Introduction

I am an observer and a good one. I also am able to process what I see, hear, and feel from the information stage to the knowledge stage. Most of what we “know” about ourselves as a species (macro) to individuals (micro) is just wrong.

Our understanding of humanity is colored by the observers’ attempts to explain it all in terms of religion, ideology or philosophy. Much of what we “know” is colored by belief, whether belief in a deity, as cause or a particular vehicle for explaining it all. These are neither unbiased nor do they address all the facts. Mostly, they address those that support the end result most fervently desired. The others are discarded. Whether you want to call it dishonesty, hypocrisy or bias, it amounts to the same thing; an incomplete picture.

Too often attempts to find answers proceed backwards. A desired answer is conceived. Facts are then marshaled to support this answer. Douglas Adams knew this better than almost anyone on the planet in the last century. He is one of the few actual thinkers we have produced in the industrial and post-industrial age in the West. Earlier in the Century, Walt Kelly was among its foremost political thinkers.

We are not who we think we are. Neither are we who we hoped we would be by now. Nor is it likely we ever will be. Our one hope is to survive long enough to escape this planet in hope other conditions elsewhere will allow our descendents to outgrow our hunter-gatherer evolution, to become some form of higher being. I see no hope here as long as we continue to struggle for self-defeating ends against each other. Truly, we are (and always have been) our own worst enemy. Until we turn this fact into knowledge, we are doomed to live and die within the same narrow spectrum of actions and thoughts as Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon man.