When I was in college, caffeine was my best friend. Actually, the relationship was more intimate than that — you could say that caffeine was my lover. Just the smell of a strong pot of coffee would get me excited and stimulated. And it was there to help get me through tough times, like all-nighters I pulled cramming for exams.

But ultimately, I learned that I was in a relationship with an abusive partner. The more I indulged, the less I got out of it, and the extreme ups were followed by equally extreme downs. I soon found myself trapped in a relationship that was physically and mentally unhealthy.

Unfortunately, breaking up with the drug seemed harder than staying in an abusive relationship, all because of what happens to the brain when you suddenly stop consuming it.

Despite the difficult break-up that any caffeine addict will inevitably face, as a neuroscientist I’m here to tell you that in the long run it is absolutely worth it. The purpose of this article is to explain how caffeine works, why it’s so addictive, and what to expect when you come off it.

First, we need to understand how caffeine works. The truth is that it’s a stimulant, plain and simple, not unlike cocaine or speed. Of course, it’s not quite as bad as an amphetamine but, if you drink enough of it, you will be as strung out as a crackhead, and when you crash you could experience a headache comparable to a “cocaine migraine.” Anyone who has made the mistake of pounding a pot of coffee or chugging a few Red Bulls for temporary superhuman stamina knows this.

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Caffeine stimulates the brain and body by blocking the action of a neurotransmitter called adenosine, which accumulates throughout the day and is responsible for making us eventually feel tired. When this chemical is blocked, we no longer feel fatigued when we should. It’s not that our body is getting more energy — it is simply being deceived about the fact that it needs rest and replenishing.

You can already start to see how this could be a very bad thing if caffeine is used regularly. But the blocking of adenosine is just the beginning of the story.

When your cup of coffee or energy drink blocks adenosine, it increases the levels of other neurotransmitters, like dopamine and norepinephrine, which are associated with cognitive processes like attention, alertness, and memory. This is why caffeine can make us feel like we have mental and physical superpowers. It can boost our focus and make us think we can take on the world. For tasks that require sustained attention for really long periods of time — like term papers, exams, and operating machines for hours on end — caffeine can seem like a gift from God.

But this is precisely what makes it so addictive. Because it makes you feel so good mentally and physically, and so momentarily productive, focused and creative, your brain quickly decides that caffeine is a good thing. It starts to expect caffeine, and at that point caffeine is now required for optimal human functioning.

The problem is, the drug simply can’t produce optimal performance forever, and the negative effects of caffeine dependency on mental health can be brutal.

When you get addicted to a substance, the brain adapts to its presence and becomes increasingly desensitized to its action. This means you will need to consume more and more of the drug to get the same effects. With caffeine addiction, the brain’s adenosine receptors become less sensitive to its effects, so now instead of a cup of coffee in the morning you add on a couple shots of espresso. Heavy use over the long term will inevitably disrupt your natural physiological and neurochemical balance. When this happens, it can have effects on cognition and mood that are the opposite of what the drug was doing before. Over time, the neurochemical imbalance can lead to disorders like insomnia and attention deficits.

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Since the aforementioned neurotransmitters all play a role in maintaining the function of the brain’s arousal system, a caffeine addict will begin to experience things like trouble sleeping due to a disturbed sleep-wake cycle. For example, you might have trouble getting to sleep, or you may not be able to stay asleep for as long as you normally would (or both, in most cases).

In addition to sleep trouble, the caffeine addict will eventually experience difficulty paying attention and staying focused — the thing that most use caffeine for in the first place. As the substance is abused, the feelings of jitteriness increase to the point that it becomes hard to sit still. At this point, even a massive amount of caffeine will no longer do the trick, and the more one consumes, the more jittery and unfocused they feel. This will lead some people to seek out stronger stimulants in hope of finding a cure for wandering attention, like Adderall, which is an amphetamine. While these stronger drugs may work for a certain amount of time, they inexorably lead to all the same cognitive problems that caffeine addiction ultimately causes, except in much more dramatic form. That’s why stimulant addiction is a slippery slope that’s best avoided altogether.

Caffeine dependency can also impair decision making. While its stimulating effect can increase the speed at which one makes decisions, this can come at the cost of the accuracy or quality of those choices. Studies have shown that caffeine increases the number of errors one makes when performing a decision task. Over time, caffeine addicts become more impulsive because they begin to act without thinking, and fail to engage the rational mind in the decision-making process. Impulsivity behavior can lead to inappropriate social behavior, aggression, and an inability to regulate one’s emotions.

If all that dysfunction weren’t bad enough, long-term caffeine abuse can lead to mental disorders, or exacerbate them. Since caffeine increases the production of dopamine, which is associated with the pleasure and reward system — known as the limbic system — addiction can cause changes in mood and personality. Heightened irritability and frequent mood swings can be expected, and getting along with others can become a real challenge. If that weren’t bad enough, it can also give you anxiety and depression, which for some people can increase the chances of mental breakdown or suicide. While the negative effects of caffeine aren’t as bad as heavy drugs, they can be enough to push someone who is already feeling unstable over the edge.

There’s no doubt that the negative effects of caffeine addiction are serious and scary, but most people who depend on the drug will argue that moderate consumption is the answer. Just about anything in excess can become dangerous — that is certainly true. The problem, as already mentioned, is that there is no way to stop the brain from becoming desensitized to the drug over time, requiring more of it to get the same result as before. You still experience the jittery stimulant effects, but the cognitive benefits begin to disappear. You start to feel like you’re stepping on the gas pedal in a car that’s running low on oil. It’s still getting you from A to B, but it’s doing damage to the machine in the process.

If you are experiencing any of the problems mentioned above, it may be time to break up with caffeine. Like all break-ups, things can be messy, but ultimately, it’s better to get out of an unhealthy relationship. Though I have to admit this is easier said than done. Why? Because the withdrawal symptoms you experience when you suddenly stop caffeine can be just as bad as, if not worse than, the negative effects that you felt from caffeine addiction. This is the “caffeine trap.” The trap is that once you start caffeine, it can be hard to quit for the following reasons.

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When we go cold turkey, the brain’s arousal system goes through some changes. The adenosine receptors that were previously being blocked by the caffeine are now free to do their job, which means you will feel tired, as if the day were over, but when it is just beginning. Dopamine and norepinephrine levels will decrease, leading to an inability to focus or stay alert. Feelings of anxiety and depression will set in, along with irritability and mood instability. Withdrawal could also lead to terrible headaches, muscle aches or spasms, and a general reduction in one’s sense of well-being. If that weren’t bad enough, a decrease in brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) can cause forgetfulness and learning issues.

This is why most of us never give up. When we start to experience the withdrawal symptoms, we convince ourselves that we must have caffeine to function in life. But that’s the addiction talking. To actually be able to kick the caffeine habit, we have to build up a moment-to-moment awareness of how the drug is subconsciously convincing us that it is a good thing, and we have to also be constantly cognizant of the fact that the effects of withdrawal are temporary.

After the brain’s love affair with caffeine, it will need time to adjust and adapt to an existence without it. While the symptoms of quitting can last a few weeks or even a few months, it’s a small price to pay compared to a lifetime of dependency and imbalance. Once it is completely out of your system and your physiology has a chance to start restoring its normal balance, you will start noticing positive changes.

Assuming you are taking no other stimulants, your sleep will likely improve. You will notice that it is deeper and more restful than you remembered it could be. Your mood will improve and you will feel less on edge, because you aren’t constantly experiencing the extreme ups followed by the extreme downs. Life is much easier to manage when things are steady and stable. You will also likely notice across-the-board improvements in cognition, such as enhancements in attention, memory and mental stamina. In a nutshell, life will be better.

Breaking up with caffeine is hard to do because of the caffeine trap, but you will thank yourself for doing it in the long run. And for those who enjoy the taste and aroma of coffee, there’s always decaf.

As a scientist, and simply as someone who would like to see society improve, I spend a lot of time thinking about what Elon Musk is doing to the world, and what he could be doing for the world.

Why? Because as the wealthiest human alive, he has more power to do good than anyone. Causal power is a term that scientists and philosophers use to describe the ability of an agent to have an impact on the world around them. If you have causal power, it means that you cause things to happen; that is, you generate effects. The chain of effects that follows a particular cause is known as a causal chain, and it is a concept that urges us to think about the unseen influence of our behavior on others, and on nature.

A rock doesn’t have causal power because it doesn’t do anything on its own. The average person has some causal power, but the magnitude of the impact of their ideas and behavior is often limited to their social network. A billionaire with a million social media followers, on the other hand, routinely creates causal chains that produce ripple waves across society. A popular tweet from Musk can generate 100,000 shares, produce hundreds of articles, and inspire countless conversations and actions in the real world. It’s hard to calculate the sum total of Elon’s influence on the nation, but there’s no doubt that he could sway the outcome of a close presidential election, if he made that his goal.

What does this mean for Musk? Well, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. The Elon I used to know and root for is not the man I see today. I see a person who is out for revenge. I also see someone who is behaving in a way that is increasing division and political polarization. For example, in a tweet obviously designed to antagonize the Left, Musk wrote, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” It is not the criticism of Fauci’s professional performance that bothers me — it is the vindictive nature of the method of delivery on a platform that is notorious for inspiring stalking and violence. This tweet is just one of many that indicate a pattern of behavior that reveals an intention to stoke division rather than unify the nation at a time when it desperately needs it. And that’s a shame, because Musk is undoubtedly a brilliant and unrelenting innovator, with the potential to do more good for humanity than any single individual in history.

That being said, the aim of this article is to cause a shift in how Elon sees the world, such that he is inspired to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. If a new perspective on life and the universe can convince him that the human progress he wants to achieve requires unification, it could motivate him to use his causal power to help bring us together under a common goal and a shared worldview — one that aligns our interests.

While this article is focused on shifting the Twitter CEO’s worldview, the hope is that it has the same effect on the reader, because right now all of us must also make a conscious decision to reverse the division that fear and anger has sowed. The old saying, “United we stand, divided we fall,” tells us that doing so is not a choice, but a matter of survival. Overcoming our shared existential threats will ultimately require the full causal power of the collective human network.

But for Elon to have the sort of awakening that motivates someone to adopt a radical new perspective and approach to doing things, he must be open to undergoing such a transformation. Science has shown that psychedelics — like LSD, DMT, and psilocybin (the psychoactive ingredient in “magic mushrooms”) — have the power to prime a person’s mind for exactly this type of transformation.

How Psychedelics Can Alter One’s Worldview

Empirical studies have shown that psychedelics “relax beliefs,” meaning they make you question your assumptions about reality and open you up to new ways of seeing the world. They exert these effects on us by dissolving our ego and our ideological framework. Most of us have rigid ideologies, regardless of whether that ideology is a religion, a political affiliation, or a national identity. These worldviews can give us a sense of purpose and direction, but they can also create blind spots that prevent us from seeing truth. Additionally, they divide us into tribes, and create tribal tendencies within us. By relaxing our belief structures, psychedelics temporarily open us up to a new way of perceiving reality, and create an opportunity for us to transcend our tribalism.

A 2017 study published in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs that surveyed over 600 people found that psychedelic experiences shifted people’s political and moral beliefs toward ones that could be described as more compassionate, and more opposed to authoritarianism. This happens because these experiences tend to reveal the interconnected, interdependent nature of the biosphere, which includes the biological network we call human civilization. This feeling of universal harmony can infuse life with meaning and purpose, and motivate the individual to live in a way that creates a positive influence on the world. We may call this perspective “the Cosmic Perspective,” and we will see that this way of looking at reality actually has a scientific basis that is quite compelling, and in some ways shocking.

If the goal is to influence Musk’s beliefs with a new psychedelic philosophy, it would help to know a little about his current worldview. According to a recent New York Times article, “it’s complicated.” Just a few years ago, most people probably would have considered him to be a liberal or progressive. He claims to have only supported Democrats until recently, including voting for President Biden in the last election. His major life goals are to put humans in space (SpaceX) and to bring environmentally-friendly cars to the world (Tesla), which certainly seem like left-wing ambitions.

But just before this year’s midterms, he encouraged people to vote Republican, claiming that it would be the way to bring about a healthy balance of political power. In a tweet that received 280,000 likes and 43,000 retweets, he wrote: “To independent-minded voters: Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic.” But it seems that the plea to voters was just as much about revenge as it was about trying to evenly distribute power. In a follow-up tweet, he admitted that “I’ve been under unfair & misleading attack for some time by leading Democrats.”

From the available evidence, it is impossible to get a clear understanding of Musk’s political philosophy or belief system, but it is obvious that he’s not advocating for anything radically new, like a worldview that could unify the nation — and that seems like a big missed opportunity. Psychedelic therapy could be helpful in opening Musk’s eyes to a philosophy that transcends political affiliation, but is radically “progressive” in the sense that its purpose is to promote human progress — social, moral, and technological. This solution may sound far out to some, but Musk is already a believer in the benefits of psychedelics, so now he just needs to understand how to extract their full power.

The power of the experience comes from the truths being revealed about nature, not the actual chemical compound. Therefore, reaping the full benefits of psychedelics means exploring the deeper story of nature the experience is pointing us toward. Musk has already shown he’s willing to entertain radical new ideas about the nature of reality, like the Simulation Hypothesis, which argues that we are living in something like a computer simulation generated by a highly advanced technological civilization. Whether or not you find this theory to be plausible is irrelevant — the point is that it proves that Musk is open to big new ideas. So, what is the big idea that psychedelics are trying to show us?

The Cosmic Perspective: A Unifying Worldview for the Spiritual and the Secular

The interconnectedness we grasp while tripping is not a hallucination or an illusion. It is a perceptual state that reflects an intuitive understanding of the causal dependency in nature. In other words, we are all connected through our interactions, because the actions of one agent will produce an effect in another, and that effect may propagate throughout the social network. The sense of oneness we often feel indicates that the whole of human civilization is something like an organism, which is constantly developing, adapting, and learning. Zooming out, and looking ahead to the future Musk envisions, we see a story of life spreading outward from its planet of origin, exerting an ever-increasing causal influence on the universe at large.

Taking the Cosmic Perspective should immediately make one wonder whether biological evolution and the spread of intelligence are part of the cosmic evolution process. We can see that the world has grown more complex over time, but we do not usually speculate about whether we are an essential part of that process. That is, until we eat a magic mushroom.

But some of the greatest scientific minds of our time have come to that conclusion without any pharmacological assistance (presumably). The list includes the prolific inventor Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, the theoretical physicist David Deutsch, the father of the quantum computer, and the neuroscientist Christof Koch, who is responsible for making consciousness research part of mainstream science. All three of these men are considered to be leaders in their field, and they all believe that the universe is growing increasingly complex, through a process of cosmic evolution that inevitably gives rise to life, consciousness, and culture.

According to this scientific paradigm, the universe is not just this big random machine evolving arbitrarily; it is a self-organizing system that is assembling itself through a hierarchical or multi-level process. As the evolutionary process proceeds, nature’s fundamental “parts” come together to form greater “wholes,” which then become the building blocks for the next level of complexity. This might sound complicated on the surface, but the story is relatively simple. Subatomic particles came together to form atoms, which came together to form molecules, which formed cells, which formed complex organisms, which formed societies, and human civilization now seems to be forming what has been described as a “global brain” that spans the planet, thanks to the internet. Humans are analogous to neurons in the global brain, because we are exchanging information through our digital and real-life interactions in much the same way that neurons exchange information in the brain. Under this view, we are not accidents of nature; we are the primary drivers of complexity growth at this stage of cosmic evolution.

What is perhaps most astonishing about this process is that it appears to be just getting started. If Koch, Kurzweil, and Deutsch are right, then we are at just the beginning of a process of open-ended evolution and complexity growth, where life emerges and then proceeds to transform the inanimate world around it into a fabric that can feel. Just as the planet Earth was composed of entirely inanimate matter 4 billion years ago, but is now completely covered with life, the same could be true for much of the cosmos 4 billion years from now.

In his 2012 book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, Christof Koch writes:

The rise of sentient life within time’s wide circuit was inevitable…islands within the universe—if not the whole cosmos—are evolving toward ever-greater complexity and self-knowledge…the laws of physics overwhelmingly favored the emergence of consciousness. The universe is a work in progress…. the evidence from cosmology, biology, and history is compelling.”

Similarly, in his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil writes:

“Intelligence is, in fact, a powerful force and we can see that its power is going to grow not linearly but exponentially, and will ultimately be powerful enough to change the destiny of the universe…Human intelligence will trump the dumb forces of cosmology.”

Although this paradigm is completely naturalistic, many will find its philosophical implications to have a spiritual quality because they suggest that life has cosmic significance. By “cosmic significance,” I mean that life is a mechanism for the growth of complexity in nature that is poised to shape the evolutionary trajectory of the universe and determine its large-scale development. If this is true, and biologically-based intelligence is the primary driver of cosmic evolution, then life has a grand and mysterious purpose that transcends the individual. In his mind-bending 1997 book The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch writes:

“Narrowly conceived evolutionary theory considers us mere ‘vehicles’ for the replication of our genes or memes; and it refuses to address the question of why evolution has tended to create ever greater adaptive complexity, or the role that such complexity plays in the wider scheme of things.”

Deutsch expands on this “role” of ours in his following book, The Beginning of Infinity (2011):

“Like an explosive awaiting a spark, unimaginably numerous environments in the universe are waiting out there, for aeons on end, doing nothing at all...Almost any of them would, if the right knowledge ever reached it, instantly and irrevocably burst into a radically different type of physical activity: intense knowledge-creation, displaying all the various kinds of complexity, universality and reach that are inherent in the laws of nature, and transforming that environment from what is typical today into what could become typical in the future. If we want to, we could be that spark.”

The cosmic perspective gives human civilization a collective goal and a purpose: to see that life, consciousness, and creativity continues into the future. For that to happen, our civilization must progress into a more complex, resilient, integrated, and intelligent state of existence. In particular, we must acquire the ability to get off of the planet before the sun dies and takes all conscious life with it (preferably much sooner, as an insurance plan against a catastrophic asteroid impact).

Without the life-spreading technology currently being developed by SpaceX, intelligence and consciousness cannot expand beyond its planet of origin. So, Elon’s ambition to put life on other planets is of cosmic significance. By initiating a causal chain that extends life’s effects on the universe at large, he is acting as an agent of cosmic evolution. But if he fails to see the worldview that provides a justification and larger context for his ambitions, he will not understand why a more unified world is essential for his vision of continual human progress.

The cosmic perspective is potentially unifying because it suggests that our shared existential challenges will require the full computational power of the interconnected global brain. That means we must cooperate and collaborate. Nuclear war, weaponized A.I, the spread of authoritarianism, income inequality, pandemics, and climate change — these are things that threaten the entire human race. Since our civilization is an interdependent system, if one crucial part goes down, the whole global network suffers. We saw how a local problem can quickly wreak global havoc with the 2008 financial collapse, and again with the 2020 pandemic. It is worth reiterating: coming together despite our ideological differences is not a luxury, but a necessity.

Under the Cosmic Perspective, there is no “us versus them,” there’s only “we.” Rather than seeing the world as a disconnected and random collection of events, we can view it as an interconnected and purposeful whole, with each part contributing to the overall evolution and development of cosmic complexity. It is the story of nature that psychedelic experiences have been hinting at. If Elon Musk adopts the Cosmic Perspective, it would align his behavior and politics with the scientific and spiritual philosophy that is consistent with his ambitions for humanity. From the look of this tweet, it is the philosophy he's been searching for.

We’ve only scratched the surface of the science underlying the Cosmic Perspective, but for those who are curious, it is described in mechanistic detail at my Substack, Road to Omega, and in my new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. So far, it has resonated with influential left-wing voices, like David Pakman and Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, but also people like podcast host Joe Rogan, who like Musk has been criticized by liberals for leaning Right on some issues. If we want a truly progressive ideology to go mainstream — one focused on restructuring our social, political, and economic systems according to principles that will most effectively bring about human progress — then we must be willing to reach out to the people on the fence. Making Musk out to be an irredeemable villain will only push one of the world’s most powerful people further toward the Right. Those who desire progress must not let that happen, especially with Donald Trump planning to run for president again in 2024.

The great cosmologist and educator Carl Sagan once said, “A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later such a religion will emerge.”

Religion is a loaded term, but a spiritual ideology that is guided by science and aided by technology, that gives us a shared existential goal, will be the worldview of the future. It has to be if we want our civilization to survive.

Bobby Azarian is an author, a cognitive neuroscientist, and a blogger for Psychology Today. He has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, BBC Future, and Scientific American. Follow him @BobbyAzarian.

We are living it totally crazy times, and if you don’t think so, you haven’t been paying attention. For the first time in modern history, it is no longer fringe to believe in UFOs. Unidentified Flying Objects that move in ways that seem to be leagues beyond today’s technology have been captured on video by military agencies and released by the U.S. government. Whether these UFOs are spacecraft manned with extraterrestrials or just shockingly advanced military technology is an open question. There’s also the possibility that the videos are not what they appear—that they are capturing something in some sort of way that creates a visual illusion. Whatever explanation you favor, it is safe to say that you are in no position to claim any certainty in the matter. And if you are betting on aliens, you are not a fool. The physics displayed by the supposed craft in the videos released by the U.S. government defy explanation.

In this article, I don’t intend to convince anyone that the videos show aliens. I’m going to make an argument that I can back up with well-established science, which suggests that intelligent life is not all that rare in the universe, and from that fact, let the reader make up their mind about whether or not they think ETs are among us. Whatever you decide, you will come away with a new understanding of the universe and our place in it. The saga of cosmic evolution is a story of intelligent beings inevitably becoming gods, or at least sentient agents with god-like powers. This evolutionary trajectory has nothing to do with anything supernatural—it is a product of natural processes that create a tendency toward higher complexity.

Richard Dawkins, a god among evolutionary theorists, atheists, and skeptics—most famous for his 1976 classic The Selfish Gene, which revolutionized evolutionary biology—was recently asked “Do you think there’s intelligent life out there in the universe?” by MIT podcast host Lex Friedman. His answer might surprise you.

“Well, if we accept that there’s intelligent life here, and we accept that the number of planets in the universe is gigantic—10^22 stars have been estimated—it seems to me highly likely that there is not only life in the universe elsewhere, but also intelligent life. If you deny that then you’re committed to the view that the things that happened on this planet are staggeringly improbable; I mean ludicrously, off the charts, improbable. And I don’t think it’s that improbable.”

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In other words, there are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, by today’s rough estimates. Either we are not alone, or we are unfathomably lucky to be here. But what if life were not a happy accident, and instead a regularity of nature that inevitably follows from the laws of physics on all those planets with the right chemical ingredients? Not an anomaly, but a natural manifestation of a universe that organizes itself to create complexity and consciousness?

Let’s get back to Richard Dawkins’ argument that intelligent life is almost certainly out there:

“…there are really two steps: the origin of life, which is probably fairly improbable, and then the subsequent evolution to intelligent life, which is also probably fairly improbable. So the juxtaposition of those two, you could say is pretty improbable, but not 10^22-improbable.”

According to Dawkins, there are so many planets out there that the improbable becomes probable. But in this article we are going to explain why life’s emergence and subsequent evolution toward intelligence was inevitable rather than improbable, not just here on Earth, but on all planets with the right planetary conditions. Basically, if the planet is sufficiently Earth-like it will produce complex adaptive systems (i.e., organisms), which will form a biosphere that produces increasingly complex and intelligent agents. Why?

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Because once you have a reproducing system that can evolve through Darwinian evolution, it’s just a matter of time before the biosphere generates an intelligent species with a collective intelligence capable of producing science and technology. In response to Lex Friedman’s question, “Do you think evolution would also be a force on the alien planet as well?” Dawkins remarked:

“I’ve stuck my neck out and said that ever if we ever do discover life elsewhere, it will be Darwinian life, in the sense that it will work by some kind of natural selection; the non-random survival of randomly-generated codes.”

In an article titled Darwin’s Aliens, published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, the authors argue that extraterrestrials would likely evolve through natural selection to be highly complex and intelligent, as Dawkins suggests. Now we are going to learn why new theoretical work is providing support for that idea.

To explain why life and intelligence emerge inevitably given Earth-like conditions, we must understand the role that energy flows play in organizing non-living matter into organic computing machinery with sentience. In other words, evolution toward conscious creatures of increasing intelligence was destined to emerge in a universe that is always increasing in complexity.

Inevitable Life

Until recently, most scientists believed that the origin of life was such an unlikely event, requiring the “chance assembly” of so many molecules, that it would be unlikely to have occurred anywhere else in the universe. The Nobel Prize-winning French biologist Jacques Monod poetically summed up this view in his influential book Chance and Necessity, published in 1970, when he said, “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.” It was his passionate and uncompromising belief that “The universe was not pregnant with life.”

However, another 20^th century Nobel Laureate, the biologist Christian de Duve, challenged this view, arguing that the universe was indeed pregnant with life, going as far as to say that biology seems to have been “written into the fabric of the universe.”

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De Duve was in good company. Carl Sagan, the most famous astronomer of the 20^th century, also thought that life was a probable phenomenon in those places where conditions are ripe for life, writing:

“The origin of life must be a highly probably affair. As soon as conditions permit, up it pops!”

Indeed, the planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and life is now estimated to be about 4 billion years old. It arose only 100 million years or so after the Earth’s surface cooled enough to support life. That’s a blink of an eye in cosmic time.

So what does it mean exactly to say that life was inevitable rather than improbable? It means that when you have the right thermodynamic conditions—thermodynamics is the science of energy flow—energy moving through a system will organize inanimate matter with the ingredients for organic chemistry into animate matter, or biology.

“The energy that flows through a system acts to organize that system,” is the memorable line that Harold Morowitz, founding editor of the journal Complexity, wrote in 1968 in his prescient book Energy Flow in Biology. Decades later he would team up with physicist Eric Smith at the Santa Fe Institute, and the collaboration would ultimately produce the book The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth, which would lay out a new theory of abiogenesis—in other words, the emergence of life from non-life.

According to Smith and Morowitz, life emerged because the Earth’s geochemistry created an excess of chemical energy that built up near underwater volcanoes called hydrothermal vents. The heat flow coming out of these vents organized carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms into biomolecular machinery through a metabolic reaction pathway called the reverse citric acid cycle, and life was born.

How exactly does energy flowing through molecules organize those atoms into a complex adaptive system that can reproduce itself? Whenever there is a process that turns a simple system into something complex, we can suspect that some form of Darwinian evolution is at play. Dissipative adaptation is the newly-discovered process by which molecules assemble themselves when they are driven to interact by a flow of energy. Although this mechanism was described conceptually by Harold Morowitz many decades earlier, Jeremy England of MIT gave it a mathematical description and devised simulation studies that would serve as a proof of concept. To put it another way, the molecules of organic chemistry self-organize when sufficient energy is flowing through the system. Given enough time, a self-maintaining chemical system emerges that can copy itself. While there are many details that remain a mystery, the basic mechanisms underlying the origin of life have been illuminated by origin-of-life researchers.

According to the theories of England, Morowitz, and Smith, the emergence of life in the energetic conditions of the early Earth should be about as surprising as water flowing downhill. If you have the right ingredients, life emerging is not improbable but inevitable. So, when we ask how common is basic life in the universe, we must ask how many Earth-like planets are out there. Depending on what exact factors are critical—such as size, distance from a star, and molecular makeup—there are billions to trillions of them.

So alien life is almost certainly out there, and while it is obviously not present on the majority of planets—at least not anywhere near us—it is presumably not rare either. While it may be too far for us to see with current technology, the cosmos could be teeming with life. Given its inevitability, you could say we live in a “pro-life universe.”

“If life in its abundance were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order,” writes origins-of-life pioneer Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute, “then we truly are at home in the universe.”

While this changes how we think about life—it is not accidental but a natural manifestation of the “cosmic code”—it would be quite disappointing if only single-celled life were out there. Bacteria are not going to produce anything interesting, like culture and technology. So the real question of interest is whether intelligent life is out there.

Well, extraterrestrial enthusiasts are in luck, because there are good reasons to believe that with biospheres like the one we inhabit, the eventual emergence of general intelligence may be just as inevitable as basic biology.

Inevitable Intelligence

If intelligence is not an unlikely phenomenon, but a natural manifestation of a universal tendency for complexity to arise and grow without bound where conditions permit, then we can expect intelligence elsewhere in the cosmos.

Those who have taken an evolution course in high school or college know that all species are not evolving toward higher complexity or intelligence. Sharks and crocodiles are well-known examples of species that haven’t changed in any significant way over many millions of years of evolution by natural selection. In fact, fish that have migrated to caves have been known to lose their eyes over evolutionary time, becoming simpler. This fact clearly illustrates that not all organisms, or even the majority, are growing more complex through evolution. If a genetic mutation simplifies the design of a creature, and that simplified design increases their ability to survive—their ‘fitness’—then that simpler form will be ‘selected’ by nature. In other words, they will get to live on and reproduce.

It would appear that evolution does not make species increasingly complex or intelligent per se, but simply well-adapted to whatever environment they habit. Some ecological ‘niches’ present a great variety of challenges that must be adapted to, while others present hardly any. As a result, some organisms become more complex while some barely evolve at all.

Some scientists, like the famous 20^th century evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, have interpreted this to mean that evolution does not create any inherent drive toward higher complexity and intelligence, but this is a mistake. While evolution certainly does not drive every species to become increasingly complex, it does continually create new species, and over evolutionary time, will produce increasingly complex species.As the great sociobiologist E.O. Wilson explained in his 1992 book The Diversity of Life, there is a self-reinforcing tendency for ecosystems to create new niches and new species.

Not only that, the need to adapt to an increasingly complex environment will systematically increase the complexity of the most complex species through what is known as an “evolutionary arms race,” which is a name for a competitive struggle that ratchets up intelligence. For example, humans in complex urban societies, like the tech hub in Silicon Valley, are competing with each other for jobs that require high intelligence and flexible or adaptive thinking. This selection pressure has been around to some degree since homo sapiens emerged, and when civilization emerged, the need for complex problem-solvers exploded.

A similar idea is the “Red Queen Hypothesis,” which says that for the most intelligent species in a biosphere, simply persisting requires a continual increase in intelligence. Members of such a species must constantly adapt, evolve, and reproduce just to maintain their existence, due to a competitive, ever-evolving environment. The name, proposed by the evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen in 1973, comes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. After Alice complains of running for a very long time and going nowhere, the Queen responds, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.” In other words, some species must evolve to become increasingly complex just to stay in the game of existence. With evolutionary arms races happening constantly, it should not be surprising that increasingly intelligent species emerge over time as a result of blind and mechanical evolutionary processes.

Inevitable Expansion

The other major mechanism of complexity and intelligence increase is known as an “evolutionary transition,” which has also been called a “metasystem transition.” These terms typically refer to events where organisms come together, through cooperative evolution, to form a larger organism—a superorganism that has a collective intelligence that is greater than the intelligence of any of its members.

One such transition occurred when single-celled organisms formed a multicellular organism. Another occurred when multicellular organisms came together to form societies. Ant colonies are a popular example, but human civilization is another, although we don’t typically think of the global population of humans as forming a superorganism. But what we are collectively is a global brain, in which humans and their devices and AIs form something like a neural network that spans the planet. The body of the superorganism that supports the global brain is the entire biosphere, and the processes of life make up its physiology.

What’s the next stage in the evolution of the global superorganism? Well, depending on how far the organism metaphor applies, the biosphere’s next step would be self-replication. What would this look like at the level of a biosphere? If we colonize Mars, that would be the biosphere reproducing! When intelligent life terraforms a new planet, it will create a copy of its biosphere, and because the new planet will have different properties than the planet of origin, there will be replication with variation. These planets may compete economically and for new territory in space, or they may cooperate to form a new superorganism—perhaps one of galactic proportions, given enough time.

“I do believe that the laws of physics overwhelmingly favored the emergence of consciousness,” says one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, Christof Koch, who was trained as a physicist.

“The rise of sentient life within time’s wide circuit was inevitable. Teilhard de Chardin is correct in his view that islands within the universe—if not the whole cosmos—are evolving toward ever-greater complexity and self-knowledge.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit priest and paleontologist who wrote a truly prophetic book about the progressive nature of biological and technological evolution called The Phenomenon of Man, published after his death in 1955 because the Catholic Church considered it heresy. This book, written two decades earlier, predicted the emergence of what Teilhard de Chardin called a “noosphere”—a word he used to describe a state in which humans form a global mind as a result of communication technology (“noos” is Greek for mind). Due to the predictive power of his theory of progressive evolution, called the Omega Point theory, Teilhard was able to foresee the creation of the Internet even before the digital computer was invented. An omega point is a state of optimal complexity that an evolving biosphere tends to move in the direction of, due to what physicists call an “attractor.”

The great inventor Nikola Tesla also predicted strangely specific details about the future based on his idea that humans on Earth are forming a global brain:

“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is…. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”

Despite the appearance of having some kind of psychic ability to see into the future, these men simply understood the continual and accelerating increase in complexity and intelligence that results from continual biological, culture, and technological evolution.

While the success of our specific civilization is in no way guaranteed, it appears that there’s a natural tendency for biospheres being pushed by flows of solar energy toward greater organization to grow increasingly complex and intelligent. Adaptive complexity—which is what life really is—doesn’t just grow more computationally powerfully over time, it also becomes harder to kill or restrain. This is the magic of a self-correcting biosphere—by learning from its mistakes, a complex adaptive system actually becomes more powerful from everything that doesn’t eliminate it completely. So, the inevitable growth of complexity and the spread of life in the cosmos is not driven by some supernatural or conscious cosmic force; it is a learning process that creates knowledge which allows sentient systems to resist the natural tendency toward decay or disorder described by the second law of thermodynamics.

David Deutsch, father of the field of quantum computing and the leading advocate for the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, is very clear about the open-ended nature of evolution: “This process need never come to an end. There are no inherent limits to the growth of knowledge and progress.”

As long as there is usable energy to extract somewhere out there in the universe, intelligence can continue to spread through the cosmos, converting the inanimate matter of the universe into the living network. Through the process of complexity increase, the inanimate universe begins to wake up and experience the fruits of its own creation. Carl Sagan famously said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself,” and that poetic statement now rests on a firm scientific foundation.

Coming back to our original question: what have we learned about the likelihood of aliens in the universe? They almost certainly exist, and some of these aliens are almost certainly intelligent. Of course, the Fermi paradox remains: if intelligent life is out there, why haven’t we seen any traces of it. Well, space is a big place, and it may take a long time to get here. Our tools for detecting them may also be too primitive. So, we may just be early to the game—ETs may be on their way here right now, coming at us from a distant galaxy at near the speed of life. Of course, that is, if they aren’t already among us, keeping themselves undetected as they study our weird and seemingly self-destructive society in an attempt to better understand the nature of life.

The topic of this article is discussed in more detail in my forthcoming book, The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity, which you can pre-order here. For a short summary of the book, check out the below video, “ A brief introduction to a Darwinian theory of reality.”

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and a science journalist. His research has been published in journals such as Cognition & Emotion and Human Brain Mapping, and he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, and Scientific American. Follow him @BobbyAzarian.

A Brief Introduction to a Darwinian Theory of Reality with Infinity Maps www.youtube.com

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In moderation, religious and spiritual practices can be great for a person's life and mental well-being. But religious fundamentalism—which refers to the belief in the absolute authority of a religious text or leaders—is almost never good for an individual. This is primarily because fundamentalism discourages any logical reasoning or scientific evidence that challenges its scripture, making it inherently maladaptive.

It is not accurate to call religious fundamentalism a disease, because that term refers to a pathology that physically attacks the biology of a system. But fundamentalist ideologies can be thought of as mental parasites. A parasite does not usually kill the host it inhabits, as it is critically dependent on it for survival. Instead, it feeds off it and changes its behavior in ways that benefit its own existence. By understanding how fundamentalist ideologies function and are represented in the brain using this analogy, we can begin to understand how to inoculate against them, and potentially, how to rehabilitate someone who has undergone ideological brainwashing—in other words, a reduction in one's ability to think critically or independently.

How Religious Ideologies Spread

Similar to how organisms and their genes compete for survival in the environment and gene pool, ideas compete for survival inside brains, and in the pool of ideas that inhabit them. The famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has used this insightful analogy to explain how ideas spread and evolve over time. In his influential 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, he refers to ideas as "memes" (the mental analog of a gene), which he has defined as self-replicating units that spread throughout culture. We are all familiar with many types of memes, including the various customs, myths, and trends that have become part of human society.

As Dawkins explains, ideas spread through the behavior that they produce in their hosts, which is what enables them to be transmitted from one brain to another. For example, an ideology—such as a religion—that causes its inhabitants to practice its rituals and communicate its beliefs will be transmitted to others. Successful ideas are those that are best able to spread themselves, while those that fail to self-replicate go extinct. In this way, some religious ideologies persist while others fade into oblivion.

It is easy to see why religion quickly spread through culture once it emerged. When humans gained the cognitive capacity to reason and plan for the future, they became aware of their own mortality. The realization that oneself and all one's loved ones will someday die is naturally terrifying, and this existential fear perfectly set the stage for anxiety-reducing ideas, like ones that offer a never-ending afterlife. But religions are complex ideas, and the psychological effects they have on minds go beyond just relieving anxiety.

Essentially, the brain is a biological computer, and an ideology is a set of coded instructions, or "cultural software," that is running on the brain's hardware. Esteemed philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett insightfully described how ideas can control minds when he said, "The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes." In this regard, it is often not the brain that controls the mind, but the memes that compose the mind that control the brain. This is especially the case when the meme is a religion.

Religions Mutate

Like genes and gene complexes, when an ideology is replicated—or passed from one person or group to another—it undergoes mutations. As a consequence, different versions of that belief system are produced, which generate different types of behavior. As such, there are often good and bad variants of any given religion. For instance, there are moderate versions of Christianity and Islam, that promote qualities like a sense of community and a moral code that fosters ethical behavior. These ideas can be beneficial to the host organism, i.e., the religious-practicing individual. At the same time, there are harmful variants of Islam and Christianity—specifically the rigid fundamentalist versions— that cause the host mind to process information in a biased way, think irrationally, and become delusional.

Ideological Viruses and Mental Parasites

There are various types of viruses and parasites, and viruses are themselves parasites. While biological viruses are infectious agents that self-replicate inside living cells, computer viruses are destructive pieces of code that insert themselves into existing programs and change the actions of those programs. One particularly nasty type of computer virus that relies on humans for replication, known as a "Trojan horse," disguises itself as something useful or interesting in order to persuade individuals to download and spread it. Similarly, a harmful ideology disguises itself as something beneficial in order to insert itself into the brain of an individual, so that it can instruct them to behave in ways that transmit the mental virus to others. The ability for parasites to modify the behavior of hosts in ways that increase their own "fitness" (i.e., their ability to survive and reproduce) while hurting the fitness of the host, is known as "parasitic manipulation."

One particularly intriguing example of parasitic manipulation occurs when a hairworm infects a grasshopper and seizes its brain in order to survive and self-replicate. This parasite influences its behavior by inserting specific proteins into its brain. Essentially, infected grasshoppers become slaves for parasitic, self-copying machinery.

In much the same way, Christian fundamentalism is a parasitic ideology that inserts itself into brains, commanding individuals to act and think in a certain way—a rigid way that is intolerant to competing ideas. We know that religious fundamentalism is strongly correlated with what psychologists and neuroscientists call "magical thinking," which refers to making connections between actions and events when no such connections exist in reality. Without magical thinking, the religion can't survive, nor can it replicate itself. Another cognitive impairment we see in those with extreme religious views is a greater reliance on intuitive rather than reflective or analytic thought, which frequently leads to incorrect assumptions since intuition is often deceiving or overly simplistic.

We also know that in the United States, Christian fundamentalism is linked to science denial. Since science is nothing more than a method of determining truth using empirical measurement and hypothesis testing, denial of science equates to the denial of objective truth and tangible evidence. In other words, the denial of reality. Not only does fundamentalism promote delusional thinking, it also discourages followers from exposing themselves to any different ideas, which acts to protect the delusions that are essential to the ideology.

If we want to inoculate society against the harms of fundamentalist ideologies, we must start thinking differently about how they function in the brain. An ideology with a tendency to harm its host in an effort to self-replicate gives it all the properties of a parasitic virus, and defending against such a belief system requires understanding it as one. When a fundamentalist ideology inhabits a host brain, the organism's mind is no longer fully in control. The ideology is controlling its behavior and reasoning processes to propagate itself and sustain its survival. This analogy should inform how we approach efforts that attempt to reverse brainwashing and restore cognitive function in areas like analytic reasoning and problem-solving.

Bobby Azarian is a neuroscientist affiliated with George Mason University and a freelance journalist. His research has been published in journals such as Cognition & Emotion and Human Brain Mapping, and he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, and Scientific American. Follow him @BobbyAzarian.

Do not be alarmed, but consider this article a prediction and a warning. Actually, it's okay to be a little alarmed, because recent events—like the storming of the Capitol—are certainly cause for concern. Let's call it what it is; Donald Trump has created a cult and radicalized its members. QAnon also shares a large part of the responsibility, whoever they are. We may not be able to see it because Trump has been banned from Twitter and Q conversation cleaned from social media, but behind the scenes, this cult is being transformed into an army of soldiers.

How do we know that it is as serious as I say; that this is not just more fear mongering? Well, for one, people have died. Heather Heyer, a counterprotester protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, was run over by a white supremacist, and 19 others were injured. Last year a man drew a hunting bow on protestors in Salt Lake City before being taken out by the crowd, a chilling moment that was captured on video. On the day of the Capitol riot, a pipe bomb was found a few blocks from the Capitol building. In addition to these troubling events, many others who will go unnamed have been the victims of hate crimes that can be traced to the alt-Right, pro-Trump movement.

But the causalities have not only been on one side. Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt was fatally wounded by a cop as the mob tried to breach a door, another frightening moment caught on video. The point I'm making has nothing to do with whether or not the shooting was justified—though saying that level of force was necessary strikes me as uncomfortably close to Right-wing apologists who defend cops that shoot unarmed black men. The point is that the violence is escalating, and there's every reason to believe that escalation will continue. To use Newton's third law as a metaphor—for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, what does this mean for the future of America?

Since aggression provokes fear, and fear promotes aggression, a dangerous feedback loop has been established, dividing the nation to such a degree that something like civil war seems imminent. It may be a "cold civil war," but there will still be violence, destruction, and death. There will also be more gridlock in Washington, which makes any kind of progress impossible. It is hard to calculate the suffering that could have been avoided with a functional Congress, but we can be sure it is substantial. And if the division gets too severe, which is where we are headed, there will be a point of no return. Social chaos and economic collapse will follow, the United States will lose its status as a superpower, and life as we know it, will cease. If the pandemic showed us anything, it is that despite how advanced we are technologically, we are not protected from disaster, and our way of life can change overnight.

The good news is that this gloomy future is only inevitable should we choose not to intervene. But we do have to make a conscious effort to avoid catastrophe if we want any chance of being successful. I'm not talking about compromising, or forgiving, or forgetting—because we should do none of those things. I'm proposing something altogether new, something radical to stop Right-wing radicalism. But to understand the solution, and why it is necessary, we first have to get a clearer understanding of the problem, and of the predictive power of science.

The Predictive Power of Terror Management Theory

To those skeptics who consider a civil war of sorts an unlikely scenario, just ask yourself how likely any of the events mentioned above would have seemed in the pre-Trump era. Imagine taking a time machine back to 2014, and telling people that the reality show star Donald Trump would be our next president. That alone would sound ridiculous. Now imagine telling people that thousands of his supporters would storm the Capitol—many armed—in hopes of overturning the 2020 election. It would sound like some zany plot for an over-the-top comedy. Now imagine that after such event, and after trying to get his vice president killed, Trump would still own the Republican party and all of conservative media. On the surface, this outcome seems so improbable that it makes one doubt our ability to predict the future at all.

Despite how unlikely this general scenario might have seemed, I'm going to argue that it was in fact predictable with a high degree of statistical certainty, if one had the proper theoretical framework through which to understand those events as they were unfolding. That framework is called Terror Management Theory(TMT), and this paradigm from social psychology will be our sense-making lens in a time where nothing seems to make much sense.

Armed with the logic of Terror Management Theory, and an understanding of the relevant neuroscience, I was able to predict the rise of Trump, the white Nationalist movement that put him in office, the Q problem that led to the Capitol attack, and the refusal to accept the results of the election by Trump and his supporters—many months in advance. These predictions will be explained later in the article. No, I am not a psychic, but I did have a crystal ball called "science."

Karl Popper, the father of the philosophy of science, said the riskier the prediction made by a scientific theory, the more convincing it is when that prediction comes true. And you can be sure that when I was making such predictions, in articles for websites like Raw Story, Daily Beast, and Psychology Today, they seemed to describe highly unlikely outcomes. That is, if one were getting their analyses from mainstream news media and professional statisticians unfamiliar with the effects of "mortality salience"—in other words, making people think about death, or making them feel that there is a looming existential threat. I bring up these predictions not to say "I told you so" or for bragging rights; rather, it is a plea for the reader to take the predictions of the theory seriously.

To understand how Terror Management Theory can be used to predict the collective behavior of a society when existential threat looms—whether that threat is ISIS, Right-wing terror, or the pandemic—a brief introduction is in order. If you are already familiar with the theory and its relevance to Trump supporter psychology from past articles published at Raw Story, know that this piece presents new insights and ties up many seemingly unrelated features of cognition in a way that illuminates precisely why everything happened the way it did. The Trump loyalist is a mystery we are about to unravel, and in doing so, we come to see that the average MAGA maniac had little choice over their behavior.

Cultural Worldviews are Death-Anxiety Buffers

Terror Management Theory, which was based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning book from the 1970s called The Denial of Death, has been supported by hundreds of psychology and neuroscience studies. According to the theory, most of human behavior is driven by our subconscious fear of death. Unlike most if not all other animals, we have an awareness that one day we will inevitably die, for reasons that are beyond our control. This realization leads to an existential fear that is always bubbling beneath the surface. Without any way to cope with that cold hard fact of life—or fact of death, I should say—it can be difficult to get up in the morning, and to go on living, knowing it is all in futility.

How do we deal with our fear of death and unrelenting existential angst? Through cultural worldviews.

According to TMT, as a way of dealing with persistent death anxiety, humans created cultural worldviews—like religions, national identities, and political ideologies—to ease our fears and distract us from the fact that we will soon be gone, and probably forgotten. These worldviews make us feel safe and permanent by providing paths to immortality.

Through the concept of an afterlife, religions make literal immortality possible, while political ideologies and national identities give us symbolic immortality. In other words, they make us feel like we're part of a group and a movement that will outlive the individual. Worldviews also give life a meaning and a purpose. Whether we identify as Christian or Muslim or Buddhist, Democrat or Republican or Libertarian, we all belong to a tribe. Some tribes are just more ideologically extreme than others, and less accepting of outsiders. This applies even to atheists and anarchists, who are often just as ideological as the ideologies they are trying to escape.

So, worldviews are a double-edged sword: on one hand they give us direction and comfort, on the other they divide us into in-groups and out-groups, turning fellow humans into spiritual or political enemies. The unfortunate result is tribalism. Racism can be thought of as a specific type of tribalism, as tribalism proper would include other types of prejudice, like bias against people of other nationalities, religions, and political parties.

Tribalism, or loyalty to one's social group and aggression toward outsiders, is bad enough when times are good, but when there is an atmosphere of existential fear lingering over society for whatever reason—terror attacks, political incompetence, or a pandemic—tribal behavior gets turned up to eleven. In response to mortality salience, we double-down on our beliefs and try to force them on dissimilar others, and if they resist, we try to punish them. Whether the purpose of this punishment is to enforce fairness or to get revenge is largely in the eye of the beholder.

Understanding racism as emergent from tribalism can make sense of many confusing things. For example, during the Capitol riot, footage from Fox News showed more than a few black protestors in the audience. CNN cameras showed practically none, and we will probably never know whether Fox was selectively focusing on the minorities in the crowd, or if CNN was selecting them out of shot, though we can reasonably assume the truth is probably somewhere in between. While the minorities appeared to be safe in the crowd of QAnons and Trump soldiers, Nancy Pelosi would have undoubtedly gotten mauled by the mob. This of course does not mean that many of the Alt-Right rioters were not racist—it simply means they interpreted the minorities in the crowd to be tribe defectors, and as long as they show allegiance to the Nationalist movement or conspiracy theory mindset that signals they belong to the right tribe, the white tribe, they are accepted.

While the Alt-Right is mostly composed of Christians and Republicans, their Christian-American worldview has evolved into the more-extreme philosophical framework outlined by the tribe leaders—Donald Trump, Q, and conservative talk show hosts looking to boost ratings. At the same time, these influencers are monitoring social media and gauging sentiment on the ground, so the views of the tribe members and leaders evolve together, and this coevolution is guided largely by the atmosphere of existential fear, which is enhanced by the fear mongering coming from the top. And then, Trump's reassuring words, and Q's perceived righteousness, provide scared and confused human beings with a philosophy that gives them comfort and purpose. It is difficult if not impossible to reach these people with reason alone, as reason is not going to make them feel safe or comforted or inspired. And if the reasoning is perceived as being based on principles from an opposing tribe's worldview, they will flat out reject that logic on principle alone. That is not to say these people are completely unreachable—it's just going to take a lot more than reasoning with them.

Predictions Come True

What were the sources of existential threat that created the conditions that would put an opportunist like Trump in the most powerful position in the world? In 2016, I wrote an article for the website Aeon titled How the Fear of Death Makes People More Right-Wing, which argued that the Brexit and Trump movements were catalyzed by existential fear created by the string of ISIS attacks that had recently rocked the world. Prior to that essay, in January—almost a year before the election—I wrote an article for Raw Story called Donald Trump Has a Mental Disorder That Makes Him a Dangerous World Leader, which over the course of his presidency would receive upwards of 30 million views, making it the website's most popular article ever published. In July of 2016, when all the pundits and statisticians were predicting a blowout by Hillary Clinton, I published another article titled A Neuroscientist Explains Why Trump is Winning, and one month later another piece titled The More People Think About Death, the More They Think About Voting for Trump, which directly linked Terror Management Theory to Trump's rabid support. A 2016 Daily Beast article along the same lines, called Why Do Some People Respond to Trump? It's Biology 101, issued a warning for voters in its concluding paragraph:

"The rise of Trump has defied almost all logic. But he isn't appealing to logic. He is appealing to our most basic survival instincts. Those include fear and the natural tendency to thrive and conquer. This presidential election will be an important test for our nation. We will see if we are evolved enough for our logic to overcome our instincts."

Apparently we were not. Over the next few years, I would write more than a dozen articles on Trump-related psychology for Raw Story and Psychology Today that would receive millions of views, and land me offers of representation by fancy literary agencies, and media requests for appearances on popular web shows like the Young Turks' Damage Report and the David Pakman Show. In these interviews I described how Trump would respond as he began to lose power, based on insights from Terror Management Theory and the neuroscience of narcissism. Again, I deserve no special credit for these predictions; had I not been introduced to Terror Management Theory by a colleague, I would have been just as clueless as the pundits and statisticians. However, Ernest Becker, the cultural anthropologist who wrote The Denial of Death, and Sheldon Solomon, the psychologist who turned Becker's idea into an actual testable theory, are prophets in my book. Prophets of death, I guess you'd call them.

A more recent article, posted in September of 2020 at Psychology Today, titled How Trump and Media Allies Target the Mentally Vulnerable, had another clear warning. The teaser text read, "We can expect that conspiracy theories will be weaponized this election (again)." In it I explain how Trump and Q targeted people with schizophrenia and related disorders, by exploiting their heightened sensitivity to patterns (which are often not actually there). In another article published around the same time, I warned that the division was getting so bad that we could expect the election results to be rejected by half of the country. Despite these dire predictions being widely broadcast, the future that the science was foreshadowing seemed to be unavoidable. Why? Because unless we can learn to mentally override our fears and biases, they will completely control us, and they will make us tribal. But we are not totally hopeless—if we understand the neuroscience underlying these phenomena, we can fight back.

The Prefrontal Cortex is the Source of "Free Will"

The kind of person who is likely to be a Trump extremist is also likely to have impaired or suboptimal brain function in an important region known as the prefrontal cortex. A healthily-functioning prefrontal cortex is what allows one to override their primitive instincts, to think rationally, and to respond to stressful events in a controlled manner, rather than being controlled by fear and reflexive behavior. It does this by arming the conscious agent with a higher form of self-regulation and control, known as cognitive control, executive control, or effortful control.

To be clear, impaired cognitive control is not just a problem we see with Right-wing radicals. It is connected to ideological extremism more generally, so poor prefrontal activation is a concern for Left and Right-wingers alike. In fact, this cognitive profile is also associated with stimulant and alcohol addiction, as well as mental illness, like schizophrenia. And in super stressful times, like during a pandemic, we all become mentally ill in some way (anxiety, depression, etc.), and therefore less in control of our biases and behavior, which limits our ability to act freely. Why? Because the cognitive mechanisms that normally allow us to do so dissolve, leaving us with only preprogrammed behavior.

While some people will claim that they have no racial biases, or any biases for that matter, a famous experiment called the implicit bias task reveals that almost all of us do, and there's plenty of data to prove it. This bias affects how we process information and perceive the social world around us. However, this bias is subconscious and not easily detected with the naked eye. This has the unfortunate result of making it easy to ignore. Whether or not our implicit racial bias leads to overtly racist attitudes and behavior depends on an interplay between different brain areas—specifically the amygdala, which lights up when we experience something we perceive to be threatening, and the prefrontal cortex, whose job it is to regulate and suppress that fear response and the associated behavior. But if the prefrontal cortex isn't working right, it can't do its job.

Brain imaging studies have shown that people who display a stronger implicit bias have a stronger electrical response to black or other-race faces in the amygdala. An exaggerated amygdala response is part of what creates the sudden sensation of feeling scared. In people with healthy functioning brains, the fast amygdala response activates the prefrontal cortex, which is slower and plays a regulatory role. When the fear system is triggered, prefrontral areas work to assess the situation rationally, calming the mind and curbing fear-evoked behavior. Thanks to specific neural regions like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex, the brain exercises cognitive control, suppressing the tendency toward tribalism.

The problem is, not everyone has a properly functioning prefrontal cortex, and these people are the ones whose biases control them. They cannot reason those fearful surges away because they lack the mechanisms that make that kind of high-level reasoning possible. Since alcohol and amphetamine addiction can exacerbate this problem, Fox News viewers with such vices will be more vulnerable to the effects of fear mongering, and if they are given a "call to action" by a tribe leader like Trump or Q, more likely to act aggressively in an effort to push their worldview on others. Most supporters will stay home, but with many millions of followers tuned in, it is not surprising that a few thousand showed up to storm the Capitol.

So now that we understand the root cause of it all, perhaps we should view Trump and Q followers differently. They are not normal supporters, but more akin to cult members who have been radicalized by fear, their fates determined due to a lack of free will—which refers to our ability to override our primitive programming and tribal instincts. They are, in a sense, victims. They have been duped and brainwashed by rigid ideologies almost from the time of birth, and those ideologies have been weaponized by divisive politicians like Donald Trump. Does it make more sense to want to punish or fight these people, or to recognize them as agents who've lost their autonomy and ability to reason effectively?

The enemies are the influencers intentionally deceiving these vulnerable people, stoking their fears and fueling their biases. You may say some were racist, crazy, or ignorant before Trump, but we now see how that got that way. Politicians create fear and hatred for votes, Alex Jones does it for clicks, Fox does it for ratings, and QAnon does it for…chaos, I suppose. These are the people we must not let win. The actual followers are pawns in their game.

So, what can we do to release these people from the grips of their psychological captors?

The Path to Deradicalization

The solution is multi-faceted, and change won't happen overnight. One major goal would be to alter the worldview and belief structure of the extremist, and another would be to strengthen their prefrontal cortex, so that the agent is in control, rather than being controlled by the primitive brain.

Fortunately, one fascinating feature of the brain is its plasticity—or ability to rewire itself in response to new information and experience throughout life. Through exposure to new stimuli, new synaptic connections can be formed, creating neural pathways that can promote a restructuring of old and rigid belief systems. To facilitate cognitive restructuring, meditation and attentional exercises can train the prefrontal cortex to attenuate a hyperactive amygdala and control those bad instincts. A campaign to make these kinds of practices commonplace should be a goal of scientists and educators. It is not easy, but it is certainly possible to reverse biased and even racist tendencies through cognitive interventions. Counterbias training has proven effective in making police officers more aware of their implicit biases, though enhanced awareness does not always immediately translate into changes in behavior.

That could require more extreme therapeutic measures, such as pharmacological treatments to reset the brain. Psilocybin, the ingredient in magic mushrooms, or LSD, supplemented with talk therapy could be an effective way to alter rigid worldviews and dissolve biases. In a 2016 article, I suggested LSD therapy for Donald Trump, and although the title may make one chuckle, I seriously believe it would be the most effective way to get Trump to understand the effects of the division he's sowed. Psychedelics work by relaxing belief structures, so that the agent can "achieve a healthy revision of pathological beliefs," to quote psychedelics researcher Robin Carhart-Harris. Unfortunately, this remedy would require that the extremist be open-minded enough to give such an experimental treatment a try. Given that the average Q follower is all about "waking up" and seeing reality as it is, it is not unreasonable to think that a psychedelics campaign could catch on in those communities. Studies have shown that the use of psychedelics is associated with a decrease in authoritarian political views and an increase in views associated with liberalism, like open-mindedness and empathy (though one could argue some "liberals" today have neither of these). These drugs work by dissolving the ego, making one feel more connected to nature and to others.

But the real problem is that our most popular worldviews—the major religions, political ideologies, and national identities—divide us into tribes, and emphasize our differences rather than our similarities and shared human interests. If Terror Management Theory is correct, then the obvious solution is a new cultural and political worldview that unites us all under a common existential goal: the continued survival, progress, and eventually, the outward expansion of humanity. This worldview is called the Cosmic Perspective, and I have outlined it in a Psychology Today blog post titled, Could a 'Cosmic Religion' Unite a Divided Nation? You can learn about how the Cosmic Perspective naturally emerges from Terror Management Theory in this YouTube video on my channel (Road to Omega), Trump Divided America—Here's How We Heal.

Part of being liberal means being compassionate, but this is just as much about practicality as it is empathy. There's really no other choice than trying to make things better. I'll be playing my part by creating more content aimed at coming together—call it propaganda for a psychedelic revolution. Coming together does not mean meeting in the middle—as extreme centrism can be just as counterproductive as any other kind of extremism. We need radical solutions that push us forward, and we cannot go forward if we're at war.

If you'd like to be part of the solution, subscribe to my Substack newsletter, Road to Omega, which is a project aimed at fighting misinformation, healing division, and redistributing wealth and power in America. The project will be tokenized with NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and token holders will benefit from the project's success, so there is value in participating.

Simply stated, Road to Omega is an effort to save the world with science and epistemology. The plan entails:

• healing the division in America and abroad by fighting tribalism
• fighting misinformation with a logical reasoning system
• decentralizing wealth and power with blockchain technology
• creating a new political party based on self-correction
• unifying the sciences with a new kind of "Theory of Everything"
• dissolving the boundary between science and spirituality
• developing a "religion for robots" that provides a code of ethics for AIs

In two days, the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, will leave the White House. As specially-trained experts remove his staff's COVID cooties from the building, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will take their oaths of office, ending what many experts believe is the worst presidency in our country's history. But America will never be the same.

Nearly 5 years ago to the day, we issued the following warning from neuroscientist Bobby Azarian, who made the case that Trump "has a mental disorder that makes him a dangerous world leader." By our estimates, more than 30 million people have read this story -- and it remains far and away the most popular story we've ever published. --Roxanne Cooper

According to a number of top U.S. psychologists, like Harvard professor and researcher Howard Gardner, Donald Trump is a "textbook" narcissist. In fact, he fits the profile so well that clinical psychologist George Simon told Vanity Fair, "He's so classic that I'm archiving video clips of him to use in workshops." This puts Trump in the same category as a number of infamous dictators like Muammar Gaddafi, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Saddam Hussein. And although there are narcissists out there who entertain us, innovate, or create great art, when a narcissist is given immense power over people's lives, they can behave much differently. As the 2016 presidential election grows nearer we must ask ourselves, if elected president would Donald Trump act on the behalf of the will of the people, or would he behave more like a dictator—silencing any dissenting voices, perpetually refusing to compromise, and being oppressive to certain groups? To answer that, we should ask a little bit more about what makes a narcissist tick, and how they tend to behave when given free rein.

What is it exactly that makes someone a certifiable narcissist and not simply a person who has a healthy amount of confidence and a burning desire to achieve great goals? According to the Mayo Clinic, narcissistic personality disorder is "a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others."

Trump's shortage of empathy can be seen clearly by his stances on topics like immigration. Instead of recognizing that the data shows that most Mexican immigrants are not violent, but instead people simply looking for a place where actual opportunity exists, with a broad brush he claims that they are "criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc." In a similar vein, Trump has vowed to ban all Muslims from entering the country should he be elected. It appears that his lack of empathy has distorted his mind's ability to grasp the fact that the refugees he speaks of are actually seeking safety from the same murderous maniacs that he wants to keep out. Perhaps if Trump had relatives in countries like Syria and Iraq, he might understand the constant fear that most live under, and in turn become more willing to welcome them with open arms rather than leaving them to be slaughtered.

But a lack of empathy is just one part of narcissistic personality disorder. Just beneath the surface layer of overwhelming arrogance lies a delicate self-esteem that is easily injured by any form of criticism. We have all seen Trump unjustifiably lash out at a number of people with harsh and often extremely odd personal attacks. When he thought he had been treated unfairly by Fox News host and Republican debate moderator Megyn Kelly, he responded by calling her a "bimbo" and later saying that she had "blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever." In response to the strange, misogynistic comments Kelly said that she "may have overestimated his anger management skills." If the news host would have pegged him as a bona fide narcissist from the beginning she might have expected such shamelessly flagrant behavior.

To be fair, it is certainly true that not all narcissists are terrible people. Some of our most beloved celebrities and musicians have been suspected narcissists, including Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, Kanye West, and even Alec Baldwin. Not only are these decent people, some have also done a lot of good through philanthropic work. Surely Donald Trump has more in common with these individuals than he does with a psychopath like Saddam Hussein.

There is no doubt that this has been true of the past, yet there is one critical difference between those people and Trump or Saddam. Only the latter two were in or are pursuing positions as heads of state—a role that grants enormous power over world affairs and people's lives. While a narcissistic personality might be one of the traits that allowed Trump to be such a successful businessman and reality TV star, it is also the trait that makes him potentially dangerous as a political leader.

What happens when another world leader who is a loose cannon doesn't give Trump the admiration that he feels he deserves? We can be sure that notoriously anti-American dictators like Kim Jong-un of North Korea or Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei aren't going to give him any respect, let alone praise. How would a President Trump react when he feels he is being put down or undermined? Will we see the start of World War III because the leader of the most important nation in the world doesn't feel that others are kissing his ass as much as they should be? Narcissistic personality disorder is known to have strong negative effects on relationships, and when it comes to being an effective and responsible world leader, diplomacy is everything.

If it is not clear how the promise of great power can change an essentially harmless narcissist into someone oppressive, let's see how Donald Trump's political views have changed thus far. Prior to this presidential race, most of us knew Donald Trump as a charismatic, cheeky, highly entertaining figure that seemed like anything but a bigot. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York told CNN that the Trump he knew, and the Trump New York knew, was nothing like the intolerant xenophobe he appears to be today. It is a well-known fact that in the past Trump was a registered democrat who was in favor of liberal causes like abortion rights and pals with the Clintons. But since the promise of power has consumed him, he has become the poster boy for ultra-right wing intolerance. This change in personality and core values perfectly illustrates how the promise of power can transform narcissists. And as the race for the Republican nominee progresses, it has become increasingly obvious that Trump's yearning to rule greatly exceeds his desire to "Make America Great Again," as his slogan says.

The position of President of the United States is one that requires great empathy, a certain amount of humility, the ability to preserve relationships, and a willingness to establish new ones. These are all qualities that the narcissist lacks, and with their absence comes danger. Do we really want to put all Americans, and even the entire world, at great risk by giving a narcissist the nuclear code? Donald Trump is very much like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, and the presidency is his "one ring to rule them all." In this case we do not have the option of destroying the ring. The best we can strive for is keeping it out of the possession of those who cannot resist abusing its power.

Bobby Azarian is a neuroscientist affiliated with George Mason University and a freelance journalist. His research has been published in journals such as Cognition & Emotion and Human Brain Mapping, and he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, and Scientific American. Follow him on Twitter @BobbyAzarian.