You write, "We’re now the greatest threat to our own survival."
This is a common way of defining the threat, but it is an imprecise articulation in need of updating.
"WE" are not the greatest threat to our own survival. VIOLENT MEN are the greatest threat to our survival. The primary threat arises from a well documented, easily identified, small percent of the human race. This is very useful information as it allows us to clearly identify the source of problem and aim solutions at a specific target. We don't need to change the entire human race, we need only to change a crucial small subset of the human race.
The primary obstacle in the way of achieving what might be called "world peace" is that we don't want world peace, and we lie to ourselves about that. We may wish for world peace in the vaguest possible manner, but at the moment that anyone proposes any plan which is ambitious enough to have any hope of solving the problem, we immediately shift all our intelligence and energy in to making arguments against that plan.
That is, we want a radically different situation that could avoid calamity and preserve the modern world, but we don't want to change the status quo in any meaningful way. Put more simply, we want world peace, but we don't want to pay for it.
What I've learned is that there's really no point in discussing any specific world peace proposal until we are willing to consciously accept that whatever an effective plan for dealing with violent men might be, we're not going to like it. If there was a world peace plan that was "reasonable" and "realistic" and capable of being widely accepted by the status quo, we'd already have world peace.
This may be almost the only topic really worth talking about because if we don't meet the challenge presented by violent men, everything else we may accomplish is likely to be sooner or later swept away in a tsunami of game over chaos.
I don’t agree with this, Phil. Politics is hard not just because a handful of people are violent but because people have different goals and different ideas about how to achieve them. Sometimes people who aren’t especially violent will resort to violence to forward their goals. And in many cases the problem is that we fail to act in our collective best interest. Climate change, for example, isn’t primarily caused by violent people.
Hi Robert, thanks for your reply. Disagreement always welcome here.
That's true, violent men didn't cause climate change. But it is violent men who will write the last chapter of climate change if the climate becomes too disruptive to the geopolitical status quo. Without violent men we can probably muddle through. With violent men it can all come crashing down in a moment.
Yes, politics is hard because people disagree, that's true of course. But it's violent men who transform "hard" in to "dangerous".
Yes, we fail to act in our collective best interest. Violent men are the primary threat, and we fail to focus on them as a group. We focus on particular violent men one at a time, a methodology which has failed to deliver the results we seek for thousands of years. I'm attempting to look beyond those perspectives which have a proven record of failure.
If you'll examine your news feed, you'll see that the overwhelming vast majority of violence at every level of society all over the world for thousands of years has been committed by men. It's on that basis I'm quibbling with your use of "violent people". That phrase implies violence is a human problem, when really it is a male problem, more specifically a subset of all men.
A moving and insightful essay. Thank you. Enjoy your vacation!
Thanks, Bill!
You write, "We’re now the greatest threat to our own survival."
This is a common way of defining the threat, but it is an imprecise articulation in need of updating.
"WE" are not the greatest threat to our own survival. VIOLENT MEN are the greatest threat to our survival. The primary threat arises from a well documented, easily identified, small percent of the human race. This is very useful information as it allows us to clearly identify the source of problem and aim solutions at a specific target. We don't need to change the entire human race, we need only to change a crucial small subset of the human race.
The primary obstacle in the way of achieving what might be called "world peace" is that we don't want world peace, and we lie to ourselves about that. We may wish for world peace in the vaguest possible manner, but at the moment that anyone proposes any plan which is ambitious enough to have any hope of solving the problem, we immediately shift all our intelligence and energy in to making arguments against that plan.
That is, we want a radically different situation that could avoid calamity and preserve the modern world, but we don't want to change the status quo in any meaningful way. Put more simply, we want world peace, but we don't want to pay for it.
What I've learned is that there's really no point in discussing any specific world peace proposal until we are willing to consciously accept that whatever an effective plan for dealing with violent men might be, we're not going to like it. If there was a world peace plan that was "reasonable" and "realistic" and capable of being widely accepted by the status quo, we'd already have world peace.
This may be almost the only topic really worth talking about because if we don't meet the challenge presented by violent men, everything else we may accomplish is likely to be sooner or later swept away in a tsunami of game over chaos.
14 more pages on this topic here:
https://www.tannytalk.com/p/world-peace-table-of-contents
I don’t agree with this, Phil. Politics is hard not just because a handful of people are violent but because people have different goals and different ideas about how to achieve them. Sometimes people who aren’t especially violent will resort to violence to forward their goals. And in many cases the problem is that we fail to act in our collective best interest. Climate change, for example, isn’t primarily caused by violent people.
Hi Robert, thanks for your reply. Disagreement always welcome here.
That's true, violent men didn't cause climate change. But it is violent men who will write the last chapter of climate change if the climate becomes too disruptive to the geopolitical status quo. Without violent men we can probably muddle through. With violent men it can all come crashing down in a moment.
Yes, politics is hard because people disagree, that's true of course. But it's violent men who transform "hard" in to "dangerous".
Yes, we fail to act in our collective best interest. Violent men are the primary threat, and we fail to focus on them as a group. We focus on particular violent men one at a time, a methodology which has failed to deliver the results we seek for thousands of years. I'm attempting to look beyond those perspectives which have a proven record of failure.
If you'll examine your news feed, you'll see that the overwhelming vast majority of violence at every level of society all over the world for thousands of years has been committed by men. It's on that basis I'm quibbling with your use of "violent people". That phrase implies violence is a human problem, when really it is a male problem, more specifically a subset of all men.