I'm Trying to Respond Differently to the US-Israel-Iran "Crisis"
Why "crisis" Is the wrong framing, and why we need to not chose fear to truly transform the crises.
We’ve been talking about a big ‘crises’ on the horizon and it appears to be here.
I originally started writing this draft before hostilities kicked off, to share a perspective that our addiction to the crises framing deceives and distracts from seeing the true picture.
The past few days have added another more visceral layer.
What ‘crises’ does inside me: fear & tension
When I see missiles raining across the Gulf region, and headlines that we might be in WW3, and the largest energy crises in our lifetime:
My solar plexus tightens as I feel fear. The drive to be informed kicks in: an insatiable desire for one more perspective, one more story, that keeps me scrolling.
In this fear state my eye latches onto anything that affirms what I already fear — oil prices rising, food and supply chain disruptions, a protracted war, more countries being drawn in, inflation, market crashes. The mind runs ahead: what happens to me? what happens to my life?
My eyes will also latch on to anything that affirms my own view of what I believe to be true, who I believe to be right. This fuels the sense of righteousness, and anger towards the other.
In this state, I may see a statement by Marco Rubio or a Tweet from the White House about Peace through Strength, or news of the bombing of the girls school in Tehran…all this generates rage in me.
At some point here I may put my phone down, but before long i’m tempted back in.
I’m writing this as a reminder to myself as much as anything. Maybe you also experience something similar?
Because in these times especially, we are all susceptible to being hijacked. The fog of crisis distracts us even further from what’s actually happening. Warfare is also being conducted on our psyche, via social media and the attention economy.
Staying informed matters. There is undoubtedly important information we need right now — around travel, finances, how to support people in the region.
In the past I considered it my job to keep myself informed with the latest news but the questions I’m asking myself:
how much information do I really need to know to be informed? How much am I simply consuming out of these compulsive loops?
And if I do have important decisions to make, then can I be relied on making the right one for me in this state of fear/rage?
Do I need to be informed with every latest detail or be driven by anger to be of support to people who need it?
What i’m starting to realise is that the crises framing itself deceives and distracts from seeing the true picture.
Climate Crises, meta crises, poly crises, health crises.
The most visible conflict playing out in front of our eyes, in this moment the US/Israel-Iran war, is is simply our systems producing exactly as they were designed to. In other words: business as usual. It is also distracts from the deeper structural conflict that was always there.
Why crises framing is problematic
1. Crisis pulls toward reaction, not transformation.
On the podcast, Sohail Inayatullah, Futurist and geopolitical macrohistory thinker, makes the point that Crisis framing pulls us toward reaction and marginal change not transformation. When we need to solve a crises we act to deal with the immediate situation, rather than the deeper questioning of what’s causing fires to keep occurring. The issue is not just solving the crisis, Sohail says. It’s finding a better way of thinking about reality altogether.
Bayo Akomolafe posed this speculative question that deserves to be sat with in contemplation
“What if ‘crisis’ is the ‘wrong’ way to think about the challenges we face? The figure of crisis calls on panic, hasty reactions, bleeping lines and tick-tocking sounds... The modern figuration of crisis has enrolled reactionary platforms, where the urgency of a situation is the sole argument for sidestepping complexity and ‘doing something’ now…the crises lies in our response to the crises.
2. Crisis is baked into the system itself.
Sohail points at a deeper fault line: what we call a crisis is really a natural outcome of how our systems were designed. The conflict is the system functioning as intended — not a failure, but a feature.
We can see this in the financial system. According to the IMF, between 1970 and 2010 there were 145 banking crises, 208 monetary crashes, and 72 sovereign debt crises — an average of ten financial crises per year. As Stephen DeMeulenaere and I discuss in EP 21, it is the rhythm of a system that requires instability to function.
We can see this in the war economy and how it boosts GDP growth and profit for many firms.
The United States will spend over one trillion dollars on its military this year. Between 2020 and 2024, private defence contractors received approximately 2.4 trillion dollars in Pentagon contracts…This is the metabolism of a civilisation that has woven war into its economic bloodstream so thoroughly that peace, structurally speaking, represents a threat to shareholder value. (Richard David Hames Substack)
The United States Department of Defense changed its name to the Department of War. Efforts to maintain any illusion are no longer.
Sohail referred to Norwegian peace scholar, Johan Galtung, to explain why responding only to the visible crises (the direct violence stage), leaves the deeper layers untouched.
Galtung’s influential paper, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research” (1969), introduced the concept of structural violence. His insight was that violence doesn’t require a perpetrator. He argued that
“the violence is built into the structure and shows up in unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances” — meaning that if people are starving, exploited, or dying preventably, harm is occurring even if no individual is directly causing it.
The structure itself is the actor.
This is why, using Galtung’s thinking, peace represents a structural threat to economic growth.
So when leaders talk about mediation and peace talks and treaties — as they always do during a crisis — those processes, by design, do not reach the cultural beliefs and economic incentives that produced the conflict. We stop the bleeding. We restore the status quo. And the status quo produces the next crisis.
If you’re interested in diving more into concepts of peace & Galtung, I had a long conversation that touched on many of these themes.
Just so its clear, this works on both sides. The crises allowed the Iranian regime to brutally hold power and control, and justify their own war games internally and in the region.
3. crises externalises the problem & hides the deepest layer
When we say "crisis," we mean: something out there has gone wrong. Fix it. This pulls us entirely into the external — toward the missile strike, the people being harmed — and away from the interior question: what in us keeps producing this?
In my conversation with Faye Shapiro — Israeli artist and Voice therapist—we talked about Gaza and Israel, and she articulated a really important point.
Israel was founded with one defining mission: to prevent another Holocaust. But Faye observed that the way you make sure a trauma never recurs is, paradoxically, a very good way of ensuring it does.
When you resist something with that force, she said, you inevitably begin to manifest it.
A state built on the memory of persecution, sealed off from its Arab neighbours by walls both physical and psychological — this is a state that has lost its soul and is now acting from pure fear to protect itself.
This is not a political observation. It’s a psychological and spiritual one but I think it connects to Galtung’s framework. Beneath the structural layer is a cultural one, and beneath the cultural one is something older — a wound, a worldview, a story about what reality is and our searching for safety.
Part of what we mean by “crisis” deceiving us is that it keeps our gaze at the surface, a very small % of reality, and away from this deeper field — what we might call collective subconscious, or the interior conditions of civilisation. The things that don’t show up in security briefings or IMF reports but that drive everything that does.
Choosing differently: dropping fear
But we may think, how do I, reading this text from a screen, do anything about the structural issues? especially now when the fires are burning hot.
This may be a close to impossible for the millions in the region facing the reality of missile attacks. But for those of us not in the region, we have to chose on behalf of everyone.
At the core of the ‘crises’ is our inability to see the interconnected nature of reality, the collective consciousness, and the role our perception plays in it, and vice-versa.
By choosing fear and anger, we vibrate in a low and dense energy, we end up spreading more harm to the world around us. There is no space in the system for Metta (love and Kindness).
So this is where our responsibility comes in to respond differently. We may not have agency to change any part of the conflict today but we do have agency to be awake and not get drawn into the fear.
I am writing this as a reminder to myself and to openly share as I figure out a different way of staying informed without falling into the chaos itself. (Grounding is an easy way to get support and snap you back into yourself.)
The view I like to hold is that the narratives and institutions of the old world are crumbling. The elite are being exposed and they are responding in the only way they know how. Our systems were designed for war and conflict.
Let us see this clearly, not get sucked back into any other illusions, and start to act differently, starting with ourselves.
Let this one truly be a crises in its original root meaning from Greek (krisis). A turning point in the disease inflicting our planet. '
How are you coping? Welcome to share your own practises in the comments.
well said dev! fear is probably the root of many many wrong choices, silence that makes us complicit in wrong doing and allowing harm to happen to ourselves, others and the planet