Similarly, many people try to motivate themselves and others to change their diet and lifestyle out of fear that something bad may happen if they don't. However, trying to scare people into changing doesn't work very well, at least not for long. Why not? We all know we're going to die one day--the mortality rate is still 100 percent--but who wants to think about it? Even those who have had a heart attack usually change for only a few weeks before they go back to their old patterns of living and eating if it's fear-based. 

Like most parents, I would sacrifice my life to defend my wife and son in a heartbeat. Imagine how passionately we would be defending our country if we were invaded. Likewise, I have found that people will often make changes in their diet and lifestyle for the sake of their loved ones even more than for themselves. When a child says, "Mommy, Daddy, please don't smoke, I don't want you to die," it is more effective than "smoking causes lung cancer." 

Both love and fear become self-fulfilling. We become what we most fear and we create what we most fear. When we torture others in the name of increasing our national security, we actually diminish it. If we declare that we have the right to invade any country unilaterally, then it should come as no surprise that countries like Iran and North Korea are accelerating the development of nuclear weapons since this is the only military deterrent to the threat of a U.S. invasion. I'm not excusing or condoning this, but it's not hard to understand. 

Also, as technology for nuclear weapons becomes miniaturized, it becomes increasingly difficult to defend against. In 1997, former Russian national-security adviser Alexander Lebed made public claims about lost "suitcase nukes" following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Nuclear "dirty bombs" are technologically feasible today. Even if we stop 99 percent of terrorists, it only takes one with a 10-kiloton suitcase bomb to wreak incalculable damage if it were to explode in Manhattan. And since modern terrorists exist outside of traditional nation-states, the cold-war tactics of threat of reprisal and mutual assured destruction are no longer effective. 

Acting in ways that cause other countries to love us rather than to hate or fear us may be our strongest defense. If we had put the trillion dollars that the Iraq war is said to have cost to date into a 21st-century Marshall Plan, building hospitals and schools instead of destroying them, perhaps that might have been better for our national security. 

Yes, I know that this may sound hopelessly naive, and I'm not advocating that we unilaterally disarm and sit around the campfire singing "Kumbaya." But those who have made the most sustainable and lasting political changes--Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, among others--have preached love and nonviolence, often at great personal sacrifice to themselves. Effective and enlightened. Love and freedom, not fear and coercion, inspire lasting transformation, both personally and politically. When we turn on the light, it drives out the darkness.

© 2008