Since the beginning of time, aggressive actions with concrete physical results have been operationalized. We live in a world that accepts aggression as a natural gesture, the fruit of an evolutionary path that maximizes immediate results.
Without traumatic events, natural or man-made, there would be no talk of peace, since the concept would be so omnipresent and stable that no one would notice its absence to give it a name. We would be like bacteria in an infinite culture medium.
We are not.
We have named the concept and have a duty to operationalize it.
Humanity has evolved beyond the limitations of the natural world and has built structures that allow us not only to survive, but to live in increasing physical, psychological, and emotional comfort.
Any person or entity has better possibilities of developing positively by eliminating negative influences, not necessarily immediately, but in a repetitive, iterative process of small incremental improvements.
It is an endless, but quantifiable, process of construction and reconstruction.
What is proposed here is to architect the concept of Peace in an active, tendentially stable, and, above all, individually identifiable way, in which any person knows how to classify within themselves what is, or is not, peaceful action.
I am not interested in being the last peaceful citizen, housed in a crystal tower in a world at war. I am interested in living in a peaceful world, in which unnecessary suffering is avoided, and in which all human beings have the capacity to identify words, gestures, and actions that are not peaceful.
But this is not an effort ‘of another’. It is a responsible individual effort.
If the citizens of the world want their peace, they have to work for it. You included.
1. On the concept of peace
Peace is an active gesture, not just the negative of conflict.
Capacity for peace: capacity to absorb impacts and process them minimizing harm or aggression to oneself or others.
Peaceful action: intentional action to minimize harm or aggression.
Peace: A stable equilibrium in which potential forms of aggression are incrementally eliminated.
Feeling of peace: The feeling of doing good or that others are doing good to us.
Individual peace scales to relational peace, which scales to social peace, which scales to world peace.
2. About the individual
Faced with stimuli, we present responses that are modulated by our emotional processing.
As cognitive beings, we learn throughout life, at all times, reaction strategies that maximize our ability to survive. As humans, we are born without these reactions, and we absorb them through observation and interaction with the world around us. In our mental growth process, we test different combinations of reactions to the emotion caused by the situation and tend to ‘record’ in ourselves the reactions that maximize our return to a baseline state. And, with this, we gradually, instruction by instruction, build our individual operating system. It is a natural process, and all of nature works this way.
In the natural world, it is common to observe organisms that carry the entirety of their operating system ‘in their genes’. In the case of humans, social animals, genes represent only the ‘bootstrap’ of the system, the minimum operating conditions upon which it is possible to develop, physically and mentally, a stable and functional system.
There is a detail here: the recording of an instruction in the system is executed, always and without exception, by the system itself.
Initially, since we are born without structured language systems, this learning is an unconscious decision. As the cognitive system develops, we structure our actions depending on the emotional response to the stimuli we receive. The more violent the stimulus, the more intense and striking the emotion, and the more immediate the processing that avoids the pain or discomfort caused.
3. About language
Language increases the degree of complexity of our system.
The first words of all children are invariably those that cause them a stable emotional state. For unstable emotional states, crying is already pre-installed and has been used until then (and healthily continues throughout life).
We rationally ‘know’ the words because, at one point or another in our lives, we anchor them to an internal emotional state.
This is why poetry works. Because it chains together variations of emotional states in an individual (the poet) that, absorbed by another human exposed to the same language, emulate this sequence in them.
Prose, like this text, appeals to the distancing from the sentimental charge of the word, and requires more rigid communication protocols. The rational self distances us from our own individual, from the one who feels their stomach moving internally, or whether they are hot or cold or hungry or thirsty or sitting comfortably or quietly. The fact is that we automatically train our eyes to consume letters and spaces and words and phrases to construct meaning, that we hardly even feel the eye muscles making the precise navigation in the direction to the end of the line and returning to the next line.
The previous sentence being an example designed to awaken the reader’s awareness of this fact, which will be important soon.
4. On reprogramming
Nature provides us with the body. Which we program, with language, environment, communication, stimuli, and, unfortunately, with aggression.
The emotional response to aggression is necessarily more immediate than the emotional response to other stimuli due to an evolutionary matter of survival. This generally implies that the emotional circuit responds ‘below’ the threshold of language. It is a known fact in therapy that verbalizing traumatic events facilitates their emotional processing.
But let’s think more in terms of systems engineering logic.
We have an independent emotional system, and we attack it (and in this specific exercise, without permanent physical damage). This causes an internal emotional shockwave in the system, an emotional overload, neurons firing, hormones accumulating, which induces chain reactions.
The neurons are the computational system, the hormones their modulators that alter levels and rates of activation. There are physical self-protection mechanisms such as the instinctive nervous response. But at the level of a cognitive system, the shockwave propagates ‘inward,’ to the innermost layers of the being. As long as the shock is not successfully integrated and absorbed, it reverberates to the deepest layers of the being, causing mental artifacts.
Here there is a bifurcation, and the tension accumulated in the system is either successfully absorbed or channeled into gestures of internal (self-aggression) or external aggression.
As responsible adults seeking peace, it is our obligation to seek ways to process and integrate the events that have happened and continue to happen to us peacefully, minimizing harm to ourselves or others.
5. On the choice of peace
As rational beings, we must consider that systems that resort to external aggression as a form of internal balance do not have regulatory stimuli towards peace because, technically, they have an escape valve, even if harmful to third parties.
As such, the initiative for peace rarely comes from an aggressor, or is integrated into a larger narrative that opens the possibility of future aggression, for ‘other or similar reasons’, because the internal mechanism of the aggressor entity is not prepared to recognize internal stability without aggression.
This inevitably leads us all to have ‘blind spots’.
And this is where the induced bodily perception mentioned above comes in. Our high-level automatic responses (”if it worked, I’ll keep doing it the same way”) blind us to the real origin of our actions until we reprocess them ‘with seeing eyes’.
With pause and awareness, when willing and possible, we can sample our responses and truly widen our point of view to find more peaceful solutions.
6. On true democratic peace
We live in a world full of democracies. And full of wars, horrors, and inequalities.
This text doesn’t change this world, but it allows us to identify its actors.
I am for peace.
And I truly wish for you to be at peace also.
Because, just because, if enough of us are aware of what is really going on, we then can start wondering about changing the world, one individual peaceful action at a time.
7. On the intent of this text
As I usually do after writing, and before publishing, I stress test it through AI and check into its review so I can later redact the text for clarity and addressed issues raised. One consistent issue AI pointed out to me is that the text lacks empathetic anchors, like giving an example of a trauma inducing situation. I can relate to that. But I choose nontheless not to include them for a very concrete reason. This text explores what it means to be human and to desire peace, naming the obstacles that prevent us from seeing the challenges, the actors, and the goalposts clearly.
I choose not to introduce empathetic anchors because one of the obstacles in the quest for peace is lack of agency. Only you, the reader, has the power to build peace inside yourself.
It is both your power and your responsibility. Only by establishing your own anchors, on your own terms, can you truly cultivate peace.
If we want peace, we must work to have it.
Since the beginning of time, aggressive actions with concrete physical results have been operationalized. We live in a world that accepts aggression as a natural gesture, the fruit of an evolutionary path that maximizes immediate results.
Without traumatic events, natural or man-made, there would be no talk of peace, since the concept would be so omnipresent and stable that no one would notice its absence to give it a name. We would be like bacteria in an infinite culture medium.
We are not.
We have named the concept and have a duty to operationalize it.
Humanity has evolved beyond the limitations of the natural world and has built structures that allow us not only to survive, but to live in increasing physical, psychological, and emotional comfort.
Any person or entity has better possibilities of developing positively by eliminating negative influences, not necessarily immediately, but in a repetitive, iterative process of small incremental improvements.
It is an endless, but quantifiable, process of construction and reconstruction.
What is proposed here is to architect the concept of Peace in an active, tendentially stable, and, above all, individually identifiable way, in which any person knows how to classify within themselves what is, or is not, peaceful action.
I am not interested in being the last peaceful citizen, housed in a crystal tower in a world at war. I am interested in living in a peaceful world, in which unnecessary suffering is avoided, and in which all human beings have the capacity to identify words, gestures, and actions that are not peaceful.
But this is not an effort ‘of another’. It is a responsible individual effort.
If the citizens of the world want their peace, they have to work for it. You included.
1. On the concept of peace
Peace is an active gesture, not just the negative of conflict.
Capacity for peace: capacity to absorb impacts and process them minimizing harm or aggression to oneself or others.
Peaceful action: intentional action to minimize harm or aggression.
Peace: A stable equilibrium in which potential forms of aggression are incrementally eliminated.
Feeling of peace: The feeling of doing good or that others are doing good to us.
Individual peace scales to relational peace, which scales to social peace, which scales to world peace.
2. About the individual
Faced with stimuli, we present responses that are modulated by our emotional processing.
As cognitive beings, we learn throughout life, at all times, reaction strategies that maximize our ability to survive. As humans, we are born without these reactions, and we absorb them through observation and interaction with the world around us. In our mental growth process, we test different combinations of reactions to the emotion caused by the situation and tend to ‘record’ in ourselves the reactions that maximize our return to a baseline state. And, with this, we gradually, instruction by instruction, build our individual operating system. It is a natural process, and all of nature works this way.
In the natural world, it is common to observe organisms that carry the entirety of their operating system ‘in their genes’. In the case of humans, social animals, genes represent only the ‘bootstrap’ of the system, the minimum operating conditions upon which it is possible to develop, physically and mentally, a stable and functional system.
There is a detail here: the recording of an instruction in the system is executed, always and without exception, by the system itself.
Initially, since we are born without structured language systems, this learning is an unconscious decision. As the cognitive system develops, we structure our actions depending on the emotional response to the stimuli we receive. The more violent the stimulus, the more intense and striking the emotion, and the more immediate the processing that avoids the pain or discomfort caused.
3. About language
Language increases the degree of complexity of our system.
The first words of all children are invariably those that cause them a stable emotional state. For unstable emotional states, crying is already pre-installed and has been used until then (and healthily continues throughout life).
We rationally ‘know’ the words because, at one point or another in our lives, we anchor them to an internal emotional state.
This is why poetry works. Because it chains together variations of emotional states in an individual (the poet) that, absorbed by another human exposed to the same language, emulate this sequence in them.
Prose, like this text, appeals to the distancing from the sentimental charge of the word, and requires more rigid communication protocols. The rational self distances us from our own individual, from the one who feels their stomach moving internally, or whether they are hot or cold or hungry or thirsty or sitting comfortably or quietly. The fact is that we automatically train our eyes to consume letters and spaces and words and phrases to construct meaning, that we hardly even feel the eye muscles making the precise navigation in the direction to the end of the line and returning to the next line.
The previous sentence being an example designed to awaken the reader’s awareness of this fact, which will be important soon.
4. On reprogramming
Nature provides us with the body. Which we program, with language, environment, communication, stimuli, and, unfortunately, with aggression.
The emotional response to aggression is necessarily more immediate than the emotional response to other stimuli due to an evolutionary matter of survival. This generally implies that the emotional circuit responds ‘below’ the threshold of language. It is a known fact in therapy that verbalizing traumatic events facilitates their emotional processing.
But let’s think more in terms of systems engineering logic.
We have an independent emotional system, and we attack it (and in this specific exercise, without permanent physical damage). This causes an internal emotional shockwave in the system, an emotional overload, neurons firing, hormones accumulating, which induces chain reactions.
The neurons are the computational system, the hormones their modulators that alter levels and rates of activation. There are physical self-protection mechanisms such as the instinctive nervous response. But at the level of a cognitive system, the shockwave propagates ‘inward,’ to the innermost layers of the being. As long as the shock is not successfully integrated and absorbed, it reverberates to the deepest layers of the being, causing mental artifacts.
Here there is a bifurcation, and the tension accumulated in the system is either successfully absorbed or channeled into gestures of internal (self-aggression) or external aggression.
As responsible adults seeking peace, it is our obligation to seek ways to process and integrate the events that have happened and continue to happen to us peacefully, minimizing harm to ourselves or others.
5. On the choice of peace
As rational beings, we must consider that systems that resort to external aggression as a form of internal balance do not have regulatory stimuli towards peace because, technically, they have an escape valve, even if harmful to third parties.
As such, the initiative for peace rarely comes from an aggressor, or is integrated into a larger narrative that opens the possibility of future aggression, for ‘other or similar reasons’, because the internal mechanism of the aggressor entity is not prepared to recognize internal stability without aggression.
This inevitably leads us all to have ‘blind spots’.
And this is where the induced bodily perception mentioned above comes in. Our high-level automatic responses (”if it worked, I’ll keep doing it the same way”) blind us to the real origin of our actions until we reprocess them ‘with seeing eyes’.
With pause and awareness, when willing and possible, we can sample our responses and truly widen our point of view to find more peaceful solutions.
6. On true democratic peace
We live in a world full of democracies. And full of wars, horrors, and inequalities.
This text doesn’t change this world, but it allows us to identify its actors.
I am for peace.
And I truly wish for you to be at peace also.
Because, just because, if enough of us are aware of what is really going on, we then can start wondering about changing the world, one individual peaceful action at a time.
7. On the intent of this text
As I usually do after writing, and before publishing, I stress test it through AI and check into its review so I can later redact the text for clarity and addressed issues raised.
One consistent issue AI pointed out to me is that the text lacks empathetic anchors, like giving an example of a trauma inducing situation. I can relate to that. But I choose nontheless not to include them for a very concrete reason.
This text explores what it means to be human and to desire peace, naming the obstacles that prevent us from seeing the challenges, the actors, and the goalposts clearly.
I choose not to introduce empathetic anchors because one of the obstacles in the quest for peace is lack of agency. Only you, the reader, has the power to build peace inside yourself.
It is both your power and your responsibility. Only by establishing your own anchors, on your own terms, can you truly cultivate peace.