Morality — our character, manners and the way we conduct ourselves with others — is currently the subject of considerable attention, producing in the process much confusion, controversy and cant. …
Q&A: Why Young Syrians Choose to Fight
Caroline Brooks is the director of the Syria Program for International Alert – a peace-building organization based in the UK. She works with partners and communities affected by violence at …
Understanding the Current Global Upheaval
ONLINE COURSE Fear and Political Chaos: How to bring clarity to societal upheaval through the lens of innate human needs The world is becoming an increasingly unstable and dangerous place. …
How Do We Improve Politics?
“Tolerance and trying to understand others, until recently a luxury, has today become a necessity. “This is because: unless we can realize that we and others are generally behaving as …
Beyond Culture
If one is working on a project with Israelis and Palestinians, and an email is sent to ten colleagues from each side, nine out of 10 Israelis will rapidly answer, …
Conditioning: Seeing Our Innate Susceptibility
To properly see and move past the problem of conditioning, it is not enough to just acknowledge that people can, and do, get conditioned, brainwashed and indoctrinated. It’s also necessary to …
Conditioning: The Deep Undercurrent
We’ve discussed how unmet human needs can block success in political negotiations, and how cult behaviour can fuel extremism. We’d also like to point out another critical dimension that can …
Joining the Cosmic Struggle
In a previous post entitled ‘Human Needs and the Lure of Extremism,’ we asserted that the appeal of militant groups (like ISIS) stems from their ability to provide for the unmet …
The Emotional Brain
Part of the difficult task of trying to resolve conflicts is getting past the perceptual barriers that stand in the way of seeing conflicts for what they really are. Longstanding …
We Are Better Than Them
We usually reserve the word “cult” for groups that commit mass suicide by drinking poison-laced purple cool-aid. There is a view however that cult phenomena are much more pervasive in our …