Gaza, Ukraine, Nigeria, and win-win marriages are all linked to instinctive behavior patterns and they all make sense and can be managed and understood when you know what those instincts are and when you know what they do in our lives.
We're all creatures of Instincts — and we're shaped and guided every day by the interaction between the world we live in and all of the instincts that are embedded at multiple levels in our minds and in the thought processes and beliefs that steer our thinking and our lives in all of the key areas of our lives.
The Institute for InterGroup Understanding believes that we all have instincts to be territorial, tribal, and loyal to our groups who we identify as being us — and we feel high levels of attachment, support, and protective concern about those people and those sets of realities in our world and we feel very right when we act in ways that support and protect those people and their interactions with our lives.
Our instincts on inter group issues have a massive impact on our lives every day in almost every setting where we lead our lives and we need to discern, detect, and explicitly understand those feelings and those behaviors in order to understand major areas of our lives.
We're not alone in having instincts that guide our lives in intensive and impactful ways.
Every single actual living species has deeply embedded instincts that run, channel, direct, steer, and guide their lives. Other species don't invent their behavior from scratch for all of the interactions they have with the world they live in. The survival of every species depends on them interacting with the world in the instinctive context that gives them support for the functional realities of their lives and gives it to them in effective and relevant ways that fit the situational needs of each species.
We know what those behaviors are and how they affect all of those lives.
Bees have massive and extensive patterns of instincts that are relevant to each set and subset of bees and that have them survive and even thrive in each setting they're in.
Bees do some fairly elaborate dances that teach and tell other bees in their hive where they should fly to find the exact food opportunities that are available in that setting at that point in time. Those instinct choreographed dances steer the other bees to the sites that will give that set of bees the supplies and the nourishment they need to survive in that setting.
Each and every species clearly has those sorts of instinctive tools effectively embedded in them.
Wolf packs have very strong sets of instinctive behaviors that help them find food and then interact with each other in effective and relevant ways in the hunting process to create survival levels and to achieve and acquire supplies of food that are needed for each group of wolves to exist.
Wolf packs also have strong instincts to mate, to create baby wolves, and to set up cultures within each pack to determine which wolves in each pack are alpha wolves, beta wolves, and even levels of theta wolves as the young wolves survive and grow into the adult population that helps their species survive over time in each setting.
We humans can recognize and relate to some of the instinctive behavior patterns that are soft wired into the wolves.
We also mate, have our own kinds of cubs, our own territorial turf battles and definitions, and we have alpha and beta instincts that can create their own kinds of interactions and aspirations with and for us in each setting.
The patterns of instincts we have are consistent and easy to see in most settings where we live as a species today.
Being Us and Them Is An Instinctive Behavior
Being Us and Them is a powerful and impactful instinctive behavior that we need to see, appreciate, recognize and understand for all of our settings because it has such a huge impact on our lives when it is activated.
We instinctively divide the world into Us and Them — and we tend to have very different feelings about people we see and identify in each of those categories as us or as them in every setting.
We tend to feel protective of our Us and we're supportive of our We group in each setting — and we tend to have negative, hostile, and often angry feelings toward whomever we believe in a setting is an actual Them.
The patterns that trigger Us-Them behaviors are consistent and powerful in their impact on our lives in every setting where we live now as a species.
Wolf packs identify other wolves as their own kind of Them and they're sometimes willing to fight to the death to damage Them or to remove Them from a setting or turf. That behavior obviously feels very right to the wolves involved.
Our own sets of instincts about our response to Them in our settings parallels both the behaviors and the hostile responses we see from the wolves.
We tend to want to damage Them in our settings and we tend to suspend conscience and ethical beliefs relative to Them because we feel it's so right to support our Us that the ethics and the morality standards we usually apply to Us are often completely irrelevant and absent relative to our interactions and responses to each Them.
That's a very common pattern of behavior across the planet in almost all of our settings and it might be the most important set of instincts that we should understand today and now in steering our own future for the lives that we'll be living with each other now in our nation today.
GAZA IS A TRIBAL WAR
There are more than 125 ethnic conflicts going on in the world today, and all of those conflicts trigger that set of behaviors and beliefs and they all have people in each conflict core who are shedding blood and who are doing damage to each other with a sense and belief that those behaviors are the right things for us to do.
It’s easy to see as soon as you learn to see it.
It’s also impossible to deny once you see that it's happening in any setting.
The Institute for InterGroup Understanding instinctive behavior core paradigm described here explains those behaviors in all of those settings — and offers insights into those settings for fighting to possibly cease and end over time, when people understand what's actually happening, and then deal with the instincts in each of those settings in ways that address the reality that exists for each set of people in each conflicted reality.
The trigger points for those conflicts are obvious once you know what that reality is and then look for solutions and approaches that soften the negative interactions in effective ways in each setting.
The core trigger points can be easy to see and recognize once you know what they are.
Differences trigger instinctive responses for groups.
Tribes are hugely important in many settings.
Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Syria all have groups of people today who speak a different tribal language from each other who are damaging and killing people who speak the other language, and who are feeling very justified in their highly intentional negative behavior against the other group in every setting because we believe that behavior to be the right thing to do when those tribe linked instincts are activated in us or in our group.
Our news media is almost completely overwhelmingly ignorant and wrong about those issues.
The news media in most settings is actually too often almost breathtakingly incompetent, incorrect, inept, inadequate, incomplete, intellectually underpowered, perceptually flawed and wrong, and very often hugely inaccurate in their ability and in their understanding, knowing, perceiving, and actually seeing and understanding that all of those conflicts in all of those settings are tribal at their core and then explaining that tribal reality to their readers and to their viewers and then explaining to their readers and viewers why and how that tribal reality is powerful and true and why it's hugely relevant and is creating conflict now in all of those settings.
That’s a massive and continuing failure in understanding by the media.
They clearly don't understand the sets of instinctive behaviors that are causing those conflicts to happen.
The media is perceptually and perpetually wrong about that vast and growing set of conflicts.
They don’t do fake news as much as they just don’t understand the news in front of them.
The media tends to write about those huge numbers of very clear conflicts that happen in all of those settings as if they were each somehow situational and even somewhat ideological or political at their core. The media in each setting ignores the painfully simple, obvious, and easily discernable and easily confirmable reality that the people who are killing other people in those settings are killing people with a different language, a different culture, and a different identity as a group from the killers — and there’s nothing relevantly political or ideological in those settings because the people identified in each of those settings as Kurds or Tibetans or Alawites can’t actually convert politically to becoming English or Irish, and they can’t become some other tribe by somehow relabeling themselves in the field in each setting with that other tribal name.
This isn’t hard to understand once you know what the actual patterns are.
Gaza is clearly a tribal war.
Gaza has more than 80,000 dead people as this piece is being written and posted today and the people who are dead there all have a different tribal identity than the people who are dropping the bombs on them today and now in that place and setting.
Both sides in Gaza have their tribal instincts fully activated, and both sides in Gaza have key people who feel no guilt or hesitation in doing very real and even intentionally evil damage to the other tribe in that setting because of their tribal status and their tribal situation.
Gaza is absolutely, totally, and completely a tribal war that activates the same sets of emotions, the ethics, and the sets of beliefs and behaviors on both sides in Gaza that other tribal wars across the planet create in all of their settings.
There are people on both sides in Gaza who are doing what people in other tribal conflicts often to do each other, and they have people on both sides who are strongly committed to treat the other group in very tribal ways today and who are doing exactly that now and who are making Gaza a long-term highly negative situational reality that will continue there as long as those people there have that opportunity to damage those people and as long as they continue to have those instincts in gear.
They've actually dropped many thousands of bombs in that community now, and the people who support the bombings and who drop the bombs do so because their own tribal thinking makes that an acceptable and appropriate behavior for one tribe to do to another in any setting when those instincts are fully activated.
Key leaders in that setting believe the other side to be a Them in an instinct-defined way, and they believe that their tribe is justified in whatever damage they do to Them with those instincts in gear.
Once those instincts are activated in any setting, people then believe that damaging the other group is the right thing to do — and people doing the damage tend to think that their own team is somehow winning, and they even celebrate when the other group is being damaged.
Group anger against the other group builds, and both groups are often completely in agreement in their own group and celebrate when damage happens to the other group.
It’s a clearly instinctive set of emotions, thoughts, and beliefs that people don't challenge or even resist when that set of instinctive thoughts, beliefs, and values are in gear.
Those behaviors are happening for large numbers of people in Gaza today, and the thoughts of the people for large and growing numbers of people there in each group that are completely aligned with those values, goals, and expectations, and they show no sign of having any inclination to move in any direction now that doesn't involve damaging the other group — with no end in sight to those negative interactions and realities.
We clearly have people from each tribe in Gaza who now hate the other tribe, and the likelihood of those sets of people somehow not hating each other in the future is functionally zero.
All of the simple solutions that might have worked once for Gaza are doomed to fail because the hatred is so high in people on both sides, and real damage has been done there to each other for long periods of time, and the damage won't be forgotten or forgiven by either side in that setting for the foreseeable future for either side.
There might be some innocent and unconnected people in that setting, but they're a small minority of the people and they aren’t particularly relevant to what needs to be done now to change the high level of damage being done to that population on a daily basis now.
What should be done now?
We need the killing to stop.
We need an actual ceasefire in the Gaza settings and we need someone not in either of the groups to be on the ground with the authority to help people in need who are being personally damaged in some ways.
The dominant tribe there believes that they will be attacked again at some time in the future, so part of the solution needs to be for them to have absolute control over some of that space. A Two State Solution has been proposed many times in politically correct ways, and that obviously cannot happen when each of the states hate each other.
They need to do what they did in Switzerland, and have canton-like areas where the tribes with no weapons can be safe from physical damage and able to run their own daily operations for functional parts of their lives.
Switzerland has tribal cantons that reflect the three Swiss tribes that live there. They haven't blended in any way.
In a remembered series of meetings, the Swiss Minister of Health who tried to build a multi-language children’s hospital in a central location was told by the first witness at the hearing: “I will let my son die before allowing him to be treated by a German speaking doctor."
The proposal failed miserably, but Switzerland continues to have separate and equal care sites, that deliver great care and that country is at peace with itself because they know how powerful tribal instincts are and they work with them rather than fighting them to run the country.
Gaza needs safe places for the Palestinian tribal people to live, and the United Nations might be the only organization that could somehow should send in their people to make the Palestinian homes and farms safe.
They'll be able to accomplish that quickly, because the majority tribe in those spaces has very bright people who will accept that reality and help it succeed once it actually exists and is safely in place.
Members of the smaller tribe want their olive groves and farms protected, and that not happen until some level of realistic agreement is reached and the United Nations puts the resources in place to make that happen.
The United Nations can guarantee the safety and dignity of some of the people in a clearly compromised, but functional situation, to provide some level of security for some of the people who will continue to live there, and that will happen because those people believe it to be where they should be entitled to live and many will absorb great pain over long periods of time rather than giving up what they believe is their legitimate tribal turf.
Surveys of both tribes in Gaza show hatred, anger, and deep distrust for large numbers of people in each tribe against the other tribe, so we should accept that as the baseline for our interactions and then figure out how to end direct killing in both the Westbank and Gaza, and create and give that area a multi-year trajectory to a long-term status that doesn’t have daily murders for either group. Probably the only possible way of stopping the killings is by having the United Nations take on a peace-keeping role there that's a logical extension of their resources and their reasons to exist and then just assume that the area can and should be protected to have safety created for the survivors of that process and do the right things to make that happen.
Russia, China, and the European countries should all support that approach because they all want a world that doesn't have atomic weapons in play at any level, and the very the worst-case situation in Gaza could have bad bounces that make that issue of atomic weapons relevant.
We should at this point in our history as a nation and a world to take a higher-level look at that situation, and we should learn, see, and we should understand that the tribal people in Gaza aren't alone in those behaviors — and we should and will see those same patterns of instinctive behavior we see in other inter group settings across the planet.
The truth is — Gaza isn’t an isolated situation.
It isn’t even an outlier.
Our news media tends not to see or discuss any of the other tribal conflicts that are happening in the world now, even though it’s clear and obvious that those situations are happening in those settings.
We need to understand instinctive behavior to know why that statement is true and why it's relevant to what we need to do now in Gaza and also what we need to do in our own country as we figure out what we should be doing now with our own people to avoid being damaged by inter group instinctive behavior here.
This instinctive damaging intergroup behavior happens a lot in the world we live in today.
There are similar and very parallel and highly damaging conflicts happening now in Somalia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Syria — with many people recently and currently being damaged and dying from high levels of conflicts in each of those sites.
It’s a very familiar package.
And it's all around us.
The people who are killing other people in each of those settings are doing it out of loyalty to their tribe, and because they all believe they're doing the right things at an ethical and moral level because our Us-Them Instinct thought process and belief system is extremely powerful and it makes whatever we do for our tribe legitimate and the right thing to do when conflicts happen, so we don’t even see it as problem and we believe that those are understandable and appropriate behaviors for us in our settings now.
In any setting where those instincts are in gear, we trigger our Us-Them paradigm thinking and we believe any negative stories about the other tribe, even when they aren't true — and even, in some cases, when they couldn't possibly be true. each side, when that paradigm is fully activated, believes every negative thing that's being said, and feels entirely legitimate in doing damage to people in the other group when those beliefs are activated and those stories are told about those situations.
That’s why the people in tribal settings in Nigeria and Sudan and Gaza will continue to damage each other as long as they have those instincts in gear and will believe the damage is the right thing to do.
People often feel that they're doing noble and loyal work in doing very evil things to other people when those beliefs are activated and are shaping the thinking and beliefs in each conflicted situation.
Ukraine is a highly visible setting that has some obvious tribal conflict going on as well that we should see for what it is as part of that situation.
People tend to miss the deep tribal issues and the clear and highly tribal points of that very current and often highly visible war in Ukraine because too many people don’t see the visible factors that exist on those issues in all of those settings.
The basic facts are clear there as well.
Ukraine has people who speak the Ukrainian language who are now killing people whose tribal languages and whose ancestral tribal linkages have always been Russian, and the people on both sides in that war from both tribal language anchors and heritages and are feeling no guilt in what they're doing because they perceive the people they're killing to be Them and because those animosities have been activated in that setting along those exact and clear lines in that setting for a very long time.
Ukraine is very much a tribal war and it's activating those thought process, beliefs and behaviors that those wars trigger in their settings, and it will probably continue until the tribes have separation at the local control level in that setting.
That particular conflict should be one of the easiest to solve, because the tribes there don't overlap on the actual space that they're in, and they're likely to stop fighting once they don’t overlap the space and once the leaders agree on who controls each piece of that space.
That battle and war isn’t ending there easily, however, because there are some Ukrainian speaking generals who run the Ukrainian army who have their own tribal turf instincts fully activated in very public ways, and those generals say it would be a sacred violation of their own personal tribal identity to lose even one square foot of their own former tribal turf to the other tribe in the process of ending that war and those generals in that setting are prepared to fight forever rather than disgrace their own tribe.
That seems nonsensical at several levels, but some people who choose the military as their career might be more likely to have that belief and value and they would rather see many more deaths instead of dishonoring their tribe.
If they end that war and if they just gave each tribe it’s own tribal turf, peace should be immediate and permanent because there won’t be any reason for anyone to fight in that space in a year from now if no one's in the language turf of any other group.
We have more than 125 tribal wars in the world now — and we get that kind of thinking whenever our basic group and tribal instincts are activated in any setting.
The reality we all need to understand is that our tribal instincts are creating conflicts in multiple settings, and that will continue to create issues, beliefs, and behaviors in those settings as long as the overlaps continue.
Paris is currently in a highly visible state of conflict at multiple levels because the people who have immigrated into France over the past decades have their own tribal identity, their own culture, their own language, and deep set emotional linkages — and they very openly tend to hate people in their communities who are not members of their tribe.
France now has permanent internal divisions and there’s no logistically possible way to restore Peace to the parts of that country that are angry and attacking each other now, because each group is fully entrenched and reinforced in their anger, and they're now the permanent occupants of those settings and places.
That's exactly what happens when those circumstances exist and those instincts are activated in any setting.
We damage people with no sense of remorse or guilt when we activate the instincts that are relevant to tribes hating and fighting tribes — and that set of behavior happens whenever people have those beliefs and perceptions in gear — and are creating the context for the groups to interact.
Each of those settings in all of those countries have tribal instincts in full gear in very visible ways today and anyone who knows about tribes killing tribes based on those instincts in various settings can see what is happening there to each set of people with accuracy and clarity because those tribal alignments are so clear for all of those people today that they believe they're doing the right thing for their tribe when evil happens to the people there and they help make it happen.
It's very instinctive behavior.
People kill other people and discriminate against others who activate and trigger that set of powerful instincts that we activate in every setting where they feel like they're the right belief by the people in that setting about the other people in that setting and they give us a context for dealing with those people.
Those patterns are easy to see once you learn to see them and they're everywhere that those differences happen.
Chechnya and the Alawites of Syria, and the Kurds of Turkey all have people with those tribal differences who are doing damage to each other today and who are feeling completely legitimate and justified in whatever damage they do to the other people, because their instincts in each group tell them the other group is a Them and not an Us and they believe the other group deserves to be damaged.
Those instincts are extremely clear when they're activated, and those same patterns of behavior happen whenever people have them as major factors in their lives and believe that those differences exist for the other group in their setting.
Those instincts can be activated within a country if people believe that there are internal differences that trigger those sets of Us-Them instincts and if people in a country believe that they need to band together against a Them.
We've clearly activated many of those thoughts and behaviors at multiple levels in our own country, and we're at risk of activating them again today and now because we have some people in our political and social settings who want to activate versions of those tribal behaviors now, and who are doing skillful and intentional things to us as a country to make that set of thoughts and behaviors happen in a number of settings now.
We Invented A White Tribe Here
We know what that behavior and inter group instinct behavior activation looks like and what it does to people in our own country when those triggers and thought processes are activated in our settings.
We know that's true because we've done it many times to ourselves in many settings, and it steers our thoughts and behaviors when it happens and is reinforced by inter group behaviors in those places and times.
We have a rich history in our own country of activating our inter group instincts and triggering those behaviors at multiple levels and then doing damage to other people here from the other groups with those instincts in gear.
Our instincts have led us very easily down those paths in a number of relevant and highly visible ways for most of our history, and we've believed that we were on the right paths as many of those beliefs and behaviors were happening.
Slavery, for example, was a major component of our national history and story.
Slavery was a prime example of part of our activation history in our own country for that set of inter group instincts, thought processes, beliefs, and behaviors.
We enslaved people as a group for a couple of centuries.
We've also done massive ethnic cleansing for major areas of our country. We've exhibited sometimes functionally and intentionally genocidal behaviors against the original inhabitants in many areas of our overall geographical space with those sets of dehumanizing instincts activated and shaping our thinking and guiding our thoughts and behaviors relative to those sets of people over long periods of our history.
Us-Them behavior relative to the original native American indigenous people of our continent couldn't have been more obvious, and it was too often both destructive and damaging behavior that was done to the people in all of those settings who weren’t Us to the people who've been in power here as Us for the most recent couple centuries of our history.
We invented White as a group and a tribe as part of that process.
White has been a tribal Us at an important and highly functional level for much of our history and that group and tribe activated all of those instincts at a relevant level that damaged people who weren’t from that group and still creates a damaging context for many of our behaviors today.
People here who weren't perceived instinctively to be part of the White European American tribe that controlled the government were damaged at many levels as we evolved as a country into the context and into the inter group conflicts and interactions that we're in now.
The good news is — we're actually now on better paths today for a wide range of those behaviors than we've been on for most of our history, and we should be able to achieve a more enlightened and very positive, peaceful, and successful future going forward from here if we understand and appreciate exactly how those sets of instincts work and if we then channel them now to create a collective Us for our country that's based on our core beliefs and on our most enlightened values instead of being defined only by our race or our tribe.
We've had a recent period of relatively enlightened behavior in our country, and we should definitely build on that enlightenment going forward from here as a nation to create a future that gives us all a chance for collective positive outcomes and for shared success as a people.
We need to create a country that believes in inclusion for all our people and that aspires and commits to win-win behaviors for everyone who is here now. Win-Win thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, and goals are built into the InterGroup Institute tool kit and strategies for inter group Peace.
To get there, we need to understand the patterns of instinctive behaviors that have such a huge impact on our thinking and our lives.
We need to see and understand how dangerous and damaging many of our core Us-Them instincts are and have been — and we should rise above those beliefs and behaviors to give us the very best future we can have as a country with the context we have to build on now.
We'll be most likely to succeed on that agenda and approach if we have a very clear sense of how badly we've done in some of those areas now.
We should recognize how poorly we've done in some areas up to now and we should be very honest about that reality and those behaviors as part of the foundation for where we are today and now so that we can make the right decisions going forward from here and can avoid some future damage and conflict by knowing what's causing it to happen.
The White Tribe Did Some Damage Against Other Tribes Here
The patterns of discrimination created by those instincts and beliefs for us as a nation and a people have been obvious and clear.
In this country, we've always discriminated in various ways against anyone who doesn't look like the original invading European tribe that took control of the land and who then did significant and consistent and targeted ethnic cleansing against the native tribes who lived here before that invasion.
That group of people who started the national governance and the basic belief system trajectory that we're on now looked ethnically White with very light skin colors for the group and it had a shared language that create a collective sense of us for that population that shared languages tend to create.
White Europeans who spoke English were the primary functional Us group who created this nation as a political entity and set up most of our structures and beliefs today were based on their levels of structure, ethics, and behaviors that they used within their own group to govern themselves as a functioning tribal Us with their own ethics, functional morality, and beliefs that initially applied only to their group, but managed to be shared by the other white tribal people and populations as they created this nation.
They invaded a continent that was full of people with multiple tribal alignments, and they managed to displace original and indigenous populations that initially far outnumbered the invaders from Europe, in total across the continent. They succeeded with the displacements in part because the original owners and first occupants of each piece of land here, almost without exception, made their own resistance to the invaders very local and very specific to their tribe, and they didn’t create any levels of alliances or build any mutual support relationships with other local tribes to defeat or even resist the invaders in any organized way.
Warriors and various warrior cultures existed everywhere for every group that was already here on these continents, but those relatively large and extensive sets of warriors who were already here didn’t slow the invasion from Europe because they all fought alone.
The original Native American and indigenous people who had lived here by the tens of millions in total as the first settlers and as the original occupants on these continents actually each and all had a long history of being warriors against the other original tribes who already lived here, and those original tribes didn’t form any effective coalitions or build alliances of any kind against the invaders from Europe because of those historic animosities between those tribes here that had caused them to be enemies to each other with all of those instincts activated, rather than allies against a common foe when that invasion of new people from Europe happened.
We have very visible and clear evidence of those behavior patterns by the original occupants of this continent on open display in Washington, D.C. now.
The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C. is very close to the Washington Monument and the Vietnam Memorial, and anyone visiting that site can see even today that each tribe still has its own space and its own set of heroes, and there were no sets of alignments or support systems that were created to resist the invaders from Europe at any level as that process unfolded.
Just like Gaza and the Ukraine, the tribes with separate languages in those settings opposed each other, and the people shooting the new weapons in the plains and in the various mountain ranges of the Americas spoke a different language than the people they were killing.
The functional local tribe resistance to the invasion of the American continents by the European tribes was also hampered and weakened hugely by having millions of people in the original indigenous tribes actually dying from the diseases brought here by the Europeans.
Villages in our country that had tens of thousands of people living in them in the years before the Europeans arrived were wiped out almost entirely by those new diseases and that significantly lowered population in many areas made settling and controlling many areas of the country relatively easy for the invaders. Biological warfare accidently happened and that biological aggression was very effective for the tribes with those diseases because it killed so many people who lived here when the Europeans arrived.
White Europeans took over the continent and white Americans created the new set of identities and rules for local behavior across the country. They had a mixed impact on the process — and because that set of people was relatively enlightened on some thinking and some behaviors, we ended up with some very good trajectories for many of the things we wanted to do as Americans from that white tribal identity and tribal reality as well as having some negative consequences for many people of color that continue today as a foundation for who we are.
We've been significantly blessed as a nation by having some of the most enlightened people on the planet who were living in this country as descendants of the white invaders who were taking control of the governance development process for the country at a key point in time and who ended up writing our founding documents and then creating our declarations of independence and building our constitution and basic functional interaction values to build an accountable and relatively enlightened governing process for us as a people that we rely on today and that has some very good component parts that we're lucky to have to steer us as a nation and even as a people now for who and where we are now.
That governance process and that direct governing group was very white at the beginning of that trajectory into figuring out and shaping the key elements of our belief system and our governance and our identity as a nation.
The people in control of that process here were very European and they were very tribal relative to the other people who lived here, but we were very fortunate that they were politically enlightened in some important ways at the same time and that fortunate enlightenment in those time frames for those sets of people gave us a framework that was probably more progressive and more positive in many political aspects than anything else that had happened historically anywhere else on the planet up to that time.
We were blessed with having some very smart and well-intentioned people steering the process for our own political and intellectual development during some extremely important points in our history as a nation to a solid intellectual foundation that we're building on today.
The white group who ran everything made a collective decision and an expectation to use English as the functional and governing language for the northern continent of this hemisphere and that single language decision for this country on this continent eliminated many of the conflicts and identity issues that would have happened here if they had retained the original tribal languages of Europe for all of those new people and if they had, instead, become a multilingual country with separate languages for each area and setting.
Canada also got almost to that single language solution point for their entire nation, but they decided at a very important point in their history to keep two languages for their country instead of pulling back to just one — and those two groups of Canadians still tend to be in the kinds if constant conflict and mutual dislike and division between groups that we can see on every continent and country on the planet where they maintain multiple languages in an area and then have the full sets of tribal instincts that are clearly and powerfully activated in every setting by having a different language for each tribe define every area.
Gaza and Ukraine wouldn't have people killing each other today if each of those settings was inhabited by a single-language speaking people and if each setting had only economic, operational, and functional issues to deal with at this point in their history, rather than being separate tribes and then interacting in tribal ways that create tribal divisions and tribal thinking and tribal outcomes for both groups.
That pattern and that division always happens in every major political setting whenever the groups occupying an area maintain multiple and separate languages for each group in the setting.
Languages both unite and divide people.
Each group with a language in any multilingual setting on the planet has people in the group whose emotional and intellectual energy gets focused on somehow preserving their language as a key priority for the group and too often people aren't dealing with the higher levels of issues that can create process and progress in various settings for overall populations of people that happen more easily when the people who live there all speak the same language and share a common identity as a group.
We avoided those particular language issues in our history as a nation by making English the common language everywhere, but we then created a wide range of other instinct-triggered issues that clearly damaged people in many of our settings based on perceived differences in group identity that we linked to the skin color of our people.
We created a national macro Us for members of the white tribe and then we triggered a number of those basic Us-Them instincts in that tribe to do a number of very negative things to other people in each of our settings as a nation for people who weren't members of that tribe.
Slavery was part of the package of extremely negative behaviors that we built as a country and that guided long trajectories of interactions as a nation.
Slavery is an ultimate and extremely definitive Us-Them behavior. We had slavery as a key part of our history for over 200 years and we had to fight a very bloody war to get it to stop being the law of the land for everyone who lived here.
We freed our slaves with our Civil War and then we continued to damage them in multiple ways because we still had our Us-Them instincts in gear for that population of people.
The former slaves in our country have been damaged in multiple ways by discriminatory laws and behaviors, and we've made great progress at multiple levels, but we have a long way to go to achieve an optimal setting for everyone and for every group that lives here with any group identity triggers and differentiators that cause those instincts to happen and steer our thoughts, emotions, and some sets of behaviors for how we interact with each other.
It isn’t hopeless.
Progress has been made.
We can build on that progress now.
We've achieved some very enlightened thinking as a country in a number of areas, and we have an overall functional governance infrastructure and cultural realities that give us rule of law, a sense of legal equality for all of our people, and a sense of justice and fairness as an underpinning for our group behaviors.
Those enlightened elements function in the context of instinctive differences at multiple levels in our interactions with one another, and they give us a package of behaviors and interactions that we've been steering in some good directions much of the time.
We're far from complete and successful in achieving our optimal interactions with each other as a country, but very real progress has been made in recent years, and more progress is possible if we're highly intentional in what we do now to make that happen, and if we make the right decisions on our key beliefs and values at this point in our history and then make that our expectations going forward from where we are now.
The functional reality is that we're now in a relatively good place for many of our internal interactions a large percentage of the time — and we need to build on our best practices and our best achievements to give us the best path forward from here, because that's clearly the right path for us to be on if we want our grandchildren to live in functional intergroup peace and to have low levels of intergroup damage with each other on an ongoing basis going into the next decades as a country — and to have a culture of trust that's created and sustained by the people who we rely on as our key factors going forward from here and from now, and to have it because we're committed to create that future for us all.
We'll need both understanding and goodwill in widespread and Enlightened ways to make that happen.
We will need both wisdom and knowledge to make that happen.
We need to collectively and individually understand our instinctive behaviors and we need to know how to use them to build a strong and better country instead of allowing us to fall into inter group battles that can activate negative instincts and send us down wrong paths together at this point in our history.
We should act in our most enlightened collective best interest today.
We should decide to build enlightened next steps for us as country from this beginning and from our current status today.
We need to look at the worst behaviors of those highly tribal nations, and we need to completely avoid going down those paths here.
We need to understand how damaging and dangerous it is to activate our Us-Them instincts in any setting, and we should decide to be Us as a nation and a people, and then make that happen because we understand what that process is and we know how to make it work on our behalf to give us the very best future that we can now create.
We need to create a working sense of Us as a nation that's based on our beliefs — and we know from doing that well in many relevant settings that it's actually possible to do, and we know and believe that it's a very good thing to do for ourselves and for each other when we do it.
Us-Them instincts are extremely powerful and they can be used to help us, as well as damage us — so we need to use intellectual wisdom and good and pure intentions now to create and build a new Us for the country that's based on our ideals and based on our values, not just on our race.
Those instincts are flexible and powerful at the same time, and they can be channeled in very intentional and effective ways to build an Us for this country that's based on our beliefs and not on our ethnicity or gender — and that can happen if we understand how those instincts work and then channel them down enlightened trajectories as a nation to give us an optimal future for us all as Americans destined to live in Peace.
We have a set of inclusive and enlightened values that we can and should build on to create the very best America of the future. We need to overcome some very powerful challenges from some political forces in our country today that have tribal thinking at their core that will make those enlightened beliefs not easy to use at this point in our history if we want to create the very best trajectory going forward from here and then actually rise past our most negative forces in play today.
We can get there from here, but it won’t be easy, inevitable, or automatic because those negative instincts can have such power over our thoughts, aspirations, and emotional interactions when they're activated and we need to not activate them by doing the right things with each other to build trust and a shared sense of American values that we believe together.
We're in danger of tribalizing politically in our country at this point in time and we need to help people understand how important it will be for us at this moment in time to teach the entire country that we need to rise above and optimize our most positive instincts at the core level to achieve real inter group Peace rather than us go down the slippery slope to hurting each other by group and then having that group anger, division, and animosity that we create from that conflict last for a very long time and badly affect us as who we are as a people and a nation for long periods of time.
Let’s figure this out together.
And let’s become wise as an American group in the most positive ways.
Chapter 18 from our Primal Pathways book outlines the key beliefs we should share as a nation to make Peace happen now and in future times as a country.
These values seem to be a possible anchor set of goals for the country:
- Democracy is the first value on that foundational list.
- Equality is value two.
- Merit follows equality.
- Personal Accountability and Sharing follows Merit.
- Freedom underlies each of those values and beliefs.
- Inclusion ties them together.
- Hating Discrimination creates an underlying context as well.
- Religious Freedom anchors the process as well.
- Innovation and Creativity are also foundational context for the process.
- Being a Law Based Society is a powerful commitment as well.
- Justice anchors the thinking at key and important levels.
- Honesty, Character, and Truthfulness define the interactions we need to have.
- Opportunity has been key to the American Dream as well.
- Human Dignity underlies the interactions and behaviors.
- Mutual Winning is extremely important because it gives us a context for our values and behaviors and thinking at several key levels.
What do you think of those goals as possible anchors for our inter group thinking going forward from here?
Those goals and commitments from the Primal Pathways and Art of InterGroup Peace books give us a context for our thinking and behaviors.
This website in intended to help us achieve those goals and to do it in the context of those beliefs and behaviors.
We need to understand that we're all influenced hugely by our instincts and by our wiring — and those realities all fit into one section on this set of paradigms for quantum physics, qyantum biology, quantum sociobiology, quantum consciousness, and metaphysic as a fun and interesting package, and we should all enjoy the ride that we're about to go on.
AI is changing many areas of our lives, and we should use that resource as a tool to give us better lives, just like many quantum components of existence are already doing.
Four core and basic paradigms now explain everything.
Let’s steer ourselves to intergroup peace by being much more enlightened in these areas and let’s use this website to help make that happen.