As a senior systems designer in the defense industry during the last years of the cold war, I had a front row seat to one of the most frightening times in the history of the world and the thinking that led to it. During forty-four years of the most potentially lethal, yet undeclared, war in human history, the superpowers of the United States and the former Soviet Union did something that seems unthinkable to any rationally minded person today. They spent the time, energy, and human resources to develop and stockpile somewhere in the neighborhood of 65,000 nuclear weapons— a combined arsenal with the power to microwave the Earth and everything on it many times over.

There is a common thread that links the rationale that led to the cold war and many of the crises that face us today. They all stem from a way of thinking that has dominated much of the modern world since the beginning of the scientific era about 300 years ago. They’re based in the false scientific assumptions that suggest we’re somehow separate from the Earth, separate from one another, and that the nature that gives us life is based on violent competition and survival of the strongest.

Fortunately, new discoveries have revealed that each of these assumptions is absolutely false. Unfortunately, however, there is a reluctance to reflect such new discoveries in mainstream science, mainstream media, traditional classrooms, and conventional textbooks. In other words, we’re still teaching our young people the false assumptions of an obsolete way of thinking based in struggle, competition, and war.