Welcome to Restoring Science to Its Rightful Place…  and Transforming our Schools and Universities to Meet the Demands of the New Age.  This is how to make sure President Obama keeps his promise, using books that are available at the public library.

I’ve been a high school teacher’s assistant, and I’m also a certified flight instructor, so I know a few things about science and education.  In my family we’ve been working on better approaches to education for about 75 years.   My grandfather also helped design the B17 and B25 bombers during World War II, back before there were computers.  Meaning, back when the engineer’s brain was the computer.

I was a volunteer in the War on Terror.  I trained as a helicopter pilot for civilian emergency services, since it was civilians who were being attacked.  But then the evolution versus intelligent design debate started up while I was taking my flight instructor training.  Between the two, I realized that I was volunteering to risk my life to defend my country just so a bunch of other people could stay home and keep on believing that people all over the world hate us for magical reasons no one will ever be able to understand.

That’s when I found out about evolutionary psychology.  Evolution is the biggest engineering project in the world.   In my family we’ve been talking about tradeoffs, adaptations, and efficiency around the supper table for generations, so now I’ve been an education activist for the past 5 years.

There are a lot of scientists who are looking for ways to use their new discoveries to make the education system more effective.  E.O. Wilson was the first to pioneer evolutionary psychology, which he referred to as sociobiology, and other people have been contributing to from various directions.  In Dr. Wilson’s book Consilience he talks about how the unification of all fields of science and humanities would make education a lot simpler because as I’m sure you know, unified concepts are a lot easier to learn than fragmented concepts.  That unification of knowledge would also go a long way toward making sure our political decisions get made based on evidence.

There are a lot of other people in the world who believe that political decisions should be based on evidence.  People like the protestors at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, and the protestors at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, and the protestors at the G20 meeting in London, and the protestors at the World Bank meeting in Washington DC.

So how big of a promise did President Obama actually make?

With all this talk of transforming the education system and making our political decisions based on evidence, here’s a couple pieces of evidence I haven’t been hearing anyone talk about.  The Constitution embodies a set of implicit assumptions about the world that, if true, and if applied in a certain way, should produce a certain result.  But the United States Constitution was written in 1787.  The Theory of Evolution wasn’t released to the public until 1859.  The Laws of Thermodynamics weren’t discovered until 1868.  The Constitution of the United States of America was written by people who had fundamental misconceptions about biology and physics.  That means human behavior, the environment, and economics.  Computer programmers call this Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Someone at the Origins conference at Arizona State University in April called the conference scientific shock and awe.  I understand the concept, but with all due respect, 70 scientists having a meeting is not shock and awe, even if it is broadcast on the internet.  Shock and awe requires a sufficient number of people to be sufficiently trained and sufficiently equipped to direct overwhelming force toward the achievement of an objective.  You force the enemy to understand that you have defeated him by forcing him to understand that you have eliminated every single asset he could use to fight.  The Nazis weren’t defeated because my grandfather designed bombers; they were defeated because people flew the bombers.  And of course, because someone trained the pilots.

So fasten your seatbelts, because this is scientific shock and awe straight from the front lines.  If at any point you feel like your brain is about to melt, don’t worry, it’s only temporary.

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A lot of people love to jump all over Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and say that the fact that we can’t measure all the properties of a subatomic particle at the same time, and the fact that everything in the world is made up of subatomic particles, proves we can’t be certain of anything.  And other people say that the fact that subatomic particles seem to appear and disappear at random proves we can’t be certain of anything.  And other people go so far as to say that we can’t be certain of anything because we can’t measure anything without changing it.

Well despite what those people say, you can be certain of the Periodic Table of the Elements.  That was discovered independently of subatomic physics.  Even if particles do act completely at random—as opposed to acting according to laws of cause and effect that physicists have yet to discover—randomness cancels out.  Whatever one particle is doing at random, some other particle is doing the opposite of that.  And that’s how randomly acting particles all add up to the reliable predictions of the Periodic Table of the Elements.

The Periodic Table of the Elements is a collection of a certain type of facts.  These are known as first principles.  A first principle is a rule that scientists have discovered to apply universally to an area of study.

Dr. Wilson’s goal of Consilience has been greatly advanced by the discovery of five first principles that connect different fields of science.  Chemistry has been connected to biology, biology has been connected to psychology, and ecology—which is a branch of biology—has been connected to chemistry, physics, and mathematics.  Each of these discoveries is not the kind of discovery you memorize, but the discovery of a perspective you can use to interpret information and convert between one field and another.

All of these five first principles are different manifestations of two mathematical laws: entropy and stability.   Change makes things spread out.  Whenever you have a large group of things, like molecules, cells, people, or ideas, the more changes you introduce to the group, the more different results you get.  The soles of your shoes are thinner now than they were when they were brand new, because with every step you take you’re adding friction to their bottom-most molecules.  That change you have introduced has spread the molecules of your shoes out into a trail of microscopic dust that follows you everywhere you go.  Once upon a time, the molecules in your shoes were concentrated into one place, but the more friction you add, the more places those molecules end up.

Out of all the possible results of changes, some create patterns that resist further change.  That’s why some kinds of rocks erode more slowly than others.  A few patterns not only resist change but also create more patterns.  And that brings me to evolution…

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The Selfish Gene Theory was discovered by Richard Dawkins.  Prior to 1976 biologists knew that biology was made up of chemical reactions, but it was made up of so many chemical reactions that no one person could keep track of them all.

The Selfish Gene Theory is a perspective that unifies the chemical reactions of biology by identifying the end result of every chemical reaction.  Every chemical reaction in biology contributes, in one way or another, to the replication of the genes that started that chemical reaction.   Dr. Dawkins explained this in his book The Selfish Gene, and built upon it in his books The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, and The Extended Phenotype.

A gene is a molecule that makes copies of itself when it comes into contact with the right combination of other molecules.  In humans, the genes are stuck together into 23 pairs of chromosomes.  The 23 chromosomes in a sperm cell have to get paired up with the 23 chromosomes in an egg cell to start the chemical reaction.  Then they react with the other chemicals that are present in the egg cell.  Then more chemicals get added through the woman’s uterus, and then more chemicals get added from the milk and food and water the infant consumes, and so on for 18 years and 9 months, until that gigantic chemical reaction turns a fertilized egg cell into an adult human.

As an adult you’re sexually mature, so you can have children of your own and then feed them and otherwise raise them, and do all the things you need to do to keep yourself alive in the meantime, and then help raise your grandchildren, and keep making more copies of your genes.  If you’re lucky, your chemical reaction runs down after 80 years or thereabouts and you die of old age.  If you’re not lucky, something disrupts your chemical reaction prematurely and you die of some other cause.   The lifecycle of every animal, plant, fungus, virus, and bacteria is a variation on this basic process.

The Earth formed about 4 1/2 billion years ago, and life began on Earth about 3 1/2 billion years ago.  After a billion years of molecules floating around all over the Earth and getting hit with energy from sunlight, volcanic eruptions, lighting, and radiation, some carbon atoms hooked up with some other atoms and formed a molecule that started a chemical reaction that made a replica of itself.  And there’s a lot of carbon in the world, so those two molecules then started two more chemical reactions, and then there were four molecules.  And then eight, and so on.

With all those chemical reactions making things change, variation began.  Some of those chemical reactions would’ve happened under conditions that weren’t ideal, but were close enough to make something close to the chemical reaction happen.  The Earth is also constantly being bombarded by cosmic radiation, which added more variation to the chemical reactions.  Some of those chemical reactions didn’t produce perfect replicas of the original molecules, but molecules that were slightly different.  But those new molecules could still make replicas of themselves.  So they made replicas of themselves.  They didn’t make replicas of the original molecules.  So now there was more than one kind of self-replicating molecule in the world.

Now, after 3 1/2 billion years of that chemical reaction taking place all over the world, the chemical reactions that are the most stable are the ones that keep happening.  Each part of that chemical reaction is happening among all the other chemical reactions, so when one part of the chemical reaction changes, other parts are also affected.  Zebras eat grass and lions eat zebras.  The zebras that can run the fastest can escape from the lions most often, but the lions that run the fastest can catch zebras most often.   Zebras have genes that create bodies that can run fast, and lions have genes that create bodies that can run fast, because those are the kinds of genes whose chemical reactions are the most stable among the surrounding chemical reactions.

Evolution is natural selection, or, the adaptation to environmental pressures, because it’s an ongoing process of elimination in which whatever chemical reactions have gotten into an environment, and are the most stable in that environment, are the ones that keep happening.   So not only are we descended from apes, or fish, or worms, or bacteria, if you go back far enough, we are descended from ultraviolet radiation shining on muddy water.

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The next big question is how the replication of genes created human psychology.  A thought is an electrical signal that’s transmitted through your brain.  Human behavior is the result of chemical and electrical signals being transmitted from your body into your brain, then through your brain, and then back out to your body.  That pattern of signals results in your keeping yourself alive, having children, keeping them alive, and making more copies of your genes.  But how can we talk about thoughts in terms of biochemical electrical signals?

We need a new perspective.  And that’s what evolutionary psychology is.

The first principle of evolutionary psychology is:  All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her genes by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.

With one rather complicated sentence, you have identified everyone’s goals for every action they ever take in life.  How the Mind Works, by Dr. Steven Pinker is a very thorough introduction to evolutionary psychology.  The Moral Animal by Robert Wright is a more philosophical introduction to the concept.

Now let’s break that sentence down.

A gene is a molecule that triggers chemical reactions that make more copies of the gene.  In the same way, a camera is a device that creates photographs.  Neither the genes nor the camera need to know what they’re doing or why they’re doing it.  When all the parts of the camera operate, a photograph gets created.  Protons, neutrons, and electrons are basically frozen droplets of energy that cooled off after the Big Bang.  Now they’ve fallen into patterns that created the Periodic Table of the Elements.  Those different combinations of subatomic particles connect to each other in various ways that create atoms and molecules.  Some of these mindless fragments of the Big Bang have fallen into patterns that create more patterns. When all the parts of those molecules operate, identical molecules get created.

If a gene made a copy of itself directly, that would be a stable chemical reaction.  But what if it started a chemical reaction that started another chemical reaction that made a copy of the gene?  That would still be a stable chemical reaction.  What if there were three steps to the process?   Or ten?   Or a million?

If you walk to the store and buy a loaf of bread and eat it, there are a lot of chemical reactions involved, but you keep the genes that started all those chemical reactions alive for another day.

If you meet the man or woman of your dreams, get their phone number, get a date with them, go to the store, buy groceries, fix a gourmet meal, fall in love, have sex, get married, and have a baby, there’s a lot more chemical reactions involved in that, but it results in your genes getting replicated.

Your life is the process by which your genes make more copies of themselves.  Each one of you is the product of 3 1/2 billion years of a process of elimination.  Each of you was born because half the genes that started the chemical reaction that created you also helped start the chemical reaction that created your mother, and that kept her alive, half of her genes helped create your grandmother and kept her alive and the other half helped create your grandfather and kept him alive, and the same on your father’s side, and so on, back through time.

Once upon a time, change and variation gave a microscopic worm a skin cell that was sensitive to light.  That worm acted differently when light was hitting its light sensitive cell than it did when light wasn’t hitting it.  That resulted in the worm being better able to orient itself to the rest of the world.  The worm didn’t need to know what it was doing or why it was doing it, it just did it.  And as a result of doing it, it survived and reproduced better than the other members of its species and passed more of its genes on to future generations.

This happened for the simple reason that the light hitting the photoreceptive cell started a chemical reaction in the cell that made some electrons move around and started an electrical current, and that electrical current made other chemical reactions happen in the worm that made its body wriggle differently than it would’ve otherwise.

As long as that process resulted in the worm acting in a way that made more copies of its genes than the other worms did, you have a self-replicating pattern that’s more stable than the self-replication patterns of the other worms.  Now you have a more intelligent worm because this worm is better able to process information.  The worm’s sensory input creates physical output that results in it replicating more copies of its genes, and that results in photoreceptive cells being passed on to some of its offspring.   The pattern creates more patterns.

If another worm got a photoreceptive cell in its skin but it didn’t act differently as a result, that wouldn’t be a more stable pattern because the worm wouldn’t be processing sensory input in a way that resulted in more of its genes being replicated.

Now fast forward to the southern tip of Africa about 7 million years ago.  Dr. Paul Erlich tells this part of the story in his book Human Natures.   A species of primate lived in the forest there.  When their forest got overcrowded, either by the forest shrinking or the population expanding, some of those primates wandered out into the grassland.

They already had hands and arms that were well adapted for grabbing branches as they climbed around in the trees, which made them one of the only species of mammal in the world whose front limbs were very different from their hind limbs.

Out in the grassland, standing upright let those primates see predators approaching over the top of the grass, which made the ones who stood upright the most, the most successful at passing their genes on to the next generation.  Eventually, all the genes for walking on all fours got eaten, which means those chemical reactions got terminated.  So that species of primate became the only mammal in the world to walk on two feet.

Now that those primates had hands that were good at grabbing things and didn’t need their hands for walking anymore, they started using more tools.  The use of tools let these primates turn inanimate objects into extensions of their bodies.  They could use clubs to help them kill other animals, they could use sharp rocks to cut through the hides of their prey, and so on, rather than depending entirely on parts of their own bodies to do those things.  But doing that also depended on their being able to recognize patterns of cause and effect that would make those things happen.  The ones whose hands let them use tools the best, and the ones whose brains could think of the most uses for tools, were the ones who passed on the most of their genes.

These were social animals, like all primates, who lived in groups for their mutual protection, but who competed against each other for mates.  Eventually, these tool-using primates got smarter than every other species in the world.  But they were still competing against each other for mates.  So changes were still happening, variation was still happening, and cumulative adaptations to environmental pressures kept happening.  People kept getting smarter because the ones who could best perceive patterns of cause and effect and anticipate the decisions other people were going to make were the ones who were most successful at surviving—and reproducing—in the group.

Meanwhile, the primates who didn’t leave the forest of southern Africa stayed in the trees and evolved into chimpanzees.

So here we are now with brains that can think that are each made up of lots and lots of molecules that can’t think. In effect, the human nervous system is made up of lots and lots of little cameras that exist as a result of stable chemical reactions making more copies of those sets of cameras than of any other set of cameras.  Those biological cameras—in other words, your senses—start different chemical reactions when different sensory input hits them.

Those chemical reactions create different electrical currents in your brain.  All those electrical currents in your brain mixed together create a replica of the outside world.  It’s not a replica in the sense of being a photograph; it’s a replica in the sense of it being a combination of electrical currents that correspond to a pattern of cause and effect in the outside world.  It results in your body acting in a way that keeps you alive and makes more copies of your genes.  We don’t need to know what we’re doing or why we’re doing it, we just need to do it.

Intelligence is the ability to recognize and act upon patterns.  It’s not simply the ability to make choices.  Making choices is just the only time you notice that you’re using your intelligence.  When one choice is obviously better than all the others, there really is no choice to make, so there’s really nothing to think about.  Every time you leave your house, you have the choice whether to lock the door or to leave it unlocked.  But one of those choices is obviously better than the other, so you make the same choice every time without thinking about it.  Then maybe you get halfway to wherever you’re going and can’t remember whether you locked the door or not. Your brain processes information that way all the time.  Those are subconscious decisions.

Sometimes the electrical currents in your brain create ambiguous replicas of the world, where two or more possible courses of action are fairly evenly matched in their predictions of the maximization of your genetic survival.  That’s when your consciousness gets involved.

If you are ever faced with a few choices and one isn’t obviously better than all the others, what do you do?  You start thinking about it.  You devote more brainpower to the problem, you might use your senses to try to get more information to use in making your decision, you might bring more information into your decision making from other parts of your brain, and you might start ignoring other things happening around you so you can focus your attention on making that choice.

If you see a hundred-foot cliff in front of you, your brain predicts that if you jump off it you will die.  So it doesn’t send signals to your body to make it do that.  Instead it sends signals to your body to make it avoid the cliff.  That’s how you make every decision in life.  That’s how non-intelligent molecules created the survival and reproductive instincts, and created the pattern recognition we use to act upon our survival and reproduction instincts.  We are not capable of seriously considering acting upon any ideas that we don’t perceive to maximize the survival of our genes in some way or another.  We think this way because that’s the pattern that 3 1/2 billion years of a self-perpetuating chemical reaction created—namely, a chemical reaction that would make itself keep happening.  Evolution had no way of creating a chemical reaction that could do anything else.

At the same time, since evolution is a chemical reaction and chemicals can’t think, evolution had no way of anticipating that our evolution was leading to some twists that could destabilize the self perpetuation of our chemical reactions.

The first is that we don’t naturally perceive the existence of our genes.  We just naturally perceive a desire to survive and reproduce.  We also perceive ourselves to have other desires, but one way or another, all of those desires helped our ancestors survive and reproduce.

Another twist is misinterpretation of our perceptions.  Sometimes the signals that our brains receive from the outside conflict with each other.  Sometimes information gets processed incorrectly and makes us perceive a future that appears to correspond to the maximization of our genetic survival, even though it doesn’t correspond to it.  In other words, sometimes we make mistakes and get ourselves into trouble.   We can make self-destructive decisions by accident.

Even a person who does jump off a 100’ cliff because he wants to kill himself perceives himself to be surviving and reproducing in the best way he can think of.  I don’t mean to make light of people committing suicide.  I’m simply pointing out the fact that when people voluntarily carry out self-destructive behavior they’re still acting upon the perception of maximizing their genetic survival.  So suicide doesn’t disprove the first principle of evolutionary psychology, it just proves that something has gone seriously wrong with those people’s perceptions.  That’s why suicide counseling depends on getting suicidal people to perceive their situation differently than they do now.

This is also the reason people can think about ideas that don’t maximize their genetic survival because they’re neutral to their genetic survival or even slightly self-destructive.  If I wanted to, I could say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious right now and that wouldn’t have any effect on my genetic survival.  Or I could smoke ten packs of cigarettes in one sitting and harm my genetic survival.  Either way, I would perceive those choices to maximize my genetic survival, even though they didn’t really.

Another twist was that the genetic evolution of our brains eventually made itself obsolete.  Generation by generation, our brains kept getting better and better at recognizing and acting upon patterns, until they got so good at it that the predictions of the future that they could make and act upon could adapt so quickly that the brains effectively eliminated every threat to the survival of their genes.  People still die prematurely, and sometimes dictators even exterminate entire ethnic groups.  But the genes that create our brains are spread throughout the world.  Wherever some people survive, the genes still survive.  And the genes survive, and don’t continue to evolve, because now the ideas the brains create evolve instead.

The study of the evolution of ideas is called memetic evolution.  Every time you think of an idea and then think of a better idea, your ideas are evolving.  The idea that your brain perceives to maximize your genetic survival replaces the idea that it doesn’t perceive to maximize your genetic survival.  That’s still adaptation to an environmental pressure—meaning natural selection.

The point at which the evolution of ideas outran the evolution of genes once and for all was reached at least 40,000 years ago, or possibly 60,000, or 100,000, or maybe even 200,000, depending on which evolutionary psychologist you ask and what they’re using to define that point.  But 40,000 years is guaranteed, and that has the most evidence to support it.  The most dramatic piece of evidence is the Chauvet cave paintings in southern France.  They are great works of art by modern standards, but they are 30,000 years old.  Which means they were painted by people who had brains like ours.

That means we are all born with brains that evolved in the stone age.   We’re trying to use them to live in the nuclear age, the space age, and the computer age.  We got here because our ancestors’ ideas kept evolving after their genes stopped evolving.  With their evolving ideas, and by combining an ever-larger number of ideas with each other, they discovered more and more ways of interacting with the world that maximized their genetic survival.  They kept developing technology little by little that removed our bodies and our ideas from the stone age, but left our brains in the stone age.  So now when we act upon what we naturally feel to be true about the world, we make a lot of misperceptions and we make a lot of mistakes that turn out to be self destructive in the long run.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance, President Kennedy faced a lot of opposition from people who thought we ought to just throw down with the Soviet Union and start a nuclear war.  Now that evolutionary psychologists like Dr. Pinker have gone back and looked at the decisions people kept trying to get President Kennedy to make, they can see that if it had been the Cuban Wooden Club Crisis, it would’ve been a perfect strategy.

Another twist in human evolution has been our process of outsmarting the environment.  The impact of any species on its environment is held in balance by all the other species.  Zebras eat grass at the same rate lions eat zebras, so the amount of grass, zebras, and lions in the environment stays stable.  But the impact of each species on its environment is held in balance by a combination of many, many things.

The evolution of human intellect threw our relationship to the environment out of balance because we don’t naturally perceive the world the way the world actually works.  We naturally perceive the world in whatever way of perceiving it made the most copies of our ancestors’ genes as of 40,000 years ago.  We best perceive the things that affected our ancestors most directly, we perceive more faintly things that affected them less directly, and we don’t perceive at all things that didn’t affect them or that affected them only very indirectly.

Over the course of history, as we have thought of the ideas and made the decisions that seemed best to us, we have been combining our stone age instincts with our current level of knowledge, to make plans for the future.  And it keeps getting us into trouble.

This brings me to Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Dr. Jared Diamond.  About 10,000 years ago, the plains of Mesopotamia were the most favorable environment in the world for human habitation.  There was so much food to hunt and gather that the people there could live in permanent villages.  So they made the best decisions they could think of and maximized their genetic survival.

But that meant using all the food they could get to feed as many children as they could have.  That meant population growth.  That meant more people hunting the local gazelle herds each year.  Eventually that meant the gazelle herds getting wiped out.

That meant a lot of Mesopotamians looking for new ways to get food.  Soon enough some of them noticed that food plants were growing out of their waste dumps from previous years.  Then they discovered that plants grow from seeds.  Then they started experimenting with planting seeds themselves.  Since they lived in permanent villages, they could tend their plants year round.  So began the agricultural revolution.  That same process played out later in other parts of the world.

But it still didn’t stop population growth.  All it did was to provide more food.  When the land couldn’t produce any more food, the population started spreading outward, looking for more land.  Since they had so many more people now, they hopelessly outnumbered their neighbors, so it was easy for them to take their neighbors’ land.   So began the empires of the Middle East, China, the Maya, and the Inca.

None of the first farmers had any way of knowing about the chemical cycles taking place in their soil that made it produce their food.  Over farming led to the depletion of soil nutrients and soil erosion.  Irrigation led to the salinization of the soil.  Which is why, as you may have noticed, the Middle East is now a desert.

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Here are all the books and CDs I have for sale.

You might want to bookmark this page or something, because I haven’t yet decided how I want to set all of these up in a single Cafe Press store.

Restoring Science to its Rightful Place– Booklet and CD:  www.cafepress.com/RestoreScience

Turning the Tide on Religious Fundamentalism– Book and CD 1: http://www.cafepress.com/TurningTheTide

CD 2:  http://www.cafepress.com/42Vol1

Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution– Book:  http://www.cafepress.com/AntiCapitalism

Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution– Booklet & CD:  http://www.cafepress.com/AntiCapitalCD

Zapatista University:  http://www.cafepress.com/ZapatistaU

Planetary Biology, Neo-Anarchism, and the Political Future of the World:  http://www.cafepress.com/NeoAnarchism

The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity:  http://www.cafepress.com/EvoRelativity

42 Volume 1:  http://www.cafepress.com/42Vol1

42 Volume 2:  http://www.cafepress.com/42Vol2

42 Volume 3:  http://www.cafepress.com/42Vol3

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Introduction  …………………………………………………………………………………………..  1,123

BOOK SIX: THE APOCALYPSE (DON’T PANIC)  ………..……………………………………….……   1,131
Chapter 32:  The Volunteers of America  ……………………………………………………………..  1,133
Chapter 33:  The New Religious Left  ………………………………………………………………..  1,352
Chapter 34:  The Evolution of Atheism …………………………………………………………..…   1,436
Chapter 35:  The Evolution of Environmentalism ……………………………………………………. 1,464
Chapter 36:  Operation Native American Freedom ……………………………………………………. 1,496
Chapter 37:  The Evolution of Socialism and Communism …………………………………………  1,528
Chapter 38:   The Evolution of Anarchism  …………………………………………………………    1,153
Chapter 39:  The Art of Revolution  …………………………………………………………………   1,593
Chapter 40:  One World Government  ……………………………………………………………….   1,637
Chapter 41:  A 21st Century Messiah???  ……………………………………………..………………  1,650

Key References  ……………………………………………………………………………….………   1,678

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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.

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Once you accept that the global environment is one giant chemical reaction, you accept that humans are a part of that giant chemical reaction.  Once you accept that human consciousness is a part of humanity, you accept that human consciousness is a part of the giant chemical reaction of the global environment.

Now a lot of things are starting to go wrong with the giant chemical reaction of the global environment.  A lot of people are studying it to try to figure out how to fix the problem.  But unless, and until, human consciousness is broken down to a chemical reaction, the giant chemical reaction of the global environment can’t be completely understood, and therefore humanity’s interaction with the global environment can’t be completely understood, and therefore, the effect that we are having on the global environment can’t be completely undone.  We can’t live without having some sort of effect on the global environment, but currently, the effect that we’re having on the global environment is going to kill billions of people in this century.  It is the goal of every human being to survive and reproduce, and on our present course, we are all rolling the dice on whether our descendants are going to be able to survive and reproduce or not.

Lots of people have figured out ways that people could live that wouldn’t be self-destructive.  Lots more people have figured out ways we could live that would solve some of the problems humanity is faced with, and if you put enough of those together, we could solve all of our problems.  But not nearly enough people are listening to those people.  And some solutions people are thinking of won’t work in the long run.  As a result, the people who are trying the hardest to save the world can’t agree on how to work together and don’t seem to stand enough chance of winning to attract much popular support.  They’re trying to be a global Civil Rights Movement, but instead they’re just a handful of people talking about ideas they have.

Before we can alter our course away from self-destruction, we have to figure out how we got on a self-destructive course in the first place.  To do that it is vital that human consciousness be understood as a part of the giant chemical reaction of the global environment, because until that happens, we don’t understand the complete chemical reaction of the global environment.  As long as we’re missing one piece of the puzzle, we can’t see how all the pieces fit together.  Without seeing how all the pieces fit together now, we can’t see any other way they could be fit together to create anything else.

A lot of the people who are trying to save the world are deathly allergic to the idea that anyone could reduce human consciousness to a chemical reaction, and with good reason.  A lot of people have tried to do that throughout history, and they all failed.  But even though they failed, they tried to build political systems on their so-called discoveries anyway.  Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are three names that always come up whenever I talk about using science to understand people and then build a political system on that understanding.  But then these people make the mistake of assuming that just because some people have tried doing what I’m doing and no one has succeeded yet proves that what I’m trying to do is impossible.  All I can say that is:  Lots of people tried to build airplanes before the Wright brothers succeeded, and that doesn’t prove that airplanes are impossible to build, does it?

A lot of people assume that no one should ever figure out human consciousness as a chemical reaction because that would make the person feel more important that everyone else and feel like they had the right to tell other people what to do.  Those people are making the mistake that just because some people would feel that way, everyone who tries to do what I do would feel that way.  There are two things I have to say to that.  First of all, figuring out how stuff works is what scientists do.  Second, scientists are doing this, and they would continue to do it whether I was involved in it or not.  Those scientists aren’t trying to turn their science into a political system, but that’s an even worse mistake that the one people who try to discourage me are trying to prevent.  All this science is ending up in the hands of people who don’t fully understand how the science works, who then try to build political systems on it anyway.  If a person who has a firm grasp of science doesn’t figure out a way to found a new political system on evolutionary psychology and environmental science, some stupid politician is guaranteed to try to use it to make himself the next Chairman Mao.

So at this point, the choice you have comes down to:  Do you want the people who do understand human consciousness as a chemical reaction to build a political system on it, or do you want people who don’t understand human consciousness as a chemical reaction to try to build a political system on it?  I’ll give you a hint:  one of those choices is already being made, and it isn’t working.

Even if it was possible for progressive activists to discourage every scientist from working on the human consciousness chemical equation, that could only lead to one thing.  The global environment is still a giant chemical reaction, and human consciousness is still a part of that chemical reaction.  That chemical reaction is still working in a way that’s going to kill billions of people in this century, and “we” (and by that I mean you) are still missing one piece of that chemical reaction.   If you don’t have all the pieces to work with, you can’t see how they could be rearranged to create something else.
Personal empowerment depends on informed decision-making.  Informed decision-making depends on people having accurate information.  The discovery of accurate information is the whole point of science.  If you call yourself a progressive activist, but you consider people discovering accurate information to be a threat to your political ideology, then you’re a so-called progressive activist who sees personal empowerment as a threat to your political ideology.  So what the f*ck are you, exactly?

The interaction between human consciousness and the rest of the chemical reaction of the global environment is going to kill billions of people within some number of decades from now, and no one (but me and maybe a few other people) knows how to stop it.  If the success of your political ideology depends on preventing people from accessing certain information and then making decisions based on that information, then the success of your political ideology depends on billions of people dying. You call yourselves progressive activists, but really all you are are conservatives with different hairstyles.  Your feelings of political success still depend on genocide. It’s just a lot easier for you to pretend that isn’t true because your victims haven’t been born yet.

Ha!  And you accuse me of trying to be Chairman Mao!

But enough about you, let’s talk about me now.

1968 was a pivotal year in my life.  That was the year the Club of Rome met, developed their systems theory for the global environment, started studying trends in humanity’s interaction with it, and first predicted global environmental catastrophe in the 21st century.  That was also the year Dr. King was assassinated.  My dad could’ve been one of the scientists who met in Rome easily enough, but he realized that meaningful social change depends on a majority of people learning about why the old way of doing things doesn’t work anymore, how things are going to have to be done differently, and how it’s going to benefit everyone.  Or to put it another way, he realized that social revolutions happen in the streets.

So instead of being an ivory-tower academic like the official scientists who’d met in Rome, he set out on a life of adventure.  He and my mom raised my brother and me accordingly.  He kept up on scientific discoveries over the years, and taught my brother and me about all the same things the ivory-tower academics knew, but he did it by relating it to real-life things that real-life people actually do.  He introduced me to aerodynamics when I was about 5 by showing me how to build a paper airplane.  He taught me about angular momentum by putting a tennis ball in the end of an old sock, twirling the sock around, and letting it go.  (That’s called a schmerltz, by the way, and it makes for a really cool game of catch.  Try it and see what happens.)  He introduced me to architecture when I was about 4, by showing me how to build really tall buildings with my blocks that wouldn’t fall over.  One day when I was about 3, I came running around a corner into the kitchen, crashed face-first into his leg as he was walking the other way, and landed flat on my back.  After my mother picked me up and made sure I was all right, my dad told me, “You’ve just discovered an important scientific principle:  Two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time.”

Every single thing you’ve ever seen in your life has been studied scientifically by somebody.  Lots of things interact with each other to make other things happen.  That means that every single thing in the entire world has a scientific law or theory behind it, and they all fit together into a giant systems theory.  All of biology is chemistry, all of chemistry is physics, all of physics is mathematics, and all of mathematics is logic.  Understanding everything in the entire world is really just a matter of understanding how all the variables that affect something interact to produce that result, and then knowing how to build up or break down from there to see how that piece of the puzzle fits with the other pieces, in units that are a manageable size.  I don’t know everything there is to know about biology, chemistry, physics, or mathematics, but I know there are people who do, so I leave those specializations up to them, and then I take their discoveries and fit them all together.  I understand enough about each field that if I need to learn more about it I can, and I can figure out what questions to ask.  Since I was raised from the time I first learned to talk being shown how pieces of the puzzle fit together, in everyday terms and in manageable units, I never bothered to write down everything I knew about life until I started the first volume of this book.  Honestly, I thought it would only be a three-page essay, so why bother?

Almost 20 years went by and the discoveries of the Club of Rome were virtually ignored.  So in 1987, Dr. Ervin Laszlo convened the meeting of the next group of scientists in Budapest, because he realized that human consciousness was the critical piece of the global environment chemical reaction they were still missing.  This happened during the final years of the Cold War, and it was intended as the peace movement equivalent of the Manhattan Project.

Unfortunately, the Club of Budapest was made up entirely of ivory-tower academics, so they had no idea how to make their discoveries understandable to the general public.     Human evolution is the most controversial topic in the history of the world, so most people who heard about it assumed it was just some ideas some scientists had about something, and all the people who were threatened by it—because their idea of political success depended on war and oppression, I guess—found it really easy to get the public to ignore it.  On one side were the 77% of Americans who don’t even believe in evolution, and on the other side were all the people who were rebelling against those people by saying that humans are mysterious, magical creatures who can’t be understood scientifically, and you can’t just tell people what to think.

The scientists who were studying the chemical reaction of human consciousness were attempting to maintain political neutrality and their academic reputations.  But that necessarily meant reporting their discoveries in academic terms, which rendered them incomprehensible to the vast majority of our species.  These scientists were studying a universal brain structure of humanity, but then they were leaving their discoveries in the hands of a few politically-minded people, who mistakenly believed themselves to know what was best for everyone, and who the scientists mistakenly trusted to put to beneficial use on behalf of everyone.  But the scientists’ own science indicates that all human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her, which says nothing about the preservation of anyone else’s DNA.  So what else did these politically-minded people do but f*ck up everything the scientists had tried to start, and use their new understanding of the universal brain structure of humanity to help them win elections and sell cigarettes and sh*t?   What started as the Manhattan Project of the peace movement quickly turned into the Manhattan Project for psychological manipulation and oppression.

Then one day I found out about the human evolution movement and the Club of Budapest.
So there I was, one of the greatest scientific minds in the world (within the top couple of tenths of one percent, anyway), who’d grown up listening to the Sex PistoLs and who had negligible respect for authority, having found out about the Manhattan Project of the 21st century, which was either going to be a formula for saving the world or for destroying it once and for all.

So to answer the big question of how to turn the chemical reaction of human consciousness into a viable political system without the next Josef Stalin f*cking it all up, you democratize it.  If everyone gets the same information, then everyone gets the choice of how to put that information to use.  If 10% of people in the world choose to measure the value of everyone else’s lives in terms of how much money they can make from those people, that can only work as long as the other 90% of people don’t figure out how to join together to stop you.  As long as they remain divided into a lot of different groups of a few people each, talking about ideas they have, then you win.  But if those 90% of people do figure out a political ideology to unite them, and figure out how to turn that ideology into a political strategy to use to get what they want—namely, build a global civilization whose survival is actually physically possible—then that changes everything.  And a lot of those people were already trying to figure out how to do that before I came along.

So if you’re one of the people out there who believe that controlling more material resources than 90% of people in the world makes you more important than them, and you want to use your expensive education and the peace movement’s Manhattan Project to build ever-more-effective psychological weapons to control and oppress people, that’s fine.  Cuz I’ll settle for the other 90% of people in the world any day.  If you choose to try to build a global so-called civilization by trying to build the biggest psychological weapon ever, and you choose to make 90% of the human brains in the world your enemies, you obviously don’t understand the first f*cking thing about psychological weapons or global domination.

You know, back in the days of the original Manhattan Project, people thought the atom bomb would be the ultimate weapon for ending wars of imperialism, because if two opposing sides had them, no one would dare to use them.  But on the contrary, the ultimate weapon for ending wars of imperialism turned out to be the AK47.  Millions of peasant rice farmers who were willing to fight as long and as hard as it took to win succeeded where dozens of the world’s greatest scientists failed.

So I guess this makes me the Ho Chi Mihn of the peace movement, eh?

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If you’re insane enough—oops, I mean, smart enough—to try reading a third volume of my book, you must be serious about wanting to save the world.

Evolution is ruled by probabilities.  I’ll tell you more about this in the Atheism chapter, but here’s simple example for now.  If an animal is born with a genetic variation that makes it 1% more successful at surviving and reproducing within its living conditions than another member of its species, and it passes that 1% advantage on to all of its descendants, and those living conditions endure for 2,000 generations, that 1% advantage compounded 2,000 times will spread that genetic variation to all the members of the species in the area.  Now that genetic variation has become a characteristic that defines the species.  That means that the members of the species in the area, who live in certain living conditions and who have spread a new genetic variation that suits those living conditions well around to all the members of the species in the area, have now diverged from the rest of their species and become a sub-species or a new species, because they’ve evolved a new adaptation to their environment.  That’s exactly what Charles Darwin discovered on the Galapagos Islands, among numerous species of animals.

In the Introduction to the first book I told you about cultural adaptation to available resources.  At the moment people evolved human consciousness they gained the ability to wonder how the universe worked and to imagine that answering the question was important.  So every group of people in the world figured out a way to give their lives a sense of meaning within their living conditions.

In the Instinctive Learning chapter I told you how childhood development creates cultural backgrounds.  Then in the Civilization chapter in the second book I told you about the molecular history of the 20th century, in which people developed different brain-molecule patterns according to their life experiences, and then passed them around to each other, depending on which brain-molecule patterns were the best suited to people’s living conditions.

All of that adds up to social evolution.  Individuals aren’t being born with genetic variations and then passing new genes around to each other according to which are best suited to their living conditions, but they are developing new brain-molecule patterns according to their life experiences, and then passing those around according to whichever are the best suited to the people’s living conditions.  (Or at least, seem to be best suited to their living conditions, as far as the people can tell.)

Now President Bush is trying to conquer the world with military power and political strategies and economic initiatives and environmental policies.  What a moron.  If you take the time to learn how the world actually works before you embark on your campaign of world conquest, you learn how constants and variables fit together, how different components of the world interact, and how probabilities and changing conditions create social developments, then world conquest becomes just a gigantic game of chess.

I spent the first two books setting up the board.

Now it’s time to play the game.

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Once upon a time, a bunch of patriots fought the Revolutionary War and won our independence from Britain.  Now that our country has been threatened once again, patriots are supposedly people who fight to protect America once again.  So why is it that the Patriot Act so badly undermines the First Amendment and so many of our other Constitutional rights that the original patriots fought so hard to establish in the first place?  Could this be yet another example of powerful people attempting to twist public opinion to their own advantage by attaching words that most people interpret a certain way to a set of rules that accomplish exactly the opposite of what that word stands for?

In George Orwell’s book Nineteen-Eighty-Four, the government of the empire of Oceana divides up its functions among four ministries:  The Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love, and the Ministry of Plenty, which basically meant the “Ministry of Brainwashing People”, the “Ministry of Waging War”, the “Ministry of Stomping People Down”, and the “Ministry of Keeping Everyone Poor”.  Of course, Nineteen-Eighty-Four  is a work of fiction, so what does that have to do with real life, right?  I mean, obviously, George Orwell possessed some kind of magical powers that enabled him to write books that people are still reading 60 years later, even though nobody has the slightest clue what the f*ck he’s talking about, right?

The problem with trying to defend America by undermining the most important principles it’s founded upon is that George W. Bush may be good at political aikido on a small scale, but Osama bin Ladin is good at it on a much larger scale.  (Or at least, let’s pretend that’s true for the moment.)  President Bush is trying to play checkers while Osama bin Ladin is playing chess.  Osama bin Ladin has posed a threat to America, and has forced President Bush to react to it.  If President Bush uses the existing apparatus of our political system to try to keep America safe in the short term, he’s going to destroy America in the long term—which is exactly what Osama bin Ladin wants.  In America, our political, legal, and economic systems function a certain way, and a lot of people have a problem with it, because those things are constructed to serve the needs of humanity according to an obsolete understanding of humanity.  (I’m sure Osama didn’t figure all this out in terms of all this “evolution” heresy, but however he did it, he figured out enough about humanity to be able to do this, just like Mohammed figured out enough about humanity to build a religion that 1/4 of the world’s population are still following 1500 years later.)

In America, the people in power benefit a lot from the way things are set up.  The people who have a problem with the way things work are people who aren’t in power.  The people in power figure out how to use the resources they have available to benefit themselves, just like people have done throughout our evolution.  The people who aren’t in power also use the resources they have available to benefit themselves as well as they can, even though they don’t have as many resources as the people in power.  One of the resources the people who aren’t in power have is the First Amendment.  If we undermine the First Amendment with the so-called “Patriot” Act, we change the resources each group has available:  The powerful people who have lots of resources already gain even more resources, and the people who are doing the best they can with the few resources they have available, lose resources.   Specifically, if we undermine the First Amendment with the so-called “Patriot” Act, the people who are trying to change  America to make it serve humanity better—and who consequently threaten what the people in power have—lose their ability to find peaceful, constructive ways to make America function better.  If we give the people in power even more resources to use against the people who threaten their power, don’t you think they’re going to use them?  That’s not what the “Patriot” Act was intended for, but it’s an evolutionarily mathematical inevitability that it’s going to be used that way.  Osama doesn’t need to destroy America; he only needs to push on Americans just right to make them destroy America themselves.

I think Teddy Roosevelt said it best when he said, “Patriotism means standing by the country.  It does not mean standing by the president.”

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