Introduction
I have decided to take over the world as a practical joke.
Obviously, in order to build a peaceful, sustainable global civilization we must build one that’s fair to everyone. To do that, we must recognize that everyone on Earth has just as much right to be here as everyone else, that everyone has just as much right to their culture and their individuality as everyone else, and that everyone has just as good of reasons for their culture and their individuality as everyone else. That way no one will need to fight off the global civilization, because nobody will be threatened by it in the first place. So I’m taking over the world just to prove that global civilization is possible to build.
I’m just one person. I can’t really take over the world all by myself. But what I can do is to give everyone in the world everything they need to know to help build that global civilization themselves. And that’s so simple I can do it just by writing one book (of which this is the first volume). If a majority of voters around the world agree with what I say and begin demanding it from their government officials, and the only way for politicians to get elected anymore was to do what I say because I put into words what a majority of voters want, that would pretty well make me king of the world, wouldn’t it?
What would you rather have? A big war? (Oops, too late…)
About 20 years ago, scientists began searching for a universal brain structure of humanity. They reasoned that in the same way that everyone in the world shares the same basic physical structure, everyone in the world would share the same basic brain structure also—simply because your brain structure is a part of your physical structure, it’s just invisible to the naked eye.
The scientists searched for the universal brain structure of humanity by combining every field of study that relates to humanity, including archeology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, biology, neurology, zoology, ecology, history, and linguistics, among others, to create as complete a picture as possible of the course of human evolution.
If everyone in the world shared the same basic brain structure, then people all over the world would share the same basic thought processes and would exhibit the same basic patterns of behavior. By now, anthropolgists have visited and studied every culture on Earth. The list of behavioral characteristics that exist in every single culture on Earth with no exceptions is nearly 400 items long. (See Appendix A for a condensed version.) If a characteristic of humanity exists in every single culture on Earth with no exceptions, that makes that characteristic a direct product of human evolution, because in every part of the world where human DNA exists, this characteristic also exists. All that left was to use all those other fields of human sciences to figure out how it happened. (The real story of how the field of human evolutionary science started is a lot more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea.)
A lot of the scientists began studying human evolution to try to figure out what it was about people’s brains that made things like environmental destruction and the nuclear arms race seem like such good ideas to so many people. Their hope was that by discovering why people were creating these problems in the first place, they could help find ways to solve them.
The discoveries these scientists have made over the past 20 years have been monumental. By now, enough is understood about humanity to bridge the differences that separate every group of people in the world. That makes human evolutionary science the most direct route to world peace.
The biggest problem the scientists are facing now is figuring out how to make their discoveries understandable to the non-scientifically-minded public. The scientists can’t solve global problems all by themselves; solving global problems depends on someone showing everyone how they can work together to solve them.
That’s where I got involved. I basically reinvented the field of human evolutionary science all by myself, before I found out that these scientists beat me to it. I started this book as the culmination of a three-generation-old tradition in my family, of using art, philosophy, and religion to make observations about people, and then using science to study what evidence exists to explain how the observed characteristics could’ve come about.
I don’t work as a scientist, but I was raised on science from the moment I learned to talk. When I graduated from high school at the age of 16, I already had 14 years of scientific background, so I set out into the world to learn about things I didn’t already know how to do.
I’ve traveled and lived all over the United States, I’ve been homeless on the streets of a major U.S. city, I belonged to a street gang briefly, I’ve been engaged to a wealthy heiress, I’ve taught high school, I’m a commercial helicopter pilot and certified flight instructor, I’ve taught myself how to write novels, and I’ve worked in theatre for a long, long time. (And that’s just the short version.) I’ve got a Ph.D.’s worth of education in a field of study that doesn’t officially exist yet. Namely, the practical study of human behavior and ways that small components of systems fit together to create something that seems to the untrained eye to be greater than the sum of its parts.
Theatre and fiction and two of the oldest studies of human behavior in the world. Philosophy and religion are two others, and I have more than a passing familiarity with them. For 2,500 years, actors, directors, and writers have been making their livings by figuring out how to replicate human behavior accurately enough to make it believable to human audiences. By now, thanks to Hollywood, everyone in the industrialized world is familiar with a working understanding of human behavior.
I began this project as an approach to conflict resolution through evolutionary self awareness. Theatre artists use their understanding of human behavior to tell exciting stories by creating and resolving conflicts onstage. To turn that into a conflict resolution strategy, all I had to do was to combine that working understanding of human behavior with fundamental principles of evolution to show how those principles of human behavior could be recognized in real life—that is, to unearth scientific principles behind that understanding of human behavior to show how theatre artists replicate human behavior and why it looks realistic. Theatre artists use this understanding of human behavior to create conflicts and then escalate them for all but about the last 5 minutes of any movie. If people could learn how to recognize how conflicts are created in real life, they could use that understanding of human behavior to defuse their conflicts instead.
After I wrote the first draft of this book, I started looking around to find out what else people had discovered about evolution. It didn’t take me long to stumble upon this new scientific movement. And sure enough, nothing any of these scientists had discovered contradicted anything I’d written in any meaningful way. And my way of studying human evolution has the added benefit that I can actually win public support for it.
You can make my honorary Ph.D. out to Ezra Niesen. That’s two Es and one S in my last name. People make that mistake all the time. You can mail it to…
Nah, just kidding.