Tribilization
We are at high risk of tribalizing as a country, and doing very negative and damaging things to one another in the context of our basic sets of inter group instincts.
Those behaviors that put us at high risk of being damaged will be rooted in the purely instinctive need we each have at a very basic level to be part of an Us.
We all feel the need to be part of an Us. We each need to have a group identity that we feel both defines us and includes and accepts us as a member of the group and we are very unhappy if we do not have that kind of group alignment in our lives.
If we do not have a sense of being included in an Us of some kind in at least one significant part of our life, we generally feel unpleasant levels of stress, unhappiness, uncertainty, isolation, exposure, and personal vulnerability and individual risk.
We often are very unhappy about being surrounded by people who we feel are not Us. We tend to experience various levels of anxiety, distress and even fear when we are surrounded by people who are not Us or when we feel that we are either under their power or at risk of being damaged by people who are not Us.
We need to be part of a group identity for our Peace of mind and we tend to prefer being in settings with other members of our group.
We are each happier when we wake up in the morning with a sense that we are part of an Us that is on our side on key issues and that will defend us and protect our group if we need to be defended.
Being defended is a highly relevant and legitimate need for people today. We live in a dangerous world where people with instincts activated that might harm us definitely do exist and the unfortunate reality is that those dangerous people can actually put us at risk in a number of ways.
That reality that bad and dangerous people do exist increases our sense that we need to have an Us identity and Us alignment that is relevant to our world and to our life and that we each need to act in ways that will help our Us succeed, prosper, thrive and survive so that we will succeed as well as part of that overall reality.
Those Us/Them instincts need to be understood by each of us because they have such a huge impact on our lives. Our group tends to define us — and it triggers a clear sense of obligations that cause Loyalty instincts to be relevant parts of our thoughts and emotions.
One of the component parts that tends to be part of our sense of Us and a key part of the set of behaviors we generally generate relative to our own Us is the very clear and often very strong feeling that we should each support, protect, defend, and be loyal to our Us group.
We each tend to feel that we are doing a very right thing when we defend and protect our Us and we tend to feel that we are doing what we should be doing when we are personally loyal to whomever we define and believe to be our Us.
Loyalty Is Instinctive Behavior
Loyalty is a powerful instinctive behavior and expectation.
We each have strong instincts to be loyal to our own group and to our own people, and that is tied to whatever approach we use to define our own people and our own group.
Cultural loyalty is part of that basic package. We tend to feel right being loyal to our culture, and we tend to expect other members of our group to share that sense of cultural loyalty.
We each tend to be loyal to our group and to the culture of our group--and we each tend to reject, condemn, punish and even damage anyone who we believe is either a traitor to our Us or is a direct internal disloyal threat to our Us.
We All Hate and Reject Traitors
We all hate traitors.
We despise and detest traitors
Many groups in the world execute traitors and often do it in painful ways.
People perceived to be heretics in many religious settings over the centuries have been killed in sometimes very horrible and very public ways for simply changing their beliefs in some way that causes other people to perceive them to be a traitor to their group. Some religious groups execute traitors today and some cultures make the executions of traitors an intentionally very visible event.
Traitors in times of war tend to be executed on the spot for being a traitor and the people in those war settings tend not to question the execution at any level.
We all feel a strong need and desire at a deep instinctive level to never personally be a traitor. We are highly likely to feel terrible when someone calls us a traitor to our group and we find it very unpleasant and even painful when we believe that they believe that accusation about us to be true.
We tend to feel noble and empowered and even energized at a core level when we support, protect, defend and are actively loyal to our us — and we tend to feel both justified and compelled to oppose, punish, and even damage anyone who we believe is a traitor to our Us.
Those sets of powerful instincts are all very relevant to us as we try to create intergroup Peace in America.
Those sets of feelings and behaviors about both hating traitors and not wanting to ever be a traitor can make it very hard in many settings for people to reach out to befriend or even interact on a non hostile personal level with anyone who we feel is not a member of whoever we define to be our core group for that setting.
It can be very hard to create an intergroup dialogue or any intergroup communication connection or link with other people when people in our own group call us a traitor for even making the attempt or for trying to create or build a connection of some kind.
Our World is Better When Our Own Us is Safe
Those instincts that we all have to protect and defend our Us and to be loyal to our Us are actually very good feelings and both good and right behaviors for us to each have at one important level because our world can be better in important ways for each of us when our Us is safe and our world is better when whoever we feel is our Us is secure and when our Us group does well in whatever they are doing.
It can be a very good thing for each of us when the Us that we are part of prospers and thrives. It is a generally a very good thing when the people we love and cherish as our own people are safe and secure and successful.
It is a good thing when the people who we feel loyal to benefit from that loyalty and it also generally feels very good when that set of people perceives us to be loyal to them and recognizes and appreciates our loyalty.
It is a very good thing for us when the homes and the areas that are owned and possessed by the people we love and who we include in our group are protected and safe and that level of safety is more likely to happen for those settings when loyal people defend them.
Our Turf Instincts Also Help Protect Our Us in Many Settings
Our turf instincts are strong and clear — and those instincts can cause us to focus in very direct and emotionally supported ways on both property and turf.
We all have very deep-seated territorial and turf instincts that cause us to identify our own turf and the turf of our family and our group as being rightfully and legitimately our turf. Those instincts that link groups to turf trigger layers of turf protection emotions, thought processes, belief systems, and behaviors that have a massive influence on our behaviors, values, actions, and beliefs.
When two sets of people feel they each have a rightful claim to the same piece of turf, the dueling turf related instincts of those groups tend to take on extremely negative energy and that conflict and disagreement about ownership issues triggers a level of intergroup anger and even rage that is seldom resolved by anything other than the demise of either the people or the relevant groups for that setting.
People who feel that their group is the legitimate owner at an instinct supported belief level of a piece of turf have a strong likelihood of holding on to that sense of legitimate ownership for as long as their group exists and chooses to continue to hold that belief.
We expect members of our own group to share our loyalty to both our group and to the turf and the physical areas that we believe are part of our group identity and destiny.
Instincts are key to that process and to both those behaviors and those beliefs.
Those beliefs about turf, group loyalty, and hating traitors all feel entirely right to us because they have instincts at their core and because we embed them in the cultures we create for our groups.
Our cultures that we build for our groups create beliefs, rules and expectations that reinforce those behaviors, emotions, and thought processes in every setting — and we each instinctively tend to feel right when we are acting in accord with the culture that has been created for our group for each setting.
We Need to Understand and Control Our Instinctive Behaviors
Instincts guide major areas of our lives and we will not be in full control of our lives until we understand exactly how that process works for us all, both individually and in our groups.
We each need to know and understand our instinctive behaviors if we want to have personal and cognitive control over our lives, our cultures, our emotions, our values, and our future interactions with the world we are in.
We all need to understand at the most basic level that our core instincts shape our thoughts, beliefs, emotions and lives every day of our life.
We all need to understand that we feel strong emotional connections between our behaviors and the instincts that are relevant to us in each setting and each situation and that we will only be able to take enlightened and intentional intellectual control over our behaviors if we understand those instincts and then decide how to use them to our advantage in each setting.
We need our instincts to be our tools and we should not have us all simply function as the tools of our instincts.
To do that, we need to have a sense of how our instincts work and how they direct our thoughts and behaviors.
We need to understand for those issues that any behavior that aligns with one or more of our instincts tends to feel right to us — and any behavior that contradicts or opposes one or more instincts tends to create stress, anxiety, discomfort, unhappiness, and a feeling that the behavior is probably somehow wrong.
We Are Not Alone in Having Our Major Instincts Steer Our Lives
We are not alone in having important sets of key instincts channel, incent, script, and sculpture our lives. We have some obvious instinct choreographed behavior patterns as people that are as predicable and as scripted at key levels as the behaviors of lion prides, chimpanzee clans, and packs of wolves.
We have many people whose Alpha instincts are activated at a group level. The patterns of several basic behaviors for our alpha activated leaders appear and feel as natural to us and to our leaders as the behaviors, expectations, and even emotions and behavior patterns that exist for the leaders and the members of each herd of horses, pride of lions or pack of wolves.
We know who is in our pack and who is not in our pack. We tend to know who our leaders are in every setting, and we tend to feel loyalty to our own pack and to our own group leader in each situation where those alignments are triggered.
We have layers of maternal, paternal, hierarchical, and behavioral instincts that feel entirely right to us in each setting because they help define for each of us who we are at a core level and because we feel right acting in accord with those core instinctive needs, emotions, values and thought processes.
One of our most useful instincts is to build cultures. We build cultures in every setting and every group to achieve the goals of our instincts in each setting and group.
We very consistently build cultures — and those cultures create rules, roles, expectations and guidance for how we activate and achieve our hierarchical behaviors, turf behaviors, and sense of group loyalty and group alignment in each setting.
We tend to act in the directions each key instinct defines for us in our cultures both blindly and with enthusiasm and with a sense of righteous empowerment, entitlement and emotional enablement for many of those behaviors because each of those instincts and cultural behavioral directions is set up to generate those emotions and trigger those responses in our hearts and minds.
When we learn what those particular packages of instincts are, it becomes extremely clear that our intergroup instincts have shaped our history since the dawn of time. It is also clear that those sets of instincts will continue to shape history for as long as people exist — because our instincts are a permanent part of who we each are and because the core sets of instincts give us the template and the context for interacting as people and as groups of people with whatever situation we are in.
Our history in every setting is the story of how our group behavior instincts, our territorial instincts, our hierarchical instincts, and our tribal instincts interact with the environments and the situations where we find ourselves at any point in time.
History is Easy to Understand and Predict — it Repeats Itself and Rhymes
Once you understand those basic instincts and how they impact our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions, major components of history are fairly easy to understand and even relatively easy to predict.
History both repeats itself and rhymes because human history is the story of our basic instincts interacting with the environments and the situations we are in and the patterns of behaviors that result for both individuals and groups from those basic and consistent factors are pretty basic and consistent in all settings.
The opportunity that we have right now as a people and a country is to clearly understand those full sets of instincts for the first time at both an intellectual and process engineering level and to use our intellect in very intentional ways to make fully informed decisions about how to steer those basic sets of instincts into enlightened and strategically adept behaviors that will give our grandchildren a chance to prosper, succeed, and even survive the world of intense diversity that they will be facing for their entire lives.
We can create a different and better future history for us as a nation if we decide now that we are going to achieve that goal. History on those issues will be what we make it.
What we make it is extremely important because the cold truth is that our grandchildren are now at significant risk and their lives will be damaged if we do wrong things now with our inter group instincts and behaviors.
We Are On a Direct Path to Being Just Another Multi-Tribal Nation at War With Itself
We are on a direct path today to being just another multi-tribal nation at war with itself and our grandchildren will have hellish, ugly and damaged lives if we allow that future to happen.
It is a very slippery slope from where we are now as a nation to some very bad places.
It can feel very right to far too many people to fall away from our national identity as Americans and to simply tribalize in various ways and then to act in all of the negative intergroup instinctive patterns that we have built into who we are along very dangerous and very dysfunctional tribal lines.
Highly skilled people in various groups in this country with their own Alpha instincts fully activated who know how to use those patterns of instincts to cause us to fight with one another are using them now in a number of very effective ways to achieve that goal of us being at war with ourselves.
Instead of creating a great and wonderfully successful and extremely prosperous, mutually supportive, highly diverse multi group nation that is anchored jointly on our diversity and on our shared beliefs, we can very easily turn into just another country of divided and angry groups of people hating one another, distrusting and resenting one another, and doing damage to one another today in various ways that will create long term division and perpetually self reinforcing intergroup conflict, intergroup dysfunctionality and intergroup anger at very destructive levels in many areas of our country.
It would be very sad for the entire world and it would be horrible for our own children and our own grandchildren if we now create a world of intergroup hatred for them that will turn our country in badly damaged ways into what we see now in so many other tribalized countries in the world.
We should be very afraid of the power of those instincts to shape what we think and who we are.
Those instincts have huge power when then are activated, and they can shape emotions, behaviors, values and thinking at extremely dangerous levels when they are in gear.
We need to be absolutely honest with ourselves about what those instincts actually do to other people in the world we live in today when they are triggered and supported by the people who lead groups in each setting and when the people who lead each group choose to cause people to be in conflict with one another.
This is not a theoretical concern.
Look at the ugly proof points we see in multiple settings in the world today for the power of those most negative and dangerous instinctive intergroup behaviors when they are activated in any setting.
Gaza Proves That Our InterGroup Instincts Are Far Too Real
Gaza proves that point. That package of ugly and destructive inter group instinctive behavior is happening today at a very clear, obvious, and undeniable level in that setting.
The people in conflict at Gaza are massively and clearly immersed in the consequences of very primal, negative and direct intergroup instincts that are playing out today in very damaging ways in that setting. People are being damaged on all sides in Gaza in behaviors that will not be resolved as long as those instincts create the emotions, thought processes and values of the people interacting with one another in that setting.
Sri Lanka is doing the exact same thing with intergroup instincts for their people. Damage is being done and the people who are doing the damage feel that they are supporting their Us and only hurting a dehumanized and inconsequential Them.
Myanmar has those same sets of intergroup instincts fully activated at cruel and even evil levels. We have seen religious leaders with those packages of instinctive interactions driving their beliefs and behaviors in that setting as a pure proof point for how much those instincts can shape our thoughts and behaviors when they are activated.
Parts of Syria are doing bloody and very intentional ethnic intergroup cleansing. Tribes with those instincts in gear are killing people from other tribes in Syria with horrible weapons aimed at killing and damaging civilians in large numbers because the goal is to make the civilians from those other groups in those cities move to other parts of the world to open those spaces and settings to be occupied by the groups that the people dropping the bombs consider to be Us.
The Sudanese are doing evil things at the group level to people from other groups and their intergroup instincts are also very clearly making terrible behaviors feel acceptable to the people doing them.
Those same patterns of instinctive intergroup behavior are happening in many intergroup settings today and they all look alike because the same sets of underlying instincts structure and guide the behaviors in each intergroup setting.
The horrors that are happening to people in all of those settings only make sense when you recognize that those intergroup instincts have been triggered for people in all of those settings and those instincts are shaping both their values and their emotions at very clear levels.
Even The Ukraine has clear and obvious intergroup and tribal divisions that shape the behaviors of people who are killing one another in that setting.
History everywhere on the planet — and current events that we can see easily in more than a hundred other intergroup settings today — are all irrefutable, uncontestable, undeniable and terrible proof points for instinctive intergroup behaviors that are a very real part of the world we are living in today.
Alpha Leaders With Those Instincts Activated Are Hurting People In Many InterGroup Settings
People have those instincts wherever people exist and every intergroup setting is at permanent risk of having those instincts triggered by events, circumstances, incidents or by leaders of groups in those settings who have their own alpha instincts to do intergroup combat in gear in their heads because those sets of instincts are always with us and because leaders in many settings both gain power and have a sense of achieving their group leadership functions by doing damage to other groups.
We all need to understand how much damage some people can do when their Alpha instincts are activated in the most evil and destructive ways.
Those intergroup instincts that we all share can do real damage when they are allowed to go to their most evil manifestations in any setting at the intergroup and interpersonal levels.
People feel absolutely no guilt in damaging other people in those settings because we suspend both ethics and guilt when those sets of intergroup instincts are activated and when we have achieved a sense of anger and intergroup hatred relative to the other party in each setting that causes us to want to do those behaviors to Them.
We Americans need to know at a very basic level what those intergroup behaviors and intergroup instincts are. We also need to know exactly what those instincts can do.
We need to have the awareness of those behaviors and we all need to know and understand how seductive and powerful those intergroup instincts can be when people who want to activate them are kicking them into gear in any intergroup setting because we do have some intergroup situations in America that can take us down those same paths if we allow that to happen.
Some Settings Are Peaceful for Years and Then Explode Because their Underlying Reality Was Always Problematic
Kosovo was peaceful for years, and then evil intergroup behavior and both real and perceived damage to people at an intergroup level happened very quickly and that situation exploded with a high level of energy when those intergroup instincts were triggered in that setting.
The Hutu and Tutsi had a similar history. People who were not aware of any active intergroup anger experienced a few events that activated those instincts and that activation quickly triggered local genocide in that setting at massive and ugly levels.
Likewise, with those same intergroup instincts activated, the Rohingya in Myanmar found themselves being slaughtered last year on the land that they had lived on peacefully for centuries. They were purged as a group from their villages and lands in very clear ethnic cleansing with those intergroup instincts channeling and directing that behavior.
A Nobel Peace Prize winning leader of the parent country did not condemn the purging because she seemed to feel that the Rohingya are a Them to her today and that they somehow deserve to be treated in those ugly and damaging ways because of their behavior at some level.
The majority tribe military in that country has those instincts fully activated and they are currently doing real damage to other minority tribes in their world who are vulnerable to their power as well. Ethnic cleansing seems to be addictive in some settings.
Those intergroup instincts can cloud the very best minds and they can turn paragons of ethical behavior into primal intergroup evil when they have been triggered.
Those intergroup thought processes are very dangerous to us all whenever they are activated.
Those instincts exist in each one of us and that includes all of us who are Americans, today. We need to understand that reality and we need to deal with it in enlightened and effective ways.
The thing that we need to do now very intentionally in our own increasingly diverse country is to use the best instincts that we all have in our favor and to very carefully avoid activating the worst and most dangerous intergroup instincts that could damage us as a country and an American people for decades and even centuries to come.
We Need to Not Activate the Worst of Those InterGroup Instincts Here
We should be very honest with ourselves about the risks we face today. We should all know that we are at a very high risk of activating those same destructive and highly seductive inter group instincts in our country and we are also at high risk of having those sets of inter group instincts define, create and shape our future as a people and as a nation.
That risk of us going down those same ugly intergroup paths as those other multi tribal nations with those same very dangerous intergroup instincts guiding what we Americans think and shaping what we Americans do in a number of extremely important areas is very real and we need to be honest with ourselves and with each other about how real that risk is.
We have some leaders for a number of groups in our country who feel strongly that we should go down those same negative, instinct supported paths for their groups. It feels very right to people to be in alignment with their leaders when those sets of instincts are being activated at the group level and we find it very easy to do negative things when our leaders have those instincts in gear.
People with their alpha instincts activated often work hard to protect their own group — and that can be a good thing for groups because groups benefit from being protected. But those same sets of instincts can create major conflicts when alpha leaders of various groups feel a need to protect their own groups in ways that can damage other groups and when the leaders of groups who have their personal Alpha instincts in gear discover that their own support levels from their own followers can significantly increase when intergroup conflict is real and happening to their group.
InterGroup conflict in those situations can have real appeal at a self-reinforcing and even addictive emotional level to far too many people. People who have those instincts activated and who are doing things together to hurt other people can feel a sense of group support, alignment, and team energy when group loyalty is activated and when collective group behaviors are aimed together in emotionally self-reinforcing ways at defeating the other group.
That set of intergroup interactions and intergroup thought processes can be a very slippery slope. It is not a slippery slope that we should go down.
Let’s Rise to the Best Behaviors That Our Instincts Support and Sustain
Let’s make a different decision as communities and as a nation about how our groups should interact with one another. We need to recognize the necessity of dealing with our instincts, because we can never exclude them from who we are and what we do, and we should build on our very best instinct elements to expand our sense of Us rather than being divided as a country into warring Thems.
Let’s rise above the worst and most damaging pathways that are created by our most negative instincts and let’s rise together to the very best pathways and the very best values and behaviors that our instincts can create.
That can be done if we truly want Peace and success as a country — and that can be done if enough of us who really want Peace actually learn at an intellectual level exactly what our instincts do for us and do to us in our lives and then use that knowledge about our instinctive behaviors in enlightened and intentional ways to create Peace.
The need is simple and the plan is clear.
We need to use our instincts to help structure, build and protect Peace and we need to do it in intentional and intellectually grounded ways.
This Website and These Books Are Created to Support InterGroup Peace
Check out this website for thoughts on how we can do exactly that and how we can bring Peace to our country instead of going down the seductive, slippery, emotionally addictive and far too easy to follow pathway into intertribal war.
The InterGroup Understanding books and the Truth and Peace thought pieces that are included and presented in this website are set up to support and sustain intergroup Peace in instinct supported ways and to teach and explain exactly what our instincts do in each of those areas.
Check out the thought pieces in this website on those issues.
This website is also set up to give direct and easy electronic access to the key books about InterGroup interactions that give us basic information about those issues.
You can read chapters in each book by pulling up the table of contents link for each book and then going to the chapters that strike your interest.
The InterGroup books can also all be ordered in hard copy from the website. Amazon can do almost next day delivery on each of the books.
For ease and convenience for each reader, the website is set up to give electronic access to each of the books by chapter and allows for easy electronic sharing of the chapters, books and relevant thought pieces with anyone who might benefit from reading them.
Key topics about instinctive behavior are covered in both the books and the website.
Primal Pathways explains instinctive behaviors. Cusp of Chaos explains how screwed up we are in many countries as the result of instinctive behaviors. The Art of InterGroup Peace explains very specific things we can do to help create Peace in various setting.
Peace in Our Time explains how those tools have worked in a number of real world settings and explains why these books were written.
Three Key Years explains how we can do important things to have a major positive impact on kids and to do very real things to keep minority Americans from going to jail.
For specific information about our Us/Them instincts, go to Chapter Two of the Primal Pathways book, Chapter Two of the Cusp of Chaos book, Chapter Two of The Art of InterGroup Peace book, and Chapter Six of the Peace in Our Time book.
That topic is covered in several of the website thought pieces as well.
For information about our tribal instincts and behaviors, go to Addendum Two about tribes in the Primal Pathways book, Chapter Three about chaos in the Cusp of Chaos book, and the two blogs on Ethnic Cleansing by Tribe in Syria and how Tribal Behavior can Damage us Badly.
All of those pieces are helpful in explaining why we have nearly two hundred tribal wars happening in the world today and what people in those settings need to do if they want to create Peace instead of conflict.
For information about the role of cultures in channeling and achieving our instincts, go to Chapter Four in Primal Pathways, Chapter Ten in Cusp of Chaos, Chapters Five and Six from The Art of InterGroup Peace, and Chapter Nine in Peace in Our Time.
Our instincts use our cultures to achieve their goals. Every setting has a hierarchy defined by the culture because we have hierarchical instincts that we feel a need to achieve in every setting.
Every culture explains how to define ownership of turf and property in that setting, because we have ownership and turf instincts that need to be supported in each setting.
The culture pieces of the books and website also teach us how to use our cultures to support enlightened behaviors. We have a strong sense of loyalty to our cultures — and the InterGroup books are set up to help embed values in our cultures that will create win-win outcomes for all groups.
We Need Win-Win Solutions and Strategies and Commitments for America
The books and website also explain how to create win-win situations in each setting. One of the first thought pieces in the blog sequence dealt with win-win strategies for Peace.
Improving the health of our population and improving the intellectual and learning success for our children is a win-win agenda that could help us all succeed. That approach is explained in Chapter Eleven of The Art of InterGroup Peace book.
For information about how our instincts are creating intergroup conflict today in both our own country and in the world around us, go to the Introduction for Primal Pathways, Chapter Three and Eight in Cusp of Chaos, Chapter Seven in The Art of InterGroup Peace, and the blogs about Syria and Tribal Behavior on this website.
Also go to the most recent thought piece on Truth and the two most recent thought pieces on Peace on the website.
This website calls for both a Peace Movement and a Truth Movement for America to help us with intergroup Peace in the immediate future.
We Need to Use All Six Alignment Triggers Well
One of the things that we need to understand is how to use the six basic alignment triggers that are supported by our instincts to create a sense of alignment in any setting.
The basic alignment pyramid looks a lot like the famous Maslow Hierarchy of Needs — but has a direct application for groups of people rather than individuals.
People can be brought together to form a level of Us in any setting if there is a sense of danger, common enemy, team functionality, group identity, common gain, or loyalty to either a belief or a leader.
Each of the six alignment trigger steps works alone, and they work even better when they are used in packages. Chapter Eleven in Primal Pathways, Chapter Eight in The Art of InterGroup Peace, and Chapters Seven and Eight in Peace in Our Time teach those triggers and explain how they have been used to bring people together in various settings.
All of the books describe situations in real settings where these instincts are relevant and real. They also point to ways that we can make our world better by using the intergroup Peace tool kit.
For information about how well we can do in setting where we are channeling our cultures and our instincts to create intergroup Peace, go to Chapter Eighteen in Primal Pathways, and the first four Chapters of Peace In Our Time.
Also, for ways of applying these approaches in the real world, look at the thought piece in the website on Police Departments needing to make Win-Win commitments and read the piece on no longer putting so many minority Americans in jail.
We imprison far too many of our people — and the people from every group who are most likely to go to jail are the people who drop out of school. The people who have fallen behind by age three are far more likely to drop out of school.
The ThreeKeyYears.org website was created to help keep newborn kids from dropping out of school. Share it with every new parent in your life.
The Three Key Years book also teaches that science and those approaches — and the website blog on what we need to do to save children in America today by helping in those first years should be read by everyone who cares about the future of American children.
We also need to do a much better jobs on intergroup issues when the relevant groups are either gender groups or gender preference groups.
For needed and painfully direct and clear information about the terrible and damaging things we do to women in ways that have deeply aligned instinctive underpinnings, please go to the current website piece on our need to stop damaging women, to the piece on this website on the historical oppression of women, and go to the Primal Pathways book addendum on Gender Roles, and also read both Chapter Ten and Eleven in the Peace in our Time book about discrimination against women.
We need to understand all of those gender related behaviors if we want to create true opportunity and inclusion for us all.
Some levels of instinctive behavior on some of those gender related issues needs to be looked at with open eyes and an open mind. Look carefully at the website piece on those behaviors. In some very ugly settings in the world where laws against rape are not enforced, we have a couple of countries today where more than half of the women report being raped in their lifetime.
We need our cultures in every setting to protect us all against violence, sexual assault, theft, incursions, and multiple levels of damaging behaviors that people can far too easily default to when the constraints of laws and cultures do not channel behaviors and beliefs in those settings.
We need our cultures to protect us all — and we should work hard to identify the enlightened behaviors that our cultures should expect, enforce, and empower for us all.
We Need Shared Values That Enlighten and Align Us All
We need to be a nation united by our values and not divided by race, ethnicity, or any other differentiating factor other than what we all accept as our core values and beliefs.
The InterGroup books have a couple of chapters that outline the core beliefs we share today and that recommend that we continue to be united by those beliefs going forward as a country.
Chapter Seventeen in The Art of InterGroup Peace outlines those values — and explains why Democracy, Freedom of Religion and Speech, and Rule of Law rather than Rule of Men and a set of other related traditional American values should unite us by us making a shared and explicit commitment to those beliefs.
Chapter Eighteen in Primal Pathways describes and explains those same ten core beliefs. They are basically the underlying values we share now as a country — but those two books put those traditional and legacy American values in a package rather than having them stand as stand alone beliefs.
We need a national dialogue now on whether or not these are, in fact, our shared core beliefs and whether or not we should renew our commitment to those values.
That could be done by people on the Internet — and these books and this website invite that process of values clarification to begin.
As an interim step, the recommendation is that we use these beliefs as outlined explicitly in those two chapters of these books as a working model for what we can continue to believe until we develop a better set of values.
All of that information in those books and on those websites is intended to give us the intellectual understanding and functional tool kit that we need to use to have our instincts serve us in the creation of Peace rather than having us simply be the unwitting tools of our instincts and cultures in ways that cause us to do wrong, evil, damaging and dysfunctional things to each other in our increasingly diverse world.
We are on a path to major intergroup conflict in America today. Anger defines the interaction between multiple groups today. That anger is deepening and getting worse in many settings.
We do not need to have that growing levels of conflict happen and we really can’t afford to have that happen because we will be damaged so badly if that is the future we allow to happen.
We do not need to end up at war with ourselves.
We can and should create intergroup Peace in America.
That intergroup Peace will only happen for Us if we understand exactly what we are doing and then do the right things to make intergroup Peace happen.
The alternatives are horrible. The alternatives are ugly and grim.
Our Grandchildren Are at Serious Risk Now
The very real and highly likely alternatives that we face today are for us to be a multi tribal nation at war with ourselves and for us to have a future where far too many of our grandchildren will need to be personally armed or guarded by armed people to simply survive and be safe in their own communities and homes.
We already have communities in our country where people from specific groups are at actual physical risk if they find themselves alone in those settings. Intergroup anger is damaging people now and the number of communities where that will be true will expand as our intergroup anger continues to grow if we do nothing to keep that from happening.
It is a very slippery slope to those most emotionally powerful, dangerous, and damaging intergroup interactions.
Sri Lanka is killing people today. Sudan and Syria are killing people today. Kenya and Fiji and Myanmar Sudan have people killing people from other groups today.
We have people in our own country who are feeling deep anger and even hatred for other groups of people today, and what anger will not disappear just because we wish it did not exist. It will grow if we do not address it in very direct and effective ways.
Peace in our time.
Let’s make intergroup Peace happen for us as Americans with a shared vision of who we are because the alternatives to intergroup Peace are so real and so grim and because the results of intergroup Peace can be so wonderful and so exceptional for us all.
We can continue to be the place on the planet that other people wish they were part of because we are doing so many good things for so many people so well and because we are doing it with respect, love, support, and clear intentions and extreme competence.
Let’s start now down that path by sharing this information in these books and on these websites with everyone who should understand these issues.
Please. Pass this website and these books on to people who we need to be in favor of Peace and who need to understand how we can use instinctive behaviors to create that Peace.
Explain the issues and help people you care about who care about America and about us as a people to understand the mess we will be in very soon if we do not get their right.
Knowledge is power.
We need that power and we need it now. We need to be an American People committed to our mutual success who is using real tools that will help that success happen.
Power to the People.
Power to the American Us.
This is the right time for us to do the right thing and to keep us all from doing some very bad things to ourselves and each other that we will deeply regret.
Let’s choose sanity and let’s let other people function as primal, instinct-sculpted tribes hurting each other and feeling instinctive satisfaction from their mutual pain.
We get to choose. Let’s choose well.