I tried freedom, but every ranking by every institute or academy, abroad, within the United States, privately funded, funded by the CIA, etc., failed to rank the United States at the top, whether for rightwing capitalist freedom to exploit, leftwing freedom to lead a fulfilling life, freedom in civil liberties, freedom to change one's economic position, freedom by any definition under the sun. The United States where "at least I know I'm free" in the words of a country song contrasts with other countries where at least I know I'm freer.
So I looked harder. I looked at education at every level, and found the United States ranked first only in student debt. I looked at wealth and found the United States ranked first only in inequality of wealth distribution among wealthy nations. In fact, the United States ranks at the bottom of wealthy nations in a very long list of measures of quality of life. You live longer, healthier, and happier elsewhere. The United States ranks first among all nations in various measures one shouldn't be proud of: incarceration, various sorts of environmental destruction, and most measures of militarism, as well as some dubious categories, such as -- don't sue me -- lawyers per capita. And it ranks first in a number of items that I imagine those who shout "We're Number 1!" to quiet down anybody working to improve things do not have in mind: most television viewing, most paved asphalt, at or near the top in most obesity, most wasted food, cosmetic surgery, pornography, consumption of cheese, etc.
In a rational world, nations that had found the best policies on healthcare, gun violence, education, environmental protection, peace, prosperity, and happiness would be most promoted as models worthy of consideration. In this world, the prevalence of the English language, the dominance of Hollywood, and other factors do in fact put the United States in the lead in one thing: in the promotion of all of its mediocre to disastrous policies.
My notion is not that people should leave the United States or swear their allegiance to some other place, or replace pride with shame. Nor does any general description or statistic cover any actual individual. There have always been subcultures including indigenous cultures within the United States that had and have much to teach. My point is that we have debates in the U.S. on whether single-payer healthcare could actually work in the real world that steadfastly ignore the fact that it is working in numerous countries. We even wear the same sort of blinders when it comes to peace, imagining that peace has never yet been figured out, and that we must look to the ponderings of Einstein, Freud, Russell, and Tolstoy to construct the means of finally evolving into the new world where peace will be first established.
The reality is that, while the brilliant thoughts of Western thinkers can be of great assistance, we go wrong if we don't recognize some embarrassing secrets. It now seems likely that many hunter-gatherer groups of humans engaged in nothing resembling low-tech war at all, meaning that most of our species' existence did not involve war. Even in recent millennia, much of Australia, the Arctic, Northeast Mexico, the Great Basin of North America, and even Europe before the rise of patriarchic warrior cultures did largely or entirely without war. Recent examples abound. In 1614 Japan cut itself off from the West and from major warfare until 1853 when the U.S. Navy forced its way in. During such periods of peace, culture flourishes. The colony of Pennsylvania for a time chose to respect the native peoples, at least in comparison with other colonies, and it knew peace and prospered. The notion held by celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that because 17th century Europe invested in science by investing in warfare therefore only through militarism can any culture advance, and therefore -- conveniently enough -- astrophysicists are 100% justified in working for the Pentagon, is a view based on an absurd level of blinkered prejudice that few liberals would accept if duplicated in explicitly racist or sexist terms.
Nothing technologically resembling current war existed a split second ago in evolutionary terms. Calling the bombing of people's houses in Yemen the same name as fighting with swords or muskets in an open field is dubious at best.
The nation most engaged in bombing people's houses around the world, namely the United States, does not involve 99 percent of its people directly in the enterprise of war at all. If war is some sort of inevitable human behavior, why do most humans want somebody else to do it? While over 40 percent of the U.S. public tells pollsters that it would take part in a war, and NRA videos promote more wars apparently as a means to sell guns to fans of wars, virtually none of those people, including the staff of the NRA, have proven capable of actually finding a recruiting station.
Western militaries long excluded women and now work hard to include them without any worries about so-called human nature, without anyone wondering why, if women can start waging war, men can't stop waging war.
Right now 96% of humanity lives under governments that invest radically less in war, and in most cases radically less per capita and per area of territory, than does the 4% of humanity in the United States. Yet people in the United States will tell you that slashing military spending and reining in U.S. imperialism would violate that mythical substance known as human nature. Presumably 17 years ago when the U.S. spent significantly less on militarism we weren't then human.
While the top killer of U.S. participants in war is suicide, and the recorded cases of PTSD resulting from war deprivation sits steadily at zero, war is said to be normal. Yet the U.S. Congress would no more pass a bill restricting U.S. military spending to four times the next biggest spender on earth than it would limit Supreme Court Justices to no more than four sexual assaults.
When I say that we should make the world great for the first time, I mean that in this age of global communication, we should conceive of ourselves as world citizens and develop world systems of cooperation, collaboration, and dispute resolution and restoration and reconciliation that draw considerably on wisdom that long predates some of the recent ungreatness of various corners of the earth. And I mean this as a project that will require people from all over the world to work together, sharing widely divergent views, and accepting the need to respect and learn from dramatically different perspectives. While this has not previously existed in the way now needed, the alternative to creating it is that this troubled species and many others will perish -- which seems to my mind even more inconvenient that trying something new, which -- truth be told -- is challenging and exciting and not a troublesome matter at all.
A global movement to abolish war, which is what World BEYOND War is working on, has to be a movement that takes on the greatest weapons dealers, war makers, and war justifiers, the rogue states that arm the most dictators, install the most foreign bases, tear down international laws and treaties and courts, and drop the most bombs. This means, of course, principally the United States government -- which stands as worthy of a campaign of boycotts, divestments, sanctions, and moral pressure as would the Israeli government if the Israeli government were multiplied 100 fold.
Professors who tell you that war can be just and that war is quickly vanishing from the globe -- and there is an odd overlap between these two groups, Ian Morris of Stanford is in both -- are exclusively Western, heavily U.S.ian, and extremely prejudiced. Non-Western wars, provoked and armed by the West, are recategorized as genocides, while Western wars are understood as law-enforcement. But, in fact, war is usually genocidal, and genocide usually involves war. If the two of them, war and genocide, ran against each other in a U.S. election we would certainly be told we needed to vote for the lesser evil one, whichever that is, but the two are in reality inseparable. And neither enforces any law, as they constitute the supreme violation of law.
At World BEYOND War we've come up with a book called A Global Security System: An Alternative to War that tries to envision a world culture and structure that allows us to end all wars and armaments. I've written a number of books that address this. But today I feel like talking about activism, about what people can do for peace and for related causes -- most good causes are related. Because I see a lot of potential and a lot of mistakes.
Here are some questions our culture asks us to respond to:
Does the U.S. government have too much money or too little?
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