Stories
Psychology for Revolutionaries
Psychology for Peace Activists
Why there are so few women warriors
The Seville Statement on Violence
A theory of mental illness
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On my return from Soviet Georgia at the end of 1981, I could no longer put my energy into research on the brain mechanisms of aggression which could be used to develop new and terrible brain-altering weapons. What should I do? My search during these years is chronicled in the notebooks that I had begun in 1979: Green Notebooks I-IV, Blue Notebooks I-II, and Black Notebooks I-II, and many photo scrapbooks that I put together with Lindsay.
Already the spring of 1980, I had turned my research to peace itself, using the methodology of cross-cultural anthropology to understand why women have been excluded from war since prehistory.
Beginning in 1982 I worked on a series of books and articles that would treat peace as if it were a scientific problem. The first book, Psychology for Revolutionaries, I decided not to publish, although it served as a basis for the others. The next two I self-published in order to make them available to young people at a price they could afford: The American Peace Movements and Psychology for Peace Activists. As for my scientific papers, although the women warriors paper was published by a reputable scientific journal, I was not so fortunate with others. "There is no instinct for war" was refused by the relevant American journals and I had to publish it in Russian. "The role of anger in the consciousness development of peace activists" was published in another Russian journal but this time in English. And "On the role of anger in war and peace" was published in an obscure trade volume. All of them are available on the Internet as part of "The Aggression Systems" at http://www.culture-of-peace.info/aggression-intro.html.
At the same time as I published on a scientific approach to peace, I also became more active politically, both in the Communist Party-USA and American-Soviet Friendship and in the preparation of the Seville Statement on Violence and the Peoples Peace Appeal, both of which came to fruition in the eventful year of 1986. The American Peace Movement, during these years, greatly expanded in the form of the movement for a Nuclear Freeze, in which Lindsay and I were involved, and I occasionally at a leadership level.
In 1983, Lindsay and I bought a cute little house across from the sea in Short Beach, Connecticut, and the following year we got married in a ceremony that was a true community event. Our marriage would provide a home base for me over the years as my sphere of political action became truly international. Lindsay shared my work in the Communist Party, American-Soviet Friendship (see photo) and the development of the Seville Statement on Violence.
During these years I continued teaching and doing scientific research at Wesleyan. As an illustration of my teaching methods, I tell the story here of the undergraduate thesis of Michael Solomon. It was at this time also that I started to develop an evolutionary, scientific analysis of mental illness, a project that I have never yet found the time to complete.
Although the Seville Statement on Violence and the Peoples Peace Appeal were both signed in 1986, the real work of disseminating their message and developing their potential for changing people's consciousness was yet to come and would occupy me in the coming years.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of the Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme