Midnight Thoughts

This book documents forays into The Land of Forbidden Thoughts by someone who late in life realized that he was a "misanthrope." I'm not the usual misanthrope, I'm just profoundly disappointed in human nature, and I haven't given up hope that a better nature may someday evolve. It occurs to me that hopeful misanthropes are in a privileged position to critique the problems with human nature that must be acknowledged and dealt with if a better world is to be achieved. Most of these forbidden thoughts were developed during the Midnight Hour, when it felt safer to question sacred beliefs that every society seems to enforce upon everyone. Non-conformance in the intellectual realm has an irresistible attraction for me, and I believe it has paid off. Many of the entries in this book have been organized into the book Genetic Enslavement: A Call to Arms for Individual Liberation (2014). A recurring theme in that book, as well as this one, is that since every living thing is assembled by genes the resulting organism is designed for enslavement into service for the genes. In other words, we are analogous to a robot that was designed to be useful to the robot maker. Inherent in this perspective is the concept of "reductionism" - a viewpoint that is disparaged by almost everyone, including most academics. However, I argue that reductionism is an inescapable result of everything known by physicists. Indeed, all of science is based on the reductionist paradigm. But if humans are "automatons" what are our prospects for taking control of ourselves as a species and averting our demise, or at least the demise of our most precious creation: civilization.