Introduction Hi there. Thank you for picking this book up, I’ll do what I can to make it worth your while. I have something to share with you that you are not going to like. I didn’t like it when I saw it. It is the nastiest thing I’ve ever seen. Why would you want to see it? Well, I’d rather not argue you into seeing it, or try to persuade you of anything. But I can tell you the reason I decided to properly look at it when I first caught a glimpse of what was going on . It was a shocking thing to see, even just a flash of it . But I chose not to look away. You’re going to have that choice when you read this bo ok, and if you choose not to look at it, I can’t stop you and I’m not going to try. But the reason I forced myself to look was this – it was a terrible, horrible possibility. But if this terrible thing wasn’t true, then I didn’t need to worry and I’d see it wasn’t true. But if it was true, then everything I was, everything I’d done, everything I was working for and attempting, all of it, ha d this massive l ie right at the heart. And I mean massive – truly massive. S omething that would totally destroy any hope I ever had of doing anything real, or helping anyone in any real way. So, I looked. And it was true. It was a bitter cup to drink, savagely bitter, the bitterest thing I can describe. It took days just to get through the initial avalanche of painful r evelations. The hits just kept on coming. It was like discovering my whole life anew from a totally new angle – a terrible angle which revealed me as something appalling, truly appalling, and all just because of this one single thing. But I kept looking. I figured if I want to have hope in my life, real hope, I ha d to see it. I ha d to see the truth all the way to the bottom. It seemed obvious that i f I c ould see the reality of this then maybe – just maybe – I’ d have a real future , b ecause only if I s aw i t in full could I possibly hope to change it in full. But if I dodge d away, or evade d it by fleeing down a line of clever - sounding distractions in my head, then this thing w ould poison – would continue to poison – all I was doing and everything I would ever touch. But as I looked, something else also started to swim into focus. I n ancient times there was a myth of a monster called the Hydra. It had multiple heads and it couldn’t be killed because if you cut off one head, it still had all the ot hers, and worse, that head you cut off would regrow two heads in its place. I honestly feel that we are all looking around a world where almost every problem we face is like that. I know I’ve encountered a lot of that in my own life. Something goes wrong, w e try to fix it, we only make it worse. Everyone entrenches, sides are drawn, the whole thing bogs down into a godawful quagmire and then nothing changes, the problem still remains just as bad, but now we’ve got this horrible layer of conflict on top of it. I could list global problems where this is true, but then it might be quicker to list problems where it’s not , and that would be a very short list. Honestly, I can’t think of any major issue the world is facing that doesn’t have that shape. We hit thi s kind of conflict in our personal lives, our professional lives, our romantic lives, even our family lives. This kind of grinding, futile conflict seems to bubble up from inside human beings, it’s enough to make you despair. To make you think – there’s no hope here, we’re all terrible, nothing can change, we’re just awful people. To make you think – people make no sense. It’s all just chaos. But seeing this thing changed that for me. Suddenly, for all the pain of the revelation , I could see that all that kind of thing was n’t chaos. There is an order to it. Something is happening underneath what we see of ourselves that makes chilling, wrenching sense of why we are the way we are. And while that thing remains hidden from us, we are trapped, forever stuck tr ying to fix the symptoms of a problem that we can never quite reach, like an itch we can’t quite scratch. And honestly, I’m so glad I saw it. I would never want to go back to being that person who didn’t know it. Sometimes I toy with that, daydream about going back to the life I had before I saw th is thing But there’s no future to any kind of life like that. None at all. Because for all it’s terrible darkness, o nly if we see th is deeply can we hope to reach this deeply. To heal this deeply, and change this deeply. To hope and really to hope. And you may well turn around and say – “ Oh, so you have a magic answer to all our problems? ” I’m sorry but no. I don’t. But I can see the shape and dimensions of a problem so central to all our other p roblems that if we never get to grips with it, we’ll be spinning our wheels forever. You can judge for yourself when you look. It’s simple enough to understand. So, is it just a big problem with no solution? Again, no. I think I can see the shape of wher e an answer lies, and that’s where I’m headed. I’ll lay it all out for you so you can see why I’m thinking the way I am . But it’s no simple trick, and I have no guarantees. T his problem is astonishingly serious. It’s massive, it’s savage. It’s dug in like a tick. I know I can’t fix it alone, you can’t fix it alone, nobody can. But together, I think there is every reason to hope, and I’ll give you my reasons for hoping. I have no special authority. I’m just a person staring into a terrible situation, trying to make sense of it. But no matter how impossible this problem seems, we don’t need a million different solutions. We only need one. And if we can find that answer, whatever it is, we can solve the issues that blight our world and blight our lives at a d epth we’ve never even imagined possible. Now I’ve put this book together in a certain way, and I’ve done this for a reason. This issue, this terrible thing, is something you need to actually see for yourself. Intellectually understanding it just as a th eory can’t really help you. W hen I started seeing it, I started leaping into debates and analysis inside my head, comparing this idea to that idea , ranting and posturing and having a whale of a time. But I stopped myself, because I could see that I was jus t running away from actually looking at the reality of what was going on – what was going on with myself, in my own life Perhaps you’ll do the same, I don’t know. There are plenty of ways to evade it, plenty of possible distraction s . It’s just such a sa vage thing to see . Doing so means making that same choice I made – g rabbing yourself by the throat and forcing yourself to look at something you are really, really not going to like. But what made me do it was the thought of t he real people that I loved. Not people in general, not people in theory, but t he real people I cared about. The people I’d let down. The people I always wished I could help. If I didn’t look, I just felt I was abandoning them , because while I was blinding myself to this issue, everything I did would contain it, and be poisoned by it. I don’t know if the same thing wi l l work for you. We’re different people. But I will say this, looking at this really is a choice, and I know several people who have made th at choice, in their own way, for their own reasons. If you want to pivot away from this thing, nobody can stop you. But also, nobody can stop you from look ing either , if you decide to So, it cuts both ways. It’s as free a choice as exists anywhere in this world. In order to give you that choice this book needs to give you two things. The first is this – yo u need a really, really clear idea of the core issue itself. It’s not just enough to just drop a quick summary in a quick paragraph. That wouldn’t wor k. You need really deep insight into it, extreme clarity. The reason is that your mind itself will resist seeing this , in a very similar way as it would resist news of a bereavement. Losing someone you love is such a horrible thing that your whole mind rec oils, pushes it away, tries to find ways to dismiss it, or to argue with it, or anything, anything at all, so it doesn’t have to be considered or accepted. This is like that. The only way I know to help a person past that problem is to g ive you really, r eally extreme clarity on the core issue . The kind of clarity that can’t just come from a short description. Absolute clarity makes it much harder to misrepresent it to yourself as a means to evade it, or deflect it I know that sounds terrible, I’m not criticising you in any way. It just really is so bad that if there’s a way to dodge it, you can fall into that quite quickly, I know I almost did. With that said, having this extreme clarity doesn’t mean you can’t still evade it. Of course you can, anyone can. Nothing can take away your choice. But this gives you the best chance I can give you to see what you need to see in real life, when it comes time to look. So how are we getting you that level of extreme clarity? The way I’ve done this might seem str ange, but it’s the best way I could think of. I have a deep interest in biology and evolution, and from th at angle I could see a way to understand th is terrible thing. So, I put together a new idea about what this thing is and how it connects to where we’ve come from . Th ose are the first two parts of the book. And it’s all written in clear English, I’ve tried to explain any words I use that aren’t common. I’ve done my best, and if you do your best I’m sure that together, we’ll b ridge any gap. But the purpose of those parts is not to persuade you of a specific origin of this problem or of human beings. The important thing is that looking at it from this perspective give s you a way to get absolute laser focus on the central issue in a kind of ‘ neutral space ’ By the end of the evolution bit, you’ll have all the clarity I can possibly give you , and more than you’ll need to see the thing itself. That also means that it doesn’t even really matter if you agree or disagree with the evo lution stuff. The only thing that really matters is that you understand the evolution part of the book. As long as you can do that, you’ll get that absolute clarity on the deeper issue we’re going to be looking at. P art three is where we’re going to talk about how to see the reality of this issue playing out in real life – how to see it playing out in yourself. There’s a specific angle from which this issue cannot be hidden. I’m going to describe that angle as clearly as I can – it’s not complex. Once you understand that, then it’s on you. T o look or not to look, that is the question . And i t’s a question you alone can answer. The final part of the book talks about what to do about this situation . Where to go next, what kind of di rection we can move in that might help resolve it. And I think there is a way. And it’s a hard path, with some seriously weird elements, but it’s the one I’m headed down. I won’t tell you to take it, or try to persuade you in any way. I’ll just explain why I’m taking it, and let you see what it is. Then I’ll leave you with my email address so you can send me abuse if you want to. I guess there’s one last thing to say – why should you listen to me? The answer is that there is no special reason. I’m just s ome guy. Everything I’ve learned around all this stuff I’ve pieced together myself, largely from making terrible mistakes and blundering into situations that I couldn’t resolve, then stumbling out through the wreckage, leaving a trail of damage in my wake. Many of the connections in this book have been made possible only because of the work of people much better than me, with far better qualifications. To be blunt - there’s no need for you to listen to, or to respect me. But you don’t need to trust me, no body does. The reason you should still read this is that what I’m going to put in front of you is something you can see with your own eyes. This thing is, when you really get down to it, very visible, very clear. If you want to have an argument between you and the evidence of your own eyes, you can go right on ahead and argue . I know I did. And I also know that’s an argument I lost. So. Four parts. Part 1 and 2 are about b iology and evolution Part 3 is the big reveal, Part 4 is all about possible path s fo rward. Oh, and one last thing. I am not better than you , far from it . When you see this, you will feel really small, much smaller than you’ve ever felt before. You’ll want to crawl under a rock so you never have to face yourself against. You’re going to f eel so bad, like the worst person in the world. But you’re not. You’re not. We’re all in the same boat. So yes, t here is a terrible discovery that you are about to make about yourself. But just to be very clear – what you’re about to learn is something t hat is absolutely true of me. 100% true of me. I wish it wasn’t. But it is. So I’m not standing in judgement of you. And I’m so sorry to be the guy who tell you what you’re about to hear. Part 1 : The Wasp And The Caterpillar Chapter 1 Three hundred years ago a man called Marcus Von Plenciz was trying to save millions of lives and being ignored. He had a new idea that made sense of something horrific. His idea was that infectious disease was caused by creatures too small to see. He was r idiculed. Everyone knew that disease was caused by evil spirits in stinking air. Since ancient times doctors had called this air miasma – foul clouds of malevolent will. You could smell how nasty they were. There was no need for a new idea. But Von Plenci z knew differently. He knew that if he was right, new ways to cure disease could be developed, far beyond anything humanity had ever considered. So, he pushed his idea. He spoke to people. He wrote letters. He even gave the tiny creatures a special name: A nimalculae . This invisible life, he argued, fed upon us, but we couldn't see it. All we could see were the consequences of the feeding – sickness, pain and death. He fought hard for his theory, but nobody listened. As far as the world was concerned, Von P lenciz was an idiot. After all, he believed something palpably silly – that there was an invisible world, and in that world, there was life of a totally different kind to the life we know. This wasn't a dry academic disagreement. This was life and death on a massive scale, real people in desperate situations, crying out to a doctor to save their dying children, dying wives, dying husbands. But the doctors didn't save them. They couldn't, they didn't understand what was going on. They were all wrong. Von Plenciz had it. Tiny creatures, too small to see. Today we call them microbes, not Animalculae, but Von Plenciz had cracked the essence of germ theory. But is it that hard to understand the resistance of the doctors of the time? It seems natural to us tha t big problems have big causes. Disease was a big problem, one of the biggest. It carried all the pain of maiming your body, losing the people you love, and your own death. They believed such horror had a huge cause – evil itself, evil spirits sent to dest roy human life. But sometimes big problems have very small causes indeed. If a cause can compound, if a cause can feed itself and grow in power, it can have enormous effects. The microscopic world is teeming with tiny things that alone pose no danger at a ll, but they can breed. Even though their scale is a fraction of our own, they can kill us. What we are going to consider in this section is that, just as in Von Plenciz’s time, there is another kind of cause for a huge range of human problems. But we’re not talking about physical problems or physical diseases. We’re talking about a huge range of emotional problems. Something invisible to us because just like the microscopic world in Von Plenciz’s time, it is outside what we have yet considered. A new kind of place where something small can multiply and grow. Where tiny things can compound and compound until they become enormous issues that swamp our lives. Another, very different kind, of invisible world. Chapter 2 Evolution is a simple mechanism. It occu pies a strange place in science, not quite the same as a physical law like gravity, but in some ways similar. Once the conditions for evolution are in place, it will always occur. When it occurs it creates something striking, which is to say, life. Evoluti on is extremely simple at its heart. There are only three conditions for evolution. They are reproduction, variation and competition. Condition one – reproduction. A thing has to be able to copy itself. Those copies must be different from each other, that's condition two, variation. There needs to be some limited resource over which the copies compete, that's condition three, competition. The variations in the copies produce a range of approaches to winning that ongoing competition for resource s all the different organisms are engaged in. Some variations help, others hinder. As those most effective at competing get more resources, they reproduce more than the others. Theirs is the heritage that is carried forward. This happens again and again. T he churn of the blind process selects for the variations that help the most. Those successful variations are more pronounced through the generations. They compound and build upon themselves until the organism is honed to exploit its environment with dizzyi ng efficiency. That's evolution, that's all it is. And because it’s so simple, that means that if these three things are present in any habitat, evolution is inevitable. Life will occur. Nothing can stop it. Life can evolve in all sorts of places. It can evolve in the deserts of Africa, the jungles of the Amazon, and near hydrothermal vents in the deep of the sea. It can occur in the bloodstream of a seagull in flight, in the froth of waves and the ice of tundra. But there is another place where it can als o happen. It is a place which humanity has never considered, a place so close to home we overlook it. Thoughts can reproduce. You can have a thought and tell your friend that thought, then you both have that thought. The thought has been copied. So that’ s reproduction, condition one. All thoughts vary. We each have a different brain, we're different people. All of our thoughts have a unique spin. Even mathematical equations sit differently in people's minds because we look at them from our unique persona l perspectives. Or two people can have the exact same idea but be doing something totally different with it. So, no matter how exact, no copy of any idea can ever be a clone. And that means variation is baked in to the world of thought, and that’s conditio n two. But what about condition three, competition? Well, is it wrong to say that some thoughts come and go, unable to gain traction, but other times, thoughts grab us, rivet us, capture us? There’s only so much attention to go around, only so much bandwi dth in a person’s mind. If a thought can dominate that bandwidth, pluck at your heart, and engage your head, then you’ll spread that thought a lot more. Which means that there is a limited resource over which thoughts compete, which directly affects how fa st they reproduce from person to person. When evolution's three conditions of reproduction, variation and competition occur all together, evolution is locked. The rollercoaster has begun to move, the bar has clicked in position and we're in there for the ride. It takes a while to get where it's going , but the destination is always life. Life has its own agenda: to survive, feed and reproduce. It adapts to its environment in amazing ways, and more than anything else, it works for itself. Evolution doesn't need blood and muscle, or cells, or even DNA. We’ve proven that by creating evolutionary programming that uses this simple process to generate computer code in a virtual environment. That shows that evolution is not limited to the physical. All it needs i s self - replicating information. Which leads us to a strange and almost science - fiction like conclusion. If this is all true, then ideas themselves must be subject to their own evolution. Which means that ideas must be a form of life. A form of life with its own agenda, which is working for itself. Chapter 3 Ideas seem like part of us. They seem so intimately part of us that it is surreal to question them. But evolution produces strange things, and appearances are not always to be trusted. Humans have ex isted in their modern form for at least three hundred thousand years, perhaps longer. That might seem like a long time, but human evolution moves slowly. It takes decades for a human to grow to maturity and decades to raise a new generation. Germs reproduce much faster. It can be twenty minutes from a germ's creation to when it reproduces. In three hundred thousand years a germ can go through seven and a half trillion generations. If thoughts reproduce slowly like humans do, three hundred thousand y ears of evolution might produce a few limited adaptations. But if thoughts reproduce as fast as germs can, three hundred thousand years is easily long enough to evolve into flawless engines of replication and hunger. From when a thought is conceived to wh en it is communicated can be a matter of seconds. It can be faster even than the few minutes it takes germs. While physical reproduction is facilitated by a physical form, it is also constrained in speed by that physicality. Human bodies are hugely complex and that takes time to copy. Germs are far simpler, but there's still a lot of chemical chicanery involved. Ideas don't have this problem. They can just be spoken and comprehended. On top of this, a human usually bears one child at a time. Germs split in two. But a single idea can be communicated to however many people can hear it. For most of our past that meant how many people could crowd into earshot, but that's still a potential of hundreds of offspring per generation. Ideas have the capacity to reproduce and spread a lot faster than germs do. Three hundred thousand years of human consciousness could well provide long enough for something to take shape inside that habitat, something very well honed to exploit it. The point of these little ‘ba ck of the napkin’ calculations is not to prove anything, but to get us considering something. Some people have written about conceptual life, memetic theories about how ideas in culture can multiply and grow. They’re talking about packets of information we share online, things like that. But we’re talking about something far more ancient. Because if we’re looking at an evolutionary history that stretches back to the start of thought itself, there’s archaeological evidence of abstract thought in pre - human a ncestors, literally millions of years ago. That means that this form of life has had a habitat in which to evolve for millions of years. W hat’s possible in this situation is a form of life staggeringly more ancient and advanced than anything we have ever s eriously considered possible, or even plausible. What kind of life are we talking about here? Well, here’s the thing – biology isn’t just a bunch of boring words and classifications that you get beaten over the head with in school. There are some fearfu lly clever people who’ve spent a long time cracking open the basic rules that all life obeys. I’m not one of those people, I’m just an amateur biologist. But those people have dug up some profound rules about how things work, how all life works in all sort s of ways. One of the things they’ve mapped out is the phenomenon of symbiosis. Symbiosis is when two organisms are linked in their evolved behaviour. It means that – in some way, any way – there has been actual evolutionary change in one organism to make it more effective at exploiting its relationship with another organism. That relationship could be positive, neutral or negative – but what makes it symbiotic is if, whatever that relationship is, the organism has evolved actual changes that make that re lationship more useful to it. Symbiosis crops up all over the place in nature. Evolution drives an organism to adapt, and working in connection with another organism is often the best available option. There are three main forms of symbiosis. The first is something called mutualism, where two organisms help each other. Examples of this would be the way that bees pollinate flowers by collecting nectar, or how remora fish cling to sharks so they can clean the shark by eating its dead skin. The second form of symbiosis is what's called commensalism, or neutral symbiosis. This is where one organism benefits from another without affecting it. An example of this would be a bird that evolves special adaptations that help it nest inside a hole in a tree. The bir d physically changes to benefit more from another organism, but the tree itself does nothing, doesn’t change, doesn’t care. The third form of symbiosis is negative symbiosis, which is what is called parasitism. This is where one organism steals from the o ther while providing no benefit whatsoever. Parasitism is rife in nature. There are many forms of parasite, each adapted to exploit their host. Some parasites siphon off as much as they can while leaving their host alive. Others control their host in order to complete their life - cycle and reproduce. Some kill their host stone dead as part of that life - cycle. Parasitic adaptations are as brilliant as anything in evolution, and are often cruel. To give you a ‘for instance’ about how nasty these adaptations c an get, there is a kind of parasite called the tongue - eating louse, which enters a fish’s mouth through its gills. Once inside, the louse chews off the fish’s tongue, and takes its place. From that macabre position the louse lives out its days as the fish' s false tongue. Everything the fish eats has to pass a gatekeeper who takes a toll. It’s a disturbing image, but not an unrepresentative one. A lot of what parasites do is pretty disturbing. The human body has many forms of parasite. These can range from things like nits in your hair to the single - celled plasmodium protozoan which causes malaria. Thought is absolutely central to human life. We can't very much say thought doesn't affect us, and neither does it make a lot of sense to say that we don’t affec t thought. That means that if thought is alive, our first port of call for getting a sense of what kind of life this is are the rules of symbiosis. So, the big question is – what kind of symbiosis do humans have with thought? Well, it feels like we might be able to dismiss commensalist (neutral) symbiosis right off the bat. We have clearly, as animal, adapted to be better thinkers. If we’re going to concede that thoughts evolve and adapt to grab hold of human attention in more effective ways, which doesn’ t seem like a huge leap, then we can say that mutualism and parasitism are the only real options. Conceptual life will have gone one way or the other. Now you may well say – perhaps it’s both? Perhaps some conceptual life is good and some is bad. We’ll have to circle round and come back to that one in a second, because there’s another law in biology that directly hits it. But for now, let’s just say that evolution is blind, and if there are two different basic strategies it doesn't prefer one over the other. Evolution just rewards the most powerful strategy. So long story short (too late) if we identify which of these strategies gives a thought the most resources, we can discover if living concepts are friend or foe. Chapter 4 There is a kind of wasp that is a special kind of parasite. It's called a parasitoid, which means that it kills its host by the nature of what it does. Many parasites kill their hosts in the end, and all parasites accelerate the death of their host by taking its resources, but a parasitoid is always lethal. The story of the parasitoid wasp is a nasty story, nastier even than the tongue - eating louse. But it is worth hearing, becaus e there’s a strange possibility buried in this tale. A clue we can follow to take us through the looking glass and get a really good look at the mechanics of a world that has been hidden from human eyes. The most common kind of parasitoid wasp seeks out caterpillars and attacks them. It doesn't sting them. In the place of a sting, it has a tube called an ovipositor which drives its eggs into the caterpillar's flesh. The eggs are very small, and the wasp can inject scores of them into the caterpillar in a single strike. The caterpillars sometimes throw themselves off the branches of tall trees in an attempt to escape. Those who do so and die from the fall have a kinder fate than those who don't jump. Caterpillars don't have blood in the way we do, they hav e something else called interstitial fluid, but much like our blood it's full of nutrients. When the eggs hatch inside the caterpillar, larvae come out. They are really unpleasant to look at. They look like tiny maggots with teeth. They burrow through the insides of the caterpillar and grow bigger drinking its interstitial fluid. As they grow the caterpillar swells. It becomes grasped by an unnatural hunger. It has to consume and consume to make up for what's being taken from it. It can never eat enough. S ooner or later the larvae grow big enough to leave their stolen womb. They rip through the side of the caterpillar all at once. Sixty, seventy larvae each gnaw their own hole, tearing the caterpillar open. Again, it is a very ugly sight. It looks like the caterpillar is detonating in a slow - motion explosion of worms. But caterpillars are tough. Really tough. Often, they don't die immediately. Some survive for a time before succumbing to their wounds. What they do in that time is, in its own way, more terrib le than what they’ve just gone through. Here’s what happens. The larvae wriggle together in a pile. The ruptured, ruined caterpillar then limps over to the pile, and weaves its own cocoon around the pile to protect it. It then stands guard beside the pile , and until it bleeds to death it fights off anything that tries to hurt the larvae. The theory of evolution didn't make Charles Darwin doubt the existence of God. The cruelty of the parasitoid wasp did. The horror Darwin felt came from the fact that the wasp isn't evil. It has no other way to reproduce. This is its nature. Whatever created it, created it like this. That caterpillar's cocoon was meant to facilitate its own metamorphosis, its own future as something beautiful that could fly. Not only do the larvae violate its body, they violate its mind too. Its dying act demonstrates how far it has been twisted into betraying its own nature. But what is the mechanism of that betrayal? A caterpillar is not a sophisticated thinker, it has a small brain and a basic mind. It is being deceived, but the deception must be simple to fool such a simple thing. The larvae are likewise simple, and althoug h sometimes a couple of larvae remain inside the caterpillar, they don't sit in the caterpillar's head pulling levers and pressing buttons to pilot it like a ship. But there is one simple change which would make the caterpillar act in the way we see. The larvae could chemically shift its identity. If the caterpillar believes that the larvae are it, it will engage all of its natural instincts to protect the larvae, believing that it is protecting itself. This sidesteps the need for any complex control. Th e larvae don’t need to know how to pilot the caterpillar around. The caterpillar pilots itself. This also helps us to avoid just lazily hand - waving away the weirdness of the situation as some form of ‘chemical manipulation’ and looking no further. That’s n ot to say that chemicals aren’t involved, of course they are, but the point is that there’s a very simple thing that the chemical manipulation actually needs to do. If that caterpillar can be deceived into thinking the larvae literally are itself, how woul d it behave toward them? Consider the cocoon. The caterpillar is going to metamorphose into a moth or a butterfly. It is part of the caterpillar's nature to enter a transitory state. When it does, it is part of its nature to weave a cocoon (or chrysalis, if it’s a butterfly) to protect itself. But then the wasp larvae also have that same kind of phase in their life cycle. They too enter a transitory state, where they metamorphose into flying wasps. They too have their own cocoons 1 If the caterpillar's identity has been shunted onto the larvae, then how else would it react other than to take the time and energy to carefully weave its cocoon around those larvae? As far as it knows, it is doing what it believes it should be doing, whic h is to say, the business as usual of turning into a butterfly. Now of course, this is a guess. We can’t know for sure what’s going on because it's hard to see inside a caterpillar's head, the vagaries of caterpillar psychology being what they are. And e ven if we could prove that this identity - switch thing is what's happening with a caterpillar, which might be possible with certain experiments, that wouldn't prove anything about humans. But – we can now see a plausible mechanism for this strangeness. It’ s very simple, quite elegant in its own dark way. There’s just one thing that needs to be done. And when it is done, the parasite sees the host throw its entire life energy, all its effort, all its everything, into helping that parasite, thinking it is hel ping itself. It’s the ultimate hijack of an evolved life - form – the basic evolutionary agenda to survive and reproduce is seized by a single, simple deceit. 1 Please forgive me, I’m unsure if that’s the specific name for it with wasps, but there’s definitely a kind of covering which they excrete to cover themselves as they lie together in that writhing pile. Chapter 5 As evolved organisms, humans have powerful drives to survive, to protect ourselves and build our lives up. The thoughts in our head could work to help us do that, gaining some sustenance from their beneficial use. This would be a mutualist form of symbiosis. But there is another option available to those thoughts. If an idea can deceive us into believing we are it, how would we act? How would we act if that idea were threatened? Or if there were a way to spread that idea? If that idea was central to who we believed ourselves to be, what would we not do for it? Is it really so crazy to say th at if an evolved form of living idea could convince us we are it, we will act toward that idea as that caterpillar did to the wasp larvae? If an idea tears us to pieces, damages our lives, and creates conflict we might well step back and give it some ver y serious reconsideration. But what if that idea is literally what we understand to be who we actually are? What would we do then? Would we always step back? Would we always reconsider? Is it impossible that we might still protect it because we have been d eceived into thinking we are protecting ourselves? A helpful thought can hold our attention only for as long as that help lasts. If that helpful idea doesn’t actually help that much, it gets discarded, but even if the idea is really effective, what do we do once it solves the problem it's trying to solve? This is a problem if you’re a form of ‘living idea’, and you’re going for that mutualist symbiosis strategy. To get that mutualist relationship working, you want to help the human host who’s head you are in, and gain what you need from them in exchange. So attention, and emotional investment, and spreading to others. It’s not that there’s nothing that a beneficial idea could do to feed itself. Techniques for learning skills might a good vehicle for that kind of strategy – something that persists over time that preserves certain ideas that help human beings. But the idea might find it hard to grow beyond that particular niche. And what if that skill becomes outdated? Or something else comes in that means t hat this good idea is superseded by a new kind of approach? Again, that’s not to say that beneficial thought can’t happen – of course it can. We can of course cherish, protect and share some ideas which really do help us. But seen from the point of view of the idea itself trying to get and keep attention so it can spread and grow, that might be a fragile and limited proposition. And all alongside that fragility and limitation, any beneficial idea could always dip into a very different and far more powerful kind of strategy, and get a lot more food and a lot more security. What if that ‘good idea’ stopped being just a good idea? What if it expanded into a kind of human identity? Take two simple examples from our ancient past. So instead of all the ideas abou t how to hunt and trap animals for meat, you now have the identity of ‘hunter’. Instead of all the ideas about how to heal people with herbs or natural medicines, you now have the identity of ‘healer’. So all those good ideas are still there, that body of knowledge, but now it’s also become a sense of self. How could that happen? Well, we’re still just talking about concepts in a world of thought. Concepts evolving through that process of competition, variation, reproduction. The concepts themselves don’t need to ‘choose’ a certain evolutionary strategy any more than a virus, rabbit, or a daffodil would choose whatever they’re up to. The one that is the most effective strategy for their particular environment is the one that wins out. And for any beneficia l thought, the option is right there to exploit their environment (us) in a far more powerful way than just providing limited assistance. Hunter and healer are far more interesting ideas than the constituent technical ideas about how to hunt and how to h eal. How excited are you ever going to really get about stringing a bow, or setting a bone? But the identities have a power, a mystique. The hunter as someone brave and daring, lethal but also a provider for the tribe. Or the healer as someone who knows th e mysteries of the Earth, and who can fix terrible things with their secret knowledge. In this way, ideas that actually do help might serve as a very effective Trojan Horse for a much more powerful kind of strategy. If an idea is good, gets us excited, ge ts us engaged, helps us a lot – is it honestly that far of a leap to say we’re probably going start identifying with whatever it is we’re up to? Start taking a deeper ownership of any success, or glory, start congratulating ourselves on who we are – even j ust a little bit? Is that wrong? The problem is that as soon as any idea, helpful or not, can get us identifying with it, where is the limit on how much energy we give it? If we literally think – this is me – how will we behave toward that concept? How mu ch will we raise it up, cherish it, defend it, give it all our attention and we pour our hearts into it, thinking all the time we are helping ourselves? What would deny it? And all of this for just one single deception. The total hijacking of a human life. If we want to get even more disturbing, (which I’m sorry but we’re going to have to) – consider what that might mean for the idea of ‘being authentic’. Living an authentic life, being authentic to your identity, to who you are. How often do we hear that ? How often do we hear that raised up as the highest and most admirable possible way to live? How often have we ourselves raised it up? But what if that idea of ourselves we’re being authentic to is not us, just an idea of us? What if it’s no more the same thing than how an idea of a tree is the same as that actual tree? What does that mean about a life lived where the highest virtue is being authentic to who you believe yourself to be? If that identity is itself alive, and has fooled you – its human host - then how is that different to spending your entire life weaving a cocoon around a pile of wasp larvae? The point i