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Ever wonder why some writing grabs you instantly while other pieces leave you cold? The secret lies in an amazing discovery about our brains — they literally dance together when we communicate well! This isn’t just a pretty metaphor — it’s solid science that can transform your writing forever.

Think back to the last time a story completely pulled you in. Maybe you felt like you were right there with the main character, heart racing during the exciting parts, or tears welling up during sad moments. That’s not just good writing — it’s actually your brain syncing up with the writer’s brain in a beautiful dance scientists call “neural coupling.”

Picture this: You’re telling your best friend about watching a stunning sunset. As you describe the brilliant orange sky and the sun melting into the horizon, something magical happens. Your friend’s brain lights up in the same patterns as yours! Their visual centers spark as if they’re seeing the sunset themselves, and their emotional centers glow just like yours did during the real moment.

Using special brain scanning equipment, researchers have watched this happen in real time. When someone tells a great story, the listener’s brain actually mirrors the storyteller’s brain activity, just a split second behind.

But here’s where it gets really interesting: this brain sync-up isn’t just about sharing experiences. It’s about creating them. When you write well, you’re actually crafting a neural pattern that your reader’s brain will follow. Think of yourself as a neural choreographer, leading your reader’s brain in an intricate dance of understanding and emotion.

Let’s get practical about how to create this magical brain sync in your own writing.

First, embrace the power of sensory details. Instead of writing “The coffee shop was busy,” try “The espresso machine hissed and sputtered, releasing clouds of aromatic steam while conversation buzzed like happy bees around wooden tables.” See how your brain created that scene? That’s what we want: writing that makes your reader’s brain light up like a Christmas tree.

Here’s another powerful technique: emotional mirroring. Before you write an emotional scene, close your eyes and really feel that emotion. Notice what happens in your body. Does your chest tighten? Do your hands shake? Does your breath quicken? Write those physical sensations into your scene. When you write “Her heart hammered against her ribs as footsteps echoed down the dark hallway,” your reader’s heart actually speeds up too!

The rhythm of your writing matters more than you might think. Short sentences create tension. They make hearts race. Longer sentences, flowing like a gentle stream through a meadow, help your reader relax and settle into a more contemplative state. Mix them up deliberately to guide your reader’s emotional state.

One of the most powerful tools in your neural-coupling toolkit is the well-chosen metaphor. When you compare something abstract to something concrete and sensory, you’re giving your reader’s brain a familiar pattern to latch onto. Instead of saying “The project was challenging,” try “The project was a maze where every solution led to three new problems.” Feel how your brain automatically creates that image?

Here’s a technique that many writers overlook: the power of silence. Just as music needs rests between notes, your writing needs moments of pause. After an intense scene, give your reader a moment to breathe with a shorter, simpler paragraph. Their brain will thank you for the processing time.

Remember that neural coupling works best when it feels natural. Don’t stuff your writing with flowery descriptions or fancy words just because you think you should. Instead, write like you’re sharing an exciting story with a friend. Use the words that feel right to you. Your authentic voice creates the strongest neural patterns.

Want to test if your writing is creating good neural coupling? Read it aloud. I do this every morning with Hartmann Report; I read the article into a recorder as that day’s podcast before publishing it, and that’s when I most often and easily discover the awkward sentences, unnecessary verbiage, etc.

If you stumble over words or run out of breath when you read your story or article out loud, your readers will too. Their brains will have to work too hard to follow your neural pattern, breaking the sync. Smooth, flowing language creates the strongest brain-to-brain connections.

Here’s a practical exercise: Take a boring sentence from your writing and rewrite it three different ways, each time adding more sensory details and emotional resonance. For example:

“The old house was scary.”

becomes:

“The ancient floorboards creaked under my feet, each step releasing the musty breath of a century of secrets.”

This doesn’t just apply to writing, by the way: it’s universal.

Scientists have found that when teachers and students’ brains sync up during lessons, the students learn better. When parents and children’s brains align during playtime, the kids develop faster. This goes beyond just writing — it’s about how we connect as human beings. Every time you write, you’re not just putting words on a page — you’re reaching out to create a direct connection with another person’s mind.

Think of this brain-syncing ability as your new superpower. You’re inviting readers to see through your eyes, feel with your heart, and dance with your thoughts. Whether you’re writing a novel, a business email, a Substack newsletter, an article for publication, or a social media post, your goal is the same: create clear, engaging patterns that other brains can’t help but follow.

The next time you sit down to write, remember: you’re not just stringing words together. You’re creating a neural dance, inviting your readers’ brains to waltz with yours through the ballroom of your ideas.

Make every word count, make every image vivid, and make every emotion real. Your readers’ brains will thank you by joining the dance, creating a connection that goes far deeper than words alone.

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This is the final third of the long “conversation with myself” that I had when trying to work out the content and story arc of a new book, Threshold, The Crisis of Western Culture, following a writing technique I learned from Joe Sugarman in the early 1970s. Here we pick up the conversation:

So what, then, is it that brings a culture back into the time of the true Paradise? I read these books that say that there are angels or channeled beings who’ll do it for us, and others say that space aliens are “helping” us toward it, and the religious folks are expecting some cataclysmic event or the appearance on the scene of a messianic figure, and some say that it’ll be the triumph of science or free trade. And where we started: some people saying that we’re “evolving” as a species toward Paradise. It’s all incredibly confusing. Which is it?

History tells us that it’s certainly none of the above. They’re all nice fantasies, and all certainly represent the collective mythos, the archetype embedded in our culture, of the memory of past Paradise and the occasional contact with people living in Paradise and what we’ve observed and learned from them. But it’s nothing as exotic or as complicated as any of those things.

You mean there are no angels or space aliens and we’re not evolving?

That’s not my point. There may well be angels and aliens, and certainly the pressure of evolution is shaping every species on the planet, including Homo sapiens. But these are not the things that bring about the return of the cycle from Spring to Summer, from Recovery to Paradise.

Then what is?

It’s when the oscillations stop.

Oscillations?

Say you have a pond in your back yard, and it’s a warm, sunny day with no wind. The surface of the pond will be so clear that you can see your reflection in the water.

Or, at the right angle, see clear to the bottom.

Right. So you throw a large stone into the center of the pond. What happens?

Waves. The whole surface of the pond gets covered with waves, and you can’t see yourself and you can’t see the bottom any more.

Right. The stone — an external force — has introduced disequilibrium. It’s thrown things out of balance. That’s the shift from Paradise to Defiance. Now, if somebody jumped in the pond and said, “I’m gonna take charge of all these waves, and I’ll make sure that they all move in lockstep just the way they should,” and maybe put a wave machine into the pond to stabilize things, then you’d have an artificial, man-made time of apparent stability. That’s the time of Tyranny. But then the machine the new wave-emperor installs runs out of gas. The waves slow down and begin to vanish. You’ve moved into the time of Recovery.

And if the machine runs out of steam altogether and the waves stop and the pond is again calm and clear, you’re back into Paradise, right?

That’s the idea.

It’s a nice metaphor for imagining the cycles, but people aren’t ponds. How do you relate this to how Paradise comes back around?

Good point. The big way that people aren’t ponds, at least in this context, is that people have memories and ponds don’t. If people have a memory of a time when there was no disequilibrium, no oscillations, no waves, then they can recreate that time.

Then you could say that ponds are better than people in that regard, because they’re always trying to return to equilibrium. Gravity and all that: it’s just natural law that when the wind isn’t blowing, the pond gets calm.

And it’s natural law that when people aren’t being pushed around by things being out of balance, they will naturally organize into Paradise time cultures.

But we’re not subject to natural law: we’re humans. We control nature.

That’s the great fallacy, the story that humans tell themselves that leads to Defiance, that maintains the power of the few during the time of Tyranny, and that people waking up from, during Recovery, will lead them back to Paradise.

You mean we’re animals? We have to obey nature?

Yes.

And nature wants us to live in Paradise?

Yes. Or at least in what I’m calling paradise for the purpose of this discussion. It doesn’t mean that everybody is happy all the time, or that life is perfect. People are still people. What it does mean is that people are living in balance with their environment and with each other. They may not have TV, or they may. They may eat fruit, or they may hunt elk. It’s not that there’s one right specific way to live, but that living in balance and harmony is the eventual goal and highest expression of every culture.

So how do the waves stop so the pond can clear? What ends the oscillations?

Experience. There are some excellent examples of this from among the early explorers of the Americas, but the most vivid examples come from the early explorations of the Pacific. Melanesian people had been sending out exploration parties from the countries of Southeast Asia for thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands of years. These people would discover an island and often they’d stay there and settle in, or drop off enough people to “seed” the island with a colony and then go off in search of another island somewhere else. Because of this long history, when explorers like Abel Tasman and James Cook came across these islands in the 17th and 18th centuries, they discovered different cultures at different stages of development.

Because of how long the people had been isolated on the islands?

Because of how long the people had been on the islands after they’d first crashed the local food supply.

Crashed the food supply?

Yes. For example, the people we now call the Maori arrived in what we now call New Zealand around the year 1200, about 800 years ago. When they first arrived, this huge island was covered with over two dozen different species of ostrich-like flightless birds, called Moa, which ranged in size from around fifty pounds to over five hundred pounds. The Maori people must have thought they’d discovered the ultimate paradise. The fossil record shows that for the first few hundred years they didn’t even make spears or arrows or hatchets — they just walked up to the birds and broke their long necks and then cooked and ate them. In a place on New Zealand called Waitaki, archeologists discovered over 90,000 Moa skeletons, and virtually all of them had died from just having their necks broken. It was a bone-dump for the local community for hundreds of years, and it’s just one of many they’ve found around New Zealand.

So the abundance of food led them to a time of Paradise?

It gave them what seemed like Paradise. I’d call it a pseudo-paradise, the mini-cycle within the larger macro cycle that I mentioned earlier.

But they had all they wanted to eat. They didn’t have to hunt, they just walked up to the birds and killed them. They must not have had any warfare among each other, either, because they weren’t making killing weapons during that time, so they couldn’t have used them against each other, either.

Yes, that’s true. But they weren’t living in balance. This was the dropping of the stone in the water. It was the early part of the Defiance stage, actually. It just seemed like Paradise to them, which is why Defiance can be so seductive. Like the jungle-dwelling people who’re shown Dynasty on TV and told that if they just leave the jungle and work hard enough in the white man’s gold mines, someday they, too, can live like that.

But life was good for the Maori!

Yes, just after the stone was dropped into the pond. Just after they arrived and found millions of pounds of meat walking around loose, docile, and flightless on the island. But then they ate all the Moa.

All?

Yes, all. The Moa — all dozen or more species — are now extinct. The Maori people ate every single last one of them. Took them about four hundred years to do it, but they did it.

And then?

And then they got hungry. So they started building spears and arrows and fishhooks, and went after the other local animals. Within another hundred years, they’d exterminated or brought to the brink of extinction every other bird on the island larger than a pigeon: the huia, takahe, and the kakapo. Along the coast, Maori people hunted the three-ton elephant seal to extinction, exterminated the half-ton sea lion (Phocartos hookeri), and from all but the most remote regions wiped out the 300-pound New Zealand fur seal (Arctocephalus forsteri).

What about fishing?

They even wiped out the local fish habitats. The seas around New Zealand, like most of the Pacific, were rich with Snappers, but the archeological record shows the fish skeletons and the hooks used to catch them got smaller and smaller over the hundred-year period following the extinction of the Moa. And that was pretty much the end of the easily-hunted food on New Zealand.

What did they do?

Well, by this time, they’d gone from the high of the pseudo-Paradise of the early stages of the Defiance, and now they were moving along the cycle into the period of the Terror. With the easily-killed large animals all exterminated, the Maori turned to what they’d previously considered famine foods: roots, tubers, frogs, ferns, rats, and small birds. And they began to hunt each other.

You mean “Terror” literally!

It’s almost always the case. Read the Book of Joshua. Read the history of the Roman Empire. Listen to the stories of Dickens’ England, when people went to prison for stealing bread but there were still millions so hungry they’d risk it. Similarly, the Maori developed a warlike culture. Around 1400 A.D. they began building forts and making the tools of warfare. They called their forts pas, and the countryside of New Zealand was littered with them: every community had to have one, or they’d be overrun and destroyed by a neighboring tribe who did have a pa. Upon birth, every young Maori male was dedicated to their newly-discovered god of war, and their language became rich with words to describe the tactics of warfare.

And what were they eating?

They began intensive agriculture. Tribes would build pas to stake out fertile lowland areas, and then grow sweet potatoes there. But they had no domesticated animals, and they’d killed off virtually all other sources of animal protein on the island, so they turned to the last source of animal protein available in the years just before Dutch explorer Abel Tasman discovered them in 1642. In the hundred or so years before that date, they began eating each other.

Cannibalism?

Yes. Not only is the fossil record irrefutable, but Maori culture itself is rich with stories of the ritual eating of captured or killed enemies. Sometimes when war parties would go out on long expeditions, they’d take along a few well-bound captives — hands tied but still capable of walking — to use as meat along the way. When Tasman first discovered New Zealand, he wrote in his journal on December 16, 1642, about how the Maori sent a small boat out to meet six of his men in their small dinghy. Without warning or provocation, the Maori killed Tasman’s sailors and took their bodies ashore and ate them on the beach. He was so horrified he named the place Murderers’ Bay and sailed away, never to return.

But they’re not cannibals now, are they? I think I’ve read about the Maori people, and they’re held in high respect in New Zealand.

No, they’re not cannibals any longer, and now many of them are trying to get some of their land back from the Europeans who eventually settled New Zealand. But it was over a hundred years after Tasman left that another European — Captain James Cook — decided to check out the islands of New Zealand again. He visited in 1768, and found that they were still living fully in the midst of the cultural cycle of the Terror. In his journal, Cook wrote: “I might have extirpated the whole race, for the people of each Hamlet or village by turns applied to me to destroy the other, a very striking proof of the divided state in which they live.” Touring a local pa fortress, he was so impressed he wrote: “...the best engineer in Europe could not have choose’d better for a small number of men to defend themselves against a greater, it is strong by nature and made more so by Art.” The Maori were still struggling to maintain themselves in the face of a collapsed ecosystem.

How do you know this isn’t just propaganda from Europeans like Cook who just wanted to rip off the local people? I mean, Columbus called the Indians he met cannibals, too, and then proceeded to use that as an excuse to enslave and exterminate them. But there’s no proof they actually were cannibals.

In the case of the Maori, nobody’s disputing it, even the Maori themselves. For example, in 1869 a literate Maori, Tamihana, the son of Maori chief Te Rauparaha wrote a biography of his father’s exploits. Tamihana made clear the importance of the flesh of one’s vanquished enemies as a food source, often even as a primary food source during long raiding trips. He proudly detailed the conquest and murder of communities of hundreds of men, women, and children, in a style reminiscent of the Biblical book of Joshua. He wrote of his father’s pride in ripping out and eating the hearts and livers of his enemies, and how successful he was at taking slaves from among those he vanquished. Tamihana’s accounts are corroborated by dozens of other Maori people before and after, including the Pakeha tribe’s Maori man F.E. Maning, who wrote in 1840 about how rich the Maori language was in words to describe every aspect of military formation and warfare. Clearly, in the few hundred years since the extinction of the Moa and sea lion, the Maori had developed a terror-driven, warlike culture. Twenty-seven dialects of the original language are still spoken, and it appears that each of these groups were often at war with others over food and the land on which to produce food.

So how or when did they transit from the Terror part of the cycle into the Recovery part? And did they ever make it back to Paradise?

The Maori haven’t yet made it back to Paradise, although some are trying. In 1999, Louise and I met with a small group of them in western Australia who are trying to create a traditional Maori community, but based on egalitarian principles. Time will tell if they’re successful. But what lifted them from Terror into Recovery was the Europeans introducing to the island domesticated animals, particularly pigs and sheep. But that’s not the point of the story. The Maori just show one aspect of the South Sea Islands and the cycles of human culture.

There are others?

Definitely! Some were stuck fully in the Terror, just like the Maori. The Easter Islanders were another example of that: when Europeans discovered them, they were on the brink of starvation and aggressively killing each other. The pseudo-Paradise time they’d experienced after first discovering the island — when they built the famous stone statues — was over by a few hundred years, and during that time they’d managed to kill off virtually all the large animals on the island and, like the Maori, were subsisting on roots and tubers.

That must have been a familiar pattern among the islanders.

Yes, but there were notable exceptions. In September of 1774, Captain Cook discovered the island we now call New Caledonia. While the Maori had only been living on New Zealand for about 700 years at that time, and the Easter Islanders on Eastern Island for 800 years, New Caledonia had been settled for 3,500 years when Cook showed up. The fossil record shows that about 3,000 years earlier, the Melanesian explorers who colonized the island had repeated the boom and bust cycle of New Zealand and Easter Island, and then descended into a warlike culture. But then they moved from the Terror through the Recovery, and into the time of Paradise. They’d learned what the limits of the island’s food supply were, and the many various humane ways to keep their human population stable and below the threshold of the food supply. They’d come up with an egalitarian culture, and a cooperative form of governance. Thus, Cook wrote in his journal that they were a “friendly, honest, and peaceful people.”

They’d completed the cycle!

Yes.

What happened to them?

Seventy-nine years after James Cook discovered the islands of New Caledonia, the French discovered nickel, iron, and manganese there. In 1853, France told the natives that they were now subjects of the French government, where they have stayed ever since, despite a few violent attempts at revolt. Currently, the French tear out of the ground of New Caledonia about three million tons of nickel ore a year, and slightly smaller quantities of iron and manganese ore. They also run coffee plantations. The descendants of the people Cook discovered, who now comprise about 43 percent of the population, provide most of the labor.

So they’re back to Terror?

Yes. It’s the most common story when people living under Defiance, Terror, or Recovery encounter people living in the Paradise part of the human culture cycle. Because people living in the Paradise part of the cycle have no need for armies, weapons of war, police, or prisons, they’re not well-equipped to repulse non-Paradise invaders. Remember: invasion is one of the three typical ways that a culture falls from Paradise into Defiance, whether it’s by submitting or by taking up arms and becoming like the invaders themselves.

Does that mean that so long as there are any non-Paradise cultures on the planet, all Paradise cultures are doomed?

Good question. I don’t think so, but it certainly does seem to be the trend. That’s the bad news, I suppose. The good news is that the experience of the New Caledonians, before the French showed up — and many of the Native American tribes, before the Europeans showed up — is that when left alone people will invariably cycle their culture back to Paradise.

Always?

Given enough time and no interference, yes.

Why?

Because that’s humankind’s natural state. It’s how every other animal on Earth lives, in balance and equilibrium with its environment and the ecosystem that sustains it. It’s how all the other primates live.

But wolves eat rabbits! Doesn’t sound like the rabbits are living in Paradise, does it?

Actually, yes, they are. You’re anthropomorphizing, and doing it from the perspective of a culture in Recovery.

Anthropomorphizing?

Yes, you’re imagining that the rabbits think and feel the same way people do, and that all people think and feel the way you do. Neither of those assumptions are correct.

But rabbits fight for their lives, don’t they?

Yes, every animal will fight for its life. Until it knows that it will die, and then it relaxes and submits. There’s probably some sort of biological process involved, like it going into shock and losing consciousness or sensation, but that’s what happens. It is the destiny of a certain percentage of rabbits to end up as lunch for wolves, eagles, and other predators. That’s a system in balance: it keeps the rabbit population from exploding, but the urge and skill the rabbits have to get away from the wolves keeps the wolf population from exploding. There’s equilibrium. The waves have stopped and the pond is clear: the system can work that way forever. That’s the definition of the Paradise part of the human culture cycle.

And the reason why, when the Maori first discovered New Zealand and found more food than they could eat in a dozen generations was not Paradise, was because it wasn’t sustainable.

Right. It was a blip, an apparent Paradise, but a false one.

Like people now who live high on the hog and think our way of life will continue forever?

It’s actually a startlingly good analogy. Our pseudo-Paradise of well-fed, comfortable people in the First World is really an artifact of the availability of fossil fuels. With oil, we can put a hundred horses under the hood of a tractor instead of just one pulling the plow. With oil we can manufacture pesticides and herbicides to kill our food-competitors, the herbs and insects, and so increase our food supply. With oil we can cheaply transport food from the growing areas into the cities. But oil is a finite resource, and eventually we’ll run out of it or the use of it will destroy our ability to safely live on this planet.

Like the Maori ran out of Moa.

Yep. Just the same.

So how do we avoid ending up as cannibals like them?

That, my friend, is the biggest question of our lifetime. Let’s take it on in our next discussion.

Ok, but I don’t think I’m gonna sleep too well tonight.

Well, if it’s any solace, the oil companies say there’s at least a thirty-year supply left in the ground. So we have a little bit of time.

But in the meantime, we’re adding the population of the country of Australia to the world every three months!

Yes, there is that. So we should have our next discussion soon…

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Last week was part one of my conversation with myself, a strategy I learned decades ago from Joe Sugarman as a way of brainstorming.

I received a lot of feedback on the article, but what surprised me most was that many of the comments were from people asking me to “finish” the conversation with myself I’d written to jump-start my thinking on what eventually became my book Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture.

So, here’s part 2 of 3 (and if you want to read part 3, let me know). This picks it up with the last question I’d asked myself:

Ok, so the folks to the north of us have started planting wheat or sweet potatoes or whatever, and their population is growing. What happens next?

Weather. Weather goes in cycles, but often the cycles are longer than the memory of a single person. In the United States, for example, we’re now moving back into the weather cycle that, in the 1930s, produced the dustbowl in the Midwest, leading to ruinous crop losses (only this time it’s worse because of global warming). That’s a sixty or seventy year cycle. There are other weather cycles that climatologists have identified that run hundreds of years. The “little ice age” which killed off the people trying to colonize Greenland in the 1700s is an example. It froze the river Thames in England, something that hadn’t happened in the memory of the British Empire and hasn’t happened since. Nobody’s sure how long that cycle is. So, anyhow, weather happens and the people who are growing the crops hit a bad year. Too much or too little water, or a short season, or a hard winter: something that radically cuts the productivity of their cropland. They’re experiencing starvation, and getting desperate.

Can’t they just move somewhere else where there’s food to be found?

Sure, and that’s what they do. But the “somewhere else” they have their eye on is where we live.

Uh, oh.

Yep. So, first they had to decide that they’d break the law that all the other humans were living by, which is that “you shouldn’t do intensive agriculture...”

There was such a law? There’s evidence of such a thing?

Here are two quick examples. First, among most of the Aboriginal tribes of Australia it was explicitly built into their culture, their stories, what we’d call their religions, that it was bad luck to engage in agriculture. It would lead to the doom and destruction of the tribe, because fields of food just attracted hungry ghosts.

Second, consider this little quote from the fourth book of Genesis in the Bible: “And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering: But unto Cain and to his offering [of agricultural crops] he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell. And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door.... And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.”

What’s that all about?

Cain was the first farmer, in this Biblical story. He was the first human ever to engage in intensive agriculture. And the LORD didn’t like Cain’s offering — he told Cain that he’d sinned, presumably by farming. And Cain was so upset that the LORD had dissed him like that, that he killed his brother, Abel. I think it’s a warning against agriculture, and it’s pretty typical of the kinds of stories and religious mythologies you find among herding and hunting/gathering peoples all over the world.

So that’s what got us in this mess: agriculture.

Actually, no. It’s not agriculture per se. It was the decision to engage in agriculture intensively, and to centralize that as the basis of our food supply. That always leads to a population explosion, which then puts the tribe at risk of famine. And it also leads to a concentration of wealth, as those who control the food literally control the power of life and death over others.

Ok, so the farmers from the north are coming to get us. They’re gonna kill us off or enslave us, and convert our land into cropland. Is that about it?

Yeah.

So what do we do?

We have three choices: run, fight, or submit.

Which do we choose?

It all depends on our situation. If there’s someplace to run to, then we would probably do that. That’s what most tribal people do. It’s what the Indians in the jungles of Brazil do when the loggers come in to clear land for cattle for the hamburger chains of the United States. It’s what the Native Americans did when Europeans first started to overrun the East Coast and then the Midwest. And if we’re out of places to run, we can submit, which is what many of the Native American tribes did, hoping to get good treatment at the hands of the Europeans. Usually they were made into slaves, but at least they were still alive.

And if we choose to fight?

Well, keep in mind that in this example we have a culture that’s not based on warfare. Our life is pretty laid back, and we have no army. We don’t even have a police force or a jail. So we can try to fight back, but first we have to develop the weapons of war and a social structure to support that.

A step forward in human evolution?

A step backwards.

Backwards?! I thought we were constantly moving forward, or at least forward through a cycle?

That’s the point we started with — that that notion is wrong. The beginning of our civilization wasn’t a step forward in human evolution or in creating a way of life that works best for humans and all other life on the planet. It was a step backwards.

But we have cars and trains and planes and antibiotics!

And one in four of us will die of cancer, and we spend our lives frantically working to make the rich richer, living in terror that we’ll be downsized and lose our health insurance. And we’re producing killer germs faster than we’re producing germ killers, and right now at this moment fully a third of the world’s population is infected with tuberculosis and half the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day and often goes to sleep hungry.

I never see that on TV.

No, you never see that on TV. But it’s what’s real.

But I read this book the other day that said that we were all evolving spiritually, and if we’d just learn to pray correctly we could reach the next level, a much better way of life, happier lives. In fact, I’ve read that in dozens of books — most of them “New Age” books — that we’re spiritually evolving, and the agency of that evolution is, depending on the book or author, intervention by God, angels, space aliens, ancient masters, hidden wise people, or a particular type of spiritual exercise, meditation, or yoga. And if we could only move to the next step, the world would be a happier place.

The second half is right, but instead of using the world “evolving,” I’d use the word “recovering.” Like Darwin’s finches, we’re cycling from one beak to another. We made a terrible mistake a few thousand years ago, and now most of the human race and the rest of the natural world is paying the price for it. If we can figure out a way to undo that mistake, then life may become good again. We can return to the Garden of Eden.

The cycle.

Yes, we’re in the midst of a cycle. It’s one that has been repeated many times before.

You mean there were trains and cars and televisions before?

Probably not. But there were people who thought they could control and dominate nature before. The earliest known record is The Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written between five and seven thousand years ago. It tells the story of a man who created a mighty empire and a huge army based on a human population bloated by his huge irrigated fields of barley. His people were farmers before the story of Cain and Abel was written: their land was apparently where Adam and Eve sent their son to find a wife. And the Epic of Gilgamesh also tells of how the fields became exhausted from over-planting, and finally the soil was poisonous to the crops, too salty, because of over-irrigation. And his civilization collapsed.

Did they learn their lesson?

Apparently not: they just moved on and started again. But some of the later prophets warned against what they were doing. Jesus, for example, said, “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?”

A rhetorical question?

A warning. Read it in context and you’ll see and hear what I mean.

So we’re not spiritually evolving?

I’d say no, we are not. Others may be, those who never left the path that we strayed from. But we’re in the bottom of the cycle, the pit. We first need to climb back up, spiritually speaking, to the place where our Older Brothers, the Kogi and other indigenous people, are already standing.

And they’re spiritually evolving?

Most likely: it’s an ongoing process, albeit probably a slow one. But they’ve been working at it for the past seven thousand years, while we’ve been fighting wars with each other over agricultural land. We’ve been stuck, and all this “spiritual progress” that everybody is talking about is, in my opinion, really an effort to get us back on track or back up to where we were before Gilgamesh made his fatal decision.

So let me see if I understand what you’re saying. There’s the large cycle of life on the planet, and of the development of human life...

And that’s a cycle of millions of years: you probably won’t notice a change in that cycle in a single lifetime. Parts of that cycle included the dying off of Cro-Magnon man, and the killing off or assimilation of Neanderthals and Denisovans into modern humans. And the differentiation of the races of modern humans. We’re talking long-term stuff, here.

Ok, there’s that cycle, a biological cycle. And we don’t know where that’s going, maybe towards the assimilation of all races into one, or maybe into the emergence of new ones, or maybe it’s just where it is, but it’ll take thousands of years to know. And then within that cycle, there’s the cycle of cultures, which can and do change within a lifetime or two. And that’s really the cycle that we should be paying attention to, because that’s the one we’re moving through. Right?

Yes. This cycle bottomed out over the past three thousand years, and is probably moving back upwards, as it were, toward its beginning point, now.

It’s beginning point? What are the stages of this cultural cycle?

Well, to simplify it, we could say there are four stages to the large cycle, and within the large cycle there are smaller cycles, which we’ll get to them a few minutes. But the four big stages are: Paradise, Defiance, Terror, and Recovery — and then back to Paradise.

Can we go through them, one at a time? Starting with Paradise?

Sure. Paradise is the first, but also the last, because this is a cycle and not a line: we keep cycling through it. It’s why every culture has stories about paradise in its ancient past...except those few cultures which are experiencing paradise right now, who are at that point in the cycle today.

There are such people alive?

Sure. And they’re well documented. Although we’re doing our level best to exterminate them as fast as we can.

And when a culture is in the Paradise part of the cycle, how do they live?

That’s the most stable part of the cycle, which is why probably most of human history was lived in Paradise. To be in that part of the cycle, people must have a cyclical rather than linear sense of time. They’re connected into the cycles of nature, of birth and death, of the seasons. They know that what goes around comes around. They have a memory of a time when people lived the Defiance, the Terror, and the Recovery. They tell stories to themselves to warn themselves not to step out of Paradise into Defiance, because it’ll inevitably lead to Terror, which will then require Recovery to get back to Paradise. The most obvious feature of Paradise is stability. Population is stable, the social order is stable, the food supply is stable, and things don’t change much.

Sounds boring!

Exactly. And cultures which remember Paradise consider anything other than that to be unpleasant. It’s why the ancient Chinese, who remembered the time of Paradise, would say, “May you live in interesting times,” as a curse.

Yeah, I guess if I lived in Paradise, I wouldn’t want things to change much. Hey — is this why our notion of heaven is that it’s a place where nothing much changes, and people sit around playing harps all day?

The words “Paradise” and “heaven” are often interchangeable in some modern religions, so I’d guess that the modern notion of heaven is a distorted or distant memory of the Paradise part of the cultural cycle.

And that’s why everybody is always trying to get there! This makes sense!

Yes, although if you were in charge during a time of Terror, then you’d want the idea of Paradise to be thought of as something unattainable by normal humans. This isn’t because the folks in charge during the times of Terror were inherently nasty — it was the times as much as the people — but because during that part of the cycle the idea of a Paradise part of the cycle was simply unimaginable. It couldn’t be real in the physical world, they’d think, so it must be metaphysical. So if you were in charge during that time, you’d tell people that they’d have to die to get there, and the way to make sure you get there after you die is to do what the people in charge tell them to do right now. “Just pick that cotton, boy, and when you die you’ll be rewarded with Paradise.”

But isn’t that what our religions explicitly say? I mean, like, some Christians even believe that if a baby dies unbaptized, she won’t go to heaven!

That’s what the religions teach, because they were the ones who happened to be in charge during the time of the cycle called Terror. They were just telling their truth as they knew it: it made sense to them, because during the Terror the idea of Paradise is so distant and far away that it seems unattainable, just like in the dead of winter you don’t think, when looking at the snowdrifts, that Summer may happen the next morning. It’s inconceivable. So they were just telling their truth: Paradise is unattainable on this Earth, at least in our lifetimes. They couldn’t see the cycles beyond their own lives. But the founders of our modern religions could see the cycles beyond their own lives, and so that’s what they taught. For example, Jesus said, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! For, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” He was saying that it is possible, and that if enough people reformed the culture, it could even be possible in a single lifetime.

It’s us who are capable of Paradise, but it’s our culture that’s stuck?

Not stuck, so much, but just here and now in this part of the cycle. And every culture, no matter where they are in the cycle, has a faint memory or a fable or a story about the time of Paradise that they’d once known. If they’re fully into the Defiance, the story is about how they’re going to either improve on or recover Paradise, depending on whether they walked away from it intentionally or were driven away from it. If they’re fully into the Terror, then they tell themselves it’s in a long-distant future, or only available upon death, because it seems so far away that it looks like those are the only sensible possibilities. And when they move into the Recovery, then they begin to believe that Paradise is actually a possibility within their own lifetime, that they could re-achieve it now, then the stories begin to shift into the arena of what can be done now, in this generation, to bring about Paradise. But everybody, all cultures, have such stories, because all cultures sprang from the roots of humanity, which has been around long enough that we all have distant ancestors who experienced the time of Paradise and told or wrote stories about it. Those stories echo either as fables or as religious myths or simply as part of the collective unconscious.

You mentioned Winter and Summer before. Are the four seasons an apt metaphor for this?

Very apt. Summer is the time of Paradise. All is well and life is good. Then the weather turns nasty: Autumn has arrived, and the cold of Autumn defies the warmth of Summer, causing annual plants to die and the trees and perennials to lose their leaves. This is like the time of Defiance, and the analogy is particularly good because most times of Defiance are actually brought about by changes in the climate. It’s a time of turbulence, of change, of danger. Those with arks survive; others may perish. Then, after Autumn, come the short days and bitter cold nights of Winter, the time of Terror. If Winter is upon us and I have food stored and you have none, I can get you to do just about anything in exchange for some food so you can survive. Similarly, during the cultural cycle of Winter, Terror, those in charge who control the food supply exercise absolute control over everybody else. The Samurai had the right to cut off a person’s head and present his family with the bill. The kings and their local Lords exercised the “right of the first night,” sleeping with every new bride the night of her honeymoon before her husband could legally touch her. People were bought and sold with the land, and life was cheap — except, of course, the life of the ruling classes. And, like Winter, the season of Terror can seem very stable, like it’ll go on forever. But, of course, it’s just a season, and pretty soon, like the first shoots of Spring breaking up through the thawing ground, the cracks in the social order begin, heralding the transitional time of Recovery or Springtime. This is a time of willy-nilly growth, all sorts of unexpected things popping up all over, movements and religions and political parties...

Sounds like the time of Recovery is rather interesting, almost pleasant.

Sometimes. Sometimes it’s brought about by another sort of crisis, though. The breakdown or overthrow of the older and seemingly stable social order that reigned during the Terror. Disasters such as famine or plague. If it happens slowly it could be a time of relatively peaceful evolution into Paradise; more often, though, it’s a time of brutal upheaval, the riding of the four horsemen. Actually, the Bible has stories of all four of these cycles, pretty clearly defined. You’ll also find them laid out explicitly in the literature of Hinduism.

Ok, so now we’re back to the Paradise part of the cycle. People have figured out how to live in harmony with their environment and with each other. But what then brings about the Defiance again? Why would somebody change things if they were living in Paradise?

As far as I can tell, there are three possible triggers. The first and probably most common one is that there’s an ecological disaster, which is not of human making. A volcano blows up, a drought or extreme rainy period extends for a few years, the oceans rise and flood the homeland, there’s a huge series of earthquakes, or — as has happened about every ten thousand years during the hundred to two-hundred-thousand years of human history — there’s a major meteorological shift like the beginning or end of an ice age.

Any one of which would disrupt the community’s food supply?

Right. Or their water supply: food and water are the two things humans can’t live more than a few days without. So something external to the culture causes a drop in the food supply, and suddenly the people must come up with a new way to live. The gods have thrown them out of paradise, at least in their own minds, and if they don’t do something quickly they’ll starve.

And in the story in Genesis, the two things they tried were herding or domesticating animals for food, which is what Abel did, and intensive agriculture, which is what Cain did.

Yes. And those, basically, are the only two options. The three ways that people have always provided for their food are hunting/gathering, herding, and farming.

What about scavenging? I read an article somewhere about ‘man the scavenger’ that said that early humans were opportunists, like crows or buzzards.

Well, first off, we’re not designed to be carrion eaters. We don’t have the digestive system, the intense stomach acids like vultures and hyenas do to destroy putrifying bacteria, for it. But if people came across a fresh lion kill and there was something left over or they could scare away the lions, they’d be silly not to eat what they could. Really, though, this is just an aspect of hunting/gathering.

Got it. So when something happened that caused hunting and gathering to no longer be a viable option, in Genesis they tried herding and agriculture. And God didn’t like agriculture. He wasn’t happy with Cain’s offering.

So it would seem. And you find similar stories still extant among the Bedouin people of that region: they’ll herd goats, but they won’t plant fields. They’re nomads. The same is true of the Karamajong of northern Uganda, who herd cattle and live mostly from the blood and milk of their cows. And you’ll find distaste for settling down and planting among the Roma people, who are often referred to as Gypsies. All of these peoples chose the path of Abel, which the Bible says was the path God preferred. The rest of us, it seems, chose the path of Cain, which is to live off intensive agriculture.

And what’s wrong with that?

Intensive agriculture creates a situation kind of like that faced by so many Americans who are trying to live a lifestyle that makes them look richer than they are. They can’t pay for a quarter-million-dollar house, but the bank will loan the money for one. So they take the loan and live in the house, but a third of their paycheck every month has to go to the bank. They’ve stepped out onto the thin ledge of debt, and if they lose their job and can’t find a comparable one quickly, they lose their home. Similarly, with intensive agriculture people step out onto the thin ledge of an artificially inflated food supply. Irrigated and fertilized fields of mono-culture crops produce huge amounts of food, but are very fragile: a bumper crop of locusts or a few years or drought will wipe out the food supply just like the modern-day householder losing his job wipes out his money supply. In both cases, the result is disaster.

And herding is more resilient?

Yes, and so is hunting/gathering. Assuming low human population density, you can move from place to place when local conditions get bad.

But didn’t the Bedouins wipe out much of the lands of northern Africa about five hundred years ago, turning scrublands into desert by overgrazing?

Yes, they did. Some of that land is only now recovering, and governments have in many cases banned them from grazing. I didn’t say the pastoral life was optimal, just that it was less fragile than intensive agriculture, and produces more food than hunting/gathering. When something local happens that makes hunting/gathering no longer viable, it’s the least fragile of the two options left.

Ok, you said there were three different ways that people could leave or be thrown out of Paradise, or that would cause the Paradise part of the cycle of culture to end and the Defiance part of the cycle to begin. What are the other ways people would move from Paradise-time into Defiance-time?

The second trigger for moving away from Paradise is the actual act of defiance. A group of people, a small tribe, for example, decides that even though their culture and religion teach that intensive agriculture is dangerous, they’re going to try it anyway. They’re going to defy the gods. This is a subtext to The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest foundational stories of our culture. Gilgamesh went out and cut the head off the god who protected the forests, and then cut down the forests. He used the logs to build a great city — Uruk or Ur — and he turned the former forestland into irrigated cropland.

And the story ended in disaster when the cropland suffered from salination and siltation?

Right. One part of the Epic is another of those ancient warnings about agriculture, just like Genesis.

But Gilgamesh’s people didn’t turn away from agriculture, did they?

No, they concluded that somebody must have done something wrong, but weren’t willing to believe that their way of living was what it was. So they blamed the gods. For example, maybe it was the revenge of Enlil, the top god, for Gilgamesh’s having cut off the head of Hambuba, the forest god. In any case, they moved on to another nearby land, conquered the people there, and set up agricultural shop again.

And the cycle of land destruction and famine happened again?

As it does to this day, all over the world. Even with the promise of genetically modified foods and super-duper pesticides and fertilizers, an ever-increasing food supply will always just produce an ever-increasing population...until the food supply hits the limits of its growth. And intensive agriculture exhausts land, so when that limit is hit, there isn’t a sudden stability of food supply, but a sudden decline.

It’s coming here, now?

It’s already started. Over ninety countries in the world can no longer grow enough food to feed their own people.

But Western Europe and the United States and Canada aren’t among them, right?

So long as we can continue to convince the nations sitting on top of huge oil reserves to keep pumping it out and selling it to us cheaply, so our tractors and fertilizer factories can keep running.

Ok, I want to get back to that in a minute, but first let’s finish the three ways people walk away from or are thrown out of the time of Paradise. You mentioned climate change or natural disaster, and somebody coming up with the bright idea to ignore the historic injunctions against intensive agriculture. What’s the third?

Invasion.

Oh, yeah. You mentioned that earlier, but just in passing. You read the history of the world, though, from the time of Joshua conquering cities all over the Middle East, to the settling of the Americas by Europeans, and it seems that invasion is probably the most common trigger for the transition from Paradise to Defiance and then to Terror.

In our recent history, yes. Talk with the Abenaki Indians of Vermont and northern New York State, though. They can tell you stories of the last cycle, when the mountains of blue ice moved north and they settled the lands. Their memory is, literally, ten thousand years long. Joseph Bruchac, an Abenaki storyteller, wrote a beautiful novel about those early times titled Dawn Land. You’d probably enjoy reading it.

So invasion isn’t the most common way that the cycle starts over by throwing people from Paradise into Defiance and Terror?

In recent history it is, but in the history of the human race, I’d say the anthropological record shows that climate change is the most predictable and unstoppable.

Ok, so we have these four cycles, these four seasons. Do they happen to every culture?

Yes. Every culture has a memory of Paradise and a longing to return to it, and is somewhere in one of the three other stages of the cycle if they’re not in Paradise.

Does this happen worldwide?

If you mean, “Does the entire world make the same shift at the same time?” then I’d say the answer is a qualified “no.” There are still a few — a very few — cultures alive on the planet right now who are living in the Paradise part of the cycle. Others are in Defiance, Terror, or Recovery.

And what about our modern culture? The United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe, what we call the First World? Where are we in the cycle?

Overall, we’re in Recovery. It started in the 18th century, when the American and French Revolutions brought back from the Iroquois the basic ideas of how a culture governs itself during a time of Paradise. [I write about this at length in The Hidden History of American Democracy.]

The Iroquois were living in a time of Paradise?

It’s not that simple. The Iroquois, as we refer to them, weren’t one people, they were a confederation of a half-dozen tribes, formed around 1570, and referred to as the Iroquois League. It appears from the histories of the time that the Onondaga and the Cayuga were living closest to the Paradise part of the cycle, and the Mohawk and Oneida were fully into Defiance. It’s harder to know about the Seneca and the Tuscurora. All, however, were thrown into Defiance by the arrival of whites, which prompted the formation of the Iroquois League, what they called the Hodenosaunee. In any case, all lived within either a few lifetimes or in physical proximity to people who lived in a time of Paradise because the fundamentals of it were so well known to them. They hadn’t descended into the season of Terror when Paradise was thought to be distant and unattainable. Even when they fought against the whites, they did so in the hopes that they could recover or return to a time of Paradise.

And that was also the idea of the Founding Fathers? That they could overthrow the tyranny of the British and create a Paradise time here?

I think that was the idea of some of them. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was very enamored of the ways the Native Americans had organized their tribes, and borrowed heavily from the Iroquois in his writing of the Declaration of Independence. Others, though, like John Adams and George Washington, seemed more interested in maintaining a hierarchical form of government, an oligarchy of the educated and wealthy. Washington, as president, wanted to be addressed and treated as if he were a king; Adams argued that only white men who owned land should have full rights of citizenship and be allowed to vote or participate in the government. Nonetheless, Jefferson and those aligned with him, particularly Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, and James Madison, built many of the Paradise time notions of governance into the U.S. Constitution, and thereby set the stage for the beginning of the Recovery.

Does Recovery come about because people decide to make it happen?

It may seem that way, but my guess is that it’s not. I believe it’s brought about by the exact opposite of the conditions that lead to the Defiance.

I’m confused: I thought you said three things could lead to the beginning of Defiance.

Yes, three situations: climate change, invasion, or decision. But at the core of all three is one primary impact on people: scarcity. When resources become scarce, then people leave Paradise in search of another Valhalla, or in an attempt to recover Paradise. The scarcity can be brought about by change in climate or by invasion, or by some third thing that would cause a decision to be made — for example the emergence of a very powerful but essentially sociopathic leader — or exposure to what seems to be the opportunity for riches. The classic example of this are the hundreds of indigenous tribes who are living on land rich in tropical woods, gold, or other natural resources that we want. Instead of just killing them off, we’ve discovered that it’s just as effective to give them televisions. Within a year or so, they decide that they don’t really live in a paradise after all: the real paradise is what they see on TV. And they want it, so they’re willing to deal with the loggers or miners to exchange their land for cash and jobs. Or at least a few of them are willing to make this deal-with-the-devil choice, and so we designate them as the tribal leaders and sign contracts with them and then give them a bunch of money and put the tribal government in their hands. We’ve done it, literally, hundreds of times in the past century: it’s much more effective and much less messy than simply going in and killing them like Custer tried to do with the Lakota because he wanted to lay a gold-mining claim to their lands for his retirement. The point is that all these transitions from Paradise to Defiance are rooted in scarcity or the perception of scarcity.

And so the transition from Terror to Recovery is based in the opposite of scarcity?

Yes, it’s rooted in abundance. Or the appearance of abundance. And you can see both micro and macro cycles of this. At their peaks, both the Greek and Roman empires thought they had unlimited fuel supplies in the forests of Greece and Italy. They entered what are still referred to as golden ages, and had the luxury of a relatively leisure lifestyle and the development of philosophy and entertainment. But these golden ages were not true times of Paradise, because they weren’t sustainable, weren’t in balance. They were based on the rapid consumption of a finite resource, in this case, wood. When each empire wiped out their forests — as the Sumerians had under Gilgamesh a thousand or two years earlier — then they, too, entered periods of scarcity. Nobody had time to be a philosopher or playwright, and their empires moved into terrifying times of warfare and expansion, capturing nearby and distant lands to get fuel and slaves. Their art shifted to scenes of war, their literature to the stories of warriors and conquest, their technology to instruments of destruction.

A micro cycle of abundant resources causing Recovery, leading to Paradise, then running out of fuel and dissolving into Defiance, and then leading to a reign of Terror?

Yes, the same as we’ve seen in Europe over the past thousand years. Every time a new fuel source is discovered, a pseudo-Paradise time is entered into when art and culture blossom. Coal around a thousand years ago, oil and nuclear power over the past century. In the United States, we are only now beginning to exhaust the abundance of natural resources that were here when Europeans first arrived: we’ve consumed about half our oil, and are discovering that the damage to our environment from burning coal is so costly we need to make it more scarce, even though there’s still a lot of it in the ground.

So what, then, is it that brings a culture back into the time of the true Paradise? I read these books that say that there are angels or channeled beings who’ll do it for us, and others say that space aliens are “helping” us toward it, and the religious folks are expecting some cataclysmic event or the appearance on the scene of a messianic figure, and some say that it’ll be the triumph of science or free trade. And where we started: some people saying that we’re “evolving” as a species toward Paradise. It’s all incredibly confusing. Which is it?

[I’ll wrap up the conversation next week in the last post on this…]

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My old buddy Neale Donald Walsh had the good fortune of God — or his unconscious, or something Edgar Cayce could tell us about — take control of his writing, pouring the words out using a 19th century technique known as “automatic writing” (where you put a pad out of sight and simply let your hand start writing, and stuff comes out). His NY Times bestselling “Conversations With God” series was the result.

Most of us, though, don’t have God dictating through us. As a result, more often than not we end up writing what author Annie Lamott, in her brilliant book Bird By Bird on how to write, calls “shitty first drafts.”

I’ve written thousands of them, as have most successful writers. Arthur C. Clarke, the guy who’s novel was made into the movie 2001:A Space Odyssey, is often quoted (perhaps apocryphally) as saying, “Your first million words are practice.” In my case, that was certainly true.

Yet so many aspiring writers unnecessarily struggle and make themselves miserable as they try to produce brilliant prose with their first drafts. Few of us can ever pull that off. Instead, as Lamott says, shitty first drafts are the foundation for better second drafts and ultimately excellent final manuscripts.

There’s this mythical thing called “writer’s block.” As a person afflicted with my own substantial share of OCD, I’m pretty sure that most people with writer’s block are experiencing something very similar to what I used to: thinking that “this draft just isn’t good enough” and then tearing it up or deleting it and starting all over again.

Here’s the secret: nobody is ever going to see or read your shitty first drafts. So have fun with them!

At least once a week, I find myself sitting down to the computer facing a blank screen — with no idea what I’m going to write — and typing something to myself like:

“Well, what are we going to write about today? How about a piece on shitty first drafts? But how should I start it out? Should I begin with a story? Or talk about how people are terrified of judgment and thus often don’t even start writing? Or…”

Pretty soon I’m in the actual process of writing the article.

When writing something larger, I also often talk to myself on the screen to try to get a handle on the concepts I’m going to try to convey.

Back in the 1970s, my first writing mentor was a man named Joe Sugarman, who taught a seminar in New York that I attended; the topic was writing advertising copy. But Joe went way beyond simply how to write good ad copy. He had a great solution to “writer’s block” as well.

Joe’s suggestion was to put a piece of paper into the typewriter (this was 1973) and just start talking to yourself. Ask yourself questions and then answer them. “You’ll be amazed what your unconscious mind will channel through your fingers,” he promised us. He was right.

A few years back, I was stuck for a topic to write a new book about after being solicited by a big New York publishing house for my “next book.” What’s below is my conversation with myself that I just found in an old archive; it led to my writing my book Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture. It’s a great example of how Joe’s technique works, and I think you’ll find some good food for thought in some of my ramblings.

Keep in mind, though, this was my process preceding writing an outline for my book Threshold. I never expected anybody to read it (and have cleaned it up a bit for this publication), but hopefully it’ll give you a sense for how a “stream of consciousness Q&A” self-administered strategy can help clarify exactly what you want to write about:

A Curious Dialogue

Life is pretty good here in America. How come the Third World can’t use economic progress to achieve our lifestyle? Why don’t we encourage them to grow their way out of their problems?

Because it would take all of the resources of at least four planet Earths to sustain the eight billion people of our world if everybody were to live a lifestyle even of an American earning minimum wage flipping burgers. It’s simply not possible.

Then why do we have it so well?

Because others live so poorly. Literally. Look at the six-dollar nightlight you can buy in Wal-Mart, made in China. It took two hundred pounds of soil mined from the earth to supply the iron and copper in there. The plastic represents a pint of oil, and the manufacture of the plastic took four gallons of oil. The neon gas inside the little bulb had to be extracted from over a thousand cubic feet of air, and the process consumed another gallon of gasoline. When you add all the components together, there’s over two man-hours of work in it, and it had to be transported over 11,000 miles to get to the store where you bought it. And the store made a profit on the sale.

How is that possible?

The rulers of China are willing to use up their resources to get our cash, and to force their people to work as slaves. North Americans are 4% of the world’s population, but we consume 30% of the world’s natural resources and produce 50% of the world’s non-organic waste. We can pull it off because through luck, happenstance, and military power we directly or indirectly control most of the world’s oil. Our control of oil and military/economic power has caused the despots of the Third World to trade their resources and the sweat of their people for our currency.

And when the world runs out of oil?

It’s already happening in some countries. Burma is down to a 3-year supply, and the realization of that about three decades ago led to an overthrow of their government. As countries in the Third World lose access to oil or their wells begin to run dry, you find war follows. East Timor is oil-rich, for example, a fact overlooked in most American news analyses of why Indonesia invaded that tiny country. When countries run out of oil, they do what Hitler did when he ran low on oil: they go to war.

But it seems to me that we’re moving toward something positive, that we’re growing and evolving. I mean, a few hundred years ago they were burning women at the stake and a few hundred years before that they were murdering people in the crusades and before that people lived in caves and chased animals with sticks. So there has to be some sort of forward path, doesn’t there? Some kind of evolution?

Yes and no. Every modern culture and every organized religion that I know of has a myth that’s central to their belief structure, a creation myth, which starts out with people being in a state of grace or happiness, a Garden of Eden, from which they’re ejected into this world...

Don’t you think that’s a reference to the birth experience? To being thrown from the world of spirit into the world of matter?

Perhaps. But I suspect it’s really far more practical, more reality-grounded, because these stories almost always point to a real, physical place, not a metaphysical place. The Garden of Eden, for example, was at the headwater of four waterways, which became known as the Euphrates, Pison, Gion, and Hiddekel rivers. The name Eden is probably an adaptation from the Sumerian name for the plain of Mesopotamia, which was called Edinn. This was a real place, and the first writers of the Bible spoke as if they had specific knowledge of it. You’ll find this same sort of reality-groundedness in most other modern culture stories that refer to a previous golden age or to the decline of humanity, from the writings of Greek Poet Hesiod, who wrote Work and Days 2800 years ago, to the stories of traditional Norwegians, dating back to before the Christian conquest of Norway about 800 years ago. The Romans believed that when Saturn reigned in ancient times, there was neither sorrow nor work: everybody was happy and lived in peace. That was followed, according to the Romans, by the age of heroes — called the silver and bronze ages — and the iron age of work, which is pretty much where Roman history ended, when the Holy Roman Empire reinvented itself as the Holy Catholic Empire. So there’s a pretty strong consensus among our modern cultures, from the Jewish to the Christian to the Hindu to the Moslem, that there was a time in ancient history when all people lived happily and peacefully.

You missed the Buddhists.

Yes, intentionally. To the best of my knowledge, they have no story about the creation and there’s no notion of a fall from grace, at least that’s acknowledged among all the different Buddhist sects. But Buddhism doesn’t believe in a continuous soul and doesn’t discuss the presence or absence of a single creator, either. So Buddhism is a bit of an anomaly here. Nonetheless, the Buddhists start out with the assumption that all life is suffering, which was the first of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, and that through the practice of their method suffering can be overcome. One could argue that this presumes there was a time before our civilization came along when all life wasn’t suffering — which puts them back in the camp of the others — or that, like with the issue of monotheism, they just don’t go there. But I think the true answer is that while Hinduism believes in cyclical time, and Christianity, Judaism, and Islam believe in linear time, the Buddhists believe in chaotic time.

Chaotic time?

Chaotic time is the notion that there isn’t any particular time at all. It’s all just an eternal “now.” The now of the past is the same as the now of the present. If somebody became enlightened in the past, then people can also become enlightened in the present, because time is essentially directionless and chaotic.

They don’t posit an end of time?

Actually, the Buddhists do: you find reference to it in the Bodhisattva and other vows. For example, at his home in India, the Dalai Lama once led a group of us in a vow which included: “As long as space remains, as long as sentient beings remain, until then, may I too remain and dispel the miseries of the world.” It implies that there is some end time toward which we’re all moving, and those who take the vow to stay or reincarnate (using that word loosely, in the Buddhist sense) are going to stick around until that time. But in the acting out of Buddhism, I’d say you see more of the chaotic sense of time than the linear sense of time.

Ok, back then to being ejected from the Garden of Eden. What does that have to do with the evolution of human beings?

It has everything to do with it, or, rather, with refuting it. With this creation story and its variations, what virtually all Western and Eastern thought is saying is that there was a time in the past when we were happier and more attuned to spirit and Earth than we are today. In other words, in our striving for improvement, we’re not evolving, but instead we’re trying to go back to something we once had.

I know of one religion that doesn’t have a “we were once all happy” story in its timeline.

And that is?

Science. Our scientific story is that we started out living in caves, living painful and terrible lives in the freezing cold and rain, and eventually, through the use of ever-improving technology from fire to transistors, reached our current state of comfort. And, of course, if we would just turn everything over to science, they’d genetically engineer the perfect food, the perfect person, and the perfect world.

Yes, salvation through technology. However, you misrepresent that when you say it’s the scientific perspective. What you’ve described is the consumerist perspective, which falsely claims itself to be scientific. Consumerism is actually the largest religion in the world, and it carries the belief system you just described. But we’ll get back to that in a later conversation: first, I want to finish with the idea of the Golden Age or the Garden of Eden.

Wait a minute — you’re saying that science doesn’t say that we evolved from apes and that our ancestors were less happy than we are?

Science says no such thing. The science of biology suggests that we evolved from an early primate, which also evolved into apes: modern-day chimps and apes are our cousins, not our grandparents. And the science of paleoanthropology — the study of human and pre-human life before the invention of literacy — has pretty much totally refuted the notion that most early humans lived miserable lives. Like tribal people today, they ran the spectrum, from eking out a living to having abundant, comfortable lives.

Are you going to pitch the “noble savage” now?

It’s neither black nor white. A few weeks ago on a cold November day here in Vermont with about a foot of snow on the ground, Louise met a fellow in downtown Montpelier who was walking around barefoot. He had calluses on the bottoms of his feet that were at least a quarter-inch thick: he hadn’t worn shoes in years. And he walked that way everywhere he went, in all four seasons. The body is capable of acclimating itself to just about any type of weather, within reason.

I haven’t seen any nudist Eskimos.

They prefer to be called the Inuit people, but, yes, you’re right. On the other hand, even in the face of all the wonders and luxury of our lifestyle, many of them would prefer to continue to live their traditional life. Why would that be, even in the frozen north?

I dunno — it seems nuts to me. Freezing their butts off.

Not at all. They’re no colder or warmer than people living in town: both live in heated buildings and wear warm clothing. The big difference is that the people in town work anywhere from six to ten hours a day, five to seven days a week, just to survive. The Inuits who live their traditional lifestyle work about two hours a day to provide for food, heat, and shelter.

What about when they go out on a whale or seal hunt for a week at a time?

And they bring back several months worth of food? Do the math: it averages out to around two hours of “work” a day. That’s what’s typical among hunter/gathering people, whether it’s in the Arctic or on the Equator. Scientists — real scientists, not writers like Thomas Hobbs who’s always quoted with his “short, nasty and brutish” comment about pre-British life — often refer to such people as having “the original leisure lifestyle.” Missionaries today often make the same comment about such people as the Pilgrims did about some of the Native American tribes: they seem “lazy.” But it’s not that they’re lazy, it’s that they’re satisfied. They’re living in Eden, and so they don’t jump at a chance to go to work in a mine or factory or on a farm.

But what about the cannibals of Borneo or the warlike indigenous people of New Zealand, the Maori? They were constantly killing each other: that doesn’t sound like Eden to me. There’s even some evidence of cannibalism among the Anasazi people living in what’s now called Colorado, during the twelfth century, and the Aztecs were big into eating people. How could you say these folks were living a leisure lifestyle?

Excellent question — you’re revealing the basic flawed myth of our culture: that linear time is the only time there is. That myth teaches that time is a line, moving from some distant “bad” point to some future “good” point, or from an extremely distant good time to a long period of bad time to some extremely imminent future good time. For example, God kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden and cursed future generations to work six days a week with their “faces covered with sweat.” But then God prepared an escape hatch, promising one day to send to Earth a savior to free people from God’s own curse. The Christians believe that was Jesus, but he didn’t fully succeed in freeing people from the curse of having to work so hard and have a miserable life, so he has to return to the Earth again to “make all things new.” So the beginning of time was being kicked out of the Garden of Eden, the long middle of time was from then until now, and the end of time is either death leading to heaven — the individual end of time — or else the final battle of Armageddon followed by a thousand-year reign of peace.

Ok, I get it about chaotic time, and linear time is pretty much a description of the way I was brought up thinking, but why is linear time a myth?

Because it’s simply not so. In order to have a notion of linear time, it’s necessary first to erect a barrier to the memory of time before now. Cultures create stories of the past which exclude all previous cycles, and focus instead only on the current cycle, from the beginning of that culture until the present, with theories of its future. For example, fundamentalists hold up our story of Adam and Eve as the story of the creation of human beings. But in Genesis we’re told that Adam and Even found a wife for their son, Seth, and that after killing Able, Cain went off to the land of Nod and found himself a wife there and gave birth to Enoch. You’ll find that most tribal people, when you ask them what they’re called, will give you the word in their language for “human being” or “people” or “man.” This is true of the San, the Lakota, the Inuit, the Ik, the Karamoja, and virtually every other tribe on Earth. They realize there are other humans around, but they consider their particular group to be unique from all the others. They were the ones who, like the Inca, were born of the sun. Or were the result of a heavenly bird laying an egg in the place where they live from which the first “people” were hatched. It’s a creation story, yes, but a story of the creation of one tribe, which came to be known as the Hebrews or the Jews.

And that story erects the barrier to remembering what life was like before their tribe got started?

Yes. It’s the beginning of linear time.

And all our modern religions observe either linear or chaotic time?

Mostly. You could argue that historically the Jews understood cyclical time — they had built into the epistemology the notion of a weekly day of rest, of giving the fields a rest every seven years, and of freeing all slaves and equalizing all income every 49 years. But while some Jews keep this cyclical notion of time alive, most have lost it: the Jubilee is no longer observed every 50 years, for example, and few fields are given their seven-year rest. Only a very small percentage of Jews even observe the Sabbath in the way that the Bible dictates, and virtually no Christians do so. The Christians were so offended by cyclical time that they smashed Maypoles in the 15th century and changed the springtime rituals of cyclical “pagan” time into celebrations of a past event called Easter. So pretty much everybody lives in linear time these days, but cyclical time is what’s true.

That’s a pretty strong statement. I think science supports linear time as being what’s true: consider the big bang theory.

And what follows that?

Well, eventually all matter turns dark and cold.

And then?

Eventually gravity pulls all matter back into the center of the universe, where it gets compressed into a pinpoint.

And then?

Got it. It explodes outward, in a big bang, starting the whole thing over again. The ultimate cyclical time.

Right. No matter how you look at it, if you look hard enough you find that everything goes in cycles instead of in a straight line.

Which brings us back to the notion of evolution. If everything goes in cycles, then how come there weren’t people back before there were dinosaurs?

Maybe there were. But it would have been in the last creation cycle of some other world, not in the last mammal-growing cycle of this planet. And the mathematical odds are vastly in favor of there having been, being, and will be what we call people on other planets in the universe. We’re part of the life-cycle of this planet, which is part of the life-cycle of this cycle of what we call our known universe.

Then evolution is a linear-time theory within a cyclical time universe?

Actually, not the way Darwin understood it. Some of his earliest writing was about the finches he found on the Galápagos archipelago. He noticed that there was a cycle occurring between two finch populations, those with larger beaks and those with smaller beaks. The birds with the smaller beaks were more efficient in their use of energy: they didn’t have to drag around as big a beak. This was an advantage, so long as there were small-sized seeds for them to feed on. But as they increased in population, they wiped out the plants that carried the small seeds, and their small beaks were not strong enough to crack the larger seeds of the large-seed plants that came to replace the small-seed plants. So the small-beaked finches seemed to vanish, while the population of large-beaked finches flourished. But after a few years, the large-beaked finches had wiped out the large-seed plants, and so their population went into a decline while the small-beaked finches reemerged to eat the small-seed plants, which were now growing where the large-seed plants had died out. What Darwin observed was a cycle, not a progression.

But there is a progression in evolution, isn’t there? I mean how else would we be here if life on Earth began with single-cell organisms?

Yes, of course. But within that progression are cycles. That’s the important point.

As it relates to humans and human evolution and that so-popular buzz-phrase these days, “The evolution of consciousness”?

Exactly. Imagine that you were living in a way that only required you to work two hours a day. The climate was decent, food abundant, and there weren’t a lot of people around to compete with you for the local food supply. You spent your days hanging out with family and friends, making up songs, telling stories, playing games, even visiting other psychic worlds and talking directly to the gods through the use of local plants or techniques of meditation and breathing. Life was good.

Sounds like Eden. But wouldn’t your tribe’s population eventually grow to the point where it wiped out the local resource base and you’d have to work more than two hours a day to find food?

Let’s say for the purpose of this discussion that that happened once in the past and that your tribe learned from it. You learned the importance of keeping your population small and stable, in order to maintain a high quality of life.

This was before birth control pills?

Yes, but there are many other means of birth control. Several plants make effective morning-after teas. Women, living as they do in the natural world, are more in tune with the natural rhythms of their bodies and easily able to spot the fertile days of their menstrual cycle. They discovered long ago that when women have equal power with men — particularly to decide when to have sex — that the population stabilized. Like the Lakota, they have a cultural belief that it’s poor form to have a child more than once every six or seven years, because then the previous child won’t get enough parental attention and the tribe will grow too fast. Non-procreative sex is encouraged, even including homosexuality. Women breastfeed their children for years, and while women are breastfeeding their bodies suppress estrogens and so it’s very hard for them to get pregnant. So, you’ve figured out a bunch of ways to keep your population stable, none of which include having to kill children or old people.

But there’s evidence that some tribal people did kill their children and old people.

Yes, but let’s assume, for the moment, that those people did that during the learning part of the cycle I referred to a moment ago. They overpopulated, didn’t know how to handle it, had to kill off some folks, and eventually discovered the methods I just mentioned.

How are we feeding ourselves in these societies?

We gather about eighty percent of our food from local plants, and about twenty percent of it is local game. The women trap small animals with nets, and the men hunt larger ones with spears and arrows and the like. It’s great fun, great sport, and also consider a sacred job. Food, after all, is the core of life.

Ok, so we’re living in a group, a tribe, working just a few hours a day, and our population is stable and life is good.

Right. Trading with the neighbors, occasionally our children will intermarry with theirs to keep the gene pool strong, we even have sporting competitions with them.

Is this true? Did this actually happen?

Lacrosse was a game invented by the Iroquois. They’d play it for fun, but most often they’d play it as a way of settling disputes between tribes.

I thought the Europeans invented sports.

Some. Until contact with the Native Americans, most European “sports” were miniaturized versions of war. Jousting, sword-fighting tournaments, battles to the death against wild animals like lions or bulls in an arena, or fistfights. There were a few that were less violent, like the game of golf which was invented by people who’d lived tribally — the Scots — until Britain conquered them. But because golf wasn’t a “preparation for war” exercise, in 1457 the Scottish Parliament passed a law making it illegal to play. They wanted people to practice their archery, instead, to help defend and expand the British Empire.

Geez. Ok, continue.

So we’re sitting around having a pretty good life, and one day a tribe just north of us decides they’re going to start organized and intensive agriculture. We visit them and remind them that every time a tribe has tried that in the past, it’s caused their population to explode and ultimately led to famine, but they decide they know better than we do and tell us to mind our own business.

Why would they do that? You mean they discovered agriculture?

No, intensive agriculture had been known for twenty thousand or more years. Probably for all of human history, a hundred thousand or more years, but we have fossil evidence of it at least thirty to forty thousand years ago. It’s just that people generally didn’t do it.

What do you mean by “intensive agriculture,” as opposed to regular agriculture?

Well, all people historically have practiced a sort of local, natural agriculture. Even some apes do it. They encourage the local growth of plants that are good to eat, and weed out the plants that aren’t good to eat. But intensive agriculture is where large areas of land are devoted to the production of a single crop. This causes a boom in the food supply, and so therefore the population grows. The story of Cain and Abel in the Bible is a warning against it: God hated Cain’s farmed goods and preferred Abel’s offerings from his herding and hunting life. It’s why Cain killed Abel.

What about all those prehistoric birth-control measures you talked about a minute ago?

Those were to keep the population stable within the limits of the local food supply. When the local food supply expands, they’re not necessary. The goal wasn’t a certain number of people in a particularly area, but a sustainable number of people in a particular ecosystem.

Ok, so the folks to the north of us have started planting wheat or sweet potatoes or whatever, and their population is growing. What happens next?

The dialogue goes on for another five thousand words or thereabouts, and I won’t bore you with the rest of it, but you get the idea. It wanders all over the place, until I finally get to the nub of what I’m writing.

In addition, I’ve written here at Wisdom School before about the strategy (that I also learned from Joe Sugarman) of writing a letter to a friend or relative, which also works for me when I’m already certain of the beginning, middle, and end of what I’m going to say/write.

But when I’m uncertain, this “talking to myself” strategy has led me to write some really interesting (to me, anyway) books and articles. And don’t worry about doing anything that is clean or polished when you’re starting out; shitty first drafts are a very common beginning for even the most professional of writers.

Try it the next time you’re stuck. I guarantee you’ll be amazed by what happens!

I didn’t really learn to write well until I was in my late 40s. I wish I’d known what I know now when I was in my 20s.

When I was a kid, my parents were both bookworms. My dad was a book collector, with over 20,000 in his basement (where I made my bedroom in a corner made out of bookshelves); my mom was an English Lit major at MSU. My brother Steve has followed in Dad’s footsteps and also has a house full of books that he buys and sells at book fairs.

Mom and Dad gave me a portable typewriter (sourced from the Salvation Army stores we visited every weekend, looking for new books) for my 12th birthday and a used electric one when I turned 15. Dad talked me into taking typing in 7th grade; I was the only boy in a room with 30 girls and terribly embarrassed. In retrospect, it was probably the most useful class I took that decade.

My parents worshiped writers. Mom tried writing a few children’s books; I wish I still had them but don’t know where they ended up after she died. Mom and Dad infused me with their love of good writing and respect for the people who produced it.

By the time I left home at the age of 16 to live in a little rented room in East Lansing, I’d papered the wall of my bedroom with 56 rejection slips, mostly from poetry magazines. I’d sold one slightly pornographic short story to a men’s magazine, even though I was just 15.

And then I got involved in the anti-war movement, got arrested for my SDS activity and thrown out of college, started a small business (the first of 7), got married at 21, and pretty much quit writing in the early 1970s.

I’ve written here before about how I learned to find a conversational “voice” by writing each article or book chapter as a letter to a friend. Over the years that I owned two ad agencies (in Michigan and Atlanta) I used that strategy to write advertising copy, but then, in the 1990s, I discovered I could use that strategy to write an entire book.

My son was having trouble in middle school — he’s a genuinely brilliant person, smarter than me, and now has a master’s degree in science and runs his own science-based business — and was diagnosed with ADHD. I believed the “broken brain” riff from the guy who’d diagnosed him was BS, and came up with an alternative explanation: that he’d inherited my and my parents’ “Hunter” genes, left over from hunter/gatherer times before the agricultural revolution.

In 1994 I wrote my first book, ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer’s World, to him. The experience taught me a few things. First, that I could actually write a book. Second, that when I wrote about something I truly cared about, the words came naturally and people seemed to resonate with my writing. And, third, that getting published and having my first book written up in TIME magazine was a rush!

That book did well and my publisher wanted another, essentially a sequel. I ended up writing six books about the subject; I’m now revisiting the topic over at HunterInAFarmersWorld.com. In 1996, we sold the advertising agency in Atlanta on a 7-year buyout to our employees, so Louise and I had a “retirement” income (writing books generally doesn’t pay much), and we moved to a house in the woods in Vermont where I committed to writing full time.

The first big lesson I learned was that if I really wanted to be a writer, I had to write. Every day. Six or seven days a week. Writers write, after all: everything else is just talk and bluster. I read a quote, perhaps apocryphal, attributed to Arthur C. Clarke that, “Your first million words are practice.”

I wrote three “big” (100,000+ words) novels in the style of Robert Ludlum that were terrible, and five smaller private eye novels derivative of John D. MacDonald that were also pretty bad, although the last in the series actually got published (and is now, thankfully, out of print).

Between those and the ADHD books, though, I hit my million words and was starting to feel comfortable writing every day. Louise and I attended writers’ conferences and subscribed to writers’ magazines looking for tips, but the best lessons I learned were from reading other people’s work and my daily writing practice.

And something I learned from a friend.

One day in the 1980s I was visiting a dear old friend and accomplished writer, Michael Kurland, at his apartment in New York. As we sat in his living room talking, I noticed a 300-400 page manuscript sitting on his kitchen counter waiting to go to the post office.

“How do you do that?” I asked. At the time, just the idea of sitting down to write 300 pages seemed overwhelming.

Michael shrugged and replied, offhandedly, “Five pages a day.”

“What?” I said, having expected some esoteric advice or admission like, “Eat nothing but granola, do Yoga every morning, and strap yourself to your typewriter…”

“I usually only write five pages a day,” he said, as I recall. “At that pace, I can write a book in about two or three months and edit it in one more month. I get up every morning, have my coffee, and sit down to write and don’t get up to start my day until I’ve written five pages.”

“How long does that take?”

“Sometimes I’m done at 9 in the morning, and sometimes I’m still stuck at the typewriter in the middle of the afternoon.”

“Why don’t you write more than five pages when those five pages come easy and you’re done early?”

“Because then the next day I’ll feel guilty for only writing five pages, and that’s the road that leads straight to burnout. I’ll sometimes spend an afternoon visiting friends or just sitting in a sidewalk café in Greenwich Village and watching people, but, really, that’s still writing: I’m imagining those people’s lives, capturing and inventing potential characters, thinking of the story I’m working on.”

Michael’s advice came back to me in the 90’s when we’d moved to Vermont, and I made a real effort to write at least five, and no more than ten, pages a day. It worked!!!

Using his strategy, in early 1996 I compiled and re-wrote a collection of letters I’d written, most to Louise or my late friend Jerry Schneiderman. They encompassed my experiences traveling across four continents with the man who became my spiritual mentor and whose international nonprofit relief agency I did volunteer work for. That book, The Prophet’s Way, has now been translated into a half-dozen languages and is as close to an autobiography as I can come.  

Later that year, hitting my groove, I wrote a book about climate change and the end of the era of oil, titled The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, which inspired Leonardo DiCaprio and his father George DiCaprio to make a half-dozen or so documentary movies (I’m in all of them but one, and wrote large parts of a few of them). Last Hours has now been translated into 17 languages and is used as a textbook in a few college ecology classes.

By the early 2000s I’d pretty much given up on writing novels and, when Louise and I started our radio show in March of 2003, I began writing every day for the show. CommonDreams.org published hundreds of my articles (and still does), and having my work recognized that way kept me inspired to keep writing.

In 2005, I compiled a collection of my articles — edited for flow and transitions between chapters — into my first political book, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class. That was followed in 2010 by Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country, which Senator Bernie Sanders had his staff hand-deliver to all 99 other senators with a cover letter recommending they read it. He later read large parts of it out loud on the Senate floor during his famous filibuster.

The final lesson I’ve learned from all this writing is that readers’ preferences change over time. In the years before the internet became a big thing in the late 1990s, people were willing to read longer nonfiction books like Last Hours; today’s attention spans (and the time available to read) are much shorter.

Louise caught this long before I did and suggested to the editor who’d published my 2001 book Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People” that we should write a series of small books that could be read in a single day or over a weekend. She wanted to call them “rainy day books,” but BK thought that was a bit too cute, so we simply went with a series title that all began with “The Hidden History of…”  

Each in the series has fewer than 170 pages of text, and they’re handy, pocket-sized books. Clocking in at fewer than 35,000 words, I was able to write two of them a year, in addition to the rest of my work writing. The tenth and last in the series, The Hidden History of the American Dream, will be out this fall.

I mentioned earlier that you can learn a lot from reading other people’s writing. It’s fascinating: when you look at a painting or sculpture, it’s difficult to know exactly how the artist created that work. But when you read a writer’s work, you can see and hear exactly how she’s structured it, how the information flows, how personal or impersonal she writes, and how she creates transitions to move from topic to topic.

Reading with a writer’s eye is, in my experience, a far more effective way to learn to write than taking a class or reading books on writing.

When I started writing novels, Louise and I dissected several books by Ludlum, John D. MacDonald, and a dozen others, breaking down their outlines and characters while highlighting particular turns of phrase we thought we could learn from.

Dashell Hammett, Ross MacDonald, and Raymond Chandler are particularly good for learning style, as is Hemmingway, in my experience. That said, you’ll probably find your own favorites: but read them like a writer (rather than like a reader) to learn from their work.

In summary, if you want to be a writer, start writing. Every day. Even if it’s just a journal, or a daily commentary on the news. Like learning how to competently play a musical instrument, there is no better lesson than daily practice.

Substack, in particular, provides a great venue for you to publish your writing and get feedback from readers; the site has an extraordinary internal system for leading readers to new writers, and if you publish every day you’ll probably catch an audience after a few months. It also features a number of great writing newsletters, many of which I recommend. Another site that works for writers is Medium.com, where I started publishing before moving to Substack in 2021.

So, get started!

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Back in the early 1970s a friend, Terry O’Connor, owned a small advertising agency in Lansing, Michigan. Terry and I put together a company to sell herbal teas, smoking mixtures, and potpourris and we ended up moving the company — which had started in my bedroom with Louise and me filling jars of tea by hand — into the old mansion built by R.E. Olds (the founder of Oldsmobile) in Okemos, Michigan.

The building, by that time, was in pretty bad shape, but Louise and I moved in there (our second child was born in that house) and Terry moved his ad agency in, along with what eventually became around 15 or 18 employees. Terry invited me to join his ad agency; he’d do the art if I could to the sales and write ad copy.

I was in my early 20s and this was my first exposure to the advertising industry. Ter Graphics had some large clients — Michigan National Bank and Kellogg’s, for example — so I went off on a search for the secrets of successful ads.

Back then Joe Sugarman was one of the most famous names in the business. In addition to running a successful mail-order company selling electronic gadgets, he also wrote the AdWeek Copywriting Handbook.

He could charge thousands of dollars to write a single sentence or paragraph for major national advertisers. And, as a favor to a friend from the old Donnelley publishing company, Joe had finally agreed to teach a weekend seminar on writing advertising copy.

I spent months saving the money to attend that weekend in New York, and it would be an understatement to say it just changed my life. It opened entirely new doors of opportunity to me.

The number one lesson I learned from Joe was how to write anything I’d like people to want to read, be it ad copy, a newspaper or magazine article, or a newsletter like this one on Substack.

“Most people make the number one writer’s mistake when they start,” he said, as I recall (and my memory of this is pretty vivid). “They think they’re talking to an audience. But there’s never an audience. Instead, people read everything from books to articles to ad copy one at a time. Each person is reading each word you write, sounding them out in their own heads, all alone.”

Therefore, Joe said, it’s essential to write in a style that’s personal and conversational. (There are exceptions, of course, like academic writing, but they’re few and far between.) And that’s where Joe’s little trick that I’ve found so handy throughout my life came into play.

“Think of somebody you know, you like, and who you think would be interested in your topic,” Joe told us. “Then roll a fresh piece of paper into your typewriter and put their name at the top, preceded by the word ‘Dear.’ Follow that with a sentence or two about anything that you’d normally write to that person about. And then tell them about your product.”

The example he gave, since he ran an electronics gadget mail-order business (JS&A Associates), was his Aunt Margaret, who he knew and liked but also knew was a gadget freak. He’d start out with “Dear Aunt Margaret,” and then ask how Uncle Harold and the kids were doing, along with a sentence or two about his family.

Then came the copy:

“But what I’m really writing to you about today, Aunt Margaret, is this incredible new product I came across when I was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Imagine this, Aunt Margaret: you’re sitting in your living room and it’s so quiet you can hear the sound of traffic and faint conversation from the street outside.

“And then a wall of sound — Beethoven’s 5th Symphony — washes over your living room with such clarity that if you closed your eyes you’d swear you were in the front row of the Philharmonic Hall. It’s an incredible new digital audio technology called the “compact disk player” and I was able to pick up a few hundred of them from the manufacturer, so I can send you one for only $395.”

By writing his ad copy as a letter to somebody who met his three criteria, Joe discovered he could trick his brain from thinking (and writing) in a linear or technical way into a personal, conversational style.

He had us all practice it in the class, and I was astonished at how easy it became to produce ad copy that would actually work. It’s like re-programming your unconscious mind, flipping your entire perspective when writing from “here are the facts, this is it” to “let me tell you about this thing I know you’ll find amazing.”

But I hadn’t aspired to be an advertising copywriter my entire life; by the time I left my parent’s home at 16 I’d already papered the wall of my bedroom with 56 rejection slips from magazines for my submissions of poetry and short stories.

My parents were literature fans (they had over 20,000 books in our basement library where I carved out a bedroom among the bookshelves), my mom had her degree from MSU in English Literature and was an aspiring writer (of children’s books) herself. My dad was working toward being a history professor when I was born and he had to go to work in a steel plant, and he was president for years of a national group of antique book collectors. My Uncle King Saunders was a newspaperman in Charlevoix in the 1950s, and our family held him in awe.

In our house, there was no higher or more noble profession than being a journalist or author, so I’d been writing with publication in mind since I was around 10 years old.

So, when I got back to Michigan from Joe’s New York City seminar, I wrote an article about using raw licorice roots to stop smoking and used Joe’s strategy. I started it with “Dear Terry” and went on from there.

Terry was a smoker and we both knew it was killing him; he’d tried quitting dozens of times. (He died recently from mesothelioma.)

Licorice contains a stimulant drug called glycyrrhizin, which is reputed to make it easier to quit smoking tobacco because it pings some of the same receptors as nicotine (it’s also mildly addictive, which is why most licorice candy has been de-glycyrrhizinated), so I got a pound of dried raw roots, cut into 3-inch lengths, vaguely resembling woody cigarettes.

I presented Terry with the bag of roots and my article and, incredibly, six months later he’d been six months “clean” of tobacco and stayed that way the rest of his life (and chewed licorice roots for years). And I was hooked on this cool new way of writing.

Ever since then, pretty much every article I’ve written was written to one specific person. Although I’ve shared this story with him before in much shorter form, I wrote this one to Rohn Kenyatta, an incredibly talented writer who specializes in issues of race and politics, and has his own newsletter, LookingNWords, here on Substack.

Several of my books were entirely written to one person, sometimes even Louise or one of our kids, although for most I’ll write individual chapters to different people.

My spiritual autobiography, The Prophet’s Way, for example, is largely made up of letters (many never sent) that I’d written to friends, mentors, and family members over the years. My Hidden History books on Oligarchy and the Supreme Court were rather technical in their detail, so to make them super-readable I wrote different chapters to different people who I knew would be interested in the subsets of the overall story line.

I’ve been doing this so long that I no longer put the “Dear…” at the beginning; now I just visualize the person I’m writing to and start writing. It’s become largely automatic.

Which brings up the second big benefit of using Joe’s technique: it obliterates writer’s block.

I’m convinced that writer’s block, for most people, is a function of being intimidated by “the audience.” My HartmannReport.com newsletter, for example, is sent to around 65,000 people a day and the site gets over 2 million pageviews a month. I’ve given speeches before as many as 5,000 people, but two million is absolutely intimidating.

One single person — and someone I like, at that — is far less scary. It’s easier to begin a conversation with somebody you know, even if they don’t know it’s happening on your computer as you’re writing an article or blog post.

Something about that “Dear Ralph” and a couple of conversational sentences just washes away anything even remotely resembling writer’s block.

So, pick a person who you know, like, and believe would have an interest in your topic and get to it!