Spiritual Logic and the Future of Civilization:
Terrorism and aikido are just two examples of conflict and resolution to conflict. Asians and everyone else in the world have figured out all kinds of ways to eliminate conflict. The solutions that succeed best in the long run are the ones that eliminate conflict without creating new conflict.
The idea that global democracy and free trade would bring ever lasting joy and happiness to the world was based on the assumption that everyone in the world wanted the American Dream—that they all wanted the 1 x 6 x 3.5 = 21 equation for finding the meaning to life. Obviously some people in the world don’t want the American Dream and they’re willing to kill a lot of people to keep it from being forced upon them. Obviously in this world where everyone is supposed to be happy now, somebody still wants something they don’t have. Now they’ve figured out how to make a lot of other people want something they don’t have. Is there something wrong with these people, or is there something wrong with the American Dream? Or both?
Obviously, conflict is still being created somehow, so for some reason the worldwide American Dream isn’t perfect. The American Dream is very popular with a lot of people, so presumably it’s a big step in the right direction, but it isn’t the ultimate solution to conflict.
So what is the ultimate solution to conflict? How does a civilization win the War on Terror when the greatest weapon of the enemy—fear—exists within the minds of every single one of its citizens? As long as the terrorists make us as a culture live in fear, they win. It doesn’t matter if they never kill another person ever again. As long as terrorists might be out there somewhere, they might kill somebody, and as long as that happens, we still live in fear and they still win. In order for us to ever win, as a culture we have to evolve beyond fear.
The American Dream doesn’t do that. We have the American Dream and we’re still afraid. We tried to buy freedom from fear by exporting the American Dream all over the world and that didn’t work, because obviously somebody wasn’t willing to sell us safety for what we were offering to pay for it. So what do we do now?
A lot of cultures over history have tried to eliminate conflict in ways that are crude by today’s standards. Some of them tried to make other people understand that “swords and guns are dangerous, and we have lots of swords and guns, so do what we say.” Other people have tried approaches that have worked better, by teaching people various forms of self-control, such as by promising them some form of meta-physical reward for acting in certain ways, or by threatening them with meta-physical punishment for acting in other ways. Unfortunately, since most of those approaches were invented in previous centuries, they are based on a lot of traditional beliefs that have since been disproven by the advances of science. Some people used to believe the world was flat. That was disproven. Some people used to believe the sun revolved around the Earth. That was disproven. Trying to convince people to eliminate conflict by believing in things that simply aren’t true is only going to create a new kind of conflict.
Any conflict resolution strategy that has survived for any length of time has survived because it worked at least partially. Obviously, conflict resolution strategies that didn’t work at all would be abandoned and forgotten. Every culture in the world has its own strategy for conflict resolution, because obviously, if a culture couldn’t resolve its conflicts its people couldn’t function as a community and the culture would disintegrate. That means there are a bunch of partial equations for conflict resolution I can sort through to identify constants and solve for variables. That takes up most of the rest of the book.
We can start by asking the Asian martial artists how to resolve conflict. Any number of them would be glad to tell you that the best way to avoid conflict is by not provoking conflict in the first place. You tread as lightly upon the world as possible, and live your life without inviting conflict. If you can avoid getting in a fight in the first place, you’ve already won. If someone tries to kill you anyway, you get out of the way. Your enemy can only defeat you if you do what he wants you to do—in the case of the knife fight, that means standing still so your enemy can impale you. As long as you don’t do what your enemy wants you to do, he can’t win. If that doesn’t work, you can try turning his violence against him and let him defeat himself with his own violence. If he doesn’t incapacitate himself that way, at some point he’s probably going to realize that trying to defeat you is turning into more effort than it’s worth, because all his efforts to hurt you are only hurting himself. If that still doesn’t work, you can resort to enough direct violence to defeat your enemy and leave him feeling like he’s been defeated by a better person than he. You prevent him from defeating you, hopefully well enough to make him realize that trying again would be futile, and then you get on with your life without sinking to his level trying to get even.
Is the equivalent possible as a way of life for societies? Can societies live in a way that eliminates conflict without creating more conflict? Certainly. People have been figuring out how to do that for at least the length of recorded history. Again, the Asians have been able to— and have needed to— devote the greatest amount of man-hours to figuring this one out. Unfortunately, in spite of all their practice, their conflict resolution strategies still aren’t perfect, because there is still a lot of conflict in Asia. So where have their strategies gone wrong? Could a strategy be constructed that could work for everyone everywhere in the world for all time? In order for our culture to evolve beyond fear, it has to change permanently, and a strategy that only works temporarily won’t make that happen.
In order for such a thing to be able to work for anyone anywhere in the world for all time—or at least for as far as anyone of today can foresee—that strategy would have to be written in universal terms that would mean the same thing to everyone, regardless of their backgrounds or beliefs, and that wouldn’t change their meanings over time.
Objective science, by definition, can be measured equally by anyone, in any part of the world, at any time, regardless of their beliefs. All science is ultimately mathematics, and mathematics is often called the universal language. In the search for life on other planets, for instance, scientists realize that they will have to conduct communications with intelligent alien life mathematically. One plus one will always equal two, no matter what corner of the galaxy you live in or what language you speak.
Luckily, humans have a lot more in common with each other than they do with aliens. Because every human being lives on Earth and is a member of the same species, we are guaranteed to have a lot more in common with each other than we do with members of a different species from a different planet. Once again we’re in luck, because scientists have been studying our evolution and our planet very intently, and their discoveries in those fields apply equally to everyone.
All mathematics is ultimately logic. Every number is ultimately a unit of mathematical logic. When you add units of logic together you perform a logical operation on two separate units of logic and combine them to create a larger unit of logic. When you subtract, you combine two units of logic through a different logical process to create a smaller unit of logic, and so on.
Therefore, it must be possible to write a universal language that functions as a system of mathematics but doesn’t use any numbers. In order to write such a non-numerical system of mathematics, it would have to be based on an objective science whose discoveries were so comprehensive that the logic could be extracted directly from the science without the use of traditional numbers, and then through a series of logical steps the logic could be broken down into units which would function as theoretical numbers, even though they wouldn’t be numbers in the traditional sense.
Artists do this sort of thing all the time. Red paint reflects light waves of a certain wavelength. Yellow paint reflects light waves of a different wavelength. If you mix the two together, you create orange paint, which reflects light waves of a wavelength that is different from either of the other two. Does every painter know the mathematical value of the wavelength of the light that each of his paints reflects, and does he decide what wavelength of light he wants to reflect when he mixes paint together? Of course not. And yet, among painters red and yellow are units of logic that can be combined to create a new unit of logic called orange. While numbers exist to measure those units of logic, painters can use those units of logic without using the literal numbers.
When Ludwig von Beethoven wrote his Ninth Symphony, he wrote it for a nine-octave piano keyboard, even though piano keyboards only had seven octaves at the time. It didn’t matter to Mr. Beethoven of course, because he was already deaf by then anyway. Full-size piano keyboards have nine octaves now, because people had to start building nine-octave pianos in order to play his Ninth Symphony. In a way, Beethoven invented the nine-octave piano even though he never built a piano in his life. So I’m sure that if I invent a system of theoretical mathematics that works, someone will figure out how to use some actual numbers in it.
I call this system of theoretical mathematics spiritual logic. It is the logic of what makes people what they are, and it is broken down into units of logic that serve as the mathematics of evolution and the universal language of humanity.
After our great cultural revolution in which our civilization mathematically eliminates fear, why will the answer to human life be 42? Because it’s a theoretical number that works as well as any.
(And yes, all you Douglass Adams fans out there, I know 42 is supposed to be the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Well keep on reading, cuz you ain’t seen nothing yet…)