Introduction

Maybe it was just me, but perhaps everyone has some difficulty growing up, accepting what we are told by authority figures - parents, teachers, priests - which as a matter of fact, isn't true at all. I remember once being asked at what age I discovered Santa Claus wasn't real - but I couldn't locate any such event. I don't think it was that I always knew - but at that young age, it didn't matter. I just accepted everything at face value - such that Mr Pratt in a false beard was Santa Claus as well as being Mr Pratt in a false beard. It was only later I learned to discriminate between reality and fantasy - but coming into knowledge of the world, it didn't seem right. Nonetheless, in order to pursue the things I wanted I had to accept the religious, political and economic ideological architecture of society as fact - which wasn't difficult, because everyone else did, and I didn't know any better, so I accepted it at face value for three years. I put my disquiet aside, worked hard and had a great time spending the money I earned. Then there was a recession - and in my little corner of the world it was particularly acute. I was 'no longer required' and suffered several ways as a consequence, in part from lack of money, identity, purpose, belonging and approbation - but the worst of it was feeling like I'd been fooled - lied to, used and then just discarded.

If it hadn't been for that recession occuring just when it did, I might have forgotten my misgivings. In that case the period of doubt would have been relatively short-lived, from 12 or 13 through to 16, before I was forced to 'grow-up' and it may be that's the case for most people. If remebered at all - the feeling they had that something isn't right would probably be dismissed as teenage angst; sublimated in the process of defining an identity and purpose relative to the ideological architecture of society. In doing so it's necessary to adopt those ideas - else, for example, be burdened with knowledge of the irrationality of working only to earn enough to continue working while someone else accumulates wealth by appropriating the surplus value of ones labour. But it's much more than that. It's the whole crazy question about why we are here - that's just too easy to abdicate from by screwing tops on jam jars 9 to 5 to get pissed down the pub all weekend.

I had an awful lot of time to think about it once I was no longer required. In forming my identity and purposes - I didn't have the same motives as most people. Instead, from a state of little knowledge and great confusion I decided I wanted to know what was true. I suffered from that as well - it was awful. I thorougly disenchanted myself. There were times I cried and prayed to have not looked reality in the eye. I wanted everything back the way it was - even if I wasn't required, had holes in my knees and the toes of my shoes were flapping open, eating eggy bread and beans day after day, on thirty pounds a week for four long years. By the time the economy recovered I was in no fit state to work. I was a recluse and clinically depressed. I stared into the nihilistic abyss - and saw, in truth - no God, the stars beyond reach, war, poverty and environmental devastation, and my own insignificant mortality relative to humankind - similarly doomed to suffer extinction.

Unable to know whether I was blinded or dwelling in darkness I stumbled along in search of light - and took every wrong turn imaginable before I found something that was true. It wasn't at all obvious that scientific knowledge provided the answers I'd been looking for - not least because I'd been indoctrinated into ideology from infancy, and scientific knowledge was also lied about, used and then just discarded. I had no understanding of the epistemic difference between ideology and science: that ideology is just made up whereas scientific truths are necessary. Thinking in ideological terms I couldn't ask the right questions. I had emotional needs established by ideological indoctrination I took to be natural - that weren't satisfied by science, and because they formed the basis of everyone else's understanding of reality, concepts like religion, the nation state and money constantly reasserted themselves to confuse my reasoning.

The key log was evolution. It's strange - because somehow I knew about it, but had never considered the obvious implication that religion, nation state and capitalism must have occurred in the course of human evolution from animal ignorance into human intellectual awareness. With that realization, my fundamental basis of analysis changed. History no longer began two thousand years ago, foriegn lands and peoples were no longer seperate realities, money was no longer a real and natural object. I recognized the falsity of these ideas - and suffered the consequences. I lived under siege from a darkly ideological world.

Aged about 28 - and still very screwed up, working toward valid understanding but still some way off - I applied to university as a mature student. It was very difficult. I could read and write - but I couldn't type or use the internet. The first year I wrote everything longhand and then typed it up. On the library shelves I found ideas I'd developed from first principles - better expressed than I'd been capable of, but employed in the course of - and justifying the fundamentality of religious, political and economic ideology. For all their brilliance - the whole of academia had overlooked something really quite elementary, and profoundly important. It was like they'd 'grown-up' before they became academics - accepted the ideological archetecture of society in forging their identities, and then - despite academic involvement with sociological and political philosophy, had never revisited those assumptions.

Consequently, in order to prove my argument I had to go right back to the nature of life, evolution and the human being - and set human intellectual intelligence in the context of the intelligent relation to reality necessary to all surviving organisms. Even the simplest primordial organism had to be physiologically correct to reality in order to survive, to breed to pass on those traits to subsequent generations. Organisms mutate - and beneficial mutations prosper - while mutations that are unintelligent relations to reality die out. This function or fail principle applies equally to behavioural intelligence, and explains, for example why a bird builds a nest before it lays eggs. In this context we can explain the transition from animal ignorance to human awareness, the unfolding of human history - and how we come to a situation now where the ideas billions of people hold to be true are in fact false. In turn, that explains why, despite progress, things are getting in some strange way worse - why the child was right, that things are wrong - and why, despite our brilliance we tend toward extinction.

I hope you don't have to suffer what I did - forging this path as if blind, and feeling it every step of the way from darkness into the light. You cannot justly claim conscientious conviction of assumptions you've failed to question, but have either just accepted at face value because everyone else does, or at best - striven to justify relative to other ideological falsities - but I appreciate that doesn't negate the emotional investment we make in ideas that form the basis of our identities and purposes. It may be that, without having walked the path you'll never be able to see it - without having the motive and opportunity to engage with these ideas on an ongoing basis, but under siege from society, you'll never see past ideological assumptions of the past - still present. But it's not Liberty or Equality - it's Truth. It's not international - but global, nay universal. It's not black and white - but concerns the human species. It's not religious - but it is the word of God. Science is not merely a tool - but valid knowledge that describes the relation it's necessary we have to reality in order to survive and prosper.