When Politics Becomes War

A dear friend reached out to me today, an esteemed elder in the Way of Council, to ask how I was doing. I told her I have the sensation of watching a slow-motion car crash, yet feeling an odd sense of serenity as the catastrophe unfolds. Because, the time of pleading with the drivers to turn the wheel and hit the brakes is over. We did that for a long time, but they accelerated instead, and now the long-foreseen collision is inevitable. In fact it is already happening.

Someday everyone, drivers and passengers and onlookers, will step out from the wreckage and dust, sober, eyes blinking, to tend the injured and grieve the dead and ask what they shall create together in their new-found freedom.

Who knows when that day will come. In one timeline, it is about three years. That timeline depends on our collective willingness to accept and integrate information that profoundly violates the old consensus reality. This information will feed a new human drama, if we so choose.

Predictions of a new chapter in the human story starting (fill in the date: 2028, or was it 2012, or perhaps the Harmonic Convergence in 1987) are not actually predictions, but prophecies. A prediction is objective. It denies the agency of the participant. When I predict the winner of a football game (that’s my side gig), I assume that I have no way to influence the result. I am not a player. A prophecy, on the other hand, becomes true only if people align their choices with the possibility it invokes.

I used to believe that collapse would save us; that we would stop destroying nature, each other, and our own bodies because we would have to stop. I no longer believe that, any more than hitting bottom can rescue an addict. “Bottom” is the moment when the addict makes a different choice. The collapse of first one, then another, then another dimension of his life—his work, his marriage, his family, his health, his freedom—offers him a series of invitations. These are moments when a choice is available, when the momentum pauses and he is asked whether he is ready to take a different path. What is bottom for one addict is, for another, just a way-station on the road to hell.

Our society is approaching just such a moment, just such a choice point.

Of our many collective and individual addictions, the one I will speak of now is the addiction to the habits of war.

War mentality isn’t a thirst for violence nor a lust for fighting. War mentality is a pattern of thinking and a habit of seeing. It organizes the world into us and them, friend and foe, hero and villain. It poses solutions in terms of victory and success in terms of winning. It traffics in punishment and blame, deterrence and justification, right and wrong. It is addictive, because when it fails to solve a problem, the solution is to up the dose. It escalates to new enemies and new battles. If there is no obvious foe to blame for the worsening situation, it looks harder to find one, or creates one instead.

The solution that war mentality offers for every problem is to find the bad thing and eradicate it. That solution applies to diverse areas of human activity: agriculture (kill the pests); medicine (find a pathogen); speech (censor bad ideas); political conflict (kill the terrorists); public safety (lock up the criminals). Complex problems, such as mass fentanyl addiction in America or industrial decline, collapse into simple but futile solutions as soon as someone can be found on which to pin the blame. The Chinese! The Mexican cartels! There is a kind of relief in this formula, even though it rarely succeeds.

The disastrous public health response to Covid drew on war mentality. After decades of declining health and rising chronic disease, for which no single external culprit could be identified, finally here was a threat that could be identified and controlled. So, all of the public’s anxiety was projected onto the new scary bad guy. The habit of find-the-enemy thinking is what made the public so susceptible to policies that ranged from the foolish to the absurd to the tyrannical.

Our leaders construct a narrative that locates evil in a certain person, nation, or group, and the habit of war thinking does the rest. Soon the public is ready to support war, censorship, lockdown, suspension of civil liberties and the rule of law, and crimes against humanity.

The same basic pattern of thought also drives conspiracy narratives. If we can locate the cause of the world’s injustices and horrors on a discrete set of bad actors, a psychopathic cabal, then in theory our problems are easy to solve.¹ Just as, if a disease is caused by a pathogen, killing the germ cures the disease, so also can we cure society’s malady by removing the pathocrats from power.

Even in cases where a pathogen is the direct cause, we still have to ask what conditions make the organism vulnerable to that pathogen. Some of my readers think me naive for understating the influence of a satanic cabal within the power elite orchestrating world events. For me though, the most important question isn’t whether such a cabal exists. It is the psychosocial patterning that allows it to maintain control whether it exists or not.

That patterning is, again, war mentality. It is us-versus-them thinking. It is dehumanization and othering, the division of the world into the full human and the subhuman. The latter category can adopt the form of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth, or just simple contempt for an opposing opinion tribe.

Once two sides are locked into war thinking, it escalates like an addiction until all else is consumed.

Hate and contempt have spiraled out of control in American politics. Trigger warning: it is impossible to write about this while remaining faithful to the narrative of either side. If you are fully convinced either (1) that Trump represents a fascist oligarchic takeover of democracy drawing on the worst racist, misogynistic, xenophobic elements of the American psyche to destroy everything good and humane about America, or (2) that the MAGA revolution will restore freedom and sanity to a system that had been taken over by a deep state that used environmentalism and social justice as excuses to implement a totalitarian control system, or (3) any other narrative that cleaves the world into Team Good and Team Evil, then, well, you will shake your head in consternation that Eisenstein has taken leave of his senses. You will feel frustration, even rage, that I’m making any argument that does not include a full-throated denunciation of the bad guys. When you face pure evil, no response is valid except to fight it by any means necessary.

How simple things would be then. How easy to be the hero of the story.

The paramount goal in war is, of course, to defeat the opponent. The difference between war and games, sports, market competition, and, in normal times, politics, is that in the these latter arenas both sides hold something higher than winning; namely, the rules of the game. Football teams normally do not attempt to poison their opponents. The game itself is more sacred to them than winning it. In a functioning democracy in which all parties believe in a constitution or in a set of norms and values, there are certain taboos they will not violate for victory’s sake. Politics in the United States and many other countries is veering closer and closer to war—inevitable when each side sees the other as the embodiment of evil. Today in my country, both left and right are quite certain that the other side is a “threat to democracy itself.”

In that certainty, each becomes exactly what the other fears. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The old political elite and the Trumpian usurpers are locked in a vicious spiral. If either side stints in its all-out pursuit of power, curtailing its ruthlessness out of respect for democratic principles, the other side will exploit this as a weakness. Once one side dispenses with scruples, all sides must. When one team in a football match cheats, the other can win only if it cheats too.

When you are fighting evil, all means are justified. You might need to destroy democracy in order to save it, suppress free speech in order to preserve free speech, cancel elections in order to defend elections. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. It is no longer enough merely to defeat one’s opponents in an election; they must be imprisoned as well. The United States, Turkey, France, Brazil, and Romania have all prosecuted opposition politicians during the last year on specious charges, signaling a reversion to the historical mean.

In the United States the opposition politician, Donald Trump, survived the lawfare and won the election. The question is, is that a victory for democracy, or is it just a victory for Donald Trump? Will he end the political weaponization of federal agencies like the Justice Department, the IRS, the State Department, CISA, the CIA, and the FBI, or will he merely direct them at new targets? Will he restore free speech and civil liberties, or will he apply the tools of censorship and surveillance to new enemies?

Will Donald Trump throw the Ring of Power into the cracks of doom? Or has the Ring merely changed hands, even as technology further magnifies its powers (censorship, propaganda, surveillance, debanking)?

I’m sorry, but it isn’t looking good. To take one example, “antisemitism” (defined as any criticism of the state of Israel) has replaced “combating misinformation” as the pretext for violating freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures (surveillance) and the right to due process. The arrests of Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil for “supporting Hamas” (i.e. opposing Israel’s slaughter, starvation, and ethnic cleansing of Gaza), and the pressure on universities to shut down student protests, set a chilling precedent.

Meanwhile, although Trump is, thank goodness, turning the country away from the warpath with Russia, he is not turning the country away from war’s path. War mentality suffuses the upper echelons of his administration. Instead of Russia, the warpath leads now to Iran and China.

War mentality always requires an enemy. If no enemy presents itself, war mentality creates one. The hero nation requires a villain. The winner requires a loser. If I expect you are seeking to profit at my expense, and treat you accordingly, then you will probably fulfill my expectation. See a world full of enemies, and legions of enemies will appear.

To be fair, Donald Trump is by no means an aberration in believing that everyone is trying to get the best deal. That’s a basic principle of classical economics, even of evolutionary biology, in which our genes program us to maximize reproductive self-interest. Those paradigms, however, are long obsolete. The discrete-and-separate self is a prism that reveals one wavelength of the rainbow of life, but obscures what we urgently need to recognize today.

Because the world is so much more than a collection of separate competing entities, but is interconnected and interdependent, policies that draw on us-versus-them thinking will inevitably harm “us” as well as “them.” War abroad brings tyranny at home. Domestic violence arises to mirror foreign violence. Environmental degradation engenders human illness. And any economic policy that ignores the interconnectedness of the modern economy will backfire on its creator.

Permit a brief digression into economics and Trump’s tariffs. There is actually some virtue in their conception. Carefully targeted tariffs, implemented at a pace that allows business to adapt to them, could contribute to positive goals: revitalizing local and bioregional economies, reversing the financialization of the national economy, and ending free trade’s global “race to the bottom” that pits workers around the world against each other. Unfortunately, Trump’s abrupt across-the-board tariffs are neither carefully targeted nor paced. They are likely to destroy hundreds of thousands of businesses and impoverish millions of families, both in the U.S. and abroad. The tariffs will introduce acute dislocation in the short term and massive inefficiencies in the long term. There are further complexities here about which I will write separately; what’s relevant for present purposes is that the error in the tariff policy stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of economic interdependency, a misunderstanding that occurs naturally to anyone locked into us-versus-them thinking.

From what I have observed through my friends and acquaintances on the “inside,” Trump’s team genuinely believe themselves to be upholding the rule of law, prosecuting their political opponents for real criminality, and defunding corrupt NGOs (that also happen to be run by their political opponents). Indeed, incumbent institutions are profuse with criminality. The agencies that Trump is destroying, like USAID, the NED, and the USIP, were instrumental in maintaining the neoliberal world order and applying the neoconservative program of full spectrum dominance. Trump’s team see themselves as reformers restoring honor and prosperity to the nation. “Drain the swamp” and “Make America Great Again” are not cynical slogans.

Intoxicated with heady ideals, Team Trump cannot see that their program equally fits another description: seizing power.

Confronted with that assessment, some in Trump’s circle would probably agree with it. They might respond: “What choice do we have, faced with a ruthless and corrupt deep state?” Similarly, his opponents might, in a moment of honesty, admit that yes, they did weaponize the courts, the FBI, etc. against Trump and his allies, and engage in various kinds of cheating, but what choice did they have, when a neo-fascist movement was about to take over the country?

What both sides believe is that the other side lusts for power more than it values democracy. But for the game to function and not devolve into war, each side must believe the other holds the game itself (fair elections, the Constitution) more important than winning the game. If you are convinced the other side will cheat, you must cheat too.

No doubt many on each side believe these are temporary “extraordinary measures”; that when they have finally triumphed over the anti-democratic forces on the other side, they will cede power back to the people. That is never how it works. Each side believes, with good reason, that victory by the other side will be permanent. Thus, the escalating fight-to-the-death, the vicious spiral, the inevitable car crash.

* * *

What has alarmed me the most in my last decade of pleading for peace is not the actions and attitudes of politicians, but the infiltration of war mentality into the general public, the rising level of ambient hate. That is the energy that feeds the most psychopathic elements of the oligarchy. It is its lifeblood. It is its power source. It is how it rules—by turning their subjects against each other. (I say “it” [the oligarchy] and not “they” [the oligarchs], because the latter are puppets of system dynamics that are independent of the individuals who occupy their roles.) The key trick in its toolbox of psychopolitical legerdemain is to redirect the primal anger of the dispossessed toward a false target; essentially, to transmute anger into hate. Paradoxically, even when the elites themselves are the objects of the hate, the system that elevates them still flourishes. One elite can be switched out for another, new wine in an old skin.

In preparing this essay, I sought some personal stories of the impact of the DOGE cuts to illuminate and humanize the damage. A friend introduced me to some small farmers in a certain left-leaning back-to-the-land region. They were unwilling to speak with me. One of them, a queer person, expressed fear that they would be put in danger (I assume by my frothing transphobic MAGA audience). Another, who described herself as being on the autism spectrum, was concerned by my association with people who promote deranged theories that vaccines have a causal link to autism. I assured them that no harm would come to them, even if someone might read my essay who harbors fear and hatred toward queer people, since I had no reason to identify them by name or mention their gender identity when discussing the impact of funding freezes on regenerative farmers. As for the vaccine issue, well, OK, I do actually believe that the childhood vaccines are partly to blame for the explosion in autism and childhood chronic disease. But that is no reason to shame the autistic or other neurodivergent people. On the contrary: these people carry gifts that are crucial for the metamorphosis of our society.

But I digress. What was really going on here was that my associations and opinions on certain politicized topics marked me as a member of the opposing side, the bad side, the untouchable side. In a sense, it is “unsafe” to associate with me. I have cooties, you see, and anyone who associates with me might catch them. During the McCarthy era, merely to be seen in the company of a communist could devastate your career. To associate with Jews under Hitler was to risk imprisonment or worse yourself. For a Caucasian to be friendly with dark-skinned people in the Jim Crow era South was to risk ostracism or even lynching. It is scary, to associate with the socially unacceptable, because that status is contagious. The fact that my intention was to showcase some stories that might wake people up from Trump Adulation Syndrome (the mirror-image of Trump Derangement Syndrome), doubtless a worthy goal in the eyes of my correspondents, was insufficient to overcome the taboo of associating with a socially unacceptable person.

This widening gulf within our society also tends to feed on itself. Once it gains enough momentum, it proceeds inexorably toward civil war or genocide. I have pleaded with the drivers of these vehicles for many years to steer in a different direction. Now I am done pleading. The drama will play itself out. Why am I done? A feeling of futility and weariness. Well, I guess I am not quite done—I’m writing about it right now. And I can already anticipate the hate I will generate by violating the narrative of both sides, my “failure to consider X,” my “white privilege blinding me to Y,” my “unwillingness to accept the reality of evil,” or that I have fallen for Trump, or wimped out and betrayed him, or am a cowardly fence-sitter, or indulging the luxury of both-sides-ism… It isn’t so much that I take personal offense at these accusations, but they are an alarming sign of the times. If I, a peace evangelist, am so easily cast into the ranks of the untouchable, what hope is there for understanding or reconciliation among society’s warring factions?

Yet I do not feel hopeless. Last week I consulted a wise man, one of my spiritual guides. I won’t reveal his name, so as not to infect him with my cooties. I’ll just say he is of African descent, and a high initiate in south and west African wisdom lineages as well as the Western hermetic tradition. His fixed me with a penetrating, kind gaze, and told me that my adrenal and blood sugar issues are because my public work has made me a projection figure. The attacks land on my body, he said. I asked him what can I do when society seems to have gone mad. He said, “Wait.”

That injunction, “Wait,” is not a call to passivity. It is to recognize when it is time to act, and when action is futile or counterproductive. It is to recognize as well that there are powers operating in the world far beyond our own. And it is to accept that certain dramas must play out to their conclusion before a new act can begin. Now is perhaps not the time, at least for me, to urge warring parties to reconcile. The urging falls on deaf ears. Each side sees the peace proponent as a traitor to the cause, since to humanize the other side or acknowledge that it too has a sincere worldview based on its own set of experiences, dampens war fever. Hate is a necessary tool of war—and of politics too, when politics becomes war.

What is futile quickly becomes exhausting, Maybe only when the warring parties have exhausted themselves too, with the drama of us-versus-them, might a new drama, of forgiveness, remorse, and reconciliation, unfold.

That is a heartbreaking proposition, because the human cost is enormous. The kind of violence suffered in places like Palestine, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, the DRC, Iraq, Yemen, Uganda, Cambodia, or Vietnam has long spared my homeland, but we are not immune. Something primal and terrifying lurks behind civilization’s thin veneer. It does not take much for murderous impulses to erupt. They bubble already in social media. We are not a different species from the perpetrators of past or current genocides. I am not saying it is certain to happen in my country, but it is far from certain not to happen.

In a sense it has long been underway in covert form. How many millions have died or suffered interminably from incarceration, violence, domestic abuse, child abuse, addiction, depression, and chronic disease? Through long and tortuous pathways, all of these originate in the same root cause as overt war and genocide. They source from the reduction of human beings to something less than sacred. Yet all of them proceed under a facade of normalcy. That facade will drop over the next three years.

The disintegration of normalcy is ultimately a good thing. When the dust clears, we will stand amid the wreckage of our prison, full of new questions.

Then we may see that cleaving the world into us and them, and the blame diagnostic that accompanies that cleavage, has failed. We will see that war has failed to bring peace, hate has failed to bring justice, domination has failed to bring security, and control has failed to bring freedom. Those failures of purpose will mirror a deeper failure, a failure of understanding. The ways we made sense of the world will no longer make sense. Will we have the fortitude to abide in bewilderment long enough for new understanding to grow? Or will we jump fearfully into a new variation on an old story, substituting a new set of villains for the old, a new us and a new them, to enact the same drama once more?

1. Though impossible in practice: Any theory that holds that nefarious powers are orchestrating world events necessarily imputes near-omnipotence to those powers.