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Writer's picturePetra Lohmeier

The conundrum of peace-making




We environmentalists and members of the peace movement by definition dream of a world where the lion lives peacefully with the lamb, where everybody loves and shares with each other, and where peace reigns everywhere.

 

So, we promote peace and cooperation - except, of course, with the capitalists, like banks, the military, the world's dictators, and big pharma and food corporations who destroy peace and therefore are our enemies...and then we wonder why we don't get anywhere.

 

If you make peace, you must talk to the people you don't like, who want to take the stuff you so treasure from you. Even more, you must understand them and understand why they act this way. That means you have to get to know them.

 

And then you have to speak in a language they understand and give them something they want, and maybe, if you propose a compromise and they are decent people - within their value system - they will reciprocate.

 

Or, if you propose a real win-win solution, they may come onboard - not because they want to help you, but because they realize that it's in their own interest, too.

 

The latter is what usually works in systems that are all around power and/or money, because it mirrors what is already happening in those organizations. People whose primary goals are power, money, and significance don't have friends, they have allies. And no matter how often they may call these allies "friends" - when the outer circumstances change, the alliances will shift. That is the nature of a society like that. "Loyalty" isn't really loyalty, as we understand it, i.e. you defend your friend even if it costs you all you have, even your life, no matter if you get a benefit from it in this life or not. What they call "loyalty" is based in fear and force - and once the person exerting that force gets weak, the "loyalty" disappears immediately, making place to a venting if all the resentment that forced cooperation will generate.

 

So, building alliances is in the nature of power-based systems, and win-win is at the very nature of such an alliance.

 

Reciprocation is not, unless it brings another advantage, and sacrifice certainly isn't.

 

So, let's say you made the journey, you got to know those that were previously on the side of what you thought of as "enemy", and "evil", you learned to understand how they think, how they talk, you understand what they want, and you even identified win-win situations that you can build alliances in, helping both sides, building a bridge between both camps, which is the very basis of peace.

 

What happens next?

 

Your own camp will attack you for "selling out", declaring you the "enemy", while your previous enemy will still be very aware that you belong to the "other side", even if they cooperate with you temporarily.

 

Which leads to the counterintuitive result that bankers and the military may be better at creating peace than the peace-movement, because at least the talk to and cooperate with the other side when it is for their benefit, too.

 

So now you have to lobby the peace-movement so they get better at...making peace with people who don't belong to their circle, while you are not just stuck in between but outside both camps.

 

And that produces two difficulties -

 

1) If you succeed, you may destabilize the peace movement or even destroy it. There will be a lot of people in the peace movement who are followers, just as in banks and in the military. In fact, social research shows that 70% of people will not do the right thing because they are intrinsically motivated, but because they fear bad consequences from other people. In power-based systems, the consequences are external. In banks, those bad consequences mean getting sacked, in the military you get executed, at least during a war. In love-based systems, the consequences are internal - you get excommunicated from the community, which means social death - something most people fear even more than physical death.

 

And there will be people in the peace and environmental movement who just like to fight - paradoxically - because you will always fight something - capitalism, whalers, you name it.

 

Both are developmental stages that all people go through on the way to social and spiritual maturity, and they are necessary stages (see Clare Graves' model of social development), and these people can be successfully used to produce good. In fact, it is the main part of a politician's and leader's work to influence these people to do something beneficial to whatever society they are leading.

 

And if course, if you motivate them to see the "enemy's" point of view, they may just walk over and become part of the enemy's camp the second they realize that they may get some perks there that they currently don't have, dismissing the good that they will lose, because we usually don't value the familiar much.

 

That is why peace- and environmental movements install social rules that "conspiring with the enemy", I e. talking to them, understanding them, and cooperating with them, means "betrayal", which leads to social death. They can't rely on the physical punishment that banks and the military dish out, who don't regulate inner beliefs but just outer behavior because these outer punishments are against the very nature of their society - and rightly so. With someone at a high developmental stage, i.e. the 30% who truly believe and who are intrinsically motivated, you don't need that punishment, but with the 70% you do.

 

People and governments who want to destabilize peace and environmental movements know that, too. That's why they employ psychologists who start groups posing as "environmentalists" and "peace activists", maybe even adding a dose of tradition, which always works well with followers, who then draw in people who follow that movement, offering to "train" them.

 

Of course, the "more advanced" stages are quite secret, and when you advance, you suddenly find that starting to hunt animals is claimed to be a "sign of your further spiritual development", but you aren't allowed to tell the people in the "lesser stages" what is happening once you "advance".

 

So what are they doing? It's called "matching and mirroring", which creates rapport, and then leading people in the direction you want them to go in, even if it is the very opposite of what they thought they believed. It's a marketing technique. Every marketer uses it to sell you stuff. Of course, if you get people to betray their beliefs, those they fought for, and those they fought with - which most of them will do, if you praise them for "persisting in their struggles to further develop", because they will be deadly afraid to lose their social circle and the significance of their "spiritual advancement" - it is also called brainwashing.

 

2) The second problem is your own mindset. Once your own people betray and excommunicate you, you have the choice to stand alone or join the enemy and at least get some of the benefits of that society.

 

Very few people will choose to stand alone long-term, just to do the right thing.

 

But some do. And they will become very good at adjusting to both camps to further the communication between them. But at some point, it will become extremely difficult to tell whether they are still doing what they set out to do, or if they have "gone native" and are now betraying their own people as "double-agents", or whether they are betraying both and just doing what's good for them, or whether something entirely different is going on.

 

Not every chameleon is a psychopath or sociopath. But a lot of them are.

 

The only way to avoid that fate if you want to be the bridge, the go-between, is affiliation with a higher power to keep you on the straight and narrow, and to let you know when you have veered off the path without noticing it.

 

That is why most of those who really produced a sizeable shift in the culture had a strong faith in a higher power and were spiritually developed far beyond what most people ever achieve. Because only by that development was it, is it assured that the bridge builders will never have to stand alone, even if they become physically and/or socially isolated. Because they will have a community on a higher level that will guide them.

 

Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi, and Mother Teresa were all highly spiritual people - and if you saw their recent interview, so are Sadhguru and, yes, Jane Goodall.

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