How to prevent Nuclear Cold War from going Hot
H O L I G E N T Societal Reconstruction
Complex Systemic Stress Reduction
Some years ago, Jared Diamond was my daughter’s professor of geography at UCLA. I read his book Collapse with particular interest. He chronicles the collapse of civilizations along history and we learn that the common cause of collapse was the depletion of resources.
This has a new and urgent meaning for us in this 21st century. Nature perfected resource management through the rule by which every organism of all species through countless generation make their flesh, leavings and remains available as resource for living plants and animals. Call it total recycling without waste and it worked for billions of years.
Now, clever humans with their do-as-I-please free will and inventions such as extractive capitalist-consumerism causing extreme inequality while spewing mountains, rivers and oceans of non-biodegradable and toxic waste depleting Earth’s life support capacity. Humans were able to break the natural system in mere centuries — a blink on the evolutionary timescale.
This is only the beginning of the tragic end of the human story. The world is running out of nearly everything — life on Earth is becoming uninhabitable. The three super powers are in an extraordinary conflict competing for the diminishing resources. Unlike during the 20th century, war is not an option to settle scores in this 21st century. Currently an unspeakable nuclear cold war is upon us as conflicts are escalating among the superpowers. In this nuclear age war cannot settle conflicts without the high risk of ending in nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). There can be no winner in a nuclear holocaust in which the lucky ones will die instantly but most will die slow tortured death in a radiation-poisoned world.
Stress is generated as a human neuro-endocrine response to perceived threat. Nearly 8 billion people on Earth are competing for the diminishing resources. This elevates global collective stress and conflicts. The products of high stress are fear, aggression and the diminishing of critical thought process (an evolutionary legacy held in the primitive part of the human brain). High collective stress predictably brings out people’s bad behavior. This condition, like a virus, infects the susceptible; bad behavior and conflicts spread like a pandemic.
Our stress arousal system is deeply embedded in the human nervous and endocrine systems — it cannot be surgically removed. The only way to prevent the rise of stress is to significantly reduce or eliminate threats. We could do that by securing universal quality of life, global peace and systemic sustainability. Not simple but possible!
War is no longer an option (if it ever was) to settle scores. To heal this terminal illness of humanity, The Holigent Initiative offers an entirely new concept: Complex Systemic Stress Reduction (CSSR). Unlike assumed remedies of the past crudely applied top-down from the outside, CSSR is analog to the application of vaccine that can work from the inside at the “cellular” level of human communities to overcome societal ills.
The Holigent Initiative is prepared to inject the “vaccine” of Quality of Life into societies one household and community at a time. This proposal is a long term healing process. When quality of life becomes universal collective stress levels diminish and the prospects for global peace improve. The “booster shot” to accelerate this societal healing can be achieved by transfer of wealth (private and public grants and donations) into the common assets of participating communities, as detailed in the book Dear Billionaire.
