World Leaders Project
Greg Bennick
PO Box 31012 Seattle WA 98103 USA
(206) 528-5500 Fax (206) 527-3078
studybecker@yahoo.comCONTACT: GREG BENNICK (206) 528-5500
PRESS RELEASE
SEATTLE RESIDENT TO MEET WITH WORLD LEADERS
TO DISCUSS THE PSYCHOLOGY OF VIOLENCESeattle, Washington, May 8th, 2002: Local Seattle area activist Greg Bennick along with Dr. Sheldon Solomon from the psychology department of Brooklyn College of City University of New York and Skidmore College in New York have been invited by President Bharrat Jagdeo of Guyana on May 29th, 2002 to discuss how examining human motivations might be used to promote peace and diminish violence worldwide.
The trip is the culmination of an effort launched in May 2001 by Bennick and Solomon entitled The World Leader’s Project (WLP). The World Leader’s Project is an initiative aimed at understanding human behavior in order to promote world peace. The two men wrote a letter to every world leader on the planet requesting a meeting with the leaders, to discuss the psychology of human motivations towards violence. The WLP is drawing on the work of the late Dr. Ernest Becker.
Dr. Ernest Becker, a renowned cultural anthropologist and social psychologist, theorized that aggression was inspired largely by an innately human fear of our own mortality. His theory suggests that violence, hierarchy, submission, dominance, and control are all extensions of that primal fear. Building on the foundation of Becker’s ideas, Bennick and Solomon theorize that these attributes are amenable to the sway of reason. They feel that discussion of these concepts at the highest levels of government will create a trickle down effect will have a substantial impact on life on the planet. Thus far, leaders from Belize, Israel, and Croatia have expressed interest in meeting with the two.
Greg Bennick has worked on human rights issues worldwide since 1993. As a member of the political rock band Trial, he spoke publicly throughout the USA and Europe from 1994 to 1999 about human rights abuses. He has also worked extensively with the Western Shoshone Defense Project and has also served as a counselor, supporting survivors of sexual assault. He is a regular speaker on the college circuit around the country on the topic of personal empowerment as it relates to politics.
Dr. Sheldon Solomon is one of the world’s foremost researchers of Terror Management Theory, a means of examining, in controlled settings, human response to mortality anxiety and then drawing conclusions about culture as a whole from this information. He has published numerous papers on his lab work confirming these concepts over the last twenty years.
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Greg Bennick
P.O. Box 31012
Seattle WA 98103 USA
Phone (206) 528-5500 / Fax (206) 527-3078
Studybecker@yahoo.com
The Honorable Bharrat Jagdeo
President
Office of the President
New Garden St. & South Road
Georgetown
Guyana
4/25/2001Greetings…
We are writing you from the United States in hopes that you will grant us a few moments of your attention either in person or through correspondence. We are researchers and students of the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker. Before he died in the early 1970’s, Becker wrote two books about death anxiety as an inherent and primary motivator for human behavior. In these books (The Denial of Death and Escape From Evil) Becker suggested that personality, culture, hierarchy, domination and submission are all manifestations of our innate fear of death and thus, are psychological phenomena.
We feel that these books contain ideas of critical importance in regards to understanding how we as leaders and followers might lessen human aggression worldwide and alleviate suffering. We feel that through an awareness of the psychological nature of violent actions and by identifying our motivations for continuing those behaviors, we all might learn to adapt them and thus hopefully foster peace.
This letter is an offer for a bilateral engagement. We would like to meet with you to discuss these ideas. We feel that these questions are pertinent and timely and we would very much like to engage you in conversation so that we might hear your opinions. Hopefully, the outcome of the discussion would be a more complete understanding of human aspirations towards power and heroism on the part of leaders, an awareness of the motivations of those who follow these leaders, and an understanding of what results at the convergence of these psychological modes of thought.
We would be happy to pay our own way to meet you at your earliest convenience and await your reply at the address above.
Sincerely and respectfully,
Greg Bennick Sheldon Solomon, Ph.D.
Seattle, WA Saratoga, NY