Wars and environmental destruction are not diseases of the human race, they are symptoms that tell us there is something wrong with the way our ancestors have organized and set up the world around us.  They tell us that the ‘system’ or ‘establishment’ or ‘arrangement of existence’ on earth is not healthy.  It is not able to meet the needs of the human race and help us move toward a better future.  It moves us further down a path that leads to the extinction for our race each day that passes. 

We don’t have to go down this path. 

There are many other paths that we can take into the future.  Some of them lead to sound societies that can allow us to live in harmony with the world around us and other members of our race.  If we understand how the world around us works, how it came to work as it does, and the tools that we have to make it work differently, we can alter the course we are on in ways that allow us to get onto one of these other paths.  That is what this book is about. 

 

Preventing Extinction
1:  The Disease

 

If someone you love has tuberculosis, you can’t prevent her death by treating the symptoms. 

You can give her suppressants to prevent bloody coughing fits, ice baths to keep her fever from reaching the point of delirium, a dietary analysis to determine the nutrients her body is losing and supplements to reduce the amount of consumption of her body’s resources the disease causes. 

But the coughing, fevers, and consumption are not diseases.  These are only symptoms that tell us that there is something wrong with her body.  If you leave the underlying cause in place, she will die.  This will happen no matter how good you are at managing the symptoms. 

We were born into societies that have incredibly serious problems.  These systems are built on divisiveness, dividing the human race into roughly 261 entities we were raised to call ‘countries.’  These countries then organize mass murder events that we call ‘wars’ that are constant parts of our world. 

Even if wars didn’t threaten the planet’s existence (which, of course, they do) they wouldn’t be desirable.  They are fantastically expensive.  According to the World Economic Forum, wars impose costs of about $14.4 trillion annually on the human race.  This works out to $5 per day, per person.  About 14% of all production on this earth (14% of the global GDP) is used to cover these costs.  For perspective, food costs average about $4.88 per person per day.  Humans spend more to kill other members of our species than we spend to ourselves.

An objective observer—say a scientist looking at the earth from another world—would almost certainly see this as a sign that the social arrangements or ‘societies’ of the earth beings are not in the epitome of health.  Something is wrong with the way the earth system is put together.  Objectively, the system they have (the one that divides their members into hundreds of different competing groups) is not a healthy way for thinking beings with physical needs to arrange their existence. 

Wars are not the only signs of problems.  We have only one world.  We are destroying it at a fantastic pace.  The key decision makers on this world not only allow this destruction, they encourage it.  Most people know that governments subsidize destruction.  But it seems so crazy that they want to put it out of their minds.  They can’t fit this reality into their worldview so they try to convince themselves that only a few destructive activities are subsidized and the subsidies are minor, relative to the amounts the earth people spend trying to protect the world from harm.  But the facts don’t justify this perspective.  According to the World Bank, global subsidies on destruction cost the human race more than $6 trillion a year.  This is a fantastic sum, about $1,000 per year per person on this planet.  Systems that actually take wealth from needy people and use it to pay to have the world destroyed have something wrong with them.  Something is unhealthy about the system in place on this little blue planet.  Without even thinking about what this ‘something is,’ we can see that it is a fatal flaw;  if we leave this arrangement as it is, the destruction and risks will grow with each advance in technology until they destroy the people of this world. 

If we don’t want this to happen, we have to accept that trying to end war and destruction by attacking each war and activity is just as futile and hopeless as trying to save a loved one with tuberculosis by injecting toxins to paralyze her lungs so she won’t cough and immersing her in ice water each time her temperature goes up.  We need to understand that the wars and destruction are not aberrations or strange and unexpected events that we might attribute to separate causes and fix one at a time.  They are necessary and natural side effects of the normal operation of the specific system that was in place when the currently living members of the human race were born.  This system is not healthy.  It has structural problems.  Even if we had very good tools to get rid of war and prevent destructive activities (and we don’t) this would not save us.  To save ourselves, we have to come to understand the structural problems and fix them. 

We will see that this can be done, but it will take time.  In the meantime, we must mange the symptoms to keep them from killing us.  But our primary focus has to be on the underlying causes.  Once we fix them, the pressures that push us to divide into independent and sovereign countries to fight other countries in ‘death-to-the-last-man conflicts, and to rape the world to get materials to help in these wars, will ease.  Eventually, these pressures will disappear.  Once the underlying causes are gone, the symptoms will fade away and then disappear on their own. 

I wish there were an easier way.  I wish I could believe there are invisible beings in the sky with unlimited powers that listen for humans mumbling for help and, if enough ask, they will fix things for us.  I wish that wishes worked to solve problems.  But I can’t make myself believe that we can do nothing and these problems will fix themselves.  We don’t have to go over the edge.  But if we don’t want this to happen, we must accept that we, you and me and other members of our race, are the highest beings on this world and the only ones capable of fixing things.  We must accept that our minds are capable of understanding these matters and take the effort to understand them.   We must come to understand exactly how a ‘healthy’ society works and how it differs from the societies we have inherited.  Then we need to take steps that put our race on a path that will take us from the societies we have to the societies we need to have if we are to survive.

That is what this book is about. 

Curing Diseases

To understand the complexities that lead to these problems, we need to shift our perspective.  We need to view our world as an outsider might. This approach can be challenging because we’re innately biased—we are all earth natives, born and raised on this planet, with no firsthand experience of any other world.  We naturally think that the way things are supposed to work, mandated by a higher power or force over which intelligent beings have no control.  This bias makes us think that any systems that don't work like the systems around us are unnatural and somehow wrong.  We are prejudiced against them and don’t seriously consider anything unfamiliar to be worth considering.

Let’s try to shift perspective and look at the situation on earth as outsiders would see it.  Our global system divides the planet into entities we call ‘countries,’ each possessing sovereign authority within its borders.  The exact number of countries changes constantly, as wars consolidate them and tear them apart, but there are 261 countries as I write this. 

 

          We often use the term ‘nations’ interchangeably with ‘countries.’  In this book, these two terms mean the same thing.

  

The concept of sovereignty grants nations supreme power over their territories.  The people who run the nations have total rights and can do anything they want to the part of the planet inside the borders.  Earth’s international laws are not formal but implied by the way they act.  They include principles that are based on this presumption of absolute authority of nations over the land inside their borders.  This includes a principle called ‘right of conquest.’  This holds that countries that conquer land (take it over and subjugate or exterminate its people) have rights to extend their sovereignty over any territory they conquer. 

The underlying principles of earth’s human societies are virtually identical to the principles of the societies of many lower animals.  Wolf societies provide an example. Wolves divide into packs that each stake out a territory.  They mark the borders of the territory in ways members of their species can detect.  (Wolves have very a highly developed sense of smell.  They have scent glands that produce an odor that they recognize as defining territorial borders.  The scents mix with urine and they ‘spray’ their entire border with these marks.)  The wolves organize border patrols.  If the patrol wolves detect incursions by outside packs, they organize to wipe out the pack that infringed in the sovereignty of their pack over their territory.  You can find detailed video of this behavior in many documentaries of wolf behavior.  (One very good example is in the in the BBC series ‘Dynasties, Painted Wolves.’  It follows a wolf pack for several generations, where the pack engages in several wars, some defensive and some offensive.)   

It seems perplexing that this primitive concept should remain a part of human societies, given our capacity for creating sophisticated social structures and legal systems. Yet we were born into this established order.  It is a foundational reality of our existence, one we often accept it without question.   We only know about one world, the earth and one type of society for thinking beings, the one we see around us.  We think of this system as ‘ours’ and are prejudiced in its favor.  We want to find excuses to discard any alternative structural reality for existence.

I want to ask you for a favor:  I want you to try to think of the earth situation from the perspective of an outsider.  Imagine yourself as an interstellar explorer.  You are of a team searching for life among the stars.  Your team has no ties to earth and have never even seen it.  You happen across this planet, enter your starship into orbit (activating a cloaking device so the earth people won’t see your ship) and begin to study it. 

As an outsider, your perspective on earth’s realities would differ significantly from those of the people who grew up in this world and don’t know of anything else.  You would see numerous organized violent conflicts across the globe.  We earthlings tend to view these events with horror and try to distance ourselves from them. We prefer to believe humans in general, and ourselves specifically, are naturally benevolent, kind, and empathetic.  We can only believe this if we think of the wars as anomalies, unusual events that are not normal parts of the operation of our highly advanced brains.  One common explanation for the wars is that some people are not good like us.  They are evil.  These evil people cause the wars.  We look at each war separately to try to find out who these evil people are.  When we identify them, we think we have identified the cause of that particular war. 

Historical wars are easy to fit into this mindset.  Victors write the story of each war.  They always thought of themselves as good and tell the story of the war from that perspective, with good ultimately defeating evil.  Since good always defeats evil (or always has in the past) each war is simply an attempt by good people to make the world a better place.  We are not fighting over the things that primitive animals fought over, but for goodness, virtue, justice, and freedom. 

Outside observers would almost certainly look at these conflicts differently.  They would see that wars are constant parts of the earth experience.  At any given moment, dozens of wars are taking place.  Each century there are hundreds of wars.  Each millennia there are thousands.  They wouldn’t feel an impulse to try to rationalize each war as a unique event with a separate cause.  They would see that wars are parts of societies built on the principle of absolute territorial control by tribal units among all animals that have them.  They would not feel an urge to believe that different forces operate for beings after they cross a line in evolution than before they cross the line.  In other words, they would not be inclined to believe that modern humans fight wars for different reasons than wolves, hyenas, jackals, gorillas, chimpanzees and other animals with the same kinds of societies (those built on territorial sovereignty; see text box below) fight wars. 

Outside observers would likely categorize the human social system on earth as a specific type of society—one among many possible configurations. They would recognize that this particular structure isn’t unique to humans. In fact, they would see similar societal models in various other animal species across our planet.   They would see that this particular system (one built on a principle called ‘territorial sovereignty,’ see text box below) is associated with fanatical conflict in all species that have it. 

 

          When Nature needs war:
          Nature must fill all environmental niches.  Some present significant challenges. Some species evolve such formidable capabilities that they effectively outpace predation, leaving their populations unchecked by natural population controls.  .When external predation proves insufficient to keep populations stable, nature uses other methods to bring about this same result.  It favors a type of society where interspecies conflicts do what outside predators can’t, and keep the population stable.  The evolutionary forces driving this phenomenon will be examined in detail in subsequent sections, but the fundamental principle operates as follows:
   1. Unchecked Growth: In the absence of predation, non-violent populations expand rapidly.
   2. Resource Scarcity: This growth inevitably leads to resource constraints within their habitat.
   3. Competitive Pressure: As resources dwindle, competition intensifies.
   4. Selective Advantage of Aggression: Individuals or groups exhibiting aggressive behaviors gain a survival advantage, displacing or eliminating less aggressive counterparts.
   5. Group Formation: The inefficacy of individual competition gives rise to organized groups.
   6. Inter-group Conflict: These groups then engage in territorial disputes, with more adept combatants securing larger territories.
         Evolution favors systems that are inherently stable.  A species that has superior capabilities can create population stability by dividing into groups to fight each other to the death.  Predators are no match for them, but members of their own species are.  A species with these superior capabilities can segregate into distinct units (variously termed as packs, troops, tribes, or countries) and split the land around them into marked territories.  These different groups can then fight each other in to-the-death-of-the-last-member-of-the-group conflicts.  This can keep populations stable and in line with the food supply for millions of years, even among species with capabilities so great no ouotside predators can effectively control their populations.
          This system can work for wolves, jackals, hyenas, gorillas and chimpanzees.  It can even work for early human species like neanderthals.   It is cruel and violent, but it does what nature needs done.  It was not merely beneficial but essential for maintaining ecological equilibrium in beings that were below the level of modern humans by keeping population densities aligned with available resources.
          However, the advent of certain modern tools has rendered this model of society obsolete and inherently catastrophic.  We don’t need it now to keep our populations stable:  Modern birth control methods are leading to declines in fertility rates that will lead to a ‘naturally’ stable population pretty much from now on.  If the ‘natural’ rate is zero, meaning the population is stable without accounting for war or the side effects of environmental destruction, but war and destruction both continue, the population will begin to decline.  Since both conflict-related and environmental risks are potentially catastrophic, and increase as technology improves, we can expect very rapid declines in populations if the trends in this area continue.  Serious risks, of course, can reduce the human population to zero in a few minutes.
          Societies built on the principle of territorial sovereignty can meet the needs of many animals.  Nature needs this system and uses it extensively for species with such great capabilities that natural predators can’t keep their population stable.  But humans have outgrown this system.  It can no longer work for us.  We need to understand that beings (of any kind, intelligent or not) can organize themselves many different ways.  Some of these systems are inherently violent.  We have inherited this system from our evolutionary ancestors and nature has favored it because of our high mental capabilities.  But it no longer works for us.  We must use our immense intellects to help us find something else and put it into place. 

 

Wolves have societies built on territorial sovereignty.  They form into packs to fight other packs in to-the-death conflicts over hunting territory.  They mark borders and patrol them.  They monopolize the land (in other words, they enforce sovereignty over it) just as humans do.  Jackals and hyenas have this kind of society too.  They mark borders and enforce them with to-the-death-of-the-very-last-member wars.  Gorillas and chimpanzees have territorial sovereignty societies.  Both animals fight wars that look very much like humans wars. 

Humans have territorial sovereignty societies. 

We don’t need them like the other animals (see text box above for more information).  We could form other kinds of societies.  We could analyze other options (there are a lot of them) and see that just about anything would be better for our race than this primitive system.  But humans have a duality to our nature that gets in the way of this.  We have an animal side that has inherited instincts that push us to act as other territorial animals act.  It tells us that the members of our species that are not members of our tribal unit (country) are not the same as we are.  They are dangerous beings that we must never trust.  They will take over our territory if they can and, if they do, life will not be worth living.  (Remember, this is not what our logical sides tell us, it is what our animal sides tell us.)   We must stop them no matter what it takes.  Even if we destroy ourselves in the process, we must do this:  Existence on this world will be meaningless if they win. 

Our human sides tell us these animal impulses do not make any sense.  The borders are imaginary lines.  There is no difference in the nature of humans born on different sides of these lines.  People have common needs and common goals.  We have incredible capabilities to help us move toward these goals if we cooperate.  (Just imagine what the world would be like if some the $14.4 trillion we devote to war and $6 trillion we pay to subsidize destruction went to encourage cooperation.)   But, unfortunately for us, there is a battle ongoing between these two sides of our nature.  The animal side is fighting the human side.  And, unfortunately, we our human side just isn’t strong enough to overpower the animal side.  We are simply too early in the evolutionary process for the logical side to have a natural victory over the animal side.  If we want the human side to win, we need to understand this battle and use our intellects to interfere to shift the odds in our favor.

The Disease

Psychologists have a name for the ailment that is destroying us.  It is ‘paranoid delusions.’  Paranoia means having deep seated irrational fears, to the extent that these fears affect behavior.  We are raised and educated to believe that there are such things as ‘countries’ and the borders of these countries separate two entirely different categories of beings.  Those inside the lines are our people.  They may make mistakes from time to time, but they are basically good people who care about their country and are trying to make it better.  Those outside the lines are outsiders or foreigners.  They  are different.  We can’t trust them.  (Where ‘we’ refers to us and the others with rights to be inside the imaginary lines called ‘borders’ and ‘them’ refers to people who don’t qualify for these rights.)  

They may pretend to be civilized and even friendly.  But history resounds with examples where ‘they’ eventually showed their true colors and attacked the people who were their pretended friends to take way things that belonged to those people.  (Usually, they took part of their territory.)  We must never let down our guards.  Danger is constant.   Protection from ‘them’ is our highest priority.  We must protect the members of our tribe/troop/gang/pack/country from ‘them.’  They always outnumber us.  This means no level of vigilance is high enough to make us secure.  We must never let our guards down and be ready to take advantage of them whenever we can.  After all, they would do the same to us. 

Or so we are told.  Most of these messages start when we are very young and not really able to think through them to determine if they are true.  The history books depict the losers in every war as horrible monsters who hate everything that decent people care about.  The losers were defeated and either subjugated or exterminated.  They can’t defend themselves.  In classes called ‘history lessons’ we go through war after war after war, to the point where it soon becomes tiresome and boring.  We don’t have to read about the next war in the series to pass the test.  The pattern never changes.  The good guys won and the horrible monsters lost.  Socrates discussed this method of ‘education’ thousands of years ago and concluded that it was not really intended to help children understand the past so they could build a better future.  He concluded it was designed to make children have the state of mind they would need to have to become part of the war machine when they grew up.  It was designed to incite hatred and fear, not to explain objective facts.  By after hearing these messages, over and over, before we are intellectually capable of using reason to analyze them, we imprint them on our minds.  There are evil people and evil countries who live outside our borders and prey on the foolishness and gullibility of the outsiders in general.  They can come together and will come together to destroy us.  This danger is above all others.  We must keep the fear and hatred ready in our minds to bring it to the front at any time.  Our governments, military experts, and the media will tell us the time.   Then we must put all doubt and reason aside and start to destroy them, without compassion, empathy or remorse, until they are they are all dead or until the world is destroyed and the human race is no more. 

 

          Since apes don’t have the brain components that we have that allow us to put our thoughts into  words, we can’t really use words to understand the feelings they have about loyalty to their own troops, their willingess to fight to the death to defend their troops territory, and the reasons they are so willing to kill members of outside troops, even children and individuals who are more closely related ot them than members of their own troops.  But their behaviors in this regard are so similar to those of humans that it seems likely that, if they could verbalize these feelings, they would say something very similar.  The members of the other troops are evil monsters who will take the land that belongs to our troop if they can.  The members of their own troops will fight shoulder to sounder to their deaths to prevent this. 

 

Objective observers from other worlds would probably think that the things we call ‘countries’ are actually just arbitrary assignments to fighting units that work just like the assignments of wolves to packs or apes to troops.  The fact that we organize our world around them, and spend more to fight for them than we spend on food, indicates that we organize our lives around paranoid delusions.  At any time in our history, we could have realized that we really were descended from lower animals, that the societies that we inherited from these animals could not meet our needs, and that we were capable of designing and creating societies that could meet our needs.  If we could be rational long enough, we could make this happen.  But our disease is a form of insanity.  Insane people aren’t able to make themselves think rationally when they need to do this.  That is how the term is defined.

The Cure

Objective observers from other worlds would realize that the humans on earth are at a very tender and dangerous point in their evolution.  They are about to realize that everything they have been raised to believe, and that has been believed for all of history, is made up nonsense that makes no sense.  They are about to realize that their societies were never planned or built intentionally and can’t meet their needs. 

The only alternative to this realization is extinction.  If they don’t gain this realization, they will remain on the path they are on until they reach the end, which is not very far away. 

Objective outsiders will probably realize that they can’t really help the humans on their path to enlightenment by arguing with or using logic against with the deluded and paranoid people who run the earth establishment.  They won’t listen, at least not to try to understand the concept to find out if it is valid.  That is the very definition of insanity:  if they were totally capable of using logic they would have figured it all out themselves and the system on earth would not exist.  To help, they need to lead the humans toward a solution, not try to push them away from the things they have been raised to believe. 

We need one thing more than anything else:  hope.

We need to know that thinking beings with physical needs (the category that includes humans) are capable of living in sound systems.  Such systems are possible.  It is possible for beings on a world who suddenly realize that the societies they inherited can’t meet their needs to find something else.  A group of beings in this situation may explore their options and find they actually have many choices.  Some of them work in reasonable and logical ways that allow the beings in them to meet their needs in sustainable ways through co-operation, rather than competition. 

We need to know such systems are possible.  We need to know how they work.  we need to know that we are on a path through time and we are in charge of the immediate future of our race.  We decide where we will go from here, at least for the next few decades.  If we know sound societies are possible, we can work out the steps that, if taken, would move us closer and closer to these kinds of societies as time passes.  We can change the course of human progress.

This is possible. 

I claim that there are two paths we can take into the future. 

First, we can stay on the path we are on.  It is illuminated by bright lights, paved, broad and straight, well marked and well signed.  Many people like this path because it allows them to give in to their animal desires to their hearts’ content.  They can hate and be proud of their hatred:  they are hating ones that they know, in their animal hearts, are evil monsters who deserve nothing other than the most horrible death they can impose on them.  They can destroy with reckless abandon and feel good about what they are doing:  They are helping their country meet its needs, their governments encourage them, so they must be doing the right thing.  They are living in traditional ways, passed down from generation to generation for thousands (millions actually) of years.  If there is a higher power that created the earth and mandates how it works, the higher power wanted this system and created it.  As long as they are doing as the higher power wants, they are doing the right thing.  If they things they do following the rules of this system destroy the world, this is all in accordance with a higher plan.  It is the right thing.  We need to stay on this path without wavering.  If the path leads to the end of this world, we must not fear because the higher power wouldn’t let this world end without having a better world waiting beyond it. 

Second, we can let ourselves accept that the universe around us is as we see it, not as the religious people tell us.  It is enormous, with septillions of star systems and habitable worlds.  Life appeared here and began to evolve.  It reached milestones over the last 3.5 billion years with the higher primates, the apes, evolving about 14 million years ago.  Evolution continued with the genus ‘Pan,’ the closest to or own genus, appearing 6.7 million years ago.  The Pans have DNA that is more than 99% the same as ours.  Evolution continued with fire-using hominids appearing about 2 million years ago.  With fire, these very intelligent beings could travel vast distances and live nearly everywhere.  They traveled and spread.  Over this period, evolution selected the smartest and best for survival, leaving the average apes to perish.  The intellect of our ancestors grew.  We used our intellects to do the things our ape instincts made us want to do:  identify land to defend and fight other groups with land to take it away from them.  Our ancestor’s weapons got better and better. 

At any given time, these beings with ever-growing intellects could have decided to use at least part of this intelligence to help them understand the way the societies of beings with their capabilities worked.  They could have analyzed the systems they inherited and seen that, eventually, the conflict-based systems would become obsolete and catastrophically dangerous.  They could have found other systems and plotted a path that their descendents (perhaps us) could take, when we wanted to act, to move down a path that would take us to these other societies.  At any time in our past, our ancestors could have done this analysis.  Unfortunately, they had other priorities.  Their animal sides told them they needed better weapons more than anything their intellectual sides wanted.  So, this analysis has not been done.  Yet.

Our second option is to start now.  We can do this analysis ourselves.  It would have been better for us if the plan was already worked out when we were born and all we had to do was decide whether to follow it.  Unfortunately, we have no control over the past and no such plan is ready and waiting.  We only have control over this little piece of time.  We can formulate a plan.  If we (the people who made up the plan) are to frightened of change to follow it, we can pause and let another generation or two grow up and study it.  If they like it, they can put it into place. 

It would have been far better for us and our race if this work had been started thousands of years ago.  It wasn’t.  We are lucky to have survived this long and risks and dangerous increase day by day.  We may not have enough time to complete the task even if we start now and devote a lot of effort to the attempt.  We might try and still fail.  But if we don’t try, we will fail with certainty.  

I want us to take the second path described above.  I have never really felt myself to be a part of these strange systems.  I feel like I am an outsider, looking at a crazy situation that does not have to exist.  I consider the situation I see on earth to be a challenge.  It is a kind of brain teaser, a puzzle if you will.  Is it possible to lead these strange beings to a different path?   I think it is.  Am I smart enough to make this happen?  Probably not.  But I hope that, even if I can’t inspire the actual change, I can inspire others to understand the need for further work on this topic. 

It may be a waste of time. 

But I have nothing better to do in my brief time on this little blue world. 

Why Try?

When I look out at the night sky, I see more points of light than I can count.  The brightest are objects in our solar system, other worlds like ours.  The next brightest are stars in our galaxy.  Behind it all is a milky haze that is not even a part of our galaxy.  It is the light emitted by trillions of other galaxies that are so numerous that they blend into our visual field. 

 

Qqq deep field webb

 

Every one of these innumerable galaxies has billions of star systems and worlds, many of which are much like this world.  If the events on earth caused the kind of life that we have here (the kind that evolved) on even a tiny fraction of these other worlds, there are more inhabited worlds than we can count. 

If this is correct, we would expect many have these beings to have struggled with the same problems that we now face here on earth.  Some have failed.  But there are so many worlds out there that I have a hard time thinking that all fail.  Perhaps most of the beings in our situation fail and disappear.  Perhaps only a few will make it. 

I think the odds are against us.  But I am arrogant and proud.  My race, the human race, has done some wonderful things in the past.  We can do wonderful things in the future.  If only a few of the multitude of worlds make it, I want us to be in that number.  If only one world makes, I want it to be my world, the beautiful blue world called ‘earth.’

Please help me make it happen.  Please read this material.  Don’t just read it like you would read a textbook in school, to get enough information into your short-term memory to pass a test.  Take the time and effort to understand it.  I think that, if you do this, you will begin to look at the realities of human existence from an entirely new perspective.   You will see that our race, the human race, is capable of far more than you ever thought possible.