Peace Quest Chapter 4: Obstacles to Peace

Cultivating peace within a violent culture is a large-scale task rendered more difficult by the following five factors, which I shall discuss in turn: 1) leaders who are deficient in peaceful vision and values; 2) powerful interests vested in war and exploitation; 3) the apathy and inaction of masses of people who make little or no effort to struggle for peace and justice for all; 4) tragic limitations to the efficacy of nonviolent means to maintain social order; 5) the religious fanaticism and intolerance of fundamentalists.

Dealing with Leaders, Positive and Negative
    To a detrimental degree, the world’s nations and most influential business and financial institutions are frequently not led by peace-building altruists, either fortunate or catastrophic ones. Although political leaders talk about peace and assert that the armies they command secure it, wars proliferate, and many regimes prey mercilessly and lethally upon their own populations. Often the most powerful leaders are among the least qualified people on earth to contribute to peace because they are tragically ignorant in the most fundamental sense, ignorant about themselves and their own motivations. Numerous studies have analyzed and interpreted the relentless, ruthless power drive of dictators, war-making presidents, and corporate CEOs.108 They were most often extremely neglected and abused as children. They did not subsequently go through altruistic character changes, but rather became hardened, brutalized, manipulative, and paranoid, needing to dominate because of unconscious fears of otherwise being destroyed, a fate they may bring upon themselves as well. This does not mean I consider all prominent leaders as necessarily destructive. There have been praiseworthy exceptions. Nonetheless, rulers throughout history have often been much more criminal, corrupt, murderous, deceitful, and cunning than the norm of the populations over which they reign.109 It is no different today, as corporate and political scandals repeatedly reveal.

    Not only does power corrupt, the corrupt seek power. This is a dilemma that those who wish to help create a more peaceful world need to face. One obstacle is that most people are not free enough in their own thinking and feeling to realize how abnormal it was, for example, that JFK risked nuclear holocaust to avoid losing face in his confrontations with the Soviet Union110 Few are willing to consider the evidence that F.D. Roosevelt had enough forewarning to avert the Pearl Harbor catastrophe, but did not do so in order to justify the U.S.’s entry into World War II.111 FDR and his cabinet also had information whereby they could have blocked the transport of European Jews to the Nazi extermination camps or destroyed the camps, but they did not act to save these lives, in part due to anti-semitism in their own ranks.112 Had these two enormously popular presidents been abused children? Yes, but not many people could see beneath their charismatic facades such telltale signs as their drug addictions, compulsive womanizing, and deceit.113

    The ability of some malevolent leaders to dupe significant numbers of people into believing their falsehoods and intentions derives both from the leaders’ guile and the followers’ lack of psychological insight. The U.S. “President,” G.W. Bush, for example, speaks about compassion and the defense of democracy, but his actions tell an ominously different and scary story. He may arguably be one of those individuals who wear a “mask of sanity,”114 but who are devoid of a full range of humane feelings and of empathy for others. Such persons, whether psychopaths or narcissists, can persuasively, albeit unconsciously, imitate the external behaviors and demeanors of normal human beings, even with charm and wit, while they ruthlessly manipulate people to aggrandize their own power, regardless of the suffering it may cost others. When G.W. Bush was governor of Texas, he revealed his contempt for the weak and needy when he publicly mocked the appeal for clemency from a woman on death row.115 As President, he has systematically trashed environmental protections and social welfare benefits, has introduced a regressive taxation structure to further concentrate wealth among the super-rich at the expense of the rest of the population, and is, at the time I am writing, hellbent on war against Iraq, with threats of using nuclear weapons as part of his messianic-sounding perpetual war against “evil.” His foreign policy advisors were among the authors in 2000 of a report entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” under the auspices of the Project for a New American Century. This report asserts that the U.S. must establish military dominance of earth and space, can rightfully ignore the opinions of other nations, and can strike preemptively against any potential adversaries with overwhelming, massive force.116 When Professor Mark Crispin Miller prepared, initially as a lark, an anthology of Bush’s infamous verbal slips and distortions of grammar and syntax, he noticed an alarming pattern. Bush is articulate and unerring when he talks about war, violence, and punishment, but fumbles and errs, according to Miller, only when he is speaking about kindness and compassion, which are, on the evidence of his behavior, emotions he does not and cannot feel. To Miller, this suggested the possibility that Bush is a sociopath.117

    Despite utopian or anarchist wishful thinking that it could be otherwise, the majority of human beings follow leaders, for good or ill. This is a fatefully consequential issue. In The Servant as Leader,118 Robert Greenleaf affirmed that unless those who are truly motivated by service actively succeed in becoming leaders, those who are motivated by greed for power will fill the void in leadership. Greenleaf appeals to altruists and peacemakers to recognize their responsibility to vie for leadership positions if they truly want their ideals to stand any chance of being actualized in the world. This is something to ponder and upon which to act while remembering that we can exercise leadership in many realms and on many levels, personal and professional.



The Revolving Door of War

    Although war is lethal for millions of victims, and although it is ruinous to domestic economies and the environment, some economically and politically powerful individuals invest in war as a lucrative business. The Dupont family fortunes, for example, have been built to a significant extent over generations from war profiteering that goes back to the days of the French monarchy and continues into the present.119

    In an abuse of leadership privilege, some business executives cycle through the revolving door into high-level government posts and back again into business. While in the government, their self-serving actions set them up for more profits when they return to business. Dick Cheney is a case in point. In 1992, while Secretary of Defense under President Bush senior, Cheney gave millions of dollars to Brown & Root Services (BRS), based in Texas, for that company to prepare reports on the privatization of logistical services to the U.S. military in war zones.120 Since then, BRS has been paid over a billion dollars from Pentagon contracts. When Cheney left the government because of Clinton’s election, he became CEO of Halliburton Oil, which owns BRS. In this position he has made tens of millions of dollars in salary and stock options. Another of the shocking feats Cheney accomplished was to be complicit in the bombing of Iraq’s oil infrastructure in the Persian Gulf War as Secretary of Defense, and then as Halliburton CEO to provide Iraq’s Saddam Hussein with $73 million in equipment and services for rebuilding that infrastructure.121 Cheney returned to Washington as U.S. Vice President under Bush Junior, where both these former oil company executives have been pursuing war-making policies that many believe are motivated, at least in part, to secure control over the oil reserves of Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.122 Cheney’s wife, Lynne, was for 20 years on the Board of Lockheed Martin, the largest manufacturer of weapons of mass destruction.123 At the same time, former President Bush Senior and his cronies work with the Carlyle Group, a company valued at over three billion dollars, that owns and invests in arms manufacturing, medical laboratories, and telecommunications.124 The long-term, multi-pronged war against terrorism that Bush Junior has declared can reap huge profits for people like Bush Senior.

    This revolving door of war exemplifies leadership at its worst, a necrophilic preying upon the world that is rendered credible by manipulating the fears of the population so that most people do not dare to question this cronyism. Independent investigative journalists and researchers who reveal such connections are among the true defenders of democracy and advocates for peace. In keeping with the thesis of this booklet, it seems altogether likely that research into the child rearing patterns of the families that produce the war profiteers would reveal a harsh lack of the loving-kindness that leads to empathy and nonviolent creativity.

Bystanders

    Activists for peace and justice have been a creative minority, just as perpetrators of violence and injustice are a destructive minority. With regard to many crucial issues, the majority of people are bystanders, not wanting their own personal interests and safety to be jeopardized, but not acting to oppose wrongdoing. Although they may not intend to do so, bystanders abet perpetrators. During the 1960s when the civil rights and anti-Vietnam-war movements were at their height, this thought was expressed by the slogan, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”  Earlier the philosopher Edmund Burke had written (in the moralistic and sexist language of his era), “The only thing needed for evil to triumph is for good men to stand back and do nothing.”

    The bystander phenomenon is problematical on all levels. When a mother slaps her small child in a supermarket and no one intervenes to protest, the bystanders are legitimating abuse and teaching the child that no one else cares. When dozens of neighbors looked out of their apartment windows as an assailant slowly stabbed the screaming Kitty Genovese to death, the bystanders were unwitting accomplices to murder, although no law held them accountable.125 When most Americans go along with their government’s rampantly militaristic foreign policy and support of murderous despots abroad, they are enabling war makers to squander the national wealth and destroy lives.

    A number of cultural factors increase the likelihood that most people in this country remain bystanders with regard to the major issues of war and peace, environmental destruction, human and animal rights. These factors include:



• Corporate control of the media: By 1988, 3 corporations had gained control of over half of the 11,000 magazines published in the US. Around 20 corporations control most newspapers, film, TV, books, and journals. Six corporations control most book publishing.126 There are more public relations “flacks” writing articles with a corporate spin than working journalists. As much as 40% of purported news articles, even in prestigious newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, have been written by the PR industry.127 When significant mobilizations for a more peaceful and just world occur, such as the anti-globalization and environmental movements, accurate reporting and analysis are often found only in alternative media sources, read by a minority of nonconformists and intellectuals.



• Ignorance: Few people read, whereas reading is one of the primary sources of developing complex knowledge. Only 6% of US adults read even one book per year, including kitsch, and about 60% have never read any book.128 Very few read alternatives to the mainstream media. One-hundred-twenty million adults are illiterate or at best read at 5th grade level. Fully literate adults may be as few as 5 million, less than 3% of the population.129 A 1995 survey reported in the NY Times showed 40% of US adults did not know Germany was a US enemy in WWII. The same year a National Science Foundation survey found 63% of US adults believe humans and dinosaurs coexisted (a 60 million year error).130



• Cognitive levels: According to research in the 1970s by Herman Epstein of Brandeis University, half the US adult population are not fully developed abstract thinkers or capable of thinking in terms of more than one variable at a time.131 Ecological

thinking, for example, is multivariate, abstract, and oriented to the past, present, and future. The education critic John Taylor Gatto has marshaled much historical evidence to show that industrial, financial, and political elites expressly designed the nation’s compulsory school system to impede the development of independent, critical thinking in children of the working class. These elites wanted docile, obedient workers and gullible consumers to come out of the schools for the masses, while they trained their own children for rule.132



•Fear: Many people live in conscious fear of crime, terrorism, unemployment, cancer, and unconscious fear of having to face painful truths about their own childhoods, during which they were likely abused and their real emotional needs were often neglected. Most people who did not benefit from enlightened parenting or later psychotherapy live wrapped in shrouds of denial. Sensationalistic news stories, movies, and government-generated terrorist alerts stimulate the fear of external threats, which interferes with objective, altruistic thinking. Protesters may be bashed and incarcerated by police, and the media often distort their message. Challenging the group consensus, which is a veritable trance, puts one at risk of ostracism, marginalization, harassment, job loss, or worse.



•Distraction: 98% of the population shop for entertainment,133 and TV, films, video games, and gossip about celebrities more often than not add to preoccupation with materialistic fantasies.



•Substance Abuse: Rates of alcoholism and drug abuse are alarmingly high. These escapes from dealing with painful emotions are rooted in personal problems, which in turn are embedded in larger dysfunctional social and cultural patterns. The epidemic of overweight and obesity affecting 62% of the population, according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s office,134 also indicates widespread eating disorders, meaning that people eat in order to avoid feelings, rather than to satisfy physical hunger. Addicted people not only consume; they are consumed by their self-destructive habits. They are not free to think about how to create a safe world.



•Ethical levels: Many people don’t care much beyond their own narrow self-interest, alas, because they did not receive empathic, loving nurturance as children, and did not learn empathy and honesty from socially and environmentally engaged role models. Cynicism about the corruption of politicians and business leaders is common, but people acquiesce to this. In fact, reading about the scandals of movie stars and politicians is another popular pastime and escape from democratic participation in working for needed social change.



• Father knows best: To see that the emperor has no clothes is just too terrifying for most people to face. When leaders lie and speak with manifest self-assurance and certainty, when they project all blame and “evil” externally and claim to be virtuous, when they act as if they and their clique are entitled to unlimited riches at the expense of others and the earth, very few people recognize these behaviors as blatant indicators of narcissism, a pathological character disorder.



• Denial:  People who were raised abusively and punitively but who remain in denial about how painful and traumatizing childhood was for them tend to idealize their parents and authoritarians in power. Their denial involves an inability to recognize the threats to the survival of all life posed by bellicose, self-concerned leaders and their policies.135 Further, it leads them to favor harsh, often violent, approaches to social issues.



    This discussion of factors that augment bystander behaviors is intended to indicate the complexity and ramifications of the problem. For more bystanders to become peace and justice advocates, they need access to information and opportunities for communication.  Those who are most committed to peace and justice need to understand the bystanders’ frames of reference as a first step. This means engaging them in respectful, nonviolent dialogue, listening to them, and reflecting back to them an empathic understanding of their words, feelings, and perceived needs. If they experience being understood and respected, they may eventually become more open to considering alternative points of view and to taking the risks entailed in becoming actively engaged in action for peace.  This is not an easy task. If the dialogue is genuine, it can also lead to broader comprehension on the part of those who are already activists. Out of the exchange of views, new and more creative options may arise. As we have seen above, unresolved trauma and residual emotions from childhood may distort people’s abilities to deal rationally with present issues and will interfere with their ability to be fully committed to peace and justice for all unless they heal from the wounds of their past.



Tragic Limits to Nonviolence: the Need for International Peacekeeping Forces, Law, and the International Criminal Court

    Nonviolent communication and peaceful negotiations are the ideal for resolving conflicts, but sometimes they are not enough. Peaceful approaches will at times reach tragic limits because some violently inclined people cannot be reached through kindness and reason. Therefore, if we expected to eliminate force entirely as a factor in maintaining social order and security, we would be unrealistic. There are too many sociopaths, by one estimate at least two million in North America alone,136 and too many legacies of inter-group hatred and racism, for the world to be able to dispense with armed police and military forces. In some circumstances, a lack of overt violence gives a misleading illusion of peace. Previous conflicts and underlying hostilities may be precursors to future violence, as occurred with the genocidal atrocities in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. These historical misfortunes are themselves rooted in deep cultural contexts of child abuse, misogyny, inequality, xenophobia, and beliefs that justify violence. In such unfortunate circumstances, peacekeeping forces, under United Nations mandate, are needed to quell violence where groups are not able to behave with empathy, nonviolence, and the other peacemaking qualities. Such peacekeeping forces are analogous to what Donald Winnicott, in the context of clinical psychology, called holding environments.  These are places with firm boundaries, safeguards, and guardians so that people who are seriously troubled psychologically cannot act out in ways that cause harm to themselves or others. In many collective cases, a similar need for holding environments exists.  Skilled peacemakers may try their best to initiate dialogue and constructive problem solving as creative alternatives to violence, but parties to conflicts are often not open to listening to intelligent voices of peace and reconciliation. Mediators, diplomats, NGO representatives, artists, writers, and scholars, even those of genius, may express their inspiring visions but succeed only in reaching and sustaining the spirits of a creative minority, while political leaders and their followers remain hell-bent to sacrifice precious lives and resources in violence. The likely results for those caught in the crossfire of armed conflicts are trauma, destruction, and death.

    If the sovereign nation-states of the world truly upheld in practice the United Nations charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we would all be well on the way to a more peaceful planet. This is far from a reality at present, but it is desirable, and citizens need to hold their governments accountable to the principles of these international accords. In addition, it is necessary to empower the International Criminal Court to try war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other violations of international law, with no nations being able to hold themselves exempt. This court was recently established for this purpose, but the United States government has, unfortunately, refused to sign the treaty that would hold its officials accountable to this court. This refusal arises from well-founded fears that officials such as Henry Kissinger would be tried, and possibly convicted, for war crimes. The citizens of our nation need to elect a government that will endorse and follow, not reject and flaunt, the rule of international law.



Religious Fundamentalism

    Religions are extraordinarily long-lived cultural institutions, outlasting empires, nation-states, and corporate entities by millennia. Religious texts, rituals, and traditions transmit ancient beliefs and practices to people of different times and places. Leaders and followers of different character types have appropriated virtually all of the religions we know of for diametrically opposed social purposes, such as liberation or oppression, equality or hierarchy, peace or war. With regard to the cause of peace, many people invest their greatest hopes in their religions and cite inspiring, peace-promoting verses from their respective scriptures. At the same time, fundamentalists-- whether Jewish, Christian, or Islamic, for example--pose one of the greatest obstacles to peace on the planet.

    Fundamentalists, of any tradition, typically engage in literal interpretations of selected portions of the ancient texts they hold sacred. They deem their own beliefs as absolute, eternal, and universally valid. They maintain that their religion, as they interpret it, is the truth; all else is falsehood, apostasy, and heresy. Such rigidity of thinking, not surprisingly, is associated with intolerance and violence. Crusades, jihads, so-called ethnic cleansings, and terrorism have all been justified in the name of religion.

    At the present time, the threat to world peace posed by religious fundamentalism, particularly Muslim and Christian, is extreme. Osama bin Laden and his terrorist followers are fundamentalist, puritanical Wahabbists who have shown hatred for more liberal interpretations of Islam, as well as for secularism and the personal freedoms enjoyed in Western democracies. I believe research into their childhoods would reveal extremes of abuse and neglect, and some studies have already provided evidence to support this view.137 Intolerant religious and political agendas that justify violence are the explicit layers in the conscious minds of people driven by unconscious, internal rage and shame stemming from early childhood humiliations.

    Islamic fundamentalism is similar in its violent orientation to Christian fundamentalism, particularly in the U.S. The current U.S. President, George W. Bush, and many of his closest associates are Christian fundamentalists who believe that an apocalyptic destruction of the world as we know it will literally usher in the second coming of Jesus Christ to earth for a thousand-year reign.138 In this new millennium, only the chosen—that is, fundamentalist Christian—people of God will be saved. Bush was influenced in his views by the evangelists Billy Graham and the Dallas-based Dr. Tony Evans, founder of the Promise Keepers cult.139 This form of eschatology is known as dominianism because it is based on the premise that the followers of Jesus must actively gain control (dominion) over the entire earth, by force, in order to prepare for Jesus’ second coming.  It is also called Darbyism after the 19th century British preacher who revived this archaic apocalyptic theology. Dominianists read current events in the Middle East as having been predicted in the book of Revelations. For example, they equate ancient Babylon with present-day Iraq, never mind the enormous historical and cultural changes over thousands of intervening years. Evidence indicates that G.W. Bush sees himself, consciously or unconsciously, as chosen to bring on Armageddon.140 The endless war against “evil” that he has announced needs to be understood in this connection, as do his flagrantly abusive policies toward the environment. Bush and his administration have declared they are ready to use even nuclear weapons to impose their political agenda. Dominionist apocalyptic thinking is delusional. If a solitary, random individual pronounced such beliefs, he would likely be diagnosed as psychotic. However, Bush is one among many. According to Hill, 40 million Americans partake of such fundamentalist beliefs.141 Such thinking must, in my opinion, derive from unhealed childhood traumas, due to abuse, neglect, violence, and betrayal of trust.

    Research about child rearing patterns has found, in fact, that religious fundamentalists, on the whole, treat their children more punitively than do more liberal believers or secularists within the same population.142 The Australian psychotherapist Robin Grille has written about this issue with appropriate recognition of the serious consequences it entails: “Fundamentalist communities are typically the harshest, most authoritarian and most violent toward women and children. And as always, the children of violence and repression grow up to embrace violence, with grave consequences that can ripple across a nation, and throughout the world. To look at the impact of religious fundamentalism on the world stage is to study the effects of mass child abuse in society at large. Fundamentalism in all faiths is a danger to humanity, first and foremost because it is a declaration of war against children.”143

    In the United States today, fundamentalist Christians have written best-selling child rearing manuals that have sold millions of copies and continue to influence millions of parents.  Such authors advocate spanking, intolerance of children’s crying for more than a few minutes before spanking them again, isolation, shaming, withdrawal of affection, humiliation, verbal abuse, and utterly breaking children’s wills.144 Such practices are the extreme opposite of the peaceful parenting model I am advocating, and they are antithetical to what we know scientifically about children’s needs for nurturance, empathy, and unconditional love. Therefore, religious fundamentalism and the child rearing patterns that typify it are among the major obstacles to peace with which we need to contend. If religious authorities with humane feelings and understandings would publicly embrace the cause of children’s rights and nonviolent parenting, they could thereby benefit children and contribute to peace.