Public Health: Focus on the last 400,000 years
War has always been the top public health issue.
388,000 BC
2025 AD
Humanity has been struggling with war since before we could speak. War has won every time. Now its final victory is at hand.
The means have changed over 4000 centuries.
The motivation - to kill - has not.
Summary of The War Age:
We have gone through the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. It is time for the 400,000 years of the War Age to end.
Why we’re in a uniquely good position to end war:
Motivation:
Humankind’s weapons are more horrible than ever before: People, cities, nations – the Earth itself – all are vulnerable to annihilation. It wouldn’t take much more than 20 minutes. This fact may incentivize change.
Capacities:
With the satellite systems we can monitor every one of the round Earth’s imagined corners; with our communication systems we can inform the world of troop build-ups or rockets moving out of silos in nanoseconds.
Why success is likely now:
The odds are in our favor:
Conflicts are won over 60% of the time by non-violent contestants more than twice as many as are won by violent contestants (~30%).
The aftermaths are more favorable in non-violent conflicts.
If more than 3.5% of a population favors a non-violent cause, it succeeds more than 90% of the time.
More than 30,000,000 yogis live in the US, and 100,000,000 plus on Earth.
Yoga practitioners are almost unanimously for peace.
How do we proceed?
The idea is to win people over to the cause of peace:
Few people on the planet are “against peace,” but we must make it a higher priority than it is for most of us. But there is no greater “public health’ issue. The point-blank horror of war does not seem to be enough.
Publicize the outrageousness of killing someone, of destroying a city.
Recognize that the armed fighters are also innocent victims of the impulse to violence that is war.
Civil disobedience:
“The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free. They are free, Aegisthus. You know it, but they do not.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Flies”
Always with a non-violent, compassionate approach to adversaries: it is they we must win over to our way of seeing the world.
Non-violent but not passive: we must convince them war is bad, using all the strategies, tactics and resources: much like generals at war!
Once leaders understand we can disobey, they listen more closely.
If no one is fighting, there is no war.
Why isn’t it that simple?
Peace is not a top priority:
Taking care of oneself and family are higher priorities.
Greed, envy, pride, fear of cowardice also get in the way.
Government ‘marketing’ e.g., patriotism are alleged causes to fight.
How is peace maintained?
The great military powers must turn against our common enemy: war.
They must quell the violence on all sides of a violent conflict.
This way the leaders and their nations are more likely to endure.
Once financial and cultural resources are utilized for the good of people rather than for harming others, the advantages of peace will be confirmed.
It can only be maintained, in the long pull, if we trust each other.
That can only happen if we teach ourselves and our children to be trustworthy.
See next week’s Substack for one approach to raising trustworthiness on this exceptional planet.