Prologue 1/5/23

I have spent a lifetime pondering human behavior: sometimes rational usually not, sometimes cooperating to create great things and sometimes conflicting to destroy centuries of accomplishment. This work is a distillation of several thousand notes and essays in my journal as well as over seventy years of confusion.

I tried to organize this material into a book or two but it just does not fit. There is too much interdependence. I have likened it to a small portion of a vast, multidimensional jigsaw puzzle. I found that the same format Wikipedia uses to be the solution. I can write about a topic in a summary level and use bold face links to provide more detail if the reader desires.

So, what does a physical chemist schooled in quantum mechanical theory bring to the study of human nature? Well, chemistry studies the general behavior of very large groups of individual particles moving randomly. Social psychology studies the general behavior of not so large groups of individual humans apparently behaving randomly. At that superficial level chemistry and social psychology are similar. Chemistry has a tremendous advantage over the social sciences since the behavior we study is reproducible to a comforting range of confidence. Much reoccurs and little seems to repeat in human behavior. Science first describes (observes) behavior, then generalizes (theorizes) it, then globalizes it (ideal systems). Social scientists seem fully occupied trying to describe human behavior.

With the security of having been schooled in a world of consistent behavior, I think I approach the study of human nature with more confidence that there are substantial general behaviors to be found. In chemistry we usually have to set up laboratory experiments to observe the behavior of atoms and molecules. Sociologists are drowning in observations of present and historical behavior of humans. Since I could not avoid observing human behavior, including my own, I started trying to make some sense of it.

My main purpose is to publish my pondering in case there are some useful new insights, other than to me. Much of what I have concluded is motivated by the social chaos threatening to explode in the midst of societies of safe abundance. I think I have found explanations for much of the paradoxical human behavior we see now and throughout history. I have suggestions about how to stimulate humanity's transition from brutal instinctive destructiveness into the next levels of conscious, responsible social evolution. I hope that what I have observed is of sufficient substance to provide a basis and encouragement for further work. What I have found is only a small part of a vast puzzle. 

Understanding of the universe itself, as well as humanity, seems to always lie just the other side of our ignorance.