Centuries have gone by and human beings have remained busy inflicting all sorts of destructiveness upon ourselves, other animals, plant life, and the Earth’s biosphere as a whole. We call this our history. At times we have called this “progress.”

What is it that we have been doing throughout our history? We have been “othering” our fellow human beings as well as every one of our biosphere’s inhabitants. We have perpetrated obscenities against Mother Earth in the name of “progress.” We have become delusional in our assumption of human superiority and sense of entitlement to dominate.

How is it that so many centuries later we still don’t know what we’re doing?

As a species we still don’t know what we’re doing because so many of us still do not know who we really are. Many of us still believe that we are nothing more than biochemical machines who consume material resources. We believe that we must consume or be consumed and that there simply isn’t enough for all of us.

There is a prevailing acceptance of this view as being based on science and therefore true. Seeing ourselves as biochemical machines, we believe we are separate from each other and independent of each other. We have hypnotized ourselves into believing that our independence is virtuous and that any form of dependency is evidence of weakness and deserving of shame. This perspective has become very advantageous to certain individuals and groups. They have gained and seek to maintain control over others without the bother of getting informed consent. It is a form of covert domination.

We have gotten it wrong for so long now that we assume the pessimism about human nature to be a given. “Why do people do these things?” We ask when we reflect upon the atrocity de jour in today’s news cycle. “It’s human nature” we are told. That is supposed to end the discussion.

“That’s not who we are.”

This has become an almost mandatory statement in defense of our collective identity when one of “us” does something horrific within our own society. We heard this disclaimer time and time again after the killing of George Floyd by police officers in 2020. If the perpetrator is too closely associated with our national power structure there is the inevitable recycling of the “few bad apples” explanation to protect the integrity and reputation of the existing system. The explaining away of the atrocities that occurred at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq a few years earlier is another example of this tactic. Police officers and military personnel may need to be held to account but as institutions, the police and the military must not be accused or held responsible.



If we are to stand firm in our denial of being psychopaths we must ultimately answer the question that will haunt us until we do:

Who are we?

The answer to this question is critically important because our understanding of who we are has major implications for how we behave.

So, to what extent do our beliefs about who we are influence how we conduct ourselves in our daily lives? Quite a lot, actually. We have come to know this as the phenomenon of “self-fulfilling prophecy.” This is the process by which one or more individuals live up to or down to the expectations that they absorb from beyond themselves. What are happens if our beliefs about our identity are inadequate or incorrect?

After Martin Luther King, jr. was murdered in 1968, an elementary school teacher provided a fascinating and illuminating lesson to her students and the rest of humanity. The teacher, Jane Elliot, informed her young students that blue-eyed children were scientifically proven to be naturally more intelligent than brown-eyed children. Then each group was given corresponding privileges or challenges. The children quickly adopted their new status. The blue-eyed children lorded their imagined superiority over the brown-eyed children who accepted their alleged inferiority. A day or so later she explained to her students that a mistake had been made and it was actually the brown-eyed children who were the naturally better students and that it was the blue-eyed students who were less intelligent. Now the brown-eyed students took on the mantle of bestowed superiority and dominated the blue-eyed students who were now regarded as the inferior ones.

We identify ourselves in so many different ways. We call ourselves Americans or Russians or Ukrainians or Palestinians or Israelis. We say that we are Hutus or Tutsis or Cherokees or Sioux. We claim to be Muslims or Hindus or Christians or Jews or Buddhists. We wear red and call ourselves conservatives or we wear blue and call ourselves liberals. Others call us communists or socialists or capitalists or fascists.

We tell ourselves all kinds of stories about what it means to be whatever label we choose or have imposed on us. These stories typically invoke a comparison that serves to clarify that “I’m one of us and not one of them.” This seems to have satisfied humankind for much of our history.

It has also been the source of much of humanity’s greatest suffering.

The time has come to stop accepting ownership of any label that invites an “us and them” framework that colonizes our hearts, minds and the fabric of human society. This corrosive mentality promotes fear and hostility. It sabotages compassion and rationality. It blocks our true potential as human beings. It makes us far less than who we are.

So who are we?

We are schoolchildren on a field trip. Our field trip isn’t simply a matter of going to a national park or a museum to look at what is there. Instead, we have been sent to a little blue planet orbiting an average star within an average galaxy. Rather than simply observing the inhabitants of this little blue planet, our teacher has arranged for us to become them in order to learn all that we can about what it means to be human beings living in human societies. One thing that we didn’t know is that upon arrival, our memories of who we really are would be hidden from us. A little surprise from our teacher perhaps? So we “forgot” who we were and believed that we were the humans we came to learn about. So for thousands of years we have lived as human beings with all the imperfections that are part of the human experience. We have had innumerable opportunities to make all kinds of mistakes from which to learn and we have indeed made an incredible number of them. We have learned from some of those mistakes and it is painfully obvious that we still have much to learn.

And yet…

There are occasions where, like the title character of The Truman Show movie, we have started to notice small oddities and little cracks in the illusion of who we think we are. While not all of us are haunted by a nagging sense that there’s something more going on in life, some do experience a persisting mystery that is difficult to dismiss. We hear the stories of people like Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and the Buddha as well as more contemporary stories of the lives of Gandhi, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Dorothy Day, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Mother Theresa, Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan. The lives of these compelling people and others give us moments of insight and awareness that question the assumption that we are merely biochemical machines. We begin to doubt how separate we really are from each other. We become skeptical of the hyper-competitive “survival of the fittest” mythology that would have us believe that only the “strong” deserve to live. We begin to remember echos from the past reminding us not to be afraid. We become open to the possibility that those reminders come from a truthful source.

What happens if we listen to the voice saying: “Do not be afraid”? What happens if we make choices and act based on a foundation of something other than fear? If we are no longer blinded and dominated by fear, what will we be able to see and know? When we get beyond the obstructions of our fear what will we then have room for in our hearts and lives?

As we find our way beyond our fear we will be able to reconnect to who we are.

There is an apocryphal story about the legendary artist Michelangelo. The story goes that he was asked how he was able to create such extraordinary sculptures out of blocks of stone. He replied that he saw the completed sculpture within the block of stone and that his work was to “free” the sculpture by chipping away all that was not part of its true form. He considered his work complete when he had removed everything that was not part of the encased figure.

Might we be living versions of Michelangelo’s sculptures? What if we are the ones encased within our own “stone blocks” of fear? As we help each other and ourselves to become free of these prisons we will know that we are so much more than just combinations of subatomic particles interacting with electromagnetic radiation. We will come to discover that “human evolution” is far grander than any mere materialistic process.

When we remember who we are, when we connect the dots and get the picture, we will be unwilling to hurt each other anymore. We will come to love and respect the other forms of life with whom we share our one and only planet. We will know that competing against each other is pointless and absurd. Competition becomes uninteresting. Instead we will find that we are now much more interested in helping and supporting each other. “How can I help you?” becomes our default setting replacing the “greed is good” ethos of our time. Each of us will come to experience our identity as both “me” and “we” without contradiction.

No one is sub-human or super-human. All are lovable and deserving of love. No exceptions. This is our journey from the illusions and distortions of our fearfulness to an ever increasing awareness of our true identity as beings made by Love, from Love and for Love. Despite the multitude and magnitude of our mistakes, we are loved beyond our comprehension. All of us belong in the Beloved Community.

When we finally realize who we are, we will fully understand that we have no enemies. It will become obvious to all of us that any attempt or inclination to harm is unthinkably absurd. We will know ourselves and each other as the sacred children of the Ultimate Mystery, loved beyond our wildest dreams.

America is a heroin addict and War is our heroin.

In its comparatively brief history, the United States of America has been at war with someone, in some way, for almost our entire national existence. Within American society itself, various forms of violence are part of everyday life whether as barely noticeable slow burns or as major eruptions that become front page news. What is less obvious is the question of why this is the case. What causes Americans, as a people and a nation, to be so inclined toward violence both internally and internationally?

America is a deeply traumatized nation. We have been traumatized by what was done to us and what we have done to others. As a nation and as a people, we are more traumatized than we know or want to believe. Like the proverbial fish that doesn’t know that it’s wet, our collective trauma is in the air that we all breathe. It’s so pervasive that it feels “normal” to us. Our political leaders are not immune to this. Neither are our military or business leaders. All who are human are susceptible. Those in positions of power are all the more vulnerable to the temptation of misusing their power in an attempt to negate or escape their own pain.

Our behavior as a nation is a manifestation of our unhealed collective trauma. This aspect of our history goes back to a time well before 1776. It actually goes back generations before that famous year, before those Europeans eventually started to travel across the ocean to the “New World” to try to make a better life for themselves than the life they left behind in the “Old Country.” Why would people undertake such a long and dangerous ocean voyage to unknown territory? Why would they take such a risk if things were fine where they were? They wouldn’t. People leave their homes behind if things are really bad. Except for those with a good deal of wealth and status, life for the rest was very hard. They left because of their great suffering.

It did not take long for those traumatized Europeans to start projecting their pain onto the human beings who were already living in the proclaimed “New World.” Assuming an inherent superiority, those Europeans declared the land to be theirs for the taking. They proceeded to do just that. The human beings native to this land quickly became an obstacle for those Europeans. The “othering” of native peoples began with labelling them as sub-human savages. It quickly went downhill from there. The subsequent history of European immigrants, the ancestors of future Americans, includes the de-humanizing of various groups of “different others” such as the people abducted from Africa who were forced into the abomination of slavery. These and other ethnic groups were regarded as second class at best and often as far worse. The pattern is one of trying to escape our own trauma by projecting it onto whoever is designated as “not one of us.”

Present day America remains highly traumatized not only by the events of centuries ago but by current events that cause tremendous emotional pain and reactions of great fear, rage, indifference, and psychic numbing. The evidence of this is in almost every news story you may read or watch on any given day.

Going back just a little over a century, America has endured World War I, the Great Depression, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and our subsequent entry into World War II, our fire bombing of Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo as well as the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the “Cold War.” We have lived through the Korean War, the assassination of President Kennedy, the My Lai massacre and the Vietnam War as a whole. We have suffered the brutality of individual and institutionalized racism in America. We have seen the vicious opposition to the Civil Rights movement by substantial portions of our people and our government. We have witnessed the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.

We have been shocked by the abuses of government power through the public revelations of the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate hearings and the national humiliation of the Iran Hostage Crisis. We were shaken by the near assassination of President Reagan, the Iran-Contra scandal, the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

We were devastated by the events of 9/11 and we were then coerced and compelled into the “War on Terror.” We were sedated into accepting the Patriot Act which opened the door for American citizens to be spied on by branches of their government. The revelations via Wikileaks of the blatant murder of civilians in Iraq by U.S. armed forces personnel and the news of the torture of detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prison left us more numbed than outraged. This was also the case when we learned of the practice of “extraordinary rendition” in which persons are abducted and transported to undisclosed locations, held indefinitely and where “enhanced interrogation” techniques (i.e. torture) could be utilized without the inconvenience of due process or any semblance of the Rule of Law we Americans are so proud to claim as the bedrock of our society.

This is by no means a complete list of the collective experiences that have traumatized us and produced an internalized national shame. We have endured all this in our own lifetimes, the lifetimes of our parents, our grandparents and our great-grandparents. This a snapshot of the collective trauma accumulated in the American psyche over the past several generations. Over time, our silence has become our complicity which has become our collective trauma.

This pattern has not stopped because the healing has yet to begin.

As individuals and as a nation, we buy into the fantasy that we are primarily rational beings who make choices and act upon those choices in a rational manner. Admittedly, it is a very attractive story. If only it were true. Individually and collectively, we continue to act irrationally. Two of the most toxic sources of our irrationality, fueled by pain and fear, are the beliefs that “might makes right” and that “the end justifies the means.” These pernicious siblings set us up to hate and oppress. They set us up to dehumanize and to kill, to go to war and to commit genocide. They seduce us into believing that domination, destruction and death are the way to solve problems.

When we make choices and act from places of great pain we are much more likely to think and behave with a singular agenda to not feel our pain anymore. In such a compromised state we are tempted into a kind of magical belief that we won’t have to feel our pain anymore if we can offload it somehow.

On some primal level, present day Americans feel the moral weight of what our ancestors have done and of what was done to them. Some cling to forms of justification for why previous generations acted as they did: “they just didn’t know any better”, “they were desperate”, “it was culturally ‘normal’ for them”, “they were just trying to preserve their way of life”, etc. Ultimately, those veneers wear thin and don’t hold up. Deep down we know that our ancestors, our people, have both oppressed and been oppressed, have degraded and been degraded, have killed and been killed. This is a historical truth we cannot escape.

We want so badly to escape that very painful truth but how can anyone escape what is inescapable? It is exactly here that addiction seduces us into a fantasy of escape. It appears on the scene when we are desperate for something to put out the fire of our agony. Like a heroic firefighter, addiction arrives to save the day and it is only after we have given our hasty consent that we discover that he is trying to put out our fire with gasoline. This is any addiction’s positive intent tragically paired with toxic strategy.

Addiction hijacks individuals, families and whole societies. There are pockets of resistance within each but the power of any addiction should not be underestimated. The drive to stop feeling intense pain is very hard to resist.

Addiction is a reaction to trauma. When we are in enough pain, regardless of the nature of that pain, we seek relief. That is the nature of addiction. There is nothing inherently pathological about seeking relief from pain. The problem has everything to do with how we go about it. The “War on Drugs” is most certainly not the solution. In fact, the War Paradigm itself is a big part of the problem. If you have cancer and your doctor told you that the course of treatment required injecting more cancer cells into your body you would probably seek a second opinion! Imagine if someone came up with the notion of declaring “War on War” as a way to Peace! War does not solve problems any more than cancer cures cancer. War always creates new problems that have to be solved.

We go to war to attempt to relieve our pain and our sense of powerlessness from which we feel shame. It is our national pain-killer, our prescription opioid, our “heroin.”

This is our recent history of the “War on Terror.” We suffered the horror and agony of 9/11 and then we lashed out with rage at “those people” thousands of miles away who “did it to us” because they “hate our freedom.” We were badly hurt and we craved revenge. Our desire for “justice” served as a veneer of legitimacy for our craving for retribution. America often boasts of being the most powerful nation in the world yet the events of 9/11 were not only intensely and legitimately painful to our nation but our sense of vulnerability and our helplessness to stop the attacks were deeply shameful to us as well. Shame ignited hostility within us and opened the doors wide for our violence to be projected outwardly. We did so in a “patriotic” fever. We compensated for our self-perceived weakness by going all-in with a sustained demonstration of our military omnipotence. Now it would be “their turn” to feel “shock and awe” courtesy of Uncle Sam. Here at home we were fed a steady diet of messages explaining how justified we were in attacking those countries because we were told that they were harboring the terrorists. We were reminded of how completely necessary and right it was for us to go to war. American Exceptionalism, now on steroids, was loudly proclaimed once again.

We needed to show ourselves and the world that we were not weak and when we waged war we felt powerful again. Our willingness to destroy nations and end life on a massive scale was our proof. We filled ourselves with a nationalistic pride that covered our shame. The problem is that this pride is unsustainable and we have to keep inflating it. If we don’t, we are left to feel the pain of our vulnerability and helplessness. That would be tantamount to a hard core heroin addict quitting cold turkey and going through a dangerous withdrawal and an agonizing detox. We avoid it at all costs. This is also an intolerable option because we are loyal subscribers to the idea that it is shameful to be vulnerable or helpless, in other words, to rely on another’s mercy. As long as we continue to believe in that story we are its prisoners. We remain enslaved to Mars. We are the addicts convinced that there is no way out of our addiction. So we keep going to war, injecting our “heroin,” and we postpone the inevitable “hitting bottom”as long as possible.

And what has been accomplished in the years since 9/11? So many more dead human beings, massive destruction and yet another generation traumatized by war. Those not physically killed often carry “invisible wounds” with them that become an inner torture chamber following them everywhere they go. These men and women hear a well-conditioned civilian population say: “Thank you for your service” as if it is the last piece of the puzzle allowing veterans and civilians alike to “get on with their lives.” “Service” has become a cruelly silencing euphemism.

In a manner of speaking, America needs to go through detox. It will be difficult and painful. As a nation, we have become dependent on war, our drug of choice, our “heroin.” We have become dependent on it both psychologically and economically. Our current way of life has emerged from this addiction to war. It is a retreat into fear that has been well-camouflaged by our national bravado. If we are to be free of it we must see it for what it is and see it for what it is not. It is our attempt to escape from our collective pain. It is not a means of rationally solving domestic problems or international conflicts. It is an escapism that perpetuates our denial of who we really are and leaves us with a cheap, fictitious belief that we are nothing more than separate biochemical machines. That belief is the Biggest Lie. We have too long been seduced by it and enslaved to it.

This will not change until we remember who we really are and who we are to each other. Recovery is the process by which we rediscover and reclaim our true identity as spiritual beings having human experiences. The fact that we are relational beings is central to our innermost truth. Our reality is one of community that is enriched by diversity and impoverished by conformity. We are conceived out of Love and Love is what we are meant to be part of.

Recovery is the most natural response to any addiction. Unfortunately, natural does not mean easy. It will not be easy. It will require letting go of long-cherished narratives of our superiority, our sense of entitlement and our “greatness.” It will require embracing honest humility and committing to courageous love as our path to the future. It will require an on-going process of reconciliation within ourselves, with each other and with our neighbors around the world. We will need to adopt and live out a set of values that prioritize the inherent sacredness of all human beings and all life in our world. No human being nor any part of the natural world can continue to be regarded as merely a “resource” to be used for the benefit of a privileged few. We must become free of the slavery to a materialism that limits us to see only “things” regardless of who or what we look at. This freedom is our birthright. It waits patiently for all of us to know it and claim it as our rightful inheritance as Children of the Ultimate Mystery.