Winters are notoriously hard for me. I am connected in to a source of clarity and energy that I use for providing authentic personal development trainings several times a month. Late December and early January I have the same energy coursing through my system but generally no trainings in which to use it. Dealing with so much energy freewheeling through me can get pretty intense. December 2007 was no different.

As the dark nights got longer I found myself peering through a crack in my world view that was opened in the spring by reading J. F. Rischard’s book High Noon: 20 Global Problems and 20 Years to Solve Them. The crack widened when Marion, Wolfgang and I met with Monsieur Rischard in his office in Paris for two days. The view coming through the crack he created was so astonishing that I wanted to find the truth of it. I had to know what was really going on.

I got deeper and deeper into the question, tearing through hundreds of websites and articles. Many midnights found me hunched over my computer, googling words and phrases I had never thought of before. When I had unanswered questions – which was often – I called people directly. I spoke with activists and researchers around the globe. I replaced a third of my library with books from authors I’d never heard of before: Thom Hartmann, Joanna Macy, Molly Young Brown, George Monbiot, Diana Leafe Christian, John James, Malcolm Gladwell, Christina Baldwin, Lester R. Brown, Hildur Jackson, Karen Svensson, Kosha Anja Joubert, Robin Alfred, Richard Heinberg, William H. Kötke, Manitonquat, Jared Diamond, Daniel Quinn, Debora Hogeland, David Bornstein, Jan Martin Bang, Michael Richards, Margaret Wheatley, Harrison Owen, Juanita Brown, Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson. Everything I learned only served to confirm the view through the crack: we human beings are in dire straits.

I couldn’t figure out which was worse: modern culture’s drive towards suicide or the depth of my naiveté about it. Daily revelations shattered my personal and professional world.

Then one day I pieced it together that Earth’s greenhouse gas concentration has probably already exceeded the Siberian Arctic methane clathrates tipping point. If we liberate only 5% of the methane that lies frozen under the melting tundra we will launch Earth’s temperatures into an unprecedented heating spiral during my lifetime.

That shock was doubled when I discovered that the nation of Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Edison, the nation I was once so proud to be a member of, is littering its battlefields with tons of genocidal depleted uranium (DU) weaponry in my name without my consent. I seriously wanted to know how could this be happening?

Why, no matter how much intelligent goodwill exists in the world, is there so much war, suffering and injustice? It doesn't seem to matter what creative plan, ideology, religion, or philosophy great minds come up with, nothing seems to improve our lot. Since the dawn of civilization, this pattern repeats itself over and over again.

The answer is that civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been built on slavery and mass murder. Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of modern culture because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, cheat, steal, torture, manipulate, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse, in order to establish their own sense of security through domination.

Our governments are hierarchical. Competition for power positions in hierarchies weeds out all but the most ruthless of psychopaths. During the past fifty years the psychopaths have quietly taken over, and leadership regimes world wide are now redirected to serve other than their original purposes.

My world rocked. I struggled to get a grip on what was really going on. Sweetly sleepwalking in modern civilization’s dream ended for me in a cold sweat. I realized that we the people are not being taken care of by our governments and businesses. Instead we are being drained of everything that can be sucked out of us. The corporocratic empire fulfills its own private agenda at our expense. My comforting images of house, job, family, car, and the normal American way of life disintegrated as if it had only ever been a silly deception. I hit bottom.

Even though I had found only wave after wave of shocking new questions and had no answers, I needed to do something. I created the , sent out the Just Stop Letter to everyone I knew (available in multiple languages on the  website), and began weekly Just Stop Team Meetings in the living room of our home that continue to this day. website

Then, after six horror-filled months of despairing research, something shifted in me.

I can’t explain this yet. Somehow, by standing on the bottom of the bottom, a new perspective came – one that avoids none of the dreadful facts about what is happening on Earth today, yet views what is happening with new clarity, and therefore an entirely new set of possibilities. My commitment is to share these new possibilities with you.

We have opened a new website to share with you what is happening in the sustainable-culture research ecovillage Possibilica: www.possibilica.org. Have Fun!