The Art of InterGroup Peace (Third Edition)

Preface

Preface — We Need A Strategy and a Commitment to Help Create and Maintain Inter Group Peace In America

We live in hard times. We have groups of people in our country who are angry with other groups of people at some very basic levels. People are angry with other people at a clearly inter group level, and people are doing negative things to one another individually and in groups in the context of that anger.

Introduction

Introduction — The Art of Peace

We need to be skilled at creating Peace.

We live in a deeply conflicted world. There are more than 200 current ethnic conflicts today in countries around the world — settings where people are damaging each other and killing one another in purely inter group conflicts.

Chapter One

Chapter One — We Need To Be Skilled At The Art Of Peace

Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, declared that the study of war and the skills needed to conduct and win a war were of “vital interest” to the state and should be a top priority for leaders in every conflicted setting.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two — Our Us/Them Instincts Can Make Peace Both Very Difficult And Possible

To create intergroup Peace in America and to protect, maintain, and perpetuate intergroup Peace in America, we need to understand and make skillful and strategic use of the basic sets of instincts that we have to divide the world into Us and Them, and then to act in very different ways toward people depending on the category of us or them that we perceive people to be in.

Chapter Three

Chapter Three — We Need To Avoid Having Any Part Of Us Be Them

If we want to succeed at The Art of Intergroup Peace — and if we really do want to create a culture of inclusion and mutual success for all groups in America, we need to be very sure not to activate any sets of instincts that cause us to perceive any segment of the population to be “Them.”

Chapter Four

Chapter Four — Turf, Traitor, Riot, And Alpha Instincts Can All Have Huge Impact On InterGroup Interactions

Our us/them instincts are not the only package of instincts that affect Intergroup interactions and Peace. We have instincts to create hierarchies and to designate Alpha leaders — with their own set of instincts — to run our hierarchies. 

Chapter Five

Chapter Five — Our Cultures Can Be Used As Anchors For Peace Or As Triggers For Conflict

We need a culture of Peace for America.

We also need a culture of inclusion and a culture of equal opportunity.

We need a culture that celebrates freedom at its most basic levels — including freedom of speech, freedom of beliefs, and freedom of religion

Chapter Six

Chapter Six — We Can Build And Shape Our Cultures To Meet Our Needs

We can make choices about how to use our cultures as tools to achieve our goals and to make our most enlightened beliefs and behaviors a functional reality.

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven — Learning About Peace And Conflict From Other Multi-Ethnic Countries

The us/them instinct packages that have shaped so much of the history of our country can be seen in painful clarity in every other multi-ethnic and multi-tribal country in the world.

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight — Six Steps to Use to Create Alignment

People who want to create Peace and internal alignment in almost any setting can use a very basic set of clearly understandable tools to do that work.

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine — Basic Organizational Models For InterGroup Interactions

There are a number of ways that groups can interact with one another.

People can interact in stress and conflict - and people can interact in Peaceful alignment.

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten — We Need Win/Win Commitments For All Groups to Sustain Intergroup Peace In America

We need to anchor Peace for America on the concept and the goal of win/win results for all of the groups of people who make up the rich and diverse fabric of America. That commitment and that achievement will be the key to our success. 

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven — We Need To Support Every Child And We Need To Improve Our Health Together

To create a win/win culture for America, we need to have some obvious areas where everyone wins.

The proof of the concept and the proof of the commitment needs to be areas of importance where wins for everyone are possible and actually occur.

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve — Our Us/Them Instincts Have Created Much Of Our History

To create a culture of Intergroup Peace for America, we need to begin by understand exactly how we are doing today relative to Peace between the various groups in this country. 

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen — Our History Included Inventing “White” And Using “White” To Discriminate

Our country has a long history that has been massively affected in both positive and negative ways by our us/them intergroup instincts. The impact of those instincts stretches back — without interruption — to the dawn of our history. 

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen — The Art of Peace For America Needs to Turn Our Instincts Into Assets And Give Us The Tools We Need To Defeat Our Common Foes

The goal for of The Art of Intergroup Peace strategy for our country is to make key realities about our growing diversity into assets, benefits, and pathways to prosperity, safety, and intergroup Peace.

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen — Threats, Challenges, And Risks To Peace

It is important to protect Peace once Peace has been achieved in any setting. Peace can be fragile — and if Peace is created and lost in any setting, the events and the situations that can cause Peace to be then lost can make it much harder to regain Peace in the future in that setting.

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen — Multiple Issues Create The Stress And Anger That Triggers The Explosions

Anyone who wants to either believe or pretend to believe that significant, meaningful, and relevant racial and intergroup stress points do not exist in this country today, is having that belief crushed by very visible and clear instances of collective intergroup anger that have happened recently in several American cities.

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen — The American Dream And Our Core Values Can Unite Us All And Create Peace

We can achieve a culture of Peace for America.

We can — if we come together to be a people united by our values and our core beliefs — create an America that succeeds and thrives going into the challenging years that lie ahead.