♫  You say you want a revolution.  Well you know, we all want to change the world.
♫  You say you’ve got a real solution.  Well you know, we’d all love to see the plan.

I’m not sure how I feel about revolutions, but I do have a plan.  It’s disheartening to peer out over a sociopolitical landscape of selfishness, inequity, corruption, and violence; I’m just not convinced that the key to those recalcitrant puzzle boxes is conventional rebellion.  Maybe I’m too old for that sh*t.  Nevertheless, I looked into the matter.

Well, I poked around on Wikipedia.  There I found a list of 700 revolutions and rebellions, starting at the dawn of civilization with the Seth rebellion in Egypt’s Second Dynasty, and ending with the military coup that displaced Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.  Seven hundred good attempts at a nice try, and we find the world in its current state.  I console myself that maybe 701 is a charm.

I’m hesitant to once again raise my glass, pen, or sword in vain (glass maybe), which is why I undertook the grueling investigative task that professional researchers refer to as “clicking links.”  It led me to three relevant facts.  First, Group A’s insurgency can seem positively revolting to Group B.  Consider the two mini-mutinies going on in the U.S. right now, Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.  Second, revolutions don’t always work out as planned.  Russians overthrew the Tsar and immediately got Lenin.  As soon as Iran ousted the Shah, Ayatollah Khomeini stepped in.  France deposed Louis XVI then Napoleon rapidly ascended.  And third, what people regard as “the problem” is often just a symptom of the underlying problem.

I personally think societal issues are symptoms of a deeper human circumstance.  Why else won’t revolutions stick?  Instead of digging out the root we prune the leaves, which grow back, sometimes more profusely.

♫  You tell me that it’s evolution.  Well you know, we all want to change the world.

Evolution, unlike shuffling the political deck, really has changed the world, at least that’s what I told my then-girlfriend Nancy when we were at Arizona State.  Nancy worked at the time for U.S. Representative Mo Udall, and is now an alternative energy activist.  She was and apparently remains a whirling dervish of political enthusiasm.  She wore me out, sometimes in the good way.  I felt, as I still do, that politics is fundamentally a rigged and exploitive game.  Power corrupts.  I proposed to Nancy that before society or government could materially improve, people themselves would need to change.  I can’t help feeling that whatever our predicament, human nature is its root, but politicians seem to regard human nature as something to take advantage of.  Isn’t that what political fear-mongering, race-baiting, and jingoistic calls to arms are all about?

As I see it, the reason human behavior hasn’t changed much over recorded history is that nature sculpted us on an evolutionary timetable.  If you’d like to review the consistency of human nature check out the Bible, or go back further to 400 BC when Socrates was killed for political dissent and Aristophanes brutally satirized Athenian life.  (“Under every stone lurks a politician.”)  Four hundred years ago, Shakespeare illuminated just about every aspect of the human condition.  And as the Bard’s Cassius spelled out:  “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”  More recently and almost as famously, the elfin cartoon character Pogo Possum explained that “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

 ♫  You tell me it’s the institution.  Well you know, you better free your mind instead.

For some business people, they are often traveling from one country to another. order viagra online http://deeprootsmag.org/2014/12/02/christmas-close-home-hearth-heart/ There will be some minor viagra tablets for women or major consequences after surgery which are easily restorable. Keep this in mind that these side effects are remaining for a longer time and stop using this medicine and consult the doctor immediately. cialis without prescription http://deeprootsmag.org/category/departments/talkinganimals/?feedsort=comment_count But the main issue is levitra no prescription not the same. My point exactly.  Our minds are the product of evolution via natural selection, which means they evolved to enhance reproductive fitness not objectivity.  You can prove it to yourself – walk into any bar on Friday night and observe the beer-goggled horndogs.  Wikipedia lists over 150 cognitive biases, proven unconscious mental distortions that affect decision-making, beliefs, and behavior.  Confirmation bias, for example, is the tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.  Why do you suppose Fox News and MSNBC typically outperform CNN?

I said I had a plan, and that plan has two parts, A and B.  Part A, in a nutshell, involves reprogramming our innate aggression, blind-spots, and natural self-centeredness.  We would identify, accept, then refine the inborn attributes engraved on us by natural selection, and which operate almost entirely outside of consciousness.  We would wake up to the fact that we’re primed for aggressiveness and for self-serving delusions that distort our perceptions and thoughts.  We would acknowledge inbuilt group bias, our well-documented ingroup and outgroup mentality, that poisons our view of “them.”  And we would forget the blame game; we are who we are due almost entirely to nature (genes) and nurture (upbringing).  Which part of a person so-constructed can we fault, or for that matter credit?  Some might call Part A of the plan spiritual remodeling, but because it’s based on an Everest of scientific evidence, I call it accommodating reality.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  But what if Nancy was right too?  Maybe political solutions are possible, especially if we could muster her level of commitment.  Perhaps we can effect lasting change through external reformation.  So far though, even our noblest efforts seem to have led us in circles, a shortcoming to which history (at least to me) confesses.  But there’s one approach that hasn’t gotten a fair tryout, and it’s Part B of my plan.

Nancy recently mounted a campaign for election to the Arizona Corporation Commission, a regulatory body on which two of the five incumbents are women.  My faithful research assistant Wikipedia informs me that more than twenty countries are currently led by women, and that female legislators worldwide have been supportive of issues related to children, family, community, and simple tolerance.

 ♫  But when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out.

I’m not being fanciful or flippant when I tell you I’d prefer to live in a world governed by women.  Gynarchy is a revolution that could work.  Women have many great qualities, but when it comes to leadership their most valuable asset is something they lack – an overabundance of testosterone – the internal agitator that philosopher Ken Wilber calls “the fu*k it or kill it hormone.”  Wikipedia, to my disappointment, does not chronicle episodes of human copulation, or even link to them, but it does contain a list of wars and their casualty numbers, along with a claim that 3,023 wars have taken place in recorded history.  Every weapon ever devised except the hydrogen bomb has been used in anger.  H-bombs are stockpiled by the thousands, and if even one is used, no matter the circumstance, a cascade of devastating scenarios would likely ensue, blasting us back to the Middle Ages.

It’s a grim bottom line that mandates revolution, which is why my plan includes two prongs, just in case.  Prong A, as mentioned, aims to first identify, then accept, and lastly reform counterproductive inborn tendencies, and would root out hatred and aggression, as well as lesser foibles, via the clear-eyed wisdom that arises when self-understanding replaces inherent self-deception.  Prong B would directly remove from governance more than ninety percent of testosterone, a known inflamer of anger, discrimination, and violence.  A + B = GAME OVER (we win), but either part of the plan by itself would do more good than a conventional rebellion.  Plus, each is non-violent and immediately actionable.

You say you want a revolution?  I say start meditating and vote for the woman.

♫  Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right, all right, all right.