Ego: The Fall of the Twin Towers and the Rise of an Enlightened Humanity

By Peter Baumann and Michael W. Taft

Ego: The Fall of the Twin Towers and the Rise of an Enlightened Humanity by Peter Baumann and Michael W. Taft is the first book to explore the positive evolutionary potential hidden in one of the most destructive events in history. In their examination of the evolutionary implications of 9/11 and its aftermath, the authors contend we are not falling into the grip of a new dark age at all; rather, we are on the verge of a much brighter one as the Darwinian process of natural selection continues to advance humankind.

The authors’ inquiry led them to the roots of human suffering: the ego. That the ego underlies our problems as a species may come as no surprise. But a deeper look into the ego’s origin and history is full of unexpected revelations:

• The modern human is dominated by a Stone Age brain
• Energy consumption and the environmental crisis is nothing more than the evolutionary drive to survive gone haywire
• Evolution has wired us to be riveted to bad news, bad outcomes, and worst-case scenarios
• When beliefs are challenged it triggers a life or death stance in the human nervous system
• Emotions are mostly physical, not mental

The self we identify with—along with its biases and beliefs—turns out to be an evolutionary tool that made its first appearance some 50,000 years ago during what’s called the conceptual revolution, arguably the biggest developmental leap in human history. The emerging ego accompanied our ability to construct complex tools, create art, and redefine social structure. For the first time as a species, we were able to imagine the future, consider the thoughts of others, and picture ourselves in our own minds. The ego is a cognitive trick of natural selection intended to insure the survival of the individual. Baumann and Taft say the problem comes when we take the ego’s conceptualization of reality as the truth about who we actually are.

Using the latest research from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology, and paleontology, Baumann and Taft show that modern humanity may be on the verge of an expansion of cognitive abilities akin to the development of the ego. This next step will free the human mind to see beyond the confines of the prison, and open the vast potential of conscious awareness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sounds True
• Release date: Sep 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781604076561

Peter Baumann

Peter Baumann began his career as a member of the internationally acclaimed 1970s band Tangerine Dream and later founded the Private Music record label. Instead of being derailed by early fame and fortune, he asked himself this in his late 40s: “Given that I probably have about 10,000 days left on the planet, how can I use this time in the most meaningful and useful way possible?” To address this question, Baumann assembled a top-notch interdisciplinary think-tank, the San Francisco-based Baumann Foundation. He serves as a trustee of the California Institute of Integral Studies and as a fellow at the Mind & Life Institute.

Book preview

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introduction

On the moonless night of May 2, 2011, specially cloaked Blackhawk helicopters slipped over the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their target was Osama bin Laden, the most wanted terrorist in the world. After a fruitless decade spent hunting him in the wilds of Afghanistan, the U.S. military had found him living in a fortified mansion in the large city of Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The helicopters landed near the mansion, disgorging dozens of Navy SEALs into the darkness. The soldiers of SEAL Team Six ran upstairs, burst into bin Laden’s room, and shot him twice: once in the chest and once above the left eye. Within twenty-four hours, they had buried his body at sea. It was the end of a terrorist mastermind, and the end of a megalomaniacal ego that believed itself to be the champion of Islam, the savior of Muslims worldwide, the spiritual heir to the prophet Mohammad, the defeater of the Soviet Army, and the scourge of America. While none of these grandiose visions was true, bin Laden was the man who inspired, organized, and financed the September 11 attacks on the United States—a turning point in world history.

The function of an individual human brain that creates and sells these stories about itself, that coordinates all the efforts to manifest that vision, is the ego. Until fifty thousand years ago, the ego didn’t exist. But once it came into being as a function of the brain, the ego changed the world—both for good and for bad.

Fifty thousand years ago, the human species was rocked by a radical shift in cognitive ability. In the blink of an evolutionary eye, we went from being smart apes to being fully human, from living at war with the elements and each other to becoming civilized. Although outwardly our bodies did not change, inwardly our experience of the world transformed. This burst of cognitive power, called the conceptual revolution, paved the way for civilization to take hold. It allowed our attention to shift from a focus on the physical world to a focus on mental models so that we could plan more efficiently and imagine safer ways to live. But the most crucial new brain function that came on line during the conceptual revolution was the ego—the mental model of ourselves.

The function of the ego is to coordinate thoughts, emotions, body sensations, memories, and desires. It is an avatar for the whole self, a mental stand-in for our total organism that allows us to engage in complex behavior. Most humans call this chimera of brain software me, firmly believing that this construction is actually who they are. Ego identification has been the defining human experience for millennia. But the age of the ego may be coming to a close.

We believe that the evolutionary process is moving the human species toward a watershed transition. A careful review of our evolutionary history shows that the development of the human brain has always gone hand in hand with expansion of technology and complexity of social networks. These three—brains, tools, social connections—form a feedback loop that continuously bootstraps humanity forward. The ability to conceptualize and create tools took us from ape to human. The ability to conceptualize ourselves and each other gave us civilization. The next cognitive step forward will be a massive expansion of conscious awareness: the ability we all have to witness our own usually subconscious brain function. Our Stone Age brain is still running the show, even in the twenty-first century, and it is riddled with cognitive biases, knee-jerk reactions, and an ego that traps us in a cramped, me-first, life-and-death struggle for survival in an environment in which that mind-set is out of date and out of tune. Increased conscious awareness will let us peek under the hood at our own deep psychology, understand our hidden motivations, and get a handle on these normally inaccessible drives and motivations. Most important, it will allow us to experience the ego directly as a function, rather than as me: a profoundly liberating experience that will permanently change our relationship to our lives, ourselves, and others.

The evolution of the human race has not ended. Although the natural-selection pressures we face may no longer be biological, evolution continues, and our species changes for the better with each successive generation. IQs are steadily rising; human rights went from nonexistent to a dominant world issue in less than a hundred years; modern medicine formed itself in less than 150 years; democratic revolutions have been breaking out around the globe for more than two hundred years; businesses have steadily moved away from labor exploitation toward egalitarian teams; the Internet is turbocharging our access to new and different viewpoints, making us more aware and tolerant; and each generation relieves the culture from the pressure of yet another taboo, becoming more open about money, sex, relationships, illness, and mental and emotional difficulties. Instead of problems hiding behind closed doors, everything is more transparent and out in the open.

These changes signal that people are moving beyond the constricted, dominance-oriented, narrow self-interest of the ego and are starting to integrate themselves into the larger process of life as it evolves on the planet. Someday the sort of dangerous, delusional ego—so full of its own self-centered importance it can smash airliners into skyscrapers—may become a relic of our past.

PART ONE

The Prison of Feelings

chapter 1

evolution’s unfinished product

On September 11, 2001, two jet airliners plunged into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, another hit the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed. In less than an hour, a group of just nineteen people had changed the course of world history. That such a small group of humans could have such a large effect on an entire planet of almost 7 billion is due in part to the fact that the terrorists had at their disposal all the energy resources, sophisticated tools, and complex interactive social structures of a modern technological society.

Imagine a genetically modern human living in the Paleolithic, about a hundred thousand years ago. In order to defend himself, he would have had a choice of two weapons: a rock or a stick. He would have crafted these by himself in a few minutes, chipping the rock into a hand axe or stripping the branch of twigs. A Boeing 767 aircraft contains 3.1 million parts, which come from more than eight hundred separate suppliers around the world. It is constructed in the largest building in the world at a plant in Everett, Washington, covering 4.3 million square feet, or about the size of about nineteen hundred family homes. It takes more than thirty thousand people working on three shifts to operate the factory, which has its own fire department, security force, medical clinic, electrical substations, and water treatment plant.

Even the most swiftly wielded stick has a limited impact. Our Paleolithic ancestor would only be able to hit one person at a time. His clumsy overhand hammering, which is our genetically programmed manner of striking, is notoriously inefficient. It might take many hits to do serious damage to an enemy.

A hunter-gatherer’s only power would be the strength of his own arm. Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, had the imagination to turn a Boeing 767-200 into a highly explosive guided missile. Each airliner that hit the World Trade Center was loaded with about ten thousand gallons of jet-grade kerosene, enough to fill the gas tanks of five hundred minivans. The total energy of the kerosene was 1.3 trillion BTUs, enough to power three hundred thousand houses for a month. The fire created by the explosive burning of this fuel was so intense that it weakened the Twin Towers’ steel skeletons, causing them to collapse, killing several thousand people.

The hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic lived in groups of up to fifty people. They were nomadic, roaming the landscape in search of food and erecting only temporary shelters. Each person required a minimum of a square mile to sustain themselves. Modern Manhattan has a population of about 1.5 million people living in just twenty-three square miles.

The Twin Towers had stood for thirty years and were about thirteen hundred feet tall, from which height people could see almost fifty miles in clear weather. On any given day, about fifty thousand people came to work in the buildings, with another two hundred thousand passing through for business or pleasure. The complex was so large that it had its own zip code (10048) and housed financial giants Morgan Stanley, Salomon Brothers, and Aon Corporation, as well as its own mall containing eighty stores including Sam Goody, The Limited, J. Crew, Banana Republic, Ann Taylor LOFT, plus restaurants, banks, and much more. It also contained a PATH train station that had been in service since 1909 and through which more than twenty-five thousand people passed every day to and from New Jersey. Atop the North Tower was a massive array of television, radio, and cell phone antennas, including a 360-foot-tall digital television mast.

The first plane, American Airlines Flight 11, hit the North Tower at 8:46a.m. By 8:50a.m. the firefighters of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) had arrived and set up the first of many incident command posts to handle the fire. The original fire department in the city, back when it was New Amsterdam, was a bucket brigade organized in 1648; the Dutch brigades carried water in leather buckets made by the shoe cobblers of the colony. By 1731 the colony’s new English rulers had sent two fire engines from London, which were pulled to the fire by volunteers, who then pumped the water by hand. Over the centuries this had grown into the FDNY, an emergency response organization of 11,600 firefighters and thirty-two hundred emergency technicians. The FDNY in 2001 used dozens of Seagrave Marauder II fire trucks with 500-horsepower engines, capable of pumping up to two thousand gallons of water per minute. In the first hours after the attack, 121 engine companies and sixty-two ladder companies rushed to the area.

The New York Police Department (NYPD), the largest in the world with around forty thousand officers and support staff, quickly sent emergency units and officers, as well as helicopters to report on conditions at the site. After the buildings collapsed, the NYPD took charge of evacuating thousands of civilians from Lower Manhattan. Boats came from all around the harbor, including commercial tugs, ferries, police and fire boats, local mariners, Coast Guard boats and cutters, navigating by radar through the thick smoke. They evacuated an estimated million people, who then began telling the world what they had experienced.

It is likely that humans of the Paleolithic era could speak only in a rudimentary way. Communication happened face to face, using gestures and sounds. There would be no written communication for another ninety thousand years, and news probably didn’t travel more than a few miles at the most. On 9/11, humans around the globe gathered to watch the events in New York and Washington DC. By 11:54a.m. Space Imaging’s Kronos—a commercial, high-resolution satellite traveling 426 miles above the earth at 17,500 miles per hour—had been redirected toward Manhattan and was taking pictures of the enormous cloud of smoke emanating from the cratered remains of the towers. With its one-meter resolution, details of the building debris and emergency vehicles were clearly visible. At the same time, a member of the Expedition Three crew aboard the International Space Station snapped photos of the New York region with a commercial digital camera from an altitude of 250 miles. People all over the world had almost instant access to these images. Since that day, communications about 9/11 have snowballed. An Internet search of 9/11 reveals over 132 million results, and there are at least five hundred books on amazon.com in English on the subject. The September 11 Digital Archive contains more than forty thousand firsthand stories and fifteen thousand images.

International reaction to 9/11 ran the gamut from compassion and sympathy to victory celebrations. People in English-speaking nations offered their profound and sincere condolences and support. For example, thirty-five hundred miles away from New York, in London, the queen expressed growing disbelief and total shock, and Ireland declared a national day of mourning. In Berlin two hundred thousand Germans marched through the streets to express solidarity with the US. The French newspaper Le Monde ran this headline: We are all Americans. Leaders from all over the world expressed their sadness and solidarity. The majority of people in these countries thought of themselves as aligned with the US, or culturally similar. Identified, in some way, as us. But that was not the whole picture. Although Yasser Arafat said he was horrified by the attacks, Palestinians on the street reacted differently. In Nablus people handed out candy to passersby in an atmosphere of celebration. And in Ein el-Hilweh and Rashidiyeh, two Palestinian refugee camps, there was ecstatic gunfire from AK-47s raised to the sky. Iraqi state television, then under the rule of Saddam Hussein, showed video of the Twin Towers collapsing, accompanied by the song Down with America.

On September 20, 2001, the United States identified Osama bin Laden as the primary driver of the 9/11 attacks and presented the Taliban, rulers of Afghanistan, with an ultimatum to deliver al-Qaeda officials and cease support of terrorist operations in the country. The Taliban refused, and a coalition of allied Western forces began bombing al-Qaeda and Taliban targets throughout Afghanistan. To date, more than two thousand members of the Western military coalition have lost their lives fighting in Afghanistan. These deaths have included members of the US, Czech, Norwegian, South Korean, Turkish, and other militaries. A total of more than nineteen thousand Afghan troops and civilians, coalition troops, contractors, and journalists have lost their lives in Afghanistan. The cultural environment and foreign policy shift after 9/11 also laid the groundwork for the Iraq War, in which an approximate 890,000 Iraqi troops and civilians, US and coalition troops, contractors, and journalists have been killed.

Statistically, there was more violent death in the hunter-gatherer period; one out of three died at the hand of another. But mass murder did not exist; killing was not premeditated. Ancient hunter-gatherers did make warfare on each other, either individually or in small groups about the size of soccer teams. These affairs could be deadly but probably rarely lasted more than a single day. They fought to defend or acquire hunting grounds, foraging areas, water sources, and mates; they fought to fend off predators, including other humans. The stakes were obvious, physical, and immediate, and the choice was to kill or to die. The famous scene of conflict between two bands of proto-humans at the water hole in 2001: A Space Odyssey depicts this sort of straightforward, survival-oriented struggle.

When necessities like food and water are contested, violence is the norm. But when our basic needs are met, we are less inclined toward fighting; thus violence has dramatically decreased over the millennia. A large segment of the human population is well fed and living a decent life, and fewer people, proportionate to the exploding population, are dying in fights over food. But the way we fight now has nothing to do with immediate survival needs. Instead our motivations come from elaborate mental concepts, and we plan in advance for future combat.

Osama bin Laden, a construction contractor by training and scion of the Islamic world’s largest construction consortium, must have carefully considered how badly the impact and explosion of a projectile loaded with combustible fuel would damage the Twin Towers. Mohamed Atta, the leader of the Hamburg terror cell that perpetrated the acts, was an architect with a special interest in skyscrapers. Bin Laden would use the Hamburg cell to guide the missiles that would bring down these symbols of what they perceived as the American war on Islam. Atta and the eighteen other hijackers spent years in training and planning the attack through an international network of like-minded soldiers. They spent long stretches of time together discussing the conceptual elements of the doctrine they bound themselves to protect. Their months together in the militant training camps in Afghanistan, enduring the brutal physical regimen, all in a context of emotionally supercharged religious justification for murder, reshaped these men. It was not just words and images by which they influenced each other: their biology caused them to reflect each other’s state of mind. Neurons in each individual brain attuned one body to the other, reflecting heart and respiration rate, level of muscle tension, and body reflexes in conjunction with their accompanying emotional expression. Buy-in to martyrdom was not just conceptual and emotional, but became a physical proposition.

Training someone to kill themselves for an idea requires subverting and overwhelming all of the survival mechanisms nature has baked into the substance of body and mind. The natural fear of death must be alleviated by a strong belief in a glorious afterlife. And the terrorist’s conditioning, both mental and physical, created a profound identification: their very survival depended on destroying any threat to their way of life, any threat to the concepts—Islam, the Caliphate, their people, home—that had become indistinguishable from the sense of self. Al-Qaeda’s ideology, strongly influenced by the writings of radical Sayyid Qutb, holds that the Muslim world is losing its spiritual foundation and regressing to the pre-Islamic state of superstition and evil known as jahiliyya, the Days of Ignorance. Because modern, Western-style governments do not follow sharia, Islamic religious law, they are the enemy, pushing real Muslims away from their salvation. Qutb also passionately asserted that world Jewry was involved in conspiracies with evil forces (such as nationalism and modernity) to subvert and destroy Islam. According to Qutb, even most Muslims had drifted from the true religion and were actually apostates; they could be killed without sin. The 9/11 terrorists saw themselves as striking back at the forces that were threatening their most sacred principles, as well as the salvation and eternal life of their families, friends, and countries. Adding the sexual lure of seventy-two virgins to spiritual martyrdom for these young men was just the tip of an entire pyramid of imagery cemented in place with intense physical and emotional drives.

Although they had a very different effect, such conceptual and emotional triggers were present in al-Qaeda’s victims as well. On September 10, 2001, fifty-eight-year-old Sonia Puopolo,¹ a resident of Dover, Massachusetts, changed her first-class ticket from Boston to Los Angeles five times. She insisted her family remain behind so that she could spend time alone with Dominic, her thirty-five-year-old son on the West Coast. A vivacious blond with a big smile, Sonia boarded American Airlines Flight 11, took her seat, 3J, behind and to the right of one of the hijackers. Just fifteen minutes into the flight, she would have seen a man stab a flight attendant. Blood sprayed everywhere and people were screaming. The man had what looked like an explosive device strapped to his stomach. A second attendant was also quickly killed. Daniel Lewin, a member of an elite Israeli special forces unit who happened to be on the flight, attempted to stop the hijacking, but was immediately cut down by Satam al-Suqami, a Saudi national and former law student. After that there was no resistance. One by one the passengers in first class were slaughtered as Sonia looked on in terror. Two flight attendants, Madeline Sweeney and Betty Ong, contacted American Airlines and reported what was happening in the cabin.

One of the muscle hijackers, hefting a box cutter, killed the passenger in the aisle beside Sonia Puopolo. She was next. As she would have realized that her life was in immediate danger, the fear response—which human beings have inherited almost unchanged from the dinosaurs—must have exploded into action. Her adrenal glands secreted catecholamine hormones, kicking the sympathetic nervous system into high gear. Blood was shunted away from her internal organs and into the extremities. Her heart and breath rate, blood pressure, and glucose level skyrocketed, and the long muscle tissue of her legs plumped with oxygen-rich blood, all preparing her body for intense physical exertion. Her eyes would have dilated and her mouth would suddenly go dry.

Although we can hardly imagine a more personal threat, the fear she must have felt in that moment was anything but personal. It was more akin to a programmed mechanical sequence. Her brain, evolved on an African savanna to deal with the life-threatening presence of a lion or hyena, understood the mortal peril of the moment and responded in its predictable, prehistoric manner. Fear was not a decision or a concept; it was an orchestrated series of chemical responses and physical reactions that, in an ancient and irresistible way, had hijacked her body. But she was not in a Paleolithic forest facing a wild animal: she was strapped into the cushy seat of an airliner hurtling toward 1 WTC at 460 miles per hour, and there was nothing she could do; neither running nor fighting were options.

With her modern human brain, however, she could do something no other animal is capable of: escape into the imagination. She was a Catholic and believed in a benevolent, all-powerful god upon whom she could call for help. Shaking and pale, she may have closed her eyes and prayed for protection. This would have allowed her a moment of calm. She never had time to send messages to her family from the plane; it is likely she was among the first passengers killed.

The murder and mayhem of 9/11 was a tragedy on so many levels. That we have brains that can create things as complex and beautiful as airliners and skyscrapers is a near miracle of ingenuity and cooperation. And yet our minds can also dream up paranoid delusions and imagine taking revenge on persecutors, real or imagined. This capacity points to something very different in human behavior; something that has dramatically changed since our long-ago days as semi-intelligent social apes. Our powerful brains, with their capacity to create the wonders and beauty of the Taj Mahal, can also create the horrors and brutality of the holocaust.

***

Albert Einstein wrote of the human condition:

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Trapped in a complex web of emotion and thought, we understand ourselves