 We once again have narrowly avoided war in the Middle East. The elites, the policy establishment really wanted a war, and they have not been able to do it. And the reason is because more and more of us are carrying peace in our daily relationships, in our hearts, on every level, and that creates a psychic climate that makes it harder and harder to wage war. Not that there's still not wars happening all over the world, you know, Yemen getting bombed, school buses getting droned, et cetera, et cetera. It's still happening. But the established powers are having a harder time now, really stirring up war fervor. Partly that's because of the relatedness of the multiple climates of our planet. The earth climate, the political climate, the social climate, the cultural climate, the economic climate, the psychic climate. When we understand that we are in an intelligent interconnected system, it stands to reason that, for example, extremes in wealth, extreme polarization of wealth in our society, somehow is related to the extremes of temperature and precipitation, the droughts and floods, way, way too much water in one place, causing tremendous damage, and not enough somewhere else, kind of mirroring the distribution of money. When we start to understand the inter-being-ness of all things, when we understand that the outer reflects the inner and the inner reflects the outer and that we live in a hologram where every level and every being is kind of a mirror of everybody else, we start thinking in a different way, and we realize that all of these issues are connected. So, yeah, a crisis in our democracy is inextricably tied to a crisis on the planet. The dysfunction, if you really look into the dysfunction of our political system, you see that it comes from the same place that the dysfunction of our industrial and technological, agricultural, medical systems are coming from. It comes from separation. The most notable feature, so if we're talking about restoring democracy, healing democracy, we have to look at what I think is the most notable feature of our dysfunction right now, which is polarization. I've never seen it in my lifetime at this extreme. The two sides have separated into their own realities where they don't even agree on what a fact is. They don't even agree on what is a reliable source of information because the technologies of narrative control are so highly developed that people are seeing each other as irredeemable enemies. If you look at the comments sections, which I do, from liberal and conservative sites, and not a lot of people do that, actually, not a lot of people visit anything and take seriously anything on the other side because you write them off in some way. That's dehumanization. They're just ignorant. They're just stupid. They're just immoral. They're just corrupt. They're on the payroll of something or something. They are just racists. That goes on on both sides. Both sides agree on the problem. The problem is those horrible people on the other side. You cannot have a well-functioning democracy when everybody believes that the problem is the other horrible people out there. You have to create conditions where those dehumanizing stories that divide us break down. There are a lot of people out there who are putting people in settings where the dehumanization can no longer operate, where you actually see each other as human. I think that if you're talking about democracy, to jump too quickly to what structures work best, should it be proportional representation, yada, yada, yada, there's all these things. I think that's premature. I don't think any of that will work as long as the substructure of polarization and dehumanization is still present.