Atrium Society’s Liberian Peace Education Project

Through working with Liberian children of war, it was discovered that the prejudicial preservation instinct to protect one’s own ethnic group and to defend against those who present a threat to its security is genetically hardwired in the brain for survival. These findings came about over an eight-year period through the Atrium Society’s Liberian Peace Education Project into the causes of its 15-year civil war for and the effect this had on former Liberian youth combatants.

It was revealed at first that these young combatants had been psychologically conditioned to fight people they were told were their enemies because of years of political and economic propaganda. But later, as the project progressed, it was discovered that there was a far deeper, biologically primitive impulse inbuilt into their brains that was the root cause of conflict, indicating that the biological brain was the source.

It was this primal instinct for survival that consequently created the divisive cultural, ideological, and prejudicial conditioning. Thus recognizing this as such, it was important to create resources and training programs that addressed both the primitive biological and psychological brain to get to the root cause and the symptom simultaneously. This significant perception has been integrated into the programs of the Atrium Society since its intent is to prevent prejudicial conflict from happening at the source – from the “playground to the battlefield.”

From this initial discovery with Liberian children of war, it was then ascertained from further investigation that, in general, this biological instinctual drive has understandably been rooted for eons in the primitive human brain of all human beings being hardwired for war as a genetically programmed survival instinct – that “combat is in our DNA and demands to be exercised”. But it is erroneous, for it is programmed to only ensure survival for the individual segregated ethnocentric group, and hence it is therefore preventing survival for the whole within which the individual group is an integral part of and thus it is destructive for all.

It was determined then that the extreme outcome of this genetically erroneous hardwired compulsion for racial self-protection, due to the genetically driven, divisively destructive nature of ethnocentric superiority, could be called “genetic genocide.” It is the desire of the Atrium Society that by bringing to light this insight into our deeper nature, we can be free of this destructive, erroneous biological instinct, thus allowing us to act from a more conscious way of living.