The Emperor Wears No Clothes!:
How do you break this Graveyard Spiral of perception and information packages that get turned into political systems? Simple. You add new information to people’s information packages.
If you just tell people stuff that their information packages already have categorized as anti-information, it won’t do any good. You’ll just sound like some New Age hippy daydreamer talking about evolution and environmentalism and bullsh*t to Rush Limbaugh fans. So you have to get more creative…
To communicate effectively with another person in any sense, you have to build upon what the other person already knows—or at least, accepts as true. I’m doing that right now. If I wrote this book using perfectly scientifically valid terms, it probably wouldn’t do you a damn bit of good, because you’d probably have no idea what all those words meant. So instead I’m using words that you—and a lot of other people—do understand, to communicate ideas to you that are close enough to scientifically valid that learning the same ideas in more scientifically valid terms wouldn’t be worth the hassle to you.
There are lots of different ways to communicate, and we’re all better at some than we are at others. But regardless of what form of communication you’re using, in order to add new ideas to another person’s information package, you have to figure out what that person’s information package already contains, and how to build upon it.
Artists do this all the time. If you’ve ever seen a movie in your life, you’ve seen this done.
Suppose you’re watching a movie, and a character in that movie walks into a kitchen and walks past a blender. If that blender shows up in the background of at least two shots, or it occupies a central place in the movie screen in just one shot, what you’ve just seen is called an establishing shot. The director has just placed the “blender” idea into your mind so that he can build upon that idea later when the blender becomes important to the story.
How is the director going to build upon the original “blender” idea and make it important to the story? That all depends on what kind of a movie you’re watching. I can tell you up front that if a director is going to devote screen time to an establishing shot of a blender, you’re probably either watching a horror movie or a comedy—or at the very least, some kind of a movie that uses one of those basic principles. One of the main artistic techniques in both horror and comedy is to start with simple, commonplace things that the audience sees all the time, and then make really unexpected things happen with them. If it’s a comedy, the unexpected thing will have a happy ending, and if it’s a horror movie the unexpected thing will have a tragic ending. Is the heroine’s cute four-year-old son going to put some tomatoes in the blender and turn it on without putting the top on it, and spray shredded tomatoes all over the kitchen? Or is some guy in a mask about to show up and use the blender to cut the heroine’s face off? Either way, between your previously existing idea of a blender, and the director’s previously establishing the idea that there’s a blender in this movie, now he’s added a new idea to your blender information package.
There are some people in the world who probably still wouldn’t make the connection, because they believe that blenders are devices that have been bestowed upon us by their god, and the homicidal maniac was clearly a servant of Satan, so there’s no way he would ever be allowed to use a blender to cut a woman’s face off, or that the woman was a single mother who had her son out of wedlock, so making a humorous movie about people like that was obviously a plot by a heathenistic movie director to subvert the loyalty of the public away from accepting the love of their lord and savior Jesus Christ into their hearts, and that isn’t funny at all… or whatever… but people like that probably wouldn’t’ve gone to see the movie anyway. If, in the next presidential elections, there was a question on the ballot, “Do you think that a movie about a four year old spraying shredded tomatoes all over a kitchen by leaving the lid off of a blender would be funny?” the “Yes, that’s funny” candidate would probably win a majority of votes.
So: What does your audience already understand, and what do they care about? In other words, what do they already have in their information package? I don’t know exactly what your situation is like or what your communications skills or abilities are, or who you’re trying to communicate with, so here’s how I’m adding information to your information package right now.
I started by assuming that most people in my audience interpret the world in one of four main ways: scientifically, artistically, philosophically, or religiously—or some combination of those. Pretty much anyone who would even attempt reading my books probably has a high school level education. So I used a high school level understanding of science as a starting point. Pretty much anyone in the industrialized world has seen movies, so that made another good point of reference. Everyone in the world is a philosopher, because everyone tries to attach some kind of meaning to life events and things they observe in the world, even though some people do it a lot more than others. So that made another good all-purpose reference. Finally, religion or spirituality is a universal constant of humanity, so everyone has been exposed to it in some way or another, even if they don’t practice it themselves. Since we have one dominant religion here in America, that makes another easy reference point.
So I started by telling four different intertwining stories of the world, all at the same time. Back at the beginning, I assumed you were a high school drop out with a little bit of life experience, a little bit of worldliness, and an interest in learning more. I know that assumption isn’t true for everyone, but even if you’re something other than that, as long as you have a little bit of life experience, a little bit of worldliness, and an interest in learning more, you can still pick up the story from wherever you’re coming from and understand what it means.
Writing this four-themed story of this code to humanity gives me another advantage in adding information to your information package. I already know what’s written in your universal human brain structure subconscious information package. And since I have a pretty good idea about what’s probably written in your conscious information package, I have a pretty good idea of what I have to work with to pull ideas out of your subconsciousness.
If you were a scientist, you would’ve cleared out a lot of space in your consciousness to install your scientific machine shop so that other scientists could send you scientific information parts with specific instructions on how to assemble them. But since you probably haven’t done that, I’ve had to figure out how to turn the contents of your consciousness into my own machine shop, so that I can send you all the parts I want and you’ll know how to assemble them, even though my machine shop wouldn’t work as well for just anyone. However, if I build the same basic machine shop in your consciousness as I build in the consciousness of everyone else who reads my books, then you can all send each other information parts and be able to tell how to fit them all together.
For instance, I knew right from the beginning that you want to understand what makes the universe work, some way to survive your physical mortality, some way to get along with other people, and some way to give your life a sense of meaning, because everyone on Earth wants all of those things. You might not have realized that you wanted those things before, but you did know you wanted some things that eventually led to those ultimate conclusions. By drawing those things out into your consciousness, and showing you why everyone else on Earth wants those things too, I’ve made you conscious of something everyone else has somewhere in their conscious or subconscious. That means that now you can stop thinking that wanting those things makes you smarter than everyone else, and instead of thinking, “Building all these nuclear missiles is f*cking stupid, but everyone else thinks it’s a good idea, so we’re going to have to keep doing it,” without realizing that everyone else is thinking the same things, now you can use what you have in your consciousness to overcome problems between you and other people.
I also knew right from the beginning that writing a story of the world was the best way to convey those ideas, which is why people in every culture of the world have figured that trick out. A story of the world is a way to control the past. Any time anyone asks, “Why is the world like this?” they’re asking, “What happened in the past that made things the way they are in the present?” By giving people an explanation of how the past created the present, whether that explanation is true or not, you put them on a path into the future. As I said in the last book, it’s a fundamental principle of geometry that two points define a line. It’s another fundamental principle of geometry that once you establish a line, you also establish all the other points along that line. If you tell someone how the past created the present, you give the person a sense of how that course of development should continue to unfold to create the future. If your explanation of the past wasn’t accurate, even if the person’s understanding of the present is accurate, the sense of how the course of events unfolded and will continue to unfold won’t be accurate either. (And if you convince the person that your explanation of the past is absolutely true, you can even distort the person’s understanding of the present, which misguides their understanding of the future even further.)
A scientific theory is a set of conclusions drawn from observable evidence that can be used to make accurate predictions. If you use a set of conclusions that can be used to make accurate predictions to show how the past created the present, then you show your audience where those conclusions lead from here. If you try to explain the present by just making up a story about the past, you’re rolling the dice on where the people’s understanding of the past is going to lead them from here. So I’m using your general background understanding of the world to do with literature what official scientists do with their very specific mental-machine-shop understanding of the world. That makes my book empirically superior to the Bible because instead of just telling a story where I make stuff up about the past and hope for the best, I use scientific theories to tell the story of the past and show you where that chain of events leads from here.
By telling you the story of Achmed the Great Mathematician and Theoretical Physicist, I’ve taken control of the past in a small way. Achmed wasn’t a real person (at least, not as far as I know), but he is the embodiment of an idea. Lots of people figured out lots of different ways to interact with their environments over the course of history. Some people decided it would be better to figure out how to live within the limitations of their environments and not eat the gazelles faster than the gazelles could reproduce, and other people decided they should use up the resources they had in their area and then go look for more. The second group succeeded in preserving the survival of their DNA most effectively in the short term, but the first group succeeded in preserving the survival of their DNA most effectively in the long-term—or at least, they would’ve, if it hadn’t been for the second group. Even if Achmed the Great Mathematician and Theoretical Physicist had been a real person, and had been the Albert Einstein of the stone age, and had figured out the secret to environmental sustainability before the agricultural graveyard spiral began, it still wouldn’t’ve done anyone any good in the long run, because his tribe still would’ve gotten wiped out by those dumb thugs from across the river who ate all their gazelles. And of course, there were people like this throughout history; they just went by different names.
So if the story of Achmed stays with you, you’ll use birth control for the rest of your life except for when you’re trying to have your two kids, because in addition to all the other reasons you use birth control, now you’ll have a few more pieces of information in your subconsciousness. Now you’ll have the “can’t have more than two children” idea and the “can’t eat up the gazelle herds” and the “Ghost of Achmed will kick my ass” ideas.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether Achmed was a real person or not. There were real people who figured out the same things, and they met with the same fate he did. Having a specific story to tell your children about how the world got to be the way it is will always be a more effective way to teach them then by telling them about a bunch of abstract ideas some scientists have figured out. If you tell your four-year-old or six-year-old or whoever, “Well, son, scientists have determined that global environmental sustainability depends on people learning to live within the physical limitations of the Earth, but unfortunately, people haven’t been doing that…” while next door some Christian fundamentalist is telling his children, “The world is approaching the brink of glorious destruction because our Heavenly Father is angry at his children for leading lives of such decadence and sin and forsaking the word of his son Jesus Christ, so now he is exacting his divine retribution upon the evil sinners and is about to deliver his faithful followers to their eternal salvation…” etc., etc., guess whose children are going to learn more about how the past created the present and what that chain of events predicts for the future?
I’m sure you’ve probably heard that old tale of the con artists who went to visit an emperor and offered to make him a fine robe out of invisible cloth. So he paid them a ton of money and they spent a few weeks pantomiming sewing cloth into robes. Then he went out to parade through the streets to show off his invisible robes. Everyone who saw him perceived their emperor to be walking around in his underwear, but nobody dared to say anything because he was their emperor. They all had the “don’t piss off the emperor” and “get in trouble” ideas in their consciousnesses, so they all put the “the emperor is walking around in his underwear” idea into their anti-information packages—or at least, they tried to, anyway. But then the emperor walked by the kid who didn’t have “don’t piss off the emperor” and “get into trouble” ideas in his consciousness. Maybe he was just too young to know any better, or maybe he was like me and Dr. Feynman and didn’t care what other people thought. So he came out and said it: “The emperor wears no clothes!”
Once one person said it, everyone who heard him finally realized that someone else was thinking the same thing they were thinking. So they started admitting what they were thinking, and suddenly realized that everyone was thinking the same thing.
In effect, the kid who declared that the emperor was wearing no clothes set off a human consciousness bomb, because he triggered a cascade effect that spread at an exponential rate, as each person he affected, affected several more people. Everyone had the same idea in their consciousness, so as soon as each person heard someone else admit to having the idea, suddenly they realized they all had something in common. Now there was safety in numbers, they could use this information to help them function as a community, etc., etc..
Once upon a time, a lot of people thought that figuring out how to split uranium and plutonium atoms and building nuclear missiles would solve all the world’s problems. How pathetic. By deducing what information each person carries in their subconsciousness and figuring out how to bring it to everyone’s consciousness and make them realize that they all share the same ideas, I can build my own human consciousness bomb. If everyone says, “Hey, building all these nuclear weapons is f*cking stupid, let’s think of something else,” then I’ve harnessed a force more powerful than atomic energy.
And that’s why I’m king of the world.