Our Lives Matter

And now, for our season finale… Our story of Being Human on Planet Earth needs one last thing.  How do we use it to plot a new course into the future?  What can young activists start doing now that will add up to a future they want?  What opportunities do young people have that they can take advantage of?   ACT I Scene 1 How is the story of Being Human on Planet Earth supposed to end?   There’s on...

The environmental crisis, and the destruction it’s bringing, are part of life now.  How do we adapt to that?  Where do we find role models for adapting?   We’ve all seen heroes in movies.  What qualities do they have that help them succeed at their goals, and that we admire?  What can we learn from them that we can use in our own lives?    ACT I Scene 1 [112 bpm] The environmental crisis is part o...

Classical economics treats money as if it’s the foundation of economic systems.  But that doesn’t explain why people want things in life that money can’t buy.   Environmental economics is the study of how organisms try to get energy and resources they need to live and that they can use to grow and reproduce.  Human economics is a subset of environmental economics, where we all try to get the thing...

(Here’s the missing Episode 26.) The principles of modern theatre let actors create realistic human behavior onstage consistently.  That means all human behavior.   The economics of the theatre industry have led the business managers of theatre companies to choose plays that will bring in the most money.  That means plays that appeal the most to wealthy old White people, the traditional base of th...

Science today depends on the same five steps of observation, self consistency, universality, reproducibility, and debate as it did 500 years ago.  But how has the role of science in society changed since then because of other developments?  When you say the word science today, what are you talking about?   How has that affected scientists?  How has the world changed in the 50 years since the envir...

Why are some environmental activists opposed to science?   We can use the Web of Human Behavior as a map to follow people’s motivations.  Why do people become environmental activists?  And how do those motivations lead many activists toward environmental science, but lead others away from it?   ACT I Scene 1 [104 bpm] We know about the religious, economic, and political opposition to climate scien...

We naturally perceive some parts about how the environment works better than we perceive other parts of it.  Those are the things we have to learn about to understand.  Our most profound sensory illusion is a misunderstanding of how energy moves through the environment versus how it moves through the universe as a whole.  But if we can understand that illusion, we can understand all the others. AC...

The environmental crisis is caused by limitations in our perceptions.  We think about things we want much more than we think about things we don’t want.   When you buy anything at the store, you think about what you’re going to use it for much more than you think about how much pollution was generated in creating it.   Our religions, political systems, and economic system are built on that misperc...

Patriarchy is an ongoing political system of men assuming they’re supposed to get what they want from women, and expecting women to go along with it.  How does it start?  And what keeps it going?   Men’s and women’s different reproductive instincts give us different ideas of common sense and good decisions.  Some of the patriarchy of today is the result of old traditions that favor men.  But other...

Men and women have many different feelings about relationships.  Relationships both partners are happy with always have some important things in common.  If men keep those in mind, it’s much easier for them to get on a path to finding and keeping good relationships.  If women keep those things in mind, it’s easier to explain them to men.   ACT I  Scene 1 [108 bpm] For the past 5 episodes we’ve bee...

Men and women have a lot of different feelings surrounding sex.  Some of those feeling can lead men to not notice, not care, or not feel it’s important, that women don’t consent to having sex with them.   If we frame our discussions about sex and consent in terms of our different biology, instincts, and sex motivations, it’s easy to understand what consent means and why it’s always important, no m...

Relationships between men and women get complicated because our different reproductive instincts make us want different things from relationships.  That makes some men misunderstand, or not ever care, about women consenting to sex. Using the Web of Human Behavior to look at people’s motivations makes women’s and mens feelings surrounding rape easy to understand.  Rape makes women feel bad in ways...

Men are fertile much later into their lives than women are.  That means there have always been more fertile men in the world than fertile women.   That means there has always been competition among men for fertile women.  That gives women choices of which men to have children with.  But that also means men have put a lot of thought over the millennia  into how to compete for women.   Our reproduct...

Men and women each have their own ways of reproducing physically.  That means we have different instincts for reproducing.  Part of our reproductive instincts are instincts for being attracted to people who have qualities we need in a mate.  Women are attracted to men who seem like they’d be good fathers, and men are attracted to women who seem like they’d be good mothers.   We have different reas...

Men and women reproduce differently.  That’s why we have different reproduction organs.   That also means we have different reproductive instincts for the best ways to reproduce.  The differences in how men and women think start with the differences in our reproductive instincts.   This isn’t a question of whether men are smarter than women, or vice versa. We’re each better than the other at some...

Our species originated in Africa.  At the time, there was no way for our ancestors to evolve a dislike for people from other continents, because there were no people from other continents.  Racism is xenophobia connected to physical features of people from different continents.  Imperialism and colonialism depended on the colonial governments writing different laws for different groups of people,...

Anthropology is the study of differences and similarities among cultures.  That means that similarities that all cultures share give us valuable clues to mental traits of our species.  That gives us valuable clues to the brain structure of our species.  At the same time, this paints a vivid picture of the diversity of humanity.  Most of these universals are ways that people all over the world have...

People always use their abilities and ideas in their environments to pursue what they value in life, and they think of more ideas in the process.  The idea of privilege is one way people talk about how differences in people’s abilities, environments, and ideas affect the outcomes of what they do in life.  Recognizing that is a big part of  understanding the diversity of humanity. Within a high sch...

People live their lives using their abilities and ideas in their environments, and they think of new ideas in the process.  The ideas they think of and learn over the course of their lives affect how they see the world.   What does education psychology tell us about that?  Teachers use principles of learning in school to make ideas memorable.  How do those principles play out with ideas that we le...

People always use their abilities and ideas in their environments to decide what to do in life.  They think of more ideas in the process.  Those ideas build up to a  personal history and cultural background of ideas they use to interpret the world and keep making their decisions.   What do you think of other people’s worldviews?  How similar do they have to be to yours for you to feel they’re comp...

One easy way to see the Web of Human Behavior and Empathy Formula play out is by looking around at people you know.  The people who relate to best are usually the people you feel you have the most in common with.  But you can relate to anyone if you can figure out how their life is different from yours.   What does that tell us about how people see the world?  How do differences between your life...

We’re all human, and we’re all unique.  How do we see through our unique differences to see our fundamental similarities?   The Web of Human Behavior connected the first principles of evolutionary psychology and modern theatre.  That shows us a map of human decision making, which we can use to tell our own and other people’s stories, and to understand our own and other people’s stories.   We’ve se...

Modern theatre and evolutionary psychology are founded on parallel discoveries of the same first principles.  What’s an easy and effective way to translate between the two?   The Web of Human Behavior is a checklist of 20 components of human behavior.  It starts with the five fundamental traits of human mental activity, of our instincts for survival and reproduction and our abilities of memory, im...

Constantin Stanislavski pioneered modern theatre by discovering a set of  artistic principles.  They let actors construct the subconscious levels of their characters’ thought processes.   Those discoveries are parallels to first principles of evolutionary psychology.  We can talk about those artistic principles using ordinary words, and we can see actors using them in movies and TV shows.  That ma...

Theatre turns human behavior into an art.  But people are very perceptive of human behavior.  We have highly developed instincts for interpreting why people do the things they do.  For actors to produce realistic human behavior onstage is very complicated.  Theatre artists struggled with that problem for about 2,400 years.  They found many ways to make human behavior interesting, but all of them f...