that same situation now.

They started the Occupation of Wall Street in August or September,
and by October there were thousands all over the world.

* * *

The fourth first principle was discovered in 1968.

That was the discovery of the effects of exponential growth in a finite system.

This was discovered simultaneously by a
population biologist named Paul Ehrlich,
and by a team of scientists and mathematicians called the Club of Rome.

You might’ve heard of the books they published about this.

Dr. Ehrlich’s first book was called The Population Bomb.

The Club of Rome’s first book was called The Limits to Growth.

* * *

The overall discovery was that
not only were we using up our finite supply of resources,
we were using them up faster and faster every year.

That’s what every animal species does.

* * *

In a stable environment, in the long run,
each pair of adults of each species has
two children who grow up to have children of their own.

So for instance, a tree produces thousands of seeds in the course of its life.

That’s because it got pollinated from another tree.

On average, only two of those seeds will grow up to produce seeds of their own.

* * *

If a species moves into an environment where it thrives,
it goes through a population explosion.

If each pair of adults has four children that grow up to have children,
you double the population size every generation.

2 becomes 4, then 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and so on.

The rate of growth stays the same but the size increases faster and faster.

So that means the species keeps having a
bigger and bigger impact on its environment
because it keeps eating more and more food.

That can’t go on forever.

Eventually the population size will reach the point where
its food supply won’t support it any more.

Then most of the species dies in a famine.

* * *

These scientists discovered that we were in the same situation.

Back 1800, the population of the world was only about 1 billion people.

It reached 2 billion around 1900.

Then 3 billion in 1960.

4 billion in 1975.

5 billion in 1988.

6 billion in 2000.

We kept adding additional billions at shorter and shorter intervals,
which meant our population size was increasing at an exponential rate.

We were also building factories,
using up resources,
and generating pollution at
exponential rates.

Even if the population size stayed the same,
increasing our wealth would mean
converting more and more natural resources into finished products.

* * *

To cut a long story short,
the simplest solution to the population explosion is
education, birth control,
and political and economic self determination for women.

Improving your quality of life depends on being able to do more.

But that doesn’t just mean having more stuff.

You can also learn how to do more with what you have now.

In other words, spiritual development instead of land development.

* * *

The scientists who made this discovery found that
if this problem wasn’t stopped
we would reach the point of the environment
not continuing to support us
sometime in the 21st century.

That would start with resources being stretched thinner and thinner.

That means economic breakdown.

Which is why we’re all here.

* * *

These four first principles lead to four more first principles.

I’ve already talked about all of them indirectly.

Does anybody want me to stop and clarify anything here before I go on?

* * *

First is the Selfish Gene Theory.

Emphasis on gene, not selfish.

This is just evolution at the molecular level.

Charles Darwin never knew about genes.

He discovered that characteristics evolve.

Well an organism’s characteristics are created by its genes.

When a plant or animal passes on its characteristics,
that means it’s passing on the genes that created those characteristics.

* * *

This was one solution to the problem of keeping track of all the chemical reactions in biology.

All the chemical reactions that happen in biology are started by genes,
and they lead to the replication of the genes that started the chemical reactions.

That’s a lot easier to recognize in species other than our own.

* * *

Next is the Gaia Theory.

This is the recognition that
all the cycles of life balancing out in a stable environment mean
the chemical reactions in all those biological cycles are balancing each other out.

So that means if you disrupt the cycles of the environment
you’ll throw the environment out of balance.

If you disrupt the cycles too much the environment won’t be able to restabilize.

* * *

Third is the Selfish Gene Theory applied to human psychology.

This is called evolutionary psychology.

This is the study of human thought, feelings, and intuition in terms of the replication of genes.

This shows three basic things.

* * *

First, everyone always makes the best decisions they can think of in their situations.

If you think back over your life, you can probably recognize that about yourself.

You’ve made mistakes sometimes because you misunderstood your situation.

Other times you’ve probably been stuck in situations where
you didn’t like any of your choices but you just had to pick the least bad of them.

Well that’s how everyone, all over the world, makes all their decisions.

So that is how you listen to people without beign judgemental.

This isn’t just some touchy-feely hippie spirituality.

This has been built up from math, step by step.

* * *

The next thing this means is that
wherever you’re in a situation where you can’t sort out a disagreement with someone,
back up.

Look at how each of your basic ideas would seem helpful to you
if you lived in a group of about 200 people
in the wilderness,
by hunting and gathering,
at a stone age technological level.

Because that’s where our brains evolved.

That’s where everyone’s ancestors lived 11,000 years ago.

Here in the U.S. we have a large body of information to draw upon for that,
because that’s how a lot of Native Americans lived here up until
a few hundred years ago.

The rest used agriculture,
but still had the stone age technology and lived in relatively small groups.

That means there are many people in the U.S.
who have this not very far back in their cultural history.

So this scientific discovery is something you can learn about just by
listening to your neighbors talk about stories they heard from their grandparents—
or that you already heard from your own grandparents.

* * *

The other big part to evolutionary psychology is the lines between
consciousness and subconscious,
and emotions and intellect.

Once again, those are things that have been made to seem really complicated,
but they’re not really.

Intellect is the ability to focus your mind on specific ideas.

Emotion is a more general sense of ideas fitting together in a certain way.

Consciousness is the stuff you know you’re thining about.

Subconsciousness is the stuff you don’t realize you’re thinking about.

* * *

So emotion is mostly made up of subconsciousness.

Intellect is mostly made up of consciousness.

But there’s some gray area in between.

That’s where art and poetry comes from.

People try to put their feelings into words, and some people are really good at it.

Then when you hear those people’s words
sometimes you gain new insights into your own feelings.

* * *

The instincts for survival and reproduction make up the
deepest levels of your subconsciousness.

You use the rest of your brain to try to satisfy those two instincet.

Intelligence is a combination of three basic things: memory, imagination, and communication.

All of the ideas you know about are ones you either
remember, you think of right now, or that your hear about from someone else.

Every decision you ever make is a way of trying to survive or reproduce.

Everything you feel to be important you feel to affect your survival or reproduction somehow.

But you don’t always realize that.

A lot of the stuff we do we just do because it feels right.

* * *

All of this adds up to a way of respecting everyone you’ll ever meet.

Just by recognizing that
they’re intelligent people
who are using their combination of
consciousness and subconsciousness,
emotions and intellect
to try to make the best for themselves
of a situation that
might be a lot different from your own,
but isn’t so far removed.

* * *

The last first principle is the final frontier in the unification of science by first principles.

That’s the search for what’s called a unifying theory of culture.

Psychologists haven’t found this one yet, but I don’t worry about that.

This is really complicated and really simple at the same time.

This is the search for how the philosophies of different groups of people develop.

But everyone already has a personal philosophy.

So there’s no way for anyone to get outside this theory.

* * *

Or to look at it another way, we are the theory.

No one can ever invent a philosophy lightswitch,
where we can make this thing be completely external to ourselves.

So we have to figure this out as we go along.

And you do that by listening to each other.

* * *

Lots of people are seeing our resources getting stretched too thin.

We’re all seeing the same pattern from different points of view.

These ideas have been idealism for a lot of people.

But as it turns out this is actually math.

This is secular philosophy every step of the way.

That means in a secular government, politicians are supposed to know this stuff.

Secular philosophy means evidence, which means the stuff that’s admissible in court.

Evidence is supposed to be the stuff that the police are use to determine the truth.

This stuff can also be taught in public school.

* * *

We can’t get rid of government altogether.

We will always need social structures that can make and implement decisions
fast enough to keep up with what’s happening.

However, once you have social structures like that,
you create the opportunity for
someone to get to the top of them and use them for their own greed,
in order to make themselves the new 1%.

So democracy will always depend on
people organizing effective opposition to corruption
independently of government.

* * *

Every struggle for social justice includes the struggle for better education.

The purpose of accumulating wealth
is to increase your ability to make what you want to happen, happen,
even if you end up investing all your wealth into choosing how you will be entertained.

Education is a form of wealth,
because it increases your ability to make what you want to happen, happen.

That’s why a big part of oppressing people is always to limit their education.

* * *

When you talk about accumulating material wealth,
you’re talking about increasing your decision making power by
increasing your control of resources.

You get more wealthy by increasing your ability to decide how resources will be used,
and to prevent other people from deciding how those resources will be used.

You can use your own education to prevent other people from getting education.

But that’s not the only way to use your education.

Instead of pushing other people down by keeping them ignorant,
you could pull them up by educating them.

You can also pull yourself further up by learning what other people know.

The more we all know about how to succeed at our own goals,
the wealthier we all are
because the better able we will be to succeed at our goals by cooperating with each other.

* * *

Now with all of this as our foundation,
we can see how our way of thinking makes us different from the 1%.

350 years ago, when Capitalism started,
and 235 years ago, when the Consitution was written,
there was no global environmental crisis.

So people developed political and economic systems that they found produced
the most of what they needed in the situation they were in.

In 1787, the biggest threat to the U.S. was the imperialism of other countries.

The original 13 states were surrounded by the empires of Britian, France, and Spain.

If the U.S. hadn’t conquered the rest of its territory,
someone else would’ve,
and would’ve made their own empires more powerful.

In fact, Arizona wasn’t conquered by the U.S.,
it was conquered by Spain,
it was ruled by Mexico after Mexico broke away from Spain,
and then the U.S. took it from Mexico.

* * *

But today the imperialism of other countries isn’t the biggest threat to us.

Today the biggest threat to us is the environmental crisis.

* * *

The 1% got into power by being the best at the political and economic system we have.

But the political and economic system we have
were developed to deal with a situation
that was different from the situation we are now in.

So there is no reason to believe that
the talents and skills that the 1% have used
to get to the top of our political and economic system
are the talents and skills that need to applied to solve the problems we are facing.

But instead of admitting that,
the 1% keep trying to get us to not notice the environmental crisis
and to get us to believe that other countries are the biggest threat to us,
so we’ll keep using the political and economic systems they know how to win at.

And that is why we are struggling to establish
a new way of thinking as the basis for decision making in the U.S.

1: The Challenge

Mike check!
The Occupy Movement needs to identify a central philosophy. We need to be able to state our goals clearly and concisely. We need to be able to represent ourselves effectively to the mainstream media. (They will try to make us look disorganized anyway, but we need to help them in that as little as possible.) We need solidarity among people within our movement, and between people in our movement and people not yet in our movement.
Every social or political struggle that makes profound changes in a society is a struggle to establish a new way of thinking. We have a long list of demands. We are not trying to get people to memorize our demands and then use their established political system to meet them. We have used a different way of thinking about what people should do. We want the things we want because we used a different way of thinking. Our struggle is to establish our way of thinking as the new foundation for decision making in the U.S..
I know that the lack of an underlying philosophy has been a tactic to this point. The imperialism of the 1% has reached the point that nobody needs to agree on any particular philosophy to see its results. That tactic has been a good start.
But we are not struggling in a vaccum. There are several practical limitations on our situation. For one, we are in a race against time with the greenhouse effect, energy crisis, and environmental crisis in general. We need to defeat the 1% in time to solve those problems.
For another, those of us who started this struggle are part of the 99%, but we aren’t the entire 99%. For our various reasons, we’ve decided to start this struggle now. But if we’re going to build our support beyond what we have now, we have to face up to the fact that a lot of people in the 99% won’t join us until they can see that we have a good chance of winning.
For another, the 2012 presiential election will happen in about 11 months from now. If we are to become the political force we’re trying to be, we have to force the presidential candidates to react to us. If all we do is to give the presidential candidates the choice of ignoring us or taking advantage of an opportunity we’ve created, then our movement doesn’t mean anything. If we are really going to change anything, we have to create a situation in this country that the presidential candidates will have to adapt to in a way that isn’t convenient for them.
Identifying our way of thinking in order to develop coherence for our movement doesn’t mean showing the 1% how to outsmart us. If their way of thinking is imperialism and our way of thinking is anti-imperialism, they can’t make us stop struggling while they continue to cause the problems we are struggling against.
This brings us to the big question: What, exactly, is our way of thinking?

If we could, we would hold a worldwide general assembly and we would establish our worldwide common ground among the worldwide 99% that way. But practical limitations prevent that.
Instead we need some other way of accomplishing that end result. That isn’t all that complicated. Lots of philosophers throughout the ages, all over the world, have tried to find common ground among different groups of people. The worldwide general assembly has been building up that way, little by little.

A lot of people have been working on this from a lot of different directions since the global environmental crisis was discovered in 1968. The discovery of the global environmental crisis was the discovery that our established ways of thinking were leading us into trouble. A solution to the environmental crisis depended our finding, and then establishing, new ways of thinking.
The discovery of the global environmental crisis predicted a global economic breakdown. The environmental crisis would lead to resources being stretched thinner and thinner among people. Eventually that would reach the point of resources not being sufficient to meet people’s needs.
That means that at some point people will begin to struggle against the economic breakdown. That means those people will search for more and more effective ways of struggling against the economic breakdown. That’s what we’re doing.
If the environmental crisis isn’t stopped, it will lead to disaster. The definition of environmental disaster is the point at which the resources in the environment are no longer sufficient to support the living things in the environment. If the situation of resources being stretched more and more thinly among people was to continue to its conclusion, that would mean global famine. The definition of a famine is people not getting the resources they need to live.

I want to stress here that what I have done in this document is not easy. The search for a unifying philosophy always runs into the limitations of the human brain. There is no way for any one person to see everything in the world in their life. The Occupy movement is made up of people who have seen many different parts of life, but no one of us have seen all of it. There are parts of life that other people in the world have seen but none of us have.
In my family, my grandparents started the search for a unifying philosophy almost 80 years ago. It depends first on people pursuing a wide variety of life experiences, backed up by research into a wide variety of ideas other people have thought of. On my dad’s side of the family we’re a multi-racial family. The generation after mine is roughly 1/4 White, 1/4 Black, and 1/2 Native American. I was raised on this stuff from the day I was born, 37 years ago. I have traveled and lived all over the United States, I’ve had jobs and education in several different fields, and I’ve lived in South America. I have been working at this as a full time occupation for the past 8 years. This isn’t just a hobby for me.

A big obstacle to the discovery of a unifying philosophy is the White majority in the U.S.. The whole idea behind the racialization of our economic system was to give White people the choice in which parts of life they wanted to experience and which parts they didn’t. That creates limitations in people’s perceptions of the world.
I grew up in the rural north, where there are almost no racial minorities. I’ve noticed that White people from most of the rest of the U.S., whether they wanted to or not, and whether they realize it or not, have a lot of absurd ideas that a lot of other people have very good reasons for not agreeing with. But those people who disagree get drowned out by the White majority. The White majority still agree among themselves that they have the right to think the way they do, and that it must be right because so many (White) people agree with them. Even if you call that the freedom to think for yourself instead of White supremacy, the rule of the more powerful, uninformed majority is still imperialism.
In the rural north White people don’t have the luxury of having an endless supply of people in worse living conditions available to suffer the consequences of the White people’s avoidable mistakes. A lot of the criticisms that racial minorities have had about White people, I’ve thought of too. Because where I’m from, I’m one of the people who do the hardest, most dangerous work for the least money.

Look at how much of White culture consists of people proving how smart they are. People try to think of ideas no one else has thought of, or they support ideas that most people don’t agree with. Then they insist that their ideas are going to work.
The racialized economic system guaranteed all the managerial jobs to White people. White people would do the thinking and everyone else would supply the muscle power. Now that’s creating a split in the 99% that the 1% are using against us.
If you’re White you might not have noticed this, but take a moment to think how this looks to other people. You belong to a group of people who live in a situation where you have to prove you’re smart so you can get a managerial job, so you can get the most wealth and decision making power, and also the most recognition of success from other people in that situation. But as a member of the managerial class, facing life-threatening danger is not part of an ordinary day. Or to put it another way, people in harder living conditions than yours have shorter average lifespans because we have more ways to die.
That means you don’t associate serious danger with your ideas not working. That means in your ongoing cultural struggle to prove who’s smarter than who, you can afford to take bigger chances on thinking of different ideas. That means your goal is to think of unique ideas, not to think of ideas that you, personally, can stake your life on applying. The managerial class doesn’t gamble with their own lives, they gamble with other people’s lives.
Then what happens? Leaderless political movements turn into a bunch of White people sitting around talking about their unique ideas while people of racial minorities are out on the streets in huge numbers, pursuing coherent goals. A good day in the Phoenix Occupation is about 100 people in the park, but every year the immigrants rights march draws 50,000 people easily.
Whether you call it Christianity or New-Ageism, conservativism or liberalism, 99% or 1%, a bunch of White people sitting around talking about their unique ideas that they can never figure out how to act upon still looks like a bunch of people who expect someone else to do all the hard work.

For a specific example, I’m from a farming town. I meet a lot of activists who obviously aren’t from farming towns, who insist that there’s more to life than food production and drinking water. There’s art and music and emotions. Food production isn’t all there is to life, but if you don’t get any food to eat for a year you’ll die and then you won’t feel any emotions anymore.
I don’t mean to put anyone down here. But that’s how a lot of people interpret it when people who previously have had lower positions in society start talking about themselves as if they’re equal people and they don’t deserve to suffer the consequences of mistakes the people of the dominant group could’ve avoided making if only they’d thought a little harder about what they were doing. Activists from the suburbs have made a lot of valuable insights about the psychological oppression of the advertising industry that I wouldn’t’ve thought of. But getting enough food and water to stay alive is still a prerequisite to feeling positive emotions.
This isn’t Disney Land. This isn’t Saturday morning cartoons. This isn’t shopping at the mall. This is political struggle for the fate of the world against the most powerful people on Earth. If we treat this like a hobby we aren’t going to win, because the 1% don’t consider this a hobby.

There will be dancing in the revolution. But there will also be a lot of hard philosophical work. We can’t solve the problems we’re trying to solve if we keep causing them ourselves.
There is strength in diversity because there is a lot we can learn from each other. But that depends on our finding a common ground to meet on so we can figure out how to coordinate our efforts toward our goals.
Everyone in the world is an intelligent person. We develop our different ideas because of the differences in the things we perceive, and the differences in things we don’t perceive or mis-perceive. We all have limitations on our understandings of the world. The trick to what I call constructive listening is to recognize why someone else knows more about something than you do, and to recognize possible limitations of their understanding of their situation also. That way you can learn from other people and also resolve disagreements constructively.
Environmental science philosophy is a great equalizer. We’ve all seem part of the picture. White people have had advantages in getting through the education system, so they’ve had opportunities to learn a lot of complicated things, but have also had their attention diverted from a lot of simple things. All the Native Americans I know believe that we’re just one part of the world and people are related to all the other animals. Everyone from an inner city knows about the law of the jungle. Everyone from an agricultural society, like all those Mexicans who are immigrating here, has seen all the parts of the cycles of life happening on their farms. All of those are good starting points. We just have to stop getting bogged down disagreeing about our “unique” ideas. We are trying to develop cohesive ideas, and everyone has a path to success at that goal.

I don’t like cluttering up my text with footnotes, so I’ll list all my reference sources at the end of this.
Also, a few words about learning about philosophies, whether this one or anyone else’s. Your personal philosophy, whatever it is, you have built up over the course of however many years you’ve been alive. In the next 13 pages I’m going to outline the structure of a different philosophy. This builds up to the overall philosophy of the Occupy movement, but does it in a way that’s probably different from your personal philosophy.
In 13 pages I’m trying to make the structure of environmental science philosophy as coherent as the structure of your personal philosophy feels to you after 15 or 20 or 30 or 50 or 80 or however many years you’ve been developing it. That means the next 13 pages are really dense. It’s a lot of straightforward ideas packed tightly together. If you try to read it all at once, you will probably get overwhelmed. That’s okay. You can read a little now, take a break, and come back and read some more later. (This document is so long I can’t read it all in one sitting either.) The fact that you can’t see how to apply it to your entire life instantly doesn’t prove it’s wrong, but a lot of people jump to that conclusion. Or you can also skip ahead to Section 14 on page 16 and read from there. In the first half of this document I focus on the science philosophy and show how it supports Occupy philosophy, and in the second half I focus on Occupy philosophy and show how it’s supported by science philosophy. A lot of people have heard of some of the science, but most people haven’t heard all of it, even though a lot of scientists have been trying to tell people about it for more than 40 years.

2: Religious Philosophy & Science Philosophy:

The conflict between religion and science is playing out the same way every conflict between two positions plays out. A few very vocal people strongly support each side, and the much larger number of reasonable people in between get drowned out.
The 1% have spread a lot of disinformation about science in recent years, precisely because the environmental crisis requires a new way of thinking. Drawing people’s attention to conflicts between religion and science is an easy way to do that, since most people in the world are religious. Some interpretations of religion, but not all interpretations of religion, conflict with science. If people believe that new scientific discoveries fundamentally conflict with ideas they already believe in, they assume the new discoveries must be wrong.
The foundation of all religious philosophy is the recognition that the world is a big, complicated thing, so we better figure out how it works so we can decide what we should do. We all do that, whether we call it a religion or not. Nobody can function in life without making some assumptions about the world, because there’s no way for any of us to know everything all the time.

The problem religion feeds into is dogma. Dogma is the refusal to change your mind about something. Religion supports dogma wherever people claim that some idea is absolute. A lot of religious people say they don’t know everything, but then they act as if they do know everything. That’s still dogma, because regardless of what the people say, they’re still using ideas they aren’t willing to change to make their decisions.
A religion is a philosophy that assumes the existence of supernatural forces. But there are two ways to interpret the idea of supernatural. One definition of supernatural is that there are forces at work in the world that humans will never be able to understand. The other definition is that there are forces at work that seem supernatural because we don’t understand how they work so far, but someday we could figure them out. Dogmatic religions define certain aspects of the world to be forever beyond human understanding. But that’s a self-contradiction, because that in itself is a claim to absolute truth. Constructive religions are ones that recognize that some aspects of the world might be forever beyond human understanding, but that we should try to figure out as much as we can about the world.
People of any religion can take the dogmatic approach—also known as religious fundamentalism. This isn’t just a problem with Christianity and Islam. If you believe that you know unconditionally that some aspect of the world will forever be beyond anyone’s understanding, someone, somewhere, probably disagrees with you, and has a good reason for it.
Religion has been a traditional way of uniting people who feel the same ways about things, to work together toward their goals. The differences between dogmatic and constructive religions are: Who decides the goals? How? And how do the religious people adapt to situations they didn’t expect?

Secularism is not a hobby. Secularism is not a random idea someone thought of. There is no democracy without secularism.
Democracy is not just the rule of the majority. That would just be a new way to justify people in the majority dominating people in the minority. Democracy is an agreement that the majority rules except in situations where a minority group can prove they’re right about something and the majority is wrong. Then whoever is in the majority admits they made a mistake and fixes their mistake.

Despite the popular myth, science isn’t something only smart people can do. Everyone understands science philosophy, whether they realize it or not.
Imagine going to your doctor for some tests. Imagine him telling you that the results show that you have a terminal disease. Think of the five most important questions you would want him to answer before you would believe him. (This isn’t a trick question, but it seems that way. The questions are hard to think of without being in this situation because they’re so simple.)
1: What symptoms did he see in your results? (What did he observe?)
2: Do all of the symptoms indicate the terminal disease, or do only some of them indicate it and some of them indicate something else? (Are the test results self-consistent?)
3: Do those symptoms always indicate a terminal disease, or do they indicate something else sometimes? (Do the results show a universal pattern?)
4: Would another doctor get the same test results? (Can the results be reproduced?)
5: Could you and the two doctors talk about the test results to refine your understanding of the situation? (Can the results be debated?)
If your doctor wouldn’t give you straight answers to all of those questions, you wouldn’t believe him.
This is how objective discoveries are made. Each person’s individual perceptions of the world are subjective, and therefore, could be mistaken. Objective discoveries are reliable discoveries. We make reliable discoveries by searching for information that would always stay the same no matter who discovered it.
Science is this, applied formalized experiments. Secularism is this, minus the formalized experiments. Life is an experiment. We are all in the experiment. There are a lot of things we have to figure out as we go along. In situations like that, reliable information is always better than unreliable information. That’s why it’s so important to listen to other people with the attitude that they could’ve figured out some reliable information that you didn’t know about. As opposed to the dogmatic approach of assuming your own ideas are always better than everyone else’s.
Secularism is no stretch of the imagination in the Occupy movement. We do it every day in the general assembly. Every day, in every Occupation in the country, a lot of people get together to talk about the facts they know about and try to figure out how they fit together. Some people just have exceptional talents at that and have been working at it for a long time.

3: Secularism as a Philosophy

We need reliable information, about potentially every aspect of the world, and we can’t conduct formal experiments on everything.
The solution to this problem is what scientists refer to as first principles. A first principle is a rule that has been found to apply universally. This isn’t a claim to absolute truth in the religious sense. Scientific first principles can be disproved through the same five criteria that are used to discover them in the first place. Discoveries are accepted as scientific first principles when people who try to disprove them always fail, and other people use them and consistently discover further reliable information. We all do this in real life. We all use ideas that seem to work until we find a situation where they don’t work or someone else convinces us they’re wrong.
A first principle is a discovery that is made scientifically, but is in fact a philosophical discovery. A first principle is a discovery of a way of interpreting a situation that leads to a better understanding of the situation. First principles fill in blind spots in our perceptions by showing how we can work around the limitations of our perceptions. Knowing that the sun is 93,000,000 miles from the Earth instead of 83,000,000 miles from the Earth doesn’t fundamentally change the way you think about anything else. Knowing that the environment is a huge interaction of things that we depend on and that we affect with our actions, as opposed to the environment being a big pile of natural resources waiting for us to use, does fundamentally change the way you think about things.

The critical disadvantage secularism has always had to religious-type dogma is that we have always had gaps in our scientific understanding of the world. No one has ever had a complete scientific understanding of the world, because of basic limitations on human perceptions. That has meant there have always been some problems that don’t have secular solutions. Those are the kinds of problems that lead to hard political struggles that end up being settled by force. For instance, the scientific evidence for racial equality is overwhelming now. But slavery and segregation were established, maintained, and then overthrown by political force, because the scientific information hadn’t been discovered yet. Even after scientific discoveries are made, they don’t become the basis for political decision making until people learn about them and accept them.

The quest among environmental scientists for a new way of thinking is a quest to discover first principles that unite all areas of human knowledge. That project is essentially finished. There are lots of things that nobody yet understands about astro-physics and quantum physics, but the activities of stars and subatomic particles don’t affect any decisions we can make in real life.
The new way of thinking that scientists have discovered is synonymous with the new way of thinking that the Occupy movement is trying to establish as the new foundation of decision-making. Not all scientists know about this, and not everyone in the Occupy movement knows about it or fully agrees with it. But the overall way of thinking that has led to the Occupy movement is the same overall way of thinking that environmental scientists have discovered.
This means that the Occupy movement has a gigantic body of work to support it. As individuals we each have opinions. But our opinions fit together to match a gigantic pattern of facts that have been discovered through a lot of debate. Scientific discoveries are secular, and therefore in a secular government are evidence admissible in court, could be taught in the public school system, and government officials are supposed to know them. This body of information has been building up over thousands of years. There’s no way we could reach these conclusions all on our own through general assembly debates in a month or a whole year. But now that these discoveries have been made, in terms that we can all see happening in real life, we can talk about this stuff in general assemblies and work out details of how things affect us in different situations.

4: Math, Science, and Philosophy

The connection between math and science is straightforward. Discovering universal, self-consistent patterns in the world depends on people taking measurements. That’s how you see how much of one thing is interacting with how much of another thing to produce how much of a certain result. Once you have some numbers to work with, you can look for patterns among the numbers.
The reason some fields of science are so much easier to study than others is because some sciences study things that are easier to measure than others. Physics and chemistry deal in things that are easy to quantify. Biology, and especially psychology, deal in things that are harder to quantify. This is why the majority of biologists and psychologists are women, because women tend to be better than men at recognizing patterns in living things that haven’t been measured.

Every philosophy has what philosophers call metaphysics. That means the founding principles of the philosophy, which are considered universal truths.
In science, math is the universal truth. You can take measurements of things and find patterns among them. You can also use the same numbers independently of any measurements and the math still works the same way. The math can be used to measure things in real life, or the math can be done completely in the abstract, and it always works the same way.

Even though science depends on math, science philosophy doesn’t. Once scientists use math to discover patterns in the world, and the patterns are proven to be universal, we can use those first principles to interpret things that happen and have a basic understanding of how the math is working even though we are not taking measurements of that specific event.
For instance, once you understand the general idea of friction, you can figure out why the soles of your shoes wear out eventually, even without conducting a scientific experiment. Scientific experiments have been carried out to measure things like that, and now that people have figured out that friction was the reason things wore out, we can safely say we know that friction is the reason things wear out in similar situations.

5: The Four Founding Principles of Environmental Science

There are four first principles that make up the foundation of environmental science. There are other first principles that are used in environmental science, but those are all products of these four.
All of these are mathematical laws. Three of them were discovered as scientific laws, but now that the initial discoveries have been made, we can see that those were just specific applications of more general mathematical patterns.
First is the First Law of Thermodynamics. This says that matter and energy can never be created or destroyed. The Earth is a finite size, and the sun is a finite size. That means they contain finite amounts of matter and energy. That means there’s a limit to the amount of stuff in the world. There’s also a limit to the amount of energy available to us. That’s why fossil fuels and nuclear power are non-renewable energy sources. Solar energy is a finite resource for a different reason. Even though the sun has about 5 billion years left on its lifespan, sunlight only shines on the Earth at a certain rate. That means we can’t use solar energy faster than the solar energy leaves the sun.
Second is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This says that everything spreads out, or, disorder tends to increase. The more change you add to a group of things, the more different results you get. This is the source of both destruction and diversity. The more musicians think about the kind of music they could create, the more different musical styles you get.
But this is also why everything wears out eventually—your house, your car, your shoes, and eventually even you. The soles of your shoes get thinner the more you walk in them, because friction makes their molecules spread out into more places than they started in. Everything else wears out by some variation of that basic process. This means there’s not only a limit on the amount of stuff in the world, there’s also a limit on the number of times we can use it. We can recycle a lot of things, but it still takes energy to run the recycling machinery, and the recycling machinery wears out eventually.
The Laws of Thermodynamics were discovered as laws of physics. But they are really mathematical laws applied to physics.
The First Law of Thermodynamics is just a distinction between finite and infinite. If you start with a finite number of things, and things can’t form spontaneously out of nothing, then you will always have a finite number of things.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is also known as entropy. This is just a recognition that there are more forms of disorder than there are forms of order. You could sort a deck of cards by suit and by number. Then each card occupies one specific place in the deck. Then you could shuffle the cards. The Ace of Spades could end up in any of 52 places in the deck. The King of Spades could end up in any for 51 places in the deck—since it can’t be in the same place as the Ace of Spades. The Queen of Spades could end up in any of 50 places in the deck. Before you shuffled the deck, there was only one possible combination of positions for those three cards. After you shuffle the deck, the number of possible combinations is 52 x 51 x 50, which is 132,600.
In real life this means that when we change things around in the world we need to make well informed decisions when we do it, because when we change things at random making a mess is a lot easier than making things more orderly.
Third is evolution. A lot of people have a lot of misunderstandings about evolution. This is simply a specific application of entropy. Even though random changes make things more disorderly most of the time, occasionally they make things more orderly. So if you make random changes to a lot of things and then keep the few that turn out more orderly and get rid of all the ones that turn out more disorderly, and then you repeat that multiple times, you can make things more and more orderly step by step.
Farmers discovered thousands of years ago that they could breed their plants and animals over the generations to get characteristics they wanted. They just had to breed together plants or animals that had characteristics they liked and then breed the offspring that inherited the characteristics they liked the best.
What Charles Darwin discovered was that wild plants and animals were bred by the environment. In each generation, there were a lot of individuals born. Then some of them would die before they reproduced. The ones that survived were the ones that would pass their characteristics on to the next generation. The ones that survived were usually the ones whose characteristics suited them best to surviving in their living conditions. Over the course of generations, that created plants and animals that were each well adapted to living in whatever environments they lived in.
As a first principle we can say that replication, variation, and selection means evolution. Even though this was discovered as a biological law, really it’s a mathematical law. The replication, variation, and selection of anything makes those things evolve, which is also true in chemical reactions and computer programs.
Fourth is exponential growth. When numbers change at exponential rates, they change faster than anyone can guess without doing the math.
One piece of paper is about 1/256 of an inch thick. Two pieces of paper together is about 1/128 inch thick. Four pieces of paper together are about 1/64 inch thick. We’ve started with a stack of one sheet of paper, then we’ve doubled the height twice. We still don’t have a stack of paper that’s tall enough to measure with a ruler. Now use your intuition and take a guess: How many more times would you have to double the height to make the stack of paper reach the sun? Thousands? Millions?
The answer is 49. At that point the stack of paper would be about 137 million miles tall. If you don’t believe me, do the math on a calculator. It’s 1 ÷ 256, x 2, x 2, and so on until you’ve hit the 2 button 52 times. Remember to convert from inches to feet and then feet to miles. If you’re using a calculator with only 8 spaces on it you’ll have to round some numbers off and divide by a few factors of 10.
Exponential numbers are a blind spot we have in our natural perception of the world. That’s why it’s so easy to use compound interest to cheat uneducated people out of their money, through credit cards, paycheck loans, rent to own, and oh yes, housing mortgages.
When population sizes change, they change at exponential rates. If there are 10,000 deer living in a forest this deer generation, and the population size stays stable, it means that all the things that make deer die, put together, kill off all but approximately 2 children per pair of adults. The population size can fluctuate from generation to generation, but in the long run it balances out to 2.
If people then come along and kill off the wolf population so there are no more wolves eating deer, now more deer are going to grow up to have children of their own. If 4 children per couple now grow up to have children of their own, 10,000 deer this deer generation is going to be 20,000 deer next generation, 40,000 the next generation, 80,000, 160,000, 320,000, 640,000, 1,280,000, 2,560,000, 5,120,000, 10,240,000, and so on. If the population size doubles every generation, in 11 generations the population size will be over 1,000 times what it starts as.
The question that raises is: What are they all going to eat?
In this example, people exterminating the wolves means an exploding deer population exterminating the trees in the forest when they eat their leaves faster than the trees can endure. If an exploding population size isn’t matched by an explosion in its food production, eventually the population size will grow bigger than what the food supply in the environment can support. The population explosion will end with a famine that kills most of the members of the species.
In the year 1800 there were approximately 1 billion humans in the world. In 1900 there were approximately 2 billion. In 1960 there were 3 billion. In 1975, 4 billion. In 1988, 5 billion. In 2000, 6 billion. Today, 6.8 billion.
We are in a population explosion. This has happened because people all over the world have found ways to make their living conditions less dangerous. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing for people to do. But they didn’t realize they’d reduced their death rates below their birth rates. For thousands of years, the human population worldwide has had more than 2 children per 2 adults growing up to have children of their own.
This was the initial discovery of the global environmental crisis. A biologist named Paul Ehrlich noticed this pattern and did the math in 1968. His first book about it was called The Population Bomb. The same year a team of scientists and mathematicians called the Club of Rome got together to study the problem in more depth. Their first book was called The Limits to Growth. They discovered that with the rate people were using up resources, we would run out of resources in the 21st century, and no amount of technology we could realistically develop would save us. They outlined several possible scenarios for how people could react to the problem, and then did the math. The only solutions that prevented global famine were social reorganizations.
Which is what the Occupy movement is.
This is a problem that can be solved. It takes education and birth control. It also takes social reorganizations that make large families unnecessary, like Social Security to provide for people in their old age. It also takes new ways of thinking, for people to be content with what they have instead of constantly wanting more. It also takes an end to poverty, and of factors that lead to poverty, so that people can physically survive with the resources they have. Nobody will learn to be content with what they have if that depends on them accepting poverty. The 1% wishes everyone would learn to be content with what we have, but we’re not volunteering to be slaves.
If we don’t solve the problem, it will lead to global environmental disaster. What we have right now is resources being spread too thinly among people. If that keeps getting worse, eventually it will mean global famine, when there aren’t enough resources left in the world to go around. That will happen because all the farmland and other food production in the world won’t produce enough to feed all the people. Now global warming is causing droughts that are reducing the productivity of farmland. Soil erosion and other destructive farming practices are also reducing the productivity of the land. The energy crisis is reducing the amount of energy we have available for farm machinery and food transportation and storage. Meanwhile, the world population is still growing and needs more food. The problem the pioneers of environmental science predicted is here, and the political upheaval we are causing is a symptom of it.

6: The Big Bang

Physics and chemistry are the foundation of biology. With the exception of the first two Laws of Thermodynamics, all the first principles involved in environmental science start at the level of biology. But there are a few points to make here on how one thing leads to another.
The Big Bang is hard for people to think about, because it isn’t similar to anything in anyone’s realm of experience. That’s a big reason it’s so easy to get people to feel that other stories about the beginning of the universe are more realistic.
Every religion has a creation myth, and none of them match the science. And that’s okay. Wondering how the universe began and using whatever ideas we could think of to try to figure it out are two more things we all have in common.

The Big Bang was discovered through a long process of people trying to figure out what the universe was and how it began, and throwing out ideas one by one when they didn’t fit the evidence. To cut a long story short, Edwin Hubble, who the Hubble Space Telescope is named after, discovered that all the galaxies in the universe are moving away from each other. So physicists looked for clues and did the math, and it showed that about 14 billion years ago, everything in the universe would’ve been concentrated in one place. Everything is moving apart from each other as if that thing exploded.
A lot of people wonder what the universe was like before the Big Bang. That’s a reasonable thing to wonder.
15,000,000,000 years ago, the universe didn’t look like anything anyone has ever seen before. And that’s okay. A lot of people take their curiosity about the beginning of the universe to the point of refusing to believe it looked like something they can’t visualize. But if you do that you’re basically trying to appoint yourself Creator of the Universe, because you’re trying to decide that the universe had to begin in a way that you approve of.

What existed before the Big Bang was whatever the thing was that exploded. More importantly, what existed was what scientists call the causal structure of the universe. Gravity, electromagnetic force, and strong force and weak force (two forces that affect subatomic particles) are the four forces of the universe that make everything happen.
The expansion of the universe is the result of the Second Law of Thermodynamics making things spread out. The more change you add to a group of things, the more different results you get. As things happen in the universe, things spread out and move into more places than they were in before.

The Big Bang was a huge burst of energy. Protons, neutrons, and electrons are basically frozen droplets of that energy. Those three types of particles soon were drawn together by strong, weak, and electromagnetic force, to form atoms and molecules.
The first stars were formed when the first atoms were drawn together by gravity. The bigger the stars got, the more powerful the force of gravity inside them became. Stars burn because their gravity rips atoms and subatomic particles apart, which releases the strong and weak forces. For most of the lifespan of a star, the heat the star gives off makes it material expand at the same rate gravity crushes its material inward. That makes the star stay the same size for long periods of time. But if enough of the fuel burns up that the heat doesn’t balance out gravity anymore, the fuel can all collapse inward, and then explode all at once. That’s a supernova. It blasts most of the star’s fuel out into space.
The atoms that were created by the Big Bang were the smallest ones—mostly hydrogen and helium. It was the gravity of the first stars ripping atoms apart and crushing their subatomic particles together that created the larger atoms. Then those stars exploded and blew the new atoms out into space.

The point of all this is that a lot of people think the scientific story of the beginning of the universe can’t be right because it just doesn’t seem miraculous enough. But humanity did not just evolve out of chimpanzees. We started out as pure energy in the center of the universe, then we turned into star dust, then dirt, then bacteria, then worms, then fish, then dogs, then chimpanzees, then humans.

7: The Periodic Table of the Elements

Another popular piece of disinformation about science starts with what’s known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. This is an idea that’s used in atomic physics that specifies some limitations on scientists’ abilities to make observations in the study of atoms. But then other people have taken that way too far and come to the conclusion that because there are some things about atoms we can’t be certain of, and everything is made of atoms, we can’t be certain of anything. So there’s no point to science.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle doesn’t prove anything of the sort. The Periodic Table of the Elements is the foundation of chemistry. That was discovered independently of atomic physics. The Uncertainty Principle applies to individual atoms. But whatever strange and unexpected thing one atom is doing, some other atom is doing the opposite of that. When you put huge numbers of atoms together— which is what you study in chemistry—all that uncertainty stuff balances out. You get consistent patterns among elemental chemicals. That’s what the Periodic Table of the Elements is.

8: Evolution and Genes

Living things are made up of chemicals. Not the kind of chemicals people usually think of when they hear the word chemicals, like the cleaning agents you keep under the sink. Everything is made up of chemicals, meaning the kind you study in chemistry. For instance, breathing is a chemical reaction, because by a sequence of steps, you take in oxygen molecules and expel carbon dioxide molecules.
All of life is a huge chemical reaction. But how does knowing that help us? It’s way too many chemical reactions for us to keep track of them all. In every cell of your body thousands of chemical reactions are happening all the time.
We need a first principle to sort this out. That’s what the Selfish Gene Theory is. Chromosomes are each gigantic molecules. They’re made up of genes, which are smaller molecules. Genes are made up of proteins, which are smaller molecules. Proteins are made up of amino acids, which are smaller molecules.
Genes are molecules that start chemical reactions that create copies of the original molecule. They aren’t the only kind of molecule that can do that, but they are the biggest and most complicated molecules that do that. Crystals grow by making copies of their molecules too, but they’re much simpler molecules.

Charles Darwin discovered that characteristics evolve. Characteristics are what are passed down through the generations and either survive or don’t survive. Every plant or animal is a big combination of characteristics. But then a lot of people lost sight of that. Some people interpreted the evolution of characteristics as somehow helping the survival of the individual organisms that had them. Other people interpreted that to mean characteristics help species survive. And neither of those ideas works very well
Why do some diseases kill people? If you get AIDS, when you die, all the viruses in your body will die. So how does that help their survival? This is just one example of a problem that doesn’t make any sense when you focus on the survival of individual organisms.
It’s the characteristics that survive. It’s pretty easy for people who get AIDS to pass it on to someone else before they die. The characteristics that make the disease work the way it does survive in the new host, even though the viruses in the old host die. That’s why the disease keeps spreading!
Genes give organisms their characteristics. The survival and reproduction of characteristics means the survival and reproduction of the genes that create those characteristics.
When the Earth first formed, it was a ball of dirt, rock, water, and gasses. There were volcanoes, lighting, sunlight, and cosmic radiation bringing energy to the surface of the Earth. That meant a lot of matter and energy was getting mixed around. That meant a lot of chemical reactions happened, all over the Earth, for a billion years between the time the Earth formed and the time life began.
Eventually a chemical reaction, or some series of chemical reactions, created a molecule that made copies of itself. Biologists have thought of a lot of different ways that could’ve happened, and there’s no way to test which one it was. But it doesn’t really matter. It’s been proven that non-living chemical reactions like the ones that would’ve happened on the newly-formed Earth could lead up to the creation of genes.
The chemical reactions that created new genes were not always perfect. They created exact replicas of the original molecules most of the time. But sometimes something would happen that would change the chemical reaction, so the new molecule wouldn’t be exactly the same as the original. Sometimes these new, different molecules would still be able to start chemical reactions that made copies of themselves. But these new, different molecules made copies of themselves. They didn’t make copies of the original molecules. So now there was more than kind of molecule making copies of themselves.
At first the gene chemical reactions were simple. There were lots of atoms sitting around to get used in these reactions.
But the gene chemical reactions spread quickly, because they spread at exponential rates. First there was one molecule making copies of itself, then two, then four, then eight, 16, 32, 64, and so on.
Eventually all the molecules lying around got drawn into the gene chemical reactions. But now there was more than one kind of molecule making copies of itself.
This meant that molecules that started chemical reactions that use atoms that were parts of other genes could get the atoms they needed that way. So these were the first predators.
This meant that molecules that were the easiest to break up were the ones that got eaten the fastest. The molecules that survived were the ones whose molecules were the hardest to break up. So this was the beginning of prey defending themselves against predators.
One thing that would make molecules harder to break up would be if they started chemical reactions that surrounded themselves with different kinds of molecules, which other molecules couldn’t use. So this was the beginning of cells.
Something that would make molecules better at eating other molecules, and harder for other molecules to eat, would be for different kinds of replication molecules to stick to each other. That let their chemical reactions get a lot more complicated. Now that there were two genes stuck together, each starting chemical reactions and making copies of themselves, that created the possibility of the two genes supporting each other, if one of the genes started a chemical reaction that created some molecules that could be used in the replication of the other gene. So this was the beginning of chromosomes, and also one beginning of symbiosis.
Something else that could make molecules harder to eat and better at eating other molecules would be if cells stuck together. That created another opportunity for symbiosis, because now the two cells didn’t have to be exactly the same. So this was the beginning of multicellular life.
I started out talking about chemical reactions here, and I ended up talking about food webs. There was no point in between in which I stopped talking about non-living things and started talking about living things. That was the big discovery of the Selfish Gene Theory, for how to interpret life as a chemical reaction.
(A lot of people have a lot of misunderstandings about the term Selfish Gene Theory. It doesn’t prove that our genes make us selfish. It proves that genes make copies of themselves, and they can’t decide to do anything else, because they’re just molecules in a chemical reaction, so they can’t think.)
This means that every chemical reaction that happens in biology does one of two things. Either it contributes in one way or another to making more copies of the genes that started the chemical reaction, or it’s somewhere in the process of dying out.
This is why, for instance, people’s risk of dying by hereditary diseases increases as they get older. If you inherited a disease from one of your parents and you died when you were a child, you wouldn’t have a chance to pass the disease on to your own children. But if the disease doesn’t affect you until you’re in your 30s, or 40s, or 50s, you have more and more opportunity to pass it on to children.
This also led to the discovery of two more first principles. One was the Gaia Theory, in environmental science. The other was the foundation of a new approach to psychology.

9: The Gaia Theory

The Gaia Theory was the discovery that the Earth’s environment is one giant chemical reaction. The atmosphere circulates air all over the world, and the oceans circulate water all over the world. This is why air pollution and water pollution end up going everywhere. That doesn’t seem like much of a discovery, until you compare it to what people were thinking about before it was discovered. We live on land, which doesn’t move, which is why it took people so long to realize what pollution was doing to the air and water.
An environment is made up of all the living things in it, and all the non-living things in it. Environments stay stable because all the chemical reactions happening in them balance each other out. A lot of the chemical reactions fluctuate over time, but they balance out in the long run.
An environment gets destabilized when its chemical reactions get thrown out of balance. A food web, for instance, is an interconnected series of chemical reactions that each feed into the next, and that each depend on each other. If you take one of those chemical reactions out of the process, they’ll all break down.
If a species of bird spent the winters in the southern U.S. and the summers in Canada, and then all its nesting grounds in the U.S. were destroyed, the birds would have nowhere to get their food and nowhere to raise their next generation. Then there wouldn’t be any birds left to carry on their annual migration patterns. Then the bugs that the birds eat in Canada wouldn’t get eaten anymore. So those bugs would have a population explosion. Then they would eat too many of the leaves in the forest where they lived, and they would kill off whole forests. Nobody notices this simple chemical reaction of genes making more copies of themselves, through food webs, mating patterns, and migration patterns, as long as it stays in balance. But when someone does something to throw it out of balance it soon turns into an international problem.
The lesson here is that we have to be careful. Everything we do affects the world around us. The environment has been settling into its balances for millions of years. If you cut down a forest or blow off a mountaintop or dam a river or burn a lot of fossil fuels just to make as much money as possible in the short term, you’re going to make a lot of abrupt changes in something that took a long time to create.
This isn’t just a bunch of touchy-feely hippies feeling sorry for a bunch of little birdies and bunny rabbits. There is a specific problem here.

10: Universal Psychology

Another problem that the discovery of the Selfish Gene Theory solved was in psychology. Previously, psychology had just been a lot of observations psychologists had made and some connections they had drawn. But there never had been a unifying concept that showed how all the observations fit together.
This new approach to psychology has gone by several names. The most common is evolutionary psychology. What it means is a universal approach to human psychology by building up from the universal foundation of human biology.
Everything a living thing does is caused by a chemical reaction that’s started by genes, and it leads to the replication of the genes that started the process. That includes all the ideas people think about, all the actions people take, and all the emotions people feel.
(There is the possibility that a chemical reaction used to contribute to the replication of their genes, but it doesn’t anymore. If a species’ environment has changed so that some of the genes that could survive there before can’t survive there anymore, it means the chemical reactions the genes start don’t replicate the genes fast enough any more. Those genes become fewer and fewer until they die out altogether. That’s how species’ evolve and adapt to changes in their environments. But we can ignore that here because we change the world so quickly compared our generation cycle that genetic evolution can’t keep up. For instance, the United States was only founded about 10 generations ago.)
This points the way to answers to a lot of questions people have wondered about why people act the way they do. Why do people do dangerous drugs? Smoking crack is not good for your health in the long run. So do people do it?
The first principle of evolutionary psychology is that everyone always thinks of the best ideas they can in their situation. The technical term is: All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to maximize the survival rates of his or her genes by the most effective means perceivable to him or her. Or as the police refer to it: Everyone always acts appropriately in the context of their situation as they understand it. So wherever you’re trying to figure out why people act the way they do in a situation, back up to this stating point.
You can do this test right now. Think about every decision you can remember having made in your life. Every decision you have ever made felt to you at the time to be the best decision you could make in your situation. You’ve probably realized that some of your decisions were mistakes when you found out more about the situation later. You’ve probably been in situations where you didn’t like any of the choices you could see, but you still made what seemed to you to be the best choice out of all your bad options. You’ve probably made some decisions from reasons you couldn’t put into words, but just because for some reason they felt like the best decisions to you.
Well the same is true for everyone else, all over the world, all the time. That’s a very helpful thing for us to know about each other. That’s a very good starting point for talking through disagreements, even with people you’ve never met before.

The easiest way to figure out what other people are talking about and why they act the way they do, and to figure out the same things about yourself, is what I cal the Web of Human Behavior. It’s a web of 18 points of reference. Since I figured this out 8 years ago it has never let me down.
The most fundamental level of our subconsciousness is our instincts for survival and reproduction. Our intelligence is made up of three basic abilities: memory, imagination, and communication. One way or another, everything you think about or feel emotionally is something that you can remember, that you can imagine, or that you’ve found out from someone else, that affects your survival or reproduction.
That leads to eight basic universal motivations:
Direct survival;
Safety, meaning longer-term survival by dealing with situations that aren’t directly life threatening;
Reproduction, meaning anything involved in attracting mates, having sex, and raising families;
Social, meaning anything involved in interacting with other people;
Self-gratification, meaning anything that makes you feel good or bad;
Self-actualization, meaning anything involved in putting your abilities to use to make a life for yourself;
Self-fulfillment, meaning putting your abilities to use as much as possible; and
Fulfillment of self-fulfillment, meaning putting your abilities to use to make the best life you can for yourself.
We all have all of these 13 things in common. The differences that make us each unique, as a result of each of us acting differently on the same instincts, mental abilities, and motivations are:
Abilities, meaning whatever you’re physically and mentally capable or incapable of;
Skills, meaning whatever you’ve learned how to do;
Available resources, meaning everything external to yourself you perceive that you can use to help you succeed at your goals;
Personal history, meaning all the things that have happened to you as an individual; and
Cultural background, meaning all the things you’ve learned about as a member of a group.
These 18 factors make human behavior so complicated because there are always multiple factors at work, and they interact in different amounts from one situation to another.
You don’t have to agree with this right this minute. Just keep this list in the back of your mind. Then the next time you talk to someone who has a different point of view about something, listen to why they feel the things they’re talking about are important. Everything they’re talking about fits into this list somewhere, and you have an equivalent of it somewhere in your life. That’s constructive listening.
For instance, the social motivation is always involved whenever two people talk to each other. Listen and watch to see how much people use their words and body language to try get other people to respect them by proving they can succeed at their goals.
Whenever I go down to the Occupation I hear people talking about how hard it is to get proposals through he General Assembly. But when I go to general assemblies people are always amazed at how smoothly things go that time. I never see the problems people say they keep having with general assemblies. But usually when I go to general assemblies I help to sort out some complicated disagreements people get into. I find that often when two people who have the same goals get into a disagreement over something, it’s because they’re talking about two different things without realizing it. I don’t want to take all the credit here, but I can’t help noticing that all the insurmountable disagreements people keep talking about always happen on nights I’m not there.

The next question is: Why do we perceive the world the way we do? We always act to preserve the survival of our genes by the most effective means perceivable to us. So what are the sources of our perceptions?
The human species evolved on the plains of Africa. Our ancestors lived in groups of about 200 people, at stone age technological levels. Those were the living conditions in which human intelligence evolved. Now everything we can think about today corresponds in some way to those living conditions.
For instance, today we have the military industrial complex. We pay billions of dollars in taxes every year for weapons. That doesn’t make any sense to a lot of people. But it makes a lot of sense to a lot of other people.
Well violence exists throughout the animal kingdom. One way to settle a disagreement with someone is to physically eliminate them. So if you believed the people in the next village over might attack you, you’d want the best spears you could get and a lot of them. That’s the basic reasoning behind the public support for the military industrial complex. Spears couldn’t exterminate all life on Earth with the push of a button. That’s something that has been developed only recently. So to a lot of people the general idea of having lots of weapons to protect themselves against attackers feels right. They just overlook that one little detail about total annihilation.
Over on the other side people are saying that we only need weapons to protect ourselves against enemies. If we don’t have enemies we don’t need weapons. The whole reason people are able to live in groups is because they figure out how to get along with each other. So if people within your group can get along with each other, why can’t you just broaden your horizons and create a larger group of people who can get along with each other, made up of your village and the next village over? Fighting each other is dangerous and weapons take effort and resources to make. So if you can get along with each other, why not?
We’ve all heard about people living in groups of about 200 people at stone age technological levels. A lot of Native Americans lived that way up until a few hundred years ago. So in trying to figure out some pattern of behavior, the question is: Why would intelligent people living in those conditions believe acting that way would be helpful to them?
I should emphasize here that people’s technological levels are not reflections of their intelligence level. A lot of people assume they are, but that’s not true. People’s technological levels are reflections of the combinations of resources they had in their areas to make things out of. That’s all.

11: Emotions & Intelligence

Emotions are instincts. Intellect is the ability to focus your mind on certain ideas. Consciousness is the stuff you know you’re thinking about. Subconsciousness is the stuff you don’t realize you’re thinking about.
Some people think emotions don’t mean anything. Some people think emotions are everything. Some people think we shouldn’t use our intellects. None of those are true.
Emotions and intellect are not two separate things. Emotion is a primal form of thought. That’s why the things you know about, or believe are true, change the way you feel.
Emotions are complicated because your brain does two things at once. It tries to predict what’s going to happen in your situation, and it prepares your body to deal with that situation.
The first problem is that your brain interprets the sensory input you get in terms of what that sensory input meant for people living in groups of 200 people at stone age technological levels. That is the source of your deepest, most primal emotions. You feel emotions about the modern stuff you learn about life, but those aren’t as profound of feelings as the ancient Africa stuff we’re all born prepared for. So this leads to people emotionally misinterpreting their situations and feeling like they should react in a way that doesn’t help them. The over-dependence on the military industrial complex is a perfect example of that.

The next problem is that once your body prepares to react to the situation you feel you’re in, you feel like you’re supposed to react in that way, because that’s what your body is prepared for. Whether that’s really the best response to the situation or not. For example, acting upon their immediate feelings is how people commit second-degree murder.
Art evokes feelings from people by concentrating certain forms of sensory input in one place. A neutral form of that is an artist creating art for herself.
Advertizements use sensory input to make people feel like they want something so they will buy it. A lot of people have talked about being surrounded by advertisements as a form of emotional oppression that makes them feel like failures because they’re constantly made to feel like they want things they can’t have. Other people have talked a lot about how people’s racist or sexist attitudes surround them with sensory input that makes them feel negative emotions all the time.
We can use this constructively too. Deciding to change something in the world begins with you feeling like the way things are is wrong. Then as you try to figure out why you feel the way you do, you find out more about your situations and see specific problems and specific things you can do about them.
Writing poetry is an easy way to sort out your emotions. Try putting your feelings into words. Like, “I feel like I’m being crushed to death by my loan payments.” Then look for how the situation you described with your words is similar to the situation you’re actually in. This doesn’t have to be good poetry, and you don’t have to share it with anyone. Using metaphors to put your feelings into words is the critical part.
Another way to sort out your emotions is to ask yourself: What do I feel is going to happen in this situation? And: What do I feel I should do? Those are the things you’re trying to work out with your emotions. So this is a very direct way of putting your feelings into words.
We can also do this as a group. This is how we build strength through diversity. The first step in people coming together to struggle for a goal is for them to recognize that lots of other people feel the same way they do. That means we are more powerful as a group than we are as individuals because we all feel like we should struggle for the same goals.
This is why constructive listening is so important to a movement of people from diverse backgrounds. If we all interpret our own emotions as the truth and then plan on acting accordingly as a group, minorities will always get marginalized. To solve that problem, we all have to agree to back up to our common ground as humans and start building up from there. People in minority groups have almost always seen things and thought of ideas that people in majority groups haven’t. For instance, as a White person I hate White supremacism, but the hate I feel isn’t the same as the hate a Black person would feel. There are general similarities between our feelings, which is why we both use the word hate to describe them. But we have each seen the problem from a different perspective, so we each have thought of ideas the other person hasn’t.
Any time you’re talking with anyone, from any group, if they are talking about a situation similar to yours, or about a situation you are involved in, they can probably put into words some ideas you haven’t yet figured out how to put into words. These are not just abstract ideas that coincidentally you feel to be right. You and the other person reached your similar feelings by using the same basic human brain structure in similar situations.
The 1% feel the emotions they feel. We of the 99% feel different emotions because we are in a different situation. They can’t assign emotions for us to feel and punish us if we don’t feel them. They wish they could, and they try to, but that’s not how human psychology works.

Another major discovery in psychology is the differences between men and women. Men and women are the two most physically different groups of people in the world. We all have brains for making our bodies work. Men and women are equally intelligent, but we are not identical. Men overall, compared to women overall, are each better than the other at some things.
The central difference between men and women is the way we reproduce. Our areas of overall gender specialty in our intelligence correspond to the things we each needed to do in groups of 200 people at stone age technological levels to have children who grew up to be adults. Psychologists have made many valuable discoveries in this area. The overall discovery is that all of our mental talents were somehow important in our ancestors’ living conditions.

Another major area of discovery has been in child development. Humans have the largest ratio of brain size to body size of any animal species. That’s why we also have the longest period of child development of any animal species. In order for us to be born with our brains more fully developed, women would have to be pregnant longer and give birth to larger heads.
Our brains develop throughout our childhoods, until about the age of 18. That’s why we learn differently as children than we do as adults. As children we are especially receptive to learning certain things, like languages. Things we learn as children get built into the development of our brains. In other words, learning as children is part of the development of our brains. That’s why, for instance, immigrants to the U.S. consider their first language to be their native language and English to be a foreign language, but their children learn English as fluently as their first language.
Culture works the same way. As adults we need to have a good sense of how to relate to the world, so as children we are very receptive to learning that. That’s why a person’s childhood culture, whatever it is, feels like their native culture, and any culture they learn as an adult just doesn’t seem as real.
We learn to relate to the world based on what we perceive happening around us as children. Whether or not those ideas correspond to reality is irrelevant. If consumer culture is what we learn as children, that’s what we feel is supposed to be most profoundly true about the world as adults. Then those are the ideas we use to make our decisions in life. It doesn’t matter to people’s childhood cultural development that consumer culture is based on the assumption that the world’s resources are infinite, even though they aren’t really. People learn what they are made to believe is true, even if it isn’t true.
This is a big reason the environmental movement has been such an uphill struggle. This is why any social movement for a profound shift in thinking is such an uphill struggle. The Civil Rights Movement is another example. People can learn about new ideas as adults, but it takes a lot of exposure to the new ideas to get people to change their minds about beliefs they’ve held since childhood. Many adults never change their minds about their childhood beliefs, and the social changes in thinking that finally take hold are the result of the next generation of children being exposed to the new ideas from early ages.
We can use this to our advantage eventually. Once we get our new way of thinking established, that will become the new way people learn to think as they grow up.

12: The Evolution of Ideas

A branch of the universal psychology movement focuses on the evolution of ideas. The scientific term for this is memetic evolution.
Ideas evolve the same basic way genes do: by replication, variation, and selection. (In fact, the word evolve refers to the combination of those three things, so a thing those three factors don’t apply to isn’t evolving, by definition.)
At first, a person thinks of different ideas and remembers the ones he likes best. Then when he tries putting the ideas to use they get tested again, when he sees which of the ideas work the best. Then those are the ideas he remembers best.
Genetic evolution is way too slow to solve the problems we are facing right now, because that happens step by step, generation by generation, in our 20+ year generation cycle. But ideas evolve as fast as you can change your mind about something.
Now that we are facing huge problems on a global scale, humanity has to evolve to deal with them. We can’t evolve genetically, but we can evolve through our ideas.
Humanity evolving through our ideas means our discovering ideas that work so well we never give them up.
Democracy is the perfect example of the evolution of an idea. In 1776, no one from a European country had ever lived in a democracy. Today the idea of democracy has spread to so many people that we’re not going to give it up and go back to living under an aristocracy. The 1% thought they could trick us into that, and it isn’t working.

The one remaining challenge in the unification of science by first principles is what scientists call a unifying theory of culture. How does psychology make ideas turn into cultural values? But even though scientists consider that problem unsolved, we don’t need to wait around for them to solve it, because other people, like art philosophers, have figured out a reliable body of information here.
The Occupy movement is putting an understanding of cultural development into effect right now. A culture is the result of people acting upon their beliefs. If you want to change a culture, you have to change the decisions people make, which means you have to change their beliefs. Wherever you want to make big changes in a culture, you have to change people’s interconnected beliefs. That means making big changes to a culture depends on making big changes to its underlying philosophy. Which is exactly what we’re trying to do.

13: The History of Imperialism

Life spreads wherever it can spread. Individuals take advantage of every opportunity they can. Species in an environment expand and spread out as far as they can to use as much of the environment as they can.
Humans, more than any other animal species, can learn about our situations and make decisions about how much of our environments we should use. There is a lot of disagreement about how much of our environment we should use, but that’s the result of our having different ideas about how much of the environment we can use, how much of the environment there is, and what else the environment needs to do.
Why is it like this? This is one place that looking at life as a chemical reaction is helpful. Life is a process of gene-molecules making copies of themselves. Gene-molecules replicate themselves until they can’t anymore. That’s the definition of a chemical reaction. Life spreading everywhere it can is the result we see.
This is why people who think about the results of their actions act differently than people who don’t think about the results of their actions. People who don’t think about the results of their actions keep spreading out everywhere they can. People not spreading out everywhere they can depends on their learning about the limitations of their environments and deciding they shouldn’t spread out everywhere they can.

11,000 years ago, everyone in the world were hunter-gatherers. Many people were nomadic, but some people lived in parts of the world where the food production was so plentiful that they could live in the same place year round.
That led to big differences in lifestyles. The nomadic people were limited in what they could own to what they could carry with them when they walked from place to place, following the growing seasons and animal migrations. Stationary people, on the other hand, could build permanent buildings. They could make more tools and other useful items than they could carry. They could create useful things that were too heavy to carry with them. They could make specialized tools that they would only need occasionally, such as tools for harvesting a certain kind of plant once a year. They could harvest more food than they could eat right away, and save it to eat later. They could also have more children than nomadic people, because they didn’t have to carry their infants with them when they moved.
In a few places on Earth, stationary people had a combination of factors that led up to their development of agriculture. In these places, the people had living conditions that were so favorable to them that their birth rates were higher than their death rates. Their populations increased until the wild food production in their areas would no longer support the populations. Over time, these people figured out how to control the food production of their environments more and more. The people in these areas had combinations of wild plants growing nearby that could provide well balanced diets year round. Eventually their population size grew so large that the only way they could feed themselves was by the full time, year round control of their food production, and they succeeded at this because the plants they had in their areas could provide them with healthy diets year round. The full time, year round manipulation of the environment’s food production is what agriculture is.

To cut a long story short, the people with the agriculture could produce more food in a year. That meant they could have bigger families so their population sizes could grow bigger. That increase in food production also meant they could support some people who didn’t have to produce their own food, so those people could specialize in other occupations. Stationary people could also develop more technology than nomadic people, since they could store up the things they made.
All of that meant that the groups that had more people and more technology could direct more energy toward the achievement of their goals than other people could. Life spreads wherever it can. When two groups of people came into conflict with each other, the people who could produce the most short-term physical output won. So they spread wherever they could.
In some parts of the world the people reached the point where their resources wouldn’t support any more people, but for some reason or other they couldn’t spread into new territory. People who lived on islands in the ocean didn’t have any more land to use. People who were surrounded by neighbors they couldn’t overpower were limited that way. Many groups of people developed lifestyles where they were able to balance their impacts on their environments against what their environments could withstand. Life spreads wherever it can. People in these situations realized that they couldn’t spread any further, so they figured out how to limit themselves. They figured out what would happen if they tried to keep spreading out, and they chose to do something different.
The stationary people with the agriculture were surrounded by lands where less physically powerful groups of people lived. So they didn’t perceive a limitation on their ability to spread. So they focused their thoughts and efforts on the simplest solution to the problem of how to support their populations by conquering other people and taking their resources. That included moving onto the other people’s land. But that still didn’t solve the problem, because they still hadn’t learned how to limit their impact on their environments. When the territory they had would no longer support their population size, they conquered more of their neighbors and took their land. The ongoing conquest of lands and resources is the definition of an empire.
The people who figured out how to balance their lifestyles against their resources made an important discovery that took a lot of work. They could’ve lived that way essentially forever, except for the fact that they weren’t as physically powerful as the imperialistic people were in the short term. The people with the balanced lifestyles had figured out that they needed to limit their use of resource in the short term so that they would still have resources to use in the long term. The imperialistic people had discovered that if they used up their resources quickly in the short term, they could invest them into food, weapons, and other technology that would make them more physically powerful than everyone around them, so they could keep getting new supplies of resources that way.
Well the Earth is finite in size. The environmental crisis we are now in and the political upheaval it’s causing as people disagree on how we should deal with it, is the same situation people have run into on smaller scales many times before now. The imperialism plan doesn’t work for very long on a small island in the ocean. Either the imperialism stops because the people adapt to the limitations of their environment and figure out how to lead balanced lives, or else the imperialism gets stopped because the people don’t figure out how to adapt to the limitations of their environment and they wipe themselves out with a famine. The imperialism plan has lasted a lot longer for people who had the technology and the force to spread all over Planet Earth, but it’s running into the limitations of our environment right now.
Life spreading as far as it can isn’t limited to geographical territory. That also includes the development of ideas and activities. Art, for instance, is a way of developing new ideas. People who figure out how to balance their lifestyles against their environments can invest some of their resources into making art and musical instruments instead of investing their resources into making weapons and having more children.

A lot of people in the Occupy movement have talked about new forms of imperialism. Bankers tricking people into taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford. People in the pharmaceutical industry profiteering on treatments for diseases. Other people profiteering on credit cards and student loans. Other people profiteering on things like war, the energy crisis, and drinking water. Other people clear cutting forests and blowing the tops off of mountains to get at the coal under them. All of these are ways people have found to get more resources for themselves. Life spreads everywhere it can, and to do that in the conventional, imperialism sense of replicating genes, it needs resources. With a finite supply of resources available, that means depriving other living things of the resources they need. Which is exactly what people in the Occupy movement are accusing the 1% of doing.
The other way that life can spread as far as it can is in the development of ideas. Once we recognize that we can’t keep taking more land and using up more resources, we can choose to stop doing those things, but that leaves all other aspects of life for us to expand upon. That’s exactly what the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll movement is, at its core. People continually getting more stuff isn’t the only way for them to feel satisfied with their lives. People can also figure out ways to invest their resources more effectively toward their satisfaction with their lives. Quality of investment instead of quantity, in other words. Spiritual development instead of land development.
Now with this as a foundation of a new way of thinking, we can talk about specific solutions to problems.

14: Politics, the Constitution, and the 1%

People have always struggled against imperialism. The history of colonialism versus anti-colonialism and capital versus labor has been a struggle over resources by people with conflicting goals.
The problem the labor/anti-imperialism movement has always run into is that the people on both sides perceived an unlimited supply of resources in the world, even though they didn’t perceive unlimited resources in their immediate situation. The limitations on the resources in their immediate situation were being created by the opposing side taking the resources. But it appeared to the people on each side that if the other side could be defeated, then their side would have unlimited resources. Or, either side could solve the problem if they could get unlimited resources from somewhere else. The labor movement in particular gains a lot of support when people are faced with poverty, and loses a lot of support when people perceive themselves to have abundance. An example of anti-imperialism leading to a new form of imperialism was the American Revolution driving the British Empire out of the United States, only to replace it with the imperialism of the United States.
With the environmental crisis humanity is now in a situation that is fundamentally different from any other in the history of our species. The conditions that lead to support for the labor movement will be here permanently, as long as the labor movement has the means to organize.

There has been a saying among environmental scientists for years, that “If we pit the Constitution against the laws of physics, the laws of physics are going to win.” More generally, if we pit our political system against scientific laws, the scientific laws are going to win.
It is a historical fact that the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787. The Theory of Evolution wasn’t released to the public until 1859. The first two laws of Thermodynamics weren’t discovered until 1868. The effects of exponential growth in a finite system weren’t published until 1972. This means that the founding document of our country, upon which all of our other laws are based, was written by people who had fundamental misunderstandings about biology and physics. That includes human behavior, the environment, and economics.
The overall problem is that our political system was founded in a time when the greatest threat to our country was foreign aggression. The original 13 states were surrounded by the British, French, and Spanish empires. Today the biggest threat to our country is the environmental crisis. Other countries are a threat to us primarily through their reactions to the environmental crisis.
When the biggest threat to your country is other countries’ imperialism, imperialism is a reasonable solution. If the U.S. had ceased its expansion with the original 13 states, the rest of what’s now the United States would’ve been conquered by someone else. The U.S. southwest was conquered by the Spanish. Alaska was conquered by the Russians. The other imperial powers would’ve used the resources in the rest of what became the U.S. to make their own empires more powerful, if the U.S. hadn’t gotten there first.
The combination of democracy and Capitalism in the U.S. led to people focusing their efforts toward goals that resulted in the U.S. surviving the imperialism of its rivals. People used their combination of political and economic self determination to get more stuff, which made them more physically powerful, which made the U.S. as a whole more physically powerful.
But that plan doesn’t work anymore. If the goal is to use force to get more resources, forever, then when our political system runs into the physical limitations of the Earth, the only place it will have left to use its force is against U.S. citizens, or against people of other countries who don’t have anything left they can afford to lose. That will result in political upheaval both at home and abroad, as people all over the world all struggle for the resources they need, all at the same time.

A lot of people don’t like the way history turned out. We can’t change history, but we can learn from it. A lot of people who don’t like the way history turned out can see the same patterns still happening, so they want to stop them now before they come to the same fate their ancestors did.
For us to discover a universal philosophy we can use to relate to each other as equals depended on people form all over the world meeting each other first. Most of that meeting was the result of some groups of people conquering others. But just because the past turned out that way doesn’t mean the present and future have to stay that way.
The challenges the United States faced from its founding up until the discovery of the environmental crisis were different than the challenges we face today. People who don’t see the environmental crisis as a problem don’t see that our situation has changed. This means that the 1% got into power because they had a combination of talents and skills that were well suited to the previous situation. Now that we are in a different situation, we need different talents and skills to deal with it. There is no reason to believe that rising to the top of the political system we have now qualifies a person to deal with the situation we are now in. Unfortunately, the unqualified 1% either don’t recognize the problem, or they do recognize it and they don’t want to give up their power.

What does the word Constitution actually mean? Does it mean a legal document that’s so complicated you have to go to college for 8 years to understand what it says? That’s not what it means to me. To me, the word Constitution means an agreement that the United States isn’t going to be an aristocracy anymore. I thought that was the whole reason George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and their friends drove the monarchy/aristocracy out of the U.S. and replaced it with a democracy. The words that are written on the paper are supposed to support that idea. That’s why the first three words of the Constitution, and the three biggest words written on the page are We the people. That’s about as far as my understanding of Constitutional law goes.
Evidently, the 1% don’t agree with the idea that the United States isn’t supposed to be an aristocracy anymore. As far as I’m concerned, if they feel the Constitution doesn’t apply to them, that makes them foreign aggressors.
Obviously the 1% and the 99% have conflicting ideas about what our political system is supposed to be like. So this is a good time to back up and see what the political system of a group of 200 people living in the wild at a stone age technological level looks like. Every Native American I’ve known has some version of this story to tell about how their ancestors lived, not so long ago.
The people in the wild each have their own interests as individuals. But they have a lot of interest in common. So they band together so they can cooperate for their mutual interests, even though they still compete against each other for their individual interests. They can cooperate on hunting and gathering and defending themselves against neighboring tribes. But a woman can never get pregnant by more than one man at a time—or, only one man can impregnate a woman at a time, depending on which side you’re seeing that situation from. There are some aspects of life that will always come down to conflicting interests of individual people.
What would you do if you were trying to make your living in the wild, and there was someone in your group who was much better at living in the wild than you were? You could make yourself much more successful at your own goals by taking instructions from him. If he knows so much more about living in the wild because he’s in his 40s and you’re in your 20s, cooperating with him is a good choice for you.
Now say it’s 20 years later. Now you’re in your 40s and other people are in their 20s. Now you’re the one who knows the most about living in the wild. What do you do?
You cooperate with them by telling them what to do. Then they use their 20-year-old bodies to apply your 40-year-old knowledge. That’s a better combination than you applying 40-year-old knowledge with your one 40-year old body, or them applying their 20-year-old knowledge with their 20-year-old bodies.
You could try to use this situation to your advantage, and get the people who want your help to pay you dearly for it. But there are more of them than there are of you. They don’t have to follow you. They all grew up in the wild, so they’ve been living this way for 20 years already. You’re better at it, but they have the same basic skills you do. If they perceive that not cooperating with you will be better for them than cooperating with you would be, they won’t cooperate with you. Furthermore, every man in the group has weapons for hunting and knows how to use them, and will get the chance to sneak up behind you at some point. The amount that you are able to get from the other people in your group is limited by their ability to function independently of you, and by their ability to stand up for themselves.
When you’re the one who knows the most about how to live this way, the other people appoint you their leader by general consensus. But they can remove you as their leader any time they feel like it. You stay the leader by continually proving you would be better than anyone else.
In a group of 200 people, everyone knows everyone else personally. (If you don’t believe me, write down the names of everyone you know personally. You’ll get a number somewhere around 200.) That means the social structure of the group is made up entirely of personal relationships. The people will formalize some rules within the group by general agreement, but the main structure of the group consists of close acquaintances continually adapting to their changing situations.
If the group grows much larger than 200 that organizational structure will stop working, because the group will be too big for everyone to know everyone else personally anymore. The group will either split in two, or else the people will start formalizing a lot more rules.

How is that situation different from what we have now?
The United States is a group of 300,000,000 people. That’s way more than 200, so we have a lot of formalized laws.
That means if you’re the chief and I want to replace you as chief, I can’t win enough support to succeed just by talking to everyone I know. So the power of the people to remove the people at the top is greatly reduced that way.
Today political leadership is a specialized skill. You can go to college to major in political science, but most people don’t. Before, people got to the top of the political structure by being better at the same basic skills everyone had. Today, most people in the U.S. don’t know what the people at the top do. That means they can’t take over their jobs easily. That also means they can’t even easily recognize what the people at the top are doing, or whether or not it’s beneficial to themselves.
Today the people at the top don’t have to mingle with anyone else. Instead they’re surrounded by the police, the military, and a lot of other people who are loyal to them. So we can’t easily assassinate them. (Not that I’m suggesting anything.) The ability of the people to remove the people at the top is reduced in this way also. That means the people at the top can afford to take more from everyone else without the rest of us being able to punish them for taking what we feel to be too much.
Today the military and law enforcement are also specialized skills. In the beginning, those were good ideas, because that let people who had talents in those areas focus on developing their skills in those areas, and it let everyone else focus on other things. That has let us develop ideas that we couldn’t’ve developed if we’d each had to focus some of our attention and some of our resources on defending ourselves personally. But that also means that the violence skills are now concentrated among a small number of people, all of whom take their orders from the 1%. That means if the 1% ever decide that we are a threat to them, they’ll have the vast majority of the weapons and the people with the weapon skills on their side.
Some people have noticed this happening to them already. A lot of people from inner cities have said they can tell the laws, the lawmakers, and the law enforcers are not on their side. If the 1% keeps using the imperialism plan to try to deal with the environmental crisis, that’s only going to get worse.

Another specific problem with the Constitution is that it doesn’t give us a vote of no confidence. Various other democracies have rules for holding special elections to remove from office government officials who are failing at their responsibilities.
The Second Amendment supposedly protects us from the corruption of our government. That was supposed to be the modern equivalent of the means to assassinate a tribal chief. Hopefully the threat of the chief being assassinated would keep him from abusing his power.
Back in 1787, the United States was the first democracy any Europeans living at that time had ever seen. The America Revolution had recently driven the monarchy out of our territory by force. The Second Amendment gave citizens the right to own weapons. At that time, weapons meant muskets, and the military were armed with muskets also. That created a reasonable balance of power between citizens and the government, in case all other balances of power failed.
The vote of no confidence is an improvement over the second Amendment that other countries developed later, when they shifted over to democracies. The Second Amendment is an essentially useless approach to a good idea. If we try to use the Second Amendment to save ourselves from a corrupt government, the first people who are going to get killed will be law enforcement officers, whose job it is to protect government officials against people with guns. The next people to die will be citizens, when the law enforcement officers shoot back. The next people to die will be military personnel, when the government calls them in to put down the rebellion. Then the corrupt government officials can finally be killed. (I’m speaking completely hypothetically.)
That’s an awful lot of people’s lives that would have to be sacrificed to remove corrupt politicians from office. Very few people in the United States believe we should treat each other that way. Combined with the fact that citizens versus the government is no longer anything resembling muskets versus muskets, people would have to driven to extreme desperation before they would resort to armed revolution. For people to resort to that, and believe they could win, the government would probably have to have come to the brink of collapse already, for some other reason.
At one point George W. Bush’s approval rating sank to 29%. His policies on the war, the environment, and health care didn’t match what voters wanted. And there was nothing any of us could do about it. Impeaching a president depends first upon his breaking a law, as opposed to general incompetence. Then it depends on one U.S. senator to sponsor. That means only 100 out of the 300,000,000 people in the U.S. need to be convinced not to impeach to prevent the impeachment. And it only removes from office the individual president and promotes his vice president to replace him, as opposed to removing his entire administration.
The Bush administration left a lot of Americans feeling that the government is not on our side. The Obama administration hasn’t changed many people’s minds about that. We still have the same political system that George W. Bush used to get into power. That means every 4 years, someone else is going to have the opportunity to make themselves the next George W. Bush.

In January every four years, we are reminded that the United States is a country of laws, when someone is sworn in for the next presidential term. But that isn’t true. The Soviet Union was a country of laws. And that wasn’t good enough. The government tried enforcing its laws until the people overthrew it.
The United States is a country where we strive for justice. Every January we observe Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. He didn’t make himself such a hero because he obeyed the law. He made himself such a hero because he broke the law in the struggle for justice. The next time a presidential nominee reminds us that the Untied States is a country of laws, just remember the United States began with 85 years of slavery laws, followed by a century of segregation laws. Laws are not what has made our country so great. It is the ongoing struggle for justice that has done that.
That’s what the Constitution means to me. It’s an agreement that we will strive for justice.

15: Education

A lot of people in the Occupy movement want better education. I’m a certified instructor. There are a lot of teachers in my family. We’ve been saying this for years.
Education, as it is defined in instructor certification training, is the act of making your student’s mental model of the world more closely correspond with reality. If your student isn’t gaining a better understanding of what you’re trying to teach, education is not taking place, no matter how many hours the student spend in school or how much the taxpayers pay for it.
Teaching people things depends on building up from whatever ideas the people are starting with to get to the ideas you’re trying to teach them. Wherever two people start out with different ideas, teaching them the same new idea depends on different approaches.
Effective education results in the self-empowerment of the student. The better the student understands the world, the better able they will be to succeed at their goals.

Standardizing an education system depends on the people who design the education system making assumptions about 1: the ideas the students are starting with, and 2: how the world works.
This leads to what I call the intellectual feudal system. There are many groups of people in the U.S., so they go into the education system with different starting ideas. Some groups’ ideas closely match the starting ideas of the educations system. Those students learn a lot from the education system. Other groups’ ideas don’t closely match the’ starting ideas of the education system. Those people tend to see going to school as having to spend all day memorizing a bunch of fake stuff, so they get bored and drop out.
This means the education system can be used—and is being used—to manufacture differences in effective decision-making power between different groups of people. That was the whole idea behind not allowing slaves to learn how to read. That continued with the segregation of schools. That basic pattern still hasn’t gone away. You see the results today in the fact that there are some high schools that college recruiters don’t bother visiting.
Teaching reading, writing, and math to elementary school children is fairly easy. Reading and writing are the act using paper to communicate with language. Math is a more complicated way of counting on your fingers.

History class, as I’m sure we’ve all heard, can be used to control what the public learns about history. By controlling what people believe has happened so far, you control what they believe is going to happen in the future, because they look for patterns in history and expect them to keep happening.
Both racial minorities and White people have criticized the Euro-centric version of history taught in public school. Minority groups say their people don’t have any heroes to look up to that way. The easiest way to make them feel like they can’t do anything is to make them feel like they haven’t done anything. White people have said that Euro-centric history mythologizes history. Teaching a version of history that isn’t true makes it a completely separate thing from the real-life present. If you learn a fake version of history you don’t learn anything you can apply to real life. Whenever I say that George Washington was a rebel, a lot of people tell me, “Yes, but things are different now.”

Science class can be—and is—used to control what students expect to happen in the future also. First students are put into a class called science, where they’re supposed to learn how stuff works. The teachers start by showing them simple little classroom experiments that they can repeat. The students think it’s exciting that they saw their teacher do one thing and make something else happen, and now they can do the same first thing and make the same second thing happen. That’s the definition of reliable information.
But then science class moves on to concepts that can’t be demonstrated with classroom experiments. At this point science education depends on first principles. At this point students have been trained to expect to learn reliable information in science class. So they have no way of knowing when their teachers leave out conclusions that can be drawn from first principles. Once again, students’ perceptions of the world are controlled by what they’re told.
A big reason the 99% have been so blindsided by the trickery of the 1% is because the 1% has been doing a lot of things that we were never taught could happen. For instance, the Euro-centric version of history that’s taught in school is a story where the protagonists are White people. To White people at least, that makes history a story where the good guys look like them. That makes most people in the U.S. not expect that the (mainly White) 1% could do the things they’ve done. When historians like Howard Zinn show that the 1% have had consistent patterns of behavior throughout history, and those patterns are also consistent with organisms benefiting themselves by taking advantage of their opportunities like biologists have shown happens everywhere else in the animal kingdom, a lot of people in the U.S. dismiss it and see it as 235 years of the same isolated incident happening over and over. They believe the 1% just made a mistake and we should be patient with them so they can learn and do better next time.

The founding assumptions that are made in the education system about how the world works are that it works the way the 1% need for it to work in order for their plans to work. When people use the ideas that have been manipulated in science and history class to decide what kinds of job skills they should learn, they end up learning job skills that depend on the world working the way the 1% want us to believe it does. Then, in order for us to put our job skills to use in making a living, we have to try to force the world to work in the way the 1% want us to believe it does.
If you majored in, say, petrochemical engineering in college, you’re going to want the U.S. to do whatever it takes to keep drilling oil, just so you can keep your job.
What we end up with that way is a country full of people voting to try to make the world work in a way that it doesn’t actually work, just so we can all put our job skills to use.
More generally, when we apply the ideas we know about, we make the 1%’s economic system keep happening.

This isn’t a hard problem to solve, conceptually. Education depends on two basic things: Students wanting to learn, and students being able to get accurate information. We have the accurate information now, thanks to the unified science philosophy. We have effective communication styles. People have been talking about their ideas for roughly 100,000 years, or, ever since the human species gained the ability to construct sentences. People have been learning by watching what other people do for millions of years. Those aren’t obstacles.
Learning environmental science philosophy is easy enough. Environmental science is biology, biology is the study of life, and we see life happening every minute of our lives. We see the end results of environmental science philosophy all around us. All that leaves to learn is how the pieces fit together.
We would then have an education system that matched reality. But that would have serious political effects. Then the 99% would all have a lot more self-empowerment. As a lot of people in the Occupy movement have believed, a better education system would directly support the Occupy movement.

The purpose of acquiring wealth is to increase the decision making power of the individual—even if it’s for something simple, like deciding how you will be entertained today. The purpose of education is to increase the decision making power of the individual. Therefore, education is a form of wealth.
Education, and especially education in unified environmental philosophy, can be produced at very low cost. The environmental crisis is a huge problem facing our country. We need for our country to be as powerful as possible to deal with it. Maximizing the power of the U.S. to deal with this problem depends on our maximizing the education of all of our citizens.
The maximization of the wealth and decision making power of all U.S. citizens will be perfectly consistent with the founding principle of the U.S., that all people are created equal, and it will be completely inconsistent with the aristocracy that the 1% are trying to force upon us.

16: The Environment

The environmental crisis was caused by the gaps in our perceptions of the world. People thought one thing was going to happen, but something else happened instead. People’s actions produced unexpected results.
If there were no gaps in our natural perceptions of the world, science wouldn’t exist. Science is the search for reliable information we didn’t know about before. If there were no gaps in our perceptions of the world, we would be born knowing everything, so there would be no scientific discoveries to make. We would all be born knowing the Theory of Relativity, which obviously we aren’t.
The problem with gaps in our natural perceptions of the world happens to everyone any time we drive a car. At a stone age technological level, traveling faster is usually better than traveling slower. Being able to travel further in a day is better. Being able to carry a lot with you when you travel is better. The fact that we all think this way means doing these things increased our ancestors’ survival rates over people who thought any other way. Or to look at it from the point of view of the present, driving a car gives you more effective decision making power in the short term over where you will go today and what you can bring with you than if you walked everywhere.
We can’t see the carbon dioxide our cars give off. We can’t see how they’re contributing to the greenhouse effect or the energy crisis. We can’t see the results driving cars will have in 20 years from now. The greenhouse effect and the depletion of fossil fuels weren’t problems that faced our ancestors in the stone age. We can learn about that stuff, but it doesn’t feel as profoundly true to us as the ancient benefits of traveling further, faster, and being able to bring more with us.

It is true that we have all contributed to the environmental crisis. But that disguises the fact that some people have the means, motive, and opportunity to profiteer on keeping our economic relationship to the environment the way it is. I don’t own an international media corporation, and neither do most people in the world.

The connection between the environment and our economic system is that making resources more useful to people, in any sense, means changing them somehow. What all natural resources do prior to human intervention is to fulfill critical roles in the environment. In a stable environment, everything balances against something else. When people change things in the environment without learning about all those connections and making sure they will stay in balance, the environment gets thrown out of balance.
Increasing wealth depends on increasing economic activity. Economic activity—or any other kind of activity—is the result of energy interacting with matter. Increasing economic activity depends on making more energy interact with more matter. The energy and matter in the Earth and sun (and universe) are finite. The natural environment makes matter and energy interact with each other at certain rates. That means making matter and energy interact with each other faster than that throws the cycles of the environment out of balance. The environment can withstand some of that, but eventually it reaches the point where changes in the environmental cycles throw the environment out of balance completely. That’s what the unsustainable use of resources is.
It is true that improvements in technology or changes in lifestyles can increase the efficiency of energy and resource usage. Putting better insulation in a house is an example of that. However, that fact is used to support a lot of disinformation. Efficiency can only be increased so far. There are always minimum limits on how much energy and resources it will take to produce a desired effect. If there were no limits on efficiency, that would mean eventually we could figure out how to build the biggest and most powerful things we could imagine using zero energy or resources.
(This philosophical trick is called ad absurdum, which means following a premise to a conclusion that obviously can’t happen. That means somewhere in between what you have now and the impossible conclusion, some other factor in the situation limits what can happen. For instance, innovation leading to zero energy and resource usage would mean some day someone will invent a bicycle that a person can ride from Alaska to Argentina without ever needing to stop to eat. If that seems unrealistic to you, that’s a clue that there’s more to economics than innovation making things more efficient.)

This brings us to a conclusion that seems absurd to a lot of people, but unfortunately isn’t. The 1% of today are using the same basic imperialistic ideas the 1% of 1968 were using, and that the 1% at every point in between have used. In 1968, the global environmental crisis was discovered. This predicted huge political and economic upheavals in the 21st century.
The fact that the 1% don’t talk about the environmental crisis publicly doesn’t prove they don’t know about it. To believe they don’t know about it, you would have to believe none of them have heard about this gigantic discovery that had been made in politics and economics, even after 40 years.
The 1% obviously are making political and economic plans. They are making their plans knowing about the environmental crisis, even though they aren’t talking about the environmental crisis, either as part of their plans, or in any other sense of it being important. And these people got to where they are by being very good at the imperialism way of thinking.
So what kinds of plans can we guess they’re making?

The discovery of the environmental crisis, back in 1968, included the discovery that if global environmental disaster struck, billions of people could die in the famines it would bring. The human population of the Earth in the year 2200 would be much smaller than what it is right now.
So what happens in between today and 2200?
The 1% got into power by being so good at imperialism. The discovery of the environmental crisis showed that the imperialism plan for politics and economics would lead to global environmental disaster that would kill huge numbers of people. But imperialism is what the 1% are best at, and they want to stay in power.
If you were to use the imperialism way of thinking to try to find a sensible solution to this problem, that would mean trying to make other people die, instead of yourself.
One simple way to make that happen would be for the 1% to release biological weapons on the world, blame it on terrorists, and say there was no cure, even though there was a cure and they had already taken it. An even simpler solution would be to lock themselves away inside gated communities and let the rest of the world turn into an inner city. Another solution would be to trick the 99% into wasting our money on bailing out banks and the airline industry so wouldn’t have any money left to buy anything with. There are much more complicated possibilities I’m sure we can all imagine. The underlying theme is that the 1% wins and the rest of us lose.
Michael Ruppert is an investigative journalist and former detective. His book Confronting Collapse is a short, easy to read book about the prospects of the 1% using environmental disaster as a political tool.

One big reason environmental science has been so slow at attracting public support is because of child development making people feel that what they learned about life as children is supposed to be more profoundly true than what they learn as adults. Most adults today haven’t learned about the environmental crisis until they were adults. They aren’t willing to believe the environmental crisis could be as bad as it is because they aren’t willing to believe the world could work so much differently from the way they thought it did. This is what makes effective education such a central component of a new way of thinking we need to deal with the problems we face.
Paradoxically, this problem even applies to the pioneers of environmental science. A person who makes a scientific discovery as an adult that leads to huge new conclusions in environmental science philosophy has already developed their perspective on the world, as a child, based on assumptions about the world that didn’t match their discoveries as adults. The beliefs a lot of environmental scientists developed in their childhoods, unfortunately, are ones that support the imperialism of the 1%.
What this means is that a lot of the pioneers of environmental science don’t even realize that they aren’t applying their own philosophical discoveries to real life. That reinforces other people’s disbelief in the discoveries, because the people who made the discoveries don’t even seem to believe in them.
I escaped this problem because I was born after the environmental crisis was discovered. The pioneers of environmental science all belong to my parents’ generation. Environmental philosophy, leading up to the discovery of the environmental crisis, is what I learned about growing up. Since I’m from family of philosophers who believe in strength through diversity and self-empowerment through education, the main philosophical ideas I was raised on corresponded to the discoveries that have been made in environmental science. I didn’t find out about some of those scientific discoveries until I was an adult, but the philosophical ideas I was already using were close enough that the scientific discoveries just clarified some points.
I bring this up because I see similar things happening for other people. A lot of people with high educational credentials will probably disagree with me that the Occupy movement is using a way of thinking that matches what the environmental scientists have discovered, because a lot of highly “educated” people aren’t even aware of the way of thinking they have discovered. Anyone in the Occupy movement who was born after 1968 has grown up among a growing body of ideas about environmental philosophy. If you believe that learning what other people know about is better than proving your own ideas about everything are right, you have the same basic philosophical foundation I do.
Other people who are not scientists have made philosophical discoveries that parallel the discoveries of environmental science. For instance, the idea of racial equality has been a big area of research for evolutionary psychologists, and their discoveries have paralleled the main philosophical concepts of the Civil Rights Movement. So people who have grown up after the Civil Rights Movement have grown up learning about philosophical ideas that are consistent with the scientific discoveries.
This means discoveries in human psychology show that something could happen that scientists don’t seem to have thought of. The scientists are a relatively small group of people who are using formal experiments to search for a new way of thinking. Meanwhile, there is a much larger group of people who are also searching for a new way of thinking that serves the same purpose. Science depends on basic mental processes everyone can do, and that everyone can figure out how to do when they know that finding reliable information is important. The ideas of the scientists reach this larger group of people eventually, and the larger group also learns ideas that other people have found to be reliable through trial and error or because the people were very observant.
This means there are two groups of people each searching for the same new way of thinking. Each group has some advantages over the other.
This means that the larger group could discover what the scientists are looking for before the scientists discovered it, but in a form the scientists didn’t recognize.
Or to put it another way, just because a lot of highly “educated”, highly respected “experts” think we’re wrong doesn’t prove we are. I’m not trying to rule out debate here, I’m just pointing out these limitations in the perceptions of some of the people who will disagree with us.

A lot of scientists and science writers have made different predictions about how badly the environmental crisis could turn out. The extreme is that we have already set into motion events that will render the entire Earth uninhabitable to humans, so there’s nothing we can do to prevent the total extinction of the human race. Other predictions are less dire. All the predictions made by reputable environmental scientists are bad.
The differences in predictions arise from the differences in founding assumptions the scientists are using. Everyone has to make some generalized assumptions because there’s no way for anyone to be an expert in every related field. But the general consensus is that hard times are ahead of us.
Barring the already-unstoppable total extinction of humanity, whatever hardship we face, we will be better prepared for with education than without it. As for the redistribution of wealth and other changes in our economic relationship to the environment, anything the Occupy movement can change is better than our doing nothing. If, for example, I was forced into a situation where I was going to die no matter what, I would rather sacrifice my life to save people on my side than to have my life sacrificed by people who aren’t on my side. I’m sure a lot of other people feel the same way about their own lives.

17. Violence:

Violence is not the goal of the Occupy movement. But violence is a fact of life. On one side of our struggle we have a lot of people who are angry about stuff. On the other side are a lot of police with guns who have been ordered to keep us under control. That’s a potentially dangerous situation. So we need to address this.
This is especially important because in other parts of the world people whose goals are essentially the same as those of the Occupy movement have already resorted to violence. Everyone in the U.S. who lives west of the Rockies lives closer to the rebel held territory in Mexico than we live to Washington DC. In 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, by their Spanish initials) rose up in armed revolution against the NAFTA, which to them, as indigenous farmers, looked like a new and improved plan for the imperialism they had already endured for 502 years. But those people were born with brains pretty much like ours. So why have they resorted to armed revolution and we haven’t? Our goal is not violence, but obviously something can make people with our goals resort to violence. So we‘d better figure this out, so we can recognize if that thing starts to happen to us.

Violence is even more primal than biology. The purpose of violence is to eliminate the ability of your opponents to oppose you.
But violence isn’t the only way to eliminate the ability of your opponents to oppose you.
The idea of violence is an idea like any other. It’s a starting point for looking for a way to deal with a situation. Then the first question to ask is, How else can the desired result of the violence idea be achieved?
Everyone has a minimum amount of stuff they need to live. They also have whatever amount of stuff they have now. In between those two is their safety margin. That’s where they can afford to experiment with different ideas. That’s where they can afford to be generous. That’s where they can have a sense of humor.
People have different sizes of safety margins for many reasons. Differences in amounts of resources is an obvious one. Also, perception of differences in resources. If people can be tricked into believing they have more or less of a safety margin than they really do, they can be tricked into acting differently than they would otherwise. Also, differences in living conditions, goals, abilities, skills, and personal and cultural values. How a person is trying to live and what they’re trying to do changes the minimum level they need. Differences in what a person is capable of doing and in what they know how to do changes the minimum level they need. That’s why education is a form of wealth, because it increases a person’s safety margin. What a person believes they should do or is willing to do, because of their personality or because of what they’ve been taught to believe by other people changes how much of a minimum level they’re willing to accept. Some of these also affect the top end of the safety margin, by changing how much the person starts with or how much they believe they can get.
Religious fundamentalists who have been convinced that obeying their orders is the only way to save themselves from eternal damnation can be convinced to commit a lot of violence because they believe their safety margin is zero. On the other end of the spectrum, people can be convinced to accept wage slavery or any other form of repression if they can be convinced that it gives them the best of all possible situations—meaning best of all possible safety margins.
Down in Mexico, a lot of indigenous farmers realized that the NAFTA was a death sentence for them. It would force them off their farms. But they needed their farms, not just to grow their food and sell their crops, but also because all of them, living on their farms, in their towns, made up their communities and their cultural identities. The communities they had developed over hundreds or thousands of years made up a big part of their safety margins. If they gave up their farms and moved into cities to take factory jobs, all their neighbors there would be strangers, who they couldn’t depend on for help when they needed it.
So our neighbors to the south realized that their safety margin would soon be gone. A lot of people in Mexico are using the last of their resources to try to relocate to somewhere they can get better safety margins. That’s what the immigration crisis is. Other people in situations like this hang onto their homes for as long as they can, and when their resources are gone relocate to work in nearby factories. Other people spend the last of their resources on alcohol to try to drink their problems away. But the members of the EZLN decided that if their lives were going to be jeopardized no matter what, they might as well fight back. Like I said earlier, they could still make the choice to risk their lives protecting people they cared about, rather than having their lives sacrificed by people who obviously don’t care about them.
The point is, the revolution in Mexico is organized around the same principles as the Occupy movement. The EZLN has resorted to violence while the Occupy movement hasn’t because they’ve been pushed to a much greater level of desperation than we have.

This means we are dealing with a window of opportunity for solving problems non-violently. We can already see that people with the same goals we have can be pushed to violence.
A lot of revolutions throughout history, like the French Revolution, have failed to solve problems because they depended on violence to win. After the French government was overthrown, the only decision-making structure left standing was the revolutionary army. That was a decision making structure that was focused on reaching its goals by killing whoever opposed it. That worked great for fighting a war. It didn’t work at all for governing a peaceful society.
The EZLN realized this. Even though they have resorted to violence, violence isn’t the goal. The goal is to build a new society that can effectively defend itself against people who try to destroy it. Hence Subcomandante Marcos’s saying: Revolutions are won with ideas, not with bullets.
So what does that mean for the Occupy movement?
We are here to stand up for ourselves. We are not here to beg the 1% for mercy. We are here to eliminate their choice to oppress us. That’s the only way anyone ever liberates themselves.
We are trying to defend our movement the same way that worked for Gandhi, Dr. King, and Nelson Mandela. The idea behind a society having laws is that the laws are agreements on things that people won’t do, because they’ve determined that individuals acting in certain ways will be harmful to the group overall. Those three great leaders got laws changed by changing people’s minds. They each succeeded in establishing a new way of thinking by getting enough people to think that way that those people no longer agreed that people should act in the ways the old laws required. So they won their revolutions without resorting to violence.
Things are not so simple for us. The Occupy movement is stuck somewhere between the Civil Rights Movement and the EZLN. The global environmental crisis was not a factor for the Civil Rights Movement. The Occupy movement is in a situation where the decisions of the 1% are pushing us closer and closer to environmental disaster. That would mean global poverty increasing to the point of global famine. That would mean zero safety margin left for people all over the world. That would mean lots of people seeing violence as their last hope.
The environmental crisis is going to make civil unrest grow. The choice we have in the matter is whether that civil unrest is going to be constructive or not. So far, the Occupy movement is the constructive unrest. There will be lots more people in the future who will realize they’re getting caught up in the economic crisis, and who will want to do something about it. If we are out here, with a plan that’s working, we can gain a lot of support.

The police are dealing with their own safety margins. As civil unrest grows, the police’s safety margins shrink. The police, with their weapons, are going to face larger and larger crowds of angry people. When the police feel like they’re in too much danger, they will resort to using their weapons. They will resort to levels of force that are excessive for controlling the immediate situation, in order to try to discourage people from trying that again in the future. Police brutality is already a problem in general, and has been a problem for the Occupy movement in a lot of places. In cities in blue states, for instance, the Occupy movement has gained support so quickly that the police have already been driven to desperation in trying to keep the angry people under control.
In Occupy Phoenix we’ve had a different situation. A lot of people here are afraid of excessive police force not because the police see us as an immediate threat, but because the people assume that in a conservative state the police will feel justified in resorting to force to stop us.
But it’s not that simple. On the second day of the Phoenix occupation—the first night we tried spending the night in a park—the police were there waiting to arrest anyone who refused to leave when the park closed. A lot of people in the general assembly were afraid that was going to mean police violence.
The reason I moved to Phoenix in the first place was to pursue a career in support of law enforcement. (Police helicopters aren’t flown by police officers, because operating the machine is so complicated and potentially dangerous that it’s a full time job all by itself.) So I got up in the general assembly and announced that I wanted to make a group with anyone there who had any background in law enforcement or the military and see if we could think of anything to do.
Immediately I was joined by a former army captain who spent 11 years working in crowd control. So we walked right up to the police command center and asked to talk to their commander. We asked what their objectives were and what their orders were. They were glad we came up to talk to them. We talked like reasonable people and they talked like reasonable people. They said their orders were to close the park for the night. They weren’t trying to start any trouble with anyone beyond that. They would warn everyone several times that they would be arrested if they didn’t leave, before they started arresting anyone. We told them that most people in the group didn’t want to start any violence, even though there were a few people who were trying to provoke it. They said that’s what they thought, and hoped, too, and they were glad to have the confirmation.
I got our whole negotiation on video. Then we went back to the general assembly and announced our results. I also got most of the 46 arrests that night on video. All the arrests I saw happened just the way the police commander said they would, with a sufficient amount of force to remove the people, and no more. The police enforced the law. They didn’t do anything to discourage anyone from breaking it again.
That same night, another group of people, who was approved by the general assembly, tried negotiating with the city government, and it was a total failure. The city government told us at first that they were considering letting us stay in the park, and then changed their minds at the last minute, as if they were trying to catch us off guard.

We didn’t need to be people with backgrounds in law enforcement and the military to be able to negotiate with the police. That was just the easiest way to organize it in the time we had. I, like everyone who serves in the military or law enforcement, trained to make life or death decisions in tenths of a second. At that point the general assembly had been talking about what to do about the confrontation with the police for about an hour, and we only had about 20 minutes left until the park was scheduled to close. I figured that a few people who were all trained to work on the tenths of a second schedule could come up with a clear course of action in time, and it would also be easy for us to establish common ground with the police, as other people who were accustomed to working on the tenths of a second schedule.
Now that we’ve figured out how to do it, negotiating with the police doesn’t need to be limited to people from a few careers. The critical part is to establish respect with the police as people who are accustomed to handling big responsibilities and whose highest priorities are everyone’s safety. I think the medical department of the Occupy movement would be best suited for this. Here in Phoenix the police respect our medical department already.
The goal of negotiating with the police is not to make the movement easier for the police to control. The goal is to solve the problem that we have a lot of angry people on one side and a lot of people with weapons on the other side, and neither side is sure what to expect from the other. If someone from one side misinterpreted what someone from the other side was doing, interpreted it as a threat, and reacted to it as if it was a threat even though it wasn’t really, just by that misunderstanding we could all get caught up in lot of violence no one on either side ever wanted.
The solution is for people who are respected on both sides to walk across the lines, let the police know the protesters want to be peaceful, find out from the police what to expect and how protestors can avoid getting caught up in violence, and then tell that to everyone on the Occupy side. Anything the police say can and will be debated in the general assembly, possibly for 2 hours, possibly by 100 people or more, all of whom are intelligent, most of whom are reasonable, and some of whom have a lot of background in political activism. If the police try to trick us, someone on our side will probably notice. Then the occupiers won’t trust the police as much the next time, when the police might actually be telling the truth about an important problem they need help solving.
In other words:
Step 1: The protesters decide what they’re going to do.
Step 2: The medical team listens to people’s concerns about their safety.
Step 3: The medical team tries to find out from the police what they’re planning to do about those problems.
Step 4: The medical team tells the protesters what the police said, so that people who don’t want to get caught up in violence know how not to get caught up in it, and nobody panics.
You have to limit your negotiations with the police to how people who don’t want to get caught up in violence can avoid getting caught up in violence, and other direct threats to public safety. If you negotiate with the police to get them to make things easier for you in the short term, you’re only going to make things worse for yourself in the long run. The police know that. That’s the plan. They’re going to try to whittle your protest down to nothing. They’re going to ask you to do one little thing for them and one more little thing, until you have nothing left. If you stand up to them and try to stop them, you’re going to look unreasonable. That’s what they want. They’re not going to arrest you for protesting the 1%, they’re going to arrest you for sleeping in a park or for unpaid parking tickets, or whatever they can. They’re going to try to make you look unreasonable to everyone else by making you look like you went to jail for something pointless. They’re going to try to keep everyone from noticing that arresting you was just one step in an overall pattern of them trying to stop our movement.
(For an extreme example, a lot of people who cooperated with the police and obeyed the law in Nazi Germany marched into gas chambers. The Nazis gave the people a series of choices. The one that gave the people the best short-term benefits gave the Nazis the best long-term benefits. The police we’re facing wear blue uniforms instead of gray, and speak English instead of German, but that doesn’t prove they aren’t using the same overall strategy.)
This is why we have to keep moving forward. If we want to win, we have to make what we’re doing more powerful than anything the police can do.

The danger of police violence helps to keep people away from supporting the Occupation. From what I’ve heard, it sounds like the Occupations in blue state cities attract a lot of support right away, pose an overwhelming threat to the police, provoke them into violence easily, and then win a lot more public support. In a red part of the country though, it seems that we haven’t reached that critical mass, so that the danger of violence keeps people away in the first place, and then if it was to come to violence, a lot of people would be scared off and more people wouldn’t come out to support us. (We’ve already run into a lot of anti-homeless laws in Phoenix that are a lot stricter than in the rest of the country, which is helping to keep our Occupation from growing the way the Occupations are growing in a lot of other places.) I certainly don’t think the police here see us as a real threat. So while in blue parts of the country huge groups of angry people can provoke the police to violence just by their numbers and draw attention to the problems they’re protesting that way, in red parts of the country, where the police can easily outnumber the protesters, someone on our side would have to actively provoke the police into violence. Then we wouldn’t win public support because of the police violence, because we would have brought it on ourselves.
By negotiating with the police to keep everyone on both sides peaceful, our peaceful movement uses every available means to stay peaceful. The alternative is to call ourselves a peaceful movement but not use every available means to stay peaceful. That’s going to drive away a lot of our support.
Police violence is only useful to us when we can show that it was used against peaceful people.

There’s a lot of debate within the Occupy movement of whether or not we should consider the police part of the 1%. Well the reason I volunteered for law enforcement was because of 9/11. If terrorists were going to kill civilians, I’d rather meet them with a weapon in my hand. Everyone I know who has worked in law enforcement didn’t do it because they wanted to tell other people what to do, they did it because they wanted to protect the public, and they trusted the people who were going to be giving them their orders.
A society is a pattern of trust among people. People try to establish patterns of trust everywhere they can, even in the seemingly most unlikely places. People who trust each other can agree not to try to kill each other.
The biggest example of that is World War I. The armies on both sides were dug into their trenches, facing each other for months at a time. So they started recognizing each other’s habits and settling into patterns of trust even there. They started doing things like taking turns shooting at each other at the same time every day, so the people on the other side would know when to duck. The soldiers on both sides didn’t see that any amount of risking their lives was going to affect the outcome of the war in any way they cared about, so they figured out how to risk their lives as little as possible. They found ways to interpret their orders that made what they were doing technically a war and in reality just a bunch of people shooting guns.
The Occupy movement is in the exact same situation with the police. The problems we’re protesting aren’t going away, so we’re not going away. The police aren’t going away either. So whether anyone meant for this to happen or not, we’re all getting to used to being around each other. So we’re all finding ways to settle in around each other with as little conflict as possible.
A week and a half after the showdown in the park, I was back in that park and I met a police officer there. We got to talking about that night, and he said he was in the line that swept us out of the park. He said they weren’t on our side, but they didn’t want any trouble either. We made our point, and they made their point, and it all stayed peaceful.
We made our point, they made their point, and it all stayed peaceful. Isn’t that the whole reason we debate ideas in the general assembly? So we can all make our points peacefully and we can all develop our new ways of thinking?
As far as our relationship with the police was concerned, the showdown in the park that night was a debate between people who work on the tenths of a second schedule and people who work on the 2 hour general assembly meeting schedule.

Unfortunately, our efforts to negotiate a semi-truce with the police haven’t worked. There was some excessive police violence in the park the first night, against a few people when the cameras weren’t around. In Arizona, dehumanizing jail conditions are part of the oppression we’re protesting, and those jail conditions are used against us whenever anyone gets arrested. Come visit our occupyphx.org site to see interviews with people who have been arrested.
As the weeks have have gone by, the police have seemed to use every opportunity they can find to whittle us down. Arizona also has the toughest anti-homeless laws in the country, which are also being used against us. You can be arrested for falling asleep in public if you have made any kind of preparations. It’s legal to get drunk and pass out on the ground, but you can go to jail for falling asleep in a chair or for lying on the ground using a backpack for a head rest. Several people in Occupy Phoenix have been arrested for things like that. The people who stay at the Occupation all night have to stay awake all night. Recently the police confiscated our information and food canopies, and everything in them, including all of our food, when the people sitting in those canopies fell asleep around 3 or 4 in the morning.
On November 18th, our part in the national days of action was to protest the anti-homeless laws. About 10 people spread out blankets on the ground and lay down. About 50 police came and arrested them. We have videos of that too.
Now Jesse Jackson has stopped by for a visit to show his support and said Arizona is the Mississippi of the Occupy movement (referring to the Civil Rights Movement). The following night the police pepper sprayed a group of Occupiers who were handing out fliers on the street.
A lot of people in the Occupy movement here have come to the conclusion that someone is assigning the police who hate us the most to be the ones who stand guard over us. Those police obviously are not interpreting their orders to give us as much leniency as possible. The rest are kept misinformed about what we’re doing here, so they won’t see any problem with enforcing a few laws on us once in a while when they’re sent to guard us for a big event. But the Occupation has been going on for less than two months now. It takes time for people in situations like this to settle into unofficial truces. Maybe we will and maybe we won’t.
Meanwhile, I hear that in other parts of the country some police have quit their jobs for being ordered to put the Occupation down. We’ve been hoping for something like that in Phoenix. The police have labor unions of their own. If all the evidence indicates that we are on the side of democracy, and people on our side know that, and the police find out about it, it will be a lot easier for them to refuse their orders or to negotiate through their labor unions.
All law enforcement officers in the U.S. swear to risk their lives to defend the Constitution. But the Constitution was written before any of the first principles of environmental science were discovered. The struggle between the Occupation and the political system the police are defending is a struggle over different possible interpretations of the Constitution. Is it a specific set of laws, or is it a more general statement that the U.S. is a democracy? If the Constitution can be interpreted in two conflicting ways, what are the police risking their lives to defend? I’d sure want someone to answer that if I worked in law enforcement—which I almost did, until I realized this problem.

When you talk about people as if they’re automatically inferior to you, you’ve taken the first step toward believing it’s okay to kill them. If those people hear you talking about them that way, they will try to stop you any way they can. So don’t talk about people that way unless you’re serious about killing them.
Whether the political upheaval in the U.S. stays completely peaceful right up until the day we win, or, completely hypothetically, some sort of catastrophe drives so many of us down to zero safety margin that we resort to violence like our neighbors to the south have, either way, the more the police, with their guns, sympathize with us and our movement, the better off we’ll be.
There are some people in and around the Occupy movement who feel that they have already been driven down to zero safety margin, so they assume the struggle is going to come down to violence. There are other people who aren’t down to zero safety margin, who are opposed to violence unconditionally, and who over generalize and believe that anyone who thinks about violence is wrong. In between there are a lot of people who want to solve the problems we have peacefully but would’ve joined a violent resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Europe.
No one said the struggle would be easy!
This is a struggle to change what’s happening in the U.S. by changing people’s minds about what we all should do. Within the Occupy movement there are people from lots and lots of backgrounds, who have lots and lots of ideas about ways to change people’s minds. If you believe that we should resort to violence because you are close to zero safety margin, chances are that someone, somewhere in the Occupy movement, can think of a peaceful solution to the problem you’re having. For us to struggle as a peaceful movement means for us to use all the means of peaceful struggle available to us. That means that no one of us knows what all the peaceful means are. That means no one of us can decide that the time has come to resort to violence because all our peaceful choices have been exhausted.
(Completely hypothetically, if our situation changed, our people’s movement would turn violent the same way it started out non-violent: Not by a small group of people deciding one way or the other, but by general consensus that a certain course of action was best in our situation.)

Most people in any society want to get along with whoever they can. That’s why societies last, instead of having riots and civil wars every single day. Violence is a very noticeable, very dramatic form of political action. It isn’t the one that happens most of the time. But nobody will ever make a video game about civil disobedience.
In a society where most people haven’t been pushed to zero safety margin, changing people’s minds about what should happen in the society can only be done peacefully. If people are trying to get along with each other and you resort to violence, they aren’t going to see you as part of their society, so they aren’t going to help you.
When the people of a society, getting along with each other, agree on how people should act, then they decide on what rules (or laws) should be enforced. The police use their weapons on whoever they’re ordered to use their weapons on. Unless they’re trying to kill us, our most effective way to neutralize the threat of police violence is to peacefully change people’s minds about what should happen in our society. If we succeed at establishing a new way of thinking it will change how we, as a society, decide what should happen in our society. That will mean changing our agreements on what people should do—meaning, changing our laws. That means the police getting different orders.
If we agree, as a society, that people shouldn’t do the things the 1% have done to get into power, that new decision would be put into effect by preventing people from disobeying it. That would mean new laws being enforced.
That would mean the police using their weapons on the 1%.
I know that sounds far-fetched at the moment. But eliminating the 1%’s choice to continue oppressing us was the whole idea, wasn’t it?

I’m from the east coast, so I grew up among a lot of Revolutionary War monuments. As Captain John Parker, the commander of the Americans at the Battle of Lexington, the first battle of the war, said to his men a few minutes before the war started:
Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.
That encompasses the strategy of any political struggle, violent or non-violent, that changes a society, including what the Occupy movement is trying to do right now:
We’re not going to start violence, but we’re not backing down either.

18: Intelligence

Since we’ve been talking so much about struggles between gigantic percentages versus teensy percentages, I have something to add that I haven’t heard anyone talk about yet.
The number of people who match me in what I call raw intellectual horsepower, is nowhere close to 1%. Albert Einstein was one.
So I can tell you first hand that raw intellectual horsepower isn’t good enough. What are you using it for? What are you thinking about? How are you connecting ideas together?
As Albert Einstein said, “There is no problem that can be solved by the same level of thinking that created it.” And that’s exactly why we’re having the Occupy movement, to try to change the way people think.
I don’t consider people who match me on the IQ test to be my intellectual peers. I consider my intellectual peers to be people who are trying to expand their mental horizons. All the IQ points in the world don’t do you any good if you aren’t using them for anything.
I’m bringing this up to show a few more reasons I’ve seen why a lot of “intelligent” people disagree with the Occupy movement.

Intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns. Once you’ve recognized a pattern, you can act upon it. That gives you more decision making power. That’s why having smart people on your side is valuable, to figure things out. After one person has discovered a pattern, he can tell other people about it and they can increase their decision making power. That’s what education is.
The 1% know this. That’s why the education system in the U.S. helps to raise people with exceptional mental abilities up to a standard of living somewhere close to that of the 1%.
The 1% use the education system to train all of us to use their way of thinking. Their way of thinking is simple. If you help to convert natural resources into finished products—if you participate in their economic system, in other words—you can make a lot of money. That’s especially true for people who are really good at recognizing patterns. Those people’s exceptional talents are in high demand.
Also, there’s something psychologists have discovered, called the 30-point communication gap. That’s the discovery that people whose IQs differ by more than 30 points have a hard time talking to each other, because they think so differently. (It was discovered with IQ scores, but the problem applies to anyone with exceptional mental abilities, like great artists and musicians for instance.) For example, I think about a lot of stuff all at the same time. That’s why I can write stuff like this document with basically no effort. But it’s really hard for me to focus my thoughts on the same things other people are focusing on when I talk to them.
That means people with exceptional mental abilities can’t carry on meaningful conversation with most of the people they meet in life. People don’t respect your intelligence if they have no idea what you think about.
This means that a lot of people with exceptional mental abilities follow the money, learn to think like the 1%, and then go to work for them. Then a lot of other people with exceptional mental abilities who don’t care so much about money go to college and then go work at the same jobs just so they can surround themselves with people who share their mental abilities.
Then we get research facilities staffed by hundreds of “geniuses” who devote all their intellectual superpowers and millions of dollars of research budgets to studying subatomic physics trying to find new scientific laws that will give us new insights into the nature of the universe and our part in it. Even though the environmental crisis isn’t happening on the level of subatomic physics but of biology.
Meanwhile, I spend 40 hours a week working in a factory, using my intellectual abilities as little as possible to benefit the 1%. I have to write this stuff in my spare time. Scientific discoveries that give new, meaningful, insights into the world and our relationship to it always start with philosophy. Before people can search for specific patterns, someone has to look at the evidence they have so far to find patterns that might exist. There are lots of things that people with intellectual superpowers could be focusing their attention on that would be much more directly beneficial to humanity, but that would require them to learn some other way of thinking from what the 1% trained them to do.
I will always wonder how the 21st century could’ve turned out if all the resources and talents NASA has used on space exploration had been used to study how we could live on the planet we already live on.

Now let’s back up to the beginning of how an individual learns about the world…
In education psychology you learn about the principles of primacy and effect. The principle of primacy means that people tend to remember the first version of an idea they hear about better than any other version they hear about later. The principle of effect means that people tend to remember best whichever version of an idea is supported by the most powerful sensory input.
My parents already knew about the environmental crisis by the time I was born. So they did what any sensible science philosophers would do and got the principles of primacy and effect on their side. The political future of the 21st century was going to come down to straightforward biological laws. My parents understood the biological laws that were discovered so well because they’d both grown up in forests, surrounded by biology. So they stayed in and around forests, so my brother and me would grow up surrounded by lots of wild living stuff. By day my brother and me would play out in the forest, and in the evening our parents (usually our dad) would read us classic literature like Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, about people using their minds and bodies to succeed at their goals and to overcome hardships. Our parents introduced my brother and me to the Theory of Evolution when we each turned 3, by buying us sets of zoo animals and showing us how the animals all have different shaped bodies in order to live in different places and eat different food. For much of our formative years we didn’t have a TV because we lived in the house where my dad grew up, which was too far out in the mountains to get TV reception. In fact, many of books our dad read to us were the same books his mom read to him.
I’m not trying to show off here. I’m showing reasons people develop different ways of thinking early in their lives. In aviation a big part of flight training is learning why intelligent people make stupid mistakes. It’s always because they overlooked or misinterpreted some critical piece of information. Then the ideas they develop lacking that information don’t match what’s actually happening. Then they try flying through clouds, over a mountain range, and don’t realize they’re at the wrong altitude and they fly straight into a mountain, or something like that.
That happens everywhere. That’s always how intelligent people make stupid mistakes, by misunderstanding or overlooking some critical detail and developing ideas that don’t match their situation.
When the main challenge facing humanity in the 21st century is to discover a new philosophical way of interpreting the world, and the ideas you develop head way off in the wrong direction before you even start kindergarten, your IQ doesn’t really matter after that. It doesn’t matter how complicated of ideas you develop, if the ideas you based them all on were wrong.
Computer programmers call that garbage in, garbage out.

The version of the world the 1% want everyone to believe is the one their political and economic success is based on.
If the world’s resources were infinite, we could all work hard and keep acquiring more and more wealth forever. But the First Law of Thermodynamics disproved that. The world’s resources aren’t infinite. The matter and energy content of the universe isn’t even infinite.
If there was no limit on the production of natural resources, the world’s finite resources could last forever because they would keep replenishing themselves forever. But the Second Law of Thermodynamics disproved that. Disorder always increases, which means nothing can be recycled with 100% efficiency. Some resources, like fossil fuels and metals, are limited in supply. Some of them can be recycled, but they all wear out eventually, even if only slowly. Other resources, like forests and wild ocean fish, are self-renewing, but only at certain rates. If you cut trees down faster than new trees grow, eventually you’ll run out of trees.
If people were inherently good, they could adapt easily to these two problems. The people who got carried away and started acting greedy wouldn’t really mean it and they would change their minds when someone brought it to their attention. But people aren’t inherently good. People are inherently good at doing whatever it takes to survive and reproduce. A few people accumulating more and more wealth while the world runs out of resources and people protest in the streets isn’t a sign of people being inherently good. But it is a sign of people trying to give themselves the best chances of surviving and reproducing.
If resource usage and pollution didn’t increase at exponential rates, we would have lots of time to sort out these three problems. But resource usage and pollution do increase at exponential rates. That means not only are we running out of resources and burying ourselves in pollution, we’re doing it faster and faster every year.

None of these discoveries had been made when the United States began. But the 1% have the education levels they need to know about them now. They use their control of the flow of information through society to try to keep anyone else from finding out about them and putting the pieces together.
If you grew up in the suburbs because your genius parents made tons of money working for the 1%, it means you grew up in a situation where every single thing around you, except for the weather and the cycles of the sun, moon, and seasons, were controlled by people. Wild cycles of nature were not central to your perception of the world. With your tons and tons of money and convenience stores on every corner, you could get pretty much whatever you wanted whenever you wanted it. People using their muscle power and other basic physiology to interact with their surroundings and produce the things they needed wasn’t central to your perception of the world either.
When scientists and other “intelligent” people act as if their work should be used in a way that’s consistent with the goals of the 1%, that’s a clue that they have not internalized their own discoveries. It’s a clue that they developed their ideas about the world in situations where they didn’t perceive a manifestation of the scientific laws they are now studying.
I don’t know that these examples apply specifically to anyone, but these examples are consistent with the decisions a lot of “intellectuals” are making.

I think the biggest sign that scientists haven’t really internalized their own discoveries is the fact that they didn’t start something like the Occupy movement years ago. If your discoveries show that we are in a crisis that’s heading toward disaster, but you don’t act as if we should do whatever it takes to stop that disaster, how is anyone else going to interpret that? If what people see you do implies that the environmental crisis can’t be that big of a deal, they aren’t going to think it’s that big of a deal.
This leads to what I call the Chosen Ones illusion. If you’ve usually gotten what you want throughout your life, you feel like you’re winning. A lot of people in that situation jump to the conclusion that means they’re supposed to win. That’s why so many ideas in the U.S. are based on the assumption that some groups of people are supposed to be better than other groups of people, because the people who are assumed to be better and the ones who have won so far.
A lot of “intelligent” people who don’t believe that the unification of science can be complete yet seem to believe there has to be one more scientific law out there somewhere that proves their group of people is better than everyone else. It doesn’t matter if the people who believe this are Neo-Nazis or college professors. A lot of people have thrown out the literal ideas of racial, ethnic, class, and gender superiority and so on, but still feel that their group of people must be better than everyone else in some sense. The problem is that people, whoever they are, start out feeling like they must be better than everyone else, and then, as they learn about more and more ways that inherent superiority has been disproved, they give up on ideas about superiority one by one, but they don’t give up on the feelings. Then they see an outline of what scientists have proven about the world, like the one I wrote here, and they feel there’s still something missing.
One of the biggest problems the Chosen Ones illusion leads to is that the search for the unifying theory of culture is the final obstacle to the unification of all fields of science by first principles. But everyone learns a culture when they’re growing up. If you start searching for a unifying theory of culture as an adult, after you’ve already learned one culture as your own, you’ve already confused yourself. It’s easy to equate your culture being the best, normal, right one when it’s the one you know the most about.
My culture is the search for a unifying theory of culture. This is the culture I was brought up in. From the labor struggles of the 1930s to the social struggles of the 1960s, my grandparents and then my parents kept seeing the search for a common ground among people of different backgrounds as one of the biggest, most exciting challenges in the world.
The world was not conquered by White people. The world was conquered by the people who were most successful at directing their efforts toward the achievements of their goals. Those people have been White people so far. But that says nothing about the future. Looking like the people who have won so far—either because you were born that way or because you dress like them now—doesn’t prove you understand anything. You have to use your brain to understand stuff.
This is just one more way I’ve seen that “intelligent” people have developed a lot of complicated ideas that don’t match reality.

Everyone in the Occupy movement has a story kind of like mine. The reason we are all in the Occupy movement is because we have all seen something in life that made us not believe the story the 1% tried to get us to believe. We’ve all realized that on our own we are in the minority, and we have all seen a lot of reasons other people have believed what they’ve been told. That’s why we’re all peers, working together toward our common goals. And this is why a lot of “intelligent” people assume we’re wrong.
A society is more intelligent than any one person, because a society is made up of many people. That means more ideas come together in a society than in the brain of one person.
Well that’s what the General Assembly is: A large group of people who have gotten together to try to fit their ideas together as efficiently as possible.
This is why, as a member of the 0.2%, I’m on the side that has the most effective information processing, that’s most consistent with reality.

19: The Future of the Struggle

If we want to win, we have to keep moving forward. Occupying parks all over the country is a start. But this isn’t a nationwide campout. We have to take this to the next level. So what is the next level?
So far we have a huge number of people drawing attention to problems. Now how do we start using our numbers to seal off the 1%’s choices?

Secular philosophy isn’t just a convenient way for people of diverse backgrounds to talk to each other. Secular philosophy is also the foundation of secular government.
First of all, in a secular government, politicians are supposed to use secular philosophy to make their decisions. That means they’re supposed to know the secular philosophy. Have any politicians in the U.S. internalized even the basic points I’ve outlined in this document? I’ve never heard of it. So Occupy the 2012 political races and let’s debate some real stuff for once. And if none of the candidates know how to participate in that debate, too bad for them.
Secularism means following the evidence. The judicial system in a secular government is supposed to follow the evidence. So all the stuff I’ve been talking about here isn’t just the basis of what we’re trying to do, it’s also the basis of the court system. That is, unless they want to prove once and for all that they’re corrupt. So Occupy the courts. I’m sure our legal teams can figure out something to do with the fact that our system of laws in the U.S. is secular by 18th century standards, but not by 21st century standards. Our rights in a secular democracy don’t match what our laws enforce. That’s what happens when you base your plans of ideas that don’t match reality: Your plans don’t work. And that’s the whole reason we’re protesting: Because the plan isn’t working!
In a secular government, law enforcement is supposed to follow the evidence too. So the next time you’re in a stand off with the police, get out your megaphones and debate some serious evidence with them. They’ve got the guns but we’ve got the evidence. So what are they going to do? Arrest us for being right?
If the police ever tell you that anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law, start talking about environmental science philosophy. If anything you say is used against you, and what you said was the truth, that’s just one more way to prove our government is corrupt.
Secular ideas can be taught in public school. Everyone in the 1% has a college education (I’m guessing, anyway). Getting the wealth and power you need to get into the 1% depends on going to college. Change the education system and you change the ideas that people learn and apply. The education system is vulnerable to students, parents, and teachers, at every high school and college in the U.S., every day of the school year. This document could be used as the foundation of a national teachers’ strike—which from my point of view should’ve started years ago. So Occupy the education system and seal off the 1%’s gateway.

There is some debate among intellectuals about what kind of political system would be capable of coordinating a solution to the environmental crisis. Some are saying that democracy might not work.
But I don’t hear any of them talking about politics in terms of stone age tribalism being the foundation of all political systems. Everyone I’ve heard talking about this problem seems to be making the primacy mistake again, assuming that politics as we’ve known them are the main reality and everything else is some variation on our political structure.
The alternative to democracy I’ve heard proposed is a benevolent dictatorship. Personally, I would never believe that a dictatorship was going to be benevolent unless I got to be the dictator. Because in a dictatorship the dictator is the only person who gets to decide on benevolence or not. I don’t know anyone in the Occupy movement who would trust a dictatorship.
A tribe is not a benevolent dictatorship. Imagine 200 intelligent people living together in the wilderness. Imagine that one of them is exceptionally talented but has no ambition to be the chief. Imagine that each person in the group decides to make the best for themselves of their own situation. Imagine that all 199 of the other people each decide that the best way to survive in the wilderness is to ask the talented guy what they should do. The people in the tribe could elevate someone to the position of chief even though he didn’t want to be.
A tribe is a proto-democracy, where people’s self-determination balances out one way or another.
The argument the intellectuals seem to be making is that everything that isn’t a democracy is a dictatorship. They don’t seem to have gotten as far as looking at how a person gets into the position of being able to tell a lot of people what to do and the people doing it. If they had, they wouldn’t call it a dictatorship.

You don’t need to look any further than Hollywood to see this. Watch any movie about a struggle between heroes and villains.
The movie starts with a relatively stable society. Everyone is just going about their ordinary lives. That means they’re using stable patterns of behavior.
That means predictable patterns of behavior. So the villains figure out the patterns and figure out how to do something no one is expecting or is prepared to stop. They get into the other people’s patterns, do their unexpected things, and get something that’s valuable to themselves, at the price of disrupting the patterns. The villains make their huge profits at the expense of destabilizing the society.
Then the heroes find out what the villains are doing. They see something they can do to stop the villains, if they face a lot of hardship. They believe they can succeed and they’re willing to face the hardship. They aren’t trying to profit themselves, other than to stop the villains. The heroes liked their society the way it was, so they’re willing to do whatever it takes to stop the villains so they can get their stable society back.
(There are usually subplots happening in the movie meanwhile. The hero might gain something else over the course of the movie from one or more of the subplots. A husband and wife who were having marital problems might sort them out in the process of defeating the villains, or the people in the society might learn something about racism so that when the society restabilizes problems other than the ones the villains were causing get solved also. The main conflict between the heroes and the villains ends with the villains being defeated in their attempts to profit by destabilizing the society.)
Then the people in the society are grateful to the heroes, and look up to them as role models, and teach their children to act like that. Societies stay stable because people learn from the examples set by people who have helped to keep them stable. If everyone looked up to the villains as role models, the society would self-destruct, because nobody would build up the stable patterns a society depends on.
This thing I have just described is exactly how an environment works too. A bunch of living things interact with each other. They settle into stable patterns. Sometimes things happen that destabilize the environment by destabilizing its patterns, and some of the living things benefit from that change. But eventually the patterns, and the environment, restabilize.
In the long run, the decisions the 1% are making aren’t supported by science or mythology. The Occupy movement is the restabilizing factor, whether that makes us heroes or just part of our environment.

To be fair, the 1% have a social environment of their own. In a sense, they’re doing the same thing we’re doing. They’re using the resources available to them in their environment to try to make the best lives they can for themselves.
The problem, for them and for us, is that imperialism hasn’t ended among them. They keep using the resources they have to compete against each other. But all their resources are coming from us.
In the context of them being people trying to use the resources they have to try to make lives for themselves, they’re people just like we are. But that isn’t the overall context. They are making choices that affect us. They all have access to the information contained in this document. One of them could’ve written this years ago. (I wrote my first version of this 8 years ago.) But none of them thought of that. The responsibility they are taking for their actions doesn’t match the effects their actions are having.
That’s the problem that the Occupy movement is trying to solve. Maybe we can get them all to change their minds. Maybe we’ll have to throw them all in prison. A real-life solution will probably be somewhere in between the two.

The Occupy movement has the opportunity to begin a new chapter in world democracy. Every government is a set of rules that establishes patterns of behavior. Even if there was no government, a stable society would still be the result of stable patterns of behavior. That means in every society there is always the opportunity for people who have the right combinations of abilities, skills, and resources to infiltrate those patterns and turn them to their own advantage.
A tribe isn’t a benevolent dictatorship because the people have effective ways to stand up for themselves. The people trust the chief because they know he’s the best leader but they can stop him if he tries to betray them.
Since every society is the result of stable patterns of behavior, which some people will always try to infiltrate, democracy will always depend on people having effective ways to stand up for themselves. The fundamental problem that the Occupy movement formed in response to will never go away no matter what kind of government we have. So now that we have found an effective way to stand up for ourselves, we should never give it up.

The problem that the Occupy movement is protesting would still be here even if all of the 1% were trying to help us. Take selfishness out of the problem and we’d still be left with limitations of the human brain. President Obama can’t think about me personally, because he has never met me. Any small group of people who makes decisions about a much larger group of people can’t be depended on to make decisions the people in the larger group will find beneficial. Each person’s attention is centered on themselves. You watch out for yourself, I watch out for myself, and so on for everyone in the world. That’s the only way everyone can be sure that someone is watching out for them.
Beyond themselves, each person cares about their families, their friends, their neighbors, and whoever else they like. Everyone has different ways prioritizing how much they care about other people, but the point is, everyone has priorities in who they care about more than who. No matter how nice of a guy President Obama is, he will always act like he cares more about his daughters than he cares about me, simply because he knows more about what his daughters need and he’s in a better position to give it to them.
The bigger the social hierarchies we build, the further away from the people at the bottom the people at the top will be.
But people will never stop building social hierarchies. We will always face problems that depend on coordinated efforts by the members of a society to solve. We will always put people in charge or making decisions in how to solve problems so that decisions can be made fast enough to solve the problems. That’s what a government is.
The limitations on each person’s perceptions of what other people need, will always create the problem of the people at the tops of social hierarchies doing less than perfect jobs of giving the people at the bottoms of the hierarchies what they need. That will always create the overall effect of the government being corrupt, even if no one in the government was trying to do that. So the fundamental problem the Occupy movement is protesting still wouldn’t go away even if we had a perfectly benevolent 1%.
In short, the Occupy movement is restoring the balance of power we need to be the modern equivalent of a tribe.

The other thing we need to be a modern equivalent of a tribe are the most competent people for leaders, who fill their decision-making roles because large-scale decisions need to be made at certain rates. The 1% do not meet this requirement. If the world’s resources were infinite and the biggest problem facing humanity was how to get the best choices in name-brand toothpaste, their profiteering on consumerism would be a perfect solution. If that was the situation we were in, they would be the best leaders. But that’s not the situation we’re in.
There are only two possibilities. If the 1% fully understand the environmental crisis, they’re trying to hoard all the wealth for themselves because they’re trying to kill us. If they don’t fully understand the environmental crisis, they’re not competent leaders. Either way, they don’t deserve to be the most powerful people on Earth.

I don’t speak for anyone but myself. I’ve written this to try to help move forward the debate about why we’re protesting. I’m sure some people in the Occupy movement will disagree with a lot of what I’ve said here, but I think enough people will agree with it enough that disagreements can be sorted out through debate.

I’ve thrown this document together in a hurry, which is why it isn’t edited very well. But the science is foolproof. I’ve outlined it more than a dozen times in books and manuscripts. I don’t have anything specific to the Occupy movement in print yet, but I’m working on it. The best resource I have available so far is my book Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution. The first 11 chapters, which cover the core science philosophy, can be read on my website, at www. newbookforanewworld .org. The complete audio book (20 chapters) can be downloaded from my site for free. If you’re familiar with the Zapatista movement and you’d rather learn this stuff in a garden or on a farm than in a library, the complete text of my book Zapatista University is posted on my site and the audio version can be downloaded for free also. If you want to know my name you can find it on my website. It isn’t a secret but it isn’t important either.

Pass the mike!

Reference Sources:
I’m listing books here by section, in the order I referred to them in the text. Some sections don’t have any reference sources listed, either because I’ve already listed their references in a previous section, or because the things I said were so general you don’t need to look for them in specific books. If you want to research all of this completely independently of my sources, you can find out most of it by spending an afternoon talking to people at an Occupation, and then spending the evening looking up facts on Wikipedia.

1: The Challenge

The Population Bomb: Paul Ehrlich (Ballantine/ 1968) …is the original…
The Population Explosion: Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich (Simon & Schuster) …is an update
The Limits to Growth: Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Joergen Randers, and William W. Behrens III (Universe/ 1972) …is the original…
Beyond the Limits: Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Joergen Randers (Chelsea Green/ 1992) …is the first update…
The Limits to The Limits to Growth—The 30 Year Update: Donella Meadows, Joergen Randers, Dennis Meadows (Chelsea Green/ 2002) …is the next update
How the Rich are Destroying the Earth: Herve Klempf (Chelsea Green) …shows how the lifestyles of the 1% fits into the problem

2: Religious Philosophy & Science Philosophy:

Why God Won’t Go Away—Brain Science and the Biology of Belief: Andrew Newberg, M.D., Eugene D’Aquili, M.D., PhD, Vince Rause (Ballantine Books) …and…
Why We Believe What We Believe—Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth: Andrew Newberg, Mark Robert Waldman (Free Press) …are two books that pioneer the use of evolutionary psychology in understanding religion and spirituality in universal terms
The End of Faith—Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason: Sam Harris (Norton) …is a full frontal confrontation by secularism to religious fundamentalism

3: Secularism as a Philosophy

Give Me Liberty—A Handbook for American Revolutionaries: Naomi Wolf (Simon and Schuster) …outlines the need of secularism in democracy, and other philosophical principles surrounding the Constitution

4: Math, Science, and Philosophy

Consilience—The Unity of Knowledge: Edward O. Wilson (Vintage) …is about the quest to unify all fields of science by first principles

5: The Four Founding Principles of Environmental Science

Entropy—A New World View: Jeremy Rifkin (Bantam New Age) …focuses on the environmental, economic, and political results of the first two Laws of Thermodynamics
The Origin of Species: Charles Darwin (Dover) …laid the foundation of the Theory of Evolution as the unifying theory of biology
The Descent of Man: Charles Darwin (Penguin Classics) …applied the Theory of Evolution to human evolution
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals: Charles Darwin (Penguin Classics) …laid the foundation for applying the Theory of Evolution to human psychology

6: The Big Bang

A Brief History of Time: Stephen Hawking (Bantam) …is a book about the life of the universe, and…
Steven Hawking’s Universe: Directed by Philip Martin (Thirteen/WNET New York) …is a much simpler to understand video about it

8: Evolution and Genes

The Selfish Gene: Richard Dawkins (Oxford Press) …introduced the Selfish Gene Theory, and…
The Blind Watchmaker: Richard Dawkins (Norton) …and…
Climbing Mount Improbable: Richard Dawkins (Penguin) …show further examples of how it works

9: The Gaia Theory

Gaia—A New Look at Life on Earth: James Lovelock (Oxford Press) …is the first book about the Gaia Theory
Gaia—An Atlas of Planet Management: Norman Myers, General Editor (Anchor Books) …is a junior-high version, with big colorful pictures
The Revenge of Gaia: James Lovelock (Penguin) …is an update, and…
The Vanishing Face of Gaia: James Lovelock (Basic Books) …is the most recent update

10: Universal Psychology

Human Natures—Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect: Paul Ehrlich (Penguin) …covers the current level in the study of general human evolution
How the Mind Works: Steven Pinker (Norton) …is a very thorough introduction to evolutionary psychology
The Stone Age Present—How Evolution has Shaped Modern Life—from Sex, Violence, and Language, to Emotions, Morals, and Communities: William Allman (Simon & Schuster/1994) …is a much easier to read introduction to evolutionary psychology, which hits all the main points
The Moral Animal—Why We Are the Way We Are—The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology: Robert Wright (Vintage Press) …is a more philosophical introduction to evolutionary psychology
The Compassionate Beast—The Scientific Inquiry into Human Altruism: Morton Hunt (Anchor Books/ 1990) …focuses on how compassion and generosity evolved out of inherent self-interest
Living with the Mek: Directed by Phil Stebbing (Image Entertainment) …is a documentary series about two British adventurers who find a group of stone age farmers living in the jungle of Papua New Guinea and live with them for two months

11: Emotions & Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence: Daniel Goleman (Bantam) …and…
Vital Lies, Simple Truths—The Psychology of Self-Deception: Daniel Goleman (Simon & Shuster) …are introductory books on evolutionary psychology that focus on how emotions affect the way we think

12: The Evolution of Ideas

The Meme Machine: Susan Blackmore (Oxford) …is the pioneering work in memetic evolution

13: The History of Imperialism

Guns, Germs, and Steel—The Fates of Human Societies: Jared Diamond (Norton) …is a history of agriculture and imperialism, and…
Guns, Germs, and Steel: Directed by Cassian Harrison, with Jared Diamond (National Geographic) …is a much shorter documentary version
Collapse—How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Jared Diamond (Penguin) …is a history of how people in different societies have made different decisions to try to deal with the effects their own actions have had on their environments, and…
Collapse: Written, directed, and produced by Noel Dockstader, based on the book by Jared Diamond (National Geographic) …is a much shorter documentary version

15: Education

A People’s History of the United States: Howard Zinn (Perennial Classics) …is a history of the 1% using their power to benefit themselves

16: The Environment

Confronting Collapse—The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World: Michael Ruppert (Chelsea Green) …is an investigation into the 1% using the environmental crisis as a political tool
Crossing the Rubicon—The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil: Michael Ruppert (New Society Publishers) …is an investigation into political developments surrounding the energy crisis and the War on Terror

17. Violence

¡Ya Basta!—Ten Years of the Zapatista Uprising: Subcomandante Marcos (AK Press) …is a history of the Zapatista movement, by its military commander
The Fire and the Word—A History of the Zapatista Movement: Gloria Muñoz Ramirez (City Lights Books) …is a history of the Zapatista movement by a journalist, who lived with them for seven years, which was longer than any other journalist by far
A Place Called Chiapas: Directed by Nettie Wild (Zeitgeist Films) …is a documentary about the Zapatistas