War & Women's Power: Principles of World Peace
Paulo Coelho’s
Declaration of Principles
1] All men are different. And should do everything possible to continue to be so.
2] Each human being has been granted two courses of action: that of deed and that of contemplation. Both lead to the same place.
3] Each human being has been granted two qualities: power and gift. Power drives man to meet his destiny, his gift obliges him to share with others that which is good in him. A man must know when to use his power, and when to use his gift.
4] Each human being has been granted a virtue: the capacity to choose. For he who does not use this virtue, it becomes a curse – and others will always choose for him.
5] Each human being has the right to two blessings, which are: the blessing to do right, and the blessing to err. In the latter case, there is always a path of learning leading to the right way.
6] Each human being has his own sexual profile, and should exercise it without guilt – provided he does not oblige others to exercise it with him.
7] Each human being has his own Personal Legend to be fulfilled, and this is the reason he is in the world. The Personal Legend is manifest in his enthusiasm for what he does.
Single paragraph – the Personal Legend may be abandoned for a certain time, provided one does not forget it and returns as soon as possible.
8] Each man has a feminine side, and each woman has a masculine side. It is necessary to use discipline with intuition, and to use intuition objectively.
9] Each human being must know two languages: the language of society and the language of the omens. The first serves for communication with others. The second serves to interpret messages from God.
10] Each human being has the right to seek out joy, joy being understood as something which makes one content – not necessarily that which makes others content.
11] Each human being must keep alight within him the sacred flame of madness. And must behave like a normal person.
12] The only faults considered grave are the following: not respecting the rights of one’s neighbor, letting oneself be paralyzed by fear, feeling guilty, thinking one does not deserve the good and bad which occurs in life, and being a coward.
Paragraph 1 – we shall love our adversaries, but not make alliances with them. They are placed in our way to test our sword, and deserve the respect of our fight.
Paragraph 2 – we shall choose our adversaries, not the other way around.
12A] We hereby declare the end to the wall dividing the sacred from the profane: from now on, all is sacred.
14] Everything which is done in the present, affects the future by consequence, and the past by redemption.
15] Dispensations to the contrary are herewith revoked.
Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland Beams Yoko Ono's Wishes into Outer Space
From a Smoldering Edge of Your "SuperMax" Society:
Nature Awakens War-Mad "Machine Monkeys" Too Late
Once Pristine Planet Overrun by Industrial Extermination
Bravo Zulu Dandelion Unit
ChronoCorps Orbital SynchLab OMEGA
Lessons from the Last Half Century
SOS from the midst of the mind-control Matrix commonly called "America."
"America", identified over the past 200 years by "Nativist" European settlers and imperial European rulers as a "conquered area" become a sprawling Empire of its own. The former "United Colonies" now ruled by a militarized regime of secret agencies and the largest complex of warring technologies and institutions to ever arise on Earth.
One can argue that the mythical "Matrix" is an actual industrialization of extruded Roman ideals and "pseudoethics" which has now degenerated into psychopathic corruption, in which nearly clueless citizens are indoctrinated into paying for vast weapons technologies and secret surveillance systems morphed into mind-control video killprograms with "Predator" and "Hellfire" technology blasting tribal village people half a world away.
In America, the mediascape has been honed into a sophisticated hypno-hype hate machinery glossed over with air-brushed advertising, masquerading as "entertainment." The killprogramming has become so graphically obnoxious and intentionally obscene that we now chuckle along to "antiheroes" smashing heads with baseball bats, in completely simulated histories and pseudorealities, while we allow battalions to actually drop hundreds of tons of bombs on underdeveloped cultures we barely understand.
Millions of innocent people have been blown to bits, maimed, driven mad by this corrupted old evil machinery. While the "Dick Army" and their Kowboy Klique chuckle, rolling in their vast hidden hordes of WTC gold. They f*cked the whole world, not a little, but the whole shebang this time. And the headless spectacle of the corporate machinery continues to spew out its mindless control programs and diversions, refusing to address these greatest crimes against humanity, the oily realization of ancient Roman power-madness and Reaganite fascism--
The "Bushwacking" of a once proud culture, now having been reduced to shame and denial by these criminals through the historic arc of: the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations, which have yet to be fully resolved, the expansion of the NSA and CIA under Bush, the theft of the 2000 election in Florida by the Bushes, the engineering of the 9-11 attacks on NYC, yet to be addressed on a basic scientific level, the subsequent shredding of the US Constitution, the Geneva Conventions and International Criminal treaties, the illegal invasion and destruction of Iraq and subsequent criminal profiteering and embezzlement of billions which have yet to be accounted for, the death of 100's of thousands of innocent people, false imprisonment and torture for a contrived "Terror war"-- the list of crimes is almost beyond the comprehension of the human mind, let alone the broken hearts of widows and orphans.
Lesson Plan for the Next Millennium
It's time for those who have freed themselves from the Matrix videogame hyper-scam, infotainment mind-control spectacle and fascist-corporatist indoctrination to set down our own ultimatums. It is likely the ONLY way that Obama and Clinton, the ICC and Amnesty will ever be able to enact any significant "change" within the control System. This is what we have learned from our recent truthtelling upwellings: we ARE the change we wish to make.
Therefore, it is possible the next evolution of this collective internet hyperintelligence is to form a NEW PARTY of wide diversity and representation. A proposal for MoveOn.org and CodePink to initiate the new "third rail" "Pop-Over Party (POP)." In which we will unseat the current corrupted "conspiracy of continuity" and war-profiteering machinery.
Rather than being attacked as "unpatriotic" and shamed into silence, we will use our color, our eccentricity and diversity, our creativity and music for a "hyperpatriotic" solution: truthtelling common people rise up to REPLACE the life-choking criminal conspiracy currently ruling our daily official "reality," OVERGROW the Strangelovian dystopia we appear to be trapped in. We know the fertile world is in our hands, and the spirit of the Earth is on our side!
Bravo Zulu Dandelion Unit
ChronoCorps Orbital SynchLab OMEGA
War & Women’s Power
The idea that “if mothers ran the world there would be no war” has been around for quite a while. Now there’s scientific research that seems to agree with that thesis.
Who among us hasn’t asked why war is such a persistent feature of human life? The most common answer is that people make war because society has taught them to make war. In their controversial book, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World, obstetrician and biologist Malcolm Potts and journalist Thomas Hayden claim instead that warring aggression is built into our species. There are measures we can take, however, to increase the likelihood of peace breaking out instead of war, the authors say, and their prescriptions focus mostly on empowering women.
I talked with Malcolm Potts in his office at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the Bixby Professor in the School of Public Health.
What experiences led you to explore connections between sex and war?
I grew up in England during the Second World War in an area with several bomber bases. There were all these wonderfully brave young men. We used to see them in church. Their job was to drop bombs on Germany, bombs that would kill women and children. And of course many of them died in the effort. From a young age, then, I asked, “Why do people do this sort of thing?”
When I was older and working as a physician in war-torn areas, I saw the consequences of war firsthand and started asking the question in a more insistent way. As an obstetrician and then a biologist, I also took a strong interest in the evolution of human sexuality, and wrote a book called Ever Since Adam and Eve, which pushed my thoughts forward. They began to link up with the lingering question of why, out of the thousands of mammalian species, only humans and a few others exhibit the behavior known as team aggression, which in its most full-blown form we call “war.”
But wars are carried out by states, not small teams.
War builds on innumerable small episodes of team aggression. Wars are fought by small teams: the crew, the squad, the ten people in the trench with you. The state manipulates and organizes that, but at the level of the individual aggressor it’s still the same basic behavior.
Isn’t violence common in many species?
A lot of animals are violent for all of the obvious competitive reasons, but team aggression, which is a very costly behavior, occurs when teams of adults, almost always males, attack and kill individuals of the same species. It depends on being an intelligent social animal that has a territory and resources to guard and enlarge. For millions of years, it was an adaptive behavior: it gave a man more resources. A man with more resources would attract more sexual partners and therefore have more offspring and pass on more genes, which is what evolution is all about. Evolution is not good or bad; it’s just what works. It gives us some marvelous things, like the human eye, and some ugly things, like the fact that teams of men in the prime of life band together to murder others.
Why in teams?
Originally, the men would have been related to each other, but in the modern world a kinship can be formed through boot camp and other rituals of bonding. In the Gaza Strip, some terrorists were all members of the same football team, so they felt as if they were a “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare put it. Men in the foxholes told William Manchester that they fought not for flag or country, but for one another.
Women don’t do this?
Women will fight very bravely if they or their children are threatened, but we could not find a single example in the whole of human history where women have banded together spontaneously and systematically and deliberately gone out to kill other human beings.
Do women play a part in your theory of the sources of war-making?
Yes. Historically, women would be drawn to men with more resources. We still see this today, most starkly in situations such as poor women who went to Somalia to marry pirates, who were newly and publicly wealthy.
Does your book, then, present a pessimistic view of human beings?
It is both pessimistic and optimistic. Saying we have an innate predisposition to kill our neighbors is a somber hypothesis. But we’re doing it less frequently than we used to, which means we look at the world in a very different way now. Most people will say that the twentieth century was the most violent in human history, but in fact it was probably the most peaceful. If we look at deaths by team aggression against total population size, we’re getting much less violent. Unfortunately we also have many more low-cost technologies, like improvised explosive devices, and many more powerful technologies, i.e., weapons of mass destruction, for killing each other. So there is urgency.
Human beings present a huge contrast. We can be extraordinarily self-sacrificing, loving, and empathetic, but at the same time so violent. It seems we’ve had to evolve a sort of switch we flip to make it possible to dehumanize other people. We inherit predispositions built deep into our nature, such as a predisposition to learn language. I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that our brain has frameworks of aggression buried deep within it.
Are you saying that we have to make war? We can’t help ourselves?
No. We don’t have to do it, but I think we will more effectively deal with our violent nature if we understand it as a universal attribute from the evolutionary history of our species rather than an aberration.
So, just because a predisposition developed over a vastly long period of time because it was adaptive doesn’t mean it is permanently adaptive?
Indeed. As conditions change, it may become less adaptive, and that is certainly what I believe about war. Team aggression at the level of killing has no purpose now, but it emerges nonetheless. The evolution of our bodies is very slow, so something that took tens of thousands of years to evolve is still there to be dealt with, even after it has no seeming purpose. It’s helpful and enlightening to look at where we’ve come from in evolution. Then we can better define the things we don’t like, and ask whether we can do anything about them. We can only do that if we’re honest about where they’re really coming from. For example, if we persist in the naïve idea that all violence is culturally determined and we obscure the differences between men and women, that’s not going to get us anywhere.
So, what is going to get us somewhere?
Well, I know it sounds simplistic, but nonetheless it’s important for men to have healthy outlets for this behavioral predisposition. It must be respected. Team sports have all the elements of bonding and aggression that are the key elements in war. Also, doing activities together like climbing a mountain can draw on the same impulses. The mountain is the enemy. It satisfies some of the same urges. Yes, there are dangers, but they are more controllable than the dangers of real war, where a lot of people get killed.
What about the role of women?
It must be said, without being vulgar, that human sexual behavior is very asymmetrical. A woman has only a few pregnancies in a lifetime, whereas, all things being equal, a man could have hundreds of children in a lifetime. Gestation and child-rearing give women an inherent orientation to long-range decisions. Also, men are evolved to take risks and be territorial. Women lived in the territory carved out by men. They benefited more from in-group cooperation and social stability than out-group hostility. As a result, they tend to take a longer view and to seek consensus. As we said in the book, “If evolution provides the poison root of warfare, it has also supplied an important antidote. We overlook women’s powerful evolutionary heritage at our collective peril.”
What is that antidote?
For one, empower women with education and more opportunities and thereby also increase the number of women leaders, the number of women in parliaments and legislatures.
How do reproductive rights play a role?
We must have energetic efforts to support reproductive autonomy. When women can control their own fertility, family size begins to fall. As family size falls, education and development increase, as does the advancement of women’s role in society. Throughout the world there is plenty of demand for family planning on the part of women, but the evolved male drive to control female reproduction often stands in the way. Male theologians, male legislators, and conservative male doctors create and maintain the barriers to family planning. All in all, then, energetic efforts at empowerment of women will mitigate the effects of the warring nature we have inherited. Peace breaks out when women have more control over their bodies and more influence in their societies.
Sharel Cassity's "Powwow" Jazz Sax at Smithsonian
