Manifesto
Two and a half centuries ago, a small group of farmers, lawyers, and revolutionaries gathered to declare their independence from a king. They named what they would no longer accept. They pledged to one another their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor — knowing, as they signed, that the cost of failure would be the rope.
The danger before us is not a king across an ocean. It is older than any king, and it lives in us. It is the willingness — bred into us by ten thousand years of war — to be frightened into hatred, sorted into tribes, and marched against strangers we have never met for reasons we have not examined. It is the silence we keep while the few who hold the codes decide, in rooms we will never see, whether our children will inherit a world.
We are not powerless against it. We have only been told that we are.
This is our declaration of independence — from the thinking we did not choose and have never examined; from the toxic leaders who would, with our consent, destroy the only world we have; from the inaction we have called patience; from the fear that hollows out our courage before we can use it; from the tribal hatreds we have been taught to call loyalty; from the stories that march us toward slaughter and call it duty; from the cynicism that names peace naive and war realistic; and from our tolerance for what should be intolerable.
Following in the footsteps of those who once dared to redraw the compact between the governed and their government, we now dare to redraw the compact between humanity and its own future.
We hold these nine truths to be self-evident.
1. We Can No Longer Afford the Luxury of War
Our capacity for wholesale destruction has far outstripped our emotional development. A species with thermonuclear weapons cannot afford the same quality of impulse control as a species with spears.
4. Some Leaders Are Deeply Damaged Human Beings
There are people whose nervous systems, almost always through severe early childhood trauma, are wired such that the suffering of others becomes a source of arousal and reward.
7. We Cannot Survive the Combination of Our Weaponry, Toxic Leaders and Wounded Followers
We are not in a position where doing nothing is safe. We are in a position where doing nothing is the most dangerous thing we can do.
2. Two of Our Greatest Minds Gave Us a Solution
In 1932, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud asking: Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war? Einstein chose Freud because he wanted the question taken at its deepest level — not the level of treaties and diplomacy, but the level of the human animal that produces them.
5. These People Have Always Existed and Always Will
A proposal for ending war that depends on never again producing a Hitler is not a proposal. It is a wish. The honest plan has to assume this type of leader will continue to appear, and design accordingly.
8. All Serious Proposals to End War Must Be Considered and Tested
The Wright Brothers did not get airborne with the first design. We did not eradicate smallpox by giving up after the first failure. We approach serious problems as engineering problems: identify the problem, generate proposals, test the most promising, learn from each failure,
iterate.
3. How We Bring Order to Chaos
At every level beneath the international, we have built governing structures, laws and the institutions that enforce them to monopolize legitimate force and replace violence with adjudication. This is how human society moves from chaos to order.
6. We've Always Been Vulnerable to Propaganda - And Always Will Be
We do not get to wish this away. As long as there is unhealed grievance in human populations — and there will always be unhealed grievance — there will be people receptive to the leader who promises to weaponize it.
9. Einstein and Freud's Proposal Has Never Been Tried
The Einstein-Freud proposal — an international authority with real, empowered, restraining capacity over state-level violence — has never been built. It has not been tried and failed. It has never been tried.