The Back Story of this Project, Version 3:
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?