There’s a story we tell ourselves about war. In that story, violence arrives like a storm: suddenly, out of the blue, irresistible, provoked by some outrageous act that “left us no choice”. In the contemporary vernacular of officials and broadcasters, escalation is framed as a reluctant necessity, a last resort, a burden soberly carried by responsible adults.
Yet when we examine the sediment of decisions that lead to conflict – the moods, myths, incentives, and silences – a different picture begins to form. War, more often than not, is prepared long before it’s declared. It is cultivated. It is normalised. It is rehearsed in language, in media, and in bureaucratic routines; practiced in the ways we’re encouraged to fear, hate, denigrate, or simply ignore each other.
A question that has preoccupied me since my teenage years is this: how do otherwise respectable people, in every region and culture, become so accustomed to the prospect of organised killing that they either support it or accept it as the price of stability? What must happen for kinetic violence of any kind to feel not only permissible but almost inevitable? The answer can’t be found within any single state, alliance, or ideology. It is woven into the broader paradigm I have called “industrial economism”: an extractionist, growth-obsessed, and intrinsically adversarial worldview that has become, for all practical purposes, global common sense. Within this paradigm, war is not an aberration. It’s a logical extension of the way things work. In effect we already have a civilisation calibrated to convert anxiety into profit, difference into threat, and suffering into collateral. We simply need to watch how people are trained to see, feel, understand and obey.
What follows is an exploration of how behavioural conditioning and narrative management combine to make escalation appear rational, virtuous, and inescapable – and what might be required to break that spell in a world teetering on multiple thresholds at once.
The Quiet Manufacture of Consent
Support for war rarely emerges in a rush of spontaneous outrage. It ripens slowly, through repetition and exclusion. This rudimentary pattern is well documented across contexts. Long before tanks roll or missiles fly, a thickening crust of anecdotes, assertions and rumours surrounds the latent adversary. Past injuries are dredged up. Their worst voices are amplified and cast as representative. Our worst actions are forgotten or excused. While their grievances are dismissed as “propaganda”; ours are elevated to universal principles. Each new incident is interpreted through an already established frame.
This gradual hardening of perception doesn’t depend on a single lie. It relies on the selective patterning of truths. Some facts are magnified; others flicker briefly before vanishing into reticence. Comparative suffering is rarely examined. Historical context – particularly our own role in creating current tensions – is indistinct.
Across the many countries in which I have worked, from Europe to East Asia and from North America to the global South, the amplifiers are familiar. Government statements, major media outlets, think tanks, defence and security bureaucracies, and increasingly major digital platforms, echo and reinforce one another. They build not just a narrative but a mood. What disappears in this frame of mind is a genuine sense of alternatives. De-escalation is treated as a weakness. Mediation is dismissed as naïve. Much worse is neutrality, which is consistently portrayed as complicity. In this atmosphere the diplomatic imagination shrinks while military resourcefulness expands. By the time public opinion is “measured”, the range of acceptable answers has already been shaped.
It’s tempting to blame this on Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Brussels or any other convenient metonym. There’s no doubt that the United States, for reasons of military reach, financial infrastructure, and media saturation, remains the most powerful conductor of such narratives worldwide – something I encounter again and again in my advisory work in Asia and the global South. But it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that narrative control is a uniquely Western craft. Russian, Chinese, Indian, Turkish, Iranian, Israeli, and Gulf state information systems, among others, deploy similar techniques when it suits them. So do insurgent movements, religious networks, and commercial conglomerates for that matter.
The more interesting matter is why these techniques are so universally attractive. The answer lies in how our institutions cultivate conformity, obedience, and an appetite for simplified moral dramas – and how they have fused those tendencies with a digital infrastructure optimised for monetising attention rather than deepening understanding.
Conformity as Infrastructure
One of the most unsettling results from mid‑twentieth‑century social psychology was the finding that people will categorically deny what they can see with their own eyes when surrounded by a confident majority saying the opposite.
The early laboratory work on conformity – crudely designed by today’s standards, yet repeatedly echoed in fields as different as organisational behaviour and communication studies – showed that people often prioritise group acceptance over perceptual accuracy even when the cost of dissent is negligible. When opposition carries real consequences – career damage, loss of funding, social ostracism – the willingness to go along with the majority, however irrational, spikes sharply. Later cross‑cultural work suggests that this is not confined to any particular civilisation; the strength of the pattern varies with context, but the pattern itself is robust.
We have built policy and knowledge systems that feed on this vulnerability. In the spheres of foreign policy and security, careers increasingly depend on signalling an alignment with prevailing orthodoxy rather than on the quality of analysis. Academics and political analysts whose work challenges alliance strategies or questions the efficacy of sanctions, interventions, or forward military deployments often find themselves bypassed for funding, media exposure, and advisory roles. In many think tanks and universities, I have watched younger scholars self‑censor to protect their prospects, long before any restrictions are formally invoked.
This is not centrally orchestrated. It’s enforced through a dense meshwork of pointers: grant approvals, editorial choices, conference invitations, social media shaming, internal HR processes. No‑one needs to send a memo banning dissenting views on NATO expansion, Chinese security interests, or the humanitarian costs of economic warfare. People learn, quickly, which topics invite trouble and which talking points guarantee applause.
The outcome is a tapered spectrum of publicly acceptable thought. By the time proposals from the field reach legislatures or presidential offices, most of the genuinely alternative options – such as non‑alignment, demilitarised corridors, mutual security pacts, or regional autonomy arrangements – have been quietly taken off the table. The apparent consensus is not evidence of informed agreement so much as a sign of prior filtration. And conformity is only the first layer.
Platforms that Feed on Outrage
If the last century’s conformity experiments were conducted in controlled rooms with a handful of students, today’s equivalents unfold across billions of screens.
Contemporary digital platforms are built on a commercial logic sometimes described as “surveillance capitalism”: the systematic harvesting of behavioural data in order to predict and manipulate future behaviour, and to sell those predictions. We know from a convergence of internal platform research, independent academic studies, and regulatory inquiries in multiple jurisdictions that content which triggers strong emotional reactions – especially anger, fear, and moral disgust – spreads more rapidly and sustains attention more reliably than content that invites reflection.
Algorithms, adjusted to maximise engagement, have learned this lesson far more diligently than most human ethicists. Recommendation systems across major platforms routinely prioritise material that inflames identity, caricatures adversaries, and distils complex events into simple moral triggers. Any corrective information travels more slowly and reaches fewer people. Cross‑cutting dialogue, where it exists, is easily drowned out by the louder clamour of outrage.
Over time, feeds become echo chambers interspersed with grotesque funhouse mirrors of “the other side”. Users repeatedly encounter extreme, decontextualised examples of the adversary’s voices and behaviours, whereas their own fears and resentments are continuously stroked. This pattern has been replicated in empirical studies across North America, Europe, South Asia and Latin America. Once again, no single actor needs to plot this in advance. It’s baked into the revenue model. The net effect is a form of polarisation that rarely deepens understanding of real differences. On the contrary, it generates a population primed for conflict, for whom escalation is easily experienced as self-defence. When the call comes to “stand with” one side against another – whether in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the South China Sea, or a contested border in Africa or South Asia – many citizens have already absorbed months, sometimes years, of emotionally charged content that makes refusal tantamount to betrayal.
Here the industrial economic paradigm and digital architecture reinforce each other. Fear and anger are profitable emotions. They keep us scrolling. They also keep us ready for war.
The Seduction of False Choices
Modern political speech has a peculiar talent for shrinking the field of possibility. Entire civilisations are reduced to opposing camps: sophistication versus barbarism, democracy versus autocracy, believers versus infidels, “rules‑based order” versus “revisionist powers”. Citizens are encouraged to align with one side as an expression of identity, not as a calculated strategic preference. To question the framing is to risk being cast as disloyal.
Meanwhile, pathways that fail to fit the binary vanish from view. Past experiences of non‑alignment in Asia, Africa, and Europe – the long experiment of Finland’s cautious neutrality during the Cold War, for instance, or the painstaking construction of ASEAN as a buffer against great‑power rivalry – drop out of public debate or are dismissed as outdated. Initiatives that might reduce the salience of military blocs, such as regional nuclear‑weapon‑free zones or shared resource management frameworks, are quietly sidelined or framed as unrealistic, despite real‑world precedents.
False binaries serve several functions. They streamline storytelling. They channel dissent horizontally, encouraging populations to attack one another across cyber borders rather than directing scrutiny towards those who actually make and benefit from strategic decisions. They also obscure the everyday complicities of those decisions: the arms traders, energy conglomerates, financial intermediaries, and political brokers who do very well from sustained tension, regardless of which flag is incised on the munitions.
One of the enduring puzzles of industrial economism is its capacity to present system‑preserving arrangements as if they were natural choices in a moral agora. Citizens in every region are invited to pick a camp. Very few are invited to query why the overall architecture depends on perpetual antagonism in the first place.
The Machinery of Moral Theatre
At the emotional core of war propaganda sits an ancient dramatic archetype. Psychologists have described a recurring triangle of roles: victim, persecutor, liberator. It hardly matters whose vocabulary we use; the pattern is recognisable across mythologies and modern media.
In the run‑up to conflicts, populations are cast primarily as victims: under constant threat, existentially endangered. Adversaries are rehearsed as persecutors whose grievances are either unlawful, cynical, or both. Interventionist powers – whether acting directly, through proxies, or through sanctions – assume the noble mantle of liberator. The roles may shift depending on which network you watch, which language you speak, and which history you inhabit. But the dramatic grammar is remarkably stable.
This grammar performs several tricks simultaneously. It simplifies moral complexity: there’s little need to comprehend the adversary’s security concerns when they are portrayed as irrational or evil. It dissolves personal responsibility: once an action is framed as necessary to rescue victims, questioning it feels heartless. And it fosters a curious form of cruelty without hatred, particularly within bureaucracies. If harm is portrayed as an unfortunate but inevitable by‑product of saving others, those designing and implementing policy can come to experience themselves not as perpetrators but as reluctant caregivers.
We saw this dynamic at work in the sanctions imposed on Iraq during the 1990s, which multiple UN officials later described as contributing to severe humanitarian crises. Similar patterns have been documented around sanctions on Iran, Venezuela, and Syria. There’s fierce debate about the precise number of sanctions‑related deaths in any of these cases, and causality is always tangled; disease, mismanagement and corruption play their part. Nonetheless, independent humanitarian and aid organisations, UN agencies and sanctions scholars all agree on one point: comprehensive economic warfare consistently inflicts disproportionate suffering on civilians while rarely achieving the much-trumpeted political transformations.
Why, then, are such measures so politically attractive? In part because they align perfectly with the victim‑liberator script. They enable the powerful to “do something” dramatic without placing their own combatants at risk. They are promoted as precise pressure points on tyrannical elites, even when the predictable effect is widespread deprivation. In public rhetoric, those who suffer are being sacrificed not to power but to virtue.
Authority, Obedience, and the Displacement of Conscience
The classic experiments on obedience to authority, conducted in the 1960s and subsequently replicated with various safeguards across multiple societies, revealed a distressing truth: ordinary people are often willing to inflict what they believe to be severe pain on strangers if instructed to do so by an authoritative figure who accepts responsibility. The details of those experiments have been debated for decades. Some of the original procedures would themselves be unethical today. Yet the central finding – that situational demands and the appearance of legitimate authority can override personal moral discomfort – continues to be supported across settings, from corporate malfeasance to military abuse in conflict zones.
Modern governance structures have been refined around precisely this vulnerability. Chain-of-command hierarchies, bureaucratic compartmentalisation, and the expert mystique of technocratic decision‑making all make it easier for individuals to tell themselves they are merely fulfilling a role and following orders rather than making a choice.
Ethical judgement is outsourced. Citizens outsource it to “leaders” and “experts”. Leaders outsource it to advisers and “intelligence”. Middle‑ranking officials outsource it to procedures, protocols, and committee decisions. In many ministries and corporations I have advised, I’ve been struck by how rarely people talk about right and wrong in plain language. They speak instead of “mandates”, “risk management”, “trade‑offs”, “compliance”. The vocabulary of conscience recedes. In this climate, extreme policies can appear oddly mundane. A sanctions architect who spends their days adjusting financial triggers on a computer screen is shielded from the hospital without medicines; the customs official impounding critical spare parts does not see the failing power grid; the drone operator monitoring thermal images never meets the families below. Responsibility flows upwards and dissolves into institutional fog.
War, in its modern administrative guise, is not decided in a single sinister room. It’s enacted by thousands of professionals, each completing tasks that feel totally normal within their context – a procurement plan here, a media statement there, a legal opinion, a data analysis, a software tweak. Role internalisation does the rest. Once someone’s social identity and livelihood are bound to a particular apparatus – military, corporate, bureaucratic – questioning its direction becomes psychologically expensive.
We’re left with vast, interlocking organisations capable of doing enormous harm without anyone inside experiencing themselves as personally violent or malevolent. This is perhaps the most dangerous form of cruelty in the contemporary world: harm without hatred, enacted by people who think of themselves as decent, ordinary, human beings.
Controlled Dissent and the Illusion of Choice
Systems that rely on conformity and obedience are fragile unless they can also manage disagreement. One of the more refined achievements of industrial economism has been to cultivate docile forms of dissent that rarely disturb structural arrangements. This is not primarily a matter of secret police. In many democracies and semi‑democracies, vigorous argument is not only tolerated but encouraged – as long as it remains within certain limits. Political parties cycle in and out of office promising change, yet grand strategic commitments, alliance structures, and economic doctrines exhibit a remarkable continuity. Parties may disagree about tactics, rhetoric, and domestic redistribution, but they leave the deeper syntax of security and growth untouched.
Media ecosystems mirror this pattern. They host passionate disputes over personalities, scandals, and short‑term crises while seldom questioning the institutional drivers that almost guarantee new crises. In effect, dissent is domesticated. Citizens can choose between brands, but they’re not invited to opt for profoundly different ways of organising and executing power.
At its most sophisticated, this becomes a form of what Italian theorists once called “hegemony”: the capacity of ruling coalitions to absorb alternative energies without ceding real control. A protest movement is given airtime as long as it feeds back into the familiar circuits of party politics, consumer choices, or identity contests. Radical critiques that question the foundations of militarised security, extractive economics, or colonial legacies find it harder to get sustained oxygen. Funding dries up. Personalities are discredited.
To point this out is not to claim that all opposition is false or futile. There are genuine movements, whistle‑blowers, investigative journalists, academics, indigenous and community leaders whose interventions have changed the course of policy – sometimes dramatically. The global movement against apartheid, the numerous nuclear‑freeze and anti‑war campaigns that forced governments to step back from the brink, the halting but real progress in areas like landmines and cluster munitions: these remind us that power can never be total.
But they also illustrate how much discipline is required to resist being co‑opted. For every movement that alters the trajectory of a conflict, many are re‑absorbed into the spectacle, their slogans monetised, their leaders tamed, their radical edge blunted.
Beyond a Western Lens
There is a risk in any critique of war narratives that we slip into a comfortable parochialism. From the British propaganda mills of the First World War to the Hollywood‑infused justifications for the invasion of Iraq, it’s easy to focus on the pathologies of “the West”. There’s no shortage of material. The deeper phenomenon though – the development of populations for war through behavioural conditioning and narrative framing – transcends geographical and ideological boundaries.
In the People’s Republic of China, a sophisticated media and education apparatus has for decades told a story of humiliation and resurgence. This story is rooted in verifiable historical events – foreign occupation, unequal treaties, war, and famine. But like all national narratives it selects, emphasises, and omits. In China’s story, external threats and internal “splittists” loom large. Military modernisation, assertive moves in surrounding seas, and intensified control over border regions are presented as necessary shields against encirclement.
In Russia, state‑aligned media and cultural production have constructed a siege and betrayal mentality, invoking both the trauma of Nazi invasion and the disarray following collapse of the Soviet machine. NATO expansion is cast not as a security choice by neighbouring states but as a menacing campaign at Russia’s doorstep. In turn, military interventions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria are explained to domestic audiences as defensive, restorative, and historically justified.
In India, Israel, Turkey, and a growing number of other countries, majoritarian or nationalist narratives entangle religious and civilisational motifs with contemporary security concerns. Historical grievances, some stretching back centuries, are woven into contemporary territorial disputes. Digital platforms intensify these moods, much as they do in Western societies.
Across all these cases we find similar ingredients: manipulated conformity, algorithmic outrage, moral drama, obedience structures, and controlled dissent. What varies is the local flavour: the myths, memories, and symbols used to fill the mould.
This global diffusion should caution us against comforting illusions. There is no singular villain, no monolithic empire uniquely responsible for endless war. There are, instead, converging worldviews – American, Russian, Chinese, European, Indian, Gulf, corporate, criminal – all learning from each other how to steer public perception, all embedded in an industrial economic paradigm that equates security with domination and ignores the planetary limits that render such thinking suicidal.
The Economic Appetite for Instability
It would be naïve to discuss narrative control around war without acknowledging the material appetites that feed it. Behavioural conditioning doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It’s entangled with major economic interests that benefit from instability.
The so‑called “military‑industrial complex”, first named in a warning by a departing American president and subsequently tracked by researchers worldwide, is not confined to any one nation. Arms manufacturers, private military and security contractors, cyber‑warfare firms, surveillance providers, and a whole ecosystem of lobbyists and consultants thrive on elevated threat perceptions. Major financial institutions profit from capital flows triggered by crises, commodity price spikes, and reconstruction contracts. Energy companies manoeuvre around sanctions and supply disruptions in ways that can generate windfall profits even as households struggle.
In many states, these interests are deeply enmeshed with political funding and career pathways. Senior officials rotate between public roles and corporate boards. Think tanks and academic centres rely on funding from defence and energy sectors. Lobbying for particular weapons systems or foreign bases is framed as technical advice rather than rent‑seeking.
At the global level, prolonged tension justifies extraordinary expenditures on armaments even as basic social and ecological needs remain massively underfunded. The opportunity costs are rarely made explicit in public debate. What schools, hospitals, housing, and climate‑adaptation projects could have been built with the resources devoted to a single fighter jet programme or a redundant nuclear upgrade? How many lives would be lengthened and enriched if we re‑directed those funds? When such questions are raised, they are often deflected with appeals to jobs or “deterrence”, without rigorous scrutiny of the underlying assumptions.
Industrial economism’s addiction to growth finds in war and preparation for war a reliable stimulant. We have engineered an economy where devastation can be counted as a vital contribution to gross domestic product as long as someone is paid to rebuild, where the carbon footprint of militaries is immense yet rarely appears in climate negotiations, and where the destruction of one region can spark a boom in another.
Law, Legitimacy, and the Vocabulary of “Order”
Modern conflicts are almost never justified in naked terms of conquest. They are wrapped in legal and moral language.
We live in an era where the UN Charter, humanitarian law, and a dense thicket of treaties ostensibly govern the use of force. In practice, these norms are applied selectively. Major powers across the spectrum invoke international law when it suits them and stretch it to breaking point when it does not. The concept of a “rules‑based order” has become a floating signifier, deployed by different actors to describe arrangements congenial to their interests.
This is not to say that law is irrelevant. Legal frameworks have restrained and shaped state behaviour in meaningful ways. On occasion they have given activists, small states, and international civil servants tools to challenge abuse. But law has also been weaponised as part of the narrative apparatus. Humanitarian rhetoric has been used to mask regime‑change operations; self‑defence has been invoked for pre‑emptive strikes; the protection of civilians has rationalised sieges and bombardments that render those same civilians homeless or dead.
The tension between stated commitments and lived practice corrodes legitimacy. Populations watch as allies violate norms with impunity while opponents are punished harshly for similar or lesser acts. This double standard is not lost on observers in Africa, Latin America, or Asia, many of whom recall centuries of colonial predation dressed up as “civilising missions”. The result is a growing scepticism towards the moral claims of all great powers, which in turn creates fertile ground for alternative empires offering their own versions of “order”.
We are approaching a point where the word “law” itself risks losing its meaning in international affairs, replaced by a raw contest of narrative and force. In such a situation, behavioural conditioning around war becomes even more potent, because appeals to shared norms lose traction. If everyone suspects everyone else of hypocrisy, bad faith becomes the default assumption. Dialogue decays.
The Fraying of Informed Consent
Democracy, in its ideal form, rests on a notion of informed consent: the idea that citizens, given access to relevant information and a genuine range of options, can participate in decisions that affect their fate. War, among other things, is supposed to be one of those decisions. In practice, the information environment around war and peace is so heavily curated, and the structural incentives for escalation so deeply embedded, that “consent” looks more like managed acquiescence. Polls revealing public support for a particular intervention or sanctions package are cited as evidence of legitimacy, yet seldom accompanied by disclosure of what information was available to those polled, how alternative perspectives were suppressed, or which costs were hidden.
In many countries, legislatures have gradually ceded war‑making authority to executives. Emergency powers, once temporary, become habitual. Security decisions are shrouded in classification. Citizens are told they must trust intelligence assessments they are not permitted to scrutinise, legal opinions they cannot read, and alliances negotiated without their input. When catastrophes follow – as in the invasion of Iraq, the collapse of Libya, the long attrition of Afghanistan, and the obscenity of slaughter in Gaza – accountability is diffuse, memories are short, and the apparatus moves on.
Digital technologies further complicate any meaningful notion of consent. Micro‑targeted messaging, data‑driven political campaigning, and AI‑generated content all make it much harder for citizens to know which of their emotions are organically theirs and which have been carefully stage-managed. Filter bubbles mean that two neighbours may inhabit entirely different narratives about the same event, weakening the shared reality necessary for collective deliberation.
Against this backdrop, “informed consent” risks becoming a hollow ritual. Elections are held. Mandates are claimed. Yet the underlying architecture of war‑readiness remains intact, untouched by periodic changes of government.
Cracks in the Edifice
And yet, the story is not entirely hopeless. The same connected world that allows rapid diffusion of war narratives also enables unprecedented forms of exposure and challenge. Leaked documents, whistle-blowers, independent investigators, and citizen journalists – from Latin American environmental defenders to Asian activists tracking arms transfers, from African peace researchers to European human rights lawyers – have repeatedly disrupted official stories. The Abu Ghraib photographs, the Panama and Pandora Papers, the revelations of mass surveillance, the meticulous documentation of civilian casualties by NGOs and UN missions: these episodes have shown that truth, while fragile, is not entirely defenceless.
Publics do resist. In 2003, millions marched across continents against the invasion of Iraq, in one of the largest transnational protests in history. The current wave of protests in support of Palestinians is a powerful contemporary illustration of the claim that “publics do resist,” and that they often do so across borders more quickly and visibly than governments shift their policies. Since October 2023, hundreds of thousands of people have marched in cities across Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, echoing the transnational scale of the 2003 anti‑Iraq War demonstrations but focused on ending the bombardment of Gaza, opposing occupation, and challenging their own states’ complicity through arms sales, diplomatic protection, and silence.
As with past campaigns against landmines, cluster munitions, and the Iraq invasion, these mobilizations don’t translate into immediate policy reversals, yet they are already reshaping political debate: legislators face electoral pressure over their positions, some governments have shifted from unconditional support to demands for ceasefires or limits on arms transfers, and parliaments and courts are scrutinizing whether existing policies comply with international humanitarian law.
The intensity of attempts to contain these protests—through bans on marches, restrictions on slogans, disciplinary measures in universities, and professional reprisals—also underscores how threatening such public dissent is perceived to be, much as earlier peace and human rights movements were met with suspicion and repression. Viewed in this longer trajectory, the current Palestinian solidarity protests are not an anomaly but part of a recurring pattern in which civil societies slowly, unevenly, but persistently contest the terms of military intervention and the broader international order, raising the political costs of certain forms of violence and helping to redefine what is considered legitimate state action.
These achievements are partial and vulnerable. They can be reversed or bypassed. But they demonstrate that the mechanisms I described earlier – conformity, algorithmic outrage, false binaries, moral theatre, obedient bureaucracy, controlled dissent – are powerful yet not impregnable. They depend on our acquiescence.
Seeds of a Different Imagination
If we’re to step away from the habit of preparing for war as if it were the weather, three shifts seem indispensable.
First, we need institutional spaces where genuinely non‑aligned strategic thinking can flourish without being suffocated by funding constraints or reputational sanctions. This is not a plea for some abstract “neutrality” – neutrality can be as self‑serving as partisanship. It’s a call for analysis that’s not hostage to a single bloc, party, or corporate sponsor, and which is measured by its fidelity to reality rather than its utility to power. In my own work with governments and corporations, I have seen how transformative it can be when people are able to explore scenarios that break from inherited scripts without fearing for their livelihoods.
Second, we must bring the algorithms that shape our attention out from behind the curtain. The point is not censorship – which too easily becomes another instrument of control – but transparency and accountability. Platforms that shape the emotional climate of billions cannot credibly claim to be mere conduits. They are now part of the global security environment. At a minimum, they should be required to disclose how content is ranked and recommend, to open key datasets to independent researchers, and to give users meaningful choice over the logics that govern their feeds. Regulatory experiments in the EU, parts of Latin America, and elsewhere are tentative steps; but their effectiveness remains to be seen.
Third, we need to re‑anchor responsibility within systems that currently disperse it to the point of invisibility. This implies redesigning bureaucratic and corporate structures so that individuals at every level understand, and are answerable for, the human consequences of their actions. It means protecting dissidents within institutions, not as oddities but as vital immune responses. It requires a renewed ethic of leadership as a collective phenomenon: groups of people coming together, across borders and sectors, to improve the human condition rather than to manage its decline.
None of this will be easy. The forces arrayed in favour of current arrangements are immense. Industrial economism has shown a remarkable ability to absorb critique and just carry on. The gravitational pull of fear is strong. And we should be honest enough to admit that war, for all its horror, satisfies a deep psychological craving for belonging, purpose, and drama that our anaemic consumer cultures rarely fulfil.
The real alternative to war is not simply peace as the absence of fighting. It’s a totally different way of imagining security and prosperity. It’s a civilisation that does not need enemies in order to feel alive.
Are we are capable of such a transformation? I really don’t know. What’s already clear is that the current pattern – where behavioural conditioning and narrative control ease us into successive confrontations while the biosphere frays beneath us – is unsustainable.
We are learning, almost too late, that the fires we light in the name of safety don’t stay nicely contained within the borders drawn on our maps. The same industrial mindset that makes war seem reasonable is driving ecological breakdown, social fragmentation, and spiritual exhaustion. To unlearn our readiness for war is, in that sense, part of a larger task: the renewal of our capacity to live together on this small, exhausted, still miraculous planet without constantly preparing to destroy one another. Whether we will learn in time is uncertain. That we must attempt to learn is, I think, beyond doubt.