Peace seekers got us out of Vietnam. But they did not stop carnage in Cambodia, Lebanon, Chechnya, Bosnia, Philippines, East Timor, Pakistan, India, Rwanda, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Today, Peace seekers have not kept us out of Iraq.

Part of their failure results from a faulty perception of what increases or decreases conflict. Consider the possibility that trends in conflict are driven by trends in scarcity. Trends in scarcity are driven by the collective behaviors of 6 billion people. That each individual acts benignly to achieve personal objectives and unintentionally creates scarcity. This would mean that this blindness prevents each individual from seeing the connections and prevents any motivation to behave otherwise.

This line of reasoning conflicts two ways with common beliefs. First, most people believe the future will be more desirable than the past. Technology has always improved infrastructure, health science, services, transportation, and ommunication. While there is every reason to believe that it will continue doing so in the future, the personal behaviors that have always created scarcity and conflict have not changed. We should expect our great grand children to experience a technology advanced version of past conflict. Even gated communities and great sacrifices in personal freedom eventually will not shield them. Second, most of us believe that some political, economic, or religious structure can facilitate peace. However, this has not happened in the past. And there is little reason to believe that it can happen in the future? As long as these institutions do not dictate changes in currently acceptable personal behaviors, we will have trends toward scarcity and conflict.Peace seekers, even when successful at restraining the military or mediating hostilities, do not change our course toward conflict. They only delay it. In the process, peace seekers consume the very energy required to change the things that would make societies head toward peace. Today we, as peace seekers, have to face reality. We have no plan for the peace of our great grandchildren or beyond. We will have no plan until we focus on changing the personal behaviors of 6 billion people. Those changes will require either, very unpleasant institutional actions, or a universal change in the cognitive processes which assign value to a never experienced abstraction, the lives of yet to be born progeny.

We have to find a way to produce a global constituency with cognitive processes that reject behaviors we think are benign. And instead choose behavior that creates ever expanding abundance and thus ever expanding peace.