Many Americans want to nurture an image of innocence and decency and yet most Americans want most of all to stay on top and continue to applaud clear victories in the Third World however achieved. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist. We have a demonstrated capacity for hatred, violence, competition, and greed. We have as well a demonstrated capacity for love, tenderness, cooperation, and compassion. Healthy societies nurture the latter and in so doing create an abundance of those things that are most important to the quality of our living.
Dysfunctional societies nurture the former and in so doing create scarcity and deprivation.
A healthy society makes it easy to live in balance with the environment, whereas a dysfunctional society makes it nearly impossible. Whether we organize our societies for social and environmental health or for dysfunction is a choice that is ours to make. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular. The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic.