Those of us who are lucky/unlucky enough to be, by the standards of society, more than a little weird have often felt the wrath of the human instinct towards social conformity in a way that those higher up on the bell of the bell curve will never know. We often have very strong negative feelings about this urge towards social conformity, cursing people’s apparent inability to tolerate individuality and diversity when it comes to their precious little social worlds, and deriding their sheeplike stampeding all in the same direction and eagerly jumping for their master’s treats.

But rarely do we stop and simply ask… why? Why do people act like this? What so unsettles people about someone different that they react with hostility? Why do we have this urge?

In order to find the answer, we must begin with a simple but often overlooked fact : modern urban society is, from a mammalian biology or even primate behaviour standpoint, extremely unnatural.

By this, I mean that it is highly unusual for any species, no matter how social, to live in highly concentrated groups where simply to function, we must move amongst dozens or hundreds of total strangers without becoming either frightened of them or attacking them or both.

Nowhere in nature do you see socially grouped animals freely intermingling without even tension, let along conflict or violence. Even our closest cousins, the chimpanzees and the bonobos, who form close-knit communities much like our own tribes or villages, react to strangers of their own species with hostility and suspicion.

But we humans are intelligent, and adaptable, and so we learned/evolved to get along with those we do not know. A modern urban human can walk through a mall or a crowded subway station past hundreds of complete and total strangers and not even notice them, let alone have the kind of reactions our primate cousins have to anyone they do not know.

We would never have made it past the family/clan stage of civilization had we not developed this ability to get along with those we do not know. We would never have invented trade, protocol, commerce, and practically everything else that paved the road to the modern world as we now know it. We would have remained scattered nomadic hunter-gatherer groups, constantly at low-level war with each other.

Nevertheless, this innovation in human behaviour is relatively new. For the millions of years that lie between the dawn of homo sapiens and the rise of civilization, scattered hunter-gatherer groups was, indeed, all the we were. It is only in the last half million years or so that we even lived in caves, and only in the last thirty thousand of those that we have lived in anything like villages, let alone cities.

So this ability to not immediately attack and kill all strangers is a relatively new upgrade, and as such, it’s more in the software than the hardware. We have learned to act in such a way that it minimizes the still very present and active xenophobia in each human being’s psyche, and thus, we can get along with one another without freaking each other out.

Which brings us to conformity. It is by acting like one another, and most especially by acting in a way consistent with the expectations of one another, that we calm one another’s fear of strangers, and it is this predictability that allows civilization to exist. We don’t fear the strangers passing us on the street as we make our way through daily life because deep in our minds, in a place well below consciousness, we know that all the other people are likely to be members of the same civilization and hence fairly unlikely to club us over the head and take our food, women, and territory.

The security we used to get only by personally knowing (and hence, being able to predict) every single person who we were likely to encounter in a day we now get by having a more vague but flexible and broad sense that while we might not know that stranger, we know enough about them that we do not consider them a threat, or even worth noticing in some cases.

But this security is a delicate thing. The trust we have in strangers is fragile and unstable thing, balanced as it is on a tottering tower of unspoken and often unacknowledged assumptions we make about others, and seemingly trivial things can upset that delicate balance and cause the slender plank to sway and bring all this fear and distrust of strangers right back again.

Plus, everything takes place against whatever the background level of conformity is in a given situation or group. What may seem like outright insanity in a time or group where conformity is extremely high might go without notice against a background of broader standards. This, by the way, is what leads to the impression that small town people get that big cities are full of “crazies and freaks”.

And along come us strange types, who for whatever reason don’t quite pick up all the conformity signals that the others are obeying without even thinking about it. We, in our innocence, can’t understand why we are treated badly by people to whom we pose no apparent threat. They, in their innocence, can’t explain why they treat you because they don’t know why your weirdness upsets them so much. They just know that you frighten and anger them.

Turns out, strange ones like myself are upsetting the very delicate balance which allows human beings to live in groups larger than the number of people we can know personally despite being less than a million way from attacking and killing strangers on sight. In order to become the modern city-dwelling ape, we exchanged fear of the stranger for fear of the strange, and the more strange you are, the greater the fear.

This does not, of course, condone the abuse of those who are different. It merely explains it. It is my hope, in fact, that through understanding the nature and causes for this reaction, we can develop ways to bridge the gap and help both sides understand one another, and make everyone much happier and more secure.

Perhaps, in the future, if we open our minds to the true understand of what is going on, and open our hearts to the possibility of things being better, we can make a future where everyone is included and understood, and nobody is pushed to the margins at all.

{ Credit goes to a conversation with my friend and ex-roomie Ryan Hawe for sparking the idea for this article. Good luck with Jenn in the new place, Ryan! }

Boredom is a negative emotion. We spend a great deal of the time we do not spend earning a living on things to avoid boredom. As a curious, neophilic, stimulation-seeking species, human beings need a constant variety of things in order to be happy and avoid the dreaded boredom. Even the most stodgy reactionary conservative old people doesn’t read the same newspaper over and over again.

In fact, boredom’s pain is so increase that it can lead some people to do things which seem downright counter-evolutionary. Without an understand of boredom, an alien race would be at a loss to explain why we Earthlings are willing to do extraordinary things like climb mountains or jump out of airplanes just for the excitement of it.

But hell, sure beats being bored!

In fact, it is possible that one might use boredom as a useful metric for intelligence. The more mental effort it takes the individual to stave off boredom, the more intelligent they are. Certainly, I’ve noticed that my fellow intellectuals and I share the characteristics of low boredom tolerance and a tendency to prefer activities which offer a great deal of mental stimulation and/or require a great deal of mental effort in order to keep the boredom at bay.

And it’s precisely this combination of boredom intolerance and hunger for mental stimulation that gives boredom such amazing power. Because when we smart types get bored and set out in search of something interesting to do, the gates of possibility are thrown wide open and anything might happen. And as luck would have it, some of that something usually turns out to be useful.

It was boredom, after all, that led the first nomadic primitive man to find out what it was like in a cave and then come back to the tribe and grunt “wouldn’t it be cool to sleep someplace dry for a change?”. It was boredom that led a bedridden Descartes to stare a fly crawling across the ceiling of his bedroom and get the inspiration for inventing a little thing called calculus. (Trust me, that was a good thing. ) And it was sheer boredom that led many an imaginative child to create worlds in their minds, populate them with characters who had grand adventures, and some day become our greatest writers.

Of course, you cannot have boredom without its root cause : leisure. If it takes absolutely every bit of your energy and your concentration and your mental effort just to barely scrape by in subsistence living, then you are unlikely to have an opportunity to get bored. You might even forget what bored was like.

But for most of human history, human beings have had a little leisure time at least, even if it’s just that brief, blissful period in between collapsing onto your straw pallet at night and actually falling asleep, and boredom has always been there, pushing us to wonder why things are how they are, and how they might actually be better if they were different.

So boredom spurs innovation, innovation spurs progress, progress leads to greater leisure time, and that leads to more boredom. And so the cycle continues.

And now, it’s the Internet age, and the true power of boredom has truly been unleashed by the power of what I call the One Bored Nerd factor. With the power of the Internet, all it takes is one bored nerd to create a program that makes millions of people’s lives easier, or come up with a solution to a problem that without the Internet they might have never heard of, or an invention that bring fresh water to millions.

The efficiency of innovation has never been higher in the history of the world, and it’s still on the rise. In recent years, people have even begun creating video games that allow people to help find a cure for cancer by applying their gamer’s ingenuity to various protein-folding solutions.

So clearly, the boredom of the masses has never been more powerful. Nobody likes to be bored, but without boredom, we would not be spurred into so much innovation and discovery, and we would likely still be sitting in the cold gnawing on raw meat, shivering from the cold with a cave right next to us.

And we certainly wouldn’t be here on the Internet, reading one another’s blogs, would we?

( Note : Due to circumstances too dull to go into right now, there will be no Friday Science Roundup today. Perhaps tomorrow. No guarantees. }

This article is the first in what I hope will be a series of open letters to my fellow nerds addressing things I think that we need to talk about, as a subculture and as a subset of the general population. Or at the very least, things I very much want to say to my neridsh cohorts.

The first thing I want to say to my fellow nerds is this : you are not an alien.

Nor are you an elf, a dragon, an angel, an immortal demigod, or any of the other attractive but entirely fictional subgroups that appeal to our deep nerd natures and resonate with our deepest pain.

Due to the criminally abusive childhood most of us faced, filled with bullying, social isolation, and a society that sees us as the lowest of the low simply for the crime of being intelligent, sensitive, and awkward, many of us wind up with an intellectual rich but emotionally and socially desperately impoverished upbringings which leave deep emotional wounds in our minds then never entirely heal.

Instead, they become deep scars, so deep, in fact, that they distort all our development and end up forming the skewed foundation of our lives well into our adult years.

And part of this terrible inheritance is a deep desire for a place where we will fit in. Not fitting in is more than a mild inconvenience for a human being. We are tribal creatures, down to the very core of our natures. We need an accepting social group in order to be happy and feel secure. A lot of us nerds use the sour grapes defense and claim we don’t need it or even want it, such rugged intellectual loners are we, but that’s bullshit, we all feel it, we are all hurt by it, and we differ only in how we try to cope with it.

Some become true loners, members of a gregarious species that, tragically, have come to see their fellow human beings as more threat than solace and seek to distance themselves from their own species in order to reduce the perceived threat level.

Some find their peer group online, where the magic of the Internet allows even those with the most personal and obscure intellectual interests cn usually find at least a small group of people who feel the same. The importance of the company of like-minded individuals cannot be overstressed.

Others find a place in more formal online communities. I think part of the massive, life-draining appeal of World of Warcraft and its host of cohorts is that it takes the online community and adds the ability to be part of a team, with a role, a job, that the system assures will be at least minimally rewarded (you get experience points no matter what) and which can furthermore be recognized by one’s clan and provide that thing that modern society rarely provides us nerds : a tribe where we belong.

But for some of the worst cases of social isolation. the only conclusion they can draw from the massive trouble they have relating to their fellow human beings is that, somehow, despite their appearance, biology, and all the other factors they share with their species, they are not, in fact, human.

Generally, this conclusion is reached tentatively at first, but strengthened immensely once the individual find, in their beloved fictions, a group which resonates with them. Elves, dragons, werewolves, androids, Klingons… the possibilities are endless. Suddenly, there is a single light in the darkness. The fact that these groups are fictional is no barrier at all. Many of us inhabit the world between our ears far more than the one outside out skulls, and in there, the difference between imaginary things and real things can sometimes seem very small indeed, and the fictional often seems better.

And it’s not so big a leap, given enough imagination and enough pain, to imagine, fleetingly or very seriously, that despite outward appearances, we are not human beings. There is another group, somehow ‘discovered’ by the writer(s) of the fiction, where the individual truly belongs. A group where they would be accepted for who they are, not meant to feel like dirt because they don’t fit in. Their true tribe.

Most of us, of course, do not take this sort of thinking to the point of developing a mental illness like dissociative identity disorder or species dysphoria. But I think this feeling that we are not entirely human lurks in the minds of all nerds, and this troubles me.

For the sad truth is that we are not aliens, merely alienated, which to me is a far more tragic fate than being a stranded alien or a reincarnated werewolf. The fact that we human beings can be so damaged by social deprivation in childhood that we feel like we do not even belong to our own species speaks volumes to the silent tragedy of the “normal” way nerds have been treated for many generations.

If you are reading these words, you are human. You may not feel human, but that does not make it any less true. The sun still shines on a blind man who cannot see it.

And as tempting as these fictional alternatives may seem, the only true salvation for the socially damaged human will be found with your fellow human beings. There is no substitute, no replacement, no pill to take to heal the wounds and fill that deep dark void inside caused by the hunger within for connection with others.

You have to learn to forgive humanity, and try to learn to get along.

If you have read part one of this article, you know my thesis that the real avenue to create change in the world for the average person is through the world of business, rather than political activism.

In this chapter, I will explain exactly how one might use the world of business and the dynamic and powerful engine of capitalism to create the sort of permanent change which really makes a difference : creating a brand new viable business model.

As with all its open secrets, the business world talks a lot about business plans and business models and makes them sound like obscure, stuffy, dull things that nobody with the smallest spark of true wit or originality could possibly understand. But at the most basic level, a business model is simply an idea for a business, developed to the point of figuring out how to make the whole thing turn a profit, or at least break even. As a concept, that’s simple enough. As a reality, of course, it’s fairly complex.

But the potential rewards in terms of change are astounding. Think of how much power Wal-Mart exerts over the marketplace. If Wal-Mart decides that it wants healthier food choices at its price point from wholesalers across the board, the winners will be those who can change their practices and get behind what Wal-Mart wants the fastest and the best. Wal-Mart, as an entity, exerts massive influence in the global marketplace. What it likes, happens. What it doesn’t like, goes away. The decisions of Wal-Mart can make or break the fate of nations, let alone thousands of businesses large and small.

Now imagine that kind of power and influence applied directly to making the world a better place.

And it all started because one man, Sam Walton. had an idea for a different kind of store, one which kept prices low all the time instead of having bogus ‘sales’ which claim to be saving you money without ever telling you exactly how. A store where they went out of their way to be a little friendlier, a little nicer, a little more accessible. A store that anyone of any background or income could feel at home in. In other words, Wal-Mart.

And he took that idea, turned it into a business and then into a business model and made them work, and despite the mutations that have happened to it since then, it’s still the most massive retail presence in the world today, and it all started with an idea for a new business model.

Look at your average strip mall, and you will see, right before your eyes, an excellent lesson in the power of successful business models that have changed modern life and how it is lived. And remember that it’s not just the chains that change things, it’s the idea for business.

Every store in that strip mall represents a successful business model. It’s easy to forget this, because we take the existence of all the usual types of businesses for granted, and it’s hard to remember that at one point, they just plain did not exist. But every one of them is a modern invention, and every one of them started, at one point, as just an idea in someone’s head.

Take, for example, the pizza place. It seems beyond obvious now that people love pizza and therefore there is a huge market for pizza, and a business selling pizza is a good idea. But at one point, pizza was foreign food, ethnic cuisine, along with the rest of Italian cuisine, and a business selling pizza must have seemed like as strange an idea to the people of that time as having a store that sold nothing but some obscure African Bushman delicacy would seem to us now.

But someone started a pizza place anyhow, and people liked it, a few at first and then more over time, until today, when pizza and Italian food are so ubiquitous and so entirely absorbed into the culture that we barely even think of them as ethnic cuisine any more, and you can get a pizza anywhere, at any time.

All because someone thought “This stuff is great! I bet other people would love it!”, and turned that idea into a business model that worked.

Or take your average dry cleaning outlet. We taken the availability of this type of service as a no-brainer fact of life, but at one point, there was no such thing. Someone invented the process, came up with a business model for the dry cleaning store, and over time, this made all kinds of clothing options more affordable for millions of people that had never been possible (or affordable) before.

And in the world of business, the key is profitability. A lot of well-meaning liberal business ventures fail because they treat profit like a dirty word, try to run their business by their ideology, or otherwise try to be in business without becoming businesspeople. But a business model is like a living creature, and profit is what keeps it alive and thriving. If a business is profitable, it can expand. If it can expand, it can grow till it becomes two identical businesses on the same business model… like capitalist mitosis. And if those businesses remain profitable, the business modem becomes a chain, the chain inspires competitors, the competitors help spur innovation and suddenly, the business idea is an industry. The success attracts more capital, and the business model spreads, and over the years, becomes a trillion dollar industry that is firmly entrenched in the very fabric of pop culture and our daily lives.

And it all starts with someone’s idea for a business that just might work.

The magic word “change” get bandied about a great deal, especially in the world of politics, and has come to represent everbody’s hopes and dreams for progress of all kinds in the public consciousness. In that context, the desire for change is universal. There is not a citizen of a democracy in the world who think the society in which they live is perfect the way it is at this exact moment. Whether the changes you desire are based on a vision of the future or a longing for a lost world of the past, everybody wants to change something.

And yet, it seems nothing ever really changes that much, and what does change doesn’t seem to have anything to do with who we vote for or what laws are passed. Why is this? The people in power, the ones who benefit from things staying the same, seem to have nothing to fear. It’s like they have tricked us into doing exactly what they want us to do and we simply can’t see the strings they use to control us.

But how could they do that, in the age of the Internet, Wikileaks, and democracy?

Easy. They get us focused on politics, and politics only affect government (and that, only weakly), and government rarely changes anything.

Now, I am no libertarian, shouting at you to forgo the evil Gubmint and all its trappings of evil Regulation and Intervention and save your freedom loving soul from a New World Order Mark of the Beast future. Government intervention is absolutely required in myriad aspects of society merely to keep the wheels of modern democratic capitalist society going, let alone make modern life worth living. People who are against all forms of government intervention should have their homes taken over by the Crips.

But despite the impression that one gets from the news media, the history books, and practically everything else in our culture, most important social change comes not from a change in law, policy, or political party, but from the people and the innovations and modifications they come up with in their daily struggles to cope with everyday life in their times.

Those who truly desire change have to go where change truly comes from : the world of business.

Surprised? Expecting something like “activism” or “public education” or “consciousness raising”? Not likely. Those have their place and historically, they have done much good. But the rate of success is very low, and for the Powers That Be who don’t want THEIR world to change, nothing could please them more than to see all the idealistic young people and change-minded parents of the world wasting all their earnestness and enthusiasm on political activism, which is based on competing with dozens of other special interest groups for the attention of a very small group of politicians for a chance to MAYBE make your case better than the extremely high paid lobbyists that said Powers That Be hired to pester politicians full time, instead of doing the other things that might actually change something.

Like learning how the world of business works. The Powers That Be’s base of power is not simply their superior access to and influence over politicians. The real crux of their power, the spell that conceals their kingdom, is the widespread belief that the world of business is boring, complicated, unsexy, uncool, conservative, and nothing that a liberal-minded person would be even slightly interested in, let alone comfortable with.

But the world of business is the world of money, and money is power. The Powers That Be don’t give a damn what we do with our votes because they control the money. The real lever of power is who has the currency to make their will be done, and right now, the vast majority of that power lies within the boring, stodgy, conformist, no-fun world of business.

As long as that remains true, nothing will truly change. The poor will get poorer, the rich will get richer, billions will live and die in wretched, squalid horror all over the world, and we will all be too busy doing fun things like having rallies and waving signs and participating in marches and online discussions, convinced we are Doing Something, when in reality, we are just doing what we like to do and counting it anyhow.

So if you are serious about wanting to change the world and make it better place, don’t protest the G6, shout things at rallies, get your degree in Political Science, or fall for any of the other easy and tempting traps for your energy and enthusiasm that the world of liberal activism innocently offers.

Instead, get a haircut and a nice looking suit, get your MBA, and take these bastards on in the world in which they live : the world of business and money.

It won’t be sexy or fun or make anyone think you are cool.

But if you truly want to change how things work, you will be willing to sacrifice all that for results.

More importantly, why do we ask?

What is is about the nature of being human that compels us to ask, as individuals and as a species, “Why are we here? What is our purpose? What are we here to accomplish? What does it all mean?”

We have to wonder why we ask ourselves these question, and indeed why these questions haunt and torment us and have done so for millennia, because in the cold light of reason, there is no logical reason to suppose there is any reason or purpose to our existence at all. This is especially true for those of us who are nontheistic and therefore have no creator in our worldview, and hence, nobody’s intentions to question, even just in our minds. Purpose, after all, implies intention, and there is no intention without an intender… no reason for an action without a reasoner. After all, we don’t ask what the purpose of an apple falling from a tree is, or ask the river why it runs. Motives are something you only find in living, thinking entities, be they gods or human beings. If a murder is committed, we jail the murderer, not his bullets or his gun.

So what is it that compels us human beings to seek a meaning to life? Why do we consistently and persistently ask ourselves what it all means and what it’s all for, and makes us incapable of being satisfied with the obvious truth of cosmic accident?

For the answer, we have to delve deep into our natures as members of a highly social and hierarchical species. We have tribal instincts that run extremely deep into the most primal layer of our psyches, instincts that drive us so deeply and strongly that, like fish who cannot see the current, we often have no idea they are guiding us.

This is why, when society breaks down, the basic unit of human society is revealing to not be the family, but the tribe. Human beings instinctively bands together for mutual protection, and even when all else is gone, they will continue to do so, whether you call them tribes, organized crime families, gangs, or nations.

Therefore, as individuals, we seek our place in the tribe. We search for a place where we have a role, responsibilities, and recognition for the effort we contribute, as well as the protection and support of the larger group (be it workplace, social scene, or fandom) in return for our contributions.

In short, we look for a place where we belong. Our entire driving for belonging is, at its root, a searching for our tribe, and our rightful, proper place in it. Modern society has broken down almost all of the sources of this much needed tribal context that sufficed through history (like social class, clan, tribe, church, and so on) and has, thus far, only come up with partial and ephemeral substitutes like clubs, social scenes, fandoms, and so on.

Our search for cosmic meaning, therefore, is this search for the place where we belong taken to the highest scale. Being social and hierarchical creatures, we cannot feel truly safe and secure unless we know where we stand in the tribal structures in which we experience our existence, and once we realized that the Universe was out there and vastly larger than anything our primate social minds can comprehend, our tribal instincts compelled us to seek our place in that social context as well.

And it doesn’t matter that we have no reason to believe that the question is even meaningful or sensible at that level. Our social instincts compel us, and they operate on a considerably deeper and more powerful level than relative latecomers like logic and reason.

That is why we cannot accept our existence as cosmic accident. In the socially constructed world of a social primate, purposeless things have no standing. Without the comfort of knowing our place in the cosmic tribe, we face the most terrifying thought possible to the mind of a social ape : that we have no place in the tribe at all, and therefore have no tribe.

A human being would rather be the lowest of the low, the untouchable of the untouchables, in a universe explicitly designed to cause them the most suffering possible, than to face the prospect of a universe with no particular place for us at all. Even Hell would be better than being a tribeless primate.

If you scratch the surface of many a nightmare vision of the world or the future, and know what to look for, you will see that the real appeal of these pessimistic, even nihilistic views of the world is that they nevertheless suggest an order in the world and a place for us in it, even if it is only as mindless pawn, feckless sheep, or cattle for the slaughter.

The only answers that, in the long run, can satisfy this tribal yearning are ones that we create ourselves. There is no grand cosmic purpose to our existence. We are not here for any particular reason any more than any other cluster of atoms swirling in the Void. There is no great and noble job for us to do, and if we but fulfill this cosmic purpose, the universe will protect us and reward us accordingly. This world does not come with a task already laid out for us, waiting for us to find it and fill it.

But that does not mean that we cannot have meaning and purpose in our lives. It just means that we must find it, indeed create it, ourselves. Once we accept the existential truth of the meaninglessness of human existence in the grand scheme of the cosmos, we are then freed from all obligations to find our cosmic purpose, as well as any potential penalties from our failure to “do our jobs”, and we are free to do, be, or become whatever it is that our inner natures need us to be.

Our cosmic search for meaning is forever doomed, but we can still find comfort, meaning, and purpose in this great big beautiful world if we just set our sights a little lower.

And nobody can tell you that you aren’t being what you are supposed to be.

Supposed by who?

One of the most common complaints in romantic life is how the other gender is so “shallow”. Women think all men care about is big tits and a skinny body. Men think all women care about is is a chiseled jaw and a fat wallet. There’s good reason why this idea is so pervasive in both genders, but what I would like to make clear is that it just is not so, and if you are willing to abandon this false impression, a whole world of possibilities will open up to you in terms of love, romance, partnership, and happiness.

First, let’s talk about where this pernicious illusion comes from.

It starts, as so much pain and trouble does, in our adolescence. The first notions we get about love, sex, attraction, and the other gender are formed in our teen years, and around other teens.

This is perfectly natural, but also terribly wrong, because in the hormonal miasma that is adolescence, we are at our most confused, least mature, least stable, and yes, at our most shallow. All the angles of human sexual response are not only brand new to teens, they are turned up all the way to the maximum they will ever bed, and hence the teen is caught completely unprepared and, for a while at least, it’s the hormones that lead them around, dragging them, often only semi-willingly, in directions they don’t understand, into places with which they are not familiar. The child they were and the adult they will be are in a terrible tug-of-war, and their sexual responses tend to be, to put it mildly, primitive.

So yes, the guys all go pop-eyed for the early blooming girls with the big boobs and the tight ass. And yes, the girls all melt at the sight of the testosterone-laden jocks with the hard bodies and the cool cars their fathers got for them. This is understandable when you realize their hormones are in charge and everyone is thinking with their gametes. The most crude, obvious, and exaggerated sexual signals will be the ones that get people’s attention the most, and this gives people a completely false initial impression that the other gender is completely shallow and only cares about these superficial things.

Even in the teen years, that’s not true. It’s what gets people’s attention, sure, but for most of us, the really sexy people are like another race, nice to look at, but they have nothing to do with us.

And as we look upon those who, through no effort of their own, happen to end up in a body that sends these kinds of strong sexual signals, we begin to see another of the causes of this false belief in the shallowness of the other gender : pretty people themselves tend to be shallow.

It’s not entirely their fault. When you have the looks that we humans are programmed to respond to when we are young, you live in a different world than regular folks. Everyone around you wants to please you. Nobody can stand to see you upset or in difficulty. People smooth the way for you in everything without you even having to ask. This is as true for men as it is for women.

And so you are never forced to develop your mind, your tastes, or your personality. Things come to you easily, and the easiest thing in the world is to just assume you must deserve them just for being you. And because you are one of the pretty people, you can have your opposite number without even trying all that hard, and so you don’t need to get over the shallow phase of attraction…. not yet, anyhow.

As a result, a lot of people have memories of approaching one of these attractive people and being cruelly rebuffed. And from this, they generalize to the entire gender of which the attractive person is merely the most obvious manifestation.

But if you simply wipe the fairy dust from your eyes and look around you, it will because increasingly evident that the entire gender can’t be shallow, or only the pretty people would ever hook up, form relationships, and get married. And nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is that most people do find someone. Most people do marry at least once in their life, most people do date and end up at least in medium-term relationships, most people do not die lonely.

When you realize this, it becomes clear that this notion of the other gender’s (or your own gender’s, for us homosexuals) supposed unbreakable shallowness is not a true observation based on reality, but rather, a convenient excuse to not bother trying.

No massive generalization of a large slice of humanity can possible be true in the face of the vast scope of human diversity, and that goes double at least when you are talking about fully one half of the entire human race on Earth.

Sure, some ladies and some gentlemen are very shallow. Generally, they are the pretty ones, who have never had to be anything but shallow, or the highly immature ones who are still trapped in the moth’s death spiral, eternally attracted to the pretty flames that will only burn them again and again.

Don’t be like them. Ignore the shallow pretty ones. Their gifts are no prize in the long run, when they begin to grow old and lose their looks and realize people didn’t really love them for who they are after all, and they have no idea what do with their life now anyhow.

Strike them from your mind, and instead, look for the one thing that really matters in love : finding a person you like to spend time with. Because beauty fades in time, not just in life but in the mind’s eye, and no mater how beautiful they are, after a while it will become ordinary to you, and you will be stuck with whether or not they make you happy, and vice versa.

Stay out of the shallow end of their gene pool, and stop thinking you know what your perfect lover will look like, or even be like.

Just find someone who makes you happy. Nothing else matters at all.

The word “natural” doesn’t mean a god damned thing.

Think about it. What does “natural” mean? It means “that which is found in nature”.

But everything is found in nature. A skyscraper is just as natural as a tree. Plastic is just as natural as sea foam. That is because nature never ends. The whole idea that there is nature, or even Nature, and then there is us is completely specious. We never left Nature. You can’t. Everything in the Universe is natural, everything that happens is natural, all that is,was, and will be is equally the product of the exact same natural forces which make bees and kittens and pretty desert sunsets.

Of course, you wouldn’t know that by looking around in our grocery stores. Natural is the hottest meaningless Madison Avenue buzzword of all time, and it shows no sign of relenting in the slightest. Everything from produce to shampoo to novelty seat covers are eager to tell you how “natural” and “organic” they are in order to convince you that they are somehow better than those nasty unnatural things which violate the laws of nature their competitors are pushing.

Everything that I have said for “natural” goes double for “organic”. If a human being can derive nutrition from it, it’s organic, whether it’s an “organically farmed” mushroom or a bag of Doritos. Just as much human intervention is involved in bringing you that mushroom as in bringing you the Doritos. There is no logical, scientific, or even sensible difference between an organically grown food item and the same thing made by more modern methods. There is no “vitamin nature” we all lack.

And I think it’s this rejection of human intervention that really bothers me about this modern fetish for “natural” and “organic” products. Somehow, in the last fifty years ago, we have all become convinced that the touch of our fellow human beings is inherently corrupting and destructive, and that the less we have done to something, the better for us it is, somehow.

It is as thought the entire scientific revolution never happened. The joke is trite now, but it’s true : our ancestors a mere two hundred years ago ate completely natural, organic foods and had active, outdoor lifestyles, and they died before reaching the age of forty. We live nearly twice that, and yet we now think the progress and technology which allows that is somehow suspect.

No doubt, in the march of science and commerce, mistakes have been made which resulted in food which was less nutritious than what came before. But that was not due to the destructive and “unnatural” evilness of science, it was due to an incomplete understanding of the human body and what it needs. It was not too much science but too little that caused these mistakes to be made.

And for every such mistake, there are dozens of ways in which modern science has made what we eat and drink and use in our daily lives far healthier than the crude and disease-ridden things of the past. From the days of Pasteur, scientific progress has made what we consume safer, cleaner, better looking, better tasting, and in all ways simply superior.

If that’s the case, then where does this modern, pervasive rejection of science and embracing of the specious notion of the superiority of the “natural” and “organic” come from?

Part of it, I think, is simple historical nostalgia. When we are discontent with modern life, we seek to place the blame, and the future is frightening and uncertain, so it is far easier and more comforting to imagine that there was a time when things which were much better Way Back When, and this involved an inherent need to think we went terribly wrong somewhere.

But I think it goes far deeper than that. I think modern life alienates us from nature, and leaves us with a deep mysterious craving for the connection with nature we once had. It is a mysterious craving because it does not map directly onto our usual sense of the needs of the body and the mind, and therefore comes from that dark and disturbing realm between consciousness and the subconscious. From an everyday point of view, a craving for nature seems entirely illogical and insane. We have everything we could possibly want in modern society, right?

But I think, deep down, every creature has a sense of what their environment is supposed to be like. Evolutionarily, this makes sense. It would keep a given species in the environment to which they are best adapted, and lead them back to it when they wander too far.

With us crazy human beings, however, not only had modern society, with the best of intentions and for the most part, the best of results, has caused us to live in environments which cut us off from the complex signals that tell us we are in the right place.

We try to compensate. We have lawns and flower boxes and gardens and parks and so on. We vacation in places of “natural beauty” in order to soothe this deep feeling of being out of place. We decorate our homes with pictures of nature. We bring animals into our homes to live with us.

But still, we crave, and it is this craving that is callously manipulated by the forces of consumerism in order to get us to buy their crap instead of someone else’s crap.

Ignore whether it’s “natural” or “organic” or “naturally sourced”. That is just bullshit magical thinking. Ask whether it is good for you, and judge without prejudice.

Because having an open mind and asking questions is a natural thing for a human being to do.

I have been playing a lot of a quirky and silly little title for the Wii called Little King’s Story lately, and it has been giving me monarchic thoughts. (Give me a game where I am a King with a castle and such, and all my latent control freak fantasies come out. )

And, seeing as the many worlds theory of quantum physics states, in part, that all things which are possible are, in fact, happening somewhere in some alternate universe, then I can safely assume that, no matter how massively improbable it is, some day, there will exist a future in which I have become king of the entire world, free to remake the entire of humanity’s sole home as I see fit and turn this globe of ours into my vision of paradise on Earth.

And if that is the case, some things are definitely going to change around here, people.

Here, then, is a partial list of the sorts of things I will change… in that future where I am king!

1. Actual Grammar Police. I’m not kidding. If I am king, language standards are definitely going to improve. People are getting away with a lot of abuse of the English Language these days, and if I am Large and In Charge, that’s got to end. There would be an actual police force comprised of tough-minded grammarians whose sole duty is to strongly encourage the proper use of the English language in all public arenas. But being a gentle king who knows this is pretty much his own petty obsession rather than a real actual Global Issue or anything, these police would be given only one weapon to use in their endless with against grammar crime : sarcasm. They would roam the streets and ruthlessly mock all bad signage and other public errors, and document it all on video, naming namings and laying blames. They would have no power to issue anything more than a non-binding citation, yet their powers of sarcasm would make them feared all over the world, and this fear alone would be enough to get people to stop using quotes for emphasis, make friends with the proper use of the apostrophe, and otherwise respect this wonderful language we speak by using it in a proper and logically consistent manner. A Public Fact Checking Bureau There would be an official government bureau in charge of establishing the truth about legitimately verifiable things. It would be fantastically conservative in what it was willing to declare true and have no other function that to provide both my government and the public a place to get reliable and objective information about things. It would be like factcheck.org combined with Wikipedia, but with a lot more funding and an official government mandate. It would not be in the enforcement business at all. People could still say and think whatever the hell they wanted without fear of consequences or reprisals. There would simply be one publicly accessible encyclopedic database which would be run by the most reliable, dutiful, serious, and above all boring people I could find which would contain the Official Truth, as best as it is possible to establish it through objective research and diligent fact gathering. And over time, hopefully, this public encyclopedia bureau would gain in reputation for objectivity, fairness, and trustworthyness, and thus truly fulfill its function as a repository of fact for such things for which objective truth can be derived.
2. Rock star scientists. My administration would be enthusiastically and wholeheartedly pro-science. I truly believe that science is capable of solving a lot of our problems, including the ones science itself caused (*cough* *global climate change* *cough cough*), and I would quite quickly organize concentrated scientific efforts to solve problems like world hunger and rising energy demand that would make the Manhattan Project look like a lazy brunch meeting of first year science students. The stakes are high and we cannot afford to put anything less than our full effort into these problems. And luckily, as king, I would be able to put these things into action without having to listen to or placate the dozens of well-funded industry special interest groups who hold sway over modern politicians. Do it because I say so, and I don’t give the tiniest and most diarrhetic of shits what it does to your profits. I don’t care if it puts you out of business. I’ll hire your staff, pay them better, and put them to work on something that helps humanity for a change. I get the feeling they might well thank me for it.
   

Those are just some of the many ideas I will implement in that heady future somewhere in the skein of reality where I become king of the world.

It won’t happen here, but it will happen somewhere! Quantum physics says so, honest!

Being a thoughtful and creative person, I have spent a lot of time thinking about creativity. What makes one person more creative than another? Why is it that creative people have so many emotional problems? Why is it that creative people seem to have a lot of characteristics in common?

First off, I think it boils down to a tension between two extremes, the creative mindset, and the ordering mindset. And the difference between these two mindsets, on a cognitive level, lies in how they treat barriers.

The ordering mindset is optimized towards separations and distinctions. It seeks out the differences between things and seeks to put all things in categories, structures, systems, and orders. It is a mindset supremely capable of dealing with a great deal of disparate information and sorting and comprehending it in an orderly and systematic way. It is drawn to clear lines, sharp distinctions, known procedures, established facts, and “a place for everything and everything in its place”. It is repelled by ambiguity, judgment calls, blurred boundaries, uncharted territory, and things which defy categorization. It is most comfortable in small mental spaces and feels anxious and unsafe without a great deal of predictability and order surrounding it.

Above all, it is a mind built for order.

The creative mindset, on the other hand, is optimized towards making connections. Hence, the creative mind wants their to be as few barriers and distinctions in its contents possible. Walls only impede the discovery of connections between things that is the heart of creativity. The creative mind is always seeking to break down barriers, find connections between things which seem unconnected, and seeks wide open mental spaces in which to experiment with large ideas and find those elusive connections. It is attracted to ambiguity, mystery, inconsistency, and things which defy categorization. It avoids sharp distinctions, restrictions, ordered systems, strict definitions, and limited possibilities. The creative mind feels anxious and trapped in the sort of ordered and defined space that the ordering mind finds comforting. The creative mind finds safety not in order but in its own maneuverability, like an animal that relies on its speed and adaptability to survive, and thus avoids anything that smells like a cage or a trap.

This are, of course, two polar opposites, and the bell curve of life dictates that most people will be some mix of these two extremes. Nobody is entirely ordered or completely creative (except perhaps autistics and schizophrenics, respectively) and I am not trying to pigeonhole people under labels and definitions.

As a creative person, that would be anathema to me.

I am simply pointing out an interesting axis which I think yields fruitful results when applied to the examintion of the human psyche.

Most people, as I have said, will be a mixture of the two poles, but most people will be more on one side of the spectrum than the other. I’ve already said that I am a creative person. Rules, restrictions, and definitions tend to bore, depress, and/or frighten me. It would be easy, therefore, for me to look down on the orderly types as dull and colorless and us creatives types as being ever so much better.

But I also know my own weaknesses too well to permit such provincialism. I know that, for one thing, my creative mind makes it difficult to make decisions sometimes. The ability to see a myriad of possibilities in every situation comes at the cost of having those many possibilities to choose from when a course of action is needed. Ordered minds rarely face such indecision. They see a clear route through every maze and are only stopped when they encounter something so ambiguous or unknown that their existing tools of ordering and categorization can’t conquer it. Then, ironically, they need someone like me.

So clearly, both mindsets have their strengths and weaknesses, and the world simply could not keep turning without both of them. We need the ordered minds to keep things straight, to create order out of chaos, to deal with situations which required a strong sense of order and regularity, and to keep everything together. We need creative minds to chart new territories, to push the boundaries, to test the known facts for weaknesses and hence improve the strength of the system as a whole.

To conclude, I think that, in the spirit of greater human harmony and understand, it would be a great boon to humanity if we creative types strove to understand the ordering types and accept that they have their value and their role as well, and for them to do the same for us.

It’s how we create greater order in the world!