Nine Cornerstones of a Campaign to End War and More
A Future Without War, is composed almost entirely of excerpts from the website I was building by that name, AFutureWithoutWar.org. By this time I’d concluded that at least nine areas of concern could roughly embrace the many many factors that would have to be fixed, attended to, or undertaken, now and going into the future, in order to build and maintain an enduring warless global community. It describes these nine cornerstones in detail, giving examples, and listing organizations already at work on each of them. All but two (Empower Women and Enlist Young Men) are critical issues also noted in the books by authors listed near the beginning of this page.
The cornerstones were listed in alphabetical order to make it easier to remember all nine. In the AFWW Logo they were presented in a circle because they must be attacked/attended to simultaneously; their issues are complexly intertwined, one of the reasons why leaders from all nine would need to participate in coordinating any campaign to end war.
Also, what had, by the time I wrote this book, become very evident is the profound complexity of the challenge to end war. We’ve made war for millennia. It is deeply embedded, financially and culturally, in our dominant societies. While abolishing war is within human capabilities—we are an enormously adaptive species—an ending-war campaign will require enormous will and skill from many different areas of contemporary human society these cornerstones embrace.
A metaphor that seems to fit the level of difficulty are projects that are already underway, putting permanent colonies on the Moon and/or Mars. These efforts—like ending war, once not even imaginable—will require that thousands of people sharing that same goal bring many hundreds of different skills to the project, plus leadership that provides oversight to keep the project focused and on track. Very much like that, ending war is possible and is within our capabilities if we want to badly enough, but no one should think it will be easy. If achieved, however, it will unquestionably be one of our species’ greatest accomplishments.
The cornerstones were listed in alphabetical order to make it easier to remember all nine. In the AFWW Logo they were presented in a circle because they must be attacked/attended to simultaneously; their issues are complexly intertwined, one of the reasons why leaders from all nine would need to participate in coordinating any campaign to end war.
Also, what had, by the time I wrote this book, become very evident is the profound complexity of the challenge to end war. We’ve made war for millennia. It is deeply embedded, financially and culturally, in our dominant societies. While abolishing war is within human capabilities—we are an enormously adaptive species—an ending-war campaign will require enormous will and skill from many different areas of contemporary human society these cornerstones embrace.
A metaphor that seems to fit the level of difficulty are projects that are already underway, putting permanent colonies on the Moon and/or Mars. These efforts—like ending war, once not even imaginable—will require that thousands of people sharing that same goal bring many hundreds of different skills to the project, plus leadership that provides oversight to keep the project focused and on track. Very much like that, ending war is possible and is within our capabilities if we want to badly enough, but no one should think it will be easy. If achieved, however, it will unquestionably be one of our species’ greatest accomplishments.
