For want of a nail...

Cause links on to effect, until a single assassination has led to a holocaust, nuclear destruction, and the threat of destroying our whole species. We need to stop this. We need to think in a new way.

At the beginning of the 20th century, trouble was brewing in Europe. The Industrial Revolution had transformed societies, bringing steam trains to quiet backwaters, mass-production, and urbanization. The British and German Empires were flexing their muscles; the Ottoman Empire was declining; the Austrio-Hungarian Empire wrestling to unite its national groups; and Imperial Russia was reeling from its first revolution. These various powers were tenuously held together with a patchwork of treaties and alliances, and at its center, the Balkans: the “powder-keg of Europe”.

Then the keg blew. On June 28th, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were killed by Serb Nationalist Gavrilo Princip during a formal visit to Sarajevo. This triggered a series of diplomatic events that led to the beginning of World War I, 15 million deaths, and the eventual devastation of Germany.

Rather than "the war to end all wars", WWI just led to worse. The severe punishments dealt out to Germany allowed Adolf Hitler to rise to power. This in turn led to World War II, with 73 million military and civilian deaths, a holocaust and attempted genocide – and the use of nuclear weapons by the United States. This weapon started its own chain: the United States and the USSR started a cold war, stockpiling nuclear weapons. The fate of the human race hung on Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD): if one side fires, both will end up dead. (Similarly, before World War I, Europe thought its “balance of power” would keep it from war.)

More powder-kegs were created. As well as advancing weapons of mass destruction, World War II led the UN to create Israel as a country for the Jewish people. This attempt at peace-making has led to tension, hostilities, and outright war in the Middle East for the last 60 years. The cycle of hatred, fear and violence just keeps going.

Was it all down to one death? What if Archduke Ferdinand had never been assassinated? What would the world look like—dramatically different, or is the cycle of fear and violence inevitable? Were the dominoes already in place; was it only a matter of time before first domino fell? Nobody knows. But we do know that when that first domino fell, the world wasn’t such a dangerous place. We weren’t capable of destroying our own species.

Can we carry on like this? In 2010, almost 100 years later, knowing that we’re able to kill our whole species, can we blindly wrap ourselves in our own flag, quiver at the sounds of our own politicians’ preaching the fear of the unknown, and hope and pray MAD will keep us safe from people who want to harm us? I believe we can’t. And it’s the natural selection of our own species that will end this level of thinking.

Albert Einstein once said “The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them”. In response to having invented the H-bomb, he and Bertrand Russell wrote in the Russell-Einstein manifesto, “We have to learn to think in a new way … Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”

With Einstein’s wisdom, with our instinctive survival mode of natural selection, I believe it is time for the human race to evolve and raise its consciousness to a new level of thinking. It’s not enough to stop the next domino from falling: we need to remove the dominoes from existence completely.

The cycle for fear and violence has to end. So what’s the solution? I think, deep in our hearts, everyone knows the true solution – TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER. The most difficult thing on the planet to do is what the human race needs to do now. And I believe we have it in us, as a species, to evolve to this challenge.