Reporter lady got me thinking I should do a quick post revealing my “elite one thousand.” These are the people whose early work revealed The Code: the five fundamental laws of human nature.
Who are they? Not the obvious candidates. Not the philosophers, the scientists, the self-help gurus, the therapists, the great business leaders, the ministers, or the politicians.
I’m not saying these experts are wrong. All have valuable things to say. My upcoming book, The Code, is a tribute to their contributions, packed with hundreds of footnotes and quotes. My point is this: in all our talk about purpose and effectiveness and happiness and everything in between, something critical is missing. And only this group of experts has it.
So, who are they? And what do they all have in common? They’re all inventors. And they’re all nerds. But they’re a specific type of inventor, and a specific type of nerd. They’re all designers of self-regulating machines. The People of the Code are elite engineers and inventors, living and dead, who designed self-regulating machines.
By the way, I’m not one of them. My engineering background helps me spot them. But there are only a few smart guys in the group. By self-regulating machines, I mean machines that mimic our own intelligence; machines that persist toward goals, in changing conditions, by processing information, like cruise controls, guided missiles, and so on.
How did these men invent smart machines? By discovering the basic laws of smart behavior. Five basic laws, to be exact. In their day, these inventors called these laws by many names, like control theory, teleology, self-regulation, the feedback loop, and so on. But basically it was all the same: the logic of intelligent control. For simplicity, I call it self-regulation science.
And when men designed self-regulating machines, they proved, beyond question, they knew how self-regulation actually works. “If you understand how a thing works well enough to build your own,” writes George Miller, “then your understanding must be nearly perfect.” The designers of self-regulating machines cracked the code of self-regulation science. They proved beyond doubt, by building machines that pursued purpose, that they truly understood the laws of purpose I call The Code.