Doomsayers and Possibility Explorers
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 29 Jun 2026
Jan Oberg, Ph.D. | Transnational Foundation – TRANSCEND Media Service
It is time for research, media, politics and citizens to stop and think: What is it we do too much and what is it we do too little.
27 Jun 2027 – We live in a time saturated with negative energy. Accidents dominate headlines, bad news is good news, and social media are full of outrage and empty of public education. Public debate has become a theatre of suspicion: one flaw is enough to condemn an entire achievement, one misstep enough to erase a lifetime of work. Commentators compete to predict catastrophe, and geopolitics and war talk of have disappeared every mention of peace.
It has become easier to do criticism and destroy than to appreciate, easier to promote fear than understanding, focus on the present and never the possible future. And who bothers about alternatives and possible solutions anymore?
In such an atmosphere, insisting on constructive thinking is an act of rebellion.
Any fool can start a fight in a bar — or start a war. But not every fool can do conflict resolution, mediation, or peacemaking. These require educated skills, imagination, empathy and a neutral focus on the issue, not the actors. Yet our public sphere has become dominated by those who offer only diagnosis and despair. The militarised geopolitical mindset — now deeply embedded in Western media, think tanks, and political commentary — has elevated the Doomsayer to a position of authority. The louder the prediction of catastrophe, the more “realistic” it is assumed to be.
This is not realism. It is a fatalist failure of knowledge and imagination.
The dominating debate in the West is about military security, not about possible roads to peace in specific and a better world in general. While China hosts vibrant discussions about future global structures, governance, peace, conflict resolution, and a reformed UN fit for the 21st century, the West remains locked in an outdated military‑first worldview.
Offensive deterrence, armament, and ever‑larger military budgets are presented as the road to peace. But if weapons could create peace, we would have been living in peace decades ago.
Even peace research institutes have drifted into military‑security thinking, financed by governments whose policies they dare not challenge. SIPRI in Stockholm is a leading, tragic example – as I have argued for years. Peace – even the word – has disappeared from science, politics and media. I mean true peace – not ceasefire agreements or ‘deal’ that ignorant people call peace negotiations.
The civilisational malaise is that “security” has come to mean military security alone — not human security, not common security, not the security of communities or ecosystems. All – more or less invented threat perceptions are about military threat, not about what challenges we have as societies. It all holds little, if any, relevance for civilian society and welfare. Sadly, it rests on a documented wrongheaded assumption: that militarisation will somehow lead us to a peaceful world or at least make us safer. In reality it serves only the Miliary-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex’s elites.
This causality is backwards. It must be reversed. There are much better roads to peace.
Peace does not emerge from weapons. Weapons may, at best, help secure a peace that has already been created. Peace is made by addressing the underlying conflicts — every single time, without exception. That requires knowledge, dialogue, empathy, and the ability to imagine a better future. The reason peace has been “disappeared” from Western discourse is simple: it demands a forgotten competence. It demands theoretical knowledge, understanding and human experience. It demands the hard work of conflict transformation. Focusing on weapons, battlefields and actors is easier — but it only prolongs militarism until, God forbid, a major war erupts.
The peace paradigm is the major perspective for the future: address the conflict that made the parties take to war; help them see a better future through creative futures thinking; and implement it with the support of those who know their trade, e.g. the UN and other peace‑oriented organisations. Not governments who, woujldwide without one exception, have no advisers on conflict-resolution and peacemakers.
Only then — then — can the world reduce its weapons, let wars fade, and redirect resources toward building the better world that is eminently possible. Weapons cannot do this. The addiction to them is humanity’s single greatest curse, as much of a curse as drug addiction or alchohol is to the individual. It can be remedied only by a new thinking for peace.
And here the contrast becomes decisive.
Possibility Explorers do not underestimate dangers, risks, or the seriousness of the present. They see the same crises the Doomsayers see. But they refuse to stop at diagnosis and false prognoses. They refuse the false comfort of fatalism. They reject the intellectually lazy slide from “this is dangerous” to “this is hopeless.” Instead of closing down imagination, they open it — outlining potentials, sketching pathways, and inviting dialogue about what could be built rather than what must be feared.
They challenge narrow perspectives and inherited assumptions. They insist that alternatives exist even when institutions claim otherwise. They are not utopians; they are practitioners of foresight – eutopians in contratst to geopolitical dystopians.
In a time of militarised fatalism, foresight is intellectual resistance.
Doomsayers speak with the heavy certainty of people who have stopped imagining. Their attention is locked onto the immediate moment — the crisis of the day, the threat of the hour, the spectacle of decline. They present the present as destiny, as if today’s turbulence were the only horizon available. Doom is easy. Doom requires no creativity, no responsibility, no proposals. It is the intellectual equivalent of shrugging.
Unfortunately, doom has a very counterproductive political function.
A population convinced that the future is already lost is a population that will not demand alternatives. Fear narrows the imagination, and narrow imagination serves those in power who prefer resignation over reflection and alternatives. Doom becomes a quiet ally of the status quo: if nothing can be changed, then nothing must be changed. And, worse, they deprive people of hope and the will to take action.
Possibility Explorers take a different stance.
They do not deny risks or difficulties, but they refuse to let the present exhaust the future. They outline potentials and invite dialogue about possible solutions. They challenge narrow perspectives, question inherited assumptions, and insist that alternatives exist even when institutions claim otherwise.
In this sense, they practice a civic duty similar to that of a good doctor. Diagnosis is necessary, but diagnosis alone is malpractice – and doom prognosis is irresponsible unless you tell what might be done to avoid it, heal the patient. Responsible professionals do not merely describe what is wrong; they propose treatments, healing, and care. Likewise, responsible citizens — and responsible thinkers — must offer more than doom. They must offer dialogue, hope and direction.
Where Doomsayers end the conversation, Possibility Explorers begin it.
There are those who think that working with constructive alternatives is ‘naive’ or ‘idealistic.’ They are stuck in the negative and militaristic thinking of our dark times. Power elites will love them for taking their side and for being totally harmless.
Peace is an alternative, eminently possible through education, radical re-thinking, good ideas and vision.
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Prof. Jan Oberg, Ph.D. is director of the independent Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research-TFF in Sweden and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. CV: https://transnational.live/jan-oberg
https://transnational.live.
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