Introduction
I have decided to take over the world as a practical joke.
Now you, lucky reader, are just one book away from the punch line.
Don’t bother skipping to the end, because if you do, the joke won’t make any sense.
I gave the mainstream liberal side three years’ head start, and they chose to throw it away. But in that time I’ve made friends with a hell of a lot of people who use the words “post-revolutionary society” in everyday conversation. So in this book, I’m going to show you how everything I’ve told you about in the first two books can be used in a global non-violent revolution, complete with its own political system, economic system, and military. And along the way, I’m going to show you how various groups of people are already working on just about every component of the global revolution. Really, all they need to win is for someone to show them how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
I call Book 6 The Apocalypse (Don’t Panic) because as I showed you in Volume II, politics is a product of economics, and in a world with an environmentally unsustainable economic system, political revolution is inevitable. It isn’t too late for that political revolution to be carried out non-violently, but our window of opportunity is closing fast. An environmentally unsustainable global economic system is a threat to all of us, and it must be stopped within a certain period of time that we can’t precisely determine. The closer global environmental disaster looms, the more obvious the threat becomes, but the more quickly it will have to be prevented. And you can eliminate the threat a person is creating a lot faster by killing them than you can be teaching them. So as you can see, if we wait for this problem to solve itself, it isn’t going to solve anything.
Violence is always an option for common revolutionaries, but not when you’re taking over the world as a practical joke. Violence will always be an obvious way to eliminate threats, and neither I nor anyone else can prevent other people from considering it. Violence is also to the most cold-hearted teacher. 55 million people had to die in World War II before everyone else learned what they could’ve learned at the end of World War I. And my goal is to prevent World War III. Any moron could prevent World War V.
As I showed you at the end of the last book, the belief that our current political and economic systems can be anything but self-destructive contradicts the most fundamental physical law of the universe. Endless economic growth would depend on an infinite supply of energy, and it isn’t physically possible for an infinite supply of energy to exist. But instead of adapting our economy accordingly, we are making ourselves ever more dependent on the hope of finding an infinite supply of energy. That economic strategy can only lead to poverty, oppression, war, and everything that goes with those things. That’s what the global revolutionaries are revolting against.
The very, very, very, very, very, very most optimistic explanation for why our political and business leaders could be considering this economic strategy to be a good idea is that our politicians and business leaders have made such strong emotional attachments to the idea that Capitalism is the best possible economic system that when you show them all the scientific evidence that indicates that it’s an economic system based on inequality, that maintaining that inequality depends on institutionalized fear, and that a competitive economy is diametrically opposed to a global equilibrium economy that can survive within the physical limitations of the world, these people are subconsciously dumping all that information into an anti-information package and it never registers in their consciousness. If our politicians and business leaders are physically incapable of wrapping their minds around the fact that our economic system is inseparable from oppression, war, and global environmental suicide, then when you add two and two together, it means that the most politically powerful people in America are all criminally insane!
The only alternative is that they’re doing all this on purpose.
The global civilization joke that we’re currently telling keeps getting less and less funny all the time…
As I’ve said, these books are a new story of the world that’s being written by scientists, artists, philosophers, religious leaders, and activists. There are lots of people in the world who have figured out part of the global revolution puzzle. They’re in the minority, but they have the bulk of scientific reality on their side. So now in this book you get to hear what the evolutionarily equal humans who make up the radical opposition to everything the American mainstream takes for granted have to say for themselves.
(That is, unless you are one of those people. Then you get to hear what you have to say for yourselves. Not in terms that are your or anyone else’s opinion about anything, but in terms that are evidence admissible in court. And public schools. And political races.)
I ended the first book by showing you how the Theory of Evolution could be used to eliminate a lot of conflict from the world by building a socially-egalitarian society in which everyone would truly be recognized as having been created equal—as opposed to recognizing that everyone was created equal but most people just aren’t smart enough to act like wealthy White heterosexual Christian men, which is what we have in America right now. Then I ended the second book by showing you how that socially egalitarian society could be built within the physical limitations of the world.
Both of those proposals I made sounded like good ideas but were so far removed from what we have now that they seem completely impossible. But in the longer term, the political and economic systems we have now are even more impossible. The political and economic systems I laid out at least are capable of surviving within the physical limitations of the world. So the real question is not, “How could this transition ever be made?” but, “How badly do we want to avert World War III?”
So here’s where this book begins. Just about every single thing I’ve proposed to this point is already being undertaken by someone. The big question facing the people who are approaching it from the environmental direction is the same question that plagued the Club of Rome: Why the hell aren’t you people listening to us? That’s where the Club of Budapest came in, to try to figure out how people think, in order to make doing what it takes to solve global problems seem like a good idea to people. The problem they’re faced with is in putting their great ideas into action. But there are a lot of other people out there who are trying to put the Club of Budapest’s ideas into action, without even knowing about the Club of Budapest or their discoveries. These people have figured this stuff out by piecing together information on their own, and by a lot of trial and error. Some of the things these activists have been trying don’t work and won’t work, even though they seem like they should. But along the way they have developed a lot of strategies and tactics that do work, and that could work a lot better if they were separated from the ones that don’t work. So taken together, somewhere in the world someone knows every part of what needs to be done, and someone knows how to do every part of what needs to be done.
I’ve already told you that I’m King of the World. Now you get to meet the rest of my kingdom.
In my kingdom, there is no government. There is cooperation, organization, administration, and agreements that people make among themselves for their mutual protection from people who threaten them.
In my kingdom, the only laws that are recognized as absolute are scientific laws. The only man-made laws that are recognized as valid are those that apply scientific laws to society effectively. If you aren’t an expert at scientific laws, you have no business writing man-made laws.
In my kingdom, there are no masters and no servants. There are only leaders and followers who cooperate with each other. Leaders and followers recognize each other as equals, and recognize that they occupy different levels of the social hierarchy only because of their differences in levels of skills and abilities as they relate to the situation.
The military of my kingdom is completely invisible. In fact, I’m not even sure if we have a military. Violence and aggression are usually counterproductive in the long run, which is why I’ve gone to such great lengths to found my kingdom on the principle of making them unnecessary. But everyone has the natural instinct to fight in self-defense, so I don’t need to write laws to make that happen, and for me to try to write laws to prevent it from happening would be impractical at best. So the law of my kingdom regarding our military is: If you choose to threaten us, don’t be surprised if some of us choose to fight back. And as I said in the last book, an environmentally self-destructive economic and political system is a threat to everyone, so anything anyone does to fight back against it can be considered self-defense. Furthermore, if I outline a political and economic system whose long term survival are physically possible, and you choose to threaten it, then you choose to accept the risk that someone might be willing to eliminate your threat in whatever way seems to them to offer them the best chances of winning.
The political stability of the economically competitive world is maintained by the people who operate the political apparatus making statistical predictions about how hard other people would be willing to fight back and how effectively they would be able to fight back given the resources available to them. Then those competitively minded people figure out how to get as much as they can for themselves while staying inside the safety margin.
Well if your goal in life is to play the statistical inevitability game to get as much as you possibly can from everyone else, and I go to all the trouble of laying out a plan for a environmentally, economically, politically, socially, and culturally sustainable global civilization, and you’re dumb enough to threaten it, don’t be surprised if someone out there decides that my kingdom is worth fighting to defend. If you want to take your chances on using statistical inevitabilities to oppress people, and I take my chances on using statistical inevitabilities to liberate people, and a statistically meaningful number of people are willing to fight against your political system to defend mine, all I can say to that is: What the f*ck did you expect????
The military of my kingdom is completely invisible because I didn’t put any effort into creating it. As Albert Einstein once said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” So I don’t even know if we have a military. Maybe we don’t. That sure would go a long way toward explaining why they’re so invisible. If we do have one, I have no idea who they are. If you want to find out the hard way, I guess that’s up to you.
Anyway…
In my kingdom, everyone is king or queen. Some people assume that in an egalitarian society everyone would be a peasant. But who the hell aspires to being a peasant? This is a cooperative greatness economy after all, not a cooperative mediocrity economy. Some peasants aspire to forcing everyone else to be a peasant just so they can feel equal to everyone else, but if you try to force anyone to do anything, you don’t have a cooperative economy at all. If you want forced mediocrity, go join an emotional communist economy.
I call myself King of the World because I’m the one who figured out how to make all this happen. I didn’t get here by telling everyone else what to do; I got here by listening to what everyone else was trying to say.
A lot of people assume that world conquest means one person being king and everyone else being peasants. That approach to world conquest has been done to death. Forget about the fact that it has never worked for anyone in the long run. I told you my life was my art, and I told you that art, by definition, is creative. Being King of the World for the sake of telling everyone else what to do isn’t worth the hassle to me if for no other reason than because it’s such a f*cking cliché.
In the last book I told you how I conquered the world when I was 23 by proclaiming that everything I saw existed because I willed it to exist the way it was, instead of my going to the trouble of trying to force it to exist in any other way. Did you think that only applied to the physical world?
The trick with applying that to people is that people are usually trying to be something else, and usually they try to get what they want from other people. That means that if I simply willed everyone in my kingdom to be the way they are, I’d be willing a lot of people to be unhappy, and I’d be king of a kingdom that was trapped in a mire of internal conflict. So why the hell would I want a kingdom like that? If, on the other hand, I willed everyone to be able to get what they wanted within the physical limitations of the world, then I would have a kingdom where everyone could be happy and everyone could accomplish something productive in life instead of everyone trying to make lives for themselves by undoing what everyone else was trying to do.
That was the real trick. I had to write the first book to define what everyone was trying to do, and I had to write the second book to define the physical limitations of the world and how they affect people. Now in this book, you get to see how the people who make up the rest of my political system are building my kingdom even as we speak.
And with that, finally I can say that I’m king of a kingdom that’s worth being king of.