Introduction
I’m still taking over the world as a practical joke.
It’s just taking longer than I thought it would.
A lot of things have changed since I published the last book. Our global political system has gotten worse, our global environment has gotten worse, more advances have been made in human evolutionary science, and I’ve met a lot of people who are involved these things in various ways.
I’m still taking over the world as a practical joke, because our entire global civilization is a practical joke. Unfortunately, most people don’t have nearly as good a sense of humor as I do, so the global civilization joke has gotten a lot less funny since the last book. So what do you think I should do about that? Fight fire with fire? To hell with that (no pun intended—okay, yes it was). I’ve found that the best way to fight a fire is with water.
Prepare yourselves for another round of good-natured b*tch-slapping. If it seems less good-natured that it was before, that’s because everyone else has gotten a lot further out of line. And by “the line” I mean all that survival and reproduction business, which people keep trying to advance by making their economic and political systems ever more self-destructive. Hey, I didn’t write the rules. It’s not my fault so many people think they can get away with breaking them. Hence I have to do a great deal more b*tch slapping in this book than I did in the last one to try to get everyone back into line.
So my taking-over-the-world practical joke gets a lot more absurd in this book. I’m writing it by putting together a bunch of science and ideas people have had over the course of history that comply with that science. If you think all this science and these science-compliant ideas stop being funny, it’s probably because you’ve attached so much emotional significance to the idea that some other idea was actually supposed to work.
I meet a lot of people like this. People who think I’m supposed to be embarrassed by using the word socialism in conversation. Or people who think I should be amazed by how many things they figured out about life by smoking some weeeeed and staring at their lava lamp for half an hour last night, or by reading some book that was written by some guy in some other century, or whatever, and how can you possibly measure something as profound as that scientifically? So now I’m supposed to take these people seriously and consider them my peers and I’m not allowed to think I know more about something than they do. Mental communism all the way.
The big question is: Do you know how to make your civilization comply with fundamental laws of physics, or don’t you? So far, our global civilization is a big joke where the punch line is something like, “Those stupid monkeys tried building a sustainable global civilization in a way that wasn’t physically possible, and they couldn’t figure out why it all went to hell.” So in order for anyone to write a better punch line than that, he’d have to be the biggest joker in the world.
So here I am.
Now here’s six other practical jokes that are taking place all around us.
Joke #1: The U.S. Constitution disproves itself. We’re supposed to have a secular government of, by, and for the people. Unfortunately, our secular government was founded by Christians in the 18th century. The Laws of Thermodynamics and the Theory of Evolution hadn’t been discovered by that point in time, and they’ve been recognized by scientists for about 150 years as the fundamental laws of physics and biology. Thanks to the Founding Fathers sharing the same religious and cultural background, they made certain assumptions about the world that simply aren’t valid, and they founded our secular government on ideas that contradict fundamental laws of science.
Well, when you pit your political system against fundamental laws of the universe, it’s a pretty safe bet that the universe is going to win. So anyone who assumes that adhering closely to the U.S. Constitution is going to fix everything is walking into a trap.
Joke #2: Literal adherence to the Bible is self-destructive. In the last book I told you how a lot of people assume that the world’s resources are supposed to be infinite, just because it says so in the Bible, and any scientists who disagree are just imagining things. So literal adherence to the Bible is environmentally self-destructive. But you already knew that.
Here’s where it gets worse: People who adhere literally to the Bible equate a total global apocalypse with eternal salvation. In other words, these people perceive the battle of Armageddon to be the best thing that could ever happen to them. Well, you can’t have total global apocalypses and all-consuming worldwide wars without billions of people getting killed. And if Christian fundamentalists perceive this to be the path to eternal salvation, what else are they going to do besides try to help make it happen? They sure as hell aren’t going to try to stop it.
So the president of the United States belongs to a global suicide cult.
Joke #3: The fundamental law of biology directly contradicts the fundamental law of physics. The fundamental law of biology is energy efficiency. But that only refers to personal energy efficiency. That’s why inventing more and more machines to do more and more work for us is such a popular idea. But the fundamental law of physics is that environmental energy is finite. We don’t have instincts for environmental energy efficiency, because for the 7,000,000 years it took us to evolve, we never had any way of using up all the energy in the environment.
So if all those people who are opposed to organized religion just “do whatever they feel to be right”, they’ll destroy themselves anyway.
Joke #4: One major founding event in the field of human evolutionary science happened in the summer of 1987 at a secret meeting in Budapest among scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain. This was during the height of the Cold War. By studying what everyone in the world had in common, where their differences originated, and why the threat of self-destruction seemed to make so much sense to so many of our species, these scientists hoped to help avert World War III. The field of human evolutionary science started, literally, as the Science of How to Not Have a War with Each Other.
When I started this project, I assumed that since evolutionary science was so useful, there must be some other people out there somewhere who trying to win support for it, so I volunteered for the most extreme end of that. Then late in 2006 I discovered that even after 20 years and all the discoveries that have been made, there is only one graduate program in evolutionary psychology in the entire United States. It’s at the University of California at Santa Barbara. They don’t even have an official budget. To fund the program, they have to pursue it as an interdisciplinary study among a bunch of departments that do have budgets.
So I’ve been a global activist movement of one this entire time without realizing it. I volunteered for the most extreme end of a movement that didn’t actually exist. So a lot of people assume I’m just a lunatic. That joke is on me.
But considering that the whole point of public education is to teach kids things they’re going to need to know as adults, don’t you think they ought to be learning something about the Science of How to Not Have Wars with Each Other?
Joke #5: Traditionally, science has been considered politically neutral, but it never has been. Science is the pursuit of information. If scientists leave that information in the hands of politically-minded people who don’t (and probably can’t) fathom its full meaning, that is a political choice in itself.
The field of evolutionary psychology is the search for a universal brain structure of humanity. It has been accepted among evolutionary scientists for over 30 years that all animal behavior—and consequently, all human behavior—is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.
If scientists discover a universal brain structure of humanity, and then don’t actively distribute that information to everyone in terms that everyone can understand, that is a very big political decision, with inevitable consequences. If they leave their science in the hands of a small group of well educated, materially wealthy, and politically powerful people, their own science already shows them what’s going to happen next—or at least, it would if only they’d care to pay attention to it. Namely, these well-educated, materially wealthy, politically powerful people use it as just another resource to help them preserve the survival of their own DNA by manipulating other people. And that just makes our economic and political inequality worse, and that just makes all the social problems facing the world worse.
To choose to leave human evolutionary science in the hands of politically-minded people who can’t fully grasp its meaning is to choose suicide. And if Mr. Spock was here, I’d think he’d tell you that’s not very logical.
Joke #6: The majority of activists in America who are trying to solve big social problems seem to be completely emotionally allergic to science. These people accept as a matter of faith that there’s more to life than science can measure. But that only proves how little they know about science.
Once upon a time it was true that there was more to life than science could measure, but that was only because science hadn’t progressed far enough by that point. Some people made the mistake of assuming that there wasn’t more to life than science could measure, and these so-called progressive activists have been fighting back against those people ever since. But they’re making the faulty assumption that just because some people were wrong in believing there couldn’t be more to life than science could measure proves that everyone who says that all of life can be understood scientifically must be wrong. And that sounds awfully closed-minded to me. In fact, that sounds like intellectual discrimination.
Over the course of writing the last book, I met up with a lot of people who were so open-minded that they couldn’t even accept all my scientific evidence that proved that everything they believed was true. Since then, I’ve met up with a whole lot more of those people.
Let’s look at what that term means: “progressive activist”. “Someone who makes things happen to move society forward.”
If you reject science, you reject observable evidence. If you then try to build a political or philosophical ideology on anything other than observable evidence, whatever ideology you come up with is going to contradict observable evidence. That means that somebody out there is going to be able to observe something about the world that your ideology doesn’t explain. Well the world is already full of ideologies like those. So if you just invent another one, in what sense are you moving society forward?
If your ideology leaves room for fundamental disagreement, then the only way for your ideology to prove victorious over your competition is for you to attract more people to your ideology than your competitors have, and defeat them in a might-makes-right showdown. Well people have been settling differences between ideologies by might makes right for as long as humans have had ideologies, so if you just invent a new way of doing that, again, in what sense are you moving society forward?
If you’re an activist, that means you’re trying to make something new happen in society. That means you’re badly outnumbered. If you were in the majority, that new thing you were trying to make happen wouldn’t be new anymore, and it would already be happening, so you wouldn’t be called an activist, you’d be called a go-along-with-everyone-elsist or something like that. Well if your new minority ideology has all the same fundamental problems that every other well-established ideology has, why should anyone give up their old ideology that doesn’t work just to try a new ideology they can already see won’t work? And if you can’t attract a lot of people to your new ideology, you aren’t going to make anything new happen in society. And if you can’t make anything new happen in society because you insist on trying to use a fundamentally flawed ideology, then you’re not really an activist at all, are you?
Joke #7: Human evolutionary scientists study how people think, but they can’t for the life of them figure out how to attract more people’s support to their science.
Oh, and you thought the activists were a joke…
The way I see it, there are four main ways people form their ideologies: scientifically, artistically, philosophically, and religiously. Art, philosophy, and religion all offer people emotional components, and science doesn’t. What these emotional components are, how they work, and why people feel they’re important are all understood scientifically. And still, scientists can’t figure out how to make science compete as an ideology against art, religion, or philosophy. If I was one of those scientists, maybe I’d try looking at my own science to try to figure out what was going wrong, but then, what the hell do I know, I’m just a stupid college dropout.
First of all, everyone in the world has some kind of ideology. Everyone in the world is a philosopher. Everyone in the world learns about the world by developing a perspective on the world to make sense of how it works. Developing a working sense of cause and effect is critical to people’s ability to interact with the world and to provide for their basic necessities.
Some people think about things a lot harder than others, and some people aren’t what most people would consider philosophers at all. But anyone who is capable of providing for their basic necessities has developed a sense of cause and effect that works within the context of their own life, or in other words, as far as they can tell.
So in order for science to compete against philosophy as an ideology, it has to be able to answer every question anyone has ever asked about life. If you try to present science as an ideology that should shape people’s perception of the world, they’re immediately going to compare it to whatever philosophical cause-and-effect ideology they’re using. If science doesn’t seem to be able to answer every question that their current ideology seems to them to answer, then science is going to seem flawed or incomplete as far as they can tell. Therefore, they aren’t going to abandon the ideology that they believe works to adopt whatever new ideas you’re trying to teach them about.
A religion is basically a pre-packaged philosophical ideology that people adopt because doing so seems to be easier than developing an ideology on their own. Religion has the added benefit of assigning everyone in a society the same basic perspective on the world so that the members of the society can agree on how the world is supposed to work and how they can work together to make their society function.
Every religion in the world offers its followers the same four things: An explanation for what makes the universe work, ways for people to escape their physical mortality, ways for people to build strong families and healthy communities, and ways for people to make themselves feel satisfied with their lives. If science can’t offer people all of these things also, people are going to reject it as a flawed or incomplete ideology. That’s why I used science to spell all those things out in the last book.
The Bible is a story of the world and reference book to life. Every culture in the world has an equivalent. That story of the world and reference source to life is how the people of a culture establish a common point of reference to use in interacting with the world and with each other. That ought to be a big clue that science will never be to compete as an ideology if it doesn’t offer people the same thing.
Here in America we used to use the Bible as our common point of reference. Even if you weren’t a Christian you had to use the Bible as your reference point anyway to be able to function in society, just because most other people used it. Most people followed it religiously, so everyone expected everyone else to follow it at least superficially. But now we’ve got a bunch of other stories of the world competing against it, which is why every presidential election we have anymore practically pushes us to the brink of civil war. If half of American voters can’t understand what the hell the other half are voting for, why, how it’s supposed to benefit them, or why they’re supposed to think it should, and vice versa, your democracy has run into a serious problem. If half of your voters perceive the other half of the voters and everything they believe in as a threat to their safety, how badly do you think they’re going to want to be ruled by the leaders those people elect?
Well, you could always ask the Iraqis how well a democracy made up of three groups of people who hate each works.
Every story that ever become a legend or a box-office smash has the exact same plot. A hero, or a small group of heroes, faces an overwhelming threat to their survival and/or reproduction, and has to use their abilities to their fullest potential to overcome the threat. First you introduce your protagonists, conflicts arise, then events start happening, then the course of events grows so strong that it carries the protagonists along with it, then events become so dire that the protagonists have to risk everything before they’re defeated utterly, then all conflicts are resolved in a manner the audience will find emotionally satisfying. That’s how you write an emotionally satisfying story. The Bible isn’t scientifically accurate, but it is artistically complete. Hence its popularity.
That’s why I’m using the same formula in writing these books.
All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her. That means that in order for scientists to convince people to adopt science as their ideology, they must find a way to make people perceive that doing so offers them the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA. But have evolutionary scientists figured this out? No.
Science is not being pursued in a vacuum. Science is being pursued in a conflict situation. The goals of other people are mutually exclusive to the pursuit of science. In a conflict situation, whoever best adapts to their changing situation gets to survive. That’s evolution in its purest form. But have evolutionary scientists figured this out? No.
If you attempt to pursue science but you reject your own science in attempting to succeed at your own goals, whether you realize you’re doing it or not, you’re attempting to invoke supernatural powers to solve your problems for you. If you have observable evidence to show you why you’re having problems and how your problems could be solved, but you refuse to use that evidence to solve your problems, depending instead upon some unknown force whose existence is contraindicated by the observable evidence itself, that is the definition of dependence on a supernatural force. And if you depend on supernatural forces to help you succeed at whatever you’re doing, then strictly speaking, you’re not a scientist. The question that raises is: What exactly are you?
So you see what I’m up against? In order to write a better punch line to our global civilization joke than, “The stupid monkeys killed themselves,” I have to figure out how to tell a bigger joke than all this.
To help me do that, I have to make one slight alteration to the approach I used in the last book. In the last book, I said that all human behavior is the product of the individual’s attempt to pursue the most favorable ratio of perceivable benefit to effort required. Those benefits always had something to do with survival, safety, reproduction, social, self-gratification, self-actualization, self-fulfillment, and fulfillment squared. That suited the purposes of the last book, because the last book was about how to understand your own decision-making, and how to recognize those same principles at work in other people.
This book reverses that process. In this book, I focus on how to recognize principles of human behavior at work in other people, and then how to recognize them at work within yourself. In this book, the magic phrase is, “all human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.”
“The most favorable ratio of perceivable benefit to effort required,” and, “The attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her” are synonymous. The benefits in the last book were always something from that list of eight items. Those eight items are things that the survival of people’s DNA have always depended on. The most favorable ratio of benefit to effort means the most effective way to do any of those things.
In the first book I took a philosophical approach to human behavior. In this book I take a scientific approach. Since the last book was about how individuals, including yourself, make decisions, if I’d said “All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her,” a lot of people would’ve said, “No it doesn’t—I don’t even perceive the existence of my DNA!” Well of course you don’t—or at least, not consciously—which is why I had to use a different term.
I stretched that explanation for human behavior as far as I could into other people’s behavior and the behaviors of groups. But when you start talking about complicated systems of other people’s behavior, it gets really awkward. So to fill in the gaps now, in this book I switch to a more direct explanation. That more direct explanation applies to you too, and I don’t think it will take you very long to see how.
Since I published the last book, a lot of people have started talking about our global environmental unsustainability joke quickly approaching a point of no return. By now it’s fairly unanimously agreed upon among environmental scientists that civilization as we’ve known it won’t exist in the 22nd century, because the resources it would require don’t exist. Either we can make the transition to a new way of life by choice, or we can wait until the world does it for us. About the only thing left to be determined is whether we’re going to turn into a global civilization where people learn to be content with what they have, ride bicycles everywhere, and grow their own vegetables, or we’re going to turn into a global community of post-apocalyptic regional warlords where people fight over everything all the time, or we’re going to destroy the environment to the point where it won’t support us at all anymore, and our species is going to become completely extinct. I think the simplest complete extinction prediction I’ve heard is that if the greenhouse effect gets completely out of control, forests all over the world could either die or get so dry that they all burn down in a gigantic forest fire. If all the plants die, there will be noting left to eat and nothing left to turn our carbon dioxide back into oxygen.
In the last book I showed you how people can control their own destines by adapting to their living conditions and changing their cultural values to fit their new situation. So remember that, because it’s going to be important in this book. Whether or not all the things I said about the future evolution of society come true exactly the way I explained them wasn’t the point. The point was that by understanding more about humanity and our living conditions, we can develop social institutions that work better than the ones we have now. In this book I’m going to talk a lot more about how our situation is changing, and show why we are going to have to develop new social institutions to deal with it.
Another thing that has changed since the last book has taken me by surprise. I started writing the last book about the system of spiritual logic that has been developing in my family for generations, and then I found out about the parallel field of human evolutionary science that scientists had started more recently as another interdisciplinary study of human behavior. Both begin by asking, “What observations have people made about life, and what observable evidence is there to support those observations?” The scientists’ way of doing it works great among ivory tower academics. Among the Niesen family, it’s implicitly understood that everybody knows something important about life, and if you try to make yourself look important by wrapping your discoveries up in a bunch of fancy terms that only a few people can understand, it isn’t going to do you much good in the long run. Meaningful social change depends on the general public being able to understand why the old way of doing things doesn’t work very well anymore, what has to be changed, and how making the change is going to benefit them. As an old friend of mine once asked, “Do you want to have a little revolution, or a big revolution?”
As I’ve said, the study of human evolutionary science began during the height of the Cold War, when the threat of global nuclear annihilation and the extinction of our species seemed to make a lot of sense to a lot of people. When your own extinction seems like a good idea to many members of your species, something is obviously going seriously wrong with your evolution! So these scientists began the field of human evolutionary science as the Science of How to Not Have a War with Each Other.
How to Not Have a War with Each Other, What Everyone in the World has in Common, and How to Recognize their Differences are such simple concepts that they’re taught to preschoolers on Sesame Street. So obviously, kids don’t need to know about biology or DNA or evolution to be able to learn things like that.
So that raises the question: If preschoolers can learn this stuff, why isn’t it being taught in public school? The Republicans will never support it, because their main voter base still believes that evolution is bullsh*t, and learning about it will turn people into homosexual drug addict child molesting Communists or something. But what about the Democrats? Last I knew we still had a secular government of, by, and for the people, so personally, I’d think the Science of How to Keep Your Children from Getting Drafted ought to be pretty goddamn important.
Science is the pursuit of information. When people have information, they get the choice in how to use it. If they don’t have the information, they don’t get that choice. Could it be that this stuff isn’t being taught to the public because our political or economic systems can’t withstand the public learning the full meaning of human equality? Could it be that our political and economic systems depend on Whites, Hispanics, Blacks, Arabs, and Indigenous people living in fear of each other and mistrusting each other? Could it be that the people who control our education system are afraid of what might happen if everyone in the world suddenly realized how much they had in common with each other, set aside their differences, and agreed to work together toward their mutual goals? Do our political and economic systems really depend on war, racism, sexism, and homophobia?
Maybe that sounds paranoid of me, but in the famous words of Sherlock Holmes, “When you’ve eliminated all the likely possibilities, whatever possibility remains, however unlikely, must be the solution.” Preschoolers can learn this stuff, so that doesn’t explain why it isn’t being taught in school. We have a secular government of, by, and for the people, so that doesn’t explain it. What else is left?
If our political and economic systems do depend on people not learning how to keep from having wars with each other, then the sooner we get rid of those political and economic systems, the better off we’ll all be. Under political and economic systems like that, unless you’re one of the people who call the shots, you’re a commodity. If you seem to be getting ahead because someone else is getting trampled on, well just wait, because your turn is coming. When there’s nothing left of those people to trample on, someone else is going to get trampled on, and sooner or later, it’s going to be you. In the famous words of the Reverend Martin Niemoller, “When they came for the homosexuals, I did not speak up because I wasn’t a homosexual. When they came for the Socialists, I did not speak up because I wasn’t a Socialist. When they came for the Jews I did not speak up because I was not a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak up.”
As the Founding Fathers of the United States put it, effective government is only possible through the consent of the governed. A majority of Americans already wish there was a third party to choose from in America. If our government has grown so far removed from serving the interests of the people already that I can write silly books about how much better the interests of the people could be served if our government would teach people a working understanding of science, and suddenly a whole lot of people stop consenting to be governed by the government we have now, that’s hardly my problem, is it? Either our government officials are going to take the hint, figure out how to adapt to the changing situation and the new information the public has gotten hold of, and figure out how to make our government effective again, or…
Whether our current government officials figure out how to construct a political system people will consent to being governed by, or someone else does it for them, either way, someone is going to make that political system work by doing what I say, because I put into words what a majority of people want.
I don’t call myself King of the World for nothing, you know.