On our ability to know how we think and change how we think

We can't change how others think. "The only book that can actually teach you how to change how others think is a lobotomy manual," wrote Bennett and Bennett.

So why would we be able to control how we ourselves think?

"You are the one who decides," wrote Anthony Robbins, "how to feel and act based upon the ways you choose to perceive your life. Nothing has any meaning except the meaning we give it. Most of us have turned this process of interpretation on automatic, but we can take that power back and immediately change our experience of the world. * * * You can run your brain as skillfully as Spielberg or Scorsese runs his set."

I think that this is not true. Probably we cannot run our brains as a director runs a stage performance.

And yet, we can surely influence how we think. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi made a more qualified statement. Because we can only absorb a finite amount of information, "the information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important; it is, in fact, what determines the content and the quality of life."

Clare Sestanovich observed that we all ask similar questions "on the brink of adulthood. Which facts should you resign yourself to? Which dreams should you devote yourself to? The liminal state of late adolescence (or at least a certain privileged one) can seem like a kind of lucid dream, a world of boundless potential, in which all you have to do is choose what happens next. It will end whenever you find an answer: which world do you want to wake up in?"

Part of what we need to do is build awareness of what other poeple are trying to cause us to believe. Advertising, as well as political communication, is based on persuasion. Rick Alan said that ordinary people need to "learn the tricks of the trade. The basic building blocks of persuasion techniques. For example, Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, which identifies the consistent themes used in advertising and in destructive cults to persuade people and influence them and bring them in. And then Edgar Schein of MIT wrote the book Coercive Persuasion, which is quite good. And then there’s the seminal work by Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Lifton studied North Korean POW camps and how the North Koreans were able to break down their prisoners and basically co-op their critical thinking and create a kind of mindset that they crafted through coercive persuasion. I think if we understand the tricks of the trade and I have a chapter on that in my book [Cults Inside Out] that I call “Cult Brainwashing” because that’s the term that’s used so often."

Neel Burton: “Cognitive distortion involves interpreting events and situations so that they conform to and reinforce our outlook or frame of mind, typically on the basis of very scant or partial evidence, or even no evidence at all. … This is similar to confirmation bias, but much more pronounced and pathological. … A cognitive distortion can open up a vicious circle: the cognitive distortion aliments the depression, which in turn aliments the cognitive distortion.”

Gustav Kuhn, a magician and a teacher of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, said magicians try to "find" and "exploit" our "loopholes in cognition." Magic "allows us to experience the impossible — and by doing so, it creates a conflict between the things that we think are possible and our actual experience." He and his colleagues "want to build a science of magic," according to Linda Rodriguez McRobbie. She explained: "One reason magic is so well-suited to explore human cognition and perception comes down to one of the weirder facts of being human: Every experience we have in the world — everything we can see and hear and taste and feel, and everything we remember about it afterward — is in some ways virtual. Our perception is created in the cognitive interpretation, how we sort through crowded fields of data to understand what’s happening to us." She also quoted Peter Lamont: "Magic is not simply something that happens in the brain, it’s something that happens between people, it’s learned from people interacting with each other." And she quoted Will Houstoun: “Each magic trick is sort of an experiment to see if you can use some form of applied psychology in concert with other things to see if people are deceived."

The novelist Roseanna White: "How could something that touched only one part affect her whole body? Her feet felt the prickles of a thousand needles that coursed like spears up her legs." Oliver Sacks said "there is increasing evidence from neuroscience for the extraordinary rich interconnectedness and interactions of the sensory areas of the brain, and the difficulty, therefore, of saying that anything is purely visual or purely auditory, or purely anything." Brian Boyd said: ”Recent neuroscience research in grounded cognition shows that thought is not primarily linguistic, as many had supposed, but multimodal, partially reactivating relevant multimodal experiences in our past, involving multiple senses, emotions, and associations. Just as seeing someone grasp something activates mirror neurons, even hearing the word grasp activates the appropriate area of the motor cortex. Our brains encode multimodal memories of objects and actions, and these are partially reactivated as percepts or concepts come into consciousness.”

We can be aware of how our brains may have changed over out lives. Alan Downs said that, for people "who have experienced significant psychological trauma, the hippocampal region in the brain has as much as twelve percent less volume than those who have not experienced such trauma." In evolutionary time, the human brain grew in size, something that "occurred before it is believed that we needed it," Gregg Braden wrote. If so: perhaps our brain grew in a manner that allows it to fill itself with thoughts that are incorrect or not particularly useful?

And maybe our brains grew to examine themselves? The mind's "chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature," Ambrose Bierce wrote in the Devil's Dictionary, observing the apparent "futility of the attempt." Patricia Churchland: “So it is that the brain investigates the brain, theorizing about what brains do when they theorize, finding out what brains do when they find out, and being changed forever by the knowledge.”

---

Oh, and by the way:

transphobia isn't just hatred of trans people; it's a fanatical insistence that people aren't allowed to change

imagine if cis adults also intentionally spent 5+ years to reevaluating their limits & mindsets, rapid self-improvement, healing past traumas, and learning self-love

— Ladye Voss (limerent thot arc) (@vyrthandi) October 7, 2022

Why don't transphobes like to hear the word transphobia? I come to this observation by Walter Rhein: "White supremacy is a toxic hate ideology that requires camouflage in order to survive. It dies if you name it, that’s why it has learned to wriggle out of the light. Instead of saying we’re a nation of white supremacy, we talk about 'American exceptionalism' or 'manifest destiny.' Those phrases are dog whistles for our subconsciously programmed sense of superiority. ... Once people see how awful white supremacy is, they reject it. That’s why the white supremacists have learned how to keep it hidden because they know it dies if people see the truth." I think that something similar is going on with transphobia, where it dies if you name it. And so I call it what it is.

Sources

Michael I. Bennett, MD and Sarah Bennett. F*ck Feelings: One shrink’s practical advice for managing all life’s impossible problems. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. p. 3.

Anthony Robbins. Unlimited Power. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1986. pp. 9-11.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990). Harper Perennial Modern Classics. p. 30.

“The Unreality of Coming of Age.” Clare Sestanovich. Lit Hub. August 21, 2017.

Alex Kantrowitz. “Cult Deprogrammer Rick Alan Ross on NXIVM, QAnon, and What Makes Us Vulnerable.” OneZero. December 23, 2020.

Neel Burton. Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking. Acheron, 2019.

“What magic can teach us about our brains,” Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, Ideas in the Sunday Boston Globe, Sept. 2, 2016.

Roseanna M. White. Jewel of Persia. WhiteFire Publishing, 2010.

Oliver Sacks, quoted in Lisa Zunshine. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006, revised March 2012. (Kindle Edition.)

Brian Boyd, ”The Psychologist" The American Scholar, Autumn 2011. p. 51.

Alan Downs, The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing up Gay in a Straight Man’s World. (Second Edition) Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2012.

Gregg Braden. Deep Truth: Igniting the Memory of Our Origin, History, Destiny, and Fate. Hay House, 2011.

Ambrose Bierce. "Mind." The Devil's Dictionary.

Patricia Smith Churchland. Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain. (Cambridge, MA: MIT PRess, 1995), p. 482. First published in 1986. Quoted in Victor J. Stenger. The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2009. p. 177.

'Zusya, why were you not Zusya?' (quotes)

“Rabbi Zusya of Hanipol used to say, ‘If they ask me in the next world, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ I will know the answer. But if they ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’ I will have nothing to say.”
Martin Buber. Quoted by Ronald S. Miller and the editors of the New Age Journal. As Above, So Below: Paths to Spiritual Renewal in Daily Life. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1992. p. 28.

"All my gifts and gaps and efforts coalesce and coagulate — to use alchemical language — into the unique individual I am. Nicholas of Cusa wrote to a man named Giuliano, 'All things Giulianize in you.'"
Thomas Moore. Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life. (1992) New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. p. 261.

“My best answer to the question ‘Are you Sam Keen?’ is ‘Not yet.’”
Sam Keen. In the Absence of God: Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacred. New York: Harmony Books, 2010. p. 118.

"The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself."
Anna Quindlen, quoted in Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, Center City, Minn.: Hazelden Publishing, 2010.

"I have realized she is never coming out; she doesn’t exist. I am her and have always been her wearing the wrong clothes and living the wrong life. I have been wearing the right clothes for five years; it’s time to start living the life I should have always been living. It's time to transition into me."
"Still Living His Life While Wearing Different Clothes." Jas Martinez, Medium, Dec. 27, 2021.

"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
William Faulkner, quoted in the AP, quoted in The Week, May 27, 2011, p. 19.

“Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.”
Gloria Steinem, quoted in Elle.com. The Week, April 11, 2014. p. 15.

"Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world. If you do so, you are insulting yourself."
Bill Gates, quoted in United Press International, quoted in The Week, Feb. 5, 2016. p. 19.

"I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do."
Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, Center City, Minn.: Hazelden Publishing, 2010.

“But we must not lose our focus on envy as such. As we have just seen, it is a special form of preoccupation with self, but it is anything but solipsistic or narcissistic. It is essentially and intensely comparative. This is what distinguishes it from greed. Greed is directed toward that which I wish to possess. Envy is directed toward the one who possesses what I wish to possess. We acknowledge this without noticing when we say, not I envy her good looks, but I envy her her good looks. Where simple greed is at issue, I can be satisfied merely by coming to possess. But if it is a case of envy my possession must be at your expense.”
Merold Westphal. God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion. (1984) Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987. p. 67.

“To be yourself is very difficult, because you think that what you are is ignoble, and that if you could only change what you are into something noble it would be marvelous; but that never happens. Whereas, if you look at what you actually are and understand it, then in that very understanding there is a transformation. … Envy arises because I want to change myself and become like somebody else. But if I say, 'Whatever I am, that I want to understand,' then envy is gone…"
J. Krishnamurti. Think on These Things. ed. by D. Rajagopal. New York: Perennial, 1964. pp. 20, 130.

”It wasn’t a particular habit or virtue, Lax decided, that made you you. It was something more like a color that seemed to be yours — something simple, indelible, given, and true.”
Michael N. McGregor. Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. Fordham University Press, 2015.

"rock our bodies back-and-forth, back-and-forth, side-to-side, side-to-side. as if to ask will we always have to answer these calls to transform?" — Destiny Hemphill, the poem "like an orb. like a planet." in motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life

"It is easy for a writer not to look like everyone else. It is hard for him to resemble himself." — V.F. in Escrever (To Write) (quoted here)

Quotes: The 'environmental crisis' is a crisis of human self-understanding

"To quote the great farmer-philosopher (and man of Christian faith) Wendell Berry, the entire term environmental crisis is a misnomer, because it is not a crisis of the environment, but rather of ourselves."
Jeremy Benstein. The Way Into Judaism and the Environment. Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006. pp. 14-15.

"The land has not been desecrated; human beings desecrate only themselves."
Leslie Marmon Silko. Quoted in footnote 410. Derrick Jensen. Endgame. Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006. p. 415.

"Some people in desperation have turned to witchcraft, magic and occultism, to drugs and madness, anything to rekindle imagination and find a world ensouled. But these reactions are not enough. What is needed is a revisioning, a fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament we call modern consciousness."
James Hillman (1926-2011), writing in 1976

"To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass — seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one."
Anne Lamott. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. p 102.

What we all must do to make a more peaceful world

Marisa Kabas writes in the Handbasket, January 2026:

"There will be many efforts to tell us that we just don’t understand; that we need to be grown-ups about all this, and that war is a fact of life. But it’s important to reject this premise. The people who have accepted war as an inevitability are the ones who keep dragging us back into it."

---

This is the magnitude of the task ahead in all our lives.

The ideas below were used to write an article for LinkedIn: "There is no button for peace."

Attain deeper understanding of emotions — your own and those of others

"The solution has to be found, as Krishnamurti has said, in the problem and not away from it. In other words, the 'bad' man's disturbing emotions and urgent desires have to be seen as they are — or, better, the moment in which they arise has to be seen as it is, without narrowing attention upon any aspect of it.
"
- Alan Watts

Attain deeper understanding of personal motivations — your own and those of others

"I am a convinced pacifist and for that reason I am curious to understand what make normal people brandish a gun."
- Enzo Baldoni

Attain deeper understanding of institutional agendas, especially the ones that leaders won't admit

"Institutions are made up of individuals, of course, but the thing that makes an institution institutional is that no one person can direct it. The actions of an institution are the result of its many individual constituent parts, both acting in concert, and acting against one another.

In other words: institutional action is the result of its individuals resolving their conflicts. Institutional action is the net results of wheedling, horse-trading, solidarity, skullduggery, power-moves, trickery, coercion, rational argument, love, spite, ferocity, and indifference among the institution’s members."

— "Commentary by Cory Doctorow: Don’t Be Evil," Cory Doctorow, Locus Magazine, November 6, 2023

"Clearly, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq if its chief export was cauliflower or carrots."
- Robert Fisk

Identify the wrongs you want to right

"The first lesson that tragedy teaches (and that morality plays miss) is that all violence is an attempt to achieve justice, or what the violent person perceives as justice, for himself or for whomever it is on whose behalf he is being violent, so as to receive whatever retribution or compensation the violent person feels is "due" him or "owed" to him, or to those on whose behalf he is acting, whatever he or they are "entitled" to or have a "right" to; or so as to prevent those whom one loves or identifies with from being subjected to injustice. Thus, the attempt to achieve and maintain justice, or to undo or prevent injustice, is the one and only universal cause of violence.
- James Gilligan

Do not address wrongs with extreme violence

"It is hardly possible to imagine that in the atomic era war could be used as an instrument of justice.
"
- Pope John XXIII

Acknowledge that the desire for violence is real

"It seems that when a society does not have natural processes (such as sex, death, and killing) before it, that society will respond by denying and warping that aspect of nature.
"
- Dave Grossman

Acknowledge what kinds of violence you perpetrate in your daily life

"We all participate in violence daily. The only questions are our degree of awareness, and what we do with that awareness." - Derrick Jensen

Think about who you really want to be

"For civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized. Tonight's very small exercise in logic from the Twilight Zone."
- Rod Serling

Be aware of how you conduct your relationships

"It seems almost incredible that we could have been at war this long without defining precisely who or what we are at war with. But such is the case, and it has never seemed an urgent matter to lawmakers."
- Caleb Carr

Acknowledge that there have been real enemies, past and present

”Innocence in our day is the hope that there 'are no enemies' ... To hang on to this picture of innocence, you must deny history. ... Hence so many of the new generation turn their backs on history as irrelevant; they do not like it, they are not part of it, they insist we are in a brand-new ball game with new rules. And they are completely unaware that this is the ultimate act of hubris.”
- Rollo May

Don't paint the world as 'us/them'

”The United States Secret Service has a dualistic worldview. There is the president, and then there are the people who could hurt, kill, maim, injure, or otherwise bother the president. They are known as ‘everyone else.’ It is an official term. It includes staff, audiences, family members, and sometimes pets.”
- David Kuo

Reject the 'us/them' shortcut to a sense of purpose

”Holy war intensifies the boundaries between Us and Them, satisfying the inherently human longing for a clear identity and a definite purpose in life, creating a seductive state of bliss.”
- Jessica Stern

Remember that the safeties and threats of the present may be different than those of the past

”We seem to feel somehow that because the hydrogen bomb has not killed us yet, it is never going to kill us. This is a dangerous assumption because it encourages the retention of traditional attitudes about world politics when our responsibility, in Dr. Chisholm's words, is nothing less than ‘to re-examine all of the attitudes of our ancestors and to select from those attitudes things which we, on our own authority in these present circumstances, with our knowledge, recognize as still valid in this new kind of world...'"
- Sen. J. William Fulbright

Emoting — e.g., being nostalgic or angry — isn't enough

Come together to discuss shared history realistically and challenge present injustice to move forward.

"Romanticizing the 1830s, despite the role chattel slavery played, the marginalization of women, and the forced displacement and persecution of Indigenous people is a useless and regressive fantasy. This does nothing to bring us together or challenge historical or present injustices. Simply hating the society we live in and wanting to escape isn’t enough to foster positive social change — maybe from a privileged white perspective, it is, but from the perspective of Black people, it falls painfully short. America cannot daydream its way forward; we have to be grounded, especially in terms of the way we discuss our shared history."
- Allison Wiltz

Allow that even that which seems inborn can be redirected

"...these two approaches [to the origin of violence, nature and nurture] are not mutually exclusive. Aggression is part of the basic equipment of men, but it is also culturally formed, exacerbated, and can be, at least in part, redirected.
"
- Rollo May

Change your thinking

"We cannot solve the problems that we have created with the same thinking that created them."
- Albert Einstein

Let your new thoughts transform your actions

"Because when one person thinks fight! he or she finds a fight. One faction thinks war! and starts a war. One nation thinks nuclear! and approaches the abyss. And what of one nation which thinks peace, and seeks peace?"
- 
Dennis Kucinich

Change your toolbox

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
"
- Audre Lorde

Do not launch the first strike

"Hitting first has always been the mark of evil. I don't think one great religious or spiritual thinker has said that it was OK. Everyone, from almost every tradition, agrees on three things. Rule 1: We are all family. Rule 2: It is immoral to hit first. Rule 3: You reap exactly what you sow. You cannot grow tulips from zucchini seeds, or peace from murder. And, it helps beyond words to plant bulbs in the dark of winter.
"
- 
Anne Lamott

Communicate what you know about yourself and listen to others

"People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they have not communicated with each other."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Look into the real options and consequences, and challenge the way others frame them

”Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld aptly summarized the prevailing view in October 2001: 'We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter.' If, today, this black-and-white perspective seems a trifle oversimplified, between 2002 and 2004, no politician of national stature had the wit or the gumption to voice a contrary view.”
- Andrew J. Bacevich

Go wider and challenge bigger frames of personal and national identity and goals

”In the Vietnam era, we watched a great nation descend into tragedy because of its inability to break the spell of such mythic metaphors as domino effect and containment of communism."
- Sam McKeen

Don't punish people who challenge your frame

”I asked why we sent missionaries to Africa but didn't have any contact with black people, or even black churches, in our own city.
I was told that we were all better off separated...Other whites said that blacks were happy with the way things were...And if they had problems, they probably deserved them...Some people told me that asking these questions would only get me into trouble. That proved to be the only honest answer I ever got in the white community.”
- Jim Wallis

Don't mistake a challenge to your ideology as a challenge to your existence

"Here, in Spain, a man is simply stood up against a wall and he gives up his entrails to the stones of the courtyard. You have been captured. You are shot. Reason: your ideas were not our ideas."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Don't insult others intentionally

“‘Raca,' the word for ‘fool’ that Jesus forbade people to use, is Aramaic for ‘empty.’ Words like that attempt to obliterate someone's existence.”

 - Paul Ramsey

Don't insult others accidentally by attributing names and ideas to them

My colleague has said that he never offends other people's beliefs. What civilization on the face of this earth allows him to call other people by names they did not choose for themselves? Once he calls them Ahl al-Dhimma, another time he calls them the "People of the Book," and yet another time he compares them to apes and pigs, or he calls the Christians "those who incur Allah's wrath." Who told you they are "People of the Book"? They are not the People of the Book, they are people of many books. All the useful scientific books you have today are theirs, the fruit of their free and creative thinking. What gives you the right to call them "those who incur Allah's Wrath," or "those who have gone astray," and the come here and say that your religion commands you to refrain from offending the beliefs of others?

- Wafa Sultan

Don't project onto others

"...we have an eternal enemy, which is our ego. The tragic mistake is to identify that enemy with other people..."
- Michael Nagler

Improve your predictive skills and be willing to act on them

"Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth."
- Albert Schweitzer

Require humility from leaders

"The ruler who wants to be above the people must speak of himself as below them.
If he wants to be ahead of the people, he must keep himself behind them.”
- Lao Tzu

Require humility from ourselves

"...we need to start that honesty in the closest place. It's a place no fascist can ever start, and if we do it, we'll differentiate ourselves from them in ways that will be sharp and clear and bright.

We start by finding and holding the blame in ourselves.

Fascism cannot accept blame within itself. It doesn't understand it when people do. It can't even comprehend such a thing."

— A.R. Moxon

Turn your beliefs into action

”Anyone can love peace, but Jesus doesn't say, 'Blessed are the peacelovers.' He says peacemakers.”
- Jim Wallis

Choose actions that have great effect on the world

”For these reasons such direct actions as the burning of draft cards probably does more to retard than to advance the views of those who take such action. The burning of a draft card is a symbolic act, really a form of expression rather than action, and it is stupid and vindictive to punish it as a crime. But it is also an unwise act, unwise because it is shocking rather than persuasive to most Americans and because it exposes the individual to personal risk without political reward.”
- Sen. J. William Fulbright

Be aware that group action can intensify or alter your personal beliefs

"The intensity of mob action has led some social critics to speculate on the theory of a 'collective mind' operating at the moment of violent mob destruction, that the participants are no longer themselves and are acting foreign to their experiences and beliefs. I contend that such mob action serves to reinforce belief... There is not a change in the basic structure of beliefs which mobilize the crowd into action; rather, there is a period of strain during which those beliefs manifest themselves in collective behavior."
- Trudier Harris

Pay attention to the results of your actions

"It's racist if the outcome...is hurting people of color. Whether or not it's intentional, that's the outcome."
- Gladys Gould

Think about how you affect real people, not just institutions or nations

“My years of experience in Jordan, and my current work with the United Nations and other international organizations, has convinced me that real security — security that is sustainable and genuine — must focus on the needs of human beings, not just nations. True security is not only a matter of protecting borders from military aggression, or achieving technological or economic dominance, but of providing a stable, safe, and healthy environment for all citizens — women, amen, and children — of all races and creeds to participate fully in economic, cultural, and political life. People must work together because no one — even the most wealthy and powerful country in the world — will enjoy true security if others in our interdependent world suffer injustice and deprivation. Given the global rise of extremism on all sides in recent years, it is very easy to turn inward, recoil from risk, and avoid reaching out to others. For all of our sakes, we can no longer afford to allow ourselves to be imprisoned by our fears and differences.”
- Queen Noor

Make a pathway to talk to your enemies

"If Bush insists on identifying all of the insurgents with al-Qaida, then there isn't anyone with whom we can negotiate."
- Joe Conason

Find a way to acknowledge and accept differences

"To encourage reconciliation, Rwanda has embarked on an experiment to change completely the way a new generation thinks about itself. Now, officially, no one is a Hutu or Tutsi; there are only Rwandans. Ethnicity, the genocide's alleged cause, is being outlawed."
- The Economist

Prepare for the perpetual challenges that differences bring

"The Indians and ourselves will long be at war. It has never ceased and possibly will not cease in the foreseeable future. What must be hoped for is not exactly 'peace,' but a creative tension. Peace does not create heroic achievement. There must be challenge that forces the best that is in us to emerge into its proper expression, challenge that brings about dimensions in human achievement that would not otherwise be attained. Just now, however, the disproportion in size and power seems to remove all possibility of truly creative relationships that would be neither destructive nor paternalistic. yet in the dialectic of human affairs, size and power eventually become self-destructive; the inequalities may eventually be leveled and the ancient fruitful combat relationships revived in a new setting."
- Thomas Berry

Transform your enemies into friends

"True security, as the Buddha said, comes not from defeating enemies but from not having any..."
- Michael Nagler

Focus on positive feelings of belonging to a group

"We-feeling is good for your health. It lowers your heart rate, reduces stress hormones, makes you sleep better and think more clearly."
- David Berreby

See peace as a precondition for human rights

Peace is a civil right which makes other human rights possible. Peace is the precondition of our existence. Peace permits our continued existence.

 - Dennis Kucinich

See peace as the continued actualization of human rights

"Among individuals, as among nations, peace is the respect of the others’ rights."
- Benito Juarez

Don't let someone else's 'talking points' confuse you or polarize your group

"We will have some rebuilding to do after this war. We all know it. The destruction is devastating. We will have to start with our collective intelligence. It is getting blasted. The collateral damage has been ugly. ... I hate this war because it makes the country I love look scared and stupid. I hate it because we went through a laundry list of a half dozen reasons to invade Iraq and we never seemed sure which one was going to hold up. I hate it because it seems it was a done deal months ago and all the debate and diplomacy have been deceptive window dressing. But I hate it most for what it is doing to us. It is turning us mean and snarling and suspicious of each other, and there is no good reason for it. I think we are being set up and being played."
- Bob Kerr

Know that anything you choose freely resists those who would control you

Any neutrality, indeed any spontaneously given friendship, is from the standpoint of totalitarian domination just as dangerous as open hostility, precisely because spontaneity as such, with its incalculability, is the greatest of all obstacles to total dominion over man.
"
- Hannah Arendt

Persist in what you know is right despite the attitudes of your opponents

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
"
- M. K. Gandhi

Allow space for sudden insight

"'We just woke up.' After hearing the same response from gang members making truces in other cities, the meaning of the young man's words began to dawn on me. I recalled that waking up is a spiritual metaphor for conversion."
- Jim Wallis

Admit that peace is hard work and the work never ends

"We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences."
- Mary Parker Follett

Be ready to 'wait and see'

"And from her [the city of Ashdod] we shall see what will flower when peace and a little repose finally come.
Patience, I say. There is no shortcut."
- Amos Oz

Focus

"What’s really hard to accept, though, is that it’s not just the government, companies, and the media that are muffling talk of climate. We all are.

It’s not that we don’t care. In fact more than half of Americans described themselves as “concerned” or “alarmed” over global warming in fall 2025, with “alarmed” being the fastest-growing category over the past decade.

It’s that our attention is under siege, and our focus is going with it. The climate organizers I speak with are lamenting privately and publicly that climate is no longer top of mind for anyone—students, moms, Democratic socialists, no one.

In the United States, climate activists, the brave few who have dedicated their lives to raising awareness of the crisis, are being called to defend democracy and civil liberties instead. Recently, my friend Katharine K. Wilkinson did a wonderful episode of her climate podcast A Matter of Degrees, talking to activists about this forced pivot.

I feel guilty of this myself. I founded this newsletter in 2023 intending for climate to be a major theme. But my true North Star is exploring the psychological landscape of the multiple and intersecting crises roiling the world. And while climate is at the center of these crises, another tentacle is often more emergent."

(The most important thing we're not talking about: A guest essay on how the biggest story of our time -- the climate crisis -- got pushed into the background, and how to refocus, Anya Kamenetz, The Ink, Mar 13, 2026)

Commit to others' survival

"I want them to have trans elders to turn to, and I want them to have the chance to become trans elders themselves."
- Hil Malatino

Support the human rights of the helpers

A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans’ Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over, Joseph Cox, 404 Media, Sep 8, 2026

Sources

Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman (1958). New York: Vintage Books, 1991. p. 68.

Enzo Baldoni, freelance Italian journalist captured and killed in Iraq in 2004, quoted in La Repubblica (Rome), according to "Italy horror at hostage execution," CNN, August 27, 2004.

Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for the Independent of London, interviewed by David Barsamian in April 2005. The Progressive, June 2005. Excerpted in Utne. Sept.-Oct. 2005. p 73.

James Gilligan. Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. (1996) New York: Vintage Books, 1997. pp. 11-12.

Pope John XXIII, quoted in James Carroll. An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. p 73-4.

Dave Grossman. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1995. p xxviii.

Derrick Jensen. Endgame. Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006. p. 407.

Rod Serling, in "The Shelter." The Twilight Zone television series

"Wrong Definition for a War." Caleb Carr. Washington Post, July 28, 2004.

Rollo May, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1972. p. 56.

David Kuo. Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. New York: Free Press, 2006. p. 154.

Jessica Stern. Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill. New York: Ecco, 2003. p. 137.

Sen. J. William Fulbright. The Arrogance of Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. pp. 8-9. Quoting Brock Chisholm, Prescription for Survival. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957. p. 9.

Rollo May, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1972. p 38.

Dennis Kucinich. A Prayer for America. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003. p 85.

Audre Lorde, quoted by Starhawk, Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery, New York: Harper Collins, 1987. p. 20.

Anne Lamott, Seeds of Peace, 2003

Martin Luther King, Jr. Quoted in "Sunbeams," the quotations page of The Sun. November 2012. p. 48.

Andrew J. Bacevich. The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008. pp. 57-58.

Sam McKeen's Preface to Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox, Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning in Your Life Through Writing and Storytelling. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1989. p. x. (This is a revised version of Telling Your Story, originally published 1973.)

Jim Wallis. The Soul of Politics: Beyond 'Religious Right' and 'Secular Left'. New York: Harvest, 1995. pp. 88-89.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Wind, Sand and Stars. (1939) Translated into English by Lewis Galantiere. London: The Folio Society, 1990. p. 162.

Paul Ramsey. Nine Modern Moralists. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1962. p 23.

Wafa Sultan, Arab-American psychologist, on a talk show on Memri TV (Al Jazeera, Qatar, February 21, 2006), speaking in Arabic, with English subtitles.

Michael Nagler, interviewed by David Kupfer. “Nonviolence, Spiritual Growth, and Real Security.” Whole Earth, Fall 2002. p 46.

Albert Schweitzer, quoted in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

Lao Tzu, quoted by Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman, New York: Vintage Books, 1991 (Copyright 1958). pp. 38-39.

A.R. Moxon, The Reframe, April 6, 2024

Jim Wallis. The Call to Conversion: Why Faith is Always Personal but Never Private. Revised and Updated. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2005. (Originally 1981.) p 108.

Sen. J. William Fulbright. The Arrogance of Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. p. 39.

Allison Wiltz, Why Black People Don’t Want to Romanticize 1830s With Taylor Swift: Ignoring racism is not the same as confronting it, Momentum, April 23, 2024

Trudier Harris. Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, c 1984. p 13.

Gladys Gould, a Providence resident speaking on behalf of Jobs with Justice, quoted in "Critics say cuts to Rite Care would hurt Hispanics most." Elizabeth Gudrais. Providence Journal. (Rhode Island.) March 31, 2006. p A1.

Queen Noor. Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life. New York: Hyperion, 2003. p. 442.

Joe Conason. "Only one option?" Salon.com Feb 3, 2006. Accessed Feb. 3, 2006.

"The difficulty of trying to stop it happening ever again." The Economist. April 11-17, 2009. p. 46.

Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988. p 190

Michael Nagler, interviewed by David Kupfer. “Nonviolence, Spiritual Growth, and Real Security.” Whole Earth, Fall 2002. p 46.

Dennis Kucinich. A Prayer for America. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003. p 77.

Mexican statesman Benito Juárez, quoted in the AP. The Week, April 4, 2014, p. 15.

"The damage is closer than we think." Bob Kerr. Providence Journal. March 26, 2003.

Hannah Arendt. The Burden of Our Time. London: Secker and Warburg, 1951. Published in the US as The Origins of Totalitarianism. p 428.

David Berreby. Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind. New York: Little, Brown, and Co. 2005. p 223.

Jim Wallis. The Soul of Politics: Beyond 'Religious Right' and 'Secular Left'. New York: Harvest, 1995. p. 21.

Mary Parker Follett. Quoted in "Sunbeams," the quotations page of The Sun. November 2012. P. 48.

Amos Oz. In the Land of Israel. (1983) Translated by Maurie Goldberg-Bartura. USA: Harcourt, Inc., 1993. p. 241.

Hil Malatino. Trans Care, University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Quotes on the mind watching itself

We all have some level of self-awareness about our own thoughts. On a minimal level, this simply makes us conscious beings.

"I posit two theorems: (1) The mind is all the information in the brain. (2) Consciousness is the brain's awareness of some of that information." - 
J. Allan Hobson.

Beyond that, we face difficulties in maintaining the awareness in a deep way and on an ongoing basis.

"It occurred to me: awareness no more permitted its own description than life allowed you a seat at your own funeral. Awareness trapped itself inside itself." - Richard Powers

"In observing the operation of his own mind, incidentally, Galton was faced with the 'difficulty of keeping watch without embarrassing the freedom of its action'." - Douwe Draaisma

If we persist, we may be called "intellectuals."

"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself." - Albert Camus

"Tetlock found that the most important difference between fox thinking and hedgehog thinking is that the fox thinker is more likely to study his own decision-making process. In other words, he thinks about how he thinks..." - Jonah Lehrer

Sources


J. Allan Hobson. The Chemistry of Conscious States: How the Brain Changes its Mind. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co, 1994. p 203.

Richard Powers. Galatea 2.2. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995. p. 217.

Douwe Draaisma. Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past. (2001) Translated by Arnold and Erica Pomerans in 2004. Cambridge University Press, 2005. p 3.

Albert Camus, quoted in Forbes.com, quoted in The Week, August 10, 2012, p. 17.

Jonah Lehrer. How We Decide. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. p. 242. See Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment, Princeton 2006. Based on Isaiah Berlin's classic essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox."