Philosophy

Welcome to my Peace Psychology blog.

For now, this format is just an experiment, as it appears much easier to keep a weblog like this than to keep my various websites up to date.

The basic motivating philosophy is this:

1. That how we, as human beings, construe reality is determined by mental patterns or schema, which (a) pre-select and pre-structure what we perceive, and (b) determine the kinds of conclusions, inferences and beliefs derived from what we perceive.

2. That, up to this point, perhaps for Darwinian reasons, our schemas are dominated by themes of aggression, hostility, conflict, and competition.

3. That these schemas are not exclusively “hard-wired”—but rather mainly learned and culturally propagated.

4. That we have come to a point where if we do not address this, we face destruction of ourselves, our society, the environment, and perhaps the planet itself.

5. Yet just as this occurs in human history, we have also developed the intelligence to understand the nature of our own minds, of schema-shaped reality. And we can choose other schemas. We are now self-conscious, and potentially self-creating to a new degree.

Our task, therefore, is to create a new culture based on principles of peace, love, and prosperity through cooperation to replace the culture that sees all in terms of conflict and aggression.

This is, I believe, first and foremost a challenge to psychologists and the discipline of psychology.