The Earth has seen an exponential growth in human violence against all species on the planet in the past one hundred years. The driving forces behind this recurring violence are complex, involving numerous economic, cultural, and psychological factors. Patterns of dissociation are shown here to play a central role in the enacting of, reacting to, and perpetuation of violence. These patterns are identified on the various systemic levels of human experience: spiritual, global, communal, familial, mental, and physical.
Children often survive years of early abuse via the mechanism of dissociation. The price for this is that the abuse is then more likely to be reenacted and passed to peers and future generations. These patterns are sanctioned and fortified by cultural taboos against "tattling" and by family patterns of secrecy that empower perpetrators and disempower victims.
Cultural history and prehistory are analyzed through the lens of dissociation and the two substrates proposed by this and other authors: detachment and compartmentalization. These substrates, which drive the "cycles of violence," cause trauma to be passed vertically down the generations as well as horizontally across to peers. For the sake of comparison, these concepts are applied systematically to the levels of human experience listed above.
In the past six thousand years, war and environmental exploitation have become the norm. However, the claim that violence is endemic to all societies is refuted by archaeological and other evidence of ancient nonviolent cultures. Peaceful, well integrated indigenous cultures recently exposed to modernity also offer a glimpse of an alternative to the current norm. Numerous cultures that were and are capable of maintaining peace and harmony are considered. Finally, modern trauma therapies, deep ecology, and the worldwide peace and reconciliation movements are proposed as approaches to healing, repairing, and offering an alternative to human self-annihilation and the violation of the integrity of the Earth's vital processes.
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