Thought
We Need To Build A Real Peace Movement Now!
We need to create a real Peace Movement for our country. We need people who want Peace and who value Peace to collectively and mutually make the commitment to actually achieve Peace.
This is the right time for Peace.
This is the right time for each of us — all of us — to make a strong and explicit commitment to create Peace in our settings and Peace In Our Time. We need to make that commitment to each other, and we need to make that commitment to ourselves understanding exactly what we are committing to in the process.
We can’t make Peace alone. Peace alone is like one hand clapping — possibly well intentioned but not optimal if the goal is to have clapping happen.
The functional reality is that we need to make Peace together. It needs to be a movement, not just an individual effort. Peace will only happen in our communities and settings if we commit to Peace and then learn together both what Peace is, and how to make it happen.
We need to understand together exactly what we need to do to make Peace a reality in our troubled times. Knowledge is power. We need to create the Power that achieves Peace by understanding the process and sharing that knowledge together. When we understand those issues together, we then can work together to make Peace happen.
We need a real Peace Movement. We need true believers to commit explicitly and collectively to Peace and we need those true believers to work together as a movement to make Peace a reality.
We need to create a collective Peace movement made up of caring, ethical, intellectually grounded, cognitively aware, personally accountable, and mutually supportive people who want Peace, and who are willing to do the things both individually and collectively that need to be done to make Peace happen in all of the places where Peace needs to be.
We need people who believe in Peace and who want us all to be at Peace with each other to join a collective and collaborative movement to create, honor, support, celebrate, protect, perpetuate, defend, strengthen, reinforce, and continuously renew and continuously enhance actual Peace in each setting where we achieve Peace.
Peace, in its most essential and purest forms, is a direct, clear, explicit, and personally accountable commitment to loving, caring, nurturing, inclusive, accepting, mutually supportive and mutually protective interpersonal and intergroup behaviors. We need a commitment to Win-Win outcomes for all groups to be an anchor part of that process.
Making an actual explicit commitment to having all groups do well is a key part of creating Peace. Peace will not happen unless people are committed to having all groups do well, and Peace will not happen until committed people work together to do what needs to be done to make that set of outcomes happen.
The default outcome in any intergroup setting where people are not committed to Peace is negative intergroup interactions. Multi-group settings that are not functionally committed to Peace slip far too easily and far too quickly into intergroup distrust, intergroup anger, and into damaging and divisive intergroup thought processes, beliefs, ethical standards, and behaviors.
We can avoid those negative intergroup outcomes in intergroup settings by explicitly committing to Peace. Once we have made that commitment and begin working to help all groups do well, we become empowered at multiple levels to do a wide range of things that can help us achieve that goal. When we make that collective commitment, then we can have a collective focus that can help us to be aligned in our actions and our beliefs.
The commitment to Peace for each of us is a key first step. We all need to make that commitment — and we need to make it in visible, credible and believable ways that let us reinforce, encourage, empower and support each other in the process.
We need a Peace movement that can lead us all to Peace. Each of us who wants Peace needs to be an accountable member of that movement.
People who are part of that explicit movement for Peace need to be aligned in mutually supportive ways to make Peace both happen and prevail in each of our settings. We need to assign a very high priority to Peace as part of that process. When we do it right …
Peace is a calling.
Peace is a mission.
Peace is a vision.
Peace is a commitment.
And Peace is a set of interactive and interlocking mutually supportive behaviors that feed on themselves in nurturing and reinforcing ways to make Peace real and to keep it alive for all of us and for each of us in our ongoing interactions with one another.
Peace needs to be a core belief, a calling and a very real commitment for the people who make up the movement for Peace.
Too often, people in far too many intergroup settings today are in a state of conflict — angry, distrustful, divided, damaged, and too often focused on doing damage at some level to the other people from other groups in their setting.
We need to move past that anger and division.
We need to put those divisive, dysfunctional and damaging behaviors, thought processes, belief systems, and negative interactions behind us. Instead, we need to move together to collectively create a movement for Peace.
We each need to make our own commitment to Peace a fully conscious choice. We each need to be fully aware that it can be a slippery and seductive slope to intergroup division and to intergroup conflict if we do not create Peace in our InterGroup settings.
We need to make that commitment to Peace in each intergroup setting knowing that our instinctive intergroup behaviors and our own sets of us/them related instincts can lead us all far too easily to damaging intergroup interactions — without us even realizing that our most negative and dysfunctional sets of instincts have been activated, and that they have skewed our thinking and our behaviors in dysfunctional and damaging directions.
When we each know at a clear intellectual level what our most negative instincts are, then we can have direct and important control over them. When we understand our instincts and the cultures they create clearly, then we can make explicit and intentional choices to have our instincts and our cultures serve as tools for the enlightened and ethical goals that we can create for ourselves using our intellects. We need our intellects to do that work of setting enlightened goals for us individually and collectively because that is the only way those enlightened goals will be set.
Knowledge is power. We can have power over our instincts, we can have power over our cultures, and we can steer them both to enlightened behaviors when we understand clearly what they both are and how they influence each of us.
We need enlightened behaviors and enlightened interactions that will only happen when we clearly understand those instinctive behaviors, and when we clearly understand the roles our cultures generally play in helping both our negative and positive instincts achieve their goals.
Instead of having our intellects blindly serve our cultures and our instincts, we need to have our cultures and our instincts both under the control of our intellect — and we need to have our intellect make enlightened choices about the values, ethics, moral standards, and belief systems that we will use individually and collectively to run our lives.
That control of our cultures and our instincts by our intellect will only happen when we each understand all of those processes clearly. It will only happen and succeed as a life direction when we very intentionally and explicitly choose to use enlightened, ethical behaviors and enlightened belief systems that allow us each to be directly and intentionally morally accountable for our own lives.
The four instinctive InterGroup interaction books, all explain how that can be done.
It’s long overdue.
We need a Peace Movement — fully informed, well designed, well supported, deeply well intentioned, and very clearly focused to make Peace In Our Time happen.