The Urgent Need for a Life-Affirming World Order

A Curriculum for One World or None

*The Zoom Link for today’s live session is far below.

Until now, I have been warning against the gravity and the reality of the dangers our world is facing, and this is how I began this Substack series. This is also why, as a social psychiatrist and a scholar of violence, I wrote and edited the following two books:

· Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures

· The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President

The first book was a textbook, written in 2014 and later published with Wiley-Blackwell, illustrating the connection between individual and societal violence and foreshadowing the triumvirate of global dangers—structural, environmental, and nuclear violence—that portended our “collective suicidality.” It is considered the most comprehensive handling of the subject to date and is now used in universities worldwide.

The second was an instant New York Times bestseller, which in 2017 was so unexpectedly successful that it took Macmillan, one of the “Big Five” publishers, five weeks of repeat printings to replenish stocks enough not to sell out instantly! Anecdotes abounded of people driving across their states to find a single remaining copy. It would later be revealed that none other than Chief of Staff General John Kelly secretly purchased and consulted our public-service book, which he used “as an owner’s manual” for dealing with the dangers in the White House and applied its principles potentially to have averted a nuclear war with North Korea!

I was never a political person, but had experience advising policy as an expert consultant to the Institute of Medicine, later the National Academy of Medicine, and the World Health Organization on using public health approaches to violence prevention. In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, when the entire globe mobilized not only to merely react to violence with criminal justice and security but to actually prevent it through scholarship and science. We made exceptional gains in a short period of time, advising governments on effective policies and achieving a global reduction of interpersonal violence by 16 percent in 12 years.

When a man with dangerous psychopathology reached the U.S. presidency, however, my focus shifted to a new public health threat: the potential transformation of our culture into one of destructiveness, via a spread of dangerous symptomatology, unless we took steps to contain it. This was the natural consequence of our general collective suicidal tendency I had been writing about, but now it would be acutely accelerated, and decisive interventions such as that of saving a patient from imminent suicide would be relevant before all other, more preventive measures.

Public health interventions, however, depend largely on education of the public. Indeed, if we educated the public and nothing else, we would not only be able to intervene in a timely way, but the vast majority of illnesses, suffering, and premature deaths would be prevented before such interventions even be became necessary. In the absence of education, on the other hand, decisive interventions such as the one called for would not only be virtually impossible, but serious spreads of pathology, violence, and destructiveness would occur through the spread of disinformation.

Therefore, we will begin here a much-needed curriculum for a more life-affirming World Order, predicated on the theme of One World or None. It points to the need for global awareness that uses our knowledge about human psychology and dangerous behavior to help reorient us away from the “Death Spiral” we are in, as we quite literally prepare to destroy human civilization with weapons that should never have been allowed to proliferate, must never be used, and thus must be brought under international control before it is too late.

I have outlined since the beginning of this Substack series how the theme, “One World or None,” has become all the more critical, outlining its history back to Albert Einstein, J.R. Oppenheimer, and other leading scientists who were responsible for developing atomic weapons. Immediately following the use of the atomic bomb, and with their scientific awareness of what was to come, they urgently promoted this theme with a conference, a historic book, and a short film in 1946. It is also when they established the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which quickly became known for the ominous Doomsday Clock.

In this manner, 79 years, ago, immediately after World War II, the leading scientists realized that they had the knowledge and the responsibility to take the lead in explaining and advocating One World or None. The effort begun in 1946 came about because nuclear scientists realized they understood best the unprecedented dangers of their scientific breakthroughs. However, their efforts soon became sidetracked with the dawn of the “Cold War” and the very fast expansion in power and numbers, resulting in a kind of implicit legitimacy, of nuclear weapons. Indeed, the social and political situation changed so dramatically, that the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” Oppenheimer himself, was ostracized and stripped of all positions and “security clearances” for increasingly warning against what was happening and unyieldingly advocating what he believed to be the One World or None imperative.

Now in our time I believe psychiatrists, mental health professionals, and physicians have the knowledge and the responsibility to take a leading role in preventing the far more catastrophic World War III that has become so talked about and is actually being seriously contemplated and planned. The incoming administration, which is predatory and violence-prone, will not alleviate the problem but exacerbate it, no matter what it purports to do; in fact, more than anything, it is a very product of our current Death Spiral. More than ever, we need a new way of thinking, a new mindset, if we are to be able to avert World War III and to reallocate human resources and talents away from creating weapons of destruction and toward creating shared mechanisms of collective human welfare, betterment, and—it must be realized—collective survival.

The ability to make this choice is a spiritual one. The mechanism for getting there requires detailed social psychological and psychiatric knowledge. Indeed, at this critical time when humans are threatening to become the first species in evolutionary history to bring about its own extinction, we must urgently find a way to curb humanity’s death drive, away from conflict, confrontation, and developing ever more destructive weapons and technologies that are literally thousands if not millions of times more destructive than those of World War II. As Einstein is remembered for warning so graphically, he said he was not sure which superweapons would be used for World War III, but he was certain that World War IV would be fought with “sticks and stones.” He insisted: “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive.” This is what we will explore in a new curriculum, over the next several weeks, for which I hope you will join me.

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is inviting you to a live session in a series: