About the Author

Bret Hughes is a philosopher, systems engineer, and author. Bret’s efforts in film have helped earn three Academy Awards for his visual-effects engineering work on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. To help people understand themselves within the history and context of the Universe, Bret wrote the book Wisdom in Perspective. Bret then created a Web-based prototype called the “Grassroots Vorpal Pipeline” to improve communication between grassroots groups and to enable each individual to find groups with like-minded goals, keep his or her own list of groups, and view the events of numerous groups on one calendar. To help people understand their sociopolitical situation and empower “We the People” to achieve widespread social justice, Bret has developed the MostCrucial.Info website. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Bio

The wielder of Excalibur, the sword that was pulled from the stone of the earth, is, as you can see, Bret Alan Hughes. A “Santa Barbarian,” Bret was born at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, California. In grade school at Adams, Bret loved playing tackle football with his friends, though he was hardly concerned with academics. He also seemed to enjoy the challenge of beating the school bus home by taking off running right after school was out (or was this a statement about his attraction to school¿). Bret often went boogie boarding, snorkeling, and sometimes even spearfishing at Henry’s Beach with his friends.

Getting nearly straight A’s in his two years at Santa Barbara City College, Bret was fascinated with the idea of programming computers to design the most efficient airplanes possible by utilizing artificial intelligence. With this in mind, in 1990 Bret transferred to Cal Poly, who had the very best undergraduate aeronautical engineering program he could find. Cal Poly was a great learning experience. Bret became a DJ for KCPR, a legendary college radio station (for playing eclectic music). Bret created his own weekly industrial radio show, Industrial Distortion, where he found an outlet for some of his hard-core music affinities, particularly for Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Front 242, Numb, and Hocico.

Eventually, Bret got disenchanted with aeronautical engineering, which he blames on his senior-year trips to large aeronautical companies like Boeing and McDonnell Douglas: “everybody always seemed to be on a coffee break.” What also disturbed him was that, during employment interviews, Bret found that some companies were already using computers to intelligently design their aircraft. And to do what Bret wanted to do, to design the overall structure of an aircraft, the usual career path was only for the top five percent of the employees and it took them over ten years to get to that position.

In response, Bret picked up a computer science minor in his last year at Cal Poly, with the thought of possibly changing his career path. Since Bret wanted to take some of the highest-level computer graphics courses offered, he had to convince instructors to let him take courses without having taken the prerequisite courses yet, sometimes leap-frogging over two or more prerequisites at a time—and did so quite successfully.

On college graduation in 1996, Bret’s favorite aerospace company, Lockheed, made Bret a reasonable job offer. But by that time, Bret had acquired other plans. Bret dedicated his time to trying to get hired by his favorite computer graphics company, Alias|Wavefront. It eventually worked! Through hard work, Bret made some nice contributions there, including writing the original Using MEL user’s guide for Maya, and then got hired by Square USA in Honolulu in 1998. The surfing he began in Santa Barbara would continue in Hawaii!

A year and a half later, Bret had done solid work for Square and even applied to the 1999 MBA program at Harvard. Harvard did not work out, though Bret felt that he was probably close to getting in with a 94 percentile in the GMAT (but with likely too little work experience), and neither did Square: Bret’s innocence of thinking that there were practically no “evil” people in serious companies was broken by some nasty politics that he accidentally stepped into—some scary stuff!

Bret ejected to San Rafael, California, in 1999 to dedicate his time to trying to get a job at his favorite film computer graphics company, ILM. However, he made a serious interview blunder and floundered for a time thereafter. It was during this time, though, that the inception of his magnum opus came to him: a book that provides universal perspectives and, hence, ultimate wisdom. Bret was shocked that he could not find any such book in the public library, and felt that such a book should really exist: a new dream and goal dawned.

Resorting to contacting his old surf buddy from Santa Barbara, Eric “satan” Saindon, (calling on the power of …!) Bret got hired in 2001 by Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand. There he found some good friends and did some great work, eventually being promoted to pipeline engineering supervisor, effecting the efficiency of the computer graphics production with scripting tools, production conventions, and automated systems. Although Bret had in his hands the very real possibility of having a fantastic home, wife, and job, he felt deep in his heart that his true calling lay elsewhere: in his first book, about ultimate wisdom, that he began in late 2001—initially called … The Book of Wisdom.

After completing work on The Lord of the Rings films, in 2003 Bret left New Zealand for Santa Barbara to complete his mission. By 2005, he finished his book in a beautiful leather-bound and gold-tooled incarnation. The book was produced with the highest standards of professional fact checking, editing, printing, and binding. The final title proclaimed Wisdom in Perspective.

After trying unsuccessfully to get this book’s proposal accepted by major literary agents, Bret took a hard look at his book in 2006. Although he got some great testimonials for his book, even from a Nobel Laureate, and was confident that his book correctly answered some of the most difficult questions in philosophy, including what human consciousness is and what the fundamental basis of life is, he felt that his book was perhaps ahead of its time (not written to meet the consciousness of the current time), was not very stylistically written, and, being about ultimate and not practical wisdom, was a bit nebulous: most people did not know what to make if it.

Bret took these matters to heart. His appraisal of the potential good that his book and his ideas could do society drove him, in 2007, despite sacrifices of the more “superficial” things in life, to begin redeveloping his book so that a maximum number of people could immediately enjoy it as well as gather great meaning from it—so began his new quest: the quest for his optimum opus, Enlightenment 2.0.

For this new book, Bret needed to research human rights, government, and politics. Delving deeply into this last topic, however, soon found him, he says, feeling like Han Solo must have felt when Obi-Wan Kenobi said: “That’s no moon…” Bret then described what he discovered in his research as follows.

“We are now facing a much worse threat than the world has ever faced before. And don’t think terrorism, Middle Eastern wars, or global warming… The threat of which I speak is enabled through governmental and corporate powers, conflated in a bed of corruption and hidden under blankets of propaganda and sheets of shallow news. The true threat is from the masters of these powers: people unbound by any governmental constitution, social contract, or any ideas of justice, compassion, or morality. As shocking as it might sound, they are sociopathic supremacists, literally seeking to kill more than five billion people and to enslave the rest.”

Becoming a political activist in 2008, Bret decided to put his systems engineering skills to good use. He developed the “Grassroots Vorpal Pipeline” prototype. This type of system, he contends, can produce the organizing power that the people need in order to put the government and the wealthy in their proper place: not the rulers of society, but merely a small part of it.

Shocked by how propagandized and immunized the vast majority of people are from the most crucial information about their sociopolitical situation, about being duped by self-called elites, Bret developed the MostCrucial.Info to bring together the multifarious pieces of the evidentiary puzzle—mostly documentaries, reports, lectures, books, and summaries—to help people see the big picture of what is going on in this larger sociopolitical world and do something about it. Bret made it clear that, in presenting these webpages—which took two and a half years of intensive research, analysis, and writing—he feels like Morpheus when he said to Neo: “You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Remember: all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.” Except, Bret says, the blue pill won’t really work, for long…