Introduction

Since the time the human race achieved the technological ability to provide the basic necessities of life for everyone on the planet, the chief obstacle to universally beneficial social change has been our general ignorance of the subliminal mechanisms at work, both inside our bodies and out, that keep us repeating destructive patterns of behavior no matter our conscious intentions to the contrary.

The purpose of most of the material on this website is, therefore, to highlight and begin to figure out, whether obliquely through fiction or more directly through nonfiction, just what these mechanisms are and how they might work.

What Happened?

I am 74 now. That means I was born in 1947, a few hundred years into what our historians call “The Industrial Revolution.” The Industrial Revolution is all tied up with the discovery of immense amounts of fossil fuels under the ground, and their subsequent technological application and use by us.

This was the big thing that happened and has spurred most of the rest of the big changes that have been happening ever since.

In 1947, there weren’t much more than a billion or two people living on the planet. This means it took human beings every year of their life on earth from the time they set foot on it until 1947 to reach that number of people. Today, just 71 years later, there are over 7 billion people living on the planet — the very same planet or, if you like, piece of real estate. As some have phrased it, this has resulted in a world often characterized as having “too many people, and not enough stuff” — a situation in some ways not unlike that of times past, but now for very different reasons.

Although lots of new inventions have been created by us — many with the help of the fossil fuels we discovered — to help us use the stuff here on earth more efficiently, we still are dealing with essentially the same amount of natural stuff we’ve always had, that is, land, air, water, soil, etc., while there are too many of us to mutually enjoy the use of it properly.

As has been pointed out so clearly in the documentary film A Crude Awakening, as well by many other publications and pundits, the introduction of fossil fuels (oil, coal, etc.) and their application into our lifestyle gave us the ability to burn tons more energy every day. Whereas before, humans had to go through their days’ work and play using just one day’s worth of sunlight energy, now suddenly they could extract energy from fossil fuels (containing “power” compressed over thousands or maybe even millions of years) to do a whole lot more of everything, a whole lot faster. This included, among other things, having a lot more babies, and also learning ways to keep them alive a lot longer.

Now these gigantic changes in the way most of us live didn’t happen overnight, exactly, at least not in any way that we humans could easily perceive. But even though the human lifespan has more than doubled during the past few hundred years, even 70 years is not so long a time to really understand and suitably adapt to many of those changes.

So the main idea is this: while technologically we have made these incredible changes, in key ways we haven’t changed our behavior very much at all. So, while we have gotten really much smarter about some things, we wound up looking a lot stupider in other respects.

Our attitudes toward warfare and scarcity are good examples. While we have gotten a lot better at waging war and perpetuating scarcity, we have been very slow to realize we don’t need to have either of them anymore, and our continued use of them as mainstays of our culture is dooming our race to a quick horrible death at the very moment, historically, when a more intelligent use of our new technologies could bring peace and prosperity to practically everyone in a few generations.

So that’s the really new thing that’s happened so very recently. And so I put up this website mainly to offer, in the form of various kinds of writings, a discussion and explanation of this change, of what’s been happening since, and of some of the new behavioral technologies I’ve stumbled upon. I think that, if we as a race were to really start understanding and applying these new ideas and behaviors together, in cooperation with our Industrial-Revolution technologies, we could fix much, if not most, of what’s wrong with us, e.g., violence, poverty, etc.

I realize this is a very big subject, with a lot of different parts to it. But it’s a big world — though not as big as we think it is — with, now especially, a practically inconceivable number of people in it. So naturally, while any more general solutions I have to offer may be relatively simple, learning how to apply them is going to be rather complicated. Not impossible, so long as we haven’t done too much damage to our ecology so far (and I don’t think anyone knows for sure about that) — no, perhaps not impossible, but certainly complicated.

And so many of the key writings and references on this website will seem at times difficult, weird, strange, new, or maybe just hard to follow. These have been big, rapid changes we’ve all, including myself, been going through, and that is necessarily reflected in some of the new ideas and perceptions I’ve gotten about what we need to do about changing our ecological, psychological and sociological behavior.

But if the changes we needed to make had been obvious or at all easy to understand, we probably would have made them already. And, as I see it, these personal and group changes are now more necessary than ever, not just to peace and prosperity, but to our very survival as a species. This is a particularly tall order since we have thousands of years of pre-Industrial-Revolution social development and psychological habits to at least modify, if not just change altogether, and quite quickly. So it should come as no surprise that there is still a huge amount of resistance, both personal and institutional, to making such changes (and I certainly don’t always exclude myself from this).

Four Endeavors

Since I consider a strong, immediately-experienced and regularly refreshed spiritual foundation prerequisite to positive outcomes in all of the following, I haven’t felt the need to explicitly mention it anywhere other than here. In general, I think of it as a “given,” though one most of us could often keep in mind and heart more often.

While to work at all these four endeavors must be engaged in more or less at the same time, I’ve ordered them from what I think is probably the least to the most difficult. The fact that even the first of them seems exceedingly difficult gives some idea of just how enormous (though not necessarily impossible) the task of saving ourselves will be.

Without further ado, here they are:

1. Balancing our planet’s population/resource ratios to create a universally life-sustaining and generally life-enhancing relationship — beginning with an honest reckoning of humanity’s current “ecological footprint.”

2. Transitioning from nonrenewable to renewable energy sources as quickly as humanly possible.

3. Coming to an intimate and well-educated understanding of the myriad ways the human body, culture, and society interact on a subliminal, “mind-body” level — and how those interactions drive our everyday behaviors in ways that have become far more of a detriment than a benefit to all of us. (See the chapters of my first book, Towards A Biology of Culture.)

4. Sort of “attached at the hip” to number 3: the development by each of us of a deep and personal understanding of how the language we use to speak, listen and think subliminally plays an integral part in subverting even our most well-intentioned, conscious efforts to change our lives for the better. There’s no arguing that language is not only a cognitive necessity but also a prime mover and bulwark in much if not all that’s good about human civilization. At the same time, so long as we remain unaware of its more insidious side, during times of rapid change like the one we currently inhabit its subliminal workings can continue to trigger the sort of self-nullifying, if not self-destructive, behavior that could lead to no sort of future we would want. (See the language essays and podcasts.)

Of course, as Buckminster Fuller, Donella Meadows, and others have already made clear, the way in which we apply our new, amazing technologies constitutes a choice. That’s why, in addition to self-knowledge and book learning, solid spiritual connection and guidance is so important, if we are going to learn to use our technological advances to truly benefit humanity.

This website is dedicated, through imagination and analysis, to an investigation of the psychological and linguistic obstacles to social change — and to turning those obstacles into catalysts. Those who want an early, relatively concise take on the sort of thing this site aims to demonstrate can start with the short essay Language In 3-D.

— Lee Strauss