An Influence of Negative Echoes

 

We really do need to stop being so angry with one another and we all need to understand more clearly that when we are at Peace with each other, our lives will be better today and our future lives will be better still.

Anger is debilitating and destructive. Intergroup anger can be particularly damaging because we tend to suspend conscience and feel no guilt when we do cruel and evil things to people under the influence of our most negative intergroup instincts. We need to move past instinct supported intergroup anger and we need to focus together on living in a world at Peace with itself -- a world where people want other people to prosper and to do well.

Our legacy and long standing intergroup anger in many settings can be very seductive and have its very direct and powerful pull on our thoughts and behaviors. People often feel drawn at a very visceral level to the emotional surges and direct energy flow that can be too easily activated by being angry at another group. It can feel right, very easily to both feel anger and to do damaging things to people from other groups when those sets of instincts are giving us the energy levels and the emotional contexts for our thoughts and behaviors.  

That is a set of instinctive feelings that we need to both de-activate and avoid. We need to very deliberately delineate, discern, detect, define, recognize, and understand our existing intergroup anger levels when that instinct-linked intergroup anger exists  and we need to very intentionally defuse that anger where it creates our context for behaviors and when it is directed in a negative and damaging way toward other groups of people. The Art of InterGroup Peace and Primal Pathways both teach us very clearly that we need to work very hard never to have those instincts and perceptions activated in any setting and that we need to work very hard and very quickly to deactivate those instincts when they are affecting our emotions, behaviors and thought processes in any setting.  

We can each have our basic thought processes influenced in any setting by our cultures or by our instincts or by our intellect. We each use all three of those basic thought processes to steer our lives. For matters of deep ethical and moral importance, we need to choose to put our intellect in charge and we need to avoid having our emotions or our more negative cultural guidances in gear and making key decisions for us.     

When we have our lives run by our intellect and not by our emotions, then a range of positive and accountable basic choices about rational and ethical intergroup interactions can be more easily made. Until we put our intellect in charge, we are far too often sadly at the mercy of our more negative instincts and we can find ourselves under the sometimes unseen but deeply felt influence of the negative echoes of very primal intergroup instincts that our cultures can give us as their desired sets of behaviors and their preferred thought processes.  

We can rise above that entire package of negative instinctive behaviors if we choose to look at those perceptions and behaviors in intellectually enlightened ways and then make conscious decisions to treat and perceive other people in an inclusive way as "Us" rather than perceiving them in a divisive and negative way to be "Them".  

The Art of InterGroup Peace gives us half a dozen very easy to use and consistently effective triggers we can use to help create the needed levels of alignment as an us in any setting. We all need to know what those tools are and we all need to use them well in the spirit and interest and cause of intergroup Peace.