This essay will be intolerable to those seeking reassurance that their side is pure and the other irredeemable. It does not excuse terror, massacre or systemic cruelty on any front. Nor does it offer the comfort of a neutral middle ground. Its only bias is towards the fragile possibility that, in an age where our species is quite capable of ending itself, clinging to the simplicities of “us” and “them” is a more immediate danger than any of the identities we deploy against each other.
On 14th December I was halfway through writing an essay honouring the contributions Islam and Judaism have made to our civilisation when Bondi Beach was turned into a kill zone. The news stopped me in my tracks. As messages arrived from my three Sydney-based daughters assuring me of their safety, my anguish turned to tears. This essay is in memory of the innocent victims of this massacre and the lives of all those taken by the insane slaughter that is occurring around the world in the name of righteousness, revenge, and the small, frightened gods of identity and power we keep mistaking for truth.
A familiar choreography unfolded with exhausting precision. Before the dead were named, factions were positioning. Commentators who had never set foot in Sydney were parsing the tragedy into their favourite slogans. The usual suspects took to their pulpits – political, religious, digital – to assign blame and reaffirm their own virtue. In the middle of this, the spectacle of Benjamin Netanyahu chastising Anthony Albanese about antisemitism was both predictable and revealing: a state warmonger under indictment for corruption, presiding over a catastrophe in Gaza, choosing once again to make moral weakness elsewhere the story.
As a pacifist, my instinct is always to step away from the theatre of reprisal. As a realist, I know withdrawal is not enough. The binaries that make such carnage both possible and narratively satisfying are not going away by themselves. They are structural, emotional, and profitable.
So I want to pose a question that feels almost naive in the shadow of the blood on the sand: what would it actually take for the reigning oppositions – Jew versus Arab, West versus Rest, believer versus infidel, left versus right, civilisation versus barbarism – to lose their grip on our imagination? What does it mean, in practical terms, for humanity to behave as one threatened species rather than a quarrelsome confederation of warring tribes?
I ask these questions not as an idealist writing from some imagined moral altitude, but as a systems strategist long accustomed to tracing the circuitry that connects inner life, institutional design, and planetary risk.
They will not be answered by another plea for “tolerance”, or by recycling UN resolutions. They demand that we interrogate the stories that shape us; the nervous systems that drive us; the worldviews that calcify into world-systems; and the incentives that keep us trapped inside conflicts that could, if we were honest, extinguish us all.
Who is “we” when the sirens sound?
Every massacre is an x‑ray of a society’s identity story. In the immediate aftermath we can observe, albeit in slow motion, which “we” becomes operative. For some it will be national: Australians under attack. For others, religious: Christians or Muslims or Jews under siege. For many, it is far more abstract and moral: “the civilised” under assault from “the extremists”.
These identity stories are neither neutral nor private. They are carried in school curricula and sermons, in constitutional preambles and border regimes, in news bulletins and entertainment, in myths we tell children before they fall asleep. They define whose life is grievable, whose death is a footnote, whose anger is understandable, whose fear is indulged, whose pain is erased.
They are, in other words, worldviews – widely shared belief systems about what is real, what matters, and who counts. Over time, those worldviews condense into material world-systems: states, markets, armies, surveillance infrastructures, sacred geographies, oceans of weapons, and whole industries dedicated to manufacturing consent and outrage.
And then, within and beneath these, we carry malleable mindsets – the habits of perception and emotion that a particular culture makes available to us. Those mindsets are not simply “in the head”. They are visceral, embodied. A fighter’s flinch at a helicopter’s shadow in Helmand; a Jewish grandmother’s tightening chest when she sees a swastika, even in jest; a Palestinian child’s instinct to run at the sight of a drone; an Aboriginal elder’s quiet fury in the face of yet another paternalistic policy “for their own good”.
In such moments, the idea of a single human “we” is not just fragile. It is entirely absent. If we are serious about behaving as one endangered species, we have to ask: can a global “we” be anything more than a rhetorical flourish if our operational identities are still anchored to nation, faith, race, or market segment? And if so, what would it take to create a layering of identity in which the local and the tribal are honoured, yet nested within a binding awareness of our shared vulnerability?
It is fashionable to declare that we are already globally connected. That is technically true; information flows instantaneously; markets are entangled; pathogens ride economy class; data is extracted with little regard to lines on maps. But connectivity is not the same as belonging. The infrastructure of globalisation was built to serve capital and power, not mutual care. Our ability to trade across continents has not translated into a capacity to grieve across faultlines.
I am not arguing for the dissolution of particular identities. I am asking whether we can acknowledge their partiality. I can be Australian and more than Australian, a male and more than male, aligned with certain communities and yet responsible to those who do not share my language, skin, or story. The civilisation we have constructed does not train us in that “more than”. It trains us in competitive loyalty.
Pain as a fuel for binaries
When the bullets stop, the emotions begin to sort themselves into story. Shock quickly braids itself with humiliation and helplessness. Threat and grief entangle. In that turbulence, binaries offer exquisite relief. They turn unbearable complexity into something simple enough to carry on a placard. If I can frame the world as good people and bad people, victims and villains, defenders and terrorists, I need not dwell on the fact that every community carries its own shadows. I can avoid the discomfort of confronting the harm done in my name. I can wriggle out of the unsettling recognition that the person I call an enemy loves their children just as fiercely as I love mine.
The human nervous system did not evolve to process planetary-scale suffering. We are psychologically configured for small-band life. Our core reactions – fight, flight, freeze, fawn – were not designed to handle images of charred bodies in one country followed by jubilant beach crowds in another, all while an algorithm quietly learns what keeps us scrolling and sells that fragility to advertisers.
So we narrow. We select one axis of identification: my people, my faith, my struggle, my preferred atrocity. Then we filter incoming information through that slender aperture. Confirmation becomes soothing. Dissonance becomes offensive. In this trance, every statement from “the other side” can be dismissed as propaganda, every criticism of “our side” as betrayal. Pacifism that does not account for this neurobiology becomes sentimental. Realism that reduces everything to power and interest misses the fact that humiliation and grief are their own currencies, convertible into votes, bombs and long memories.
If we want to escape the repetitive loop of massacre‑outrage‑repression‑reprisal, then we need to ask: can cultures be redesigned so that grief does not automatically seek a target? Is it feasible for public life to accommodate rage without turning it into a licence to kill? What kind of education would equip a child in Lagos, Lahore, Lisbon or La Paz to experience anger without feeding on hatred? Until we are able to metabolise collective emotions differently, our politics will reliably fracture into warring moral caricatures.
Observe how swiftly Bondi’s blood was parsed into familiar oppositions. Within hours, Israeli ministers, UK rabbis, American envoys, and columnists converged on a single refrain: this is the harvest of “Globalize the Intifada” chants from protests afar. Simultaneously, voices from the opposing camp decried the tragedy’s hijacking to shield Israel’s actions in Gaza, calling it gleeful distraction from suffering there. Is this synchronised outrage a genuine alarm at violent rhetoric, or merely the machinery of deflection doing what it does best – turning shared grief into ammunition for the next round?
Either way, the dead vanish beneath the scrum. What if, instead, we lingered on the beachfront heroism of Ahmed al-Ahmed – a Muslim vendor who charged the gunman, disarming him at cost to his own body? No slogan guided him; no binary contained him. He embodied love’s quiet insurgency: seeing a stranger in peril and choosing life over tribe. Such moments puncture the Cartesian machinery that splits humanity into protagonists and villains. They whisper that metabolising pain might begin not with superior arguments, but with reclaiming our capacity to rush toward the vulnerable, whoever they are.
When courage collides with the political business model
There is a reason binary narratives remain dominant despite decades of peace processes, development aid, and well‑meaning dialogue initiatives: they are extraordinarily useful to those who seek to hold power within the current world-system of political and economic neoliberalism.
It would be comforting to think this was simply the work of malicious individuals. There are, undeniably, people in the public eye who lie with intent, who incite with precision, who have built entire careers on the exoneration of “our” crimes and the amplification of “theirs”. But to make this solely a story about bad actors allows us to avoid a far more uncomfortable question: do our political and media systems structurally reward those who keep us divided?
In many countries, access to office now depends on mastery of outrage. A politician who speaks in tentative terms, who admits uncertainty, who acknowledges the legitimate pain of their opponents, is typically seen as weak, untrustworthy, “soft”. The ability to simplify becomes a survival skill.
Liberal democracies are not exempt. Election cycles are short. Advertisers and donors are impatient. Social media platforms are tuned to metabolise fury into engagement with every click. In such an unforgiving environment, a thoughtful politician who refuses to exploit fear is not just noble; they are probably unelectable. So we are confronted with a bitter reality: any attempt to collapse binaries at scale will need to confront a political business model that depends on their preservation.
Could it be altered? Perhaps. Imagine media institutions that prized depth over speed, that did not derive their profits from polemic. Imagine electoral systems that did not reward zero-sum contests. Or regulatory frameworks that treated algorithmic amplification of hate as a design failure rather than an inevitable by-product of “free speech”.
Are such transformations possible without major shocks or breakdowns? If history is any guide, they may require crises on a scale we are reluctant to contemplate. Which brings us, inevitably, to the converging existential risks that hang over our species.
One threatened species, multiple delusions
We are living through a convergence of hazards with no precedent in the human record: climate disruption, biodiversity loss, advanced artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, nuclear arsenals still on hair-trigger alert, and socio-economic inequalities that corrode social cohesion across continents. Each of these threats is, in theory, global. None respects borders, belief systems, or military budgets. None can be managed unilaterally by even the most powerful state. In that sense, they are the closest we have to a material foundation for a genuinely planetary “we”. And yet, our dominant worldview remains anchored in empire-era assumptions: extract what you can, defend what you have, externalise the costs, and securitise the fallout. We treat the Earth as if its carrying capacity were infinite, treat technology as if it were inherently emancipatory, and treat one another as disposable.
The prevailing world-system follows suit. Fossil fuel infrastructures, global supply chains, intellectual property regimes, investment treaties, data extraction platforms – all of these were designed to serve narrower interests than “humanity as a whole”. They lock us into behaviours that, when aggregated, constitute a kind of dawdling self-destruction. So we live with a cognitive dissonance seldom acknowledged. On the one hand, almost every government now elevates “global cooperation” in its rhetoric. On the other, defence spending climbs, borders harden, and mistrust deepens.
What would it mean to treat the phrase “threatened species” not as a metaphor but as a literal descriptor? Would educational systems still be organised primarily around national histories and competitive exams? Would investment banks still be permitted to fund activities that destabilise the biosphere on which their clients’ grandchildren depend? Would religious leaders still prioritise doctrinal disputes over building a shared moral language for an age of planetary risk?
I don’t have tidy answers. What I see, however, is that most current institutions are not configured to pose, let alone resolve, profound questions at that scale. They are short-term, siloed, and addicted to linear extrapolation. In this sense, a pacifist’s realism must be brutally clear: there is nothing inevitable about our survival. There is no law of nature guaranteeing that Homo sapiens will respond intelligently to the hazards arising from its own success.
Faith: the double-edged software of civilisation
It is against this background that my abandoned essay on the contribution of faiths returns to haunt me. Religious mindsets have shaped civilisations for millennia. They have inspired art, architecture, law, and ethics. They have given meaning to suffering, lodged compassion at the centre of moral life, and asserted, in various idioms, that the stranger and the outcast are owed care. They have restrained rulers, comforted the poor, and, on countless occasions, interposed themselves between vulnerable populations and rapacious interests.
They have also sacralised conquest, justified slavery, subjugated women, demonised outsiders, and blessed weapons. What is called “religious violence” is seldom pure; it ordinarily splices theology with territory, trauma, and power.
In my own work I have often treated civilisations as complex information-processing systems, with faith traditions acting as a form of deep cultural software. That software does not determine behaviour, but it shapes what is thinkable. It influences what a society will accept as legitimate violence and what it will condemn as an atrocity. It sets thresholds of outrage and forgiveness.
When Benjamin Netanyahu castigates foreign politicians, among them Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, for insufficient zeal in the fight against antisemitism, he is not merely speaking as a contemporary politician. He is drawing on centuries of despicable Jewish suffering, persecution, and survival. When a militant Islamist invokes verses about struggle, he is not simply a criminal with a gun. He is tapping into a narrative of resistance to humiliation that extends far beyond his own lifespan.
This does not absolve individuals of responsibility for their actions. But it does oblige us to recognise that faith is a powerful amplifier of latent convictions. At its best, it can break binaries by insisting on the humanity of the stranger. At its worst, it hardens them into eternal categories of saved and damned. If faith communities are to play a constructive role in a civilisation under existential stress, several shifts might be necessary.
First, they may need to recalibrate the universal within their own traditions. Almost every major religion contains strands that reach beyond tribal boundaries towards a wider moral community: love of one’s neighbour, care for creation, hospitality to the traveller, solidarity with the oppressed. Are there ways for those strands to be brought into the foreground, then taught, embodied and lived, without erasing doctrinal distinctiveness?
Second, they may be asked to submit their own histories to a more candid self-scrutiny. Can a community admit that it has, at times, been both victim and perpetrator? Can it mourn its own dead without denying the suffering it has inflicted on others? This is not a uniquely religious challenge; it applies equally to nations and ideological movements. But religious narratives often give such self-examination a transcendent weight.
Third, they will almost certainly need to form alliances with secular actors in ways that collapse into co‑option. In many places, religious institutions still have reach and trust that governments and corporations lack. They can mobilise volunteers, access remote communities, and speak a moral language that resonates where technocratic jargon does not. How might that capacity be used to foster an ethos of shared vulnerability, rather than merely rallying the faithful against perceived enemies?
I don’t know whether such shifts are likely. I ask instead: is it credible to imagine a planetary civilisation capable of steering through present dangers while sidelining or suppressing the spiritual impulses of billions? Or must those impulses be engaged and re-directed if we are to have any hope of collective sanity?
Binaries as design features, not just moral failures
The temptation, when faced with relentless polarisation, is to turn it into another morality play: enlightened moderates against fanatical extremists. I want to resist that impulse. Binaries are not simply rhetorical tricks or personal failings. They are embedded in the architecture of our institutions, technologies, and habits – and, more fundamentally, in the very operating logic that has shaped Western thought for four centuries.
Since Descartes, much of what passes for rationality has rested on a particular provocation: to know something, first separate it from everything else. Mind versus body. Reason versus emotion. Subject versus object. Human versus nature. The method has been extraordinarily powerful in science and engineering. But the same habit of thought, when applied uncritically to social and political life, turns difference into division and complexity into opposition. A style of inquiry becomes a way of being.
Social media architectures, for instance, are built around engagement metrics that privilege outrage and certainty over reflection and doubt. That is Cartesian logic at scale: a universe of isolated “I”s, each broadcasting its views into a field of objects and adversaries, rather than participating in a shared web of relationships. Electoral systems structured as winner‑takes‑all contests almost guarantee adversarial politics; they enact a permanent referendum on who is “right” and who is “wrong”, with no conceptual space for shades of grey. Economic designs that treat humans primarily as consumers and workers rather than as neighbours and custodians embody the same split: value is abstracted from relationship, the living world is treated as external “environment”, and we are then surprised when this produces a culture in which relationships are transactional and identities fragile.
If we keep thinking in Cartesian binaries, we will keep designing Cartesian systems: platforms that separate expression from responsibility, markets that separate profit from consequence, politics that separates security from justice. The result is a civilisation optimised for control and clarity in the short term, and for conflict in the long term. In our context, the issue is not whether we can abolish binary distinctions altogether – no complex organism can function without some capacity to differentiate – but whether we can outgrow a worldview that mistakes its own analytic cuts for the structure of reality itself.
Even the way we tell history often reinforces simplistic oppositions – civilisation versus savagery, progress versus tradition, development versus backwardness. These stories seep into our bones.
If this diagnosis holds, the work before us is far more arduous than cajoling individuals to “be more tolerant”. It asks for a re‑imagining of the pattern language of civilisation itself. What would it take for media to reveal complexity without inducing paralysis? For decision‑making arenas to welcome contending voices without collapsing into choreographed outrage? For our digital infrastructures to be engineered so that they nourish curiosity and fellow‑feeling rather than rewarding venting and tribal display? These are not abstract philosophical puzzles. They are design questions with very practical implications for platforms, parliaments, classrooms and courts. Yet to date, they have mostly been left to lawyers and politicians working within inherited assumptions rather than questioning them.
There is no guarantee that alternative designs will produce wiser societies. But it seems reasonable to ask: will continuing to reinforce existing binaries, in the face of converging existential threats, give us anything other than more Bondi Beaches, more Gazas, more nameless atrocities on forgotten frontiers?
Crossed lives in entangled futures
One of the few dependable solvents of binary thinking is sustained contact across faultlines – not a weekend workshop or a staged handshake, but shared life over time. A nurse in Johannesburg discovering that her colleague’s child has been taken by the same disease that haunts her own community. A software engineer in Bangalore working daily with a climate modeller in São Paulo. Jewish and Muslim teenagers in Munich falling in love over music before the full weight of their inherited narratives descends. A Pacific Island leader arguing for the survival of their homeland in the same room as a Russian or American admiral calculating the opportunities for new shipping lanes in a thawing Arctic.
Such cross‑cutting relationships are the unseen ligaments of a global body. They do not abolish conflict, but they do make it more difficult to render the other fully faceless. Our current world-system creates such ligaments almost accidentally. Global corporations recruit internationally. Universities host foreign students. Diasporas transplant whole social fabrics. But the same system also encourages withdrawal into enclaves – gated communities, curated feeds, sectarian neighbourhoods, nationalistic entertainment.
What would it mean to treat cross-cutting connection as infrastructure, not fortuitous accident? Could city planners, educators, diplomats, and business leaders be tasked explicitly with fostering environments where identities overlap rather than segregate? Where ideological opponents share concrete projects – cleaning a river, rebuilding a neighbourhood, responding to a disaster – instead of only clashing in televised debates?
Again, I don’t pretend this is a panacea. In deeply violent contexts, contact can inflame as well as heal. Yet, wherever I look, durable peace has depended on fibres of relationship that ran in multiple directions, refusing to map neatly onto a single axis of division.
If that observation is valid, it strengthens the argument that a planetary “we” cannot be legislated into existence from above. It must be woven, day by imperfect day, in the mundane spaces where lives intersect.
Pacifism with teeth
Pacifism is often caricatured as a refusal to acknowledge evil. Realism is caricatured as the art of accepting, and occasionally managing, that evil. Both caricatures are the result of lazy thinking. A pacifism worth taking seriously must start from a sober assessment of how violence functions in our current arrangements. It is not merely an eruption of individual savagery. It is a regulatory mechanism of the world-system. It protects property, maintains hierarchies, disciplines dissidents, clears land for extraction, and enforces borders. It is hugely profitable. Similarly, a realism worthy of the name must move beyond the static analysis of states and interests. It needs to engage with feedback loops, tipping points, and non-linear dynamics. It must integrate insights from ecology, psychology, and complexity science, not just diplomatic history and military doctrine.
From that vantage point, pacifism and realism are not enemies. They are complementary lenses. One preserves the moral intuition that slaughtering other human beings is never simply “regrettable collateral damage”. The other keeps us attentive to constraints, unintended consequences, and the sheer stubbornness of institutions built to absorb outrage and proceed unchanged.
What might it look like to inhabit both lenses at once in responding to a massacre like Bondi, or to the slow‑motion cataclysm in Gaza, or to any of the conflicts that do not make headlines in places like Sudan, Myanmar, the Sahel, or now parts of Thailand and Cambodia?
It means grieving without hierarchy for the dead of Sderot and Rafah and Sydney, while recognising that the chains of decision and responsibility leading to those deaths are not the same – and that in every case some of those deaths flowed from deliberate policy choices and were, therefore, avoidable. Above all, it means refusing to surrender our imagination to the claim that political violence is our only language of last resort.
An invitation, not a conclusion
I began by asking what it would take for binaries to soften and for humanity to act as one threatened species. Having walked through identity stories, emotional economies, political incentives, existential risks, the role of faith, design questions, and the interplay of pacifism and realism, I am acutely aware of how incomplete any answer must be.
No previous society has had to manage nuclear weapons, global digital networks, planetary‑scale ecological disruption, and machine intelligences that may soon surpass human capability in key domains. It would be intellectually dishonest to claim certainty about the pathways through such terrain. So instead of concluding with prescriptions, I return to questions that I believe every community, institution and individual might find useful to pursue, wherever they live, whatever they believe, however they identify:
What story of “we” is most alive in me when I feel afraid, and who taught me that story? Who, if anyone, benefits from its persistence?
How is my own pain being recruited into narratives that divide? What practices help me feel grief without translating it instantly into hatred?
Which “leaders” and “media” do I now allow to shape my perception? Do they gain influence by deepening my understanding or by inflaming my resentment?
Where in my daily life do I encounter people whose identities cross my preferred binaries, and how might I strengthen rather than avoid those crossings?
And perhaps the most unsettling: if our species were to be judged, not by its monuments and technologies, but by how it treated the most vulnerable among us – children in war zones, the poor in floodplains, the stateless at borders, the non‑human life whose habitats we erase – what verdict would be fair?
I can’t pretend that any single essay, strategy or initiative will “collapse the binaries”. Civilisations don’t change by epiphany. They change when millions of small, seemingly inconsequential acts of refusal and re‑imagination coalesce into new patterns. But I do hold to one conviction. As long as we keep treating every Bondi, every Gaza, every unnamed atrocity as an opportunity to harden our categories and rehearse our innocence, we will remain unfit for the dangers we have unleashed.
To become a species worthy of survival, we will have to learn – in ways our institutions barely begin to support – how to hold at once our particular loyalties and a wider allegiance to life itself. That is not a gentle project. It is heretical to entrenched powers, disorienting to established identities, and simply exhausting to sustain. Yet if we refuse it, pacifism will remain a private ethic, realism will shrink to cynicism, and the threatened species will drift, armed and enraged, into a future it did not bother to imagine differently.
Let this stand, finally, as a memento mori for the innocent – those whose names briefly trend and those who never reach a headline; those on Bondi sands and Sderot streets and in the ruins of Rafah; those in markets, mosques, synagogues, churches, schools and refugee camps on every continent. They were not combatants in our culture wars, nor authors of the dogmas and decisions that sealed their fate. They were simply alive until our stories, our so‑called leaders, our systems and our habits conspired to make them collateral to somebody’s cause.
If this essay has any purpose beyond analysis, it is to insist that their deaths are not tidily absorbed into anyone’s narrative of revenge or righteousness, but remain a standing indictment of a civilisation that still prefers the simplicity of “us” and “them” to the harder work of becoming fully human together.