World Peace & The Human Sentience Limiting Factor

As the burdens of resource scarcity influence our mind-state sometimes fight or flight rules our reality construction Observing those changes in myself during the course of my rapidly changing life, from living in Korea for a decade to the Army to living in the house of an undercover spy as a child, I have enough experience to observe it non-linearly. I sometimes do not like how it shapes what I have time to think about, and how I prioritize.

Last night it hit me that I have spent my whole life fighting the world out of a sense of rejection, and that has altered my ability to form relationships. This resulted in today being like no day before it: freed from my own mind’s hidden constructs in a way. This liberation helps me to see things more clearly, and speak without fear of failure pushing me to push people my way. This story is however the story of our world leaders and the populations that push them.

Humans are not self-aware except within strict parameters. We can extend those parameters by examining ourselves non-linearly over many decades. We then can try to start our children down that path earlier, and give them guiding habits for observation and reflection, limited expectations, and observing the self in motion. I don’t have the power to give this to the world. I suspect neither do you.

World peace, avoiding nuclear war, requires evolving human sentience and recognizing our lack of self-awareness in each of us— starting with ourselves, you, the reader of this essay, you in particular, you— so that we do not trust ourselves. Not trusting ourselves inside our own minds then brings us closer in to rely on each other collectively, to check each other, to bring each other closer to truth and reality: because alone we are unable to do this.

I suspect the roots of human conflict and those who lead are full of misinformation about the nature of each other and our intentions; the problem however here is that we are sometimes unaware of our own intentions. When asked why we do something we may give an answer in the present. When asked two weeks later the same question we may give a different answer.

The human mind is computing things we cannot observe consciously, and that means humans are in part almost sentient, and not fully self-aware. It is a necessity of mental stability to avoid peeking into our lack of sentience; Evolving beyond this to see each other more clearly without tipping into insanity from questioning our sentience first requires de-coupling our self-esteem from our image of ourselves as in control of our minds and actions.

Our entire justice system is based on the faulty assumption that people have total free will; with the exception of the malicious most people would make choices that give them positive sum outcomes with humanity; they don’t because they either do not know how to or they are too confident to look inward and see how little they control in themselves: so that they then may start down the path of seeing the limits of the self and others with more love.

This is what I think is running the world. We expect too much from each other. We are unable to expect less because we are unable to admit to ourselves that we also lack agency; how can someone else lack agency if we do? Only when we are unafraid to be nothing can we open our hearts to everyone else to be themselves, flawed, imperfect. The upside from that is they feel at home with us, and trust us. When they trust us they will listen to us.

Our political climate is divided because individually we think too much of our own agency, or being woke. No one is woke. We are in our most infantile state of sentience; we have a long way to go: hundreds of years. I believe a key to reducing tensions around the world is to reduce self-awareness expectations form each other, on an individual and macro level. We can raise task performance expectations, but not so much self-awareness.