Reviews, Paradigms & Beliefs

International Peace and Security Institute (IPSI) Massive Conflict Reports And Predictions

April 6, 2018

The reports of extensive, negative, and damaging inter group conflicts that we can see from the International Peace and Security Institute reinforce the information that we have from the Institute for InterGroup Understanding about those conflicts and confirms and reinforces that flow of information and tells us that our basic packages of tribal instincts are causing problems in more than 200 settings in the world today.

They tell us that the number of people being killed in those conflicts is increasing in far too many settings today and show us that we have many settings where there is no end in sight for the violence and for damage being done now in those painful and grim realities for the people involved in those settings who feel right doing the damage and support having it done.

We live in a world of inter group conflict — and we're on a path to have that conflict increase and be strongly supported by the people who believe that those behaviors are the right thing to do.

We need to create alternative behaviors and beliefs in an increasing number of multi group settings, but enlightenment in many settings is extremely rare, and many people believe that they should be damaging the other group in their setting rather than creating positive results for anyone who's not in their own group in any way.

We see conflicts between groups in all of those settings that draw on the basic thought processes, values, beliefs, emotions, and inter group behaviors that those instincts cause and trigger for people to do negative things to each other create for the people who have them activated in their hearts and heads and who believe them to be the right behaviors that they should have and create in their lives.

We know with great clarity why those conflicts are happening.

We all instinctively divide the world into Us and Them.

We do horrible things to people we perceive to be a Them. We feel no guilt in lying to Them, damaging Them, and displacing Them from any setting they're in.

We tend to hate Them and want Them to suffer or be displaced in negative and damaging ways.

Some current  reports from the International Peace and Security Institute (IPSI) describe multiple  current intergroup conflicts that are damaging people in each of the settings, and no one in the news media is looking at the IPSI information or sharing it with their viewers and readers in any clear or understandable way.

Our journalists tend to completely miss the entire point of these conflicts.

The news media almost always mislabels and describes them as political differences.

Those differences for the conflicted people are actually tribal and ethnic — not ideological or political — but the news media generally describes them as situational and even basically circumstantial.

The media and social media processes that exist and share information about those conflicts have no clue that there are patterns of underlying programming that's causing them all to happen and exist, and those programs couldn't be more predictable, foreseeable, understandable, and easy to label once we see them for what they actually are.

They're usually tribes.

Tribes are extremely important to millions of people in their lives — who use tribal categories to describe to people the Us that they personally align with — and most of the media settings have a strong resistance and almost a complete refusal to even look at, know, recognize, or understand that tribes exist and never mention them when they explain why people who are fighting actually fight.

Tribal issues and conflicts are relevant in over 100 settings, because we live in a world where the current national boundaries of many nations do not reflect the natural and historical territories of local tribal and ethnic groups, and the absolutely consistent pattern is that when people from multiple groups are forced to live together inside artificial national boundaries, they dislike each other and do battle as groups with one another.

People don't choose tribes. It’s a birth thing almost all of the time.

People are born into their group, and most people with tribal identities were born into their tribes.

There are other group identities that people use extensively and sometimes very well to create a sense of Us for a setting or a community. Good leaders who understand instinctive behavior often work to create a sense of community identity for their group that causes people in their group to feel good about being in the group. Military units work hard to create a sense of group identity, and the best processes in that area create a sense of group identity that can create strong linkages for the group.

Being a Marine is a group identity that has great power to create alignment and achieve shared group identity.

Our US instincts are extremely powerful, and we all want to be in an Us that gives us the kinds of reinforcement that we feel as an Us.

When we look at macro patterns and realities for the world and at the 200 conflicts we see in our world today, we can see that the pattern that most consistently sets up battles, distrust, and conflict in various settings, is being in a tribe.

We have millions of people being killed now in Ethiopia, Somalia, Nigeria, Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza, and we can see that the people in each of those settings who are pointing guns at other people and pulling the trigger to create damage and death, speak a different language from the person they are killing.

There are no converts or any personal alignment decisions being made by the combatants in those settings. Birth actually determines who kills whom in almost every site with conflict today.

We know that everyone with a gun in almost every setting was born into the group who has given the gun to them, and we know they're shooting people who were also all born into their own groups as well.

People are born into ethnic groups, cultures, clans, and tribes — and that group identity that's based on who gave birth to each person, determines whom they shoot and whom they defend.

Even though those particular levels of personal identity and group alignment and loyalty are extremely important to each person, we do not tend to honor that sense of who people are for several key areas of their lives.

We don't introduce any sense of wanting people to somehow choose which group they're in to the overall reality or process. Many settings in the world have local ethnic groups being overpowered and run by the local majority group.

Kurds have been oppressed by local majority groups in almost every setting.

We have Irish, Welsh, and Scottish ethnic groups with a long history of being dominated to some degree in their settings, and that set of conflicts will probably continue indefinitely because they're tribal, and those tribes will continue to be who they are forever.

Catalonians feel oppressed by the local Spanish tribe, and the most famous anti war picture we have was actually Guernica, by Pablo Piccasso, which was actually people from the Catalonian tribe being bombed by German war planes doing it to support the local Spanish control over that part of the world.

We have an almost absolute disregard for democratic decisions to be self-governed made by people in any of those groups. The will to govern their own territory and group turf is very consistently overruled with great energy and power by other people with guns who were also born into their groups, and who do not want self determination to be the right or destiny of any of those sets of people.

The Kurds are labelled terrorists for wanting to run their own space in a couple of countries, and the Alawites have been labelled terrorists for their firebombing other tribes in Syria and for forcing millions of people in those tribes from their traditional tribal settings.

Refugees from Syria have gone to several European countries and created neighborhoods with significant local conflicts in many communities in those countries.

Many European cities now have extremely hostile neighborhoods that have been populated by refugees from the Middle East, and the Albanian clans at war with each other in Albania have also taken over neighborhoods in several cities that the local police now say have problematic levels of law enforcement because of those neighborhoods.

We have millions of people who are killing other people today in Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Gaza, and Ukraine — and we know that the people they're killing in all of those settings are from the other tribe and speak the other tribal language that exists in each of those settings.

The patterns are extremely unfortunate, damaging, and destructive, and they're sometimes intentionally evil in very basic ways in those settings. They're extremely consistent in what they believe and what they do to each other when those inter group instincts are in gear in each conflicted setting.

The institute for InterGroup Understanding was created to help deal with those issues and to encourage less damaging and more enlightened behavior in as many inter group settings as possible, when people understand those instincts and choose to act in less damaging and more productive ways because they're understood and used in effective ways.

The Institute for InterGroup Understanding books Primal Pathways, Cusp of Chaos, and The Art of InterGroup Peace all explain those histories, behaviors, and problems those instincts create.

Anyone who doubts the power of those intergroup instincts over people’s lives in today’s world should read this weeks report from the International Peace and Security Institute.

Those problems are happening in multiple settings. Intergroup conflicts exist in a wide range of settings and people are being damaged by those conflicts in each setting.

We need to understand clearly why these issues are all happening in all of those settings if we want to resolve any of them or keep them from reoccurring.

We also need to make very sure that those same sets of instincts don’t get activated at the most dangerous levels in America, and that we don’t’ become just another multi-tribal nation at war with itself.  

It can happen.

It can happen to Us.

Let’s make sure it does not happen here.

We need to get the various political groups in our country who have increasingly activated Us-Them thinking and Us-Them instincts here to not have us sink to the lowest levels of hating each other as groups in our country and do damage to each other in ways that will make us permanently impaired or damaged as groups within our country.

We should get faith leaders to work together to have the Eden we live in be a blessing to us all.

Christians could follow the Words of Jesus Christ and have us all understanding that our quantum physics, quantum biology, and quantum sociobiology are all very intentional, highly effective gifts to us. We should make the commitment to tell the truth to other Christians and to each other as a basis for our interactions with one another and as our personal commitment to ourselves.

We once took great pride in being honest and ethical.

It once was a sense of dignity and self-worth to be a honest person.

Let’s return to that expectation and to that commitment from us to ourselves, to be ethical and honest people.

We can do that.

We can each make that commitment to ourselves to be ethical and only say the truth.