A deck of cards, the articles of UN Declaration of Human Rights. The ingenuous thought leader, entrepreneur, and I were attending the Review Conference for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The cards have helped me stay intentional as a member of the Somerville Human Rights Commission.
Saint Paul VI addressed the United Nations encouraging delegates to be "...pupils and teachers of the art of peace. Asserting that they had the human capacity to build peace, to live up to the trust of a young generation believing that peaceable mankind is possible. "...Peace is built with the mind."
Diane Perlman's website www.consciouspolitics.org offers the resource. Explaining the need for resourceful thinking in our perspective nuclear weapons, Perlman suggests a paradigm of transformation is necessary by way of a metaphor: the nine-dot problem.
Connect all nine dots, drawing only four straight lines and without lifting pen from the paper.
To begin with I lay the dots out in three rows of three, copying an image on the screen, though I don't realize I've made an assumption not stated in the instruction. The square with a dot in the middle. I make a triangle. I'm still missing a dot.
As I begin doodling, I wonder if I can't just put the dots all in a line, but rule that out. Then I suppose I dot an orange and like an unpeeled orange, manage to connect the dots that way. Or if I drew on a flat beach ball and inflated it, I could draw a continuous line around the ball connecting them. It's just off the wall. One more comes to me, an hour-glass figure, a transformation to squeeze the middle: the four straight lines follow the top of the cone cross the intersection and at the bottom circle the cone. Emily shrugs after drawing triangles. At least I've tried to engage the problem before scrolling down to see the solution.
"A solution," reads the next bolded title, a kite-like triangle with a string, more self-possessed then my first doodle. This neatly expands the corners of the triangle past the "bounds" of the square. For Diane Perlman, her thinking about nuclear abolition is informed by those willing to construe reality in different terms. She suggests the aim of nuclear abolition itself begins outside the limits of the system imposed by the nuclear hegemony.
The nuclear-weapons possessing states control a process of deliberation and stultify human ingenuity; namely it's a rule by threat, with their insistence on a geopolitical scarcity of trust, aka deterrence theory. Before the international community can do right by the NPT Article 5 negotiations in good faith for nuclear disarmament, a more expansive frame of mind is necessary.
To read in the context of account of conscience for Aug. 6, 2026 act of civil disobedience:
Fatigue of Resistance
Archive to What End
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What do you think of this passage? What is at stake here? How would you evaluate this author's claim? With what criteria do you support your view? Which authority would you point to as an authority of the principal at stake in your view?