There is something almost unbearable about watching people celebrate the death of other people’s children. Yet across the world, on every side of every current conflict, that is what is happening — on screens, in comment sections, in living rooms. People who would describe themselves as decent, compassionate human beings are finding themselves flooded with something that feels like righteous satisfaction when the enemy suffers.
This is not a moral failure unique to bad people. It is what prolonged, managed conflict does to human beings. It is worth understanding why — because understanding it is the first step toward something more useful than either side’s version of the truth.
The world is closer to a general war than at any point since 1962. The confrontation with Iran — long prepared, long provoked, now barely contained — sits at the centre of a web of proxy conflicts, economic warfare and nuclear posturing that has been building in earnest since the event that changed the frame: the destruction of the World Trade Centre in September 2001, an event whose official explanation has not survived serious scrutiny, and whose actual authorship remains, for many informed observers, an open question.
That is an uncomfortable place to begin. It is also the necessary one.
The difficulty is that by now, more than two decades on, the competing narratives around every major conflict have become so entangled, so repeatedly revised, so algorithmically amplified, that most people have lost confidence in their ability to know what is actually happening. And yet — paradoxically — certainty has never been louder.
This is not coincidence. It is a known feature of how managed conflict works.
Psychologists studying memory have established something important: memory is not a recording. Every act of recall is a reconstruction, shaped by what we have heard since, what we need to believe, and what our social environment rewards us for believing. Large groups of people can share the same confident, detailed, entirely false memory of an event — not because they are stupid, but because human cognition is social, and therefore vulnerable to systematic influence at scale. The phenomenon has a name — the Mandela Effect — but the mechanism is far older than the internet that accelerated it.
What this means, in practice, is that by the time most people form a view on who fired first, who is the aggressor, who is defending and who is attacking in any given theatre of war, that view has already been shaped by forces with a strong interest in the conclusion reached. This is not conspiracy — it is structure. The media infrastructure through which we receive information about Iran, about Gaza, about Ukraine, about the grinding tension between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, about Venezuela’s slow strangulation by sanctions, about the resource wars being fought across the Sahel and the Horn of Africa — is funded by interests that benefit from specific outcomes. Different conflicts, different geographies, different historical grievances — but the same question applies in every case, and it is ancient and reliable: who benefits?
The answer, in every case, is never the ordinary people doing the dying.
Wars are expensive. They require financing, logistics, political cover and a continuous supply of human beings willing to kill and be killed. None of that is possible without populations who believe, with genuine passion, that their side is righteous and the other side is not fully human. Manufacturing and maintaining that belief is therefore not a byproduct of conflict — it is a prerequisite for it.
The art of doing this at scale has been refined over centuries. It does not require a single controlling intelligence, though concentrated power certainly helps. It requires something simpler and more durable: a structure in which opposing narratives are both funded, both amplified, and both kept just coherent enough to be believed by those already inclined to believe them. Each side’s rage becomes the other side’s recruitment poster. The conflict feeds itself, and those positioned above it — financially, politically, militarily — harvest the result.
This is sometimes called, in older analytical traditions, pilpul: the maintenance of two opposing, internally coherent arguments, neither of which is permitted to resolve, because resolution would end the harvesting. It is not unique to any culture or religion. It is a technique, and it is being applied, right now, to the confrontation with Iran, to the question of Palestine, to Kashmir, to every theatre where populations have genuine historical grievances deep enough to be lit.
The grievances are real. The suffering is real. The dead are real.
What is manufactured is the conclusion that more killing will resolve any of it.
And the invisibility of those who benefit when it doesn’t.
At the root of all of it is fear.
Fear of death. Fear of not having enough. Fear of losing status, identity, the sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. These are not weaknesses unique to particular cultures or political positions. They are the common inheritance of being human in a world of real scarcity and real violence — and they are, precisely for that reason, the most reliable levers available to those who wish to keep populations controllable.
When fear is high enough, and sustained long enough, it does something specific to human cognition. It narrows. The capacity for nuance, for holding complexity, for questioning the framing of a situation — all of this contracts. What remains is the urgent need to identify the threat, locate the enemy, and align with those who offer protection. This is not stupidity. It is the brain doing exactly what it evolved to do under conditions of mortal danger. The problem is that those conditions are now being manufactured and maintained artificially, because a frightened population is a manageable one.
When a person has chosen a side in a conflict — when they have publicly declared it, argued for it, perhaps lost friendships over it — that position becomes inseparable from their identity. To question it is to question who they are. A challenge to the position is experienced, neurologically, as a threat to the self — and the brain responds to threats to the self in the same way it responds to physical danger: not with curiosity, but with defensive mobilisation. Evidence that contradicts the position is not evaluated. It is rejected, and the source of it is attacked. This is fear operating at the level of identity, and it is the most resistant form of closed thinking there is.
The conditions of social media are precisely calibrated — whether by design or by the logic of engagement — to maximise that investment. Every like, every share, every expression of solidarity from within the group deepens the trench. Every challenge from outside it confirms the enemy’s bad faith. Over time, the algorithm does not merely reflect our existing views — it constructs a version of reality in which those views are continuously validated, and anything that might complicate them is either invisible or framed as dangerous. Fear, which might otherwise subside when the immediate threat passes, is kept permanently elevated.
What results is not simply ignorance. It is confident, socially reinforced, identity-protected ignorance — the most resistant form there is. People are not clinging to their narrative because they haven’t seen the evidence. They are clinging to it because releasing it would mean releasing part of who they are, and in a state of fear, that feels like annihilation. That deserves acknowledgement, not contempt.
And yet it is also, right now, lethal. Because populations locked in fear-driven, mutually reinforcing certainty about the righteousness of their side are the necessary raw material for the next escalation. The rage is real. The grief is real. The sense of injustice is real. But the conclusion being drawn from all of it — that the answer is more force, more destruction, more death — is not arrived at freely. It is the conclusion that the structure requires.
So what is the alternative? Not neutrality — neutrality in the face of real suffering is its own kind of moral failure, and is anyway impossible for anyone paying honest attention. Not the false balance of “both sides have a point,” which is the liberal version of the same harvesting mechanism, draining energy into endless procedural argument while the killing continues.
Something harder than either of those.
Patience, in this context, is not passivity. It is the refusal to be rushed into a conclusion that serves someone else’s timeline. Every escalation is accompanied by urgency — act now, choose now, whose side are you on. That urgency is itself a tool. The pressure to declare, to perform solidarity, to demonstrate that you are not the enemy — this pressure is what fills the recruitment pipelines on every side. Patience is the capacity to hold the question open long enough to ask who is generating the urgency, and why.
Acceptance is not approval. It is the recognition that the current madness is real, that it has structural roots going back decades, and that no amount of personal outrage will undo it on the timescale that outrage demands. Acceptance is what makes it possible to act from clarity rather than from the wound. It does not mean accepting that things cannot change — it means accepting what is actually true about how they got this way, however uncomfortable that truth is.
Forgiveness is the most radical of the three, and the most misunderstood. It is not absolution for those who plan and prosecute wars for profit. It is not the instruction to forget what has been done. It is the personal decision not to allow hatred to be the organising principle of one’s life and therefore one’s politics — because hatred, however justified it feels, is precisely what the structure feeds on. A population that has chosen forgiveness as a practice cannot be harvested. That is not a spiritual observation. It is a strategic one.
None of these are comfortable positions. They require more, not less, than rage. Rage is easy. It is also, in the current configuration of power, almost entirely useless — and worse than useless when it is directed along the lines that the structure has prepared for it.
There is a reason why the harvesting of human conflict is so dependent on the current money system.
War is the most profitable activity the system permits. It creates debt at scale, transfers wealth upward with extraordinary efficiency, and destroys the productive capacity of populations in ways that require decades of further debt to rebuild. The financial infrastructure that funds opposing sides of the same conflict — a pattern documented across every major war of the past century — is not an aberration. It is the system working as designed.
This matters because it means that Patience, Acceptance and Forgiveness, while necessary, are not sufficient. The psychological liberation they represent has to connect to something structural — an alternative way of handling value that does not require scarcity, does not reward destruction, and cannot be captured by those whose power depends on keeping populations divided and dependent.
That alternative is not utopian. It is already being worked out, in practical terms, by people who have followed the logic of the current system’s failure to its conclusion. The question of how human beings might coordinate and exchange value without the intermediary of debt-based money — directly, transparently, in ways that reflect actual contribution and actual need — is no longer merely theoretical. The tools exist. The understanding exists. What is being built, quietly, is the foundation of a different kind of world.
The cosmic context for that transition — what it means at this particular moment in history that the old structures are simultaneously most dangerous and most visibly failing — is a larger story, for another time.
But the beginning of agency is simply this: to refuse to be harvested. To ask, of every conflict presented for your outrage, who benefits. To hold, against every pressure to choose a side, the knowledge that the sides were constructed for a purpose — and that purpose is not yours.