Jon Ramer is helping lead an audacious experiment called 11 Days to Prove Peace Is Possible.
So it is perhaps surprising to hear him say, “I don’t believe in peace.” But he means it.
“I think it’s either you are practicing or … you’re not,” he says.
For Jon, believing in peace risks placing it somewhere in the distance—an aspiration humanity might someday reach if enough things go right. Practicing peace brings it much closer.
“There’s something off about believing in peace,” he says. “There’s something right about being peace.”
That distinction has shaped decades of Jon’s work exploring compassion, cooperation, collective action, and what becomes possible when people stop waiting for a better world and begin practicing one together. Right now.
From Within to the World
One teaching in particular has stayed with Jon since his involvement with Seattle’s Seeds of Compassion gathering around the Dalai Lama’s 2008 visit. It was shared with him by Hereditary Chief Phil Lane Jr., who became a close collaborator and now serves as chair of Compassion Games: Survival of the Kindest.
“Starting from within. Working in a circle. In a sacred manner, we heal and develop ourselves, our relationships, and the world,” Jon says. “Everything I’ve needed is right there.”
Peace may begin within, but it cannot end there. It must enter into relationship.
Jon has a phrase for the kind of relationship he believes is needed: relationship without domination. It asks something more difficult than simply being kind to people we like. It asks us to notice the ways certainty, hierarchy, blame, and the need to be right can separate us from one another.
“Any way of operating where my certainty is somehow more important than your certainty misses them,” he says. “This is this relationship without domination thing.”
And because human beings are, as Jon puts it, “perfectly imperfect,” rupture is inevitable. Peace is not the absence of those ruptures. Part of its practice is learning how to repair them.
For Jon, that requires making room for what people carry into their relationships in the first place.
“People need to be able to empty,” he says—to have safe places where trauma, grief, incomplete experiences, withheld communication, and unfulfilled expectations can be expressed and witnessed. Over time, Jon has worked to become a trusted place where people can bring what might otherwise remain unspoken.
“There’s no healing in blaming,” he says.
This complicates the idea that practicing peace means always appearing peaceful. In Jon’s telling, peace also asks us to make room for what hurts—for anger, grief, disappointment, and unfinished experience—so it can be witnessed rather than carried forward as further harm.
Changing the Game
Jon has spent much of his life looking for ways to move ideas like these from personal values into collective practice. After the Charter for Compassion launched in 2009, he noticed that individuals could sign it. His response was characteristic of the way Jon approaches big ideas: “What about institutions? What about organizations?”
What would it look like, he wondered, for compassion to have a role not only in individual lives, but in collective life?
That question helped lead to Seattle becoming the first city to formally affirm the Charter for Compassion and, eventually, to Compassion Games: Survival of the Kindest—a playful experiment in turning compassion into something people could actually do together.
The Games reimagine competition as coopetition.
“You can’t lose in the Compassion Games,” he says. “The new definition of winning is we all win.”
He points to competere, the Latin root of competition: to strive together.
“We compete in how we contribute so we can be our very best, bring our very best to the field, and cooperate to do something that no one of us could do alone,” he says.
It is a small linguistic shift carrying a much larger proposition: What if creating peace does not require eliminating competition, but changing what it means to win?
Coopetition does not ask people or organizations to become the same, surrender what makes their work distinct, or agree on one way forward. It asks them to bring their particular strengths into relationship with others and measure success by what becomes possible together.
Intelligence in Service to Peace
Now Jon is bringing that same question into one of humanity’s newest frontiers.
During 11 Days to Prove Peace Is Possible, September 11–21, people and organizations around the world are being invited into a global coopetition and mass collaboration aimed at making meaningful progress toward a verified 24-hour global ceasefire and day of nonviolence on September 21—25 years after the United Nations designated the International Day of Peace as an annual day of global ceasefire and nonviolence.
And this year, some of the potential players are not human.
Jon is exploring how artificial intelligence might help connect knowledge and capabilities across peacebuilding efforts that often operate independently—making relationships visible, strengthening collective intelligence, and helping people recognize possibilities for cooperation they might otherwise miss.
“I do put forward this idea of AI for peace as a really important moment for humanity,” he says.
But for Jon, the opportunity is not about the technology alone. It is about what humans might choose to do with the intelligence now available to us.
“AI doesn’t care,” he says. “We do.”
His emerging Peace Intelligence work explores what might become possible if human wisdom, lived experience, trusted relationships, and organizational capacity could be brought into greater relationship with artificial intelligence—helping people see connections, share knowledge, and cooperate in ways that might not otherwise be possible.
“The question isn’t about the AI,” Jon says. “The question has to do with us.”
The current initiative extends that experiment even to competing AI labs, inviting them to contribute distinct capabilities while cooperating toward a shared purpose. In that sense, AI becomes another arena for a question Jon has been exploring for years: How might we bring our individual strengths to something none of us could accomplish alone?
Technology may increase the intelligence available to that effort. But Jon draws a firm line around who remains responsible for what happens next.
“It’s not AI that’s going to make peace.”
People still have to do that.
The Courage to Join In
Perhaps that is why, for all the large-scale movements and global experiments Jon has helped build, he describes himself not primarily as a leader, but as a first follower.
“There’s no movement without the first follower,” he says.
We are often told everyone needs to lead. Jon sees another possibility: find something worth joining, courageously step toward it, and help others see that they can join, too.
“The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow,” he says.
It is another way of moving from spectator to participant—and recognizing what is already emerging around us as worthy of our attention and participation.
And perhaps that is what Jon is ultimately trying to prove during these 11 days—not that humanity can arrive at some permanent state called peace, but that we can practice our capacity for it.
For one day, perhaps, we can stop fighting. We can pause. We can try another way of relating.
“Let’s see if we can do it,” Jon says.
But the experiment is larger than a single day. It is already taking place whenever people choose contribution over domination, repair instead of blame, collaboration without requiring sameness, or the courage to join something worth carrying forward.
Because peace, as Jon understands it, is not somewhere humanity eventually gets to.
“Being peace is right where I am, right here, right now,” he says.
And from there, we can become available to one another “to see if we can work this thing out.”
Perhaps right here, right now is exactly where something larger begins. One person becomes two. A first follower becomes a movement. Separate efforts discover one another. Intelligence becomes shared intelligence. People who could not accomplish something alone begin discovering what they can accomplish together.
The outcome of Jon’s 11-day experiment is not yet known. That is what makes it an experiment.
But perhaps proving peace is possible has never required knowing how the story ends.
Perhaps it begins by choosing to practice it—and seeing who joins in.
Join 11 Days to Prove Peace Is Possible
11 Days to Prove Peace Is Possible runs September 11–21 and is open to people, teams, organizations, and communities everywhere. Through the Peace Intelligence Commons, participants can form or join teams, discover missions and work already underway, find collaborators, share intelligence and resources, and contribute their own capabilities to the collective effort.
The Peace Intelligence Room offers live Zoom sessions, briefings, mission collaboration, conflict-focused conversations, and opportunities to learn from and connect with others throughout the 11 days.
Visit the Peace Intelligence Commons in One World to explore what is happening, see the work already underway, and find your place in the experiment.
There’s something off about believing in peace. There’s something right about being peace.
One Response
WaDo UNaLiI for sharing this important discussion “believing” in peace is one thing, being peace is quite another. It takes us from a reductionist thinking process to a more Holist mind set. I look forward to this journey.