Gambling with WWIII !!

We Must Pull Ourselves Out of this Death Spiral before It is Too Late

On April 1, 2024, Israel attacked the Iranian consulate in Syria, killing at least ten people, including two of Tehran’s top commanders.  It was a new breaking of norms, where even embassies are no longer safe from military attacks.

On April 14, 2024, Iran launched more than 300 cruise and ballistic missiles and drones at military targets in Israel, in retaliation.  The attack was novel in that, this time, it was not performed through proxy militias, such as the Houthis in Yemen or Hezbollah in Lebanon, but directly from Iran.

U.S. and Israeli military forces shot down “the vast majority” of the missiles and dozens of attack drones, and damages were minor.  Iran said that, after this attack, “the matter can be deemed concluded,” unless there is a counterattack.

On April 15, 2024, Israel’s war cabinet met to weigh possible responses to Iran’s missile and drone attack over the weekend.  World leaders called for an “utmost degree of restraint,” while Israel’s military chief is vowing revenge, although he did not elaborate on when and how.

What is happening here?  The world is holding its breath, bracing for a full-blown regional war, as Israel, headed by a dangerous leader as the U.S. once was, endangers us all.

Gambling as our country and our world are doing with World War III is madness.

It is the same madness with which we are positioning freely and voluntarily to vote in a fascistic dictator, intent on destroying our country.

It is the same madness with which we are careening toward dangerous tipping points in a climate crisis, without changing our ways.

It is the same madness with which billionaires no longer earn their wealth but steal it through deception and exploitation, to an unsustainable and catastrophic degree.

This madness is what I have called our “collective suicidality.”

What has happened since the times of Albert Einstein and J.R. Oppenheimer—as well as such visionary leaders as John F. Kennedy, George Kennan, Henry Stimson, and Daniel Ellsberg, and such luminaries as Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Bernard Lown, and many other philosophers and academics?  Then, it was recognized that the old ways of thinking about our world had to be changed urgently and massively if humanity were to prosper and indeed survive.

Their thinking helped secure relative world peace for eighty years, but now we are experiencing an opposite shift in consciousness that can quickly spiral us into Armageddon.

I began this Substack publication two years ago, because of the extremely dangerous situation we are now in and because I wished to urge psychiatrists and mental health experts to play a far greater role in “Preventing World War III” than they are right now.  I entitled it, “Societal Safety and Survival.” We are in this situation, not because we lack the science or the resources or the solutions, but because of our state of collective mental health.  This is the real cause of the Doomsday Clock ticking louder and faster, and a “Death Spiral” threatening to consume us all.

This was the reason for our issuing our “Prescription for Survival 2022” and “Prescription for Survival 2023,” following our original “Prescription for Survival,” issued in the first month of the Covid pandemic, in March 2020, in an attempt to save thousands of American lives from a mentally unfit leader.

Unless dangerous individuals are contained, the rest of human civilization cannot flourish, as we saw in the seven hundred years following the fall of the Roman Empire.  Until the time of the Renaissance, Europe essentially lived through the Dark Ages, when little could be accomplished outside of survival, and life was indeed “nasty, brutish, and short”—to recall Thomas Hobbes’ phrase—so engulfed was humanity in spiraling violence.

As long as all this is mental health-driven, what happens is up to us.  I have tried to emphasize this, for it is a two-edged sword: it means that all the external turmoil and chaos could stop instantly with a change of consciousness, but it also means that the consciousness we are in will have built into it a blindness that prevents that change.

(Tragically, it is useless to hope that the psychiatric establishment will contribute in any positive way, considering the American Psychiatric Association’s continued lack of remorse: its ethics committee head recently renewed its egregious Trump-era gag order, and its CEO has moved onward to corrupt the World Psychiatric Association.  I would be happy if the field did not cause harm—yet, harm is what results when its focus is not on patients and the public good but on corrupt pharmaceutical pursuits, most recently in the form of wild ethics violations through psychedelic “data fixing” for profit.)

In spite of all this, the knowledge remains for us to apply, and once we learn our own dynamics—or gain insight—possibilities open.

Today was originally the launch date for the first chapter of my new book for paid subscribers, but I could not let this day go without addressing these critical events. I am therefore pushing the launch by a few days.  Chapter One will be released on April 20, 2024, to mark the seventh anniversary of the Yale conference I organized in order to warn publicly about the dangers of the first Trump presidency.  Before then, there will be a sneak preview of the Preface, on April 17, 2024.

The Psychology of Trump Contagion is relevant, even here, since this dangerous state of the world cannot afford to have dangerous personalities in charge, either in the United States or in Israel.  There are many parallels between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu: both have sought to be in power for personal immunity reasons, both have crippled the judiciary to avoid criminal accountability, and both have made alliances with extremist factions to protect their power.  Both have brought us to the brink of world war. Furthermore, Trump with presidential powers, authority, and bullhorn again would seriously escalate the dangers, no matter what he says or whose side he takes—for such is the nature of mental pathology. We should recognize that our “sleepwalking” (to borrow Liz Cheney’s word) to this state of affairs is an illustration of even greater dangers from Trump Contagion, not less.