The Age of Peace is Very Close
How can I speak of an age of peace? My nation has been almost continuously at war my entire life. One of my earliest memories is of sitting in front of the television with my father watching images of guns and tanks from the Vietnam War. He was so infuriated he leapt from his chair to shout at the television screen.
The few years of peace that followed the Vietnam War ended with the mini-wars, covert wars, and proxy wars of the Reagan-Bush era: Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Angola, Libya, Lebanon, Honduras, the Philippines, Kuwait. Then came Clinton’s wars: Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan (Operation Infinite Reach), and Iraq (Operation Desert Fox). This low-level simmer of post-Vietnam conflict finally erupted after 9/11 into the War on Terror under George W. Bush, starting in Afghanistan and Iraq (and neighboring countries), plus Somalia and the Philippines, launching the era of borderless global war. Next came Obama, who added major military operations in Libya and Syria and expanded Bush’s incessant low-level drone wars in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Trump continued most of these operations, as did Joe Biden, who contributed the proxy war against Russia via Ukraine and supported Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.
Finally we have Donald Trump, who in defiance of his numerous anti-war campaign pledges has continued his predecessors’ globalized omniwar and added a catastrophic new one in Iran. Let us also mention his campaign across Latin America, ostensibly against the drug trade: “Operation Total Extermination.”
Given this history and current events, what besides wishful thinking could inspire the declaration of an age of peace?
First, we are entering an age of peace because war isn’t working anymore. On some level, it never did work, but with the Iran war it is becoming so obvious that even Donald Trump cannot ignore it.
Pragmatic critics of America’s imperial wars are fond of observing that the United States has not waged a truly successful war since World War Two. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya… each was left in worse shape than when the war began; in none of them were the stated objectives achieved.1 Of course, to the extent that the real goals like enriching defense contractors, sowing chaos, or justifying domestic surveillance and control, then these wars succeeded admirably. Nonetheless, the aggressor would have at least liked to achieve the appearance of victory. Why was it unable to? Why can’t the world’s most powerful nation not actually win a war against far weaker adversaries? If it were just Vietnam, or just Iraq, we could dismiss it as an aberration. But every war? There must be a deeper reason why war isn’t working the way it used to.
The historical coincidence between the last “successful” war and the dawn of the nuclear age offers an important clue. The Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949 closed the era of total war. For thousands of years prior, utter destruction of the enemy was a viable possibility to resolve a conflict—obliterate civil infrastructure, decimate the population, or even kill every man, woman, and child. That all ended with the Bomb: the doctrine of mutually assured destruction and the threat of radioactive fallout and nuclear winter made total war between the United States and the USSR impossible.
Certain nations have not yet realized that victory through force is disappearing from the menu. They may have to learn the hard way.
The basic principle operating underneath mutually assured destruction is interdependence. I like to take the concept further and call it “interbeing” —the basis of peace consciousness. It means that we aren’t really separate, that our very existence is relational. In the case of nuclear war it is obvious: what we do to the other, we do also to ourselves. In the case of conventional war it is less obvious—or was less obvious.
Mutually assured destruction no longer depends on nuclear weapons. In asymmetrical warfare (as between the United States and Iran), of course the weaker party bears the brunt of the casualties and physical damage. Yet the stronger country cannot actually win. We see that now. Iran doesn’t have nukes, but it could destroy enough energy infrastructure to cripple the world industrial system. Energy shortages, frozen supply chains, plummeting food production, financial collapse, and civil unrest would quickly follow an all-out war. Two factors give Iran and similar countries that kind of leverage. First, military technology like missiles and drones is more easily available than ever. Second, the world is so tightly interconnected, so technically and economically interdependent, that damage to any of its key nodes reverberates throughout the whole system.
What happens when the simple solution of obliterating your enemy is no longer available? You have to find some form of accommodation. To do that you have to understand the situation, at least a tiny bit, from their perspective. To do that you have to acknowledge that they have a valid perspective in the first place, that they aren’t simply a pack of frothing orcs. You have to acknowledge their humanity.
It isn’t only military technology and economic interdependence that is making war obsolete. I want to say that the rising consciousness of our time is inhospitable to war, but that’s not quite right. Consciousness does not “rise” along some linear axis on which some people are more conscious than others. The question is, “Of what are you conscious?” So when I speak of rising consciousness, I mean the conscious awareness of interbeing. Or let’s call it the Mirror Principle—what we do to the other, we do to the self.
The Mirror Principle operates across every domain. We dump vast quantities of plastic into the environment—and our bodies and brains are riddled with microplastics. America wreaks violence abroad—and suffers high rates of violence at home (gun violence, domestic violence, violence to self). On a personal level, we also find that we are not immune to the radioactive blowback of our harm to others. Those we have mistreated may not take revenge, yet somehow what we have done eats at us from the inside. And the good that we do others glows within us too.
Consciousness of interbeing is growing, through our direct experiences, through the discovery of observer-dependence in quantum theory, through the teachings of ecology, through psychedelic medicines, through reacquaintance with indigenous worldviews, through revelations of UAPs and psi phenomena, through many many ways. War is utterly senseless in that consciousness. Its rationalizations ring hollow, even if we accept its geopolitical premises.
The Mirror Principle operates partly through mundane channels. For example, as the United States has destroyed whole countries’ infrastructure over the years, its own infrastructure has fallen into disrepair. That’s an obvious matter of budgetary priorities. But there is a deeper pattern operating too.
War is the logical extension of the habit of externalizing problems that are actually within. Now sometimes problems are very much external and can be solved by force, and only by force. Running away from a predator is an example of that. The leopard isn’t attacking the antelope because of the latter’s victim mentality. However, most of the time the outside problem mirrors something within. To look at that is uncomfortable, because it means altering one’s view of oneself. In the national case, to examine how the actions of our “adversaries” reflect our own actions will violate the story, forged in the aftermath of World War Two, of America the hero-nation. So it was that after the 9/11 attacks, virtually no one (at least in politics or the media) asked what US policies and imperial systems might have bred such terrorism in the first place. No, the only explanation was, “They are deranged fanatics who hate us for our freedoms.”
Projective externalizing of problems invariably leads to their neglect. If, for example, we blame Trump’s 2016 election victory on “Russian interference,” we never look at or understand the Trump phenomenon and the unrest and dispossession that fueled it. If Democrats blame his 2024 victory on the bigotry, madness, and dim wits of his followers, then they never see the grievous shortcomings of their own party. If we blame disease solely on pathogens, we never look at the diet or lifestyle that creates the terrain in which pathogens thrive. If we blame crime on those depraved criminals, we never look at the social and economic conditions—in which we participate—that breed crime. If I blame the disgusted looks I’m getting on rude people, I never will notice that I have dog poop plastered to my pants.
War mentality is victim mentality. It rejects self-responsibility and displaces it onto others. Paradoxically, hero mentality and victim mentality are one and the same. The problem is always someone else’s fault. The hero vanquishes one villain after another, externalizing all evil, never recognizing his own participation in creating the very thing he is fighting.
Note that the Hero as presented by Joseph Campbell isn’t quite the same hero I’m discussing here. Yet even the Campbellian Hero is self-evidently immature, a boy archetype not a man archetype. After his journey, the Hero must enter a next phase of maturation, in which he is presented with the limitations of his previous triumphant approach to challenges. He nonetheless reiterates it, each time to greater sorrow until finally, through the bitter gift of defeat, he looks at what he had never examined before. He understands that the parade of villains was a byproduct of his own warlike nature.
See the world in terms of enemies, and enemies will appear to fulfill that seeing. It matters little whether those enemies are objectively villainous. Regardless, the hero nation will portray them that way. It must, in order to maintain its identity.
Arguments about the personal character of Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, Ali Khamenei, etc. are diversions. The hero not only attracts, but also produces his foil. US policies of sanctions, “maximum pressure,” and missile and drone attacks discredit moderates in the targeted countries and enhance the power of militant extremists, who are then used to retroactively justify the aggression. These political dynamics illustrate a larger principle of interbeing. The world reflects back upon us who we choose to be.
Naturally, with a large part of its attention and resources focused on externalized problems, the hero nation neglects the blind spots that might otherwise be visible if it turned its gaze inward. So it is that America, once a mighty engine of invention and discovery, the leader in nearly every field of technology and industry, the standard-bearer of freedom and democracy, has fallen into such profound disgrace. The rot is easily visible in the form of dilapidated infrastructure, homeless encampments, and the baseline ugliness of the modern built environment. The less visible rot is even more serious: epidemics of chronic disease, depression, obesity, and infertility, economic precariousness, community disintegration, loneliness, child abuse, domestic abuse, and perhaps most tellingly, addiction.
None of these problems will succumb to war mentality, yet war mentality permeates every aspect of policy discourse. We wage a war on drugs, a war on terror, a war on poverty, a war on crime. We “tackle” our problems. We wage “campaigns” against them. We mobilize our forces. We fight homelessness. We battle deficits.
But terror is an emotion; drugs are a substance, and homelessness is a condition. What is there to fight with? We have to insert a proxy with which to do battle, someone to blame. Saddam Hussein! Narcotraffickers! Blackrock!
War terminology offers a framing that people understand, but it forever leads us astray by offering easy, superficial, false solutions to the problem at hand.
It is a relief to identify a culprit for one’s troubles. Then you know what to do. Then you know whom to blame. Then you know whom to bomb.
To exchange the identity of hero and villain does not undo the basic pattern. This has sometimes been the approach of the political left. America is not the hero, it is the monster. The rogue state is not Iran, it is ourselves. White people are not better than brown people, they are worse. Industry is not the benefactor of the world, it is the destroyer. Modern cultures are not superior to the indigenous; it’s the other way around. Flipping the script like this serves a useful function, which is to reveal the hero’s shadows, to fill in the untold parts of the story. The aforementioned maturation of the hero requires that he know himself as he has been. However, to reverse the roles in the good-guy/bad-guy drama does nothing to change the drama itself.
The oppressed become the oppressor, the victim becomes the abuser, the hero becomes the villain, the solution becomes the problem, endlessly cycling until we inhabit a new story.
The age of peace runs a different screenplay. The hero/villain drama, the victim-abuser-rescuer drama, the us-versus-them drama may never disappear entirely (just ask the antelope), but it will no longer be the template for understanding every conflict. We will bring other plot lines into the theater that draw on interdependency, interbeing, and the Mirror Principle. We will ask, “What are the conditions that made you who you are?” “How have I contributed to those conditions?” “What can we do together to change them?” Conflicts may still arise, but we will no longer battle cartoon versions of real people and real nations painted in the hues of our own unhealed histories.
Turning attention to the wounds and maladies that we no longer externalize, we can finally begin to heal them. The age of peace will therefore be also an age of health and an age of prosperity. All that has languished while we were busy fighting ourselves will grow strong. That is true for an individual, it is true for a family, it is true for a nation, and it is true for this earth.
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OK, I realize I’m overstating the case. One could argue that the first Iraq war and the Serbian intervention were “successful.” But the trend still holds.