Terrence Webster-Doyle Papers

Established in 2004, the Terrence Webster-Doyle Papers contain materials having to do with conditioned thinking based on the bully/victim cycle – from the playground to the battlefield – and how the primitive biologically programmed brain creates psychological conditioning that creates conflict and hence prevents peace, individually and globally. Influenced by the educational philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti in 1968, Webster-Doyle began to teach classes at Sonoma State University in the search for understanding the cause, nature, and structure of conditioned thinking. Webster-Doyle also studied the work of Dr. David Bohm Quantum Physicist, a former colleague of Albert Einstein, who studied the relationship between thought and reality; and Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World and George Orwell author of 1984 which explored the nature and effect of destructive conditioning.

With his wife Jean, they founded the Atrium Society to promote the understanding of conditioned thinking in the education of young people worldwide (http://youthpeaceliteracy.org). His 56 published literary works contain not only books but also workbooks for students, and curriculum for teachers, martial arts instructors, and parents, with worksheets, group and individual activities, and tools to chart progress in conflict prevention. Webster-Doyle is also the Founder and Chief Instructor of Martial Arts for Peace, and has utilized his extensive experience for over 50 years in this peace educating field as a focus for the exploration of the nature of conflict for individuals, schools and society.

Working with Dr. Marvin Davis, an eminent Liberian peace educator, Webster-Doyle discovered a completely new paradigm for peace education. After carrying out a research test case of twenty former child combatants’ post-war behavior for five years in Buchanan, just after the Liberian civil war’s end, Dr. Davis, using Webster-Doyle’s program Why Is Everybody Always Picking On Us? Understanding the Roots of Prejudice demonstrated that the fundamental cause of the war was due to psychological conditioning. This realization led to the book Brave New Child – Liberating the Children of Liberia and the World. Dr. Davis has now introduced these findings to more than 5000 war-torn Liberian youth with amazing success. Not satisfied that these findings completely addressed understanding the core of human conflict Webster-Doyle’s further studies based on this initial find led to the realization that underneath this psychological conditioned state of mind in the primitive biologically hardwired brain was a genetic instinctual malfunction in the brains of these young warriors. This inbuilt state of mind was rooted in eons of being hardwired for war as a maladaptive survival instinct that was paradoxically preventing it and that was the fundamental cause of the conflict. In other words, they suffered from an inborn conditioned drive to survive through ethnocentric domination, what Webster-Doyle calls “ethnocentric genetic genocide”– that war is in our DNA – that it’s a genetically instinctive survival reaction due to the notion of what survival mistakenly means. What triggers this biological hardwired automatic survival reaction is the instinctive fear of who and what we have been conditioned to think is a threat to “our” survival. In this case of war it is the image of “the enemy,” that ethnocentric ideological nemesis –“them” – that is in competition with “us” for our survival. And that survival at all costs depends on our allegiance to and identity with our group, belief system or nation state for that assurance. This led to the development of Webster-Doyle’s program Hardwired for War – A Genetically Instinctive Survival Reaction http://www.atriumsoc.org/hardwired-for-war.php that is now being used in schools in Liberia. His books are also on permanent display at the International Museum of Peace and Solidarity in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, the Commonwealth of Independent States and at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Japan.