Summary:

The main focus of this initiative is delivering a scientific psycho-social discovery, with its high-impact strategies and tools, to those who may accept and use it. The discovery is focused on the mental cognitive structures that are the Direct Causes of prejudices, war and conflict. The research questions leading to this Theory of Dehumanization were the obvious: How exactly does it happen that normal people, all endowed with conscience, aware of their personal responsibility for their choices of truth over untruth, reason over irrationality, justice over injustice and morality over sin ? manage to justify in their own eyes even the most inhuman atrocities and acts of self and others destruction? What can be objectively defined as wrong with them? Which of their mental functions of perceiving, thinking and telling right from wrong, is affected? How does it happen? When? The theory of Dehumanization embodies answers for all these questions. Evidence regarding beliefs about war and conflict was collected from public media over 25 years. It was found that war-oriented thinking patterns universally conformed to one basic orientation structure: We Always GoodRight ? Them Always BadWrongGuilty. That fantastic belief system avoids any cognitive dissonance by means of Blind Areas that cover the most basic human realities. The Blind Areas are our major discovery. It has been found, that people and leaders who consistently expressed their views in patterns that conformed to the "We Right Them Guilty" map of orientation practically never (sic!) expressed any awareness of even the most obvious human realities that did not agree with it; mainly, that We may be as wrong and "bad" as any humans and that "Them" are human individuals, each one unique and different, good, bad and suffering as We are. The Theory of Dehumanization organizes the identified Blind Areas (about 30) and the resulting Patterned Beliefs into a Dehumanization Syndrome under ten headings, each an aspect of a conflict reality (We, Them, Bleeding Hearts, Leader, Strategy, Morality, etc.) That is our tool to work with. We bring to people's awareness the specific symptoms of the condition ? Blind Areas and Patterned Beliefs ? they'd be able to identify and by that to humanize their orientation system.