Peace Through Strength?
This has been the winning belief for centuries driving our minds and systems. But as our planet shifts is this still the winning story? The space is open for us to reimagine what peace means for us.
The war that has been on the precipice for decades has begun. Israel and Iran shooting ballistic missiles at each other sans proxy. The United States promptly joining in on the act in support of Israel.
Of course, this is the latest bubble in the broth of forever wars. Millions of Palestinians in Gaza subject to a genocide. Elsewhere, we still have Ukraine, Myanmar... its never stopped really.
We’ve seen it all before. Its a script so old. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Venezuala, the list goes on. Yes, here I’m referring to the American conquests as the global hegemon of our time but we can also speak of Great Britain and other colonisers of the past several hundred years. We can also speak of the BRICS, the so-called leaders of the Global South, with their own domestic and regional colonisation missions and wars.
We are exhausted with this game.
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"Peace Through Strength”
Scrolling through Instagram an Israeli friend’s post showed up on my feed with this caption “Peace comes from Strength” as a justification for “bombing Iran, Lebanon, Gaza to stone age.”
It reminded me of the beliefs that we hold in our interplay with the world.
We kill leaders of some countries because we believe it will make us feel safe.
We kill entire groups of people in the hope that without their presence on the earth we may finally feel safe. The ‘We’ i’m referring to here is our dominant discourse, systems, and institutions.
As a freshman student of International Relations in the U.S. we read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War
“The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must”
It was a sharp and seemingly inarguable law of nature that stuck inside me like a jabbed knife. A foreign object that felt necessary to stay lodged in. It justified the devastation around me.
We also read parts of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.
"life is short, nasty, and brutish…
My fellow IR students and I internalised this as truth about life as freshman embarking on a degree in global politics.
The Hobbes view on the world is well-known. That we are driven by fear and self-interest and in a chaotic world only the threat of violence can ensure order.
I dont claim Hobbes is wrong. But his view cannot be a complete one. Yes, fear and self interest play a part. But so does love and joy. Selflessness, generosity, and kindness also orders our society without a threat of force. The forest is made up of competition but also collaboration.
Yet this limited view is baked deep into our systems and we swim in this soup. Each of us constructing our own reality field informed by our own thoughts, beliefs, contributing to one large collective field.
For the last several hundred years at least (Hobbes published Leviathian in the late 15th century) these beliefs have been ingested and propagated around the world through colonisation and globalisation. Through universities, through media, popular culture, etc.
The belief that humans are separate from each other, rational actors who only act in self interest, is the basis of our modern economic and political systems.
This is page 1 in an Econ 101 text book.
You can hear Senator Ted Cruz spill his code in his recent interview on Iran with Tucker Carlson.
You cannot argue with this cold, hard reality. The logic of the dark forest.
In the dark forest, this is the winning strategy.
In this era “peace” came from strength. The nuclear bomb brought us “peace”. I’m not saying we done need national defense—but when war becomes the engine of the global economy, a means in itself rather than a last resort, we have an imbalance.
This is a report from Brown University:
Over half the annual Pentagon budget – hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars per year – goes to private companies, especially weapons manufacturers. This high rate of spending yields a cycle of political power: companies receive large contracts, which are often spread throughout multiple states, enabling the contractors to seem indispensable. The largest contractors spend millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions to ensure that military spending remains high and that they continue receiving lucrative contracts.
What is the track record of peace from strength?
Today a quarter of the world’s population is affected by war. The earth devastated from resource exploitation, chemicals, and other 1st and 2nd order effects of war.
Where is the peace? How much more do we have to fight?
But what if our world is changing. Transforming inside us and around us.
It is evident the power and institutions of the West are on the wane. With each war over the past few decades the illusions attached to the myth weaken. Today, trans-atlantic media does not have the kind of narrative control to manufacture consent like it once did. Yet its leaders attacked anyway. Peace comes from strength after all.
But the winning strategy of the past no longer has quiet the same effect. You can feel it. I can feel it. Even in the US this is being questioned like never before.
When I spoke to Faye Shapiro on the podcast she had a lot of interesting insights on the situation in Israel. She is Israeli and lived most of her life there. I’ve linked directly to point we start talking about this (starting at the 60 minute mark for about 15 minutes).
Energetic shifts are taking place and we don’t know how to deal with it. Reality is calling us on to lean more into the feminine, into the nature, into the ground. The Israeli High-Tech nation has become devoid of soul and disconnected to the land.
The scale of transformation i’m talking about is civilisational and cosmic
Systemic shifts that occur over 500 and 1000 year cycles. Epistemological shifts that occur i.e. a fundamental change in how we know, what we consider valid knowledge, and how we relate to reality. Profound shifts in consciousness that change the field of reality. A rebalancing from a masculine heavy culture to one more balanced between masculine and feminine. We are not taught to recognise this because our current epistemology does not have space for it, but ancient traditions from the Mayan calendar to Vedic astrology point to. I am not a medium but I speak to friends who are plugged in and it rings through in my experience with life so I feel like sharing this here.
So back to the winning logic of the dark forest ‘peace through strength’.
Michel Bauwens in his talks on civilisation transitions raises an interesting question of seasonality and strategy.
The strategy we chose to interact with the world and affect change can be one of three buckets: pre-season, seasonal, and post-seasonal. Naturally, you want to be in-season if you want to have the best possible success.
If we hold the assumption that the old system has run its course and we are amidst a transition to a new system. As Michel does. Macrohistorians such as Spengler and Sorokin do. This is the Light Forest view too.
Then we see the present situation in a fresh light. We are in chaos right now because our leaders and the mainstream is operating on the old myths and logic, as a new field is emerging. Hobbes and the many generations of leaders after him may have been seasonal but our current leaders and politics are post-seasonal.
I think we are in the liminal space between a new season coming in, but with each day we are getting closer. We are in the cracks.
I dont claim to know how it will play out in the coming weeks, months, and years. But this time feels different. The US is dealing with core identity crises within and the collective Nato-West is no longer as important economically. The BRICS civilisation states like India may offer alternative like Sanathan Dharma in rhetoric, but their actions are devoid of Dharma.
The space is open and inviting us in.
For us in the Light Forest we want to live with unconditional love. This means loving all parts of ourselves, light and dark. Our history is undeniably littered with violence and war that goes back thousands of years. But we do not need to be trapped by the past.
What will be the new myths that might take root that show us a different path to peace? That ones that can hold both the dark and light, and remind us of our interconnected nature and allow us to hold ourselves with more compassion and love.
Strength through peace?
It’s interesting that Chinese philosopher Mozi, living during the warring states period, before the Han Dynasty, attributed war and conflict to the lack of love (仁爱). This is in sharp contrast to Hobbes over a 1000 years later.
When might we see an attempt by a nation or a people to try responding from new myths? My personal hope is that we see this in Taiwan in its resistance to the PRC unification dream. The seeds and culture are there. Perhaps I will expand more on this in another post.
We do not need to wait for a new myth to be force fed to us. We can enquire for ourselves and access our own truth. This is how we shift to Light Forest world.
Here are a few reflection questions. Treat them as meditations and ask the deepest part of you:
What does peace feel like to you? (stress on the feeling of peace not definition)
When have you felt such states of peace and in what conditions did they arise?
Thank you for reading and engage. I invite you to share this article with a friend and help this forest grow.