Passengers Not Prisoners: Home

“(Don’t) stay in your place.”

Freely exercise the right to travel, and more fully know your world and that it is almost invariably a safe place. The vast majority of the people on the planet are not benevolent, they are simply indifferent to you.

The world is not becoming more dangerous, it is becoming safer. A person was six times more likely to be murdered in the Middle Ages than today. It is just that today, through the mass-media, we hear about more instances which leads to a distorted sense of jeopardy.

People invariably only attack one category of victims: those that they feel deserve it. Out of the over 6-billion people alive today, they have better people to harm than you so the key is to not give them a reason to do it. (Even among those incarcerated for violent crimes, in study after study it has consistently been found that less than 6 percent of them can be clinically classified as sadistic.)

Aggression is communication, arguably the first act of communication. All individuals, no matter how wrong they may be, at the moment of action believe that they are right. Counter-attacking only leads to an intensification of conflict and a greater sense of isolation and opposition. Empathy (emotional understanding of others) and education are the most potent antidotes to softening adversarialism.

Ian Brennan 2010