The Urgent Need for a Life-Affirming World Order, Session 2

A Curriculum for One World or None

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

In just a few days, on January 28, 2025, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will be updating the Doomsday Clock—a metaphorical device to warn the public about our proximity to self-destruction. The Bulletin has cited the emergence of artificial intelligence and threats of new pandemics as reasons for its impending update. No doubt it has also taken note of the command of more than 5000 nuclear heads being under a man who is threatening to invade Mexico, to annex Canada, to take over Greenland, and to seize the Panama Canal.

For the last couple of years, the hands of the Clock have remained at 90 seconds to midnight, its most alarmist position since its creation in 1947, when the hands were at seven minutes to midnight. Still, it has not gone far enough. In recent years, the now very establishment and politically-connected keepers of the Doomsday Clock have only once in a while moved its minutes closer to Doomsday World Cataclysm. In January 2020, for the first time in the Clock’s history, it was shockingly designated to be advancing in seconds rather than minutes—100 seconds to midnight—and emphasis was now put on the dangers emanating from “climate change” rather than solely from nuclear weapons. No further movement was made, despite even more seriously deteriorating world conditions, until January 2023, when under considerable pressure and following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Clock was moved to 90 seconds. No further advance was made after that, despite an explosion in the Middle East that places the globe in perhaps a more perilous position than ever.

I myself have been writing about the compromises of the Doomsday Clock, through State Department, CIA, and the military-industrial complex connections. Last year, just before the Clock’s position was to be announced, I wrote, “Preventing World War III,” and just afterward wrote, “Preventing World War III, Part 2.” I estimated that the true position of the hands of the Clock should be at around 60 seconds to midnight. Now, with a change in global leadership that includes not only mental instability and cognitive decline, but newly emboldened and expansionist defenses, it is doubtful that the Doomsday Clock will give an honest, objective assessment of the dangers—and the unspeakable death and destruction we are about to experience if we continued on this course.

This is the collective suicidality, or “Death Spiral,” that I have been writing about and calling our attention to. From a social psychiatrist’s perspective, it is natural, if not inevitable, that the greater the perils, the more we will wish to ignore or to deny them. This tendency arises from an underlying belief that we cannot change our circumstances or our destiny. Numbing the immediate pain, therefore, becomes a greater priority than solving the problem. This is what is truly occurring beneath world affairs, why our leaders are not only incapable of tackling the problem but contributing to it, and why, in an effort to deny that this is what is happening, increasingly installing unfit “leaders” in the highest offices.

However, one of the greatest lessons of psychiatry is that the problems we perceive as intractable are not inevitable. The greater the self-awareness, or the recognition that we are the generators of our own problems, which we then project onto others and the external world, the greater our control over the situations in which we find ourselves. Ultimately, it takes far less mental energy to acknowledge and to take responsibility for this reality, than to continue to feed the defensive belief that the origin of our troubles is external, and that we are merely passive observers of our own fate.

Although discomforting at first, the more we understand how we got here, what was the mindset that led us to where we are, and what are our capacities for drawing humanity out of a predicament of its own creation, the more empowered we become. Since the time of Socrates, autognosis, or self-knowledge, has been upheld as a path toward wisdom and better decision-making. It has now become existentially critical that we not shy away from this most urgent of tasks. To quote Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” We must examine the systems of thought we are employing, admit shortcomings where they exist, and imagine and generate new ones if we are to solve global problems at their source.

For example, national military commands regularly contemplate and war-game the ultimate act of obliterating human civilization. Through specialization and compartmentalization, these war-making institutions instruct and prepare national political leaders in how quickly and in what ways they are to make decisions within minutes literally to destroy our world. Most war-gaming is highly classified and super-secret. However, in recent months the most senior military officials have come out and stated it is their responsibility not only to prepare for nuclear war but to devise strategies to “win”. Also recently, it has come to light that forty years ago, during the Reagan Administration, hundreds of military officials including the Secretary of Defense conducted a twelve-day nuclear war game known as “Proud Prophet.” Even then, the conclusion was that, if such a war began, it would likely end with the destruction of human civilization. The weapons and delivery systems have far advanced in the decades since. Yet, it is never discussed how this way of organizing and governing our world is bringing us literally to the brink of self-annihilation, how meaningless strict obedience to these plans will be if we no longer exist as a species, and how we might draw ourselves out of this “insanity”.

This is the very reason why global political affairs have become, before anything, a matter of mental health, public health, and social psychiatry. Whether psychiatry, itself a compromised field—as we have seen in the actions of the American Psychiatric Association and the pharmaceutical industry—can mobilize the knowledge of human behavior and human potential that we have is a spiritual question. I do not have much faith in the field, but I have faith in humanity. After all, the collective knowledge we have is not confined to a profession but can be mobilized through our own initiative, edification, and application. This is why public education is extremely important, and professionals sharing their knowledge, our having shared knowledge, and making choices based on that shared knowledge of the human sciences may be a first step toward achieving “One World” over “None”. These are the issues we will be exploring in our curriculum.

Announcement:

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