The Republican Party:
The Republican party isn’t a progressive activist force. I just included it in this chapter because it’s a valuable study in how evolutionary factors came together to create the enemy’s point of view. In order to defeat the enemy, first you must understand him. Not to mention, in order to avoid becoming the enemy, you must understand where he went wrong.
Here in America we have the conservative party and the liberal party, the Republicans being the conservative party. A lot of people say Republicans are just plain stupid. But a lot of people say that about Democrats—and for that matter, about every other group of people in the world. It can’t simply be a matter of Republicans possessing less gross intellectual capacity than Democrats (or at least, not much less) because if that was the case, the Democrats would be able to figure out how to beat the Republicans in elections consistently. And obviously, that hasn’t happened.
If you simply categorize the enemy as “stupid”, but you aren’t smart enough to figure out how to defeat him, what you’ve done is completely counterproductive. You have decided that you know a certain thing to be true, when the evidence clearly contradicts it. This means that subconsciously you have created information and anti-information packages that don’t correspond with reality. If the Republicans were simply “stupid” but they keep wining elections anyway, obviously they do know something important about how to get what they want. If they keep winning elections against your party, obviously they know something that you don’t.
You could keep trying to win elections by winning a 51% majority and keep pitting your political ideology against 49% of the population. But if 49% of people keep fighting against what the other 51% are trying to do, then all your so-called political victory has accomplished is building a political system that’s basically 2% efficient.
At this point you basically have an arms race going on in your own country. That’s what we have in America right now. You could call it a Cold Civil War. The Cold War was an economic war of attrition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Neither side dared to fire the first shot because nobody actually wanted to fight the war. So both sides kept preparing for a war until one side went bankrupt. Here in America now, the Democrats and Republicans have completely incompatible political ideologies but neither can side can figure out a way to prove decisively that theirs is better. So every election year the two sides wage a huge war of attrition for the sake of winning a few percentage points of the vote. And all we end up with is a political system that can do basically nothing. Nothing productive, anyway…
My point is, unless you can outsmart the enemy, you can’t possibly expect to win. The Democrats and Republicans can’t even outsmart each other, and in spite of how big and well established of political forces they are, might-makes-right isn’t even working for either of them.
The alternative is to wait for something else to happen in the world that makes the other side’s political ideology stop working. But if that’s your strategy, you don’t have a political ideology that can compete against the enemy, all you have is a political ideology that works better than his in a certain situation, and your strategy is to wait for that situation to come along. In that case, you aren’t winning; you’re just waiting around for the enemy to lose. And if that’s the best strategy you can come up with, you’re not a progressive activist, because a progressive activist, by definition, is someone who makes new things happen. But waiting around for new things to happen would make you a progressive passive-ist.
Calling the enemy stupid is useless unless you can define why he’s so stupid. Or more precisely, why he seems so stupid to you.
So start at the beginning. He is the enemy because his ideology is mutually incompatible with yours. His success at his goals and your success at your goals are mutually exclusive. So what are each of your goals, and why do you each think your own goals are better than the other’s?
This is a lot harder than it seems to a lot of people, because outsmarting the enemy depends on your putting yourself in his shoes. That is, it depends on you recognizing your ideological enemy as your equal. And if you can recognize your ideological enemy as your equal, that tends to break down your sense of identity and your sense of his identity as enemies. But that doesn’t change the fact that your goals are mutually exclusive, and therefore the two of you are in conflict by definition. In this case, your goal is to make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep everyone alive, and the enemy’s goal is to make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can’t keep everyone alive. The enemy’s goal is to kill you, as efficiently as possible. You might not be his first victim, but you can plan on being his victim sooner or later, because out of the limited number of people he intends to keep alive you can be sure that he puts himself higher on the list of priorities than he puts you. So his goal is to kill you as efficiently as possible, but in order to defeat him, you must recognize him as your equal.
Not so easy, is it?
Now you see why I’ve been throwing the word ‘enemy’ around so much in this chapter. You’d better get used to it. Because a lot of people who call themselves progressive activists keep trying to take an easier way out, but those ways lead them into traps.
On the one hand you have the progressively minded activists who recoil from the word “enemy”. Not defining their opponents as the “enemy” makes it a lot easier to think of them as people and otherwise keep a positive outlook on their situation. But by believing the situation can turn out positively, and trying to make it turn out positively by thinking positively of their opponents, what do they end up doing? They compromise. But that’s no solution. Your goal is to make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep everyone alive, and your enemy’s goal is to make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can’t keep everyone alive. That’s a yes or no question. The only way you can compromise with your opponent, for the sake of feeling equal to him and not considering him your enemy, is to make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can’t keep everyone alive. If you want to make the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep 100% of people alive, and he wants to make it work in a way that can only keep 80% of people alive, how do you compromise on that? By making the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep 90% of people alive? If you dare to call that progressive activism, then I’m asking you point blank: Which 10% of the people do you intend to kill for the sake of saving yourself the emotional discomfort of considering your opponent the enemy?
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: If that’s your idea of progressive activism, don’t accuse me of trying to be the next Chairman Mao!
The other big trap progressively-minded activists are falling into is that of considering their opponents the enemy and immediately dehumanizing the enemy to make him easier to hate. But if you dehumanize him, you underestimate him by definition. By dehumanizing him you subconsciously save yourself the need to outsmart him. After that, whatever amount of brainpower you devote to trying to outsmart the enemy is going to be less that what you need to actually outsmart him. Then when he comes at you with something you didn’t expect, you’re going to have to start looking for a reason he beat you, when the real reason he beat you is because you underestimated him. That’s such a common emotional defense mechanism that it has a name—it’s called rationalization.
I meet a lot of progressively-minded activists who dehumanize the enemy without going so far as to call him the enemy, but who assume that he’s just too stupid to know any better. These people have a whole lot of ideas about how the world ought to work, but they just can’t figure out an effective way to defeat their opponents. So they try some little might-makes-right tactics and say the reason they didn’t win is because they’re so badly outnumbered, and then go back to their coffee houses to sit around drinking over-priced coffee at their problems. But as I’ve said before, if you can’t score any meaningful victories, why should anyone see any point in joining your revolution? A lot of these would-be revolutionaries I meet say the reason they’re so badly outnumbered is because so many people have been indoctrinated to believe what their enemies want them to believe, but then they skip from that to saying that the people who oppose them just aren’t smart enough to know any better.
According to that line of reasoning, the people who oppose them are people just like them, but in the process of being indoctrinated, some of their mental capacity was removed from their brains. If that was the case, it shouldn’t be hard for the would-be revolutionaries to outsmart those people. But obviously, that’s not happening.
The only way all the pieces of the puzzle fit together is that by indoctrinating the people who oppose the would-be revolutionaries, the enemy has convinced them to use their intellectual capacity against the would-be revolutionaries. This makes them seem stupid to the would-be revolutionaries, but it leaves them intellectually equally matched. Then the would-be revolutionaries jump to the conclusion that the fact that they’re revolutionaries and the other people have been brainwashed proves that they’re smarter than the other people, so they underestimate the other people. The other people outsmart them, and the would-be revolutionaries can’t figure out how they did it. That makes the would-be revolutionaries look like they don’t know what they’re doing, so nobody bothers to join them. Then when they try to use might-makes-right tactics as a show of force, everyone ignores them, or worse, thinks that really proves the would-be revolutionaries don’t know what they’re doing. And in a way, those people are right.
So: The enemy is equal to you, but he has mutually exclusive goals, which is what makes him the enemy. He’s using his equitable abilities—his George Washington power, as I called it in the last book—against you. Now the question becomes: Why is he using his equal abilities against you?
The obvious answer is: Because he feels he should use his equal abilities against you.
So the next question is: Why does he feel he should use his equal abilities against you?
The obvious answer to that is: Because he perceives the world differently than you do.
So now we have two questions to answer: Why does he perceive the world differently? And:
What is the source of his perception?
Now we’re getting somewhere…
In the great state of Maine, back when I was growing up anyway, we didn’t really have a Republican and a Democrat party. We had a Keep Things the Way They Are party and a Try Something New party. To be fair, if what you’re doing seems to be working pretty well, why not keep doing things that way? So for conservatives, keeping things the way they are is the most effective means they can perceive of preserving the survival of their DNA.
But here’s where things get tricky…
I think it’s safe to say there are three main things conservatives are trying to conserve: Their traditional cultural values, their economic system, and their individual perceptions of the world.
Traditional cultural values are the most obvious. People want a political system that will uphold what they perceive to be true about the world. They perceive any other type of political system as a threat. So here in America we get laws against gay marriage and laws against buying alcohol before 10 a.m. on Sundays, and laws against abortion, and laws against certain types of sexual acts, and all kinds of weird laws, just because a majority of Americans believe in a completely fictional story about the beginning of the world. To that belief in the fictitious origin of the world, they make strong emotional attachments to the ideas that certain things are bad, so they feel that their legal system should uphold their beliefs.
Economic conservatives want to conserve their economic system. People who have been on a 10,000-year winning streak especially want to keep their economic system the way it is. And the way our economic system has worked for the past 10,000 years, we’ve always had more material wealth than anyone else, and we’ve always gotten more.
Now here’s where the real problems start. Our economic system is now stretched to the physical limitations of the Earth. The conservatives want to keep our economic system, because they perceive that to offer them the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA. Unfortunately for them it isn’t physically possible to keep our economic system the way it is. So there you have one major difference between the conservatives and the Globalization 4.0 revolution: We (or at least, some of us) perceive the physical limitations of the Earth, and they don’t.
Now the conservatives attach their 10,000 year winning streak to their beliefs in the fictional origins of the world. For 10,000 years they didn’t have any other way of explaining their unbroken winning streak than by saying it was the will of the same fictional entity that created the world. So conservatives made a lot of strong emotional attachments to the idea all that was true.
Now that conservatives have defined their fictitious origins of the world and the fictitious reasons for their 10,000-year winning streak as true, within their own minds, it automatically renders any conflicting ideas false. If you hear someone talking about an idea that you have already defined as false for the simple reason that it conflicts with what you have already defined as true, there’s no real reason to pay attention to what that person is saying. So when people start talking about the Big Bang, evolution, and physical limitations of the Earth, conservatives automatically dump that information into anti-information packages. Technically they can hear the words, but those words don’t pull additional information out of their subconsciousness, so they can’t see how the pieces of the puzzle fit together to create a functional explanation for how the world works. On the other hand, when they hear people talking about how their all knowing, all loving, all powerful Lord and Heavenly Father created the universe for his children, that pulls all kinds of ideas out of their subconsciousness, some of which they’ve heard from other people, and some of which they’ve thought of themselves. If an all knowing, all loving, all powerful entity created the universe and humans are his children, why would he give them only a finite supply of material resources to work with? That does not follow from the chain of logic these conservatives are working with. And I have heard people tell me this in person—except their words are usually something like, “That doesn’t make any sense.”
So there you have another critical difference between conservatives and the Globalization 4.0 revolution: Conservatives are depending on divine intervention to make the world’s economic system function, and we aren’t. Or more to the point, conservatives perceive that divine intervention is an inherent part of their economic system, and we don’t.
Individuals’ perceptions of the world are the least tangible but most important thing conservatives are trying to conserve. A lot of progressively minded people are making this mistake too, and can’t figure out why they’re having so much trouble making any progress.
As I’ve been saying for two books and counting, our natural perceptions of the world, including our emotional instincts, evolved to deal with life in the wild, as hunter-gatherers, during our species’ colonization phase. Now that we’re moving into our sustainability phase, a lot of things we naturally perceive to be true about the world aren’t true anymore. People can learn that their natural senses are being led astray, but teaching them that requires effort. For people to use their natural perceptions of the world requires no effort at all. On top of that, people naturally resist anyone’s attempt to teach them that what they feel to be true isn’t true.
When you add that to the cultural traditions and economic history of the conservatives, things get more complicated still. People’s natural perceptions show them that the economic system we have produces the most favorable results, and then the conservatives reinforce that perception either with their religious values directly, or with values derived from their religion but practiced in a secular fashion. Now, with Globalization 3.0, some of the conservatives’ level of material wealth is being spread to more people, and people naturally perceive material wealth to be good. So now a lot of people are joining the conservatives’ economic system because it agrees most with their natural perceptions of the world, even though they don’t share the conservatives’ religious beliefs or cultural values.
So there you have another critical difference between conservatives and the Globalization 4.0 revolution: We perceive the need to expend any amount of effort necessary to learn how the world actually works, and to teach that to others, while the conservatives, for various reasons, don’t perceive any need to go to the effort of learning a new way to interpret the world than the way they’ve been using.
The conservatives have a number of strengths. They have the oldest and best-established cultural values. That means they have a lot of people on their side, and that means they can make a lot of things happen with brute force. The fact that a majority of Americans trace their ties to the conservatives’ cultural background back long before the founding of the United States helps a lot in that. Whites are naturally the easiest people to convince that the Europeans conquered the world because the Christian god willed it to be so. About 70% of Americans are Whites, which means that conservatives can win elections by building their political ideology on a completely fictitious version of history.
As a result of their well-established ideology, people learn more about conservative values as a result of their cultural background. The conservatives’ cultural values are derived more directly from ancient myths than anyone else’s ideology, which means their cultural values are also the most simplistic.
Also, their ideology is pretty compatible with people’s natural perceptions of the world. Conservatives do teach people cultural values and pass laws that conflict with people’s natural perceptions of the world, but every group of people in the world does that. Violence and murder exist in every culture on Earth, but laws against murder and some types of violence exist in every culture on Earth also, so conservatives having those things also doesn’t make them special. In fact, out of conservatives, liberals, and Anarchists, conservatives are the most prone to violence and killing—like, in the form of waging wars against people they perceive to be bad.
Since the conservatives’ values are so widespread among people for all of these reasons, it’s easy for individuals to perceive that everyone else knows them. Since everyone knows that everyone else knows them, practicing them becomes a tribal ritual. Everyone has to practice them just to be able to function in society among all the other people who practice them. So conservative values would still serve an immediate practical purpose even if no individuals wanted to practice them. A lot of disillusioned young people reject conservative values publicly, and a lot of older people reject them privately. But when all these people meet up with each other in the day-to-day world, what do they do? The older people try to impress everyone with their business professionalism by using conservative cultural values. They talk like professionals, comb their hair like professionals, and wear conservative business suits—or conservative gas station attendant uniforms, or anything in between. Most people can’t reject conservative values completely, because they don’t know how to survive in the world any other way.
Taken together, all of this means that conservatives’ greatest strength is the fact that their ideology requires the least amount of effort to teach people and requires the least amount of imagination to use.
The Globalization 4.0 revolution, unlike the War on Terrorism, is going to be waged—by our side, at least—with weaponized education. The enemy can never be defeated until his ideology is defeated. In order for our side to win, we must fight as effectively as possible. That necessarily means that with every action we take, we must attack the enemy’s ideology. To that, all else is secondary. There are many ways to attack the enemy’s ideology, some of which I’m including in this book, and many more of which can be found in other places I direct you to in this book.
The conservatives’ main weakness is that their ideology is the least compatible with the way the world actually works. Out of any group, whenever they use their ideology to make plans for the future, their plans are the least likely to work. So more than any other group, they will defeat their ideology for us. This is where a functional understanding of science serves us, along with the simple strategy of offering people choices. If conservatives want to tell everyone that their ancestors conquered the world because their god willed it to be so, and we can readily outline how their differences in material resources gave them a more physically powerful civilization, basically anyone we meet—and especially people whose ancestors didn’t come from Europe—will find our version a lot more believable. And our version can be explained as simply as by saying that the Mesopotamians had the best growing conditions in the world, developed agriculture first, were able to produce more food than anyone else, support more people than anyone else, and consequently built the biggest and most physically powerful civilization in the world. And from that point, their conquest of the world is a simple matter of physics. The conservatives can argue that their god led their ancestors to Mesopotamia, and we can’t argue against that… but do we really need to? The only direction they have left to run from that point would be to say that their all powerful, all knowing, all loving god wanted them to conquer everyone else. We can pretty much leave them on their own to sink their own ship from there. If they believe that their all loving god wanted them to conquer everyone, kill lots of people, spread plagues, enslave people, and everything else, it’s not hard for even the most casual non-conservative observer to notice they have a severe misunderstanding of the most basic concept of an all loving god. Alternately, they could be worshipping a god of war, murder, genocide, and oppression, doing his bidding, and simply calling him an all loving god, but to the casual observer, lying about who they worship isn’t any better. Alternately they could say that their god made White people inherently superior to everyone else, but now they’re White supremacists, and the fact that we’re all members of the same species makes the possibility of racial superiority fundamentally impossible. Alternately, they could say that their ancestors made a lot of mistakes, but now that they’ve built the most physically powerful civilization on Earth they better tell everyone what to do anyway, because they obviously know more than anyone else about how to build a civilization. But the fact that they’re evolutionarily equal members of the same species as everyone else proves that they aren’t superior to anyone else, so they aren’t fundamentally more intelligent than anyone else. Everyone knows basically the same amount about how to live in whatever living conditions they live in. The fact that conservatives know so much about how to live the way they live doesn’t prove sh*t, and it wouldn’t be useful to anyone who lived a different way.
That’s just one example. If you have a functional understanding of science, you can systematically destroy any argument the conservatives put forth and show how simple laws of physics made the world turn out the way it did. And will continue to make the world work the way it does, instead of working the way the conservatives imagine it does—or rather, not working the way the conservatives imagine it does and proving it when all the things they predict are going to happen don’t happen.
With a functional understanding of science you can attack conservative ideology through the same governmental institutions they’re using to try to force their cultural values on everyone else. The contents of these books are the Science of Human Equality and How to Not Have Wars with Each Other. The whole point of public school is to teach kids things they’re going to need to know as adults, so there is no excuse why these things couldn’t be taught in public school.
Likewise, anyone who doesn’t care enough about the Science of Human Equality and How to Not Have Wars with Each Other to get a Ph.D. in it has no business running for president or for any other governmental office in a secular government of, by, and for the people. There’s not much any anyone can do about that right now, because my work isn’t yet being taught at any accredited universities, and even if it was, it takes eight years to get a Ph.D.. But that’s the basic idea. You can attack the ideology of any politician who isn’t an expert at human equality and how to not have wars with each other by asking simple questions that are scientifically valid but completely contradictory to their so-called secular government of, by, and for the people. Questions like, “Senator McCain, if you are elected president, you will be making global decisions. But you don’t have a Ph.D. in physics or biology or evolutionary psychology, or any other branch of science. Obviously, learning how the world works has not been a very high priority for you. So why do you believe, and more importantly, why should we believe, that you should be entrusted to make decisions that affect everyone in the world?” Obviously, your goal isn’t to get an answer from him, but to show that he can’t answer it—or that his answer is completely incompatible with a secular government of, by, and for the people.
You can also attack conservative ideology through the court system. Now that I’ve told you about the major reference books that have gone into these books, if you have to go to court to defend your civil rights, you can put together a defense that the judge can’t say no to. Freedom of religion is a big one. Right now, Wiccan and Pagan U.S. military personnel are getting killed in Iraq, but if they want to be buried in military graveyards among all those white crosses and Stars of David, they aren’t allowed to get Pentacles on their graves. Or if you get in trouble for wearing Pentacles to work or school, or for looking up Pagan websites on public school computers, or whatever. However human evolutionary science applies to your case, if you know what questions to ask, you won’t have to look far for expert witnesses. Just about every college in America has a psychology department.
The conservatives’ biggest weakness is one they will exploit for you in the end. All you need to do is to use the aikido to get them there. Since their ideology is the least compatible with reality, if you and lots of other people all over the country start championing human equality, peace, and environmental sustainability, and winning victories everywhere you go with surgical precision, you’ll threaten them, and they’ll cling harder and harder to what they believe to be true about the world. The only way they’ll be able to fight back will be to keep trying harder and harder to force everyone to agree with them. And that will never work. All they’re going to do is to prove to everyone they’re a bunch of a**holes.