• Book website
• Review by Ray Kurzweil

See the video by the author as he explains why and how the world is getting better and better:

Read the newspapers, and you’ll think that war is worse than ever. But as the book “Winning the War on War” shows, the reality is just the opposite. We are in the midst of a decline in armed conflict that is extraordinary in human history. Global peacekeeping efforts are working; large-scale looting, sexual assault, and genocidal atrocities are being stopped. 2010 had one of the lowest death rates from war.

Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating idea that guides this project — the pleasure of overthrowing the Planetary Work Machine.

The book presents a vision about our money system that is original yet commonsense, radical yet gentle, and increasingly relevant as the crises of our civilization deepen. How can you live according to your ideals in a world seemingly ruled by money?

Many people think we live in the most violent age ever. But this book shows the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, pogroms, gruesome punishments, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, these have all dwindled and are widely condemned.

Zen master Nhat Hanh turns his hard-earned wisdom as a survivor of war, persecution, and exile to the age-old dilemma of what happens when one dies. If the greatest fear is, as he suggests, that one becomes nothing, then how is one to live with this threat of complete annihilation? Using Buddhist parables and anecdotes, Nhat Hanh offers an alternative perspective. Buddhists see birth and death as mere concepts, not manifestations of reality. When someone dies, they are still with us, just in a different form. In this view, a continuation, a connection between people and nature persists because time is understood as being circular: nothing begins; nothing ends; it just is.

In fairy-tale justice, as in the deep psyche, kindness to that which seems less is rewarded by good, and refusal to do good for one who is not beautiful is reviled and punished. When we enlarge ourselves to touch the not-beautiful, we are rewarded. If we spurn the not-beautiful, we are severed from life and left out in the cold.

There is an aspect to the question of what the soul is which is startling and strange, but so widespread that it cannot be avoided. It is connected to the popular idea that we all have a guardian angel. According to a US poll in the 1990s, sixty-nine per cent of Americans believe in angels. Forty-six per cent have their own guardian angels and thirty-two per cent have felt an angelic presence.