Preventing trauma: the choice of a generation

Dear friends and colleagues gathered in the name of peace, I greet you at a distance from San Jose, capital city of Costa Rica. I am honored to be speaking to you today and very impressed about the technological tools that allow us to have this conversation from thousands of kilometers away. If we have been able to bridge time and distance so dramatically in the course of a generation, it only makes me wonder what other bridges our generation could build.

In a time when the global human society has become ever more integrated, complex and sophisticated, opportunities, wealth and comfort have not become a standard around the world. What is worse, the standard of opportunity, wealth and comfort has triggered an absurd rate of consumption that is exhausting natural resources worldwide, not only for the human civilization, but also for thousands of other species who have collapsed faster than we were even able to notice.

I do not intend to make this a presentation about climate change, which some people still choose not to believe as a reality, one that is perhaps the most severe conflict that life on Earth has faced in the last four million years. I do feel a responsibility to bring the topic to this conference because, as we discuss trauma, it is highly important that we understand that there is much to do to avoid future trauma for hundreds of millions of people around the world who will face life-threatening conditions arising from human-made alterations of the global climate system.

In an attempt to make a brief diagnosis of the conflict as I perceive it, we are facing increasingly long and wide episodes of human suffering that are leaving a deep trace of trauma behind it. Most of this suffering is, paradoxically, induced by humans onto humans. I call it a paradox because humans are the most intelligent species on Earth, and by intelligent I mean self-conscious of the fact that we are able to love and able to choose to love. And still many humans choose violence instead. Violence, in my opinion, is the absence of love, or, in the worlds of His Holiness, The Dalai Lama, the absence of lovingkindness.

There is, unfortunately, no guarantee that this scar of human trauma that is being left behind is going to reduce in number of episodes or intensity in the coming years. What is worse, there is a strange feeling in the air that things might continue aggravating. So, our gathering in Istambul during the coming days will be searching both for answers to treat existing trauma as well as identifying and creating together alternatives to prevent future trauma in the years to come. In conflict transformation, there is a method that is seldom applied to real-life conflicts which is to enlarge the pie. If you imagine that a present-day situation could become larger in the future, then we would understand at least two things: first, that the present situation, as bad as it looks, is not as bad as it could be in the future if we fail to act effectively to prevent it from happening; and second, that there is a need for conflict transformation into the future given the prognosis of what happens if things continue evolving the way they have evolved until now.

So, our call for action is to act with our hearts in the present, and keeping our minds focused on the future, searching permanently for a more prosperous scenario for those who suffer. Only in recent times, this was the role of governments. A handful of nations managed to reach high levels of human development and economic wealth that allowed them to live a long episode of widespread comfort. The reality for the rest of the world has been less prosperous, and, in many ways, there are hotspots of violence around the planet that deteriorate the living conditions for all humans alike. Whether it is a massive exodus of entire populations that flee starvation, disease or armed conflict, or large communities that are severely affected by natural disasters foreseen and unforeseen, in today’s interconnected world everyone is impacted in one way or another.

Today, many governments have failed to adapt to modern circumstances and to the complex social sophistication we live in. Agriculture, education, healthcare, and technology have evolved tremendously during the last 100 years, and still states and governments look in many ways the same as they looked 100 years ago, with similar methods, policies and institutions to solve problems that do not exist anymore; that is, in democratic states. In other non-democratic states, government looks like it did several hundred years ago or more. The failure of governance is yet another example of the Tragedy of the Commons: because governments do not belong to anyone, there was no one concerned with its flaws and inability to adapt effectively to human evolution. Governments failed us. Ironically, history has proven that a bad government is many times better than no government at all.

Politics, or the persuasion of masses through ideas, has become, in many places around the world, a vehicle for violence. Every state that sponsors the manufacturing, trade and use of military armament on civilian populations is using politics to spread violence. There is no justification around that fact. And while climate change adaptation requires, worldwide, some 100 billion US dollars per year, worldwide military expenditure reaches 1.4 trillion US dollars per year. To put it in simple terms, if the military economy spent 7% less per year, climate change adaptation could be financed completely for all communities worldwide, especially the ones most at risk.

As governments and states weaken, the rule of law also weakens or becomes inexistent. This brings a dangerous lack of order, a violent lack of justice, a severe lack of basic infrastructure, a general lack of prosperity. This, in time, only worsens when environmental constraints affect living conditions and force people to turn to their governments for answers, solutions, hope, perhaps a little bit of lovingkindness.

As I mentioned earlier, if left unattended, the conflict situations we are witnessing today will only tend to aggravate. As Albert Einstein reminds us, “we will never be able to overcome a problem if we continue thinking like we did when we fell into it.” I interpret his wisdom as a reminder that this generation, all of us in good health and willingness to contribute, has a unique opportunity to shift things over.

More importantly, it is never too much to remind ourselves that violence breeds violence, and the more we try to repress violent conflict through violent means, the more we will perpetuate the very conflict we are attempting to suppress. On that same token, peace breeds peace. Lovingkindness breeds lovingkindness.  

I strongly believe that humanity must bypass some institutions, power structures, beliefs that we have created throughout history in order to regenerate livelihoods, to restore ecosystems, to bring life and peace back to Earth. I mean to develop grassroots support systems like the ones humans created when we settled down as hunter-gatherers and became farmers by domesticating food. That was the way humanity started, and even though it was not a world free of conflict, there was as much concern for one’s own life as for that of our neighbors. We were each other’s keeper indeed. Our livelihoods depended on three elemental things: access to drinking water, access to arable land and housing solutions. The rest was hard work, fast learning and a predominant lovingkindness that made civilization prosper.

I also strongly believe in modern support systems that cross political borders. Much healing and assistance and development and prosperity has been created by solidary initiatives of humans helping humans.

To conclude, our emotional efforts should stay focused on our present conflicts and all the suffering they are provoking. Our intellectual efforts, instead, should be strongly harnessed into future scenarios of prosperity from which we can derive a much-needed sense of optimism as well as the mental energy to creatively co-create together those scenarios that humanity deserves.

In the process, and exercising the method of enlarging the pie, let us accommodate in our vision of a better world all other life forms. Only then will we be truly able to transform trauma into healing, conflict into harmony, and violence into lovingkindness.

Thank you.

Ideas Going to Bed

I once attended a conference organized by the Common Bond Institute at Kalamazoo, Michigan, where the keynote speaker, Dr. Maureen O’Hara, stated that, given the amount of information available in modern times, the human brain was only capable at grasping at any one time only a trillionth of all knowledge. This marked me in my career as peacemaker and conflict facilitator, as I reflected on the fact that this meant what we ignored was pretty much everything. In other words, I realized that what we ignore is so vast that it is a very arrogant posture to believe one is right about anything. In a conflict situation, this means that believing I am right and the other one is wrong is the least constructive stance of all, because it is leaving the solution –if any- to a third party decision, like a referee or a judge, or to the political might or any other force that would influence the harmonious and synergistic approach of transforming the conflict towards mutual benefits and enriching the relationship. Impossible? Too idealistic? Precisely. That’s what principles are made of and their raison d’être.

When Dr. O’Hara mentioned this humbling fact, we were barely scratching the surface of what has become a social media globalization. Now we are really connected with hundreds of millions of people around the world in real time. The amount of content that is being added onto the internet today, to some accounts, is equivalent to all the knowledge that our civilization had created until the year 2000 every two days. This is yet another reason to understand that it is ineffective to believe we know any better than anybody else.

If you know what I mean, take a look all around you and you will see examples of this jumping at you everywhere. Look at the political dynamics in your country or in any other country. Are politicians asserting opinions as if they were right and others were wrong? Are they categorically making statements that leave no room for doubt? So their political counterparts have no choice but to air out their discontent in a very similar fashion, asserting how mistaken the other is. The vicious cycle goes on and on and does not seem to come to an end. What is worse, it seems to be growing over time. When we have heard this discussion before, and we have seen the outcomes of many a debate that really leads to a stalemate in the best case scenario, and intense animosity and even violence among rivals, then it makes us wonder if this will have a positive outcome some time in the future.

Do you really think that politics will overcome the deadlock on Sunday morning and we will go back to the honorable way of making politics, being first of all respectful of the other, obedient of the legitimately elected leaders, willing and able to engage in transparent and principled negotiations that observe the superior and common cause of collective wellbeing? If you have grown skeptical to this scenario it is probably because you are not a politician or aspiring to become one. On a more serious note, your skepticism is the natural projection humans make into the future when we perceive tendencies that are unsustainable, detrimental to our collective prosperity, in a word: destructive.

The fascinating reality is that, even though we see it worsening, and we envision a dead end where our governance will hit a wall, we react indifferently to the theatrics, sometimes we experience five minutes of rage every so often, but most of us do nothing else about it. We do not have constructive conversations about how to get together and try to influence the neighbors on our street or the coworkers on our department, or our friends on our digital network. We do not consider running for office. We do not even consider staying away from the voting ballot. We the people, citizens of our respective countries, still support the show we are being fed day in and day out by our ever ineffective, tasteless and uncharming public leaders.
Transforming our political system is among the top priorities for our global governance and sustainability. In fact, it might be an indispensable and urgent change for our survival. As long as group o 20 people –mostly men- get together once or twice a year somewhere around the world to decide to continue on the same unsustainable path towards collapse just because change is too politically costly in each of their constituencies, then we can be certain that we will continue traveling this same path, not an inch in any direction.

The way to transform the largest system is exactly the same way to transform the smallest system: interrupting the spiral of violent and vicious growth of a trend and drastically start moving in another direction. The smallest system I can think of that we can influence and transform radically and dramatically is our individual self. Have a look at your past choices in life that have become achievements. They all started off by a decision you made to change, for whatever reason. Have you ever passed a school subject? Have you ever successfully completed a school year? Have you graduated from elementary or high school? Do you have a university degree? Have you ran a marathon or similar athletic accomplishment? Have you quit smoking or put down weight? Have you planted a tree, raised a child or helped someone on the street? All these small and not so small acts of progress have been the result of a decision you made.

Decisions are emotional resolutions that we choose, pacts we make with ourselves: I will do it. All decisions come from a more primitive source: an idea. Eureka! I have an idea: I will do that thing. The reason is not so important as the fact that the idea was entertained in your mind for some time –seconds, days or years- until it finally received the emotional resources to be attempted.

The funny thing with ideas is that they are not invented. They come from somewhere else. Which does not mean that nobody invents something genuinely new and original. There would be no innovation if that were true. My point is that many ideas are the result of observation, whether something we saw or listened, consciously or unconsciously, from someone else or on the media or out on the street. Which means that we owe at least a tiny part of the credit of an accomplishment to the source of where the idea came from.

In fact, innovation sometimes means that one person or group of people put together two or more ideas and come up with something that did not exist before, although the separate elements were already there. The point I am trying to make here is the importance of ideas coming into contact with people, or to put it in more proactive terms, that people get in contact with ideas, as many as possible, as often as possible, as diverse as possible. Perhaps that is what makes traveling to other geographical locations is so enriching, because one enters into contact with an entirely different system of human interaction that is composed of hundreds or thousands of ideas that blend together harmoniously. Then we grow at a faster pace than if we only occasionally entered into contact with an infrequent idea here and there. Again, that is why it is so critical for one’s own decision-making process to remain constantly exploring new ideas through reading or listening to systematic trains of thought, like books or manuals or lectures or speeches that have been elaborated carefully as a collection of other ideas that come from somewhere else.

Innovation is what we need to do with our individual personal system, which is going to train us to do it later with those around us, our relatives, neighbors, colleagues, and beyond. To change the world, therefore, we first need to change ourselves. And the easiest way to do it is to be open and perceptive to new ideas that already exist all around us. Those ideas, in fact, mutate faster than we think. Today there is an idea that tomorrow has become something different when it entered into contact with someone else. When we are the main characters of this process of transforming ideas into something different, then we make individual progress, we make decisions that are life-changing, and we build our character stronger, ready to take on a new challenge.

In a way, we could say that ideas reproduce at the pace at which they are incepted into people’s minds. Do not think of elephants. Now you are thinking about elephants. The notion of an elephant has been incepted into your mind (it was actually already there, I am just illustrating this example with elephants, which you were not supposed to be thinking about now, except I mentioned it). It may be hard to let the elephant go for a while, but you could use the idea of an elephant to think about other things that may be valuable for you. It might remind you that you have not fed your pet, or that you need to congratulate your friend from Thailand on her birthday (there are many elephants in Thailand). It could also help you think about your diet, not because you are fat, but because you are thinking about becoming vegetarian and elephants are. Or you may have remembered a sad story you read about elephant tusks being illegally traded, causing the death of thousands of elephants worldwide. These secondary ideas can derive into something else. The article you are supposed to write by Monday, the Thai restaurant around the corner, or any other thing that is activated when all the database in your brain enters into motion around this new idea of an elephant.

This pace of reproduction of ideas is vital for our individual and collective development. It is this hyper-reproduction of ideas that has brought us so much scientific development that has been transformed into technological tools and gadgets that has added so much value to our lives and has even provided us with a high degree of comfort. In fact, this process will continue to lead the solutions that are required to transform some of the most serious problems we face as a global civilization, especially in terms of energy consumption as a need and pollution as a consequence of our behavior.

It is in our individual and collective interest that more ideas come together, because when they do, they reproduce virally and spread around the world increasingly fast and we grow in digital connectivity with one another. Since no one can have but only a trillionth of all the information available, the best we can do is to share what we know and in the process go exchanging what we know for what we do not. Of course we are not going to lose what we already know. It is already with us permanently, like the idea of the elephant. In fact, this process is a win-win situation for you and for everyone you interact with: they will gain from your ideas and you will gain from theirs. So go ahead and mingle as much as you can, with as many and as diverse a people as you can, spreading your wisdom and collecting new one. Your future decisions will most likely be triggered and composed by things you still do not know and you are about to learn.