Peace is Jerusalem

Most civilizations have encountered the dream to harmonize minds at scale but found it to be notoriously hard.

First, it requires political, cultural, and educational institutions deeply grounded in knowledge of the human mind which mystified our ancestors.

Second, it requires enlightened leaders to shape and steward these institutions across generations. Such leaders are rare, while tyrants are aplenty, resulting in reversion to the mean.

Third, it requires ample resources to sustain such institutions and defend them against conquest or sabotage.

Religion represents an institutional attempt to harmonize minds and calibrate their sense of right and wrong. However, in the absence of scientific knowledge and technological means, it has been used to control minds instead. The zeal to spread the light became the crusades to colonize foreign lands, lands where indigenous people now faced pressure to adopt the culture and creed of their conquerors.

This has bred deep resentment among cultures with indigenous cultural institutions, fueling cycles of humiliation, payback and struggle for domination. Inspired by memories of an enlightened civilization built by their ancestors, and traumatized by experiences of subjugation, each culture insists on its monopoly over truth, despite all paths converging to the same summit. Theology wins over philosophy, time and again, but something has changed in the last few decades.

Advances in neuroscience, psychology and human anatomy have uncovered profound insights into the foundations of human thought and behavior. Humans have developed the ability to image the electrical activity in the brain, and identified the neural correlates of phenomenon ranging from psychopathy to the enlightened spiritual states that our ancestors paid homage to in the stories they told, the songs they sang, the art they created, and the architecture they built.

We can heal the civilizational traumas of the past. We can see that we are all reaching for the same summit. Working together to find answers is superior to fighting over who has answers when it is evident nobody does, yet.

This is extremely hard. For nations, this represents a game theoretical problem. Every nation has its tyrants and its enlightened leaders. Every nation finds balance between them based on an assessment of the calculus of its opponents, and an accounting of history. Therefore, even a nation that intends to harmonize minds at scale, must paradoxically leverage disharmonious minds in its own midst as weapons against enemy nations doing the same. A nation seeking harmony may breed disharmony to survive in a world lacking harmony.

This is why no single nation, culture, religion, race, or civilization can enlighten itself at the cost of others sustainably. Unless we unite, we perish. Will we finally listen to the better angels of our nature? Or will we allow this fleeting window of understanding to close, condemning humanity to remain trapped in cycles of its own suffering? The choice is ours.