Building Peace

Peace Building

In this film, originally recorded as part of the Global Resilience Summit, Spiritual leader, Surrealist painter, and Brasilian Capoeira master Pete Jackson explores the fundamental differences in worldview that arise from societies that understand Nature to be dominant to humans, versus those who believe humans are dominant to Nature. From this profound distinction emerge ancestral worldviews, on the one hand, that are cooperative, and encourage us to welcome the stranger, and the stranger within ourselves. These societies develop in ways that have rigorous rules for conflict resolution, and begin to view martial practice as a spiritual discipline: a gift from Nature that helps us learn to stay centered in the tumult of life. In these societies, martial practice and the military are in service to Life. On the other end of the continuum are societies that presume humans are dominant to Nature, and in turn exhibit aggression towards the stranger. From this view emerges domination, and the continuum of Empire, and a view of the martial and the military as an enterprise of extraction that seeks to obtain the spoils of war. Drawing on the work and military strategy of Sun Tzu, whose timeless classic The Art of War is still a de facto guide to military strategy, Pete explains how modern society has come to embody principles of this latter part of the continuum, how it operates as a construct of war, and how strategies of divide and conquer, useful to the elite maintenance of power and control, play out through various forms of domination in our society: principally caste, race, and gender. Pete's work and research suggest that external conflict arises because of a war within, and that if we are truly to know peace in the world, we have to learn to find peace inside and then work to build it around us. Only when we disarm ourselves will we be able to put down the weapons of words and war that keep us in perpetual conflict.