Lessons from the Toilet Seat

I have a bone to pick with you, ladies. If you share your home with a man and demand that he put the toilet seat down after he pees, you are a fascist.

Maybe that's not such a bad thing...

Don't mistake my view on toilet seat etiquette as sexism. I think that women have been horribly mistreated throughout most of civilized history and though things have improved greatly in the last century or so, there is still much work to be done. The fact that women make significantly less money than their male counterparts in the workforce is inexcusable. I think it's ridiculous that, in some parts of the world, old men are attempting to dictate whether women ought to have personal sovereignty over their own bodies. I also think that unfair double-standards and shaming women for their lifestyle decisions is deplorable.

It's precisely because I believe men and women should be treated equally that I rebel against the tyrannical view that men are the custodians of the toilet seat. If a household contains one man and one woman, the toilet seat duties should be divided equally. Guys need the seat up and women need the seat down; why should men be obligated to cater to the "fairer" sex?  Doesn't sound fair to me! Is it because women run the risk of falling into the toilet?

Come on. That doesn't actually happen, does it? And if it does, it serves you right for expecting deferential treatment. Equality goes both ways, ladies.

Gentlemen, I implore you to fight for your rights. There may come a time when the balance shifts and the equality argument loses its validity. Use it while you can!

During the first six years of my relationship with my lovely wife I adamantly refused to put the seat down. "There's two of us living in the house," I would tell her whenever the issue came up. "You need the seat down. I need the seat up. Why should I have to put it up before I pee and then down after I'm done? When do you move the toilet seat in this grossly unfair arrangement? 'Cause from here, it looks like the seat is always in the right position whenever you need to use the toilet whereas I have to perform a freakin' surgical procedure just to take a leak!"

Then my wife gave birth to our daughter and on that very evening I saw a hard glint in her eye. I knew immediately what she was thinking. He's outnumbered now. Soon he will have to put the seat down!

I fought it right up until my daughter fell into the toilet one night.

Just kidding. That never happened because as soon as she ditched the Dora training-seat and started sitting on the toilet like a big girl I began the long and arduous process of reprogramming myself. I always said it was an issue of equality and the moment I was outnumbered two-to-one I was obligated by my own personal code of honor to amend my behavior accordingly.

Putting the toilet seat down is a perfect example of a micro-transaction--a tiny change in behavior or thought-pattern that, if focused on by itself, is easily achievable. At first I had to think about putting the seat down as often as possible. Even when I wasn't going to the bathroom I would remind myself about that damned toilet seat. New habits are like unfamiliar plants; in order to successfully grown them, you gotta plant a whole lot of seeds.

In the beginning I probably put the seat down 10% of the time but every success reinforced the new habit. In a few months it became second-nature to put the seat down.

I never told my wife about any of this. I wanted to see if she'd notice this radical change in my behavior and I'm proud to say that, after a year or so, she made an offhand comment about how I was getting "pretty good" at putting the seat down.

I know what you fellas are thinking right now.

I admit I've been making a lot of changes for my wife lately. Like I said on Valentine's Day, a good relationship requires balance and a fair division of labor. If I can program myself to put the toilet seat down and do some other stuff to make her happy, why shouldn't I?

And if I'm being honest, pleasing my wife isn't the only reason I started reprogramming the old meat-computer. The principles behind breaking bad habits and forming good ones are the same across the board. Teaching myself to put the seat down was a practice run. Since then I've trained myself to cultivate positive thought, master my emotions, dissolve my ego, stop misplacing (losing) my keys and wallet, improve my posture, and the list goes on. It's a work-in-progress--I stumble and relapse on a regular basis--but the improvements have been measurable.

I guess what I'm trying to say is thank you. Thank you, toilet seat, for showing me I have the ability to change myself, one habit at a time.

Spring Break

I miss writing stories.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy blogging, it just doesn't stimulate me the same way creative writing does. So with Spring upon us I thought I'd take a brief hiatus from the Meme Merchant.

My brain is never quiet. I'm always thinking up different concepts and ideas for stories and since last September they've just been slowly accumulating in my mind and gathering dust. Sometimes it's just a little piece, a character or event or something like that; other times it's a hook, a premise, or an entire plot. Now usually I would start writing these things out immediately but since I started the blog they've remained locked up in the old noggin.

Time for a Spring cleaning, my friends. I need to organize all these new ideas and see if I can fit some of them together into something cool. I might start a first draft. We'll see. I've always been good at starting projects; it's finishing them that's tough.

I'm nowhere near finished with the Meme Merchant. There are still plenty of interesting ideas and insights I want to share with you. There's just not enough hours in the day to fit everything in.

Breaks are good. They give us time to reflect and recharge the batteries. And just like this break from creative writing gave me a bunch of new ideas (and in some cases new twists on old ideas) I'm sure taking time off the blog will have a similar effect. I'll be back with a vengeance.

See you all in a few weeks!

Stoned Ape Theory

Did magic mushrooms play a part in human evolution? Did the consumption of visionary plants facilitate the development of language, art, culture, and religion?

This is the theory proposed by the late Terrence McKenna.

McKenna, an ethnobotanist, philosopher, and psychonaut, first proposed the Stoned Ape hypothesis in his book Food of the Gods. According to McKenna, the desertification of Africa forced homo erectus, our distant ancestor, out of the dwindling tropical canopy in search of food. Following herds of wild cattle in hopes that they would lead to greener pastures, homo erectus noticed mushrooms growing out of the dung heaps and started consuming them.

These were psilocybin mushrooms, better known nowadays as magic mushrooms.

The Stoned Ape Theory could help explain the sudden and rapid growth of the human brain which took place between 2 million and 700,000 years ago. Since the emergence of the homo genus, the brain increased in size from 400 cubic centimetres to nearly 1400.

Rapid development of this kind is problematic to the evolutionary biologist. Nearly all evidence in support of evolution points to a long, grinding process that takes hundreds of millions of years so whenever biologists come across signs of sudden change--like the Cambrian Explosion or the growth of the human brain--they have to come up with plausible explanations.

There are currently two popular explanations for the rapid expansion of the human brain.

The first has to do with our move from quadruped to bipedal animal. With their hands liberated, the theory goes, our early ancestors would've started using tools with more frequency, increasing motor skills and triggering rapid neurological development to account for a variety of new motions and actions.

The second explanation is that we started eating substantially more meat. Meat contains protein which in turn could have fuelled rapid brain-growth.

I think both explanations are plausible. They also compliment each other. As we got better at making and using tools, we eventually started making spears, bows, and arrows. These tools made us better hunters and better hunters catch more prey. 

Rather than disprove the above, the Stoned Ape theory further compliments it. According to McKenna, low doses of psilocybin would've improved visual acuity in our ancestors, making them even better hunters. At higher doses the mushrooms would've increased sexual arousal, leading to more sex, higher birth-rates, and greater genetic diversity.

In other words, McKenna suggested that psilocybin might've provided our ancestors with an evolutionary advantage. He also believed magic mushrooms would have aided the development of symbolism, language, art, and shamanistic religions and here McKenna has recently found support from the scientific community. More on that later. 

The thing I like about the Stoned Ape theory is that it not only attempts to explain how our brains suddenly ballooned and how language and symbolism emerged, it also compliments the mainstream explanations I described above. It doesn't disprove the idea that advanced motor skills and greater consumption of meat were contributed to the brain's growth. It adds another layer to those explanations.

Um, what?

Needless to say McKenna's idea was not well-received by the scientific community. The Stoned Ape theory was largely ignored or treated as pseudoscience, as is often the case when radical new ideas are proposed. Luckily McKenna is no longer alone in supporting the Stoned Ape theory. There is legitimate research pointing to psychedelics as the inspiration for the prehistoric cave-paintings found across Europe, many of which dating as far back as 40,000 years ago. Here's a tidbit from the article linked above:

Prehistoric cave paintings across the continents have similar geometric patterns not because early humans were learning to draw like Paleolithic pre-schoolers, but because they were high on drugs, and their brains—like ours—have a biological predisposition to "see" certain patterns, especially during consciousness altering states.

The researchers compared geometrical patterns found in prehistoric cave-paintings to patterns drawn by people under the influence of psychedelics and, lo and behold! We have a match. This may not prove that homo erectus was a psychonaut but it does insinuate that visionary plants have been a part of our lives for a very long time, potentially influencing art, language, and primitive religions.

It's a line of questioning that's worth pursuing. If psychedelics played a part in human development, whether in the evolution of the brain itself or by helping our ancestors think symbolically, it would be worthwhile to study their effect on the brain and their potential value beyond recreational use.

Need a hand? Have a hundred!

Studies conducted in the 60's and 70's--the golden age of psychedelic research--pointed to LSD as a potential treatment for addiction to alcohol and hard drugs like heroin. After a brief hiatus, the study of psychedelics as medicine is finally making a comeback and the results are shocking. MDMA has proven effective for treating PTSD in veterans, ayahuasca and ibogaine for treating substance addiction and easing anxiety in terminally ill patients, and our old friend psilocybin for regenerating brain cells.

This might come as a shock to some but in light of the Stoned Ape hypothesis it actually makes sense. If psychedelics were pivotal in the development of the human mind, it stands to reason that they could be used to treat various disorders affecting the organ they helped to craft.

Either way it's an idea worth looking into!

Get Inside my Head

I was trying to explain meme theory to my good friend a few months back when she stated, with a dismissive eye-roll, that such topics make her head hurt. I tried to impress on her the power of ideas and the importance of understanding how they work. "Everything you see around you," I said, "is a result of human thought. Every material object, religion, political ideology, and philosophy was born in the human mind. Every human crisis and its potential solution resides in the seat of our collective consciousness. You shouldn't let the complexity of the topic discourage you from studying it."

This was her reply: "You should spend less time thinking about thinking and more time doing."

What nerve! From where do actions emanate if not from within? Where does perception of the external world arise if not in the mind?

As you read these words your brain is literally and figuratively generating the world around you: literally because everything you see around you--cars, buildings, clothes, light-bulbs, carpet, furniture, windows, space shuttles, etc.--was derived from someone's mind; and figuratively because your brain filters external stimuli and generates what you perceive today, a tiny sliver of objective reality unique unto yourself.

No one experiences the world quite the same way you do. Isn't that a trip? We're all experiencing individual, isolated realities colored by our beliefs, biases, and past experiences.

Everything is a direct or indirect result of human thought. So to my friend I say: "Maybe you should spend more time thinking about thinking and less time doing."

Your mind is divine. It is the gatekeeper, the creator, the regulator. It can make your life a blissful paradise or agonizing hell. If you don't strive to understand its inner-workings and gain mastery over it you're bound to fall prey to its devious tricks over and over again.

Human history is the stock-market of ideas: intellectual commodities rise and fall in value, compete for investors, and combine to form the various ideologies that govern human affairs. We label these mega-memes "religion," "politics," and "philosophy" but in truth they are the amalgamation of ideas, the result of colliding memes and specific socioeconomic and cultural conditions. Humans are usually involved in the making of ideologies only insofar as they carry their various building blocks.

But some people, having gained a rudimentary understanding of the rules governing the human mind, conspire to manipulate and engineer memes toward selfish purpose. They have come to the important conclusion I tried to impress upon my silly friend: that ideas regulate the material world and that the mind, being the source and carrier of both, must be understood and controlled. And so, upon understanding this, the conspirators attempt to leverage the stock-market of ideas to their benefit. They establish ideologies that facilitate the control of the masses or interpret existing ideologies to the same end.

In order to restore balance to the world and repair the many deficient social, economical, and political systems that govern our day-to-day lives, we too must accept the potency of human thought and its ability to sway events this way and that. We must learn to manufacture our own ideologies, ones that seek to reverse the current trend of exploitation and raise as the highest ideal the greater good of our species and planet.

Since the dawn of civilization the multitudes have been exploited by the select few. At first they were god-kings, then the spokesmen of the gods; later we fell under the dominion of royal bloodlines and lineages who were supposedly sanctioned by God to rule over us. (On a side note, I find it extremely disturbing that monarchs still exist, even in a solely symbolic function, and that we continue to regard them as special somehow. In many ways, this is more confusing than religion's persistent grip on the masses. But I digress.)  Finally we arrive to the present day and the various top-down democracies of the developed world, where the multitudes have very limited control over the internal conditions of their respective nation-states.

Do you see a pattern? From pharaohs and divinely-sanctioned dynasties to our current paradigm, in which an elected group of oligarchs, swayed by corporate interests, greed, and selfishness rather than the will of the voters, engage in bloodless wars of words and power-plays financed by tax-payer money.

It's progress to be sure, only not as much progress as most people think. We've traded heavy shackles for slightly lighter ones. It's a step in the right direction but our true intent should be to break free of shackles altogether.

Despite the many anchors weighing us down, we are moving forward. The will of the people cannot be stifled endlessly and the turmoil we see today in Ukraine, Venezuela, the Middle-East, and everywhere else is the proof. These are the growing pains of our species. We can move past this dark time toward brighter horizons if we get our shit together.

We'll never be rid of conflict. So long as individuals exist there will be disagreements and the butting of heads. The key is to find ways to resolve conflicts amicably, to devise a system in which everyone is free to do as they please so long as doing so does not bring about harm to others, a system bent on helping those in need, curing the sick, and protecting the weak.

The world as we know it is shrinking. We can no longer afford to see ourselves as separate from our brothers and sisters around the world. We're all passengers on spaceship earth, neighbors regardless of spiritual or political beliefs. There is enough room on earth to house all cultures, beliefs, and preferences, enough room so that all may live in peace and harmony as functional components of this great and mysterious machine. Some do not wish to see it so but they are the few; together, with our minds and our wills turned toward the highest purpose, a purpose found in all the major religions and philosophies of the world, we can veer away from our current path of over-consumption and greed toward a world of universal cooperation.

Do I think we'll succeed in forging a Utopia in our lifetime? Probably not. But for the first time in our history I believe we have the tools and knowledge to make it so. Never before have the masses been united behind a single purpose. If that purpose is universal--concerned with the well-being of humanity and the planet--I believe we could accomplish great things.

In the meanwhile, looking after the well-being of our brothers, sisters, and planet isn't a bad ideal to live by.