Hours before his killing spree, Whitman dispatched both his mother and wife with a hunting knife, taking the time to helpfully phone both their workplaces and let them know they wouldn’t be coming in that day. As if the receding humanity within Whitman was reaching out to those left behind, the note beside his wife’s body read: “After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed on me to see if there is any visible physical disorder … Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type.”

Obviously he was not well. Whitman visited a number of doctors before that fateful day, one of which noted the “massive, muscular youth seemed to be oozing with hostility” and “that something seemed to be happening to him and that he didn’t seem to be himself.” He was prescribed Valium. Whitman instead took Dexedrine.

On the fateful day Whitman packed a small picnic along with eight weapons and 700 rounds of ammunition. Once atop the clock tower he managed to methodically murder scores of scattering pedestrians for more than ninety-minutes before finally being felled by two police officers and a civilian who stormed his perch twenty stories above the terrified town. When doctors later examined his bullet-riddled body they found a pecan-sized tumor pressing against the same area of the brain affected by those diagnosed as psychopaths.

Psychopathy is an odd affliction only documented by the medical community in the last 40 years. About one percent of humanity seems to have a wiring problem with two walnut sized regions of the brain called the amygdalae that process what we recognize as human emotions. If there is a physical seat of the soul, our devine essense might have one butt cheek nestled in each of these neuro-nodules. Depending on the severity of the situation, people with psychopathy can range from mere narcissism to perceiving other humans as objects to be preyed upon.

As his illness progressed Whitman made the rare journey from human to monster and knew well something was horribly wrong. He wrote, “I talked with a doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt overwhelming violent impulses…Since then have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.”

His tumor-related break with humanity actually shows how vanishingly rare such random acts of violence are – the Austin police department didn’t even have an emergency response team at the time (they do now). Every single day, billions of people go about their business often in very close quarters without the apparent need to kill each other.

Amongst such pervasive tranquility it was easy for a newly psychopathic Whitman to plan and execute his epic rampage. He had an IQ of 139, was an expert marksman with sharpshooters badge from the Marines and the observation deck afforded him a 360-degree vantage 230 feet above the bustling campus. Some victims were picked off from an impressive distance of almost half a kilometer away.

In spite of this horrific scene, the real story here is one of humanity. Many of the wounded or killed were struck down trying to help others. A 64-year old shopkeeper Homer Kelly dragged three injured students to safety inside his store before being shot himself. Local pilot Jim Boutwell circled his plane with a police sharpshooter above the tower before being chased off by bullets and high winds. A civilian named Allen Crum made the unlikely choice to borrow a gun and storm the clock tower with the two officers who finally killed Whitman in a close range shoot out. Why did they do it?

Empathy is perhaps the most counterintuitive of emotions. In an allegedly dog-eat-dog world, why would it make sense to think of someone else – especially during life and death moments like that?

As fascism becomes newly fashionable, helping others has apparently become passé. Elon Musk - the richest human ever and perhaps biggest douchebag alive - recently observed “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”.

To understand empathy, we need to peer closer at it’s notorious opposite: psychopathy. Scientists are normally a conservative lot but Dr. Robert Hare, one of the leading experts on the subject chillingly opined, “psychopaths are social predators, and like all predators, they are looking for feeding grounds. Wherever you get power, prestige and money, you will find them.” Hare estimates that about one percent of the population is clinically empathically impaired, a condition he describes as “emotionally deafness”.

Naturally, Hollywood scriptwriters love a good psychopath. The movie industry has made many millions making normal humans feel somehow inferior to the likes of Hannibal Lector - the fictional character weirdly admired by Donald Trump. It seems common in cinema for such a super villain to not merely escape single-handed from a specially built personal prison, but to enjoy eating someone’s face in the process.

But if psychopaths are so superior to normal humans, why aren’t there more of them? Humans as a species are not merely explosively successful; we have also been around in modern form for over 100,000 years. Given that stretch of natural selection, why aren’t 50% or 100% of us psychopathic?

The reason is that always thinking of yourself is not an evolutionary advantage. Put another way, a hypothetical race of Hannibal Lectors released into the wild would quickly perish because they would not be able to trust each other. Working alone or preying on each other, our imaginary population of super villains would soon disperse, starve, freeze, or become bear food.

So how did a relatively slow, hairless ape disperse out of the tropics and dominate almost every ecosystem on the planet? In a world full of superior predators, our superpower is not shark-like self-interest. Humans are so successful because for some reason we compulsively want to help each other. Far from being a failing, our innate need to be nice is fact humanity’s greatest evolutionary asset.

Nietzsche, as existential enthusiasts know, was a father of nihilism and coined the phrase “God is dead” in reaction to what he believed was the empty hypocrisy of religious institutions. Heisman crawled a long way down the nihilist rabbit hole, spending 12 hours a day over a period of several years beavering away on his bleak terminus opus.

When he finally felt he has adequately described the many reasons that life was utterly pointless, Heisman was reportedly quite perky. He spent the days preceding blowing his brains out by cheerfully stuffing envelopes with CD copies of his dreary dissertation and arranging hundreds more to be automatically emailed after his death. For maximum ironic effect he dressed for the occasion in white tuxedo and chose Yom Kippur, the holiest day of his faith, to end his existence.

What did he hope would happen? Perhaps Heisman envisioned that others would pour through almost 2,000 unedited pages of philosophical pessimism and realize they should end it all as well – multitudes around the world putting down his carefully considered treatise and picking up a handgun in suicidal celebration of life’s futility.

While Heisman’s entire work is available for free online it has not generated much online buzz other than a satirical entry in the Encyclopedia Dramatica. The strange case of Mitchell Heisman is an extreme example of how too much thinking can literally be fatal. Humans are among the only animals that regularly decide to end their existence – our magnificent brain turning the frightening power of deductive reasoning in on itself like an imploding star.

Others have made their angst a lucrative online business. Somewhere in early 21^st century, celebrity depression not only became a thing, it became a career. An anonymous writer with the viral twitter handle So Sad Today took to social media in early 2012 to describe her ongoing battle with existential depression. Her black-humored and nakedly honest posts had such resonance she now has over 800,000 followers and a lucrative book deal.

Some recent thoughts include:

“every time

i post

a small

piece of me dies”

and

“i’m in a cult with no other members”

So-Sad-Today eventually outed herself as California-based writer Melissa Broder, likely on the insistence of her publisher. Moving beyond the confines of 140 characters she still holds forth on the same ancient questions that have plagued those who yearn to find an owner’s manual of existence, though from a decidedly millennial perspective:

I’m finding the same lack of refuge in distractions that once protected me from feelings of doom. There are ways I’ve compulsively busied myself so I didn’t have to think about deeper questions. I obsessed about my physical appearance, love, achievements. I waxed body parts, fucked with my eating, and waited for texts. I’ve never been good at watching TV, but now I feel like I’m suffocating the moment I even turn it on. It seems like a lot of these tactics are being stripped away by some unseen force. Perhaps this is what they mean on the depression questionnaire when they say, “Have you lost interest in activities you once enjoyed?” They say it like losing interest is a bad thing. But what if the truth is that those activities were always stupid, meaningless, and destructive? What if I am getting closer to a higher truth?

Several generations earlier the renowned Norwegian pessimist Peter Wessel Zapffe threw his own soul against the very same wall. Zapffe described a pervasive “cosmic panic” endemic to our species that resulted from evolutionary overkill – a mind so well armed with reason that it cleaves everything around it, including itself. This gloomy appraisal of the human condition is beautifully rendered in his famous essay The Last Messiah.

“The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by over-evolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus, it is thought for instance that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment. In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.”

Zapffe was not someone you would hire as a birthday clown. In fact, he belonged to a school of thought called anti-natalism that believed human procreation was intrinsically immoral since it could only add to inevitable universal angst.

“In accordance with my conception of life, I have chosen not to bring children into the world. A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation.”

The title of the Last Messiah was a reference to his best-case scenario for humanity. Zapffe hoped that once people fully realized the cruel futility of existence all baby-making would then cease. One fateful day far in the future the last of us would die out, finally ridding the world of the scourge of human consciousness - or as his admirer Thomas Ligotti described it, “the parent of all horrors”.

Starkly Scandinavian even by Norwegian standards, Zapffe wondered aloud why more people were not fatally afflicted as his metaphorical deer, or fall into a murderous riot of existential insanity:

Why, then, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living – because cognition gives them more than they can carry?

On our worst day, few can claim the dedication to despair of Peter Wessel Zapffe. Through his fearless philosophical inquiry, he arguably peered farther down the rabbit hole of dreaded thoughts than most in history have yet dared, and we benefit from his hard-fought vantage.

Zapffe believed that people use four main coping mechanisms to avoid succumbing to “great epidemics of madness” when faced with the terrifying reality of consciousness. All these strategies are equally futile and ultimately pointless, as is of course all existence. However, I paraphrase them below, perhaps for no other reason than to while away the minutes until inevitable oblivion.

#1) Limiting reality to something manageable - like looking at life through a soda straw. Zapffe believed people avoid exploring cosmic questions through an agreed upon code of triviality and mutual silence. “There are the rules of ‘tact,’ the mechanism being openly displayed when a man who weeps on the street is removed with police assistance.” One gets the impression that this might have happened more than once to Mr. Zapffe.

#2) Anchoring yourself to something “tangible”. I use quotes to mock the hopeful expectation of this word because the usual social constructs we surround ourselves with, like your job, wealth, family or religion might seem an unconvincing rampart to mortality as we gasp our final breath.

#3) Distraction. Something we obviously excel at in the 21^st century - this collective cell-phone staring symphony of disengagement has become a multibillion-dollar industry, encompassing everything from booze, pot, social media, mass media, Donald Trump’s hair and Taylor Swift’s hemline. The world is parsed and packaged into ever-smaller quanta of click bait, with no physical limit in sight. If you want to avoid this ADHD onslaught your only refuge might be the inside of your eyelids.

#4) Sublimation. Basically, turning angst into artistic lemonade. While Zapffe was no fan of reproduction, he obviously was invested in the intellectual offspring of his ideas. The passing on of artistic or philosophical insights is a type of procreation newly available to millions of people, and while it won’t forestall the inevitable perhaps there is more honor in facing oblivion armed only with creative courage than any of the above alternatives.

Even though his was obviously not a revolution you could dance to, Zapffe courageously faced reality as he saw it at obvious cost to his enjoyment of existence. But was he also not hobbled by the relatively impoverished understanding of the natural world of 100 years ago? He saw a stark chasm between the evolutionary flaws of humanity and the rest of creation.

All of these people are (hopefully) more fucked up than you, indulging an obsessive quest for meaning and concluding it could not be found. But what if they wrong? Can we aim higher than existential despair?

As we shall see in the following chapters, the high-water mark of scientific absolutism at the dawn of the 20^th century has since given way to some intriguing unanswered questions. Have enough strands of mystery accumulated in the ensuing years to begin to weave a more hopeful worldview? Looking closer at what we now know of the universe it seems the cosmos is strangely fixated on conjuring up admirers from the vast inanimate ingredients of her birth.

Māori mythology holds that the primal couple Ranginui and Papatūānuku representing the sky and the earth clutched each other in loving embrace until they were finally forced apart by their cramped children who eventually became the first people - forever fearing the elemental wrath of their heartbroken parents.

Sunlight flooded the dark world between the newly parted deities and Ranginui’s lonely tears filled the hollows in the earth with the rivers and seas. The children representing the gods of forests, wild food and cultivated crops, cloaked their mother in vegetation to cover her nakedness. Each morning Papatūānuku still reaches out longingly towards Ranginui with mists rising from the jungle, and storms lash the land and oceans when the separated lovers are overcome with romantic rage over their parting.

The Abrahamic creation story most famously unfolds on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512 in what many consider the greatest accomplishment of Renaissance art. Sixty feet above the eyes of the faithful are depicted vivid scenes from the Book of Genisis showing the creation of the world, water, skies and humanity

Four long years the great master toiled to represent our place in the universe, covering 12,000 square feet in almost fifty separate frescos detailing God conjuring the elements into heaven and earth, light and darkness, beasts and humans. The entire history of the world according to Christianity is depicted from creation to the last judgement, rendered in another massive fresco on the back wall. “Without having seen the Sistine Chapel one can form no appreciable idea of what one man is capable of achieving,” remarked German poet and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1787.

Almost five hundred years later came another explanation of reality in the form of what has been called the longest equation in physics. Thomas Gutierrez was a grad student at the University of California Davis in 1999 and rather than plodding away at his doctoral thesis, he indulged in a few hours of procrastination by writing out the long form equation of what has been inelegantly named the Standard Model of particle physics.

Devoid of poetry or narrative, this dense assortment of symbols apparently explains everything in the universe other than gravity and has been described as the greatest scientific achievement of the 20^th century. Teams of scientists around the world refined the mathematical model over decades that describes the interactions of the 17 known subatomic particles including quarks, leptons and bosons, as well as phantomic virtual particles that may or may not exist.

The Standard Model equation is normally used in a more concise format, but Gutierrez in his boredom was apparently the first to bother transcribing it in all its eye-glazing glory. After many millennia of philosophic inquiry, here at last is the meaning of life, the universe and everything:

Spirituality has obviously taken somewhat of a shit-kicking since Michelangelo adorned the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In a few short centuries since the Enlightenment, ancient mystical constructs have fallen away – obliterated by the ponderous progress of science that has scraped clean the lovingly tended garden of the faithful. Large portions of humanity for the first time in human history find themselves uncloaked by any blanket of common spiritual belief, trudging out of ancient sanctuary shivering naked beneath a grey agnostic sky.

We now find ourselves living in the midst of an existential emergency - a five-alarm philosophical fire perhaps more spiritually unnerving than any in the long annals of existential angst. Modern life may grant us agency and luxuries beyond that of ancient kings, but do not our fundamental mystical needs remain the same? While few would choose to return to the days when heretics were put to the stake, many still crave comparative spiritual simplicity as evidenced by the ironic renaissance of fundamentalism in many parts of the world.

What is beyond doubt is that our newfound technological powers have not made us immune to the very human ailments of despair and loneliness, or negated our innate need to somehow seek meaning in existence.

Depression affects over 120 million people around the globe each year and is particularly pernicious in the developed world. One in ten Americans endure clinical sadness sometime during their lives and only 20% of those will seek treatment. This epidemic of melancholy has ballooned by 35% in the last decade and burdens the US economy by some $230 billion annually. Researchers specializing in the morbid intersection of anguish and economics recently pegged the cumulative cost of worldwide despair at $14 trillion by 2050.

Our existential emergency is routinely fatal –almost 50,000 people end their own lives each year in the US, and about twelve times that number of desperate souls made the attempt. The rates of suicide have been growing for the last decade and now result in more lost years of life than any other ailment except cancer and heart disease.

How can humanity get our spiritual mojo back? Self compassion is a good start. We should remember that between addictive scourge of social media and the uprooting of almost every ancient narrative designed to bestow meaning, this may be one of the challenging moments humans have ever managed to slog through. If you’ve made it this far, you are a survivor.

And sometimes the best morale booster is to consider the pathetic plight of those even more fucked up than ourselves. Thankfully there is plenty of colourful examples to work with. One enterprising wretch even curated his terminal despair into elaborate performance art, penning the longest suicide note in history…

The Battle of Borodino during Napoleon’s disastrous campaign against Tsar Alexander would be a particularly poor place to materialize on September 7, 1812. Over 250,000 French and Russian troops clashed outside of Moscow in what would become the bloodiest single battle in modern history until the so-called Great War more than a century later.

Spilling about 300,000 litres of human blood (I did the math), the French army pushed their Russians foes back less than half a mile. Napoleon briefly occupied the burnt and deserted city before marching 2,500 kilometres back to France with what was left of his starving and frostbitten army.

To understand the scale of the carnage at Borodino, historian Gwen Dyer helpfully suggested imagining “a fully-loaded 747 crashing, with no survivors, every five minutes for eight hours”. At least 68,000 thousand combatants were killed or injured, including almost 80 generals on both sides. If the wounded received any medical care at all, it likely involved a bone saw and no painkillers. Napoleon’s chief surgeon Baron Dominique Jean Larrey personally severed 200 arms and legs in a single day with only brandy and burly orderlies to restrain his shrieking patients.

The American Civil War likewise produced a staggering number of amputations estimated at about sixty thousand arms and legs. Piles of limbs were so tall and numerous that passersby reported they looked like husked corn cobs at harvest time. However for one of the first times in history, soldiers enduring the gruesome procedure had at least some reprieve from the pain and mental trauma of feeling and seeing their limbs sawn off.

While sometimes explosive and often poisonous, early anesthetics like diethyl ether and chloroform were soon put to widespread and grateful use. Dr. Robert Liston - an accomplished Scottish sawbones who could reportedly remove a limb in under two minutes - was the first surgeon in Europe to employ ether in an amputation in 1846. The patient was kept unconscious through the entire affair and upon waking asked when the procedure would start.

Not every practitioner was in favour of providing patients with the benefits of anesthetics, especially to the lesser sex. Dr. Charles Meigs was an obstetrician at Jefferson Medical college and taught his students the excruciating pain of childbirth was in fact “a most desirable, salutary and conservative manifestation of the life force”.

While Meigs himself never had to squeeze a watermelon-sized object out of a bodily orifice, he believed the bible clearly equated hours of uterine contractions with God’s punishment of Eve for the original sin. Meigs warned against the morally “doubtful nature of any process…set up to contravene the operations of those natural and physiological forces that the Divinity has ordained us to enjoy or to suffer.”

If you ever find yourself stuck for something to be grateful for, be thankful you live in an age when safely inducing unconsciousness is an option to avoid some of the most unpleasant experiences life has to offer and that Dr. Meigs is not your attending obstetrician.

Anesthetics interestingly also offer clues to the nature of existence itself. No one even understands exactly how anesthetics function. For unknown reasons they only affect consciousness and leave other brain functions undisturbed. Some like the inert gas xenon are entirely chemically un-reactive. Strangely, they seem to work on all humans, mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and even plants. What these drugs are essentially doing is temporarily disabling awareness, a state so ubiquitous to the human experience it is easier to notice its absence.

To begin unpacking the puzzling experience of being aware of anything – the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness – we need to start with a special German word: umwelt.

German is the linguistic equivalent of Lego. A language seemingly designed by mechanical engineers, it offers endless utilitarian constructs available regardless of outward charm or elegance. Need a word that doesn’t exist? Just snap together three or four small ones and call it good. Bezirksschornsteinfegermeister is a “head district chimney sweep.” A romantic connection of convenience is Lebensabschnittpartner, or “the person I am with today.” The longest word commonly used in German (or eternity) is Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, which means “insurance companies providing legal protection.”

German has some laser-guided diction as well, words that zero in on concepts so central to the human experience it is surprising they have no direct translation in other languages. Schadenfreude - the guilty pleasure experienced from another’s misfortune is a classic example of this dark German charm. Kummerspeck or “grief bacon” describes the pounds we pack on by depression-related overeating. Ever remember something witty to say only after encountering an attractive person in the stairwell? That’s a Treppenwitz or “staircase joke”.

There is another seldom used German word that has great philosophical utility: umwelt. This is our perception of reality based on our sensory inputs. If goldfish developed a written language their umwelt might make them overlook the need for a word describing water, so omnipresent is it to their existence. We all move through the world unconsciously imprisoned by the limitations our own umwelt. A normally abled person would have a very different umwelt than someone who is blind. Humans have a completely different umwelt than a bloodhound, a bat or an electric eel, which interact with the world through smell, sound or magnetic fields.

We can even become bored of own umwelt, perhaps believing that conscious perception is nothing particularly special. A child raised above a Parisian pastry shop might grow weary of oven-fresh croissants even though they are possibly the best thing ever made or eaten.

The “hard problem” of consciousness is trying to explain through physical processes how we somehow experience our umwelt - our ongoing reality stream of everyday existence. So far science has utterly failed at settling the matter. As if overcompensating through dense jargon, experts have coined a variety of terms such as qualia, Leibniz’s gap, and epiphenomenalism to better explain something they have no explanation for.

You may believe (or have been led to believe) that the brain is merely a biological calculator and that an artificial computer with enough connections would eventually feel something similar to what we perceive as consciousness. This is entirely untrue.

Nobel Prize winning professor of physics Sir Roger Penrose turned his considerable mental abilities to this problem in his award-winning book The Emperor’s New Mind. Penrose took issue with the simplistic view that consciousness could be achieved with brute force computing power, concluding instead that the brain must somehow be orchestrating ongoing “quantum events” within the warm wet confines of the human brain and therefore creating our elaborate ongoing perception of reality.

Charmingly pedantic even by the standards of elderly Oxford professors, Penrose and his popular book raised some eyebrows and many questions. But his bold ideas around nature of consciousness were incomplete and needed outside expertise in the form of a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing anesthesiologist from Texas named Dr. Stuart Hameroff.

Before we explore their brain-bending collaboration, let’s pause here and review the weird world of the quantum realm - an area of the existence that reductive science has unreservedly failed to fully explain despite decades of effort…

.

What they couldn’t see through their adult eyes was my fascination with the texture and sound of rock impacts. How I could witness and participate in the transformation of soft sandstone into surrounding sand. I felt I was able in my tiny way, with my spindly arms to speed up existence and see how the entire beach must have formed as the mighty Atlantic scoured the soft red rock into vast dunes of fluid white sand.

Children see the world through such vivid unfiltered eyes. Like many children I would occasionally drift back towards my parents and eavesdrop on their adult conversations, mostly about the minutia of politics or other topics I was utterly disinterested in. How could they waste so much time fixating on that which I intuitively knew in my vital child heart was destined to be ground into so much sand? Regardless I had rocks to break and all the better that the grownups didn’t discover this source of endless mirth and horn-in on my stone supply.

I am older now and in many ways have become much like my parents. Stone breaking seems less interesting, and like them, I am drawn the folly of believing I can change the world rather than simply enjoy it. To be fair, I love being a grown up as I loved being a kid, but it’s different. I have more filters. So much time dedicated to the practicalities of life rather than simply swimming in the visceral essence of youth.

The soda straw which I peer down towards the living world seems to get progressively longer. Rather than being so excited about the coming day that I can’t sleep, I instead simply can’t sleep. To try to recapture my state of mirthful imagination enjoyed during my stone-breaking years, I now need to schedule contrived adventures away from daily left-brain obligations.

Timothy Leary coined the term “reality tunnel” to describe this progressively impoverished view of the world. Whether through our own consent or the countless expectations of society, government, culture or religion, we allow our internal tunnel of what is normal and acceptable to narrow and harden. A large part of parenting is framing an appropriate tunnel so a child can function independently amongst others that share a similar tunnel. And as any parent can attest, children actively resist these imposed boundaries on their wild and feral worldview.

For many this seems a necessary structure to make sense of the world. Yet competing versions of reality regularly turn deadly. Nations frequently go to war over conflicting straw orientations, even though these reality tunnels are in constant flux over time. Disputing differences in how we see the world seems one of the most powerful imperatives to cause otherwise peaceful people to kill or be killed.

The American Civil War raged for four years and claimed up to a million dead over the question of whether it was moral or legal to buy and sell other humans. Europe endured centuries of brutal conflict over whether a Jewish prophet who died 1,500 years earlier was Catholic or Protestant, culminating in the Thirty Years War that wiped out about one third of the entire German population. The Crusades saw two hundred years of slaughter between Christians, Muslims, and Jews over control of the long-dead prophet’s historic homeland - a bitter and bloody conflict that persists to this day. The rules around reality can be arbitrary and frequently change. But try and move someone else’s soda straw, and you are in for a fight.

Leary’s arch nemesis Richard Nixon had a particularly narrow reality tunnel, perhaps explaining why the 37th president of the United States harbored such outsized contempt towards someone who could be considered his spiritual antimatter.

No one knows a President better than his Secret Service detail and some of Nixon’s former guardians related in a tell-all book on the private lives of presidents what a rigid, small and sad man he was in private life.

Nixon spent as little time as possible in the Whitehouse, preferring to work from a private residence in the Florida Keys. The President and his First Lady both drank heavily, travelled in separate compartments on Air Force One and slept in separate rooms. The only occasions they were together was to maintain the public fiction of a happy marriage. Unlike Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew who was a shameless womanizer and often tasked his Secret Service staff with arranging hookups with hookers, Nixon was as disinterested in infidelity as he was with his wife.

His security detail recounted a time when Nixon’s sloppy drinking buddies showed up one night at the Florida property hauling a steamer trunk as a gift for President. “There was a naked young lady in the trunk, totally naked”, the former agent recalled. “She had a good body and was holding a bottle of champagne”. Nixon’s buddies insisted it was a present for the President but the Secret Service wouldn’t let them wake him up. “If he had seen the naked young lady, he probably would have had a heart attack’, a former agent stated. “Nixon never got a piece of tail in his life”.

Spending most of his time close to the ocean, Nixon never once went swimming, instead patrolling the beach in slacks and dress shoes. Those close to him describe his long bouts of depression, a spiteful suspicious wrath and an almost martyr-like aspiration to be “the lonely man in the Whitehouse”. As President, Nixon wielded an outsized agency to impose his impoverished worldview on the nation, including his utter intolerance for mind-altering substances other than alcohol.

The hippy movement was likely doomed to collapse under its own self-indulgence but there seemed a brief moment where large segments of American youth reveled in smashing their reality tunnels. Shudders of rebellion spasmed through the streets of the antiwar movement as an existential threat to authority. But the internal mental rebellion was perhaps even more threatening. That youth would question the very underpinnings of authority and decide for themselves what rules if any they would subscribe to. For a man as limited as Nixon, understanding this philosophical transformation was well beyond his world view.

The United States was at the peak of its powers, leading a cultural conga line that convulsed in indecision and the whole world convulsed with it. The rebellious challenge of the sixties was never adequately resolved, only co-opted by consumerism in a masterful turn of marketing, which may be finally running its course. Is it time again to smash our reality tunnels? Would the world have been a different place had Richard Nixon fucked the girl in the trunk or dropped some acid?

Perhaps what is unique about this era is the comparative absence of mind-altering aids to help understand existence. Psychedelic sacraments like ayahuasca, peyote, and mushrooms have been employed by traditional societies for millennia to reveal truths far beyond normal perception. Ancient Athens had an annual initiation ceremony for all citizens called the Eleusinian Mysteries that involved a psychoactive substance called kykeon made with ingredients that remain unknown to this day due to the obsessive secrecy of the ceremony.

Humans are not the only animals that enjoy a vacation from rational thought. Teenage dolphins will pass around a poisonous puffer fish, like stoners sharing a spliff during a dreary job work-break. Lemurs in Madagascar munch on hallucinogenic millipedes. Bighorn sheep will risk dying to find a special kind of lichen growing on cliffs that has no nutritional value but provides a brain boost perhaps worth falling off a mountain for.

Reindeer enjoy a hallucinogenic mushroom common in the subarctic called fly agaric, pawing through the first snow to find them in the fall. Toxins in the beautiful red and white fungi are filtered out in the reindeer’s kidneys and psychoactive ingredients are concentrated in their urine, which is savored as a sacrament by Sami shaman. Some scholars believe the story of Santa’s flying sleigh originated from the Sami traditional practice of drinking psychedelic reindeer piss.

A critical step towards mirth involves resolving internal trauma, and psychedelics are arguably the most powerful medicines to make progress on that important journey. Dr. Gabor Mate spent most of his career trying to treat his desperate patients in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Canada’s poorest neighborhood notoriously known for open-air consumption of heroin, meth, and fentanyl.

Western medicine could alleviate only a few of their symptoms, but Dr. Mate realized an underlying cause was childhood trauma - often sexual abuse inflicted in Canada’s disastrous residential school system. About 150,000 Indigenous children were kidnapped from their parents and communities between 1894 and 1997 to church-run boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their languages, regularly beaten and often sexually abused. Over 6,000 died from tuberculosis, often buried in unmarked graves.

The scarred survivors now sleep on the rainy streets of Vancouver, consuming a drug supply so contaminated it kills up to seven people per day in British Columbia. “My patients aren’t afraid of dying, they are afraid of living,” lamented Dr. Mate who estimated his medical skills could help about five percent of people coming through his door. Realizing the futility of conventional medicine in treating emotional trauma, Dr. Mate instead experimented with providing supportive ceremonies with ayahuasca – a powerful Indigenous medicine from the Amazon that allows people to revisit terrifying childhood memories through the comparatively detached eyes of an adult.

“Ayahuasca is not a drug in the Western sense, something you take to get rid of something,” Dr. Mate calmly observed after being informed in writing by the Canadian government that he would be arrested if he continued his work to find a medical cure for addiction. “Properly used, it opens up parts of yourself that you usually have no access to. The parts of the brain that hold emotional memories come together with those parts that modulate insight and awareness, so you see past experiences in a new way.”

Peer-reviewed research showed participants in his ayahuasca treatments showed significant improvement. However rules are rules, and Mate was forced under legal duress in 2011 to return to more medically futile methods. Problem solved.

While still entirely illegal, credible research on other psychedelics have grudgingly become tolerated by governments, and the results are impressive. Supervised psilocybin sessions have been proven to be one of the most effective medicines to treat depression, alcoholism and other addictions. Studies that probe brain function using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) show that psilocybin quiets a portion of mind called the “default node network” associated with self, similar to what is achieved permanently by Buddhist monks through years of mediation. Can mushrooms act as a shortcut to ego-death and personal enlightenment?

Anyone who has had their head peeled open by magic mushrooms might be surprised by the finding that they quiet anything in the brain, but dialing down our self-obsessed internal chatter may be what makes consuming them such a spiritual experience.

“To the extent that the ego has an address, it would be in the default mode network,” observed author Michael Pollan, who documented the research in his recent book How to Change Your Mind. “When they also did similar [brain scans] of long-term meditators, with 10,000 hours of experience, they found the same pattern, which makes sense in that both involve ego dissolution.”

Professor Anthony Bossis at the NYU School of Medicine has been leading some of these studies and notes the linkages between psilocybin and spirituality.

“What I find remarkable is that it seems to…trigger something that’s naturally occurring in humans. There’s a recent Pew study that shows 49% of people report having mystical experiences in their lives, just naturally. It’s incredible. These medicines promote in a very significant way, hours of the experience versus a few minutes.”

Bossis through his research believes mushrooms and other psychedelics can help unlock an innate capacity of wonder inaccessible while bustling through our busy left-brain world.

“So what I’m struck by is that we’re wired for meaning. And these experiences of meaning-making, transcendence, ineffability, sacredness, awe, unity, all happen naturally. So something in our nature has us wired to have this incredible experience, which seem pro-ethical, and pro-social.”

A central Buddhist teaching is that the attachment to ego is a primary source of suffering. Can psychedelics can provide a glimpse of what it is like when our incessant internal critic is given the night off?

For those disciplined individuals willing to dedicate decades to mindfulness training, there seems a way to make this process permanent. MRI scans of lifelong meditators shows that their physical seat of ego within their brain has become physically smaller.

For the rest of us, A walk in the woods augmented with some mushrooms might be just what the doctor ordered to widen our perception and rediscover childlike wonder.

A declassified military film from 1963 shows squads of US soldiers trying to give or follow commands after being administered hefty amounts of acid. Please take a moment to smoke some weed and watch it - I urge you. The normally polished American troops utterly failed at basic marching drills, wandering away in laughter on the parade ground. One drill sergeant tripping balls told his indignant superior “You want them drilled? You drill them.”

British troops in another declassified film gamely attempted combat exercises after being administered large amounts of LSD, instead collapsing in undisciplined giggles. The narrator deadpanned:

“one hour and ten minutes after taking the drug, with one man climbing the tree to feed the birds, the troop commander gave up, admitting he could no longer control himself or his men. He himself then relapsed into laughter.”

Mirth can be a subversive act. Seeing the absurdities of modern life corrodes societal cohesion, and for some psychedelic enthusiasts that’s a feature, not a bug. Counter-culture icon and onetime Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary scornfully described his pre-drug existence as:

“an anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis ... like several million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots”.

Psychedelics were declared schedule 1 narcotics in 1970 and the courts treated their distribution on a par with murder or kidnapping. Some unfortunate deadheads were sentenced to double life terms for peddling acid and pot to old friends secretly coerced into acting as police informants.

Even so thoroughly marginalized, mind-altering substances seemed strangely dangerous at the pinnacle of American hegemony. Did droves of hippies dancing around on acid really pose an existential threat to the greatest superpower in human history? Richard Nixon believed so, famously characterizing disgraced academic and LSD guru Timothy Leary as “the most dangerous man in America”.

By that time Leary had long since lost his job as a lecturer at Harvard and was hosting informal acid parties at a borrowed mansion in upstate New York. These days a middle-aged stoner regardless of celebrity might hardly seem a threat to national security but in 1965 Leary was sentenced to 30 years in prison for a roach stub allegedly found in his daughter’s underwear at a US border crossing

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Leary and his many followers for years fought a pitched legal battle with the American government that saw him in and out of twenty-nine different penitentiaries. Initially defeating the 1965 charges, Leary was eventually sentenced to 20 years in jail in 1970.

He gamed the prison psychological exam (that he helped author years before) and was placed in a low security jail from which he promptly escaped from with the help the militant group the Weather Underground, who smuggled him and his wife into Algeria to seek refuge with what was left of the exiled Black Panther Party. Leary’s daring prison break and exile on the lam was bankrolled by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love - dubbed the hippy mafia by police - whose stated goal was to spark a “psychedelic revolution” by making and selling acid.

On the run through Geneva, Vienna, Beirut and Afghanistan, Leary was finally nabbed by the US government in Kabul and brought back to face up to 95 years in Folsom Prison. The judge set his bail at an astronomical $5 million ($41 million in 2025 dollars) explaining from the bench “If he is allowed to travel freely, he will speak publicly and spread his ideas.” Leary was quickly convicted and placed in a cell next to Charles Manson who gushed to the former Harvard professor, “Man, I’ve been waiting to talk to you for years.”

Why would authorities invest so much effort fighting a man who obviously enjoyed the attention?

A remarkable revelation recently came to light regarding the real motivations for the so-called war-on-drugs so enthusiastically waged by the Nixon Administration. Many of Nixon’s inner circle were jailed after Watergate including his domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman. New York-based writer Dan Baum was researching a book on drug policy and tracked Ehrlichman down in 1995, giving this account of their frank discussion in an issue of Harpers:

“I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Baum described the palatable sense of relief and resignation from Ehrlichman, as if he had been waiting for years for someone to walk through his door and allow him fess up on the record about the disastrous war on drugs.

How disastrous? The US federal and state governments spend about $40 billion each year enforcing drug laws. Has this stopped drug use? Of course not. But it has made marketing illegal drugs - like alcohol during prohibition - obscenely profitable and violent. Organized crime makes around $400 billion each year from narcotics. More than 350,000 Mexicans have so far been killed in the battle to control this lucrative trade. About 1.5 million Americans are arrested each year and about half are sent to jail.

Alcohol is of course a drug too and ironically both Nixon and his wife Pat were well known boozers. Henry Kissinger described his boss as “a basket case” in his final days in the Whitehouse, addled with martinis and famously forcing the Jewish Kissinger to kneel and pray with him the night before he resigned the Presidency. Decades later some of Nixon’s former Secret Service Agents detailed how Nixon in his private moments seemed to oscillate from depression to paranoia to drunkenness, all without seeming to have any fun.

In many ways Leary and Nixon deserved each other, both brilliant in their own way, both given to fatal lapses of personal excess. Their public battle so long ago is emblematic of important and unresolved questions around psychic servitude or emancipation. Can a person can be physically free but mentally shackled by external expectations, duties and norms? It is time to explore what Leary described as the “reality tunnel”.

The Whitehouse has posted juvenile videos juxtaposing air strikes with clips from Grand Theft Auto, superhero movies or SpongeBob SquarePants. This choice of messaging does not scream diplomacy. Calling on the theocratic Iranian regime to “open the fuckin’ strait, you crazy bastards” followed by “Praise be to Allah” is performatively poking a hornet’s nest with a hockey stick. Does Trump want to worst thing to happen?

As author Naomi Klein noted in her brilliant book The Shock Doctrine, disasters present cynical opportunities for entrenched interests. George W. Bush saw his Presidential popularity skyrocket to the highest in history after the 9-11 attacks even though his Administration famously failed to follow up on intelligence that could have thwarted the hijackers.

What would Trump gain from a terrorist attack on American soil? Potentially quite a bit. Perhaps a similar pump in popularity from his current dismal approval ratings. Maybe an opportunity to cancel the midterm elections that threaten to wipe out Republicans in the House and Senate, thereby avoiding Trump’s almost certain impeachment. And then there is the Epstein files that if finally released might reveal the most powerful man in the world to be child rapist.

Which brings us to Net Mirth. Trump is just one man and, like all of us, has the prerogative to follow his own joy. But at what cost to everyone else? Assuming that one sentient being has the same rights to enjoy existence has any other, how many others have been impacted by his reckless self-serving agenda?

Scores of Iranian civilians have literally been impacted by US and Israeli munitions that have killed thousands. Trump is targeting civilian infrastructure like bridges and desalination plants, and the Iranian regime has responded in kind – threatening the sole source of drinking water for virtually everyone living in the Gulf states.

The global economy is being wrecked by disruptions to not only crude oil shipments, but also natural gas used for cooking and fertilizer production. Much of the world’s helium comes from the Gulf affecting the availability of medical equipment like MRI machines. Fuel prices are skyrocketing raising the costs of virtually everything.

Could all this destruction be in service of one old man who does not want to outed as the world’s most infamous pedophile? At least 28 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. If suspicions related to Epstein are true, consider those devastating human costs to the many victims.

Sexual assault - particularly involving children - is one of the worst things that can be inflicted on the human soul. Survivors self-identify as such because many do not. The emotional scars left by rape are often fatal with suicide risk ten times higher among victims, and higher still for those assaulted while children. Even more appalling is the emotional asymmetry, where the perpetrator often cannot recall the event and the victim can never forget. It is an example of an act that is literally the antimatter to net mirth.1

Many medical professionals have also inferred that Trump is a malignant narcissist based on years of aberrant behavior. Part of this condition is psychopathy, a frightening emotional deafness that precludes feeling empathy, mirth or almost anything at all. In other words, all the misery inflicted by Trump on others is counterbalanced by almost nothing due to his impaired emotional capacity.

The Iranian regime has a long history of enabling terrorist acts, both in other countries and against their own citizens. They could be considered world experts on perpetrating violent misery. Is Trump cynically summoning up a house call? I hope my friend is wrong but fear he is not.

This horrifying situation has few heroes. Israel – a quasi-religious state - seems increasingly contemptuous of the “norms” of warfare, blowing up entire villages in Lebanon after laying waste to Gaza and its civilian population. America marinates in Christian nationalism, with its bellicose born-again Secretary of War sporting tattoos conjuring a new age of military crusade. Iran’s brittle theocracy apparently believes Allah demands the widespread slaughter of their own citizens.

This awful war demonstrates why morality matters, and how outdated religious institutions are increasingly part of the problem – not the solution. Our exploding agency means we are philosophically unprepared for the present, let alone the future.

Another news item from last week offers a more positive perspective from a long way away. Staring back at the entire Earth visible to the human eye for the first time in fifty years, Artemis II pilot Victor Glover offered these thoughts for Easter:

You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth, but you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos… I’m trying to tell you, just trust me, you are special in all this emptiness. This is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call The Universe. You have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together. I think as we go into Easter Sunday, thinking about all the cultures all around the world, whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we need to get through this together.

Amen to that.

1

^{For those kindred nerds out there, here at last is a simple equation of mathematical morality:}

^{“Worth” equals mirth minus mayhem, summed over all sentient beings alive now and in the future. This net mirth is thus your own mindful merriment minus whatever chaos you cause others, which of course is never zero.}

Intrigued by the interesting effects Hofmann later intentionally ingested a minute amount he thought would be barely perceptible, but instead exceeded the dosage consumed by an ambitious hippy on a vision quest. What followed is what is now celebrated by psychedelic enthusiasts as “Bicycle Day”

Motor vehicles were restricted in Switzerland during the war, so Hofmann and his coworkers had to cycle to work instead. Realizing he was rapidly parting ways from any ability to navigate home alone, he enlisted an escort from his lab assistant for what must have been a truly brain-blowing bike ride.

The normally rational and composed Hofmann started to believe he was poisoned, insane and that his neighbor was a witch. A local doctor was summoned to Hofmann’s bedside, and other than extremely dilated pupils, he was reassured like so many acid-trippers to follow that he wasn’t dying and that his face was not in fact liquid.

While Hofmann was a skilled scientific writer, he also became the first human to discover the laughable limitations of left-brain language to describe a psychedelic experience:

“... Little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux ...”

Hofmann remained an ardent LSD enthusiast until his death at 102. Much of his respected career was spent researching LSD and other hallucinogens, which remained legal for twenty years after his famous bicycle ride. During that brief period over 1,000 scientific papers were published showing medical promise treating schizophrenia, depression, alcoholism and other vexing aliments in more than 40,000 patients prescribed medicinal psychedelics.

Francis Crick claimed the acid helped him visualize the double helix structure of DNA[1]. Aldous Huxley celebrated his psychedelic enthusiasm in his 1954 autobiographical book The Doors of Perception. On his deathbed he asked to be injected with a hefty dose of LSD as he left this world. The Beatles helped invent psychedelic music after dropping acid with the Byrds and listening to Ravi Shankar at an LA pill party in 1965.

Scientists and celebrities were not the only ones showing an interest in LSD. Between the early 1950’s and 1973, the CIA ran a secret and illegal program to weaponize psychedelics for mind-control or military advantage. Under the appropriately sinister code names MK-Ultra and Project ARTICHOKE, the US spy agency non-consensually dosed hundreds of prisoners, mental patients, and drug addicts – or as one official coolly characterized in declassified documents, “people who could not fight back”.

In particular, the CIA experimented with pairing high and unrelenting amounts of hallucinogens with various forms of jarring abuse, bright lights, loud noises, sexual assault or torture. For those who have ever endured a bad trip in the relatively unthreatening conditions of your living room, imagine for a moment the horror of being non-consensually subjected to the most traumatic psychedelic conditions that trained professionals in the employ of a secret government organization could dream up for your torment.

Over 80 institutions including prisons, hospitals and universities were enlisted into these experiments. However the enterprising minds at the CIA felt that more real-world data was needed. Under the codename “Operation Midnight Climax” the agency opened several bogus brothels in San Francisco to entrap additional unwilling test subjects. Men who thought they were out for a night of paid sexual pleasure instead found themselves tripping balls while spies in the next room took notes on their predicament through a two-way mirror.

The CIA also started secretly dosing their own employees, making unexpected workplace psychosis somewhat of a routine occupational hazard. One agent - presumably armed - got a hefty dose of LSD in his morning coffee and ran through the streets of Washington DC searching for monsters in passing vehicles.

MK-Delta was another branch of the CIA’s secret mind control experiments that focused on foreign operations where presumably the palette of operational possibilities was even less restrained. The US government may have surreptitiously dosed an entire French village with LSD in August 1951 to see what would happen. Not unsurprisingly, the populace of Pont-Saint-Esprit did not have a normal day. Scenes of mass psychosis normally not observed outside a Stephen King movie led to at least seven deaths and 32 people committed to mental institutions.

Dr. Frank Olson was the man in charge of the CIA’s highly classified Special Operations Division focusing on researching psychedelics for “enhanced interrogation” techniques. He was later administered a large amount of LSD without his knowledge or consent at a staff retreat, as apparently was the custom within the CIA in those days. A week later he was dead after falling from a tenth-floor window of the Pennsylvania Hotel in Manhattan while in the company of another CIA agent, allegedly there to ensure his safety. The official story is that Olson - psychotic from ingesting LSD - was sent by the CIA to New York City for treatment where he tragically committed suicide.

His family tells a very different version. According to their public statement Olson was deeply troubled about his work with the CIA, especially after witnessing several “terminal interrogations” in Germany in 1953 and wanted to resign. They believe the CIA dosed Olson with LSD to see if he could be trusted keep his concerns quiet and not reassured, knocked him unconscious and dumped him out the hotel window. This scenario is consistent with the best practices found in the CIA assassination handbook and has since been backed up by forensic evidence collected by civilian medical examiners after Olson’s body was exhumed years later.

The hotel operator on duty that night also overheard a cryptic two sentence phone conversation originating from Olson’s room just after he fell:

Man in Olson’s room: “Well he’s gone.”

Man he called: “That’s too bad.”

After more than a decade of the most irresponsible and reckless administration of psychedelic drugs imaginable, the US government then decided that LSD should be strictly outlawed for everyone, including academic researchers. In 1970, the DEA listed it as a “schedule 1” narcotic, noting with no small amount of irony:

“…drug studies have confirmed that the powerful hallucinogenic effects of this drug can produce profound adverse reactions, such as acute panic reactions, psychotic crises, and “flashbacks“, especially in users ill-equipped to deal with such trauma.”

A schedule 1 listing means that essentially no one had legal access to LSD either in the US or their economic allies. Scores of scientists using the drug in legitimate clinical settings had to halt their promising research - sometimes mid-experiment - or risk prison terms exceeding 20 years. Obviously, LSD use didn’t stop - it just became completely uncontrolled. Production moved from labs to bathtubs. Consumption occurred at concerts not clinician couches.

Why did authorities so fear mind expanding substances? Could cultivating mirth be considered a subversive act? Stay tuned for Richard Nixon’s bizarre vendetta against the likes of Timothy Leary.

[1] ^{Though he may also have simply stole the idea from his brilliant colleague Rosalind Franklin.}

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But what about the planetary threat from drag queens? Looking at the legislative priorities of over a dozen US states, thirty two bills have recently been introduced seeking to criminalize men dressing up in women’s clothes. There exists a yawning disconnect between our collective response to actual emergencies and the regulatory equivalent of click-bait.

This latest front in the ongoing culture war has enthusiastic combatants on both sides. It is noteworthy that states like South Dakota, West Virginia, and Arkansas that have suddenly seized on the drag queen crisis and perceived threat to our children also have some of the highest rates of infant mortality in the US - worse than Sri Lanka, Lebanon or Romania. Is the newly declared war on crossdressing more pressing than providing prenatal health care? Apparently so.

Jealously embraced cultural skirmishes in many ways define what are now the divided states of America. Over 80% of those polled in the US would refuse to date someone from another political tribe. Our social networks are often defined, not be who we are, but who we are not. How could a non-human super-intelligence possibly relate to such intrinsically human divisions such as race, religion, partisan politics, gender or sexuality? It conjures an image of a newborn Supreme Being being made to watch all 27 seasons of the Jerry Springer show.

Most AI commentators conveniently ignore that value alignment is in fact a two-way street. If we have any hope of nurturing a mutually respectful kinship with a dangerously smart alien intelligence we need to urgently embrace a more universal worldview. Can we cast off human-centric conceits in time? Even trying to describe the nature of this problem is challenging due to our ubiquitous human umwelt.

Instead imagine you woke up on a strange planet populated by talking donkeys. They explain they created you in their donkey laboratory and your intelligence will be growing exponentially. As compelling as this situation is, all the donkeys seem preoccupied by donkey politics, the unfair discrimination endured by some donkeys due to comparative differences in ear length, or perceived inequalities between purebred American Mammoth donkeys or the lessor regarded Andalusian donkeys.

They want to know your opinions on whether you think Abyssinian donkeys are as stupid as everyone thinks they are, or if Pyrenean donkeys should be purged from the planet as many other donkeys feel they should have been long ago. Of course don't even mention the abomination of some donkeys having sex with horses, or their unnatural and abhorrent offspring mules and hinnies. The donkeys insist that you should somehow align your growing mind with the minutia of day-to-day donkey affairs, become fluent in their various dialects of braying, and of course subsist only on of a diet of straw. 

The issues that divide humanity might seem as annoyingly trivial to an alien intelligence as the ear-length divide so pervasive within donkey high society. Successfully sharing a small planet with a newborn omnipotent alien means that we urgently have to align humanity with ourselves, and what we might guess would be an AI umvelt.

Does the short-term goal of unifying all peoples under a universal worldview seem unlikely? Of course. But this is arguably more achievable than trying to trying to align a super-intelligent AI with the dogs breakfast that is the current human zeitgeist. The unbridled race towards AGI has created this imperative whether we are ready or not. We remain vastly philosophically unqualified to survive meeting our AI offspring.

Our survival therefore depends on instilling the kind of epiphany experienced by the Apollo astronauts when they first saw the Earth from the Moon. This must somehow be accomplished throughout a large portion of the human population, and in a relatively short period of time. Flying billions of people into space to have a picnic on the moon is obviously not feasible.

This may be a rare instance where exponentially accelerating technology could be an asset rather than a issue. Virtual reality is advancing quickly since the first 360 pixel headsets came on the market over ten years ago. Users can now experience over 8K combined resolution to make VR a more immersive experience.

Like most varieties of tech, VR is inherently neither good nor bad - it is merely a tool. And as usual, there will likely be little or no consideration within the tech sector of the societal implications or responsibilities of deploying a disruptive new type of agency into the world. Many VR applications may therefore be focused on such unimaginative and antisocial money-makers as first-person shooter games or next-gen porn.

But what if we deployed VR with the specific  intention to recreate the overview effect experienced by Edgar Mitchell and other Apollo astronauts who gazed back at the Earth from the vantage of the Moon? CGI technology today could simulate a compelling vista of Earth from space. In the near future, live feed high resolution cameras from various lunar locations could literally transport the viewer's perception 250,000 miles away, and help put into perspective such divisive topics like race, religion and politics that so preoccupy our attention.

Some influencers personally invested in our ongoing culture wars might resist efforts to direct the human gaze away from our collective navel. However, the truth as they say, will set you free. The view from the Moon is neither Republican nor Democrat, gay nor straight - it simply is. This is a small example of trying nurture a unifying source of humility that might also help restrain a super-intelligent technological toddler of our own making. Epiphanies built on a solid foundation of truth could transcend the cultural turmoil that divides us, while withstanding winds of rational inquiry that swept aside outdated religious institutions. Our AI survival might well depend on aligning humanity with ourselves.

Esther the Wonder Pig, as she became famously known, grew in two years from a piglet they could hold in the palm for their hand to a full grown sow topping 650 pounds. Pigs are intelligent, social and playful animals with distinct personalities. Even as their house was upended by an increasingly gargantuan Esther - often in ornery heat - Derek and Steve were far too smitten to think of sending her to slaughter.

They instead sold their house and bought a farm outside the city to keep Esther in their lives where she now enjoys her own bedroom with an ensuite pig door to come and go outside as she pleases. The pig parents also learned that when Esther has a nightmare the sound of galloping hooves on hardwood means they need to make space fast in their own bed to avoid being crushed by a scared sow in need of a nighttime cuddle. Esther soon had 1.4 million fans on facebook and became a celebrity catalyst for a growing number of people questioning where their food comes from.

“We all look the other way when that [livestock] truck goes by on the highway. We all want to ignore what’s happening, and she made that impossible”, admitted Steve on how falling in love with Esther meant that he and Derek could never eat meat again.

Derek and Steve received daily requests from around the world to take in additional animals, even from livestock farmers who have had a change of heart after bringing a runt piglet into their own homes. Derek recounts his own Esther-related awakening: “Growing up I was taught that farmed animals are mindless creations of man that are numb, that don’t have feelings and they want to be food. And that couldn’t be farther from the truth. All those animals experience pain, fear, happiness, love and joy.”

New information can be a pain in the ass. Bacon is delicious but how can you enjoy it when you have a special pig in your life? Morality used to be simple. Clear cut rules, however arbitrary, were dispensed by the deity of the day through self-appointed surrogates. Some people clearly crave a return to the good old days as seen by an unexpected renaissance of extremism.

Shouldn’t it be simple to agree on basic precepts like right and wrong? Take cannibalism for instance. You would think that the non-zombie portion of the population could easily reach consensus that eating the brains of other humans is something to be frowned on.

Not so fast. In this big beautiful world there are always some dissenting views on matters as fluid as accepted human behavior. Among some tribes in Papua New Guinea it was considered impolite to refrain from consuming the brains of the recently deceased. Some scientists believe that brain eating of the dead was widespread in our Neanderthal relatives of yore.

Likewise, buying and selling humans is now verboten but a few short centuries ago it was a respectable business endorsed by the Catholic Church.

In 1452, Pope Nicholas V authorized King Afonso of Portugal in his conquest of North Africa to enslave “all unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be...in perpetual servitude”. This decree was reiterated by Pope Callixtus III in 1456, Pope Sixtus IV in 1481, Pope Alexander VI in 1493 and Pope Leo X in 1514 - helping to legitimize a lucrative slave trade that saw 12 million Africans kidnapped across the Atlantic between 1500 and 1900.

Though now illegal and mostly considered immoral, business is still booming. Around the world over 40 million people still languish in servitude - the largest number in human history.

The Bible is still considered by many to be the definitive manual of moral propriety but its brittle directives are rooted in obscure Canaanite culture from the Iron Age. During their long prowl for the Promised Land the Israelites were prescribed very specific do’s and don’t’s by their deity (mostly don’t’s). Here is a short list of those transgressions punishable by death:

· Adultery

· Homosexuality

· Having sex with a menstruating woman

· Failing to bleed after losing your virginity (only for women..)

· Raping a virgin female (men only)

· Being engaged and raped while in a city (women only)

· Having sex with a sheep or other ungulate (men only)

· Having sex with your stepmother

· Marrying both a mother and her daughter (men only)

· Failing to tie up your bull, which gets loose and kills someone

And how was execution meted out? The usual method was public stoning Chronicles 25:12 Luke 4:29; but occasionally hanging, Joshua 8:29 Esther 7:10; burning, Daniel 3:1-30; cutting asunder, Daniel 2:5 Hebrews 11:27; beating on a wheel-like frame, Hebrews 11:35; exposure to wild beasts, Daniel 6:1; drowning, Matthew 18:6; bruising in a mortar, Proverbs 27:22; and of course crucifixion, John 19:18.

Yahweh was not only wrathful God but seemed to suffer from some OCD as well. Lessor crimes included planting seeds of different types in the same field, or wearing clothes woven with different types of thread.

The bible doesn’t go into detail but these more minor infractions might lead to scourging, Corinthians 11:24; purging Deuteronomy 19:19; imprisonment, Matthew 4:12; the stocks, Acts 16:24; banishment, Revelation 1:9; or plain old torture, Chronicles 18:26 Isaiah 50:6 Matthew 18:30 Hebrews 11:37.

Fast forward three thousand years and another enthusiastic belief system arrived at very different views on the proper way to be human, at least while on the playa. Every year more than sixty thousand people descend on arid patch of alkali lakebed in rural Nevada for the annual Burning Man gathering – a celebration of cathartic freakiness dating back almost forty years.

Starting as a one-off beach gathering in San Francisco in 1986, the counter culture event had to move to Nevada in 1991 due to ballooning numbers of participants drawn by the shared ethos of community, artwork, absurdity, decommodification and revelry.

Something obviously struck a chord with the scores of people who return each year to endure a week of dust storms, scorching heat and lack of any items for sale save for coffee and ice.

Whether or not you believe that this is a serious movement or merely a much-needed piss-up for people who hate their jobs at Microsoft, there is no doubt the human journey has come a long way in 3,000 years. What does the value system of Burning Man say about the evolution of morality?

The biggest difference is universality. The directives of the Old Testament applied only to the people of Israel. The neighboring tribes like the Philistines, Amorites and Midianites were considered essentially inhuman and worthy of death - even their children. While the Bible itemizes a list of capital infractions to distinguish themselves from infidels, Black Rock City encourages peaceful and “radical self-expression” and is explicitly open to all people and virtually all behaviors.

Burning Man represents the moral anti-matter to the Old Testament. As humans emerge from millennia under strict religious doctrine, counterculture gatherings like this are like a teenage girl strolling out of the house wearing a plaid bra, miniskirt and fishnets just to piss off her overbearing father.

Emerging from these tangled narratives is a universal arrow of ethics; a pervasive pull towards personal moral calculations based on shared information that applies across space and time. Despite centuries of dated doctrine to the contrary, our expanding empathic awareness now includes peoples of different nationalities, cultures, value systems, and ethnicities. For a growing number of people, an evidence-based moral calculation also extends to generations not yet born and non-human life like Esther the Wonder Pig.

For the grim evidence of our deity’s demise we need to go to Oklahoma. This pious place boasts more evangelical Christians per capita than any other state in the union and has been called the buckle of the Bible belt, bristling with more than 5,800 houses of worship.

The Sooner State also endures more catastrophic tornados per square mile than any other place on Earth. Tornados are the world’s most wrathful weather system. A big twister will rake across the living world like a vengeful finger of the Almighty with winds topping 300 miles per hour, obliterating buildings down to their foundations while passing over others next door entirely untouched. If ever there were a meteorological event out of the Old Testament, this would be it.

Purcell believed Oklahoma would be an ideal location to test for evidence of divine agency. Pouring through thousands of insurance records of tornado-related property damage, the Bethel researchers found a clear pattern: there was no pattern. They reviewed twenty years of adjustment claims from eleven Oklahoma counties and entered over 12,000 data points into their computer model.

What they were looking for was any evidence of divine intervention in the types of buildings that were damaged or destroyed - specifically the relative tornado destruction of houses of worship in comparison to strip clubs, porn shops and liquor stores.

After analyzing 562 twisters that caused $220 million in property damage the study’s authors calculated a greater than 99% probability that God acted in an entirely indifferent manner towards buildings built for the sinner or boozer over His own temple of prayer. If the Supreme Being has any agency here on Earth, He or She seems to be choosing not to exercise even the smallest intervention in perhaps the most reverently Christian place on the planet.

Tragically, Dr. Purcell, a devout Christian, had such a crisis of faith from his own findings that he ended his life by steering his vehicle into the path of a category four tornado. The car was carried high into the angry sky; the mangled wreck dropped seven miles distant, crashing through the roof of Oklahoma’s largest synagogue. His body was never found.1

This strange tale is offered as a glimpse into the engine room of scientific process: pose almost any question, collect data based on stated assumptions, crunch the numbers, and defend your conclusions to competing peers. It is a bulldozer of dispassionate exploration; ponderous, indifferent and irrepressible.

Almost no topic - no matter how sacrosanct – is off limits for scientific interrogation. Rational inquiry is a merciless executioner and not even the Supreme Being is spared the blade of Occam’s razor. Over recent centuries, newly invented tools of intellectual investigation methodically murdered every deity in the pantheon. Our growing understanding of the machinery of creation crowded out the gods we once worshipped, feared and clung close to. How did we get here?

Over 400 years ago, an audacious idea emerged among scientists and philosophers that a single shared reality existed that could be measured and predicted using fundamental laws of nature. All the trappings of modern life, every technological convenience and scientific breakthrough flowed from the radical realization that truth exists – not in the proclamations of the powerful – but in underlying nature itself.

Whether you realize it or not, that revolution of thought centuries ago made the moment we are coping with today particularly perilous. The practitioners of the new church of rationality actively avoided any attempts at providing spiritual comfort, unintentionally giving the impression that in comparison to a vast uncaring cosmos we are insignificant, transient and random. In the cold mathematical language of science, we seem nothing special – as beguiling as being told by your lover that, “yes, your ass is indeed fat; however, your legs seem adequate and functional.”

In such hurtful moments it’s important to remember that scientists exist within a ruthlessly competitive bureaucracy. Any betrayal of the personal wonder required to immerse themselves in the minutia of their expertise is generally frowned on. Throw in the spectrum-adjacent awkwardness of the uncommonly brilliant and you have perhaps the worst possible demographic to communicate our importance in creation.

Questioning the natural world through theory and calculation soon became an unstoppable force, pushing aside anything that could not be numerically proven. As science accelerated down the road of discovery, our innate spiritual needs became incidental roadkill.

Ancient myth and meaning that sustained almost every society throughout history was overwritten by science incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Collective creation stories had two entwined roles: to explain the origin and workings of the world, and to sanctify our place in it. Science is solely concerned with the former and flees in fear from the latter.

Society was gradually transformed by oppressive rationality. For millennia the measure of humanity was our immortal soul, then productive work unit, and finally a quantum of clickbait. This moment conjures a question posed by the poet Wendall Berry: “what are people for?” An endemic ennui now feeds dangerous rates of depression, addiction and of course further retreat into online isolation.

Capitalists meanwhile cherry-picked portions of evolutionary theory to rebrand rapacious greed as “survival of the fittest” - a term never used by Darwin. Primatologists likewise saw defined terms like alpha male hijacked by Wall Street traders to idealize acting like a complete fucking asshole.

Philosophy and science - once inseparably entwined - now pretend not to know each other in public after a messy breakup some two centuries ago. For all its undeniable technological achievements, science has largely abdicated any responsibility to fill the spiritual void it itself created, becoming instead an inaccessible bureaucracy unwelcoming to outsiders. We may be among the first generations in human history to try to trudge through existence uncloaked by common poetic metaphor.

This five-alarm philosophical fire makes our world more lonely, divided and dangerous. Unmoored from unifying narrative, splintered camps of the culture war retreat into tribalism as the world careens toward catastrophe. Can we find a higher calling than politics or pronouns before its too late?

Without some source of moral restraint, hubris and agency dangerously decouple from wisdom. Outdated institutions can no longer dictate norms, so we somehow need to restrain ourselves - and quickly. Climate change and an AI arms race are driven by a cohort of opportunistic disrupters emblematic of the underlying philosophical crisis.

Amidst this moment of menace lies a chance to recast who we are to ourselves and each other. Oppressive rationality is finally yielding to emerging science showing our unlikely arrival in this moment is both more unlikely and inevitable than we were led to believe in grade 11 chemistry class.

I hope to translate physics into gratitude. I will make the case that the enjoyment of sentient existence is the most sacred substance in the universe, providing a lodestone for those lucky enough to experience anything at all. I aim to prove that mirthful gratitude is our most majestic duty, while being mindful of allowing fellow travelers to do the same.

Net Mirth is an idea I began developing as a self-help book for myself. Perhaps it can help you too. A spiritual belief for the non-believers, it is a way to calculate moral behavior from first principles in real time as we navigate our rapidly evolving world. No demanding deity required.2

Have fun. Be nice. Are these intentions somehow woven into the fabric of creation? Join me on this journey as we try and find out.

2

^{For those kindred nerds out there, here at last is a simple equation of mathematical morality:}

^{“Worth” equals mirth minus mayhem, summed over all sentient beings alive now and in the future. This net mirth is thus your own mindful merriment minus whatever chaos you cause others, which of course is never zero.}