Preface

November 1, 2017

To quote Forrest Gump, “I am not a smart man.”

Despite intellectual and educational limitations, I managed to unravel a puzzle that stymied great thinkers for millennia. Granted, the twenty-first century provides advantages denied yesteryears’ superior minds. Fortunately, that didn’t keep them from spinning wheels describing, identifying, questioning, quantifying, rehashing, condemning, speculating, arguing, writing, and complaining about perplexing yet inexplicable proclivities.

Thanks to the resolve of true intellects, my most significant advantage was the wealth of knowledge they bequeathed. I am forever indebted to the geniuses who shared observations, impressions, theories, and ideas. Many of the quotes in this book were borrowed from heroes who spent their lives pondering, puzzling, and attempting to explain what no one could understand until a decade or so ago.

A second advantage was the game changing brain scanning advances making it possible to validate impressive and perceptive but heretofore unverifiable speculations.

Third, fourth, and fifth include living in the computer age, a honed bullshit detector, and a tenacity that kept me searching, learning, and yearning to connect so many mentors’ intriguing, inspiring, and often paradoxical dots.

It took forty plus years to figure out why everyone does, or doesn’t do, everything we do or don’t do. Including how the clues were right there for all to see. And why the international scientific community helped a layman beat its clueless members to the breakthrough of the century.

My search began with a suspicion that something was seriously wrong with our species, starting with me. I was in my early twenties and couldn’t understand my compulsive exaggerating and worse, fabricating, to impress others, especially those I didn’t like, respect, or know. The struggle to stop sometimes felt like an out of body experience. It was if it didn’t matter what I decided to say or do, something was taking control and determining what was said and done.

Dealing with the dishonesty revealed blatant fears I didn’t know existed. It took time, but admitting to self-deceptions and fears made life easier and more interesting. It was like discovering a super power that made it possible to identify others’ deceptions and fears until I was able to differentiate the fearful majority, who lied all the time, from the insecure many, who lied when they felt cornered, while learning from a unique few capable of rising above fears and deceptions.

No surprise, the biggest liars invariably, fervently, and honestly believed they never lied, while the most fearful proved too afraid to admit to fears.

Conquering what turned out to be the conquerable fears responsible for my dishonesty resulted in a very real dread of sharing a planet with out-of-control, self-deceptive, terrified creatures incapable of acknowledging or even discussing their dishonesty or fears.

A newfound modicum of awareness convinced me to make serious inquiries into what was going on.

To satisfy my curiosity, I collected articles in folders labeled dishonesty, self-deception, destruction, corruption, dysfunction, collusion, hypocrisy, racism, slavery, bigotry, hatred, greed, crime, and other difficult to fathom behaviors. As the folders filled drawers and then cabinets, the sheer volume left me wondering if everyone was insane.

Around the same time I was fascinated by the implications of atoms being, essentially, empty space. In other words, we’re optical illusions, reality isn’t really real, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin hit the angel on the head with, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

When friends expressed a growing disinterest in my obsession, I set off to find rational explanations for inexplicable irrationality. More specifically, I wanted to know what was behind the madness, why so few seemed to notice or care, how the most insane managed to seize control of the asylum, why more people weren’t acting as if we’re “all in this together” sharing an ephemeral, impossible, magical, miraculous experience, and what was causing the never ending conflicts turning an actual heaven into a virtual hell.

Delusional, deluded, deluding leaders and followers of organized and disorganized groups turned me off to their preachings, sending me looking elsewhere for answers they clearly didn’t have.

Finding books confirming the rampant dishonesty/madness and spiritual/material dichotomy was easy. But when it came to the most important questions, even the visionaries who opened my eyes were blind. Not because they weren’t insightful or brave enough to solve the puzzle but because they were born too soon.

It never occurred to me that I’d end up writing the book I was looking for but here it is. A straightforward explanation of the root cause of the insanity, why so few notice (or want to), and how/why our species ended up in the mess we’re in, complete with a challenge to the convenient conceit that human behavior is too complex to fully comprehend.

I’d like to believe Dopamine for DIMwits would have made sense to me so many years ago. From the start, I’ve avoided dismissing many outrageous ideas until they imploded under their own weight. Keeping an open mind sent me chasing down more than a few nonsensical, implausible, and even harebrained dead ends. But even dead ends provided insights. Time and again, a healthy balance of cynicism and pragmatism kept me from believing I’d found what I was looking for. Until now.

Granted, many of the book’s generalizations and oversimplifications are in need of modification, extrapolation, and/or correction. Until the scientific community picks up the ball, DfD  provides valuable and relatively easy to grasp explanations that simplify, connect, and fuse centuries of confusing, diverse, supporting, as well as seemingly conflicting theories, concepts, beliefs.

Give it an honest chance and you’ll understand why everyone does or doesn’t do everything we do and don’t do, and why so few are interested in learning why they aren’t interested in understanding what’s going on inside their own heads.

The biggest challenge is finding the courage to rise above innate fears (experienced in the brain as pain) keeping all but the bravest of the brave from wanting to notice what’s right in front of us all the time.

That said, I don’t expect (or want) anyone to accept anything on faith. Instead, I encourage readers to learn what it means to keep an open mind. Open minds make it possible to consider threatening concepts while honestly trying to disprove, as opposed to dishonestly dismissing, information that might initially seem less than convincing.

History is rife with examples of colluding cowards and frauds hiding behind group dismissals to protect members from frightening but impossible to refute facts.

Testing my theories doesn’t require advanced degrees, PET, or fMRI equipment. The only requirements are a pinch of self awareness and a dollop of honesty. Two qualities in short supply, especially among DIMwits who can’t help but delude ourselves into believing we possess an excess of both.

In a nutshell, getting the most out of DfD comes down to resisting the temptation to cop out (by dismissing hard to digest information) and committing to disprove the information, by honestly observing and admitting to illogical, embarrassing, and suspicious personal behaviors, choices, and reactions.

Be forewarned. Time and again, naysayers, skeptics, and critics have demonstrated the futility of trying to disprove my theories and that honest attempts invariably verify them.

Introducton

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