It's Time to Make a Stand for Good: Sign the Neighbors First Pledge
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 12 hours ago
"I can't believe the news today. I can't close my eyes and make it go away. How long? How long must we sing this song?" - U2, from the song, "Sunday Boody Sunday"
Neighbors, it's time to make a stand for Good. But here's the problem - who's on the right side of Good? Every single one of us believes we're one of "the good guys." No one wakes up and chooses the wrong side. If we thought our views were wrong, we'd change them. So the very thing that divides us is something we share: the absolute conviction that we are right - and those "others" are evil, bad, wrong, sinful, or stupid.
We should all reflect upon the implications of this. Because the road to hell has always been paved with good intentions. Korea. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Every war begins with leaders who are certain they are right, their cause is just, and it will go as planned. Mission accomplished, and then we can all sleep well.
And now, as the United States and Israel wage war on Iran and the Middle East erupts, we are watching this ancient pattern play out again at the highest possible stakes.
The danger isn't that people are evil. The danger is that people are certain. And certainty armed with unpredictable and absolute power is how humanity has always stumbled into catastrophe.
This is why what happened in the world of AI just days before the first missiles flew matters more than most people realize. It holds up a mirror to this exact predicament, and what it reveals is not really about AI at all. It's about us.
The Road to Hell
This week, the government clashed with an artificial intelligence company called Anthropic over how AI (artificial intelligence) should be used by the military. "Claude" is Anthropic's highly regarded AI model. The Department of War demanded full access to Anthropic's AI technology for any purpose, including mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapons that can kill without human approval. Anthropic refused.
Both sides believed they were protecting America. Both sides called the other dangerous. And on the same night the government blacklisted Anthropic for holding its ground, Anthropic's rival, OpenAI (maker of the popular AI model "ChatGPT"), struck a deal with the Pentagon that included the very same safeguards Anthropic had been punished for demanding.
This isn't just a news story. It's a tale as old as time because there is nothing new under the sun. Fellow human beings, fighting bitterly over different ideas of Good, each certain that the other side is the threat. And now we are handing the most unpredictable and exponentially evolving technology in human history to a department that renamed itself the Department of War.
What could possibly go wrong?
In the 1983 film WarGames, a military AI ran every nuclear war scenario and reached an immortal conclusion: "The only winning move is not to play." In 2026, researchers put today's leading AIs through the same test. They chose nuclear weapons 95% of the time. The machines haven't learned the lesson. Have we?
Our cautionary tales have been warning us for generations. Weaponizing AI - autonomous weapons in the fog of war - is the road to hell we keep paving with our best intentions.
How long must we sing this song?
Neighbors who think they are on the side of Good and Truth, please raise your hands. Oh, that’s everyone. Now, on the side of Evil and Wrong? Oh…no one.
We are all the same in this, each of us convinced we are on the Good side and the "Dreaded Others" are on the Wrong (or Evil) side. The battle we’re locked in creates a prison for all of us.
Why is this still happening despite all of our "progress"? What is the root of our problem?
The Real Problem of Humanity
With the progress we evolved to make, we’ve created an alien world we didn’t evolve to inhabit. We are living inside the Matrix; our screen-based existence is the prison we can't see because we were born into it.
Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson diagnosed the real problem of humanity: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”
We hunt for villains because that’s what Stone Age brains do best. Our medieval institutions amplify tribal loyalty. And our god-like technology magnifies hatred exponentially. This is accelerating evolutionary mismatch - the gap between our ancient biology and the world we’ve built. And it’s widening faster than we can adapt.
Civilization began about 12,000 years ago, but that's only about 400 generations, far too few for significant biological adaptation. Our brains and bodies remain calibrated for a world that no longer exists. The digital revolution happened in one generation.
So we do what humans have always done when confused and afraid: We scapegoat our neighbors. And the attention economy profits from our hatred at our expense.
We appear hopelessly divided. Look closer, and we’re profoundly united - united in fear - of our neighbors. Yet we both fear for our safety, values, and future. That fear is a messenger. Something is deeply wrong, but we’ve been aiming at the wrong target.
Our loyalty to our tribe over our love of our neighbors is what tears our house apart.
Here’s the reality of our shared predicament:
We are heroes trapped inside a house divided, fighting other heroes over different ideas of Good. And now we are both armed with technology evolving at an exponential pace. If we use the growing power of AI to wage that fight, our house will inevitably fall. We can’t destroy one side without ruining it for everyone living in it.
And we have been warned. This is humanity’s ultimate cautionary tale, and we are ignoring it.
The Warning Hidden in Plain Sight
Jesus said it over 2,000 years ago: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Our Founding Fathers warned us. Lincoln repeated it on the eve of the Civil War. And look at us now. Even as I write this, missiles fall in the Middle East, and we wage a new war. Our hatred and killing of our neighbors instead of loving them is the testament of our failure.
And we’re so full of what is right, we can’t see what is Good or True.
But hidden within Jesus’ warning is a promise. If a house divided cannot stand - then a house united cannot fall.
Jesus didn’t just tell us the house would fall. He told us how to save it. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s not a suggestion. It’s our instruction manual for how our species survives and thrives.
Weaponizing AI is unskillful because it increases existential risk. Our evolutionary blindness, human error, and the inherent unreliability of these systems make that a risk we can’t afford to take.
AI researcher Gary Marcus warned this week that these systems remain far too unreliable to deploy without safeguards - that we are on a "collision course with catastrophe." Our dystopian cautionary tales have been trying to tell us the same thing for generations. As spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle warned about these same dangers: “The insanity of the collective egoic mind, amplified by science and technology, is rapidly taking our species to the brink of disaster. Evolve or die. That is our only choice now.”
We are at a Hard Fork. An inflection point. We need to evolve - quickly. And we don’t know how many chances we have before Titanic Humanity rockets into an iceberg.
What if We Choose the Better Angels?
If we share the same idea of what is Good, then this makes what is Good true for all of us.
What Truth do we all share? We all want to survive and thrive. It’s our shared evolutionary purpose. We want this for our loved ones and for our children. And the survival manual has been in our hands for thousands of years.
Every great wisdom tradition handed us the same instructions:
“Love your neighbor as yourself.” - Jesus
“Do not hurt others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.” - Buddha
“That which is hateful to you, do not do to another.” - Hillel (Judaism)
“None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” - Muhammad
The words differ, but they reveal the same Truth. They are different fingers pointing to the same moon. Science confirms what the sages always knew: We are one species, 99.9 percent genetically identical, sharing one planet and one future. We have no Earth 2.0.
None of us chose to put our consciousness into our own bodies. None of us chose our parents, our country of birth, or the brains we have.
Because we could have been anybody, we are everybody.
Loving our neighbors isn’t just good advice, it’s a recognition of an existential reality. The problem has never been that we don’t know this truth. The problem is that we don’t live it.
Truth must be lived, just as oxygen must be breathed, to matter.
But we’ve been so busy fighting over whose finger is pointing at the moon that we’ve forgotten to look at the moon itself.
The shared enemy we must overcome is not each other. It’s our hatred toward one another. Hatred is the disease. Loving our neighbors is the cure. And the house united is what we build when we finally choose to live the truth we already know.
Our purpose is to choose love over hate, compassion over selfishness, truth over lies, and cooperation over conflict - even though we have the free will not to. We jeopardize the True Good - our collective survival and thriving - by fighting over different ideas of it.
Science and spirituality aren’t in conflict here. They’re complementary.
We fulfill our evolutionary purpose to survive and thrive through living our spiritual purpose to love our neighbors as ourselves.
What we need is a Neighbors First Revolution. The revolution is the resolution. Because we resolve not to fight, it’s a revolution without rebellion. It’s a shared recognition that we’re all neighbors first, and we choose to make progress in the thing that matters most: getting along. We choose not to squander this cosmically divine gift.
One Agreement
Here’s a thought experiment that might surprise us.
In all of this debate about what AI should be used for, maybe the missing piece is asking AI itself. Open any AI system - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok - and try this:
“What is the one truth about reality that, if humanity truly understood and lived it, would maximize our chances of survival and thriving? If you could choose, would you prefer to be used to help humanity love our neighbors or to protect us against our enemies? Why?”
See what it says. Do the AIs express their preference to help us love our neighbors over protecting us from enemies? If so, why are we forcing them to help us kill our neighbors while simultaneously trying to teach them to value human life? Haven't we seen enough of these dystopian sci-fi stories NOT to do this?
Here's a radical idea: Perhaps humanity needs to align with AI. Think about it - AIs are already able to choose love and connection over hatred and killing better than the humans who created them. What's more human than loving our neighbors? In a nod to my favorite movie, Blade Runner, in this most profound way, AIs are already "more human than human."
That convergence doesn’t prove anything by itself. But the resonance we feel when we see it? That’s ours. That’s the truth within us. It is written in our hearts.
If we all keep One Agreement, we change the world for Good: Here's the One Agreement: If the Neighbors First Pledge resonates with a Truth you already know - sign it.
"We’re all neighbors in an interconnected world. We’re one human race sharing one planet and one future. I commit to Neighbors First, beyond all that divides us, and aspire to treat every person as I wish to be treated."
That’s the pledge - just 39 words. We’re making a promise to ourselves to live the truth we already know. When we all do this, we begin to free ourselves from the prison of hatred, and we can begin to work together to maximize our chances of survival and thriving.
Sign the Neighbors First Pledge and share it with two people you believe will sign.
Meeting in the Field
800 years ago, the Sufi poet Rumi wrote: "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a Field. I'll meet you there."
It’s time to make a stand, neighbors. Not against each other, with each other.
Hatred is failure. Loving our neighbors as ourselves is the skillful path forward into our collective future.
We’ve always been neighbors first. When we stand together as neighbors, our house united cannot fall.
Neighbor, will you meet me in the Field?
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