Three Key Years explains what parents, family, communities, and day care settings can all do to strengthen each child’s brain in those key months and years.  A top public health priority for our nation should be to teach that information to every single parent even before each child is born.  We owe it to every parent to explain that science and to share those realities about helping their children with every single parent.  

Three Key Years

The opportunities for Peace and for positive InterGroup interactions are real and they are immediate. We need to be both informed about the opportunities that exist and accountable for what we do in response to them.  

This book focuses on those issues. It also explains the learning journey that took the author from the backwoods of northern Minnesota to interacting with people in dozens of countries and a wide variety of business, health care, and governmental settings in ways that created both insights about intergroup interactions and test sites for the tool kit needed to create and protect InterGroup Peace.  

The first prominent use of Peace in Our Time by a British Prime Minister as a label for a working intergroup Peace agenda was a failure. We have the same need today--and this time we need to get the agenda and the strategy right. The book Peace in Our Time explains how to make that happen and explains why we need to do that work now before we end up being just another troubled nation at war with itself.

The book explains why we need to become a nation united by out core beliefs rather than a nation divided by race, ethnicity, economic status or gender.  This book also explains what the key beliefs are that we can use to bring us all together, drawing on the legacy of the best beliefs that have made America great in the past.  

Peace in our Time

People are doing evil and discriminatory things to people in multiple settings across the planet. The old colonial powers gave up their empires in a very clumsy and dysfunctional process.  They left behind a world of aberrant , almost idiosynchratic and frequently non-sensensical multi-tribal nations with groups of people trapped together in national boundries that too often make no functional sense and create situations where too many people in too many settings are at war with themselves.

The collapse of the Soviet Union created its own array of problematic and newly independent multi-tribal settings that are each also generating their own internal intergroup conflicts and divisions.

All of the internal conflicts in all of those troubled settings are creating floods of refugees — with more than 50 million people today in refugee situations. Those refugees — combined with a flood of economic immigrants who are seeking better economic status for themselves and their families — have created intergroup conflicts and intergroup stress points across a wide range of countries and settings.

Many countries that had been ethnically pure for centuries — like Austria and France — are finding themselves with major influxes of new people who have a different culture, a different ethnicity, and often very different belief systems.

Riots in London, Amsterdam, and Paris are happening far too often at purely ethnic levels — with all of the worst instinctive us/them behaviors and us/them intergroup thought processes fully activated in all of those settings. The religion of the new immigrants tends to be different than the religion of the origional inhabitents in most of those settings. The people who are in a state of intergroup conflict in many of those settings believe that the conflicts they face are religious to a sgnificant degree. That, unfortunately, tends to be a self-fullfilling and self-actualizing assessment, and religious leaders in some settings are now calling for the equivelant of holy wars.  

We are seeing tribes at war in a wide number of settings who are making religion a major element in their intergroup hatred. The Shia tribes and the Sunni tribes and the Kurdish tribes all fight as tribes but ascribe religion linked motivations to their shedding of intertribal blood.  

In our own country, we don’t have tribes at war with tribes, but we do have significant economic and educational differences between ethnic and racial groups that are causing real problems and we have levels of intergroup anger that emerge regularly with high levels of visibility when trigger events bring the negative intergroup energies in various settings to a situational boiling point for the settings where those events happen. 


Cusp of Chaos

There are more than 200 intergroup conflicts going on in various sites around the world today. People in a wide range of sites face intergroup tension, discrimination, anger, and division.

Our basic instincts to divide the world into us and them, and then act in tribal ways both for and against other people shape our thoughts and our behaviors in a wide range of settings. Those instincts affect how we think and they affect what we do in every intergroup setting. Left to their own devices, those instincts can cause us to behave in very ugly and even evil ways against one another.

We do not need to allow those instincts to do as much damage as they far too often do. We can make the enlightened intellectual choice to recognize those instincts for what they are and we can choose to act, instead, in ways that reduce or eliminate our worst patterns of behavior.

At the core of the Intergroup Peace strategy, we need to be skilled and good at creating a legitimate sense of “us” in each setting — and we need to avoid having people in any setting where we aspire to create Peace being perceived by other people in that setting to be “Them.”

The Art of InterGroup Peace also involves identifying the fact that us/them intergroup instincts and behaviors are activated in any setting. The book helps explain the various ways we can defuse those instincts and keep them from doing damage when they exist and are activated.

The Art of InterGroup Peace has an array of eight approaches that can be used to steer and channel intergroup interactions — ranging from a truce or ceasefire at one end of the continuum to a full merger and complete intergroup assimilation at the other end of the continuum.

The alignment approach answers that will be most useful most of the time in most settings for creating and maintaining intergroup Peace fall between those two extremes. Treaties, alliances, confederations, and various levels of intentional integration can all be the right answer for achieving Peace in a particular setting.

The Art of InterGroup Peace explains that continuum. It also explains the triggers we can use to get people in a setting to choose alignment and to feel aligned. Those  extremely useful triggers range from a sense of real danger at one end of that continuum to having a shared mission, purpose, vision or highly motivating leader at the other end of the continuum.

Having common enemies, functioning as teams, sharing a group identity, and achieving collective gain or mutual benefit are all also very good instinct-linked tools for bringing people together. Loyalty to a common leader can also create levels of both group and intergroup alignment.

As we make decisions today about how to make Peace happen and how to make Peace work in any given setting, it can be very useful to know what the alignment triggers are and what the alignment options might be that are best suited to that setting.

Our cultures tend to serve as tools of our instincts to help our instincts achieve their goals. Our turf instincts, for example, tend to manifest themselves in cultural rules and guidelines about territory and turf.

To create Peace, we need to understand how to use our cultures as tools for Peace. We need to make enlightened and ethical choices to achieve Peace, and then we need to steer our instincts and shape our cultures in ways that will make Peace in each setting a reality.

The Art of InterGroup Peace teaches all of those approaches. Use it to do the right things in the right ways for the right reasons.

Art of Intergroup Peace

We are affected by our instincts at multiple levels. We have maternal instincts, so we do maternal things — and it feels very right to us when we do them.

We have hierarchical instincts, so we do hierarchical things and it also feels very right to us when we do them.

Our cultures function as tools for our instincts — so every culture creates its own version of a hierarchy — and it feels very right to us when we do the hierarchical things that are embedded in our culture.

Our instincts steer our behaviors by making some behaviors feel right. Our instincts also make some other behaviors — like abandoning a baby or being a traitor to our group — feel very wrong.

Our instincts even use stress to guide our thoughts and behaviors — generating a sense of stress when our behaviors are not in alignment with the specific instinct that triggers the stress.

Emotions are very directly used by our instincts to influence how we behave. Anger is often a very strong instinctive reaction. Joy, limerence, lust, and love all have strong and influential instinctive alignments.

We feel strong emotional reinforcement at an instinctive level when we are surrounded by people we trust and love, and we feel deep levels of anxiety and even fear at an instinctive level when we are surrounded by people who are more “Them” than “Us.”

To create InterGroup Peace for our country — we need to understand our Alpha, Beta, and Theta hierarchical instincts and we need to know how our territory and turf instincts interact with our tribal instincts and our belief systems.  

Primal Pathways explains a dozen basic sets of instinctive behaviors that are relevant to InterGroup interactions and helps us understand our behaviors, feelings, thought processes and belief systems that are triggered by those relevant sets of instincts.

We can never be free from our instincts — so we need to use them as tools to achieve our enlightened goals rather than have them steer us to negative and damaging types of primal outcomes and behaviors.

We can make our instincts our tools, but only if we understand them well and then make very intentional choices about which instincts to activate and how to activate them.

The book, Primal Pathways, explains how to make that strategy a success.  

We need to function as a legitimate "us" in every setting and we need to work very hard in each setting not to have anyone in the setting be"them." We need everyone to understand the validity and the value of that strategy and that agenda.  

Instead of having our instincts and our cultures use our intellect as a tool to meet their goals, we need our intellect to make enlightened decisions about our behaviors, our values and our beliefs, and we need our intellect to use our cultures and our instincts to help us succeed in realizing those values and achieving those enlightened expectations.  

Primal Pathways makes that entire thought process and that specific strategy clear and achievable as a way of each of us being personally accountable for our lives.   

Primal Pathways

The Institute for InterGroup Understanding exists to help create intergroup Peace. We need to intellectually overcome our more negative   and damaging instinctive behaviors. We instinctively divide the world into Us and Them -- and we react very differently to Us and Them. We protect, defend, accept, and support “Us” -- and we dislike, distrust, attack, and damage “Them.”

Those instincts have great power to shape our lives. They have had major impact on our history -- causing us to be who we are and to do what we do in ways that we often do not understand. Understanding those instincts gives us great and needed power over Them. We need that power over those instincts and we need it now to create Peace in our world.


Cusp of Chaos

Intergroup Institute

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