(“Bushman”) people of the Khalahari desert, although they do not wage war, have an extremely high murder rate. But this only supports the theory that the cause of war is not the violent nature of the individual but the structure of the society.
Star Snake, is the story of a young Aztec warrior and the history of the rise of the Aztec Empire.
The two stories Arobanai and Star Snake contrast one of the most peaceful and loving societies that has ever lived on this planet with one of the cruelest and most warlike. They ought to be read together. The task for the students should be to carefully compare the structure of the two societies and the various aspects of life. What is the economic basis of each society? How are the goods distributed? How is labour divided among the members of society? How are decisions made? What sort of ethics prevail? How are the children and young people educated? What are the ideals they are taught? And finally: How is it possible for beings of the same species to be so different in their feelings, thoughts, and in their actions?
At your Own Doorstep was originally inspired by the traffic situation in Beirut. But of course road traffic serves here as an example of a special case of societal entanglements. If you enter the words “Peace begins” in any Internet search engine you will be amazed how many pages you get of the form “Peace begins at your own doorstep”, “Peace begins within your soul” and so on. But what is the next step?
At the beginning the drivers all think they are confronted with what game theory calls a “zero sum game”: “If you win, I lose” If you win 5, I lose 5, so the sum of our winnings is 0.In our case this means: “You can only get home earlier if if I get home later”. But in reality the drivers are caught in a a sort of prisoner’s dilemma, in which they all lose. By communicating and cooperating the women manage to turn this situation into a win-win situation: Everybody gets home earlier.
Conflict resolution is not so much about compromising: Okay, I’ll be content with less so you can have more. This is what nice people would do, and of course it is nice to be nice and to deal with nice people. But if you manage to turn a zero sum situation into a win-win situation you can also convince the not so nice people and make them cooperate.
Warmongers often want us to believe that we are in a zero sum situation: “If they take X, we can’t have X” (for X insert land, water, oil or whatever). They make us believe that if there is not enough water we must fight for the well. But if instead of fighting for the well we get together and dig a second well we can all gain.
The philosopher Sir Karl Popper warned of revolutionary change. He advocated “piecemeal social engineering”, small changes which by and by will lead to a better society. He argued that social experiments on a smaller scale could not cause so much damage and could more easily be reversed if they were not successful. There is much to what he said, but in my opinion he overlooked one thing: social systems tend to settle in a relatively stable equilibirium. If you put a little ball on the bottom of a round bowl and you push it a little, it will move a little towards the edge of the bowl and then roll back. If you push it a little harder it will climb up a little higher towards the edge and then roll back again. You need a certain minimum of force to push it over the edge of the bowl. Anything less will just not make a difference.
Take the example of a city council that wants to improve a “bad area” of the town. The streets there are strewn with litter, so the city council decides to put up litter bins. But to no avail. Almost nobody uses them.
Why is that?
In the “nice area” of the town, if you throw away a banana peel on the sidewalk a person who sees you doing it will approach you and ask you to use a litter bin, or they may even pick up the banana peel and put it in a litter bin. In a “nice” area one banana peel on the sidewalk makes a big difference. And everybody living in a “nice” area wants it to remain nice.
In the “bad” area of town one banana peel more on the sidewalk does not make a difference at all. And putting your banana peel in the litter bin does not make a difference either. So why take the trouble? If you want people to use the litter bins at least you must remove all the litter from the streets first, so that putting your banana peel in the litter bin will make a difference. Probably you will also have to educate the people because they have been used to throwing away their litter in the streets. They will have to reach some sort of agreement that clean streets are good for their health. Or - because the “bad” area of the town is probably the poor area - they may have more pressing problems on their hands than litter.
So even if you want to adopt the piecemeal approach for social change you must find out what is the minimum effort necessary to overcome the stable equilibrium of a certain situation.
The bad news is that situations where people work together for a common good are usually less stable than situations where everyone fends for themselves. One careless litterer will not upset the equilibrium of the “nice” street. But if, let's say, 10% or 20% of the inhabitants get careless and throw their litter on the street, the rest of the population may soon give up and get careless too. On the other hand, if 10% or 20% of the inhabitants of the dirty street start using the litter bins they still will not make a visible impact and will not be able to change it into a clean street if they do not proactively try to convince their neighbors.
The Two Prisoners introduces something known in game theory as the “prisoners dilemma.” It is a classic model for how the quite rational pursuit of an advantage for oneself can nevertheless become harmful to all concerned. As long as one adheres to the conditions of the model that the two prisoners cannot communicate, there is no solution.
Justice I wrote for a congress on children's books in Israel in 2001.”Justice” is a very ambiguous concept and it is often abused. What is a just distribution of goods? Give to everybody what he or she deserves? Or give to everybody enough for a decent life? How do you decide what someone deserves? And who decides?
And if someone commits a crime, what is a just punishment? An eye for an eye? Should a murderer be killed? Should a rapist be raped? And what about mass murderers? You can only kill a person once. For the murderers of my grandparents who were killed in the holocaust their could never be a “just” punishment. And for my father, who survived, their could never be a “just” compensation. My father never sought justice or revenge. His goal in life was to understand what happened, how it could have happened and how something similar could be prevented in the future.
The Bewitched Islands: What causes a king to be king? Some quality he was born with? Some skills he has learned? No, only the fact that people accept him as their king. What causes money to be money? Some quality of the material it is made of? The numbers and letters that are stamped on it? No, only the fact that people accept it as money. Many words that seem to denote a certain thing actually denote a certain human behavior. The sentence: "This pair of shoes costs 20 dollars" seems to describe a quality of the shoes. But this is not so: Someone demands 20 dollars, someone pays 20 dollars. The price is not a quality of the shoes but a certain human behavior. A "price" or a "law" or a "country" is something that exists only because of the rules of the game, just like a "trump" or a "straight flush". Will a straight flush always beat a full house? Yes, as long as we are playing poker. If we decide to play bridge instead, words like "straight flush" completely lose their meaning, even if we are still holding the same deck of cards in our hands.
Money is about economic conquest. Events such as the one described in the story happened many times in the history of colonialism. The story also tries to explain the most puzzling aspect of money: Why can you get something for it? All earlier forms of money are relatively easy to understand: People were willing to exchange useful things for money because the things that were used as money were also useful. Cocoa beans, cowrie shells, camels, copper, silver or gold: you knew you could exchange these things for almost anything else because these things were useful themselves. You could eat them or milk them or ride them o
r turn them into tools or jewellery. Anything that many people want to have can serve as money, as a means of exchange. Nowadays people accept worthless paper money (no, the bank does not guarantee to give you gold for it. That was a long time ago), because they need the government's money to pay their taxes. That's the simple secret.
In the War shows that war has many sides that may appeal to boys and men and even girls and women. If it were not so, it would be much harder to make the men (and boys and girls and women) march into battle.
The Story of a Good King I wrote in Korea in 2010. I attended a meeting of writers and illustrators from all over the world. They all had contributed to a collection of peace stories and had come together to celebrate the publication of the book. There was much talk about the power of love and the importance of tolerance and friendship. “When people sing and dance together they will not fight each other later on”, was a statement that got much applause. I did not like to contradict this statement but I had to because it simply is not true. How often in history has it happened that people who had been good friends and neighbours suddenly found themselves on