Exploding pagers and two way radios triggered these reflections but they are only the tipping point of a long history of concern. When your skin-close personal possessions and accessories suddenly are outed as potential weapons of war some kind of internal shift occurs. Human kind’s inhumanity to humans could be considered a product of evolution that points to a flaw in both our incomplete neurology and culture in that we can now too easily out think our own core humanity or ‘heart’. Put less metaphorically the new brain of evolution now can create a ‘reality trance’ that can suspend the virtue attributes of our species. First among those attributes are empathy and cooperation. War up until the 20th century was steeped in rules, uniforms and rituals, simply because it was such of brutal test of a society and its institutions that it had to be conducted on a ‘field of war’. The conflict’s possible damage to daily life had to be defined and contained. The last two centuries have changed all that. The internet, global supply chains, and unbridled, amoral strategic thinking have generated a reality capable of disconnecting us from from the foundational virtues of the human race leaving us all ever more vulnerable. 

This is not going to be another critique of the internet and global supply chains or even war itself. That tends to be pointless in hot times like these. We begin any journey from where we are. The call to individual conscience and sense of good could also be seen short term as pointless, but in the long game of survival perhaps they are our only route. You will notice this project does not identify itself politically or religiously, but concentrates on what we have had in common for not just centuries but millennium. We are wired to care for children, one another and the community, and that wiring is seen by many scientists as what has successfully brought our species this far. Unbridled or ‘unbannistered’ amoral strategic thinking is what is killing us here. I doubt if anyone, and certainly not a significant number of people reading this, could go out and commit a violent crime today. It would shock, harm and confuse them it they committed such an atrocity. But that said we are seeing across the globe that some strategies though are demonstrably morally and humanly wrong and are carried out by people more like us than not. We may hold our engineered often outsourced violence at arms length through technology but that arm’s length cognitive strategy could destroy us all in this newly connected world.

What can any of us do about this nightmare of a problem. Whatever any of us can do, it will begin with us and our local in-person communities. On that scale there is plenty we can do. I think the human flaw is our physical capacity to be trained and tranced out of our own good natures. The brain’s plasticity is a double edged sword. The good news is we can with some discipline train our own trances back to our own original authentic good natures and the memory of good that most of us carried into this world and practiced as children. If we and our communities work daily to supplant this near collective trance of division, hatred and vitriol, we may yet overcome this human flaw. We owe it to ourselves and our communities to lay the ground work within ourselves for genuinely good decisions into the future. One thing is for sure, the future won’t wait for us.