Two nights ago, while dreaming, I was seeking to understand the mathematics of words, searching for the equations in language, wondering how music connects them both.  In the dream, the answer felt to be related to evolution.  The answer emerged.  The answer is the price of homemade baked goods at the farmer’s market. (I don’t know what that means.}

Scientists are stumped by how few genes there are in the human gnome.  Some less somatically sophisticated species display a far larger library of genes.  Having a complete gnome is not leading to deep insight as regards our disabilities, diseases, talents or evolution.  Over and over again, difficult-to-understand genetic riddles are ascribed to not-yet-understood, multiple gene effects.

Consider this.  By understanding music, we can understand how genetics works.  This is because the human connection to music is a direct reflection and result of the ontogenetic processes created by our genetic algorithm.

Genes engender a growing being with cells that pay astonishingly close attention to the behavior of contiguous cells and the environments beyond the growing body.  Growth is all about receiving and displaying information, not following a template.  As each cell splits and acquires a series of tasks to perform based upon location and other information, it is passing on a musical score to be adjusted depending on how the other instrumentalists participate.

This is perhaps a case when a metaphor and that which the metaphor represents begin to merge.

Genes are a score or script outlining a specific symphony or performance, yet each gene also retains a score or script that includes an almost infinite number of ways for each instrumentalist to adjust to changes in the performance of the other players.

The human gnome is a score with instructions on how to vary that score and under what circumstances.

This music is most obvious in the womb when environmental information is heavily influencing ontogenetic outcomes.  This is perhaps the case with every species on the planet.  Humans, members of a species profoundly impacted by neoteny, have experienced over the course of tens of thousands of generations the emergence of this ontogenetic womb music in postbirth life.  Not only have ancient forebear embryo features, such as hairlessness and huge head-to-body ratios, prolonged to appear in great great great… grandchildren, but ancient embryo characteristics have manifested in contemporary adults.

In other words, the remarkable flexibility of cells in embryos to embrace change and adjust growth has emerged in aspects of human personality that include an obsession with music, which reflects exactly how it is that genes compel cells to participate in the creative process.  When compared to genetic process, music displays an isomorphic, or almost identical, dynamic.  Both display an unfolding across time of information influenced by the environment.

Music rhythms reflect human heartbeats, human breathing and the breadth and limits of human footwork.  We all go into a trance with music, often experiencing shifts in identity characterized by identification with groups larger than our selves.  For some, music bridges to spiritual experience, featuring shifts in identity beyond the group.  To ally oneself with music is to experience one’s boundaries becoming less firm.  The experience of multiple-person musical give-and-take allows us to feel as a cell might when instructed by the gnome to dance a person into existence.

Consciousness, or identity, is not nearly as stable as we often think.  Every night we slide into alternatives.  Music encourages shifts in identity.  This is not by chance.  Who we are as beings integrated into a larger society and ecology has a lot to do with our abilities to change.  This is a direct result of our living lives informed by the dynamics of the womb.  To understand genetics, we have only to pay attention to how we dance.

In other words, I am looking for useful stories.

I am coming to the conclusion that the world is so complex and so gorgeously constructed that any theory–that is what I specialize in, creating theories–can only be a temporary, partial explanation.  It feels obvious that the universe was created by god as artist.  It is while deeply engaged in the artistic process that the universe feels most understandable.

So, I look for patterns.  If I had been trained in music, I would be composing and playing tunes.  That not being the case, I compose and play the patterns evident in the world around me.  Theory formation is so like music because those patterns I draw out from my environment are so deeply influenced by my culture, the information available, my sense structure (sight, feeling, hearing, taste and smell) and my personal experiences.  The theories I come up with are not arbitrary, but they are deeply informed by my place in space and time.

Whereas a musicians works with notes, bars, phrases and musical sentences, I as a theorist play with fads, trends and transformations.  I parse out time by examining social pattern durations and look for the beautiful, subtle and complex larger patterns evident in this world that I see, hear and feel.

There is as much truth in a theory as there is reality in a song.  Every song serves to communicate emotion and create a consensus about how the world works.  Every theory seeks to consolidate structure long enough to make it useful to perform predictions.  Time is an issue.  Reality changes as time flows, and a theory can grow dissonant, like a song developed for ancient ears.

I am an artist playing with fads, trends and transformations, constructing melodies that make it easy for listeners to feel how the music sounds in the moments coming up.

The narrative fine arts (music, dance, song, storytelling) often allow the participant to predict the future in a fashion that makes it feel like what is being created is by both artist and participant.  The artist sets up a structure that allows specific futures to unfold.  The performer and the audience member experience closure at the conclusion of one of the many predicted pathways.

Concluding that reality is so deep, subtle, complex and ever changing as to be ungraspable except by works of art, I would suggest that science might be usefully redefined as art.  Let’s give up this idea that something can be known.  Reality can only be romanced.

What probably began the runaway loop were females selecting for superb dancers and sound makers with males responding over time with astonishing feats of endurance and acumen. Females become far more appreciative of the nuances the males could exhibit because females were being selected over time for acute judgmental abilities. Those females with subtle evaluative capacities mated with the most adroit male performers.

Somewhere along the line, females began selecting for males with talents for escalating pattern exhibition unrelated to any particular or specific stimuli trajectory.

Females selected for creativity.

There is no fiction in biology. Natural systems evolve within firm boundaries such as climate, food sources, natural disasters and competing peers. Now humans began operation in an alternative, complementing universe of pattern exhibition and recognition, having crossed a line where what exists, exists, but not in the biological world.

With imagination humans could perform feats of pattern recognition and exhibition in more than one time and more than one place at the same time. Females were selecting for imagination. Females were selecting not just the creativity to generate novel variations on a theme but for an ability to generate new themes.

There is runaway sexual selection and there is careening-crazily-everywhere-at-once sexual selection. Well, not actually everywhere. Just two places. Sexual selection split the human brain.

Not long before the diaspora from Africa, the human brain shifted from random-handed gesture-users thinking almost always in the here and now to right-handed speech-users with a slightly smaller right hemisphere and a smaller corpus callosum hemispheric bridge. The new brain could be two places at once by decreasing communication between the hemispheres and assigning speech mostly to just the left side. With the emergence of a facility manipulating place and time, sexual selection focused on the productions of imagination. What we call “consciousness” was born. What emerged was actually split consciousness. “Consciousness” had always been present. The striving of consciousness to engage in pattern recognition and exhibition for millions of years, sexual selection, led to split consciousness and the eruption of imagination.

Imagination is the sexualization of experience by creating time.

So, we’re maybe 50,000 to 100,000 years after the split, having had some time to explore the repercussions of using an imagination to navigate a biological world with real bodies. One of the challenges is that our love of stories, products of the imagination, stories exhibiting our ability to be in more than one time or more than one place at the same time, lead us to confuse the conclusions of our stories with the way the world works. Biology corrects our widest wanderings but still we get into trouble. For example, the financial world meltdown.

We are storytellers. That is our nature. We sexually selected ourselves to display astonishing abilities to makes things up. When those that control financial assets tell stories that enormous amounts of money can easily be made with little risk and involve no products or services but only the estimations of relative value over time, that is a story. When the story meets biology–biology tells us that everything changes and everything is interconnected–the story will suffer.

So, now we have a new story. The new story says we need regulations, just like nature regulates itself. In this new integrated global economy, integrated like our natural global ecology, we need constraints, natural constraints, like nature uses.

The first law of the new economy? Trade what’s real.

If humans evolved through matrifocal societies, driven by female sexual selection, what would have been the origin and nature of that dynamic?

“All at once Evered charged forward, leapt up to seize one of the hanging vines, and swung out over the stream in the spray-drenched wind. A moment later Freud joined him. The two leapt from one liana to the next, swinging into space, until it seemed the slender stems must snap or be torn from their lofty moorings. Frodo charged along the edge of the stream, hurling rock after rock now ahead, now to the side, his coat glistening with spray. For ten minutes the three performed their wild displays while Fifi and her younger offspring watched from one of the tall fig trees by the stream. Were the chimpanzees expressing feelings of awe such as those which, in early man, surely gave rise to primitive religions, worship of the elements?” (Goodall, Jane (1990) Through a Window. Houghlin Mifflin: Boston, pp. 241-242.)

Less overt but perhaps more evocative of our evolution is the behavior of the bonobo. Slighter than the chimpanzee, they have far fewer male demonstrations in these matrifocal societies with alpha males often the sons of the head female. Food is often exchanged for sex, and sex is frequent. Very frequent. Bonobo societies are horizontal societies sexually and in social structure. Males are not competing for dominance as intensely as in chimpanzee societies, though they still perform for sex.

Jane Goodall also describes the influence of a thunderstorm upon a male chimpanzee, propelling him into sexual display. Testosterone has powerful components of both aggression and sexuality that compel males to exhibit and then procreate. Jane Goodall observed that these behaviors appear in concert with natural phenomena such as thunderstorms and waterfalls. Now imagine rhythm as the central bridge between the sounds of nature and the sounds around which demonstrations would be engaged, sex procured and societies formed.

If we assume that the selection of neotenous features in our ancestor species often occurred in the context of matrifocal societies–small bands where fathers did not know their sons and women controlled procreation opportunities–societies driven by rituals of dance and sound, then how did this evolutionary trajectory get started?

When did rhythm and sex become allied?

Consider that it all started by the ocean.

Imagine roving bands of hominids coming occasionally to the ocean side. The sound of crashing breakers fills the males with the reverence and desire characteristic of the chimpanzees that Goodall observed. A good time was had by all.

It happens again. The band journeys to the ocean, the males get worked up, infants are created.

The rhythm of the ocean becomes associated with the sound of sex. Then, away from the ocean, a male gets the idea to stamp his feat to the rhythm of the ocean. The other males join him. By stamping in unison, the males arouse the band. The males with the best sense of rhythm, those that can most powerfully evoke feelings of fear/reverence, get to mate.

Ritual is born.

I am a practical mystic. I don’t consider something to be true unless I’ve experienced it personally, and even then I accept it on a relative basis. If it’s true for me, maybe it’s true for others. Maybe not.

A life characterized by terror and anxiety propelled me to search for comfort and integration. Studying Castaneda starting around 1971, I launched a nighttime career of lucid dreaming. Not particularly adept, I still established dream as a refuge and a resource that over decades has provided both solace and instruction about myself.

In the 1980s, I explored hypnotherapy after becoming a practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, concentrating on the work of Milton Erickson. Through a combination of deep dream exploration and hypnosis studies, I acquired an ability to shift consciousness fairly easily. Unconscious material would rise to the surface with relatively few barriers. As an artist, this ability is useful. As a mystic, this ability feels nurturing.

Dream themes have started and developed, unfolding over years or decades, established closure and then moved on, communication successfully imparted. I feel accompanied by my unconscious. I am provided these gifts of story and then often insight. Sometimes, while still dreaming, the meaning of the dream is offered.

In the last two or three years, I have remembered few dreams. My life has acquired a quality of dream that seems to make my remembering dreams less necessary. Awake, I feel I’m acting a role, dancing a dance, reading from a script provided me by the producers of my dreams, except the productions are unfolding in society. I’ve experienced a shift from receiving gifts from and engaging in conversations with my unconscious to receiving gifts and engaging in conversations with consciousness. It’s as if dream has expanded to occupy the everyday.

Dream themes have emerged in life. What formerly only occurred while I was sleeping now happens in the everyday.

In the way I used to face and embrace my dreams that resulted in discoveries about myself, I now listen, watch and feel for meaning in the productions of society. Joseph Campbell and C. G. Jung were pioneers in the interpretation of myth. Their teachings apply to our everyday. In contemporary society, we produce myth like the spring makes dandelions. We are hardly even aware that most of what we make is myth.

Having spent so many years traveling the corridors of dream and having stepped outside, I see that the same dynamic is engaged. So, I feel/listen to the world at large in the way I’ve grown used to listening to myself. The world feels the same outside as it feels inside. The world is filled with story, interpretations of experience, experience obfuscated by our unique culture, experience confused by the way our species has evolved.

Stories are everywhere. We bathe in stories when sleeping or awake. It fascinates me what life was like before the story when we were babies, when we were first learning gesture in Africa, when we were autistic. Stories are the mother’s milk of being human. Consider what we might be drinking when we are grown.

The fifth stage loops around to stage one, what we think of as competitive evolution, accompanied by awareness.

1) natural selection
2) sexual selection (selecting for pattern when seeking a mate)
3) human sexual selection (selection for novel pattern when seeking a mate)
4) art (selecting for novel pattern outside of mate selection)
5) awareness of the selection or creative process

Story has structure. Lifted from the infinite associational matrix of experience, a story allows the traveler to follow a single strand from a beginning through a middle to an end. Whether the story is a joke or the history of a civilization, the story’s pilgrim arrives at the destination a changed person. Somehow, experience has been enhanced.

Besides a beginning, a middle and an end, a story also provides a circle. A convention that is almost a compulsion is a theme or feature of the beginning of the story that is repeated at the story’s end. This story-telling device is used across cultures across the world. This technique could be looked at as a signal that the tale is about to halt. Perhaps, like the hero’s journey, it grew from ancient myths and legends where the protagonist returns home with gifts. It could be said, when telling stories, that the destination is where the journey started.

I would suggest that deeply embedded in our personal, social and biological psyche is the circle, the ouroboros, the transforming of a single narrative thread into a round. With spoken language so deeply constrained from communicating the non-narrative nature of reality, this simple device creates a simulated whole. A larger sphere is suggested by the connecting of the end to the beginning.

In other words, the five-step principle of evolution is reproduced with many of the stories, communications, jokes and messages transmitted from one person to another. This reproduction is one way, as a species, that we pray. It is secular homage to our origins, our evolution and our awareness of this process. Telling these stories, we participate in the creative process that the stories themselves, through their construction, describe.

There is a five-step evolution continuum that begins with natural selection and ends with consciousness becoming self aware. Only, it was always so. We have been accompanied from the start.

I had several favorite stories when I was a child. Yurtle the Turtle convinced his colleague turtles to allow him to achieve a greater and greater height by standing on the backs of his shelled associates. Disaster at the end. But not before the reader got a bird’s eye view of Turtleland. It reminds me of Newton’s suggestion that his accomplishments were achievable only because he was able to stand on the shoulders of his predecessors. In science, there are still moments of “all fall down.”

Our stories stack, back to back, not unlike an almost infinite pile of turtles. The philosopher Ken Wilber uses a stacking-turtle metaphor to describe how evolutionary scales nest and stack. There is a mirroring between the nested stages of social evolution and the stories that accompany those stages. The impact of competing societal stages can be experienced by stories that are told.

Perhaps the most classic tale of clashing societies is how the now lost stories, rituals and traditions of the prepatriarchal goddess cultures were demonized by their Indo-European conquerors. Snakes and serpents were integral to the symbology of the ancient, matriarchal societies. The victor writes history, in this case rewriting herstory, so that serpents morphed into dragons killed by heroes rewarded with an adulating wife.

During the Carter Administration Iran Hostage Crisis, I observed a political cartoon showing Khomeini, head of Iran, as a giant octopus with tentacles snaking out past Iran’s borders. Not noted by the cartoonist was that 25 years earlier, in 1953, the American government overthrew the Iranian democracy to install a head of country that would allow American and British petroleum corporations to do business there. Yesterday, while talking to a client in a hot dog stand, I noted on the restaurant TV CNN doing a history of the conflict between Iran and the U.S. As background for the present conflict, CNN’s history started in 1979.

Where we choose to begin and end the stories that we tell has everything to do with the message we assign them.

Carl Sagan has suggested that humans’ negative focus on serpent/dragon tales have biological origins in our fear of being poisoned over the course of our evolution. I would agree that there are biological informants to the stories that we make. The most profound biological imperative is that stories require a single narrative stream of information with a beginning and an end. As we know from dream, this structure is not the only way of receiving or imparting information. Very close to the language centers of the brain is the place where we process rhythm. Quite possibly, as language bridged over from gesture, with information being communicated by a combination of expression and hand movement, language transformed into speech in our brains, where we were making and listening to music. What would be the effect of how we tell and listen to stories, informed by a part of our brain that evolved making and listening to music? In music, there is a single, over time, thread of information with a limited number of complementing subthreads. In other words, a story is a song. A story is not reality, not even close. Yet we use the stories we tell to deeply inform how the world works.

I read yesterday that a couple generations ago, someone said that all models are wrong, but some models are useful. Models are wrong because they are stories. Some stories are more useful than others.

Perhaps the most useful story of all is the story we can tell ourselves that suggests that a story is a lie.

Words pop up and quickly disappear, having served their purpose, such as “dynamite, totally, far out, awesome,” though “awesome” may be lingering for a while longer. I think I’m the only person I know that still uses “far out.”

Most of my adult life, the words “fantastic, incredible, unbelievable, amazing” have served to communicate generic wonder. Lately, noting what might be described as word fatigue for the previous set, there seems to be an increase in frequency of use for three additional words: “astonishing, remarkable, extraordinary.” I suspect those three words sort of meandered over from common British usage. The British make almost every word sound like it has more meaning.

It is no accident that words are often invented by teens and young adults, sexual beings without permanent mates. This age is when music drives our lives and souls and is able to explain the feelings and experiences conventional culture seems opaque to. Dancing, we invent new moves. Our musical tastes compel new tunes. It’s as if every moment we’re wrestling with the challenge of communicating both our uniqueness and our allegiance to what our immediate tribe most reveres.

Two currents inform this process of sitting on the edge of invention and assimilation. Mass media homogenize class and culture, massaging regional dialects and accents into softer, less idiosyncratic versions of their former selves. This election cycle has revealed that the mountains of Kentucky hold some of the most racially polarized whites in the country, Democrats unable to vote for a black man. Mass media homogenization has been so subtle and so powerful that this prejudice is the exception to the rule of relatively universal tolerance for a black man president, relative to where we were 50 years ago. Where goes language, so goes society. We’re all sounding the same and thinking the same thoughts.

The second current manifests in the several dozen musical subgenres serving several dozen groups of subcultural demographics. Fifty years ago, there was rock, pop, jazz, blues, classical, rhythm and blues, country, gospel, folk and a couple of others I’m forgetting. We’re watching a homogenizing society revel in subcultural idiosyncrasy. The fashion and accessories business has followed this path that music pioneers. Stand at Clark and Belmont in Chicago and watch several fashion/music demographics stride by in any given minute.

Two currents. Two waves.

In previous entries, I’ve noted biological, societal and ontogenetical evidence of evolution unfolding in complementing waves. Neoteny manifests creative impulses by drawing a compulsion to originate forward in time, to manifest in the physiology or behavior of descendants. For example, a chimpanzee infant, surmised to be similar to a human progenitor infant, often walks upright, has a large brain relative to body size, a small jaw relative to head size and a goofy or playful disposition. Those four features (there are over 30) are all now evident in the adult stage of human beings. Neoteny is the biological evolutionary process of prolonging rates of maturation, and adjusting the timing of maturation, so that ancestor infant features evidence themselves in contemporary adults. We might also say that the proliferation of subcultures in American society today reveals a neotenous societal impulse with invention running amok among our young. Novelty is appearing along with new words to describe the changes.

Astonishing subgenres emerge with remarkable new words being invented to describe extraordinary developments.

The other wave, homogenization, if following the pattern uncovered earlier in these entries, should be working its way backward from the older or more established forces in society. Indeed, this movement seems to be the case. Corporations, by controlling most of mass media, have established a template that the rest of us can ally with. It’s the idea that if we express our independence by the products we purchase, we become unique by what we own. The media that the message is expressed through (TV, radio and film) unite us all as we absorb this communication by the corporate elite. Yet, convention is not as conventional as it seems. This idea of a consumer economy is a relatively new idea. It’s an idea assimilated, disseminated and shared by almost all. It’s a new idea that has become a shared convention working its way down though society, subsuming all classes.

Even convention has its origins and is part of a process of change. It’s just hard to recognize because it moves down from the opposite direction of conception and birth. In other words, what the old folks, the folks who seem to be in control, the elites, are telling us is what they’ve learned or is new to them. It’s something they discovered. Still, these things can change.

Watch for a new convention to emerge from the proliferation of ideas emerging from the young. This convention will take time, maybe ten years. Considering the impact of the web and its unique growth, coming particularly from what the young are drawn to, watch for an imminent end of the consumer economy.

Consider what the new convention might be.

Wow. “Wow” is sort of the big bang of exclamations. It just sort of comes out, yet as a word “wow” seems to have been around forever. For me, it feels like the first word. ‘Wow” is neoteny in three letters.

In some communities, a pidgin gives birth to a creole. If children grow up listening to a previously unconnected smorgasbord of words and phrases, those children will provide those words and phrases grammar, syntax and the other civilized accoutrements of communication. In a single generation, a creole is born. Strangely, this creole is not as unique as you might imagine.

Creoles born of pidgins across the planet use an almost identical grammar, syntax and language structure. It seems that great minds think alike, in this case revealing a universality of thought. But the roots of language suggest a deeper hidden source for this way of thinking. There is only one language in the world with deep structural similarities to creoles born of pidgins.

That one language is sign language.

Sometimes when watching people talk, I become mesmerized by the movement of people’s hands. It’s obvious when watching people on the phone. A show of hand displays for a person on the line that the talker cannot see. Some people exhibit astonishing skills at hand dance. How often are we aware of people with these skills? A genius gesturer could go through life observed, but never noticed.

Very soon keyboards will disappear. Computers will become savvy enough to interpret our idiosyncratic utterances and cameras will be able to decipher our subvocalizations. It’s only a matter of time before reading fades away. In less than one hundred years, world culture will return to one characterized by speaking and listening, as digitalization stores and retrieves everything we hear and say.

And so, another great circle of societal evolution will have looped around so that a beginning re-emerges as an end. The skills and strengths of aboriginals and third world cultures–auditory story-telling societies–will become the demanded aptitude of a world culture demanding creativity and facility in the spoken word.

It is not just a new language that finds itself emerging, like waking from a dream of the future, when a creole is born that can speak the ancient slang of hands. When two humans mate from bloodlines separated by prejudice or geography, the progeny often exhibit features of the ancestor the two parents last had in common. As the world turns toward those who are skilled in communication forms not encouraged for thousands of years, parents will be producing children able to communicate across these great divides.

Watch people’s hands and listen to the melody of their words. Doing so, we’ll be able to grasp both the future and the past.

When I was training to practice therapeutic interventions, one tool was the “As If” frame. I was encouraged to guide a client to access difficult-to-integrate personal resources that could be leveraged to achieve a specific change goal. The idea was to offer a client a novel story. Framed as a story, this alternative point of view was one the client could choose to resist less. Basically, we were making sales pitches, except the therapist was speaking both to the client’s conscious mind and an unconscious that had been engaged in a particular way of doing things for particular reasons. The “As If” frame allows someone that feels like they have limited choices to have additional ways of looking at the world.

Many things did not come easy to me during training. Creating stories was not a problem. Years of relying upon comic books as a safe place to withdraw from a frightening world not only made my mind moist to fantastical interpretations but introduced me to the “As If” frame at an early age. In comic books, story lines often veered off into alternative worlds, dreams, make-believe futures, time changes, hit-on-the-head hallucinations and fever reveries that allowed the heroes to engage in actions that their personas would not allow. I can’t tell you the number of times Superman married Lois, and then the comic ended and he didn’t really marry Lois.

Stories Within Stories Within Stories.

When Gore lost in 2000, I was more than just shocked and disappointed. I felt scared. It felt to me like a story was being created by our American communal mind that required far more drama than I had been considering we’d be willing to endure. It seemed to me that a tragedy was about to engage. It was as if electing someone with good intentions was not enough to motivate the most powerful nation on the planet to face the tidal wave of problems on the way. We had decided to make a story so stark in its lessons that there could be no question of which path it was appropriate to follow. We had decided to elect an idiot as president, a representative of the corporations, and see what happens.

We decided to exaggerate all the warped thinking that created barriers to change, making it obvious where the walls were so we could tear them down. We decided to take the stories that we’d been living by since we started using language, distill them to their essence, and then watch and listen to them over and over and over again.

We were told ghost stories where the purpose of the stories was to feel frightened. We were told cornucopia fantasies that declared that giving the government no money would make the government far wealthier in the end. We were told morality tales that said that corporations and the wealthy, policing themselves, would behave not in their best interests, but in ours. We were told stories of murderers, women who would abort becoming murderers that should not be punished for the taking of a life. We were told the Muslim radicals hate us for our freedoms, that jealousy motivated our enemies and that our own behaviors could never cause someone else to hate us.

We were told the air was not dirtier, the poor were not poorer and that global warming was not a threat. Then, we were told that even though global warming was a threat, Americans did not need to change their behavior to effect a change. We were told we were not responsible.

An ocean of stories many fathoms deep. Stories nested within stories within stories. The outside thread of this ball of yarns was the story that Americans did not have to respond. Our government would fight the war, not Americans. Corporations would regulate themselves; the government would not regulate corporations. The government, corporations and Americans did not need to respond to environmental threats. Individual Americans did not need to respond to anything. The story: Americans don’t need to be responsible.

Gore lost. The repercussion of the loss is now evident in the story pushed by our idiot as King. We now see what happens when we choose to believe the story that we are not responsible.

Not just during this Administration have we been telling ourselves these tales. We’ve been believing these stories as a species since we started using language and thinking in narrative threads instead of associational fabrics. It is our telling stories that we need to stop doing on occasion, at least so we can tell when we’re telling stories.

We’re approaching the surface after deep sea diving inside of stories since the origin of language. Fresh air will at first feel foreign. Being able to have the choice to give up our stories, the air will be clean, not too globally warmed and the ocean will grow no deeper than it’s been.