War is a Failure of Compassion

December 1, 2025 Empathy - Compassion, War and Peace No Comments

War is the tragic shadow cast by minds that can no longer feel one another. The restoration of Compassion is not idealistic; it is structurally necessary.

When people’s living patterns revive, war no longer seems logical. Peace does not need to be imposed. It comes from the natural coherence of human beings who know they share more than what divides them.

From living patterns to dead concepts

In the previous blog What is a Pattern?, we explored how a pattern emerges when outer structure meets inner meaning. Patterns feel alive because they resonate. They connect. They allow nuance. They give human beings the sense that others are different and yet somehow part of the same wider field. But when this resonance collapses, patterns lose their vitality. They freeze into concepts that no longer breathe. Once this happens, people begin to see the world through narrow categories rather than through living meaning. And from these deadened concepts, hostility becomes strangely easy. This process echoes insights from Inner Dissociation – Ego – Total Self, where the ego isolates itself and loses access to depth.

The death of living patterns is not a mere metaphor. It is the point where people no longer perceive each other’s humanness. When nuance disappears, compassion cannot take root. War begins here — at the moment when resonance is replaced by rigidity and when connection gives way to separation.

The breakdown of rational resonance

In What is a Pattern?, we ended by noting that depth makes things rational and logical. When patterns resonate, the mind naturally organizes the world in a meaningful way. But when resonance collapses, logic collapses with it. What remains is pseudo-logic — a reasoning that seems internally consistent but is based on fear, fragmentation, and conceptual rigidity. This pseudo-logic makes war appear justified even when it is self-destructive.

A culture trapped in pseudo-logic repeats the same defensive patterns again and again, convinced that each escalation is necessary. This mirrors what happens within individuals in Inner Dissociation is NEVER OK, where dissociation shrinks the mental world until only harsh interpretations remain. When nations behave like dissociated egos, they too lose the ability to see the whole. They cling to simple stories and divide the world into safe and unsafe, us and them. And once this divide is accepted, war starts to feel inevitable.

Trauma as the rigidifier of patterns

Trauma freezes what once was fluid. This holds for individuals and for societies. A traumatized nation carries grooves of fear, humiliation, and mistrust that easily harden into enemy-concepts. Living patterns – which could have fostered understanding – are replaced by fixed interpretations of the world. The experience becomes similar to the deep grooves described in Deep Dynamics of Confirmation Bias, where repeated emotional intensities make certain interpretations unavoidable.

Collective trauma, especially trauma connected to violence or humiliation, is a powerful rigidifier. It prevents societies from sensing the humanity of others and often from sensing their own. When trauma dominates perception, the capacity for Compassion weakens. War then becomes the tragic continuation of trauma by other means.

An attempt to break another’s patterns before one’s own break

A deeply original and unsettling insight emerges here. When a group senses that its own internal patterns are shaky or near collapse, it may try to break another group’s patterns first. This is not conscious malice but a defensive reflex: an attempt to stabilize one’s own identity by destabilizing someone else’s. This dynamic aligns with the mechanisms described in The Enemy Within, where inner conflict seeks expression outward.

It is a tragic movement. Instead of restoring resonance inside, a society projects its fear outward and tries to fracture another group’s coherence. But breaking another’s pattern never restores one’s own. War becomes a displaced attempt at inner repair — an attempt doomed to fail because it deepens dissociation rather than healing it.

Civil war versus external war

Civil war represents the total collapse of internal resonance within a group. It is the moment when people can no longer perceive each other as part of one shared pattern-field. Because this collapse is terrifying, societies intuitively avoid it. One way – although deeply unhealthy – is to shift the tension outward. The logic becomes: “Better to fight an enemy out there than risk falling apart in here.”

This psychological dynamic is visible in many historical contexts. It echoes ideas from The Fate of Humankind, where fragmentation and flatness lead groups to search for identity anchors outside themselves. When internal disunity becomes too threatening, external conflict becomes a false source of unity. War becomes a substitute for wholeness — a way to avoid facing internal fractures.

Example 1: the United States

After the American Civil War (1861-65), the nation carried immense unprocessed trauma. The wounds were too deep to resolve quickly, and the identity fractures remained vivid. In this context, fighting external enemies became a way to avoid renewed internal conflict. The nation found coherence by projecting danger outward. Wars abroad created unity at home, at least temporarily.

This pattern repeated for generations: outer conflict replaced inner healing. A rigid groove formed. War felt like a stabilizing structure. The mechanism resembles the dynamic in Divide et Impera, where creating external tension helps mask internal division. But masking is not healing. The internal patterns remain brittle, waiting for deeper repair.

Example 2: Europe

Europe endured two self-inflicted catastrophes in the twentieth century. The trauma of WWI and WWII destroyed much of the inner coherence between European peoples. Afterward, Europe sought unity not from within but by adopting a shared external enemy pattern. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union served as this pattern, offering psychological cohesion that Europe could not generate on its own.

In recent years, as internal divisions reappear, Europe has again sought unity through external adversaries: Russia, Islam, and, potentially, China. The structure is clear: when inner wholeness is weak, external enemies provide a temporary sense of togetherness. Yet this sense is fragile and dangerous. It is built on fear rather than Compassion. And as The Fate of Humankind suggests, such fear-driven coherence cannot sustain a peaceful future.

Media as accelerators of dissociation

Modern media amplify precisely the tendencies that lead toward war. By thriving on outrage, simplification, and conflict, they encourage dissociated interpretations of the world. This reinforces confirmation bias, deepening grooves. As these deepen, patterns lose their flexibility, and concepts harden into rigid categories.

People are then guided not by living resonance but by repetitive interpretations that make hostility seem reasonable. The media do not create war, but they make war-thinking easier by killing nuance. They amplify dissociation in those who are already dissociated. A society inundated with such media becomes less capable of Compassion because Compassion requires openness, and openness requires living patterns.

Teaching children Compassion

Preventing war begins long before any political negotiation. It begins with how children learn to meet themselves and others. Children who grow up with Compassion – real Compassion, not mere kindness – learn to sense the living patterns in other people. This gives them resilience, not fragility. They can withstand fear without collapsing into rigid concepts. They can encounter differences without perceiving a threat.

Such children become adults who are not easily manipulated by fear or simplistic narratives. They retain a sense of depth even under challenging circumstances. They carry the seeds of peace within themselves because they remain connected to wholeness. Compassion makes them strong in ways that militaristic thinking cannot fathom.

Restoration of resonance

Compassion is not an emotion or a moral stance. It is the reopening of resonance where patterns have collapsed. It reconnects people with their own depth and with the depth of others. When concepts become too rigid, Compassion softens them. When patterns die, Compassion revives them.

War is the failure of this movement. War is the endpoint of dissociation — the moment when a society has lost contact with its own wholeness and no longer sees the wholeness of others. In that state, Compassion cannot circulate. The task, then, is to restore resonance before it fails entirely. Peace is not achieved by force or deterrence but by cultivating wholeness at every level of human life.