By Eric Anthony Jones, known publicly as Ruler In Peace™

Short answer: In this inquiry, a candidate human capacity is an underlying ability that a person can develop and exercise across different behaviors and contexts. It is not simply a behavior a culture teaches or a trait it admires. A working test also asks what exercising the ability makes possible between people. That test is provisional, not an established scientific classification.

Someone can speak softly and still leave no room for another person. Someone else can speak with visible emotion and remain willing to listen, acknowledge a mistake, and reconsider.

Those possibilities matter to the question I am carrying through The Peacemaker's Passage™. If I am examining human capacities for peace, I need to look beyond the behavior that happens to feel comfortable or familiar to me.

What, exactly, am I looking for?

During an inquiry exercise in Bali on September 12, a prompt asked how I would actually know that something is a human capacity rather than a personality trait, a cultural value, a moral belief, or a behavior somebody learned.

There was one constraint: do not list the capacities. Explain how you would recognize one.

My first answer began with developability. A capacity is something we can develop. The analysis that followed pointed out the limit of that answer: habits and skills can be developed too, so developability is a starting point, not the whole test.

I also reached for what an ability makes possible between people: connection, unity, harmony, and an environment in which a person can keep their dignity in relation to another.

And I said plainly that I did not know the correct answer. That uncertainty still belongs in the account.

For this inquiry, a behavior is an observable action. A value concerns what someone considers important. A trait describes a tendency. A capacity concerns an ability someone can develop and draw upon.

These are working tools. They do not settle every boundary, and one action can express more than one of them.

Consider listening. Staying silent is observable. It may express attention, respect, fear, obedience, exhaustion, or a decision to disengage. Silence alone cannot tell us whether a person has understood what was said.

Now imagine two people who disagree. One asks a careful question. Another explains the other person's position before offering a challenge. Their behaviors differ. Both may be exercising the ability to attend to a perspective without immediately replacing it with their own.

The word "may" matters. A convincing performance still has to be distinguished from the ability we think we are seeing.

An AI-assisted framework developed from that September exercise gives me four questions to carry into the inquiry.

Can the ability be developed? Can it be expressed through more than one behavior? Can it be exercised across contexts, rather than depending on one cultural script? And what does exercising it make possible in the conditions peace actually involves: disagreement, threat, accountability, cooperation?

That is a proposal for field testing. It is not a validated instrument or an established scientific classification.

The practical question underneath it is becoming clearer:

Does it help people keep their dignity and stay in relationship across difference?

Staying in relationship does not require agreement, continued access, or remaining in an unsafe situation. An honest boundary can be part of taking a relationship seriously. What we can examine is how people recognize and protect dignity in their conduct.

The test has to let experience complicate it. If I arrive with a preferred behavior and call everyone who behaves differently less capable, I will have turned an inquiry into a judgment I brought with me.

Choose one ordinary encounter. Afterward, separate three things.

What did the person actually do or say? What ability did you think that behavior expressed? What else could explain it?

Then turn the same questions toward yourself.

Perhaps you paused because you were making room to understand. Perhaps you were avoiding a difficult answer. The pause is observable. Its meaning still needs examination.

Across The Peacemaker's Passage™, I am examining nine human capacities: mindful awareness, regulation, perception, truthfulness, dignity, judgment, relationship, agency, and contribution. Mindful awareness means noticing what is happening within and around us and returning our attention to the present with openness and care.

These are working areas of inquiry, not a finished taxonomy. Mindful awareness emerged as the Passage developed; the list did not arrive complete at the beginning.

The responsibility is to keep asking whether these names help us see human life more accurately, and whether our encounters require us to revise them.

What would you need to observe before calling something a capacity? And what familiar behavior might you be mistaking for one?

My own search for these capacities didn’t begin in a library. It began with the painful end of a relationship that had spanned years. That ending taught me about boundaries, and about several other capacities I hadn’t known I would need. “Thunder in the Stillness (I Am Ruler In Peace)” is the first of four songs from my journey through The Peacemaker’s Passage™, and I share it here as one example of what capacity can sound like when someone is living through something immensely intense.

This question of what we are actually capable of as human beings, and how we stay that way when life gets loud, is what REMAIN CAPABLE explores, issue by issue. Issue 001 is free to read, a welcome into that inquiry before you decide whether to become a Founding Reader: https://www.rulerinpeace.com/remain-capable

Eric Anthony Jones, known publicly as Ruler In Peace™, is the founder of The Peacemakers Movement™. Through writing, music, keynotes, teaching, and daily practice, he explores human sustainability and the capacities that help us remain capable of peace.

Explore The Peacemaker's Passage™: https://www.rulerinpeace.com/the-peacemaker-s-passage

Eric Anthony Jones | Ruler In Peace™