Yes. That Pentagon. Because Goonan, author of This Shared Dream, is part of the SIGMA think tank.
Long, meaty, fascinating read. Click for the whole!
The more we believe that we are the same as others, the less we are inclined to hurt them. Portraying others as subhuman gives permission to harm them. The greater our capacity for imagining the lives of others and relating them to our own, the more difficult it is to hurt them. The increasing connectivity of the world is one element that may well widen our circle of empathy as well as increase our information and knowledge in general. The less centralized anything is, the more difficult it is to destroy it. That’s why the suppression of terrorism is so difficult, and is also a good reason to equally distribute as much information, power sources, and other resources as much as possible. According to my father, who was in Germany at the time, when Roosevelt died, Germans were sure that America would leave the war because their leader was dead. Our government and country survived because our power is distributed. Germany fell because everything was concentrated in one person.