About the Book
In 1932, on the eve of catastrophe, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud with a single question: Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war? Their exchange is short, unsparing, and written as the world was about to burn — one of the most honest attempts in the modern record to ask what peace would actually require of us. Almost no one has read it. And neither man could have known how much harder his question would become within a single lifetime, once our weapons acquired the power to end the story entirely. This is not a book about inner peace or about feeling calm in a world on fire. It is about the actual work: the conversations we keep avoiding, the propaganda we keep falling for, the stories we keep telling about who is to blame — and the structures that would have to exist before any of it could be made safe. If you have ever wondered why we keep doing this — why this species, with all its intelligence and tenderness, cannot seem to stop killing itself — "How Peace" is a serious attempt at an answer. And an invitation to do the one thing available to all of us: to refuse to look away.
About the Author
Scott Petit has been a psychotherapist in the Pacific Northwest for more than thirty years.
A great deal of that time has been spent in a room with two people who love each other and yet cannot stop causing each other pain. What he kept seeing was a particular kind of blindness — each person vividly aware of their own fear and their own injuries, and almost entirely unable to see the damage they were doing in return. Both were defending themselves, and both experienced the other's defense as an attack. And neither could find the way out, because the information that would have ended it was in the other person's hands.
When he came across the 1932 correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, in which they asked whether humanity could ever be delivered from war, what struck him was how familiar it sounded. The same fear, the same half-picture, the same loop in which every defensive move becomes the other side's evidence — only now with weapons that could end civilization, and with no third presence anywhere in the room.
How Peace is an argument that the forces pushing nations toward catastrophe are the same things frightened people have always done, at enormous scale — and that what an individual can learn to do through awareness, a nation can only do through structure. It is also an invitation to the work he believes is now being asked of all of us.
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Get in Touch
Write if you've had one of these conversations and want to tell someone how it went — including if it went badly.
Write if you think something in the book is wrong. Disagreement is welcome here; it would be strange to argue for staying in hard conversations and then flinch from one.
Write if you have something to say and nowhere else feels like the right place to say it.
And for speaking engagements, interviews, or anything else practical, this is the place for that too.
I try to read everything that comes in, and answer when I can.
scott@howpeace.com