Peter Gabriel, musician, activist and co-founder of the human rights organizations WITNESS and The Elders, shares with 3 Generations his vision of a world free of genocide.
"The question is what would a world look like without genocide or crimes against humanity?
It would look much better than the world does today.
I think it might require an evolutionary leap of some type where self-knowledge is on the menu because I think until you understand your own nature you can’t really control it. You have to accept it, and then you maybe have some chance of organizing it.
There will be hostile environments from time-to-time, that’s in our nature, and we have to find mechanisms for dealing with that don’t involve killing and abusing our fellow man and woman. I think our species is still extraordinarily aggressive. And I hope that will come to an end.
I spent a little time working with apes and one of the things that interested me a lot was that it seemed access to tools actually changed the way the brain was wired. So I wonder, access to the tools that we now have for the very first time in our evolution today--like the computer, and particularly the mobile phone, which Muhammad Yunus says is the first bit of technology really to transform the lives of poor people now--how is that going to affect the movements for change, and movements against our darker nature, our darker selves?
I think this is a world of judgment too, where it’s very easy to look at evil when someone else is dressed in it, and not to notice it internally. I think until we sort that out we can’t hope to clean it anywhere else. So, I do think some work on self is an absolutely fundamental prerequisite to getting the world without genocide and crimes against humanity."
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