The Seven Points of the Paradise Paradigm:
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The human world is as we make it.
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The character of each adult is largely shaped in
the earliest months and years of life.
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Consistent love and respect given early in life
create healthy, loving adults who respect others.
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Any person or group which improves the lives of
pregnant mothers, infants, or children, contributes to the
goal of a healthy world.
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Enough healthy, loving adults will make a
healthy, loving world.
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Freedom is a necessary part of love. Unfreedom (coercion) is
abuse; it erodes and destroys love.
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Change happens when enough people share the
necessary understanding.
1. The human world is as we make it.
This first point is two-fold:
First, much of the human world is
in terrible shape. Second, we have the means to change that. Not
overnight, but soon enough. Mankind no longer has to put up with
widespread violence, racism, and other human evil and misery.
That the human world is "as we make it" seems obvious, but we
don't always keep the obvious in mind. Knowing (and acting upon)
the truth that we can bring about change is crucial. We can make
the world as we want it to be, if enough of us understand what
we want and how to get there.
To put it bluntly, the world can be healed. We can make this
earth a paradise.
What does that mean: "a paradise?"
It means a world without wars, without crime against others,
without needless misery.
Can we create such a world? Of course we can. This web site is
designed to spread the idea that such a world is possible, and
to remind people of what they already know: how to get there.
The word "paradise" is not used here in a supernatural or
conventionally religious sense. It does not mean any place, in
heaven or elsewhere, where we might find ourselves after death.
Nor is it meant to suggest that the world can be made "perfect"
or completely without pain, misery, or even conflict.
Instead, "paradise" is here used to mean a world without human
evil. Our premise is that the worst of what we read about in our
newspapers, and that we find in our history books, can, should,
and must be eliminated from the world.
How long will it take to accomplish that? Real, visible progress
may take only a few decades, if we begin the process now and in
earnest. Full success, of course, will take longer: generations,
in fact. How long depends upon how quickly and efficiently we
work to move things in the right direction.
Some people may still (and may always) be rude -- but do they
have to be murderers, rapists, or con artists? Some of us may be
unhappy, even with the most loving and gentle of childhoods --
but must any of us be genocidal dictators? Or their henchmen?
Must any of us (or at least so very many of us) be depressed or
addicted or thoughtless or cruel?
Many will find this hard to accept, but please consider that it
is time to eliminate human evil -- and along the way, to
eliminate much of human misery besides. Indeed, we may not have
much time left to make the transition to a more gentle and
emotionally healthy world. Modern technology brings enough
danger that this, right now, could be our only chance to get
things right.
Now or never.
For the how of all this, see points 2 through 7 in this list.
And no: government programs will not be the answer here. Far
from it.
Is the world really in such dire need of change? Yes, it is.
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2. The character of each adult is largely shaped in the earliest
months and years of life.
Western epigrams on the topic include:
"The child is father to the man"
and
"As the twig is bent, so grows the tree."
Every culture probably has its own folk wisdom on this theme,
because it is a basic truth about life.
Modern science adds its own support in the form of Chaos theory,
which tells us that complex systems exhibit "sensitive
dependence on early conditions." In other words, events early in
the life of a complex system tend to have far more impact on the
outcome or later states of that system, than do similar events
which happen at a later time.
Other things being equal, early experience is more powerful than
later experience, and the changes wrought by early experience
form the building blocks that later character must be built
upon. This is true for the "complex system" of a human being,
just as it is for flow turbulence or weather systems.
Please see
Scientific and general references for further support
of this point.
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3. Consistent love and respect given early in life create
loving, healthy adults who respect others.
This is a corollary to something we read about frequently: that
abused children often grow up to be abusive adults.
It isn't always "someone else" who is being abused, either. Many
abused children grow up to abuse themselves, with unhealthy and
destructive habits. Smoking, heavy drinking, and the use of
other drugs are all higher among adults who were abused as
children. Not surprisingly, cancer, heart disease, and other
physical problems are also more common among such adults. See
"People Find Unhealthy Ways to Cope: Bad Childhood, Sick Adults"
and other material in
Scientific and general references for
details.
The good news is that a loving childhood -- starting with good
prenatal care, actually, and continuing through birth, infancy,
and later childhood -- sets the stage for a life with less risk
of physical and emotional problems. And every study which shows
that violent or abusive adults are more likely to have been
abused in childhood, is also saying that loved, non-abused
children have a better chance to become normal, loving,
non-abusive adults.
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4. Any person or group which improves the lives of pregnant
mothers, infants, and children, contributes to the goal of a
healthy world.
This is intuitive, obvious -- and important. A healthy human
world will never emerge while large numbers of humans are
repressed, traumatized, and without a sense of love and
connection to others.
Please see
Scientific and general references for further content
on this point.
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5. Enough healthy, loving adults will make a healthy, loving
world.
This is simple mathematics. Who are the bad guys gonna get to
run the concentration camps and staff the secret police, when
almost everyone is emotionally healthy? Who will be the
executioner, when every person feels love in their heart for
others? How often will crimes be committed against others when
no one was victimized during childhood?
Perhaps it is time to find out.
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6. Freedom is a necessary part of love. Unfreedom (coercion) is
abuse; it erodes and destroys love.
Our natural ability to
forget painful truths makes this harder
to remember than it should be. But imagine trying to raise your
children in, say, Tibet under the Red Chinese, or in Hitler's
Germany, or in Pol Pot's Cambodia.
Even when used for a good cause, coercion creates nightmares. One simply cannot do good with the evil of initiated coercion.
In contrast,
a free society sets the stage for and encourages compassion and
emotional health generally. Freedom for children is an important part of freedom in any society; consider Summerhill School in England or Sudbury Valley School in the United States for examples.
Love and freedom require each other. Indeed, love and freedom
form one of the dualities in human life that must be in balance
for a healthy world. Love requires us to respect the right of
others to live their own lives in their own way. Each of us is a
unique individual, and yet we are also all brothers and sisters.
As Rose Wilder Lane (quoted at the top of this page) put it
during World War II: “All men are brothers, and each man is free
and self-controlling.”
For more discussion of this topic, click here.
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7. Change happens when enough people share the necessary
understanding.
Why? Because that is how paradigms work.
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