This concise work manages to filter out
the dross of human existence and to provide a clear and viable
path to what Mr Storey calls 'human potentialism'. The title traces
the history of human politics and argues that the 'moral potential'
of all humans can only be achieved, or 'cultivated' via a government
that governs for all humanity. This according to Mr Storey is
not achievable via national governments in that they naturally
exclude non-nationals and do not represent the interests of all
humanity.The work provides an excellent political framework for
the establishment of a global government that governs for all
humanity and recognises and cultivates the moral potential in
all humans.All global politicians and policy makers should read
this carefully argued work, which makes current policy obsolete
and provides a firm approach for a better, more enlightened humanity.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Nonkilling Global
Political Science
This book is offered for consideration and critical
reflection primarily by political science scholars throughout
the world from beginning students to professors emeriti. Neither
age nor erudition seems to make much difference in the prevailing
assumption that killing is an inescapable part of the human condition
that must be accepted in political theory and practice. It is
hoped that readers will join in questioning this assumption and
will contribute further stepping stones of thought and action
toward a nonkilling global future.
This may be the first book in the English language
to contain the word "nonkilling" in its title. The term
is not in customary use. It seeks to direct attention beyond "peace"
and even "nonviolence" to focus sharply upon the taking
of human life. The initial response of many may be that to focus
upon nonkilling is too negative, too narrow, and neglects more
important things. They may find company in Gandhi's admonition
that to define ahimsa (nonviolence: noninjury in thought, word,
and action) as nonkilling offers little improvement over violence.
The thesis of this book is that a nonkilling global society is
possible and that changes in the academic discipline of political
science and its social role can help to bring it about. The assumption
that killing is an inevitable attribute of human nature and social
life that must be accepted in the study and practice of politics
is questioned as follows.
First, it is accepted that humans, biologically
and by conditioning, are capable of both killing and nonkilling.
Second, it is observed that despite their lethal
capability most humans are not and have not been killers.
Third, nonkilling capabilities already have
been demonstrated in a wide range of social institutions that,
if creatively combined and adapted, can serve as component contributions
to realize nonkilling societies.
Fourth, given present and expectable scientific
advances in understanding of the causes of killing, the causes
of nonkilling, and causes of transition between killing and nonkilling,
both the psychobiological and social factors conducive to lethality
are taken to be capable of nonkilling transformative intervention.
Fifth, given the foregoing, the role of lethal
human nature as the basis for acceptance of violence in political
science and politics must at the very least become problematical
as a foundation of the discipline.
Sixth, in order to advance toward universally
desired elimination of lethality from local and global life, political
scientists who are presently not persuaded of human capacity for
nonkilling social transformation are invited to join in taking
up the possibility as a problem to be investigated hypothetically
in terms of pure theory, combining inductive and deductive elements.
Hypothetical analysis and role-playing by skeptics
as well as by those who accept the possibility of nonkilling transformations
can markedly assist disciplinary advance. Just as nuclear deterrence
advocates and critics have been able to engage in theoretical
and simulated exploration of local and global effects of limited
or full-scale nuclear war, nonkilling and violence-accepting political
scientists can join in constructively and critically exploring
the preconditions, processes, and consequences of commitments
to realize nonkilling conditions of global life.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Nonkilling Global Political
Science
Glenn Paige, Philadelphia: Xlibris Corp, 2002
Bill Bhaneja (reviewer)
In the fourth year of the new millennium, war
and terrorism are the norm for resolving international conflicts.
Has nothing been learned from the bloody wars of the previous
century? That's the question asked by Glenn Paige, professor emeritus
of political science at the University of Hawaii, in Nonkilling
Global Political Science.
Paige argues that if political scientists do
not seriously challenge the acceptance of lethality, then one
could hardly expect citizens to do so. He also asks: "Is
a nonkilling global society feasible?" then challenges his
discipline, asking whether a nonkilling global political science
is achievable. On both counts, his answer is a resounding "yes."
This work synthesizes decades of research by
Paige, the author of The Korean Decision (1968), The Scientific
Study of Political Leadership (1977), and To Nonviolent Political
Science: From Seasons of Violence (1993).
The term "nonkilling" is not as comforting
as "nonviolence." Mighty nations still assert pre-emptive
wars without qualms. Paige shows that both the violence-accepting
politics and political science of the last century have failed
to suppress violence by violent means. The study of government
and international politics has not addressed the root cause of
global violence.
Paige's vision is for political science to diagnose
the pathology of lethality, and seek to remove killing from global
life. He shows that at most only about five percent of human beings
have ever killed another person. Paige suggests we should train
people to strengthen their resistance to killing.
He uses medical science as a metaphor. Medicine,
through focusing on prevention, intervention, and post-traumatic
transformation strategies, has produced both knowledge and practitioners
for the preservation of life. Paige considers the same commitment
to non-lethality applicable to the social sciences.
The last three chapters of the book lay out
a model of a nonkilling global society. Why has the study of successful
conflict resolution remained neglected? There is a long list of
Nobel Peace Prize recipients who dared to take the nonviolent
route for complex regime change in their respective countries,
and succeeded. Their accomplishments, leadership styles, ideologies,
skills, and strategies are waiting to be analyzed.
Plutarch (c. 40-120 AD) suggested some principles
for the comparative study of rulers. These can be used to evaluate
peaceful leadership in terms familiar to modern social science
-- personality, role, organization, tasks, values, setting, and
errors. This has been done for Gandhi.
Paige calls into question the Weberian dogma
that acceptance of violence is required for the practice and science
of politics. On this bias, he writes that
"political science has tended to be unreceptive to theoretical
imagination, and this is especially true with regards to nonviolence
creativity. By dismissing it in professional training as "utopian,"
"idealistic," and "unrealistic," political
science is condemned to support perpetual lethality."
Killing that was expected to liberate, protect,
and enrich has become instead a threat to human and planetary
survival. Intended defences can become the source of self-destruction.
Bodyguards kill their own heads of state, armies violate and impoverish
their own people, and nuclear weapons proliferate to threaten
their possessors.
Paige concludes that the time has come for a
paradigm-shift in the discipline:
"If tradition has taught that we must kill to be free, equal
and secure, the present teaches that unless we stop killing, not
only freedom and equality are in jeopardy but our very survival
- individual, social, and ecological - is imperiled."
Paige considers his "Nonkilling" approach to be reachable
as a new sub-field of political science. The book is both provocative
and creative, a wonderful tonic for these troubled times.
Reviewed by Bill Bhaneja, a former Canadian
diplomat, and currently a Senior Research Fellow, Program for
Research in Innovation Management and Economy (PRIME), University
of Ottawa.
Some relevant works include:
Rachel M. MacNair, Perpetration-Induced Traumatic
Stress: the Psychological Consequences of Killing, Westport: Praeger
Publications (2002).
Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire: Militarism,
Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, New York: Henry Holt and
Company (2004).
James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary
People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, New York: Oxford University
Press (2002).
---------------------------------------------------------------
by Vincent Casspriano,
Jr.
10 Keys for Unlocking Your
Personal Potential, Achieving Spiritual Awakening, Transforming
Global Culture, and Reclaiming the Promise of Humanity's Ultimate
Cosmic Destiny
Produced by New Paradigm
Press www.newparadigmpress.com.
New Paradigm Press
is committed to publishing and promoting the work of authors who
are actively and wholistically rewriting Earth's future - authors
whose work encourages individuals to at all times express their
highest personal potential, while making daily efforts toward
awakening all Humanity to an evolutionary view of time, history
and our individual and collective responsibility for the conscious
creation of a future worthy of our highest ideals as a species.
The Simplest Path, Step One: Free Your Mind
is described as delineating, in one slim volume, a complete system
for achieving personal spiritual awakening, along with a straightforward,
no-nonsense plan individuals and groups ,so enlightened, can follow
to awaken Humanity en masse and positively transform the world.
It is a practical, bare-bones toolkit designed to empower anyone
willing to sufficiently apply themselves to the task to quickly
recognize the true human situation, to achieve individual psychic/spiritual
liberation from it, and to subsequently take on an enlightened
leadership role in the much-needed near-future awakening of the
greater human species.
This book, is entertaining and written in a
highly readable way it galvanizes the mind into thinking in new
ways and also highlights the problems that humanity as a whole
is facing by giving clear examples--as shown below, regarding
environment and the world of hunger.
It also has exercises that the reader can do
on ther own or together with friends . Vincent has a great idea
to spread his message across society so that people become more
aware of the way they are constantly brainwashed by the media
and the prevailing cultural norms of society.
He says some significant key questions, in his
basic ground rules,
He sees that the way
to break through is to become conscious of your brain washing
or memetics and open up within the self ,the wonder and astonishment
at the nature of life.
So many people in our society, accept the status
quo so it is imperative that we ask people to question the nature
of their life and the nature of society. Only in this way can
we get positive answers in a society in rapid change and transformation
Vincent Casspriano, says his book was conceived at the crossroads
of three at least apparently disconnected events:
The first was my personal spiritual quest
and practice so far, now approaching its fourth decade, which
allowed me to become familiar with the many religious, spiritual
and scientific concepts which, together, form the nucleus of the
Simplest Path - plus a great many more that have been intentionally
excluded from it - and to experientially verify, firsthand, for
myself, which avenues of exploration were capable of producing
practical results and which were not, which worked to unveil reality
as it truly is, and which led to dead ends of ego-flattering illusion.
The second event was encountering the remarkable
modern science of memetics, which is an evolutionary approach
to understanding human thought and behavior in terms of the mind-to-mind
transfer of information by way of imitation, accomplished through
the auspices of physically real, and mentally viral, entities
called memes. I won't go into detail here about what memes are,
how they work, or the psychic and spiritual implications of their
existence, as the first six chapters of The Simplest Path, Step
One: Free Your Mind are already ably dedicated to that task. A
few sentences here would not do the topic justice. What matters
for the purposes of this introduction is that the science of memes
supplied me with a new (to me, anyway) real and metaphorical language
capable of expressing spiritual concepts that had been brewing
in my mind, with no clear means of coherent expression, for decades.
Memes provided me with a fresh and vastly expanded context in
which to understand the human mind and spirit, and to "connect-the-dots"
between many apparently-unrelated spiritual ideas to reveal a
cohesive picture of our Earthly human condition, as well as our
genuine latent human potential, that is in equal measure frightening
and inspiring of the deepest imaginable awe and personal commitment.
These first two factors, together, produced
a complete transformation of my personal experience of reality
and of my own unlimited potential within it.
QUOTE - ENVIRONMENT and HUNGER
In truth, ninety percent or better of all the
intertwined ills currently challenging Humanity, and through us,
all life on Earth, are deeply rooted in only two globally-pervasive
human activities - the use of fossil fuels and eating meat.
Chances are you're well aware of the dangers
of petroleum. The Greenhouse Effect, the chief culprit behind
global warming, is caused by the buildup in the Earth's atmosphere
of certain heat-trapping gases, the most prevalent of which is
carbon dioxide produced when fossil fuels are burned (gasoline,
home heating oil, natural gas, coal), and which accounts for approximately
85% of total US greenhouse emissions. The process of pulling oil
out of the ground devastates the local environment. The non-fuel
products we make from the stuff, like plastics, ink, synthetic
rubber, paint, insecticide, fertilizer, dishwashing liquid, disposable
diapers, etc., are often themselves environmentally hazardous,
practically non-biodegradable, or both. Oil spills routinely ravage
coastlines and ocean ecosystems, often causing irreversible environmental
degradation. Worst of all, as dependent on oil as we have become,
both as a fuel source and as a raw material used in the manufacture
of just about everything, in recent years the writing on the wall
has become undeniably clear concerning oil's future - it's a non-renewable
resource, and someday very soon world supplies are going to run
out. Predictions of a fast approaching "oil crash" have
become a hot topic with book authors and Internet bloggers, and
even global mega-corporations like British Petroleum, whose trademarked
"BP" logo is now said to stand for "Beyond Petroleum,"
have begun to very publicly promote alter-native fuels research.
In the face of soaring energy prices, increased global temperatures
and violent weather patterns, melting polar ice caps expected
to result in disastrous increases in sea level, etc., it is no
longer possible to deny the dangers of oil, for the planet and
for people everywhere.
You may be less aware of the equally-disastrous
and far-reaching impact of eating meat, both on the environment
and on world hunger: