About
It started with one question
In 2010, in a class called "Conflict 101", a student asked himself: why did we spend less than twenty minutes on successful peace efforts?
That student was Damian Niolet, then a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Air Force, studying strategic intelligence. The course spent twelve weeks on the origins, mechanics and outcomes of conflict. He understood that history offers fewer peace movements than violent ones. Still, he could not shake the feeling that something had been missed. Why didn't a course on conflict ask how each example could have been prevented with a little diplomacy, rather than just shortened with bigger and stronger weapons?
Over the Christmas break he went looking for an answer. He read through existing worldviews, ran thought experiments and wrote papers on what he found. What came out of it was a different way of thinking about conflict: a new picture of human needs, which are the real drivers of what we do, and a model of behavior that accounts for the true source of most conflict. Ourselves.
He later left the Air Force as a pacifist. The framework kept growing in scope and in form, but its core has not changed since that first winter. The elevator pitch has always been the same: it's a baseline of understanding. Of life, the universe and everything, to borrow Douglas Adams' phrase, with human needs at the center of it all.
Baseline Your Life today
The framework now has a name of its own, Basisophy, and a home here. The test is the front door. The book, built in ten steps, is being refined, and a workbook is on the way. The goal is simple, and a little stubborn: if you take the time to absorb it, you may walk away with less conflict in your life. That is kind of the point.
Baseline Your Life is published by Baseline It!, Inc.
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