Category Archives: Psychology

What happens to cognitive diversity when everyone is more WEIRD?

Posted on by
Reply

By Kensy Cooperrider

Source: aeon

For centuries, Inuit hunters navigated the Arctic by consulting wind, snow and sky. Now they use GPS. Speakers of the aboriginal language Gurindji, in northern Australia, used to command 28 variants of each cardinal direction. Children there now use the four basic terms, and they don’t use them very well. In the arid heights of the Andes, the Aymara developed an unusual way of understanding time, imagining the past as in front of them, and the future at their backs. But for the youngest generation of Aymara speakers – increasingly influenced by Spanish – the future lies ahead.

These are not just isolated changes. On all continents, even in the world’s remotest regions, indigenous people are swapping their distinctive ways of parsing the world for Western, globalised ones. As a result, human cognitive diversity is dwindling – and, sadly, those of us who study the mind had only just begun to appreciate it.

In 2010, a paper titled ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’ gave the field of cognitive science a seismic shock. Its authors, led by the psychologist Joe Henrich at the University of British Columbia, made two fundamental points. The first was that researchers in the behavioural sciences had almost exclusively focused on a small sliver of humanity: people from Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic societies. The second was that this sliver is not representative of the larger whole, but that people in London, Buenos Aires and Seattle were, in an acronym, WEIRD.

But there is a third fundamental point, and it was the psychologist Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania who made it. In his commentary on the 2010 article, Rozin noted that this same WEIRD slice of humanity was ‘a harbinger of the future of the world’. He had seen this trend in his own research. Where he found cross-cultural differences, they were more pronounced in older generations. The world’s young people, in other words, are converging. The signs are unmistakable: the age of global WEIRDing is upon us.

This marks a major change of course for our species. For tens of thousands of years, as we fanned out across the globe, we adapted to radically different niches, and created new types of societies; in the process, we developed new practices, frameworks, technologies and conceptual systems. But then, some time in the past few centuries, we reached an inflection point. A peculiar cognitive toolkit that had been consolidated in the industrialising West began to gain global traction. Other tools were abandoned. Diversity started to ebb.

The WEIRD toolkit comprises our most basic frameworks for understanding the world. It touches on every aspect of experience: how we relate to space and time, to nature, to each other; how we filter our experiences and allocate our attention. Many of these mental frameworks are so ingrained we don’t notice them. They are like the glasses we’ve forgotten we’re wearing.

Consider our obsession with numbers. In global, industrialised cultures we take it for granted that we can – and should – quantify every aspect of experience. We count steps and calories, track interest rates and follower counts. Meanwhile, people in some small-scale societies don’t bother to track how old they are. Some couldn’t because their languages don’t have numbers beyond four or five. But WEIRD quantiphilia is quickly catching on. Hunter-gatherers in the Amazon are now eagerly learning Portuguese number words. In Papua New Guinea, once home to a rich variety of ‘body count’ systems – numbered landmarks on body, usually ranging to about 30 – children are learning English numbers instead.

Another peculiar part of the WEIRD toolkit is our fixation on time. We budget it, struggle to save it, agonise over losing it. We count days, hours and seconds. We are always oriented to exactly where we are on the long arrow of history. In the United States, for example, when doctors screen patients for cognitive impairment, one of the first questions they ask is the year, month and date.

To many in non-Western, non-industrialised groups, this fixation might seem odd. One early 20th-century ethnographer, Alfred Irving Hallowell, observed that the Ojibwe of native North America would be unruffled by not knowing whether it was a Thursday or Saturday. What would distress them, he remarked in 1957, is not knowing whether they were facing south or east. Not so for WEIRD people: our fixation on time appears to be balanced by a breathtaking obliviousness to space. A 2010 study found that Stanford students could not reliably point to North.

Now, such obliviousness to space is going global. Satellite-based navigation systems are displacing traditional techniques worldwide. It’s happening in the Arctic, as we have seen, but also in the Pacific. In Micronesia, seafaring was once accomplished with jawdropping precision by using a conceptual system so different from Western ones that scientists struggled to understand it. Today, this masterwork lives largely in museum exhibits.

Everyday ways of talking about space are undergoing a sea change, too. Very often, people in small-scale communities prefer to describe space using cardinal directions or local landmarks – often slopes, rivers or salient winds. Some of these systems, like the Gurindji compass terms, are highly elaborated. In contrast, WEIRD folks prefer to carve up the world in terms of their own bodily axes – their lefts and rights, fronts and backs. This ego-based frame of reference now appears to be taking hold broadly, spreading along with the influence of global languages such as Spanish.

Humanity is getting more ego-centred in other ways, too. It has long been observed that Western adults – and Americans in particular – privilege the individual over the group. We give our children unique names; we put them in bedrooms of their own; we emphasise their autonomy and needs. People in many other societies, most famously in East Asia, have historically privileged the collective instead. But Western-style individualism is gaining a foothold, even in the East. Japanese people have started giving their children unique names, too. A recent analysis of 78 countries found that, over the past half-century, markers of individualism have increased in the majority of them.

These are just some of the frameworks that are being displaced as global WEIRDing accelerates. Elsewhere, taxonomies, metaphors and mnemonics are evaporating. Many were never really documented in the first place. Researchers still don’t fully understand the conceptual system motivating khipus – the intricate string recording devices once made by the Inkas – but there’s no one left to explain it.

Human cognitive diversity joins a number of other forms of diversity that are disappearing. Diversity of mammals and plants, of languages and cuisines. But the loss of cognitive diversity raises issues all its own. Cognition is invisible and intangible, making it harder to track and harder to record. You can’t pin mindsets to a specimen board, or store them in a seed vault. It’s not easy to pose ways of knowing in a diorama. Thinking leaves footprints, of course – in language, in artifacts, in knotted string – but the act itself is ephemeral.

The loss of cognitive diversity raises an ethical dilemma, too. The forces that are eroding cognitive diversity – the forces of global WEIRDing – are often the same forces that are raising literacy levels worldwide, promoting access to education and opportunity in indigenous communities, and connecting people across the globe. Few would deny that these are positive developments for humanity. So we are left to ask, not only whether we can slow the loss of human cognitive diversity, but also whether we should even try.

Cognitive scientists such as myself are not used to grappling with these kinds of questions. Nor are we used to thinking about big trends in the human journey. But global WEIRDing is a trend we can’t ignore, one with scientific, humanistic and ethical implications. For much of human history, one of our most distinctive traits as a species has been our sheer diversity. But then our course began to change – and it’s time that cognitive scientists joined the conversation about where we’re going.

A Nonviolent Strategy to Defeat a US Military Invasion of Venezuela

Posted on by
Reply

By Robert J. Burrowes

To the People of Venezuela

Recently I wrote an article explaining how you could defeat, using nonviolent strategy, the US coup attempt that is taking place in your country. See ‘A Nonviolent Strategy to Defeat the US Coup Attempt in Venezuela’.

I would like to complement that article by now briefly explaining how you can also defeat a military invasion by the United States and any collaborating invaders by using a strategy of nonviolent defense as well.

In making this suggestion, I acknowledge the extraordinary difficulties inflicted on Venezuela by the US sanctions imposed over many years as part of its ‘undeclared war against Venezuela’ (partly designed to destroy its progressive social banking model), explained straightforwardly by Ellen Brown in her article ‘The Venezuela Myth Keeping Us From Transforming Our Economy’ as well as alternative proposals to resolve the crisis, ranging from that by several governments to facilitate dialogue between the Venezuelan government and the opposition – see, for example, ‘Russia Proposes Venezuelan “Peaceful Measures” Initiative to UN’ – to Stephen Lendman’s suggestion that a peacekeeping force be deployed to Venezuela by such countries as Russia, China and non-aligned nations. See ‘Save Venezuelan Sovereignty: Oil Economy Destabilized. Peace-keeping Role by Russia, China, Non-alligned Nations?’

I understand that your first reaction to the idea of a strategy of nonviolent defense might be one of scepticism or even outright disbelief. However, if you are willing to consider what I write below, I will briefly explain why a strategy of nonviolent defense is theoretically and empirically sound, has often been successful in a wide range of contexts in the past, and why I believe it is important and how it can be done.

Of course, I am well aware that this history of successful nonviolent defense is little known because it has been, and still is, suppressed. And yet the history of nonviolent resistance in many diverse contexts clearly demonstrates that a strategy of nonviolent defense has the best chance of defending your country while minimizing the death and destruction in doing so (which does not mean that it would be without cost).

Moreover, if you want to read many carefully documented historical accounts of nonviolent struggles that were successful against military opponents, including those that were ruthlessly violent, you can do so in The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach. The book also carefully explains why these successes occurred without incurring heavy casualties on the defense, particularly in comparison to military campaigns and guerrilla struggles.

In my view then, the idea of implementing a strategy of nonviolent defense is important to consider for two essential reasons.

First, you are dealing with an opponent that is insane – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ with a more detailed explanation in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ – incredibly ignorant – see this interview of US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo ‘Venezuelan military will realize Maduro’s time is up: Mike Pompeo’ which is critiqued in these articles ‘Pompeo: America “obligated” to fight “Hezbollah” in Venezuela to save “duly elected” Guaido’ and ‘Pompeo Attempts to Link Iran, Hezbollah to Crisis in Venezuela’ – and grotesquely violent – see ‘The History – and Hypocrisy – of US Meddling in Venezuela’ and Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II – that, history teaches us, is highly likely to destroy your country to gain the geostrategic advantage and natural resources that control of your country offers, as the people of Iraq and Libya, for example, can testify.

And second: no matter how committed and courageous are the (loyal) members of your military forces and civilian militia (the National Bolivarian Militia of Venezuela), and the military forces of any allies who will stand with you in the defense of Venezuela, even a ‘successful’ outcome, such as that which Syria may be on the verge of ‘celebrating’, will only come at enormous cost in terms of human lives, infrastructure (including national heritage), ecological impact and time, all of which can be far more gainfully employed to continue building Venezuela, including overcoming outstanding problems, as you decide.

The Background

As I know that you are well aware, given the declared interest of the US elite in stealing your natural resources, including oil – see, for example, ‘“Good for business”: Trump adviser Bolton admits US interest in Venezuela’s “oil capabilities”’ and ‘Regime Change for Profit: Chevron, Halliburton Cheer On US Venezuela Coup’ – the US elite has long interfered with – see, for example, ‘US Influence in Venezuela Is Part of a Two Centuries-old Imperial Plan’ – and threatened military invasion of Venezuela to seize control of these resources in clear violation of international law. For recent examples only, see ‘Trump pressed aides on Venezuela invasion, US official says’ and ‘Time for talks “long passed”: US weaponizes aid amid push for regime change in Venezuela’.

Consequently, the US administration has finally used the pretext of an unfair election result in 2018 to call for the overthrow of your government despite the widely accepted result, verified by independent sources, and even the testimony of a former US president that your electoral system is without peer. See ‘Former US President Carter: Venezuelan Electoral System “Best in the World”’.

Moreover, the US puppet Juan Guaidó, anointed by the US to replace your elected President, has effectively indicated his support for US intervention, which clearly reveals where his loyalties lie, his willingness to now provide a pretext for a US invasion, and his complete disregard for the well-being of those Venezuelans who will inevitably be killed, injured and/or dispossessed during an invasion to support the ‘neocon regime-changers’ in Washington. See ‘Venezuela’s self-proclaimed “president” Guaido isn’t ruling out “authorizing” US intervention’ and ‘The Cynicism of Empire: Sen. Rubio Tells Venezuelans to Overthrow Their Government… or Starve!’

This threat of military intervention, as the historical record clearly demonstrates, has every prospect of being carried out. See ‘Before Venezuela: The long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America’ and ‘Overthrowing other people’s governments: The Master List’.

Despite this threat, as you are aware, President Nicolás Maduro has persisted in offering to discuss the issues arising from this conflict while also calling on the international community to ‘“Stop Trump’s insane actions!” Venezuela’s Maduro talks to RT about avoiding war’ and even writing an appeal to the people of the United States which, of course, was ignored by the corporate media so that it does not even reach a wide audience. See ‘An Open Letter to the People of the United States from President Nicolas Maduro’.

While I applaud your President for his persistent calls for dialogue to resolve this issue – for a recent example, see ‘Maduro Asks International Community to End US’s Threats of War’ – there are simply three realities that make it highly unlikely that his call will be heeded, whether by the US administration that has already rejected such a call – see ‘Time for talks “long passed”: US weaponizes aid amid push for regime change in Venezuela’ – or by the international community, a substantial section of which has already declared their support for the US puppet Juan Guaidó, who has been carefully groomed for a decade for the role he is now playing. See ‘The Making of Juan Guaidó: How the US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela’s Coup Leader’.

These three realities are those I mentioned above: You are dealing with an insane, incredibly ignorant and grotesquely violent opponent: an elite that seeks geopolitical control and endless resources for profit no matter what the cost to fellow human beings and the biosphere, as the record demonstrates.

Moreover, in seeking to secure its objectives, the US elite will endeavour to control the narrative in relation to Venezuela. Hence, as you have noticed, the corporate media is lying prodigiously about Venezuela as it ‘beats the drums of war’. See, for example, ‘Dissecting the jingoistic media coverage of the Venezuela crisis’, ‘Venezuela Blitz – Part 1: Tyrants Don’t Have Free Elections’, ‘Venezuela Blitz – Part 2: Press Freedom, Sanctions And Oil’ and ‘The BBC and Venezuela: bias and lies’.

For you and those of us outside Venezuela who have some knowledge of your country’s history, we are well aware of the enormous gains made by the Bolivarian movement, despite the enormously damaged country that the movement inherited. See, for example, ‘Venezuela: From Oil Proxy to the Bolivarian Movement and Sabotage’.

This progress, of course, does not mean that all problems have been resolved, most of which have been exacerbated by the sanctions imposed in recent years by the United States government. See, for example, the report by Alfred de Zayas on behalf of the United Nations Human Rights Council – ‘Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order on his mission to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and Ecuador’ – which identified the crisis the US ‘economic warfare’ was precipitating. See ‘Former UN Rapporteur: US Sanctions Against Venezuela Causing Economic and Humanitarian Crisis’.

Defending Against a US Military Invasion of Venezuela

So, while your effort to defeat the coup attempt continues, even if the United States military invades Venezuela before or after this issue is resolved, you have the powerful option of resisting any invasion effectively by employing a strategy of nonviolent defense.

I have explained the essential points of this strategy on the website Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy. The pages of this website provide clear guidance on how to easily plan and then implement the twelve components of this strategy.

If you like, you can see a diagrammatic representation of this strategy by looking at the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel.

And on the Strategic Aims page you can see the basic list of 30 strategic goals necessary to defeat a military invasion. These strategic goals can easily be adopted, modified and/or added to if necessary, in accordance with your precise circumstances as you decide.

If you want to read a straightforward account of how to plan and conduct a nonviolent tactic so that it has strategic impact, you can do so here: ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’.

This will require awareness of the difference between ‘The Political Objective and Strategic Goal of Nonviolent Actions’.

And, to ensure that the military violence directed against you is made as difficult as possible to perpetrate and, in many cases, does not eventuate, you are welcome to consider the 20 points designed to ensure that you are ‘Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’ whenever you take nonviolent action to defend yourselves when repression is a risk. This information is useful for both neutralizing violent provocateurs but also to ensure that invading military forces are compelled to deal with complex emotional and moral issues that do not arise against a violent opponent who is threatening them, and which will lead some, and perhaps very many, to desist as the historical record clearly documents. Again, for many examples, see The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach.

Conclusion

The US government and its sycophantic allies might not invade Venezuela. It may transpire that the diplomatic and other efforts of your government to defeat the coup and avert a US-led military invasion of Venezuela will be successful. There is also a fracturing of the opposition forces within Venezuela, in several ways, which works against the success of ongoing efforts to remove your government. See ‘Venezuela Regime Change “Made in the USA”’.

However, the extensive historical evidence of US interventions in violation of international law, the geostrategic and natural resource advantages that will accrue to the US elite from an invasion that removes your elected government, the anointment of a puppet president of Venezuela, the recent posturing and declarations by key members of the US administration and many US-allied governments, and the manufacture of public acquiescence by the corporate media all point heavily in the direction of invasion. And, as you are well aware, it is wise to treat this possibility seriously.

The elite conducting these preparatory moves is insane and, if it attacks Venezuela, there is a serious risk it will destroy your country as it has destroyed Iraq and Libya, especially if it meets significant military resistance. Their insanity precludes them caring about you, the people of Venezuela (even as they present any intervention as ‘humanitarian’). See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’. They care about nothing more than geostrategic advantage, eliminating progressive elements of your society’s development, and seizing your natural resources from which they can profit enormously.

Nevertheless, a strategy of nonviolent defense would enable you to defend yourselves and enable every last member of your population, irrespective of age and ability, to be strategically involved, as well as any solidarity activists overseas. It would also minimize the loss of life and destruction inflicted on your country.

Importantly, even if you suffer setbacks, unless and until you accept outright defeat, your strategy of nonviolent defense, ongoingly refined to maintain effective strategic coordination and to retain the initiative, will ultimately prevail.

As always, however, whether or not you decide to consider/adopt my suggestion, you have my solidarity.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

The 4 Greatest Enemies of the State

Posted on by
1

By Gary Z McGee

Source: The Mind Unleashed

“It’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~Krishnamurti

How do we know that our society is profoundly sick?

  • 1.) Our society pollutes the air it needs to breathe.
  • 2.) Our society pollutes the water it needs to drink.
  • 3.) Our society pollutes the food it needs to eat.
  • 4.) Our society pollutes the minds it needs to evolve with.

Any system that forces its people to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water, eat polluted food and then continue to do all the things that causes that pollution is a profoundly sick society.

It is in this fundamental way that human wellbeing itself has become the enemy of the state. Statism only functions with unhealthy, divided individuals. It cannot continue if people are healthy and connected. In short: statism fails when enough people achieve a sense of wellbeing despite it.

So, if wellbeing is the enemy of the state, then it stands to reason that anyone seeking wellbeing is also an enemy of the state. Just as those seeking health, vitality and freedom do well to be maladjusted to a profoundly sick society, those seeking wellbeing do well to become enemies of the state.

Freedom is the enemy of the state:

“State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’” ~Nietzsche

Have no illusions, the curtailment of human freedom is the state’s business. At every turn the Goliath of the state rears its ugly head, checking the free movement of otherwise free individuals. It’s a monstrous Hydra of overreaching power, hellbent on keeping its people controlled, corralled, and contained under the illusion of security and safety, and under the rampant delusion of law and order.

No nation-state on the planet is genuinely free. All are falsely and insincerely “free.” They are only ever “free” inside the unhealthy box of their conditions. Therefore, they are not free. True freedom is allowing the free movement of people and allowing people to govern themselves under the guidance of the golden rule and the nonaggression principle.

So what is a free-range human to do in the face of such a monstrosity? Become David against Goliath. Become Heracles against Hydra. Become a well-armed lamb contesting all votes. Become lionhearted despite all cowards.

But before that, you must check yourself. You must become free. If you are not free, then you cannot be heroic. You must be free in order to gain the type of courage necessary to become. Full stop.

The golden rule is the enemy of the state:

“Live simply so that others may simply live.” ~Gandhi

Statism is the antithesis of the golden rule. Why is this? Because the state demands that you do unto each other as the state demands. This is the opposite of the golden rule.

The state tricks you into believing that the state is the people. But the state is not the people. It’s the illusion of a people. People are made up of individuals. Individuality is predicated upon freedom. Further freedom is predicated upon individuals allowing other individuals to be free. The state doesn’t allow individuals to be free. It only gives individuals “permission” to be free upon certain conditions, which is the illusion of freedom.

If freedom is the foundation of the golden rule, then consent is its backbone. Without consent there is only rape. Lest we allow rape, consent is paramount.

It’s simple: The difference between robbery and a good trade is consent. The difference between murder and assisted death is consent. The difference between rape and a healthy sexual encounter is consent. The difference between oppression and freedom is consent. The difference between coercion and voluntarism is consent. Consent is everything.

If I don’t want to trade my dollar for your twinkie and you steal my dollar anyway, that’s robbery, because I did not consent. If I don’t want to have sex with you but you have sex with me anyway, that’s rape, because I did not consent. If I feel that your arbitrary law is immoral and you force me to follow it anyway, that’s oppression, because I did not consent. If I don’t want to give up my money to your arbitrary tax system but you force me to do so anyway, that’s coercion, because I did not give my consent.

In order to be a healthy, responsible, moral, and just human being, you must allow others to give their consent. Otherwise, you are violating the golden rule.

If your values are based upon violence being the solution to problems, then your values violate the golden rule. If your values are based upon hindering the freedom of others, then your values violate the golden rule. If your values are based upon coercing people to give you money when they haven’t consented, then your values violate the golden rule.

Bottom line: if your values are based upon violating the golden rule, then your values are immoral, unjust and unhealthy.

Nonviolence is the enemy of the state:

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” But “When there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.”~Gandhi

The state wants violent citizens so that it can control them. When people are nonviolent and compassionate toward each other the state doesn’t have an excuse to prevent freedom (though it will still make up excuses). When people are violent and intolerant toward each other the state has a reason to prevent freedom.

Nonviolence is the enemy of the state because the state’s solution to all problems is violence. When its citizenry comes up with nonviolent solutions it makes the state obsolete. But the state will always fight to maintain its overreaching power and control. So, in order not to become obsolete, it must maintain its violence.

The only thing that can prevent state violence is the people realizing that the state is not the people, and upon realizing this, choose to be nonviolent despite the violence of the state.

The flip side of this coin, however, is self-defense. The people must also wake up to the fact that they alone must defend themselves against violence. Whether that violence comes from an individual, a group of individuals, or from the state. The only time when violence is morally correct is in self-defense.

This can become a tricky psychological briar patch. But, basically, offensive violence is unhealthy and immoral (tyranny), whereas defensive violence is healthy and moral (justice). As Albert Camus said, “Absolute freedom mocks justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.”

Peace is the enemy of the state:

“Never relinquish your ability to doubt, reflect, and consider other options –your rationality as an individual is your only protection against the madness that can overcome a group.” ~Robert Greene

If wellbeing, health, freedom, the golden rule, and nonviolence are all the enemy of the state, then what does that tell you?

Feel free to lose the wrestling match between your higher reasoning and your cognitive dissonance. I’ll wait here…

The bottom line is this: War is the only way any nation-state maintains itself. And yet love (peace, compassion, freedom, justice) is the only way humans can progressively evolve in a healthy way.

The state is always at war—with itself, with its citizens, with other states. There is no way out of its net of covert violence unless you leave it behind and become a free-range human. In order to be a lover of humanity one must become an enemy of the state.

The realization that in order to be a healthy, moral, and just human one must become an enemy of the state, is a tough pill to swallow. It’s not for the faint of heart. It will take counterintuitive reasoning to fully fathom it. It will require you to think outside of whatever box you’ve been conditioned to think inside of for most of your life. It will force you to unwash the brainwash. It will involve reprogramming your programming. It will demand that you question the profoundly sick society you were born into.

Most of all, it will require audacious courage in the face of comfortable cowardice. But, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wisely stated, “A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition. I ought to go upright and vital and speak the rude truth in all ways. Your goodness must have some edge to it—else it is none.”

Learning from Gandhi

Posted on by
Reply

By Robert J. Burrowes

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869: 150 years ago this year.

There will be many tributes to Gandhi published in 2019 so I would like to add one of my own.

This reflects not just my belief that he gave the world inspiration, ideas and powerful strategies for tackling violence in a wide range of contexts but because my own experience in applying his ideas has proven their worth. This included his awareness that led him to declare that ‘If we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history. We must add to the inheritance left by our ancestors.’ and his encouragement to reflect deeply and listen to one’s ‘inner voice’: ‘you should follow your inner voice whatever the consequences’ and ‘even at the risk of being misunderstood’.

In essence, we can productively learn from history but we can build on it too. And, vitally, this includes dealing more effectively with violence.

So how did Gandhi influence me?

Shortly after midnight on 1 July 1942, my Uncle Bob was killed when the USS Sturgeon, a U.S. submarine, fired torpedoes into the Japanese prisoner of war (POW) ship Montevideo Maru. The ship sank immediately and, along with 1,052 other POWs, Bob was killed.

Apart from his older brother, my father’s twin brother was also killed in World War II. In Tom’s case, he was shot down over Rabaul on his first (and final) mission. He was a wireless air gunner on a Beaufort Bomber. See ‘The Last Coastwatcher: My Brothers’.

My childhood is dotted with memories of Bob and Tom. The occasional remembrance service, war medals and the rare story shared by my father.

In 1966, the year I turned 14, I decided to devote my life to finding out why human beings kill each other and to work out how such killing could be ended. The good news about this ‘decision’ is that, at 14, it all felt manageable! But I wasn’t much older before my preliminary investigations proved that even understanding why humans are violent was going to be a profound challenge. And I intuitively understood that I needed this understanding if any strategy to end violence was to be effective.

In any case, as one might expect, my research into violence and strategies for addressing it led me to nonviolence. I came across virtually nothing about nonviolence during my own studies at school and university but was regularly presented with news reports of people participating in activities – such as demonstrations and strikes – that I later learned to label ‘nonviolent action’.

In 1981 I decided to seek out materials on nonviolence and nonviolent action so that I could learn more about it. I had not been reading for long when the routine reference to Mohandas K. (or Mahatma) Gandhi, about whom I had heard a little and knew of his role in leading the Indian independence struggle, forced me to pay more attention to his life and work. So I sought out his writing and started to read some of his published work. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth was an obvious and early book but there were many others besides. I also read many books about Gandhi, to get a clearer sense of his life as a whole, as reported by his coworkers and contemporaries, as well as documented by scholars since his death. And I spent a great many hours in a library basement poring over The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.

The thing that struck me immediately about Gandhi was that his own interest in tackling violence had a comprehensive ‘feel’ about it. That is, he was not just interested in the violence that occurs when nations fight wars or one person kills or injures another. He was interested in addressing the violence that occurs when individuals and nations exploit other individuals/nations (such as when British imperialism exploited India and Indians) and the violence that occurs when a structure (such as capitalism or socialism) exploits the individuals within it. In his words: ‘exploitation is the essence of violence’. He was interested in the violence that occurs when members of one social group (say, Hindus) ‘hate’ the members of another social group (such as Muslims). He was interested in the violence that occurs when men oppress women or caste Hindus oppress ‘untouchables’. He was interested in the violence that occurs when humans destroy the environment. And he was interested in the violence that one inflicts on oneself.

This comprehensive interest resonated deeply with me because, apart from war, my own childhood and adolescence had revealed many manifestations of violence ranging from the starvation of people in developing countries to the racism in the United States (highlighted by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960s) to the destruction of the environment, each of which had gradually but deeply embedded itself in my consciousness. Tackling violence was a far bigger task than the large one I had originally imagined. Violence is everywhere. Most importantly, it seemed to me, there was enormous violence directed against children in the family home but little was spoken or written about this.

So how did Gandhi explain violence and what was his strategy for addressing it?

Gandhi on Conflict and Violence

For Gandhi, conflict was a perennial condition. He also viewed it positively and considered it desirable. For him, it is an important means to greater human unity precisely because their shared conflict could remind antagonists of the deeper, perhaps transcendental, unity of life, which is far more profound than the bond of their social relationship.

He viewed violence differently, however. And, as might be gleaned from the many configurations of violence that concerned him, as noted above, he considered that violence was built into social structures and not into people.

Fundamentally, as Leroy Pelton characterized it, Gandhi understood that the truth cannot be achieved through violence (‘which violates human needs and destroys life’), because violence itself is a form of injustice. In any case, violence cannot resolve conflict because it does not address the issues at stake.

To reiterate then, for Gandhi there was nothing undesirable about conflict. However, Gandhi’s preoccupation was working out how to manage conflict without violence and how to create new social arrangements free of structural violence. The essence, then, of Gandhi’s approach was to identify approaches to conflict that preserved the people while systematically demolishing the evil structure. Nevertheless, he firmly believed that structural purification alone is not enough; self-purification is also essential.

In other words, in Gandhi’s view, resolving the conflict (without violence) is only one aspect of the desired outcome. For Gandhi, success also implies the creation of a superior social structure, higher degrees of fearlessness and self-reliance on the part of both satyagrahis (nonviolent activists) and their opponents, and a greater degree of human unity at the level of social relationships.

Two Key Questions

Despite the enormous influence that Gandhi had in shaping my own conception of conflict and the precise conception of nonviolence that should be used in dealing with it, I nevertheless remained convinced that two questions remained unanswered: What is the psychological origin of the violent behavior of the individual who perpetrates it? And what theory or framework should guide the application of nonviolent action so that campaigns of all kinds are strategically effective?

The first question is important because even if someone is trapped within a social structure (such as the class system) that is violent, the individual must still choose, consciously or unconsciously, to participate (as perpetrator, collaborator or victim) in the violence perpetrated by that structure or one must choose, consciously, to resist it. Why do so many individuals perform one of the first three roles and so few, like Gandhi himself, choose the role of resister?

The second question is important because while Gandhi himself was an astonishingly intuitive strategic thinker (whose 30-year nonviolent strategy liberated India from British occupation), no one before him or since his death has demonstrated anything remotely resembling his capacity in this regard.

Hence, while nonviolence, which is inherently powerful, has chalked up some remarkable successes, vital struggles for peace (and to end war); to halt assaults on Earth’s biosphere; to secure social justice for oppressed and exploited populations; to liberate national groups from dictatorship, occupation or genocidal assault; and struggles in relation to many other just causes limp along devoid of strategy (or use one that is ill-conceived). So badly are we failing, in fact, that humans now teeter on the brink of precipitating our own extinction. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’.

Anyway, having studied Gandhi extensively and learned from his strategic approach to nonviolence (elements of which I was progressively including in nonviolent campaigns in which I was involved myself), I resumed my original research to understand the fundamental origin of human violence and also decided to develop a strategic theory and framework for addressing violence in the campaign context so that Gandhi’s strategic thinking could be readily copied by other nonviolent activists.

It turned out that developing this strategic theory and strategy was simpler than the original aim (understanding violence) and I have presented this strategic thinking on two websites: Nonviolent Campaign Strategy and Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

Despite my preliminary efforts in the 1990s to encourage fellow activists to use this framework, it soon became clear that only the rarest of activists has the capacity to think strategically about an issue, even when presented with a framework for doing so.

The Origin of Human Violence

Consequently, the vital importance of understanding the origin of human violence was starkly demonstrated to me yet again because I knew it would answer key supplementary questions such as these: Why to do so many people live in denial/delusion utterly incapable of perceiving structural violence or grappling powerfully with (military, social, political, economic and ecological) violence? Why is it that so many people, even activists, are powerless to think strategically? How can activists even believe that success can be achieved, particularly on the major issues of our time (such as the threats of nuclear war, ecological devastation and climate cataclysm), without a focused and comprehensive strategy, particularly given elite resistance to such campaigns? See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

Hence, in an attempt to answer questions such as these, Anita McKone and I went into seclusion in an endeavor to understand how our own minds functioned so that we might better understand the minds of others. I hoped it would take a few months. It took 14 years.

So what is the cause of violence in all contexts and which, depending on its precise configuration in each case, creates perpetrators of violence, people who collaborate with perpetrators of violence, people who are passive victims of violence, people who live in denial/delusion, people who are sexist or racist, and activists who cannot think strategically (among many other adverse outcomes)?

Each of these manifestations of human behaviour is an outcome of the adult war on children. That is, adult violence against children is the fundamental cause of all other violence.

How does this happen? It happens because each child, from birth, is socialized – more accurately, terrorized – so that they fit into their society. That is, each child is subjected to an unrelenting regime of ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence until they offer the obedience that every adult – parent, teacher, religious figure… – demands.

So what constitutes ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence?

‘Visible’ violence includes hitting, screaming at and sexually abusing a child which, sadly enough, is very common.

But the largest component of damage arises from the ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that we adults unconsciously inflict on children during the ordinary course of the day. Tragically, the bulk of this violence occurs in the family home and at school. For a full explanation, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

‘Invisible’ violence is the ‘little things’ we do every day, partly because we are just ‘too busy’. For example, when we do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and feelings, the child learns to not listen to themSelf thus destroying their internal communication system. When we do not let a child say what they want (or ignore them when they do), the child develops communication and behavioral dysfunctionalities as they keep trying to meet their own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, they are genetically programmed to do).

When we blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize with and/or judge a child, we both undermine their sense of Self-worth and teach them to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail, moralize and/or judge.

The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout their childhood by this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However, mothers, fathers, teachers, religious figures and other adults also actively interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioral responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioral outcomes actually occur.

For example, by ignoring a child when they express their feelings, by comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when they express their feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing their feelings, by terrorizing a child into not expressing their feelings (for instance, by screaming at them when they cry or get angry), and/or by violently controlling a behavior that is generated by their feelings (for example, by hitting them, restraining them or locking them into a room), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings.

However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing their awareness of their feelings (rather than being allowed to have their feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed their awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. This has many outcomes that are disastrous for the individual, for society and for the biosphere because the individual will now easily suppress their awareness of the feelings that would tell them how to act most functionally in any given circumstance and they will progressively acquire a phenomenal variety of dysfunctional behaviors, including some that are violent towards themself, others and/or the Earth.

So what do we do?

Well, if you want to make an enormous contribution to our effort to end violence, you can make the commitment outlined in ‘My Promise to Children’. If you need to do some healing of your own to be able to nurture children in this way, then consider the information provided in the article ‘Putting Feelings First’.

If you want to systematically tackle violence against the biosphere, consider (accelerated) participation in the fifteen-year strategy, inspired by Gandhi, outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. This project outlines a simple plan for people to systematically reduce their consumption, by at least 80%, involving both energy and resources of every kind – water, household energy, transport fuels, metals, meat, paper and plastic – while dramatically expanding their individual and community self-reliance in 16 areas, so that all environmental concerns are effectively addressed. As Gandhi observed 100 years ago: ‘Earth provides enough for every person’s need but not for every person’s greed.’

But, critically important though he believed personal action to be, Gandhi was also an extraordinary political strategist and he knew that we needed to do more than transform our own personal lives. We need to provide opportunities that compel others to consider doing the same.

So if your passion is campaigning for change, consider doing it strategically, as Gandhi did. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

And if you want to join the worldwide movement to end all violence against humans and the biosphere, you can do so by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948. But his legacy lives on. You can learn from it too, if you wish.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford, Victoria 3460
Australia

Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Feelings First
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

Human Beings are Destroying Life on Earth but Deluding Ourselves that We are Not

Posted on by
Reply

By Robert J. Burrowes

It is easy to identify the ongoing and endless violence being inflicted on life on Earth. This ranges from the vast multiplicity of assaults inflicted on our children and the biosphere to the endless wars and other military violence as well as the grotesque exploitation of many peoples living in Africa, Asia and Central/South America. But for a (very incomplete) list of 40 points see ‘Reflections on 2018, Forecasting 2019’.

However, despite the obvious fact that it is human beings who are inflicting all of this violence, it is virtually impossible to get people to pay attention to this simple and incontrovertible fact and to ask why, precisely, are human beings behaving in such violent and destructive ways? And can we effectively address this cause?

Of course, one part of this problem is the existence of many competing ideas about what causes violence. For example, some ideologies attribute the cause to a particular structural manifestation of violence, such as patriarchy (which generates a gendered system of violence and exploitation) or capitalism (which generates a class system of violence and exploitation). However, none of these ideologies explains why humans participate in structures of violence and exploitation in the first place. Surely a person who was not violent and exploitative to begin with would reject such violent and exploitative structures out of hand and work to create nonviolent and egalitarian structures instead.

But most people really just accept the elite-promulgated delusion that humans are innately dysfunctional and violent and this must be contained and controlled by socialization processes, laws, legal systems, police forces and prisons or, in the international arena, by such measures as economic sanctions and military violence. It is a rare individual who perceives the blatant dysfunctionality and violence of socialization, laws, legal systems, police forces, prisons, economic sanctions and military violence, and how these institutions and their violence serve elite interests.

Hence, humans are trapped in a cycle of attempting to address the vast range of manifestations of violent human behaviour – the wars, the climate catastrophe, destruction of the environment, the economic exploitation of vast sectors of the human population (women, indigenous peoples, working peoples…), the military dictatorships and occupations – without knowing what, fundamentally, causes dysfunctional and violent human behaviours and draws many people to participate in (and benefit from) violence in whatever form it takes.

Well I, for one, find it boring to see the same manifestations of violence repeated endlessly because we do not understand or address the fundamental cause (and so even well-meaning efforts to address it in a variety of contexts are doomed to fail). How about you?

Moreover, I find it boring to listen to (or read about) people endlessly deluding themselves about the violence; that is, deluding themselves that it isn’t happening, ‘it was always like that’, ‘it isn’t as bad as it seems’, ‘nothing can be done’, ‘there is another explanation’, that I am ‘doing enough already’, and so on.

To illustrate the above let me write some more frequent examples of people deluding themselves about the cause. You may have heard delusions like these expressed yourself; you may know some of the many others.

  1. ‘The child deserved the punishment.’
  2. ‘She asked for it.’
  3. Violence is innate: it is ‘in our nature’.
  4. ‘War is inevitable.’
  5. The people in Africa/Asia/Central/South America ‘have always been poor’.
  6. ‘The weather hasn’t changed; it was like that when I was a child.’
  7. ‘We can’t control Mother Nature.’
  8. ‘Nature is abundant.’

Of course, the most common delusional state is the one in which most people are trapped: they are just not paying significant attention to critical issues and have no knowledge (and informed opinion) about them but allow themselves to be distracted from reality by the various elite channels used for doing so, such as the corporate media.

So why do most people delude themselves rather than carefully observe reality, seek out and analyze the evidence in relation to it, and then behave appropriately and powerfully in response?

Because they are (unconsciously) terrified.

‘Is that all?’ you might say. ‘Surely the explanation for dysfunctional (and violent) human behaviour is more complex than that! Besides, when people I observe doing the sorts of dysfunctional and violent behaviours you mention above, they don’t look frightened, let alone terrified.’

So let me explain why the explanation above – that most human beings live in delusion, behave dysfunctionally and violently, fail to observe and analyze reality and then behave powerfully in response to it, because they are terrified – is the complete explanation and why people who are utterly terrified don’t ‘look frightened’.

At the moment of birth, the human individual has a genetically-embedded potential to seek out and powerfully pursue their own unique destiny by progressively developing a complex set of capacities to observe and listen, to think and feel, to analyze and evaluate, to plan and strategize, and to behave with awareness and power in response to their own astute insight into reality and the guidance provided by their conscience.

However, rather than nurture this potential so that the child grows up deeply in touch with their conscience, sensing capacities, thoughts, feelings and other faculties necessary to seek out and powerfully travel their own unique path, the significant adults in the child’s life immediately start to ‘socialize’ (that is, terrorize) the child into conforming with culturally and socially-acceptable norms of thought and behaviour on the basis that one human is more-or-less identical with another (give or take some minor variations among races, languages….).

The idea that each human mind might be unique in the way that each body is unique (while conforming to a general pattern in relation to shape, height and other physical characteristics) never even occurs to anyone. The idea that their child could have the potential to be as creative, powerful and unique as Leonardo Da Vinci, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Albert Einstein, Mohandas K. Gandhi or Rosalind Franklin never enters the mind of the typical parent.

Instead, we parent and teach children to conform to an endless sequence of beliefs and behavioural norms on the basis that ‘one size fits all’ because we are literally (but unconsciously) terrified that our child might be ‘different’ or, horror of horrors, unique! And we reward most highly those individuals who do conform and can demonstrate their conformity by passing, often literally, the endless series of socially-approved tests, formal and otherwise, that we set. See, for example, ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

The last thing we want is an individual who fearlessly thinks, feels and behaves as they personally decide is best for themself, perhaps even because their conscience dictates. But when they do act out of their own volition, we punish them to ensure that behaviour that is generated by their unique ‘Self’ is, if possible, terrorized out of them.

Of course, there are ‘good reasons’ for doing this. If we want obedient students, soldiers, employees and citizens, it is the perfect formula. Terrorize the child when they are young and obedience to a set of parentally/socially-approved beliefs and behaviours is virtually guaranteed.

Equally importantly, by starting this onslaught against the child from the moment of birth, they will grow up utterly unaware of the fact that they were terrorized out of becoming their ‘True Self’ and seeking their own unique destiny so that they could be the slave of their society, performing some function, menial or even ‘professional’, after they have submitted to sufficient training. The slave who never questions their role is truly a slave. And that is what we want!

Equally importantly, the person who has fearfully surrendered their Self at the alter of physical survival cannot observe or listen to the fear expressed by anyone else, including their own children. So they simply ‘fail to notice’ it.

So what, exactly, do we do so that each human being’s individual Self is crushed and they are rendered too terrified, self-hating and powerless to pursue their own life path, to honestly observe and listen to their own children and to mindfully consider the state of our world and act powerfully in response?

We inflict enormous, ongoing violence on the child, starting immediately after their birth.

‘How?’ you might ask. ‘I don’t scream at or hit my child. And I never punish them.’

Well, if that is true, it is a good start.

But, unfortunately, it is far more complex than these obvious types of violence and, strange though it may seem, it is not just the ‘visible’ violence (such as hitting, screaming at and sexually abusing) that we normally label ‘violence’ that causes the main damage, although this is extremely damaging. The largest component of damage arises from the ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that we adults unconsciously inflict on children during the ordinary course of the day. Tragically, the bulk of this violence occurs in the family home and at school. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So what is ‘invisible’ violence? It is the ‘little things’ we do every day, partly because we are just ‘too busy’. For example, when we do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and feelings, the child learns to not listen to themSelf thus destroying their internal communication system. When we do not let a child say what they want (or ignore them when they do), the child develops communication and behavioral dysfunctionalities as they keep trying to meet their own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, they are genetically programmed to do).

When we blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize with and/or judge a child, we both undermine their sense of Self-worth and teach them to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail, moralize and/or judge.

The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout their childhood by this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However, mothers, fathers, teachers and other adults also actively interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioral responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioral outcomes actually occur.

For example, by ignoring a child when they express their feelings, by comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when they express their feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing their feelings, by terrorizing a child into not expressing their feelings (e.g. by screaming at them when they cry or get angry), and/or by violently controlling a behavior that is generated by their feelings (e.g. by hitting them, restraining them or locking them into a room), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings.

However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing their awareness of their feelings (rather than being allowed to have their feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed their awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. This has many outcomes that are disastrous for the individual, for society and for nature because the individual will now easily suppress their awareness of the feelings that would tell them how to act most functionally in any given circumstance and they will progressively acquire a phenomenal variety of dysfunctional behaviors, including some that are violent towards themself, others and/or the Earth.

From the above, it should also now be apparent that punishment should never be used. ‘Punishment’, of course, is one of the words we use to obscure our awareness of the fact that we are using violence. Violence, even when we label it ‘punishment’, scares children and adults alike and cannot elicit a functional behavioural response. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

If someone behaves dysfunctionally, they need to be listened to, deeply, so that they can start to become consciously aware of the feelings (which will always include fear and, often, terror) that drove the dysfunctional behaviour in the first place. They then need to feel and express these feelings (including any anger) in a safe way. Only then will behavioural change in the direction of functionality be possible. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

‘But these adult behaviors you have described don’t seem that bad. Can the outcome be as disastrous as you claim?’ you might ask. The problem is that there are hundreds of these ‘ordinary’, everyday behaviors that destroy the Selfhood of the child. It is ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and most children simply do not survive as Self-aware individuals. And why do we do this? As noted above, we do it so that each child will fit into our model of ‘the perfect citizen’: that is, obedient and hardworking student, reliable and pliant employee/soldier, and submissive law-abiding citizen.

Moreover, once we destroy the Selfhood of a child, it has many flow-on effects. For example, once you terrorize a child into accepting certain information about themself, other people or the state of the world, the child becomes unconsciously fearful of dealing with new information, especially if this information is contradictory to what they have been terrorized into believing. As a result, the child will unconsciously dismiss new information out of hand.

In short, the child has been terrorized in such a way that they are no longer capable of learning (or their learning capacity is seriously diminished by excluding any information that is not a simple extension of what they already ‘know’).

Fundamentally, the child is now incapable of carefully observing reality, analyzing the evidence in relation to that reality and responding strategically so that conflicts and problems are moved closer to resolution. That is, the child is now unconsciously trapped, believing and behaving precisely within the spectrum of socially-approved beliefs and behaviours that society terrorized them into accepting, no matter how dysfunctional and violent these beliefs and behaviours might be.

In industrialized countries, for example, this will invariably include overconsuming, which is standard (but highly dysfunctional and violent) behaviour, particularly given the current state of the biosphere. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

 

Responding Powerfully to Reality

So how do we nurture children to become the unique and powerful individual that is their birthright? Someone who is able to clearly identify what they need and what outcomes work for them, and who does not learn to progressively compromise themselves until there is nothing left of their unique identity. Someone, in short, who is so powerless, that they are incapable of considering themself, others and the state of the biosphere. Someone who lives in delusion.

Well, if you want a powerful child, you can read what is required in ‘My Promise to Children’.

If, after reading this ‘Promise’, you feel unable to nurture children properly, you might consider doing the healing necessary so that you can do so. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

If you already feel free of the delusions that afflict most people and able to respond powerfully to the state of our world, then consider joining those participating in the fifteen-year strategy outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ and signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

If you are powerful enough to campaign for change against one or more of the ongoing manifestations of violence in the world, consider doing so strategically so that you have maximum impact. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

And if none of the options I have offered immediately above appeals, ask yourself if you are serious about helping to end the violence or just deluding yourself like all of those people I described above.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford, Victoria 3460
Australia

Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Feelings First
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

HOW TO REPROGRAM YOUR MIND TO TAKE AN ACTIVE ROLE IN YOUR PERSONAL EVOLUTION

Posted on by
4

By Jonathan Davis

Source: Waking Times

For a long time we’ve been taught that evolution is a process that is happening to us. Thankfully we’re living in times where the human race is finally getting a grasp on the fact that we’re actually actively involved in how we evolve as a species.

As humans, our bodies are constantly changing in response to the environment around us. Our muscles change according to whether we choose to use them or not. The enzymes in our digestive system change in response to the foods we choose to eat. Our endocrine system is in a constant feedback loop with our emotions which can change dramatically according to what’s happening in the world around us. As Dr Bruce Lipton put it, “the cell is a carbon-based ‘computer chip’ that reads the environment”, and the field of epigenetics teaches us that our DNA changes in quality – again, according to our environment.

When science talks about ‘environmental influence’ it seems to imply ‘all that which is outside ourselves’. It’s easy to overlook the fact that that our conscious choices about which environmental factors we engage with are part of what shapes the way our bodies restructure. We are part of the environment that influences our own development; our free will lets us choose and change the environment. We participate in our own evolution during our lifetime and what we do in our own lives can also affect future generations. In this way, personal evolution is collective evolution, and nowhere is personal evolution more apparent than how we are capable of rewiring our own brain.

How Reprogramming the Mind Is Helpful To Us

Humans work really well with routines. We repeat the same pattern over and over, and through neuroplasticity our brain wires itself so that it doesn’t have to think too much about that task anymore, it just runs that established electrical pathway. To riff off Noel Burch, it’s like when we learn to drive a car: we move from unconscious incompetence ‘I don’t know how bad at this I’m going to be’; to conscious competence ‘I now know how bad I am at this’; to conscious competence ‘OK, I can do this but I have to keep my mind on the job’; to unconscious competence ‘I can wind the window down, change the radio, turn a corner and change gears all at the same time, without even thinking about it’.

We program ourselves all the time with repetition, so we don’t have to waste energy engaging isolated focus on every task. The question is whether these are routines we are choosing for ourselves or that have been imposed on us? If they are imposed, are they helpful to us both personally and as a species?

When Are We Most Easily Able To Wire And Re-wire Our Mind?

During early childhood our brains are wiring themselves for the first time. While this process slows after the intense surge of development in first few years, our brains are still establishing the wiring we will largely use for the rest of our life throughout childhood. When we hit our teenage years we experience the second surge of new wiring and there is an opportunity for patterns to be created during this time that can setup behaviours for years to come. After this period, neuroplasticity still occurs but it just isn’t as fluid as it was before. So you can teach an old dog new tricks, it’s just a slower process.

The problem here is that our subconscious is overhearing everything our conscious mind is hearing, and is therefore to a being programmed by whatever influence we’re being exposed to. The Jesuits knew this 400 years ago. They would boast:

“Give me a child until it’s seven, it will belong to the church for the rest of its life.’” – Dr Bruce Lipton, paraphrasing Jesuit priests.

We Are Always Programming Ourselves

I like to imagine the subconscious mind is like an autopilot system. It is overhearing everything we ever think or say, and it’s mission (in the background and whenever possible) is to guide us towards whatever we want… or at least whatever it thinks we want according to what it overhears. An extra level of challenge is introduced when we imagine that the conscious mind has the capacity for judgment its higher expression – discernment. The subconscious, however, doesn’t have that ability. When it is overhearing everything you think and every word you say it simply hears the topic, not the context. ‘I don’t want to be fat’ with the judgment of ‘I don’t want’ removed becomes the topic only: ‘be fat’. The subconscious ‘overhears’ the topic of what is active in your conscious mind and it is listening for repetition. This is how it figures out for how ready we need to be for that particular thought process.

Repetition Is The Key. Repetition Is The Key.

If we lift weights we are using repetition to say to the muscles, ‘be ready for this, we may need to do this at any moment, so restructure yourself’. Scientists have found the fastest way to get fit is to do interval sprints, which is basically a physical way of saying to the body through repetition ‘you need to restructure yourself so we can sprint at top speed at any time, at the drop of a hat’. Rest, get your breath back and sprint again, over and over. This repetition tells the body that it’s a high priority to restructure and be ready for this at all times. My observation is that the same appears to be true for our brain. When our subconscious overhears our thoughts and words and there is repetition, there is an increased likelihood of neural rewiring. After all – neurons that fire together wire together.

The path of least resistance

When attempting to re-wire an old habit or behaviour pattern, it is useful to remember the old adage from high school science: electricity follows the path of least resistance. Imagine the old pattern as a well-established electrical pathway in your brain. As you put conscious focus into creating a new electrical pathway to replace the old pattern, you make that new electrical pathway fatter. As soon as you stop putting conscious focus into running the new behaviour pattern the electricity will revert to the old cable for as long as it is the fatter of the two cables, as that is the path of least resistance. As soon as the day comes when the new electrical pathway is thicker than the old one you have a new program in your autopilot system, that will now run on it’s own without you needing to focus conscious intention on it. You have reached a level of conscious competence. According to Dan Coyle a key to making the consciously chosen wiring stick is holding the intention that ‘I want to know this for the rest of my life’. Coyle suggests this causes the brain to coat the new electrical pathway in the brain with myelin insulation, making it much more permanent.

Taking care with the programs we allow our subconscious to overhear

As stated earlier, our autopilot system is taking direction from everything you’re experiencing – which includes the media we watch, the people we surround ourselves with and more. For this reason, one of the most powerful things we can do is exercise discernment around the kind of experiences we expose ourselves to, and their level of intensity and repetition.

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” – Frederick Douglass

More importantly is the need for extra care in exercising this discernment on behalf of the children in our care and teaching this discernment to teenagers as, in both cases they are in a heightened state of neuroplasticity and are more susceptible to influence. To be clear, I am by no means advocating prudishness or avoidance of the truth, just a higher level of awareness of how we are either consciously or inadvertently being programmed all the time.

In the video below Bruce Lipton speaks passionately on this very subject, citing this discernment on behalf of our children as a clear solution to war and conflict.

The Psychological Warfare Behind Economic Collapse

Posted on by
Reply

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.com

The concept of using the economy as a weapon is not an alien one to most people. Generally, we understand the nature of feudalism and how various groups can be herded onto centralized plantations to be exploited for their labor. Some people see this as a consequence of “capitalism,” and others see it as an extension of socialism/communism. Sadly, many people wrongly assume that one is a solution to the other — meaning they think that crony capitalism is a solution to communist centralization or that communism is a solution to the corruption of crony capitalism. The reality is that this is just another false paradigm.

What is most disturbing is that the majority of the public have no grasp whatsoever of the true solution to the problem of corrupt or totalitarian economies: free markets.

Free markets have not existed within the global economy on a large scale for at least the past 100 years. The rise of central banking has eroded all vestiges of freedom in production and trade. Crony capitalism with its focus on corporate power and monopoly has nothing to do with free markets, despite the arguments of rather naive socialists who blame “free markets” for the problems of the world. If you ever hear anyone making this claim, I suggest you remind them that corporations and their advantages are a creation of governments.

The protections of corporate personhood, limited liability, unfair taxation of small business competition and legislation shielding corporations from civil lawsuits are all generated by government. Therefore, corporations and crony capitalism are much more a product of socialist-style systems, not free markets. In a true free market devoid of constant government interference and favoritism, corporations could not exist and would be obliterated over time by the competitive environment. And without limited liability, business moguls that violate the rule of law and harm others would be subject to personal prosecution and jail time instead of simply paying a fine. The cost/benefit ratio for corrupt business would disappear and thus corrupt businesses would flounder.

At the very core of the combination of corporate power and government protection (what some might say is the classical definition of fascism), rest the central banks, globalist institutions and the banking elites behind them. Central banks are the stewards of the various plantations (nations) and oversee the exploitation of these societies and their labor. Major globalist constructs like the IMF or the Bank for International Settlements are the policy makers for the national central banks. They hand down the strategy, and the central banks implement that strategy in concert. At the top of the pyramid sit the round table groups and the international bankers themselves, reaping the rewards of the cycle of theft.

As noted scholar, globalist insider and mentor to Bill Clinton, Carroll Quigley wrote in his book Tragedy And Hope:

“The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank … sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”

This is an easy notion to understand, I think. That is to say, the idea of oligarchs, the 1% if you will, controlling the other 99% through economic leverage is something that most people can agree exists, whether they identify with the political Right or the political Left. They may only have a vague notion of the facts behind this conspiracy, but they have seen it in action in their daily lives and they know it is real. Here is where most of them start to lose sight of the bigger picture, though…

Many see the conspiracy as merely a product of profit motive. That is to say, they don’t see it as a conscious and organized effort so much as unconsciously motivated greed. This reminds me of the most famous line from the movie The Usual Suspects:

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn’t exist.”

All the evidence overwhelmingly assures us that the conspiracy is fully conscious, organized and deliberate. It is not an ugly or random byproduct of “profit motive.” This is absurd when you consider the amount of coordination that is required or the number of think tanks and secretive conferences that occur yearly, from the Council on Foreign Relations, to Tavistock, to the Trilateral Commission, to the Brookings Institute, to Davos, to Bilderberg and to even weirder circles like Bohemian Grove. These are very real centers of power that can have far reaching influence in our daily lives.

To ignore this and reduce it all down to a “natural” extension of greed is to stupidly rest one’s soft spongy head in the jaws of organized evil while pretending you can’t smell the stench of its gingivitis.

The control mechanisms of the globalists are far more complex though than simply exploiting the flow of money or the accumulation of debt. Numerous liberty activists that have accepted the reality of institutionalized control of the economy still refuse to acknowledge another very real control mechanism — the use of economic collapse. I’m not sure why this idea is taken as farfetched by people who are already versed in the facts behind globalism. Their biases just won’t allow them to look at the environment objectively and see the usefulness of collapse as a tactic to gain more leverage and influence.

I believe the key to understanding economics and the world at large is to embrace the truth that almost everything that is done in the world of politics and finance is done to manipulate public psychology toward certain ends.  That is to say, the true battlefield is the human mind; everything else is secondary.

But what ends am I referring to? To be more specific, the masses are constantly being pressured into more dependency, more fear, less self-sufficiency and less awareness of the grand scheme. We are encouraged to box with our own shadows, to produce for the system but not for ourselves, to struggle for minimal gains spent haphazardly on meaningless objectives, to fight with each other for scraps while remaining blind to the enormous parasites attached to our backs, to affiliate with pointless causes led by puppet politicians and controlled opposition, to never build anything ourselves, always waiting for some hero on a white horse to come and save us.

In essence, we are consistently being distracted or admonished from our natural inclination to establish free markets – free markets in thought, in trade, in information, in government, etc.  The globalists are even willing to collapse entire economic systems to prevent this outcome and to keep us trapped in centralization.  This prison is a mental one, for the most part.  At any time, we could walk away from the totalitarian model and build our own free market systems.  Getting to this point psychologically, getting people to take the first steps, is the hard part, however.

Economics as the globalists implement it is not about profit. It is sometimes about milking the population for labor or hard assets, but this is a side benefit. What economics is really about is molding minds; it is about changing the psychology of millions of people. It is about erasing inborn conscience and moral compass. It is about destroying long held societal principles and heritage. And sometimes, it is about erasing history altogether, killing most of a generation, and then writing a new history that is more suitable to the globalist ideal, which is much easier when there are so few people who remember the truth left to argue about it.

Globalists exhibit most, if not all, the traits of narcissistic sociopaths, who sometimes organize into cooperative groups as long as there is a promise of mutual gain and a structure of top down dominance. Narcissistic sociopaths are notorious for using crisis as a means to keep the people around them off balance and serving their interests. Their ultimate goal is rarely profit. Instead, they seek power; power over every aspect of every life of every person around them. A modicum of power is not enough. They want total control, and they will use any means to get it, including engineering threats and disasters to elicit compliance or to paint themselves as a necessary hero or “protector.”

A sociopath is not content to control people through fear or violence alone. They want their victims to love them; to view them as saviors instead of tyrants.

To reiterate, the goal of economic subversion is to break down the human mind and change it into something else; something less human or, at the very least, something less rebellious. One can only control people through debt and false rewards for so long before they start to recoil and revolt. Economic collapse, on the other hand, can change people fundamentally through persistent terror and through tragedy. Through trauma, the globalists hope to make men into monsters or robots.

The current system was never built to last. Our economy is designed to fail, yet few people seem to question why that is? They tell themselves that this is because greed has led the money elite to self-sabotage, but this is a fantasy. It is not just that the system is designed to fail, but that it is designed to fail according to an organized timetable.

The globalist magazine The Economist announced in 1988 the coming of a one-world currency system, one that would be launched in 2018 and that would require the decline of the U.S. economy and the dollar to open the door to the reset. It is no coincidence that we are now witnessing the beginning of a major financial crash in the last quarter of 2018. This crash was engineered starting in 2008 by central banks first through the inflation of a historic bubble encompassing almost all asset classes using stimulus measures and near zero interest rates, and it is being imploded today by the same central banks using tightening measures into economic weakness.

It is also no coincidence that the globalists have announced in 2018 that their intention is to adapt to a digital monetary system using blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. That is to say, the one world currency system predicted in The Economist is already here. They are only waiting for a crisis large enough to pressure society to accept total global centralization as a solution.

Forcing the public to embrace worldwide centralization would require several measures. First, the current system, which as stated is designed to fail, would have to be allowed to crash. Second, the crash would have to be blamed on someone other than the globalists and their ideology of globalism. Third, philosophical opponents of globalism (i.e., conservatives, nationalists and decentralization activists) would have to be demonized or eliminated so that the globalists can build their new world order without opposition. Fourth, the population would need to be sufficiently traumatized to the point of psychological submission and desperation, so that when the new system is introduced, they will be grateful for it, thus preventing future rebellion by making the public a willing cooperator in their own enslavement.

The success of such a plan is not guaranteed. In fact, I believe the globalists will ultimately fail in their endeavor as I have outlined in past articles. This does not mean though that they aren’t going to try. Liberty activists must accept the fact that the plan of the globalists involves the deliberate destruction of our current economy. Those who refuse will find themselves bewildered by the outcome of future financial developments, instead of being prepared. They will find themselves easily subdued, instead of ready to rebel. And they will wonder after it’s all over why they didn’t see it coming when the end game was so obvious.

IS REALITY A HOLOGRAM?

Posted on by
1

By Jonathan Davis

Source: Waking Times

You may be aware of the fact that tech billionaire Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX is now publicly stating his belief that it is mathematically impossible in a practical sense, that we are not living in a computer simulation. His logic is surprisingly sensible.  In 1972 we had Pong, a rudimentary simulation of table tennis. Now we have games that are near photorealistic.  If we keep to this course, we will create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, even if it takes us a few more thousands of years, it will happen. So if it will happen… how do we know it hasn’t already happened? How do we know we’re living in the base reality and are not already in a simulation?

There’s a one in billions chance we’re in base reality. – Elon Musk

Recently, a team of Japanese scientists also announced they have found ‘clearest evidence yet’ that the universe is a hologram. While this may be the most recent effort to prove the holographic universe theory among numerous others, science has been perplexed by the insubstantial nature of reality since well before holographic theory existed – not to mention the mystics and philosophers who have been suggesting the same thing (in less reductionist terms) for thousands of years.

From The Ancient East To Modern West

Eastern mysticism has long held the perspective that our physical reality is really the maya of illusion. First century buddhist philospoher-poet Aśvaghoṣa put it that ‘all phenomena in the world are nothing but the illusory manifestation of the mind and have no reality of their own, while 13th century sufi mystic Rumi suggested that ‘this place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real.’ Jump all the way forward to the 1960s, and a wave of eastern mysticism crashed on the shore of western culture thanks to public figures like Alan Watts. Perhaps out of everyone, his is the most captivatingly poetic rendering of the subject.  For the full experience, take a look at this beautiful new short film from Aaron Paradox.

Kensho from Aaron Paradox

Quantum Conundrum

Since the emergence of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, science has struggled to reconcile the conundrum of reality no longer being able to be identified as something in any way permanent or fixed, and it was with impermanence that the first echoes of eastern philosophy began ringing uncomfortably within the walls of science. Neils Bohr, one of the fathers of quantum theory is famously quoted as saying:

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.  If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it. – Neils Bhor

This sentiment was clearly understood by physicist Henry Stapp who said ‘There is no substantive physical world in the usual sense of this term. The conclusion here is not the weak conclusion that there may not be a substantive physical world, but rather that there definitely is not a substantive physical world.’  Einstein even described reality and an ‘optical delusion of consciousness’ and stated that ‘reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one’.

As eastern philosophy spread into the western world with the influence of figures like Alan Watts and Frijof Capra, author of  The Tao Of Physics (1975), the question began to spread as to whether quantum physicists were in fact observing phenomena with electron microscopes that had already been observed thousands of years before via mediation.  What has been even less known is that the founders of quantum physics were in fact students of the vedic texts, and were not just accidentally observing similarity.  They were looking for it, and found it. Neils Bhor stated that he would ‘go into the Upanishads to ask questions’. Werner Heisenberg shared that ‘quantum theory will not look ridiculous to people who have read Vedanta; and Irwin Schrödinger thought that ‘the unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics.  This is entirely consistent with the Vedanta concept of All in One.’

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop. – Rumi

From Recent History To The Not-Too-Distant Future

In the 90s, ‘dark poet’ comedian Bill Hicks helped awaken a generation with statements like his positive news story: ‘Today a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing ourselves subjectively. There’s no such thing as a death, life is only a dream and we’re the imagination of ourselves… here’s Tom with the weather’, as well as his beautifully inspiring Just A Ride riff. Then, by the end of the 90s we had The Matrix.  Like no piece of media before it, The Matrix was a pop culture breakthrough causing the very question of whether reality is actually real to be considered at least once by the tens of millions of people who have now seen it.

In the years since the turn of the new century, science has gained the courage to openly explore topics like the holographic universe theory, the relationship between consciousness and matter and even the once banned subject of psychedelics as medicines. We may well be witnessing a generational change on the kind of scale that Thomas S Kuhn was referring to when he coined the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ in his seminal 1972 book The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions.

A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. – Max Planck, one of the other fathers of quantum physics

Will this paradigm shift bring a full re-unification of science and spirit? Speaking on behalf of those who seek truth as much from outside the boundaries of rational reductionism as within it, I really hope so.  I know if I was a scientist, I’d have my mind on catching up with the the ideas of Nicola Tesla, (well known to have studied the Vedic texts); a man who like Copernicus, was born at least a hundred years before his time.