Science as a Political Weapon
All that leaves is how to use science as an offensive political weapon.
Science as a body of information and as a system of thought has never been able to function as anything resembling a political system before for two reasons.
First, until recently, science hasn’t been complete enough as a body of information that scientists could claim to know as much about the world as politicians claim to know. The politicians were lying about how much they knew, of course, because politicians’ careers depend on their appearing to know everything, even though they don’t. Scientists’ careers, on the other hand, depend on their not lying about how much they know. So if a politician claims to know everything and a scientist doesn’t claim to know everything, to anyone who doesn’t understand what science is and how it works, it sounds like the politician has a much better idea of what he’s doing.
Second, we have a global environmental crisis on our hands that keeps getting worse and that is going to lead to inevitable disaster on our present course. Science as a system of thought doesn’t attach artificial meaning to how its information should be used. However, it is understood scientifically that people want to survive and reproduce, along with some other basic desires that are universal to humanity. It is also understood that global environmental disaster will make those things impossible for most people. Science all by itself can’t save the world, and scientists can’t tell people how they should live. However, it has been determined scientifically that some ideas for how people can live can be disastrous, it has been determined scientifically that the most politically powerful people in the world are choosing to live that way, and it has been determined scientifically that the choices those people are making are threatening everyone else in the world.
What I’m teaching you about in this book is science as a martial art. As the legend goes (which is historically accurate to a point, at least), karate was invented in Japan (or Okinawa, or China), by some monks who figured out a way that peasants could defend themselves from heavily armed samurai using their bare hands and simple farming tools. Capitalism is the empire of the 21st century, and a lot of peasants are trying to figure out how to defend themselves from it.
Politically weaponized science is a martial art of the mind. I don’t need to teach you a lot of scientific information, I just need to teach you about the system of thought and the critical points where the information fits together. I can’t turn you into a scientist with one book, but the politicians and business people you’re trying to defend yourselves from aren’t scientists either. They’re using might makes right against you, and you don’t have enough might to beat them. But just as with a farmer defending himself from a samurai, you don’t need might if you know how to recognize your enemy’s weakest points and attack them as efficiently as possible.
The first thing you need to know is how to tell the difference between someone talking about fake science and someone talking about real science. There are two easy ways to do that.
The first is the easier of the two to use. Listen to the way the person is talking. Does his tone of voice make you feel like asking questions, or does it make you feel like not asking questions?
When a scientist talks about science, he isn’t afraid of you asking questions. If he’s talking about well-established scientific discoveries, he already knows there aren’t any questions you can ask that will prove him wrong. If he’s talking about a new hypothesis and there are questions you could ask that would prove him wrong, people asking questions that hypotheses can’t explain is a critical part of the progress of science. Either way, the scientist has nothing of importance to lose, and a great deal to gain, by your asking questions.
As far as the science relates to you, the scientist will recognize that you’re better off asking questions than not asking questions. If there’s some part of it you can’t understand, you won’t be able to learn the science or put it to use. So if you ask questions to clarify what the scientist means, again he benefits, because now you know more about science than you did before. Scientists everywhere are trying to attract public support to science, and by asking questions to help yourself better understand what he’s talking about, you’re doing exactly that.
You have to be careful how you ask your questions. The simplest way to avoid accidentally derailing your own learning process is to be open minded to the possibility that the scientist could know what he’s talking about, that he could know a lot more about the topic than you do, and that you could benefit from learning about it. If you ask your questions with the attitude that any answer the scientist gives will be wrong, with your tone of voice you’ll make it difficult for him to figure out what he needs to say and how he needs to say it to get you to understand what he’s talking about. With all those extra things you’ve forced him to think about to try to answer your question, whatever answer he gives won’t sound as good. It’ll sound confused and will be harder for other people to understand. Religious fundamentalists use this trick all the time. A lot of so-called progressive activists frequently use it against me.
If the person’s tone of voice makes you feel like not asking questions, definitely ask questions. If the person is talking about science in a way that makes you feel like not asking questions, it means he’s trying to hide something. He’s trying to keep you from thinking about something, or he’s trying to keep you from saying something, or both. If he’s afraid of you asking questions about science, he’s not a scientist.
It doesn’t matter how the person is talking. If the end result is your not feeling like asking questions, that’s the clue you need to watch for.
One way for a politician to keep you from feeling like asking questions is to make you react to his emotional state. For instance, if he’s angry or intimidating, and that makes you afraid to ask questions, he’s made you feel like not asking questions. There are films of Hitler at the Nuremburg rally, shaking his fist and shouting angrily. That’s a perfect example of someone who made people afraid to question him.
Another way for a politician to make you feel like not asking questions is to use an emotional state that gets you to sympathize with him. President Bush does this all the time. He acts really friendly and really stupid. The easiest way for you to get along with someone like that would be for you to act stupid too. The easiest way for you to act stupid would be for you to be stupid. If your friend was stupid and you asked him a lot of questions he didn’t know how to answer, it would make him look stupid, and that would damage your friendship. The easiest way for you to get along with a friendly, but stupid person is to talk to him on his level. You decide most or all of this subconsciously. Then you focus on questions you think the other person can answer and forget questions you think the person can’t answer. I’ll tell you how the psychological machinery behind that works later in the book. For now, suffice it to say that President Bush’s stupidity is contagious. He constantly weaves this psychological illusion around himself that’s turned all of Washington D.C. into a black hole of intelligence.
Listening to a person’s tone of voice is easy, but tones of voice can be misunderstood. The second science martial arts technique is more difficult to use, but more effective if you can use it. It can be used after you’ve identified a politician by his tone of voice, it can be used independently if you can’t tell whether a person is a politician or a scientist, and it can be used on people who seem to be scientists to see if they’re really scientists or if they’re politicians who are good at impersonating scientists.
This is the technique of first principles. In science, a first principle is a founding idea of an area of study. This could be an entire branch of science or just some small part of a branch of science.
A first principle is a rule that, one way or another, has been found to apply to everything in an area of science. This gives you a frame of reference. When you are talking about something in that area of science, you automatically know that this rule applies to it.
Acid rain is a good example of this. A first principle of biology is that plants and animals need healthy cells in order to be healthy. A first principle of biochemistry is that cells need a certain pH to be healthy. If scientists find that acid rain is falling on a forest, it means a lot of water with the wrong pH is entering the environment. The scientists don’t even need to look out the window to know that the forest’s environment is being harmed.
Earlier I told you how scientists figured out how snowflakes form. They figured out how the creation process of snowflakes could create a thousand unique snowflakes, and the only creation process that could create a thousand unique snowflakes would also make every snowflake in the world unique.
A first principle of the formation of snowflakes is the freezing of water vapor. If the water vapor in a cloud doesn’t freeze, you won’t get snow, you’ll get rain. That means that every single part of the formation of snowflakes depends on freezing temperatures. That means that if you’re talking about snowflakes, you’re talking about freezing temperatures. If you’re not talking about freezing temperatures, you’re not talking about snowflakes.
Now suppose you hear a politician talking about his big plan for combating the economic problems the greenhouse effect is causing. As the governor of your state, he’s going to make water vapor freeze at 38º, and then that’s going to benefit the local skiing industry and the tourism industry and it’ll create a lot of jobs and they’ll be able to invest so-and-so an amount of money in the public schools and such-and-such an amount of money in your public library system, etc., etc.. He can make himself look smart by overwhelming everyone with all his plans and statistics. Then a lot people who feel like the governor is smart are going to ask a bunch of little questions to clarify or debate minor points. Then his big plan is going to be spread all over the commercial media. Then more people are going to hear about it, and they’re going to think the governor is really smart because he has such a big plan.
By knowing one little piece of information, you can destroy his entire political strategy, without knowing anything about economics or the skiing industry. Water doesn’t freeze at 38º. By knowing that, you can disprove everything he said would happen as a result of water freezing at 38º.
This example sounds ridiculous, but I’m just using it to illustrate the idea. Politicians do things like this all the time. The only reason they get away with it is because the public doesn’t know enough about the first principles politicians keep promising to violate.
The rest of this book is about how to attack first principles as the weak points in Capitalist ideology, and how to make sure you cooperate with first principles in the post-revolutionary society. This is not to say that you can build the entire post-revolutionary society on first principles alone, but it is to say that if you don’t cooperate with first principles, whatever post-revolutionary society you try to build won’t work.
Equally importantly, since Capitalism doesn’t cooperate with first principles, first principles are all you need to destroy the foundation of Capitalism—as opposed to wasting your efforts on trying to destroy its individual manifestations one at a time.
Some activists are wondering how the revolution can succeed without getting absorbed by the Capitalists. As the revolution gains popularity, politicians are going to join the revolution to win votes, they’ll try to take it over, and they’ll water it down to try to win votes from people outside the revolution. Meanwhile, Capitalists are going to start selling things to the revolutionaries for a profit. Meanwhile, a lot of people will join the revolution just because it’s popular, and the revolution will turn into just another fashion statement. So what can anyone do to prevent all of that?
Once again, science is the perfect solution. If you learn what environmental sustainability depends upon and how to recognize whether or not someone is doing it, you have a revolution that’s immune to co-optation—because the Capitalists can’t co-opt the laws of physics. By knowing how to use first principles to destroy Capitalist ideology, you can destroy it anywhere you find it. It isn’t possible for a person to cooperate with all the first principles I have to tell you about in this book and still be a Capitalist.
By learning enough about science to destroy Capitalist ideology structurally, you learn how to do something else that’s crucial to the revolution. Now you don’t have to depend on your tone of voice to convince people you know what you’re talking about. Now you can stop being a grassroots politician and become a grassroots political ninja.
Environmental unsustainability is a crime against humanity. But most of the actions people take today won’t have any noticeable effects until decades from now. Basically, environmental unsustainability is the perfect crime, because by the time the victims are born, their assailants will already be dead. That’s an exaggeration of sorts, but that’s the basic idea.
If a person attached timers to 10,000 nuclear missiles that would launch them all off in a hundred years from now and start a global nuclear war, and then he was caught, it wouldn’t be difficult to accuse him of 6 billion counts of attempted murder. Environmental unsustainability is just a different kind of global time bomb.
Once you learn how much of a threat global environmental unsustainability is and why Capitalism isn’t environmentally sustainable, your success no longer depends on your maintaining any particular attitude to the revolution. The revolution is just something that is, not something you need to feel any particular way about. You can take any attitude you want, at any time, and it won’t change your revolution. There is no amount of violence Capitalists can inflict on people to make their economic system survive. Once you understand that, you can be Gandhi, Lenin, and Peewee Herman all at the same time. You can use any amount of civil disobedience and any amount of direct action you need, and laugh at the Capitalists all the while. Once you understand that there is no action the Capitalists can take to make their economic system survive, the only question it leaves is which actions you can take that will be the most effective at destroying it.
A global political movement made up of people each of whom can be Gandhi, Lenin, and Peewee Herman at any time, is a political movement that’s impossible to out-manipulate. If you depend on an attitude to make your revolution succeed, you limit your choices to the ones you’ll be able to think of while you have that attitude, and that will seem to other people to correspond to that attitude. If the success of your revolution depends on a certain strategy that’s consistent with a certain attitude, you make your revolution predictable. That will let people who are good at manipulating other people predict what you’re going to do and to manipulate it to their own advantage.
On the other hand, for a revolution whose success depends on a set of external conditions being met, the only thing that’s predictable is the ending. What people can do to get from the beginning to the end is a wide-open field.
Some people are better at civil disobedience, some people are better at direct action, and some people are better at laughing at the Capitalists. Right now the Capitalists are under siege from all sides by people each doing whatever they’re best at. But people each doing whatever they’re best at makes the revolution predictable in its own way. If everyone in the revolution learns how to be John Lennon, Ché Guevara, and Groucho Marx all at the same time, it will make the revolution more cohesive for the revolutionaries and less predictable for the Capitalists. Everyone can still do whatever they’re best at as long as it works, but any time the Capitalists try to outsmart one tactic, whoever was using it can abandon it temporarily and join some other group that was using a different tactic.
With a little strategic education, you can make the anti-Capitalist revolution stop being a political movement and make it a personal empowerment movement that brings with it political results. Because what else do you call a revolution made up of people who can all be Dr. King, Malcolm X, and Charlie Chaplin all at the same time, except a revolution of people who each have the greatest possible number of choices in life?
Ultimately, the revolution that needs to happen to solve the problems the Capitalists are causing and make the transition to global environmental sustainability, is not a political revolution, but a revolution of human consciousness. It’s not a struggle between Capitalism versus anti-Capitalism; it’s a struggle between personal manipulation versus personal empowerment.
Personal empowerment means people being able to provide for themselves. People being able to provide for themselves depends on informed decision-making. Informed decision-making depends on information.
Revolution begins with education.
It’s time for everyone to get educated.