Chapter IX - Can Human Society Get The Sniffles?

You wake up one day next to your gorgeous...dog, get out of bed, go to the toilet, and while looking in the mirror and wondering how the hell you can possibly be so sexy, you see something that wasn't there yesterday. You pluck that nose hair out, and then you notice a second thing that wasn't there before: A red rash on the side of your face. You consider that it may perhaps be from sleeping with your cheek on the laptop keyboard again, so you think nothing of it and get ready for a brand new day, until you get to Uni for your lecture and people start asking where you are hiding the whiskey bottle that you've obviously been indulging in that morning judging by your looks, and may they have some. So you storm out of the lecture hall and go to the toilet, where you find that the red rash that you saw when you woke up has now diligently extended all over your face, making you look like a poor man's Mr. Potato Head fashioned out of last year’s Christmas decorations.

Next stop, the Uni infirmary, where after being inspected by the doctor, you are informed that you have acquired a rare case of slapped cheek syndrome. Rare in that this syndrome generally only appears in babies, and although you may be a babe, the doctor points out and winks - which you find somewhat disturbing but also strangely arousing, since it's a ridiculously attractive doc - a baby you are not.

So, you are given a topical cream and are sent on your merry way to find the whiskey bottle which goes with your flush. These is not an unusual occurrence for a person - well, maybe getting slapped cheek syndrome is - but not acquiring some sort of disease. People get sick all the time. Some diseases are less serious, and others are more so. Some diseases are caused by bacteria or viruses, others are caused by things going wrong in our bodies. And no, a hangover doesn’t count.

But what about human society? Do multizoa organisms have diseases? Can human society get the sniffles too?

Well, what’s a disease in the first place? It’s something which causes harm to the organism, most of the time by harming or killing the organism’s basic units. Whether we’re talking about the common cold, diabetes or silly yak disease, these human conditions do damage to the cells of the human body one way or another.

So then, a multizoa disease would be something that goes around doing damage to the human beings within human society, and there’s one thing that fits this description quite well. Take a look at this picture:

On the left, you have the character Jorah Mormont from Game of Thrones revealing the Greyscale infection spreading on his hand and neck, but still managing to look cool while doing it. Greyscale is a fictional disease that among other things hardens the skin over time, making brittle, dark and stone-like, similar to a reptile skin. There are genuine skin diseases out there that are similar to it, but none of the pictures available on them were accompanied by such good fashion taste. Gresycale presumably kills off skin cells as it spreads, and wreaks havoc on other cells in the body as the disease progresses.

On the right, you have the war in Syria. Let’s look at war in terms of human society as a whole. Wherever war spreads on the body of human society, it results in images like the one you see above, with dead people and dead buildings. So far, the spreading war has resulted in the death of somewhere between 317,000 and 470,000 of human society’s people, with countless others injured and millions forced to leave their homes behind and relocate. About 30% of the residential buildings, and around half of the country’s medical and educational facilities have been destroyed. The conflict has extended across 70 percent of the Syrian area of human society’s body, giving it more or less of a look similar to the one you see above. Look at that picture. Does it not seem like the flaky skin of Greyscale, but for human society? In other words, does it not seem like a multizoa disease?

Now, as far as diseases go, war does not seem to be spread by a pathogen, like a virus, bacteria or Chuck Norris memes.

Rather, war is similar to an autoimmune disease. In medicine, an autoimmune disease is one characterized by the fact that the human body’s immune cells do not recognize another group of cells as being part of the same body even though they are, so cells get attacked and killed off. It includes diseases such as type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and Chuck Norris memes. (Chuck Norris is the only thing in existence that can both be and not be a pathogen).

That is, more or less, what’s happening in this case. Humans that are part of human society’s body are attacking other humans that are part of human society’s body, just like in autoimmune diseases some cells of a person’s body are attacking other cells of the same body.

In that sense, if war was to be compared to a skin disease it would be more like psoriasis, an autoimmune disease where the skin becomes red and flaky, caused by the body’s T cells attacking skin cells.

So why is war bad? Setting aside the commonly known fact that, you know, war is not fun for anyone involved. First, the biological perspective. A disease lowers the desire and ability of an organism to reproduce. Have your ever tried getting funky while being sick or injured? Exactly. This applies to multizoa organisms as well. Our human society's energy is too busy focusing on the disease it currently has to seriously turn its worldwide resources towards establishing colonies on other planets.

Then, a disease can stunt an organism’s growth, leaving it underdeveloped. Our human society is definitely still in its growing stages with a population projected to increase by a couple of billion until 2050, so how is having a serious disease like war affecting its development - both physical and cognitive?

Then, disease lowers an organism's chances of survival - for example, in the wild a sick or wounded animal is more likely to be killed off than a healthy one, because a healthy one is better able to protect itself against unforeseen dangers, be it a predator, some unexpected change in its environment like a drought that leaves it without food and water, or lack of sleep caused by loud music coming from their neighbors practicing their dance moves.

And it's the same with multizoa organisms. A multizoa organism that is sick or wounded may not be as able to protect itself against unforeseen threats coming from its environment. Our human society is lucky in that its environment is relatively stable and challenge free for the moment, so even though its disease weakens it, it is still surviving, and even in certain senses thriving. I mean, Chewbacca mom! ‘nuff said. But we should use this window of environmental stability to make our society developed and strong rather than simply survive a self-caused disease because truly, as humans our enemy is not each other, it is the darwinian natural selection process applied to multizoa organisms, whose judgments can come swiftly and without any sort of empathy or remorse for our human society as Discovery Channel shows us they do for animals in nature. It can be a rock coming from space, some major geological change on Earth, some new crop disease that threatens to wipe out our food supply, or Chuck Norris going rogue…Oh God, just the thought of that last one makes me want to give up and die.

But whatever the next challenge will be, a sick human society will have a much tougher chance surviving it than a healthy one. So, in light of the new information presented in this book, wasting anymore resources, energy, human time and potential on perpetuating a multizoa disease is, biologically speaking, as ignorant as tying your dog's leash to your Formula 1 racing car because it has no back seats and then driving away full speed assuming that Rex will be fiiiine.

The second category of reasons for why war is bad involves the human perspective, for which I would like to call out the 10.000 rule.

The 10.000 hour rule basically says that whatever you practice for 10.000 hours, you can become an expert at. Some people have clocked 10.000 hours of playing the video game Star Wars Jedi Academy and have become experts at it, some people have clocked 10.000 hours of riding unicycles and have become experts at it, and some people have clocked 10.000 hours of wielding machine guns and have become experts at it. Now of course, it’s not guaranteed that practicing something for 10.000 hours will make you an expert.

There are other factors such as the underlying talent involved, genetic make-up when it comes to certain activities such as sports or pulling cars with your testicles, and the kind of practice engaged in, whether it’s pushing (or pulling) to perfect or simply rote practice. But what’s certain is that without practice, you can never become good at any activity. Practice is the bedrock of expertise.

I want to expand on the 10.000 hour rule a little bit, and say that whatever you repeatedly do when you’re young, you can easily develop an emotional connection with and might want to repeat doing throughout your life. For some, it means eating at McDonalds with their family when they were kids. For others, it means carrying around sawed off shotguns in their youth, and looking out for strange activity around their village to warn people of incoming attacks from rebel camps. It kind of becomes part of your specialization. Similar to how stem cells can specialize into skin cells, or brain cells, or any other cells based on the environment that you initially put them in. And why would we want people to specialize in things that are related to war? That just has a very big chance of perpetuating into more war.

And second, it’s worth pointing out that in the course of 10.000 hours of practice you are more likely to have become usefully creative in a field. 10.000 hours of doing physics will make you have such a good grasp of physics that you might come out with a physics paper that adds to the field. 10.000 hours of playing Civilization IV will make you build cities in that game of a kind that no one’s ever seen. 10.000 hours of playing ultimate Frisbee will make you have Frisbee in your blood to the point where you may invent some kind of double backflip blind throw with a 60 degree curve that will have your name on it. 10.000 hours of writing will enable you to write things of the type you’re reading. And why would we want anyone to clock 10.000 hours in warfare and become usefully creative in things related to it? That’s the kind of stuff that leads to the development of suicide bombing, of ingenious terror tactics, of some heavy-duty knife wielding.

But if the same people would grow up in a different environment, one that has nothing to do with war, they wouldn’t practice in that field and become usefully creative in it. In fact, they might practice for 10.000 hours in another field, and that same creative modjo could now yield something totally different and positive, like the invention of an automatic pancake making machine. Mmm, pancakes!

As a side note, the 10.000 hour rule is also related to the idea from the last chapter that if you free up people’s time, the world will become a better place, essentially. That’s because more people could clock in 10.000 hours in things other than repetitive labour or satisfying their basic necessities, becoming usefully creative in those fields and potentially leading to new possibilities, new inventions in those fields for all of the world’s people to use and benefit from.

Now that we’ve established the fact that war is a multizoa disease, as well as pointed out some of the obvious and less obvious pitfalls of war, how do we stop the disease? Well obviously I don't know the complete answer, but I know something that can help! Can you guess? Yes, it’s human society’s consciousness! And if you didn’t guess, drop and give me 20.

So what about human society’s consciousness am I suggesting can end wars, exactly? Naturally, it entails putting up images of cute looking sad puppies all over the world with the caption “Zdoop da warz."

But seriously, art. One of the gruesome results of the war mentioned earlier has been the large number of refugees that have emerged from Syria. There are approximately 6 million Syrian refugees outside of the country spread throughout the world, out of which about 10% are sheltered in refugee camps. Many of these people find themselves with limited resources, little possibility for further education, little diversity in recreational activities, little chances to dance naked in the wild, except if they happened to cross borders through a jungle that had magic mushrooms, and one of them happened to be a botanist. So, little chance. Approximately 2 million of these refugees are children.

Now, the theory of consciousness laid out in this book explains that whatever works of art people throughout human society popularize bring with them resources and human creativity. It doesn’t matter where these works of art stem from as long as they become popular.

So, one of the solutions gleamed from this book could be for the children, who have experienced the effects of war like no one else, to be given the chance to specialize in channeling their passion and experiences into making works of art, and in doing so to wake up the entire human society to what is going on in their home country. And this doesn’t simply mean drawings, or sculptures. The end goal would be to produce high quality works of art that rival blockbuster movies and internationally renowned songs, which can and will want to be shared by people everywhere. (The kind of stuff that multiple people which have put in or are going for 10.000 hours in their fields working together can get you.)

Why? The reasoning has multiple angles.

First, we talked before the fact that whatever human society’s consciousness focuses on attracts with it resources as well as human creativity. If refugees were to make works of art that become popular throughout human society, they could then channel the resources that come with that into improving the quality of life for refugees all around the world.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, if the Syrian refugees learn to channel their passion into producing works of art that displays their situation in a way that draws empathy from everyone watching but that is also good enough to be a musthave for the general population - works of art that basically everyone will want to experience - as those works of art become popular, the sense of empathy that comes with them will essentially make human society consciously aware that something seriously wrong is going on in the Syrian part of Her Body and will seek to heal it as naturally as a human who realizes they’ve just been injured turns their attention to tend to their wound.

In light of this proposition, some of the resources that go into helping refugees can be in the direction of allowing the people, and especially the children to learn to express themselves through art: Give them not just pens, but cameras. Build not just schools, but movie studios, animation studios. Give them not just training in science and engineering, but special effects training. Allow the people, and especially the children to learn to express themselves through art, so that they become experts through the time they invest in it, so that the art that they produce in combination with their experience and their passion will make the entire world sympathize, and empathize. Just like the movies on Nazi history has been doing for the Jewish plight retrospectively for decades through documentaries, movies, etc., have art of the same high quality do it for the atrocious plights that people experience today.

I mean, have you ever seen Schindler's list? If you don't cry at that movie you're a monster. What about a Schindler's list for people of Syria, done now while it can affect how refugees are received? What about not just one movie, but 10, 100, 40,000? How about not just movies, but art of various kinds that people like to experience and own? How about not just works of art that make people sad, but that make them happy, elated, hungry, sexy? How many works of art will it take for people to feel that enough is enough? And I mean everyone - from the people in the world’s parliaments, to the people in their homes, to the people in the offices, to the people on the street? Because war cannot go on without human time being invested in it, so if the works of art that become popular worldwide have the effect of stopping every person from engaging in war, the war will stop. It’s as simple as that. Works of art can have miraculous effects. Just look at Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Just look at Thomas Nast’s pictures of Santa Claus. Just look at Bruce Lee’s The Big Boss movie. Just look at these legs:

Anyway, the point is that this is what I feel fighting this war is about. It’s what pushed me to write this book, really…Because given how connected this world is, given how we’re all part of the same multizoa organism, I feel that I am a part of the war, and I’ve vowed to be a warrior in it even if I am so fantastically lucky to live in the part of the world that I am living. And so, I’ve put every other part of my life on the backburner to write this, just like war takes over the life of the people directly involved in it. The pen is my machine gun (well really the keyboard on my computer is, but let’s not get technical) the words in this book are my bullets. But the bullets are not aimed at other people, they are aimed at the war itself, because killing more people in the name of stopping the war is like wiping your butt with dried poop after pooping: Just because it’s dry, it doesn’t mean it’s not just more poop. These words are aimed at the ignorance that allows the input of human time into war. Put human time into relieving the causes of war instead.

So, my advice: You want to fight in the war? Enlist in the army of artists, and generate works of art around why war sucks for everybody, why war is biologically unsound, why war is ridiculous, why war is illogical, why war is raw spelled backwards, until human society becomes completely conscious of it. Works of art so good that they cannot be ignored, with the same passion as if you had a machine gun in your hand, with an urgency as if bullets were flying past your head every day. Because whether or not they are for you, for some people part of this organism that we are all part of, they are. They freakin’ are!