As we near the tenth anniversary of perhaps the most famously disregarded Presidential Daily Bulletin in history it's a perfect time to look back at all that has changed since then. Ten years ago I was just beginning to record the longest and most acclaimed Fireaxe work: "Food for the Gods"; and was in the process of writing a series of essays entitled "On the Origins of Violence" for the Burning Blade. After the September eleventh terrorist attacks I paused writing that essay series to show how the theories which I was expounding matched the things that were happening in the real world. To that effect I linked what was known about the hijackers to what I had predicted would be their sources of inspiration and motivation and found that the two aligned rather well.

The essay went on to compare the mentality of the September eleventh hijackers to a pair of mass murderers who showed similar resolve and efficacy in their crimes: the Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. At the time I had noted that most murder/suicides were more spontaneous in nature, following the pattern of "the slightly obsessed and eccentric but otherwise well mannered individual who one day snaps and goes on a murderous rampage." To the contrary, "Klebold and Harris were able to control their emotions despite being in a state of suffering so severe that only death could relieve it. But [theirs] couldn't be just a normal death, it had to be a spectacular one, since only a spectacular death, shocking to behold and full of retribution would ease the pain they were feeling." In order to be psychologically sated by their final act, their retribution could not have been a mere spur of the moment rampage but had to be well prepared and methodically carried out, which I wrote was something relatively new to the world. What our modern ideologies have given birth to are individuals who can reach their breaking point and "snap", choosing a path that will lead them to murder and suicide, but who are so well conditioned to suppress their emotions that they can make elaborate preparations for a spectacular and destructive event and then carry them out with ruthless efficiency. Furthermore, even though the emotions that led to them reaching their breaking points had long since subsided by the time they acted, the scars that those emotions left behind were deep enough to keep driving them onward down the path to self-destruction. This is a remarkable development.

The essay credited the source of these new murder/suicide perpetrators as being the psychological pressure cookers that are our modern ideologies. Our ideologies need us to be successful, and need us to do great things on their behalf to help them to survive and thrive. They propel us toward success by promising us great rewards, making us feel woefully inadequate when we fall short, and repressing any and all behaviors in us which are seen as unproductive or dangerous to the ideology. As ideological conflict has raged and the world has become more competitive, the pressure on the individual to become a success and help their ideology thrive has been ratcheted up to new levels. This pressure has produced many truly exceptional successes but it has also produced many highly volatile failures which, when they break down and explode, leave tremendous damage in their wake. In producing the former, the latter are inevitably created. Adding to these pressures are the increasing number of political, religious, and ideological conflicts and hostility around the world which draw us in and make us sympathize with those upon whom great violence and suffering is inflicted. As the conflicts drag on and the suffering worsens it's not unusual to find oneself wanting to settle such conflicts with heavy-handed measures like assassination, revolution, and war. Pundits work tirelessly to evoke and manipulate such feelings, encouraging the motivated individual toward supporting their ideological cause, but not all individuals select peaceful outlets for their outrage.

Ending chillingly, as so many of these essays do, I predicted that "As social orders grow stronger, the acts of violence and rebellion [will] grow more extreme. The atrocities of the past [will] pale in comparison to those that will come in the future." Unfortunately I appear to have been proved correct. In the last ten years we have seen Seung-Hui Cho murder thirty-two people and injure twenty-five others at Virginia Tech, Bruce Jeffrey Pardo dress up as Santa Claus and murder his ex-wife and eight others on Christmas Day, Nidal Malik Hassan murder thirteen fellow soldiers and injure twenty-nine others at Fort Hood, Jared Loughner murder six people and injure thirteen including a Congresswoman in Tucson, and now Anders Breivik murder a total seventy-seven people and injure ninety-six in Norway. All of them planned their attacks and methodically carried them out, showing no signs of remorse for their victims. To this list we could also add the scores of suicide bombers and "gunmen on one-way missions" in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere, which have become so numerous that we no longer seem shocked by them. I dare to say that the last decade has made this style of atrocity so commonplace that we scarcely bother looking into the details of the event and just pass them off as just another nut case "going postal". We should be more concerned as this trend shows every sign of worsening.

In many of these cases the blame has been placed on the fiery rhetoric that allegedly influenced the killers to commit their acts: Hassan is said to have read numerous websites espousing radical Islamist ideals; Loughner had ranted about notions of the government brainwashing people through grammar, a theory which he picked up off of the internet; and Breivik quoted extensively from neoconservative and anti-Muslim bloggers as well as the infamous Unabomber in his manifesto which runs over fifteen hundred pages long. Of course, one would have to be a fool not to realize the impact that such inflammatory rhetoric has on individuals, especially those who are already close to their breaking point. It's without question that violent imagery, hyperbole, and distortion of the facts can deepen a troubled person's persecution complex or push him past his breaking point and those who spread their messages in such ways are partially responsible for the extreme actions of murderers no matter how much they disavow them. And what's worse is that such inflammatory rhetoric is everywhere these days. It seems that one can't go three clicks on the internet without reading a harshly worded blog saturated with half-truths and outright lies that is intent upon angering its readers into a state where they will demand change using whatever means necessary. And no matter what your beliefs, it seems that you can find online communities of like-minded individuals who are even more fanatical than you are which can help to solidify sketchy or doubtful ideas in your mind and push you to take actions you wouldn't have considered before. And it isn't hard to find sites which purport to have proof of some sort of conspiracy theory or another that portrays the world as a desperate struggle between a tyrannical oppressor and a few enlightened individuals. These conspiracies can be very well presented and seemingly supported by the facts and all sorts of reasonable and intelligent people have been taken in by them. Being intelligent doesn't prevent one from falling victim to the persecution paradigms upon which ideologies are built. The truth is that we are all uniquely vulnerable to inflammatory rhetoric and conspiracy theories, they being specifically targeted at our weak points in an attempt to motivate us into action for their cause. All that we require is for them to speak to us in a way that appeals to our inner vulnerabilities. Of course, most of the authors of angry blogs and conspiracy websites are not intending to motivate their adherents to commit murder, but they play an important role in those acts nonetheless.

Now, my point is not to advocate that all sites which contain harsh language be shut down out of fear that they will push an unstable person over the edge, nor do I feel that premeditated acts of extreme violence can be eliminated if everyone toned down their rhetoric a little. Calls for such actions are merely cover for ideological warfare with one side trying to score a few political points by blaming the other for mass murder. I remain in support of unrestricted free speech, as violent and offensive as it can sometimes be, for if we lose this essential right then our ability to effect change is greatly limited. My point instead is that if the idea is to effect change in the world, then it would be better to use methods that aren't so ideologically antiquated. In short, if you want to change the world, you must first change with it.

This hits home for Fireaxe, and while no one has ever been caught shooting up their school or workplace while "Black Knight" was blaring on their iPod there is no shortage of depictions of persecution and violent retribution on Fireaxe CDs. I've strived to keep my music and writings free from persecution paradigm style of rhetoric though, avoiding notions of "us versus them" and instead focusing on a more balanced understanding of the way the world is, but there's always the chance that someone will be inspired to commit murder after listening to my music or reading my newsletters. It's not something that I'm particularly afraid of, my readership is tiny and tends to be peaceful rather than large and prone to violence, but it has made me rethink the idea of how people should try to effect change in the world. Blogs, websites, books, music, videos, radio, television, seminars, sermons, and so forth are all good ways to disseminate your ideas to potentially a large audience, but if the communication with that audience is purely one way then you end up having no idea whether your ideas are valid, whether they worked for people, or what affect you are having on your audience. By standing on a virtual soapbox you can easily become like an insulated dictator, spouting off whatever thoughts cross your mind and pretending to yourself that you are spreading mana from heaven among the unwashed masses, at least until you discover otherwise with an arrestingly harsh wake-up call, such as someone calling you out and making you look like a fool. Even then, the narcissists among us have found ways to ignore our critics and drone on and on as if hypnotized by the sound of our own voice.

This "proselytizing", as the spreading of all ideas to an audience in an authoritarian style manner should probably be termed, is old world thinking. Ideologically speaking, disseminating ideas to a crowd seems to be becoming less and less relevant as systems are progressively becoming more complex than one person or a few people can control or even understand. And even if one could learn enough about a complicated subject to write a manual about it, like how to run an economy, how to plan the growth of a city, or how to run a successful counterinsurgency, by the time that one is finished writing the manual would probably be obsolete. Also, the lack of uniformity across such systems, and in the general population in modern times, makes mass any advice irrelevant to all but a small minority of the target audience. For example, it's easy to tell everyone that to survive the recession they should work harder and cut back on expenses, but when you start to look at the particulars of people's budgets, the complexity of their lives, and the unique opportunities they have and see how widely varying they are from one person to the next, you will find that your sound advice will really only work well for a few people and can certainly harm others if they follow it. So when you proselytize, the majority of your audience will just nod in agreement to your generalities and then hope for you to say something specific that applies to their situation. Of course, you can't address every specific issue, or very many or them, so mostly you are wasting your time and your audience's time.

Furthermore, even if you could get feedback from everyone who heard you proselytizing, it would be difficult for you to gain insight about how you should change your ideas to make them work better. You'll get conflicting advice, wrong advice, unsupported notions that might or might not work, arguments over tiny issues that matter to only a few, and a huge number of honest questions about how to apply your ideas to their particular case which cannot be solved with generalities. That's reality, and reality doesn't have a simple solution. None of this stops our legions of proselytizers who compensate for the inadequacies of their advice by being so loud, outrageous, and extreme that sometimes they inspire people to commit spectacular murder/suicides. And they spout off about everything from politics to economics to religion to music to art to literature and everything else as if they a) could easily solve our current complex problems with a few simple measures, b) could make their solution work for a wide variety of people in a wide variety of situations, and c) don't need to refine their theories through the painful process of trial and error in the real world to make sure that they work. So in essence we've all become street preachers, ranting on and on about how the end of the world is coming and telling everyone how they can be saved, but never bothering to set an actual date for when the rapture will occur for fear that we will be exposed as a fraud when that day comes and goes and nothing happens. Obviously we need to move in a new direction.

And thus I believe that it is time for myself and others to step off of our collective soap boxes do something truly radical: either put our high and mighty advice to the test or kindly shut our mouths. If we truly know how to fix the world, we should first start by fixing our little corner of it. This seems so obvious but it is so often ignored. Why take marriage advice from divorced people or take economic advice from someone who is always in debt? We should first all make sure that we can show that our advice at least works for ourselves before we try to improve someone else's life with our helpful advice. Then, when we do seek to aid others we shouldn't just tell them what to do and then wag our fingers and say "I told you so" if they don't take our advice. That accomplishes nothing. We must first understand the scope of their problem before we come up with our solution, then we need to give them advice that they are willing and able to follow, and lastly we need to follow up on them to see if our advice actually worked. Admittedly that's a lot more difficult than just talking at someone, and might involve a lot of hard work, plus there's always a risk that we might be proved wrong, but on the good side we might actually help more than just a tiny handful of people if we do all that. Then, once we've achieved success with someone else it's time to spread our advice to a third person and a fourth and so forth, again making sure that we follow the same steps as before: understanding the problem, giving useful advice, and following up to see if it worked. Chances are that we'll learn something new with each person we help and probably find that our advice needs to be changed and expanded upon to meet people's actual problems instead of the simple ones that we imagine them to have. Yes, the real world is a harsh mistress, demanding that a lot of hard work to be done to appease her. So if that sounds like too much work for you then try writing a book, it's much easier.

So let's imagine that we've helped a lot of people with our advice, working with them on a personal basis and following up to make sure that our advice is sound. Is it now time to write a book or start a business or blog with an air of arrogant self-assuredness? Perhaps, but again, it's old world thinking. It's still following the authoritarian model of disseminating the truth as a complete, rigid, and self-contained package. That may be good for capitalism, mass production, and acquiring wealth and fame, but I think that it's becoming less and less useful for a diverse and interconnected world. More and more it seems that we need solutions that can apply to a variety of people, or that each person can customize to their particular needs. For instance, we can buy a computer game and play it according to how the authors intended it to be played: as a hero on a quest with a relatively predetermined plot. We can't play as one of the enemy creatures, or change the rules or the plot to fit our tastes, or pull out the graphics engine or the artificial intelligence module and plug them into some other game or into a game that we made. Instead it is given to us as is, to be played as intended and to be discarded when it is no longer useful. Compare that to the way that we used to play with our toys as kids, coming up with our own games and doing what we wanted to do with them rather than what the manufacturer might have imagined. Something has been lost. Also, we need flexible sources of information too, ones that can be easily disassembled, analyzed, and reassembled. We need to be able to pull facts and ideas from similar but conflicting sources so that we can use them to see the bigger picture and how the issue impacts us specifically. How often do we find ourselves confronted with two opposing viewpoints with no way to resolve the differences between the two? Where did each author's facts come from? Are either of them hiding something? How did they arrive at their conclusions? We have questions and we can't get answers because the communication only goes one way and the sourcing is woefully inadequate. Why aren't we demanding better?

The internet might yet change all this. It is the first medium that can connect masses of people and give them all two-way communication. It also allows the delivery of many forms of content at very little cost which could revolutionize the world, changing the authoritarian model of information dissemination into an interactive, collaborative experience. This idea isn't new and has had a few fits and starts, Wikipedia being the most notable example and which has had serious problems – it is somehow both too easily changed and too tightly controlled at the same time - but people have not given up on the concept of mass collaboration because the potential upside is so huge. The trouble with collaboration at this level is that we currently do it so poorly. Most collaborative ventures inevitably lead to arguments about which direction to go in and often end with one person settling the dispute by making a final decision or with each person disowning the collaboration and going off in their own direction. Because of this, our collaborations are often less productive than if one person was in complete control or if we all just did things our own way. This is unfortunate, and I see a few reasons why it hasn't been working.

One reason is that we've all been brought up to think and do things using the authoritarian model: from our childhoods, where our parents are all-powerful authority figures; to our schools, where our teachers hand down lessons which we must learn or be failed; to our workplaces, where our bosses control what we do and how we do it; to our communities, where the police and judges wield great authority to keep us in line; to our religions, where our priests, ministers, imams, etc. deliver the word of an omnipotent power to the masses; to our political systems, where although we elect our leaders, we then hand over a great deal of power to them and are unable to change them for years. Because of our immersion in such systems we instinctively expect things to follow an authoritarian model and are confused about what to do when things are different; and, unfortunately, when given the freedom to act without the threat of punishment from a central authority too many of us tend to abuse that power. One of the biggest challenges for collaborative systems is preventing the abuse of power without resorting to authoritarian control.

Another reason why we have trouble collaborating is that collaborations prevent people from doing things the way that we want to do them. If we have a great idea that we want to make real, we know that if we enter into a collaborative process that others will try to change that idea, fitting it better to their vision, or, in our eyes, screwing up something perfect and wonderful. Instead we like to do things our way, producing our vision the way that we want it to be, and if people don't like it then that's their problem, not ours. We tell them that if they want something different than what we're offering them then they should do all the work necessary to make their vision a reality. Sometimes they take us up on that offer and we become rivals, letting our audience decide whose idea is best through popular support. Thus, instead of collaboration we favor competition, which can be beneficial, but sometimes such competition is wasteful and counterproductive.

A third reason why we have trouble collaborating is that it's not clear who gets the credit for the success or failure of a collaborative venture. It's almost impossible to point out each individual's contribution to a project and measure how much it helped or hurt the overall performance. Oftentimes when a project is successful, everyone takes more than their share of credit for it, and contrarily, when a project fails everyone blames somebody else. This fracturing of collaboration into competition greatly damages the process. For instance, when political struggles erupt between the collaborators involving who gets to decide in which direction the venture will go, the losing side often chooses to obstruct progress and both sides end up blaming the other. We can see this pathology clearly enough in our democratic systems. If credit and blame can be rightly shared, our collaborations would likely be more productive.

But what I think is that main reason why we have trouble collaborating is that it is an inherently unnatural process, at least to the degree that is necessary to make authoritarianism obsolete. Of course, it's natural for humans to cooperate and work in groups, as we have been doing since long before the Stone Age, but thinking in groups is something that we humans don't do well. Thinking in groups resembles brainstorming, which is something that we tend to do in a special session, held rarely if at all, where we collectively figure out what to do and then all go off on our own to do our parts. I think that we need to brainstorm more frequently, perhaps continuously, with people chipping in ideas whenever they occur to them. With the internet and cell phones and tablets, this constant connectivity is possible, but the way in which we communicate poses an additional limitation. Up until very recently our ability to communicate has been limited to linear forms: speech and writing; where an idea is presented using a single medium, is told from beginning to end, and where any outside references must be already known to all parties or explained in a haphazard, off the cuff manner. Because of this we find it much easier to communicate our ideas using the autocratic model of one person presenting a complete idea and others absorbing the information, and thus we spend most of our time either being active, that is, delivering communication in authoritarian form, or being passive, that is, taking in what someone else is communicating to us, and spend little time interacting. But using our mass, two-way communication networks which can relay more dynamic forms of communication: images, videos, whiteboards, and more, and through multiple mediums simultaneously, we have the tools that can allow us to communicate more at a deeper level and be far more interactive than we are now. Developing this approach could even push us to the next level of ideological evolution.

Experiments in this sort of dynamic communication are going on as I write this from Wikipedia to Second Life to business management software to what we are seeing during the "Arab Spring" and to all points in between. All over the internet people are trying to harness the power of group intelligence to reliably produce superior results to what individuals can do on their own. Watching this phenomenon unfolding I feel that my time would better be spent working with those models of communication rather than continue to produce this authoritarian style newsletter every few months. How much does writing it actually accomplish? To be honest, most of the people who received this e-mail probably didn't read it this far for one reason or another, and those who did probably didn't understand what I have written completely, or disagreed with some things without trying to resolve them, or skipped over the more tedious parts, or reacted in some way that demonstrates the failure of this mode of communication. In other words, I got up on stage, I did my thing, a few of you clapped, and then we all went about our lives almost completely unchanged. That's old world thinking. We can do better.

Speaking of trying to do better, finding answers to my ongoing health problems is still very frustrating. Over the last three months I made some good progress and then had an annoying setback. I'd like to say that I am closer now than I have been for a while but who knows what the next three months will bring. I still cannot plunge my spare energy into making music and I may never get back to the point where I can truly create with the same zeal as I have done in the past. I sometimes feel that the musical chapter of my life may be over and that I should be moving on. Of course, as long as I am alive I will fight for my health. The battle will continue.

A big ‘Hello' to anyone receiving the Burning Blade for the first time. This is the Fireaxe newsletter.