Ultimate Violence: Grave Dangers

Why I Continually Try to Sound the Alarm

Seldom in recent memory has there been such a dystopian convergence of global threats and domestic dangers.  After the deadly January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Bill Moyers called me, “the least surprised person”—as have a number of Congress members that day.  Now, we are seeing the very geopolitical dangers I had warned against, at least since our 2019 interdisciplinary conference, “The Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.”

Now, in 2023, to a considerable extent because of the Trump presidency and what has ensued from it, our country and our world are in a much more dangerous situation than when we began warning with The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.  What I referred to as a psychological and social contagion has now progressed to a “mental health pandemic” and “shared psychosis” domestically and a species-endangering, “collective suicidality” globally. Homicide spikes occur with a couple years’ lag period from the presidency of cause; hence, how much more global warfare?

Violence is an end product of a long process, which is why I have emphasized scholarship, education, and prevention throughout my career.  My textbook, Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures, considered to be the most comprehensive textbook on the subject to date and used in universities worldwide, stresses structural violence—or injustice and oppression—as a potent stimulant for the existential threats of nuclear violence and climate destruction.  Written in 2014, I intended to counter the propaganda for the public’s desire for complacency, as I found among my more opportunistic colleagues.

There can be actual reduction and prevention of violence if we resort to true knowledge, not denial.  The greater and more emergent the problem, the more urgent and important is the “primary” prevention at the population and societal level, even before the violence is visible and before it starts to cause vast suffering.  This is why I entered public health, to educate and consult with legislators and policymakers, far before I began speaking up about Donald Trump—and now, I have my own Substack publication to deal with the subject of “Ultimate Violence.”

By “Ultimate Violence,” I mean the growing dangers of world war, nuclear war, and climate destruction—all of which are a reflection of our collective suicidality.  I have repeatedly mentioned the Doomsday Clock and how it is ticking faster and louder than ever before, since its creation in 1946 by Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, and other leading scientists who had one basic message for us all: that our most important concern now, our most important choice, and the human species’ more urgent task is: “One World or None.”  And, so far, we have definitely failed to bring about “One World”—much the opposite, in fact, and thus we are on the road to “None”.

The results of escalating climate destruction are more and more visible, already upon us, no longer projections after yet another climate-turbulent summer.  In our own country, from Hawaii to Florida to Burning Man, to unprecedented wild fires, floods, and record-breaking temperatures globally, the results of humanity’s collective disregard for the damage to our only habitat are on display.  Insanity may be described as believing we are serving ourselves through selfish exploitation and unconscionable pollution of the planet, while being unable to consider that we are causing the collapse of the very ecosystem we depend on for survival.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. Congress, actual “climate deniers” control the House and are more tragically dysfunctional than ever.  Shocking escalations of extreme partisan political maneuverings, gross expenditures for war, and incessant plotting to take and keep control of the country with blatantly self-serving lies and unending chicanery are imperiling the country.  Benjamin Netanyahu had similarly upended the Israeli government’s stability before the cauldron of the Middle East exploded.  His U.S. counterpart, Donald Trump, may well have been the source of Israel’s intelligence failure—but just as a kompromat was unnecessary for Trump to become Vladimir Putin’s “useful idiot,” an actual leak is unnecessary for him to have emboldened dangerous “leaders” and to bring every democratic institution under assault.  This is not a product of his power, but the potency of spread of mental pathology.

Sending a major armada of military forces to the Middle East and still further emergency appropriations for the military, while dramatic in response, is the least effective prevention strategy.  Part of the $158 billion plan to finance and enable endless super-sophisticated weapons, against numerous United Nations Security Council vetoes, is a manipulation of the public into thinking in the myopic terms of Palestine vs. Israel, Russia vs. Ukraine, and Us vs. Them.  The very real and most serious problems of our country and our world are for the most part being largely ignored, or falsely addressed with rhetorical Band-Aids, governmental propaganda, foreign lobbying, and military industrial complex-manipulated floods of misinformation.  Militantly trying to “save” ourselves, therefore, may hasten the end of ourselves.

I return to my hypothesis that Donald Trump was a weapon of “psychological warfare,” intended not only by rational actors to “distract, divide, and conquer,” but by a dynamic of pathology to destroy its host—as all pathologies do.  Domestically, our political and economic systems are largely paralyzed, as we are consumed with the self-destructive excesses of a small but dominantly controling class.  Globally, the increasingly disregarded United Nations seems incapable of dealing with the truly critical, literally civilizational life-or-death issues.  It seems increasingly clear that, no matter how urgent and dangerous these real issues are to our collective future, the solution lies not just in attacking our enemies but in changing our view.