Art of Climbing Trees

Peace / The War Machine

During the first phase of our transition to the world peace of Eutopia, we’ll likely still need a threatening presence. There will still be greedy, wilful psychopaths among us, and we’ll be raw from conflict, carrying historical grievances and trauma. Some of us will only understand the language of threat until a more co-operative and caring system allows us to decompress. 

More significantly, the machinery of war is intertwined with the Establishment that won’t give up its privilege easily. We can be almost certain of coup attempts to reinstate the status quo, or something worse. (Our dreams can be too easily be co-opted and twisted; time and again, revolutions are appropriated by a new centralised Establishment). The machinery of war, therefore, needs capturing as soon as possible, while political power is assumed. Gaining the support of military personnel in advance to mitigate the heavy brainwashing/brain-soiling will make a peaceful transition a lot easier.

The good news is that a neutered Establishment/military industry largely responsible for pushing violent solutions will make de-escalation, peacekeeping, and world peace much quicker and easier.

While trust is low, we may begin with a Peace Insurance Pact (PIP)¹⁹⁹ as a non-nuclear deterrent of shared protection, i.e., any territory/people facing violence will be protected by everyone else. As trust grows, we can go further and pool the best of our military’s equipment and most level-headed personnel who will be trained in peacekeeping and distributed around the world. (Peacekeepers would only be deployed with UE consensus.) This would be to relinquish our ‘private’ powers of mass destruction/defence to the UE, with the certainty of protection, since we are all the UE. 

The colossal energy invested in the military⁵⁶ – the machines, the tech, the personnel – is an incredible resource that can ultimately be diverted towards all the practical needs of our emergency: firefighting, assisting with mass climate migrations, large-scale soil improvement, rewilding, etc., (Peacekeepers will be our large-scale first-responders when they’re not peacekeeping).

For a complex society, it’s good to have teams of helpers on hand, specialising in fire, health and security emergencies.

As we heal and the emergency abates, the superfluous weapons can be dismantled, and Peacekeepers can find other jobs. This should happen as soon as possible since the longer we keep weapons lying about, the longer we risk someone using them.

Laying down our arms will be a tightrope walk between tipping points of fear and faith, between the desire for openness and wall-building. Again, none of this will work without recognising the trouble we’re in – that we’re already in the ‘valley of the shadow of death’.

Please try using the (efficient) ‘Six Thinking Hats’ method of parallel thinking for sharing your ideas.
It helps us to organise our thoughts and feelings. Wear the Black Hat for critisism/doubts; the Green hat for creative suggestions; the Yellow for positive responses, Red for gut feelings; White for information. I am wearing the Blue Hat now, when I say we are here to design Eutopia.

Simply write ‘Black’, ‘Yellow’, ‘Green’, etc, before your given response. Then, start a new paragraph for ideas of a different coloured hat.