The Selfish Gene Theory was first popularized by ethnologist Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene (1976).
 
This book and the theory it espoused became standard doctrine across the entire scientific community. The book became required reading in universities—which is how I found out about this theory. I had to read the book in college.
 
The Selfish Gene Theory states that individuals of any given species are motivated subconsciously to act in every way to promote, reproduce, and benefit the spread of their own genes.
 
According to the theory, our genes are the ones directing us to act in certain ways, such as providing for our children and contributing to our communities.
 
The theory describes the conflicting reproductive strategies of men and women. The author states that men and women are pursuing different agendas when it comes to passing their genes on as much as possible to future generations.
 
The author describes the male reproductive strategy as scattering one’s wild oats far and wide.
 
Men have much more sperm to go around, so the author believes that each man will try to impregnate as many females as possible before moving on so he can widen the possibility of his genes taking root in multiple bloodlines.
 
Females produce far fewer ova and these ova require a much larger investment of biological resources to create them. Gestating, giving birth to, and raising children also requires a significant investment of time and resources on the mother’s part.
 
The female therefore makes a significant investment in a smaller number of children. The mother concentrates on securing a male counterpart who will share this investment.
 
The mother also seeks to prevent the male from pursuing his own broad-spectrum strategy in order to get him to invest in her children instead of someone else’s.
 
This theory has become one of the cornerstones of modern scientific thought.
 
It’s rare for anyone to carry on any scientific discussion without referring to and questioning the evolutionary and genetic benefit of any given behavior.
 
There’s only one problem with this theory. It’s nonsense.
 
If the Selfish Gene was real, we as human beings in general would feel no motivation at all to help anyone who isn’t directly genetically related to us.
 
The Selfish Gene Theory offers no explanation at all for the major mental health benefits we humans get from helping others.
 
One of the feel-good brain hormones responsible for our wellbeing is oxytocin.
 
Scientists call it The Love Hormone because it’s associated with the feelings of deep connection we get during romantic relationships, parent-child bonds, intimate friendships, and other meaningful interactions that affect us at a core level.
 
We get a massive oxytocin boost when we help other people, including those closest to us. Our love for them makes us want to give to them and improve their lives.
 
We get the biggest oxytocin boost—and the biggest boost in all our other feel-good brain chemicals—when we help total strangers.
 
These are people we have no connection with. We have no genetic link to them that would give us a genetic advantage by helping them.
 
In some cases, these are people we’ve never met and might never even see.
 
The entire philanthropy and charity industry exists because of this drive of ours to give and help people when we have absolutely no hope that we’ll ever receive anything in return.

We get the biggest oxytocin boost precisely because we won't get anything in return. We get this sto precisely because we understand at a deep level that we don't have to do it. We do it purely because it's a good thing to do and it makes us feel good about ourselves.
 
We wouldn’t have this drive at all if the Selfish Gene was real. We would have no interest at all in helping others, especially not people unrelated to us.
 
Our genes would make it impossible for us to help people we aren’t absolutely one-hundred-percent certain are related to us by blood.
 
Imagine you’re walking down the street and you see a newborn baby wrapped in dirty newspaper tucked into the corner of a filthy alley.
 
The vast majority of us as normal human beings would stop what we were doing, go over there to find out how we could help, at a bare minimum get the child to safety by handing it over to the Police, and possibly going so far as to taking the child home and maybe even raising it as our own.
 
Men are just as likely to have this reaction to someone else’s defenseless child as women are.
 
When I first told my thirteen-year-old daughter about the subject of this blog post, I told her this story and her very first response was, “It’s mine. That baby is mine.”
 
This would never happen if the Selfish Gene was real.
 
If the Selfish Gene was real, we would avoid the child.
 
We might even possibly try to harm or kill the child to stop it from competing with our own genetic children. Never in a million years would we take the baby home and divert resources away from our own children to raise someone else’s child.
 
My ten-year-old son happened to be listening to this conversation. He very rightly pointed out that, if the Selfish Gene was real, helping others who aren’t related to us would actually be socially frowned upon. We would have socially embedded rules and customs to stop us from giving to other people’s biological progeny.
 
It would never cross our minds to help some stranger on the other side of the world we will never even lay eyes on.
 
These behaviors are hard-wired into us for a reason. Our genes aren’t selfish at all—or if they are, we aren’t ruled by them.
 
We’re ruled by something much bigger and more powerful—something innately unselfish.
 
We all understand at a core level that the person over there who needs help is actually part of us. We’re all connected.
 
By helping them, we’re helping each ourselves. We’re helping Project Human Race because we’re all in this together.
 
No man is an island. Another person’s suffering injures and detracts from me.
 
This is why we get such a massive boost to our mental health when we help others.
 
It’s one of the quickest, easiest, cheapest, most accessible solutions to all our mental health problems.
 
It’s the quickest, easiest, most reliable way to start feeling instantly fantastic. All our own problems seem to disappear when we give our time, resources, and care to those in need.
 
If anyone reading this is suffering from depression, anxiety, or mental health problems, the chances are high that you’re focusing too much on yourself.
 
Think of the vast number of people in the world right now who have it so much worse than you do. Some of them could be right down the block from you right at this moment. In fact, they almost certainly are.
 
Feeling amazing is waiting for you right outside your door. It’s accessible to all of us, at all times, and it’s absolutely free.
 
You just have to ask yourself, honestly, if you really want to start feeling better—because you can start feeling better whenever you want to.
 
The ripple effect of our actions affects everyone on the planet. This is the most effective, most immediate way we can make the world a better place.
 
Whatever you think is wrong with the world, you have the power to change it each and every day with your actions.
 
We’re all born with this desire built into us at a core level. We all want to make the world a better place.
 
We wouldn’t have this drive at all if the Selfish Gene was real. We wouldn’t even be aware of it.
 
This is proof that we’re being guided and governed by something much bigger—something much better—something that makes us happier, brings us together, and gives us a clear path to make the world a better place exactly the way we want to.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann.
You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

Human beings are fundamentally selfish.
 
This isn’t a bad thing. We’re hardwired for survival. If something threatens that survival or even makes it more difficult, we treat it as a threat.
 
As airline flight attendants so often tell us, put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.
 
A relationship is only as good as its ability to serve the needs of the people involved.
 
All of us go into every relationship and every interaction with other people thinking about how this relationship affects us.
 
If the relationship doesn’t benefit us or, in the worst case, if it actually works against us, we withdraw from the relationship. In some cases, we have no choice but to push the person out of our lives completely.
 
There is not a relationship anywhere in human interaction that doesn’t operate by this rule.
 
There is no relationship that is totally unconditional, not even the parent-child relationship.
 
There have been plenty of children who have had to push their parents out of their lives because the relationship posed such a grave threat to the child’s wellbeing and even their life.
 
The reason could be emotional cruelty, manipulation, or outright abuse. The children have to cut their parents off just to survive and rebuild a life from scratch.
 
The opposite is also true. Many parents have had no choice but to push their own children out of their lives for the same reasons. The parents had to save themselves from manipulation, toxic behavior, and even physical violence inflicted by their own children.
 
It doesn’t matter how much you think you love someone. Every relationship has boundary lines that, when crossed, destroy the relationship and drive the two people apart.
 
None of us should have a problem with this. It’s a good thing.
 
Many so-called influencers on the internet would tell us that we can improve the quality of our relationships by making them more relational and less transactional.
 
These influencers are telling us that we shouldn’t focus the relationship on what the other person can do for us—or what we can do for them. We should just enjoy relating to the person for their own sake.
 
This poses two distinct problems—mainly because it completely violates the law of human interaction that I’ve just spelled out here. Human beings don’t interact with each other this way.
 
If you’re telling yourself you aren’t going to treat a relationship as transactional, you’re probably already either getting taken advantage of or you’re the one taking advantage of the other person.
 
This advice is just a sloppy way of ignoring the needs of both parties.
 
If the relationship doesn’t work for one person, it doesn’t work for both people. 
 
Someone I care about could come to me at any time and say, “This particular aspect of the relationship isn’t working for me. We need to change it for us to continue.”
 
Then it’s on me to actually find out what the problem is and work to fix it.
 
This doesn’t mean I’m admitting any fault on my part. It’s my obligation as one party to the relationship. It’s my job as half of the relationship to make sure it works for the other person as well as it works for me.
 
If I don’t work to fix it, then I’m failing in my role as an actor in this relationship.
 
If I say, “Screw you. The relationship works fine for me, so just suck it up and accept it,” then the person would have every right to say, “Either fix it or we’re done.”
 
If I persisted in not addressing the issue, then they would be right to end the relationship. It would be a clear sign that I don’t care enough about the relationship to make it meet the other person’s needs.
 
This actually happened to me with my mother. I spent years trying to get her to change the way we related to each other because our relationship didn’t work for me.
 
She continued to use the manipulation tactics she developed when I was a child. She did this for decades into my adulthood.
 
When I raised the issues, she didn’t say she wasn’t doing it. She knew she was doing it. She just said, “Well, this is the way I do it, so just eat it.”
 
Eventually, I had no choice but to cut her out of my life just to keep my own sanity.
 
There is another aspect of this that our influencer friends don’t seem to realize when they tell us not to make our relationships transactional.
 
Many times, the transaction involved and the payoff we receive is not from getting something for ourselves. Many times, the payoff is in what we can give to the other person.
 
This is the case with parenting—good parenting. Good parents don’t work and sacrifice for years to give their children a good life because of what the children can give to the parents.
 
The parents make these sacrifices and do this work because of what they can give to their children. These parents make the investment for the express purpose of benefiting their children. That’s the payoff—the children’s benefit and improved wellbeing both in the present and in the future.
 
This is also the case in friendships, romantic relationships, and other family relationships.
 
None of this negates the law I stated earlier. There is a limit to which anyone will work and sacrifice to benefit another person. There is always a line in the sand that, once crossed, will shatter the relationship and cause the parties to stop giving to each other.
 
We shouldn’t be trying to change this law. First of all, it isn’t possible to change it. Doing so would be counter to our own survival.
 
It isn’t even necessary or desirable to change it. This is the way human relations operate, but it goes beyond that. Transactional relationships are a good thing.
 
We should make our relationships more transactional, not less so.
 
We should all have clearly stated boundaries about what we will tolerate and what kind of behavior we’re willing to accept from those closest to us.
 
All actions have consequences. If you mistreat me, the chances are high that you won’t be in my life for very long. That’s a good thing. Getting people who mistreat me as far out of my life as possible is a great thing. It’s the best thing for me.
 
When my children were small, I used a very simple X-Y formula to communicate with them.
 
If you do X, I’m going to do Y.
 
This isn’t a threat. It isn’t a punishment. It’s a statement of fact about the consequences of the other person’s actions.
 
If you don’t put your shoes on right now, I’m going to put them on for you.
 
If you throw that ball in the house, it could break the window.
 
If you keep hitting your sister, I’m going to have to put you in your room until you calm down.
 
This is an effective formula we can all use in our daily interactions with people. They often don’t know how their actions are affecting us, so they don’t see the potential consequences.
 
Explaining it to them in a clear, concise manner gives them all the information they need to do the right thing.
 
If they really care about us, they’ll modify their behavior so the relationship works better for everyone involved.
 
If they say, “Too bad. I’m going to keep doing it,” then you’ve already outlined for them what will happen as a result. That’s on them.
 
We don’t need to feel guilty about delivering the consequence we already warned them we would deliver. Delivering the consequence will only benefit us.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann.
You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

Everything we do in life has consequences, either good or bad.
 
Everything we do is a choice that will have some consequence. Even the decision to do nothing is a choice that will have consequences, most of them unforeseen.
 
If you see someone getting attacked on the street and you do nothing, you’re making a choice to carry out a certain action as opposed to another action you might take.
 
Your decision will have repercussions for the victim, the perpetrator, for you, for those close to you by extension, and for society at large.
 
Nothing we do happens in a vacuum.
 
The Law of Consequence is one of the immutable laws of the universe. It’s a law because it works even when we don’t want it to—even when we don’t think it is working.
 
We don’t have to do anything to make this law work. It happens by itself no matter what we do.
 
If we think it isn’t working, that’s just another way of saying we didn’t see the consequences.
 
On the flipside, if you choose to help that person in need, that will also have consequences—most of them we will never see.
 
The consequences will affect the victim, the perpetrator, you, those closest to you, and by extension, society at large.
 
If we do a good action, we get a good consequence, both internally and externally.
If we do a negative action, we get a negative consequence, both internally and externally.
 
There is nothing we can do to stop this from happening. Thinking we can stop it or escape this law is pure delusion.
 
This is why the rewards of investing in our own development are always guaranteed. If we put in the work to improve, the results will pay off. This result is inevitable.
 
There is a second component to this law that few people understand.
 
Even fewer people understand this than understand the first component of the law—and even more people try to escape it and stop it from happening.
 
The consequences of any particular action are always cumulative. They compound over time the longer we carry out that particular action.
 
Say you ate junk food five times a day for fifteen years and you gained three hundred pounds.
 
If you suddenly ate a salad and then went straight back to your normal way of eating, nothing would happen.
 
Eating that salad would have absolutely no effect on your life, your weight, or your sense of self-worth.
 
Conversely, imagine you ate healthy, exercised, and took meticulous care of yourself in every way for fifteen years.
 
Then the day comes when you go out and eat an ice cream sundae before you go straight back to your normal lifestyle.
 
That ice cream sundae wouldn’t hurt you at all. You wouldn’t gain a single pound from eating it.
 
You would have to completely reverse the process in order to wind up in the same position as the person who ate crappy food every day and weighted four hundred pounds.
 
The effects would accumulate over time. The longer you followed either of these paths, the more profound the results would become.
 
Imagine you never touched drugs until suddenly, in a moment of lunacy, you snorted a line of cocaine.
 
That action would have an immediate consequence, but it wouldn’t be life-changing—not unless you kept doing it.
 
If you never did it again, it probably wouldn’t have any long-term negative consequences at all.
 
It would have long-term negative consequences if you kept doing it.
 
The long-term negative consequences would compound the longer you kept doing it.
 
Eventually, the long-term negative consequences could accumulate to the point where you lost your health, your finances, your job, your family, your freedom, and ultimately, even your life.
 
Think of any area of your life. Whatever result you’re looking for, it will accumulate the longer you keep doing it.
 
If you do it once or in short bursts, you won’t see any result. The result compounds with time. You have to keep doing it for a long time to build the result that you want—or to avoid the result that you don’t want.
 
The same goes for positive consequences. Putting up a website and offering a product for sale won’t make you rich. Making a bunch of YouTube videos won’t make you rich.
 
Everything in business compounds over time. If you work for a company, your presence there compounds over time.
 
If you give it your all-out effort, your results will improve the longer those above you see you putting in the effort.
 
By the same token, if you don’t put in the effort, those above you will see that, too. Their opinion of you will diminish over time.
 
They’ll see that this way of life is entrenched in your character. They won’t expect you to do anything else—and they’ll be right.
 
On the other hand, you might suddenly one day have a lightbulb moment and start putting in the effort.
 
The results would compound over time. No one would trust you at first or think much of your efforts. They wouldn’t trust you to stick it out.
 
It would take a long time of you continually putting in the effort and taking the initiative before your superiors let themselves believe that you were sincere in your desire to change.
 
The same is true for all change.
 
If you suddenly start a new healthy lifestyle—or a business—or a self-improvement program, no one will believe you’re sincere or that you’ll keep doing it.
 
These people aren’t malicious. They’re basing their assessment on the accumulated actions of years of your own behavior—maybe even decades of your behavior.
 
It’s going to take an equivalent accumulated amount of time to convince them that you’re committed to doing things differently.
 
The good news is that the positive consequences will accumulate. This is the other facet to this universally immutable law.
 
The longer you keep doing positive actions, the more the positive consequences compound.
 
The bottom line is that other people’s opinion of you is just another consequence of your actions—either good or bad.
 
It won’t change just because you did something once…..or twice…..or ten times. Their opinion of you won’t change just because you changed.
 
Their opinion—either good or bad—will compound based on your actions.
 
If you continue to improve, their opinion of you will improve. If you continue to deteriorate, their opinion of you will deteriorate—and rightfully so.
 
This process will happen.
 
It’s inevitable.
 
It’s as inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow morning and setting tomorrow night. None of us can escape it.
 
The solution is to harness the power of this compounding effect and ride the wave in our favor.
 
All we have to do is continue to do the right actions and reap the resulting benefits.
 
They, too, will come inevitably, just as the negative consequences will inevitably come as a result of negative actions.
 
The choice is always ours—and this is another area where we always control the outcome.
 
Thinking we can escape this law or stop it from happening is the definition of insanity and will only bring pain and tragedy into our lives.


All content on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

May God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
 
We’ve all been told our entire lives that there are some things we can control and others that we can’t control.
 
We can control our activity. We can control our nutrition. We can control what information we consume.
 
We can’t control the weather. We can’t control random accidents and disasters.
 
We can’t control things that are happening on the other side of the world that we never even find out about until after they’re already long over.
 
These are the events of our lives, and as we all know, the events are not the story.
 
We also don’t control other people’s responses, thoughts, and emotions despite whether they might try to make us believe that we do.
 
Other people might blame us for their responses, thoughts, and emotions.
 
There is one thing that we always control—the way we respond.
 
We respond to everything that happens to us and everything that we ever find out about. We respond to everything that enters our awareness.
 
We always control the way we response—always.
 
No one makes anyone else respond a certain way. One person’s reactions and emotions never dictate the reactions and emotions of another person.
 
Say someone cuts me off in traffic. That’s an event. I have no control over what the other driver did.
 
I always control the way I respond.
 
I could choose to completely fly off the handle. I could yell at the other driver, shoot him the middle finger from my window, and spend the rest of the day fuming about how inconsiderate he is.
 
I could instead respond by shrugging it off, forgetting about it, and focusing on all the much more important things I have to do today.
 
The other driver never entered the equation to determine my response. He acted the same way in both scenarios.
 
How I responded was entirely under my control at all times.
 
We don’t always control the events.
 
We always control our response—and here’s the most important thing.
 
Our response to the events will determine the outcome.
 
Say that driver cut me off and we got in a wreck that paralyzed me or one of my children.
 
I could choose to give up on life, waste away in a void of self-pity, and spend the rest of my life hating him and letting that hate eat away at me from the inside.
 
Or I could choose to bounce back and make the best of the life I have left.
 
I might not become a marathon runner, but maybe there’s another outcome waiting for me that would be even better and more fulfilling.
 
Australian pastor Nick Vujicic was born without arms or legs. He spent years depressed and resenting God for giving him such a terrible affliction.
 
Now he embraces his situation as the vehicle that has given him the platform to change other people’s lives and communicate his message of hope to the world.
 
Australian exercise physiologist Drew Harrisberg thought he was getting a death sentence when he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.
 
Drew later became famous when he wrote a letter to his diabetes thanking it for all the wonderful changes it had brought to his life.
 
It made him healthier, happier, and more fulfilled.
 
It also gave him both the empathy and audience to build a global platform to touch other people’s lives. His diabetes allowed him to help other people in ways he wouldn’t have been able to if he never received that diagnosis.
 
We will always experience events beyond our control. Our response will always determine the outcome and our response is always under our control—therefore, we always control the outcome.
 
Remember that the next time you feel stressed, overwhelmed, depressed, or hopeless.
 
You control everything that happens to you. You always control the outcome of everything that happens to you. You control it through your response.
 
I spent decades living behind the eight-ball and getting knocked around from one life disaster to another.
 
A series of changes occurred in my life that brought me to where I am today.
 
When my publishing contract ended in January 2024, my very first thought was, “This is going to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”
 
And I was right. I was right because I turned what could have been a disaster into the greatest thing that ever happened to me.
 
Within a few hours of making the decision to pull out of the contract, I created a plan that to skyrocket my publishing to something far beyond what that contract could have given me.
 
This was the third time I had the same response to what could have been life-destroying events.
 
The first was when I separated from my children’s father. The second was the end of another long-term relationship.
 
I was married to my children’s father for eleven years before that marriage came to an end.
 
The breakup was absolutely fantastic for me. It was one of the best things that has ever happened to me.
 
I made a list of everything I wanted in my new living situation and I got everything I asked for.
 
When I took my kids and moved out of the house into a new place, I thought, “This is going to be great. My life is going to get so much better after this.” And it did.
 
My life became exponentially better as soon as the relationship ended.
 
When I initiated the breakup of the other relationship, I also thought, “This is going to be the best thing for both of us.”
 
It wasn’t easy. None of those events was easy to go through.
 
These three experiences taught me something. I wasn’t thinking about this before. It happened three times one right after the other for me to learn this lesson.
 
From now on, no matter what happens, tell yourself, “This is going to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”
 
You might not see how that’s possible right now, but ten or twenty years from now—if you play your cards right—you could get yourself somewhere so much better that you wouldn’t have gotten had you stayed where you are right now.
 
Whatever you’re going through right now will be the best thing that has ever happened to you because you’ll make it that way.
 
If you respond to this event by embracing it as the best thing that ever happened to you. You’ll be in the best possible position to launch yourself into whatever opportunity is coming into your life. It will lead you down the other road—the better road.
 
One thing is guaranteed.
 
If you tell yourself this is the greatest disaster of your life and that it will destroy you, it will. You’ll find a way to let it destroy you.
 
You’ll give yourself permission to fall apart instead of taking a leap into something new—something that might have been the greatest opportunity of your life.