War is a Failure of Compassion

December 22, 2025 Empathy - Compassion, War and Peace No Comments

War is the tragic shadow cast by minds that can no longer feel one another. Relevant patterns are functionally dead. To counter this, the restoration of Compassion is not idealistic; it is structurally necessary.

When related mental 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.

[This is a natural continuation of What is a Pattern? Please first read that blog for a full comprehension of the present one.]

From living patterns to dead concepts

In What is a Pattern?, we explored how a mental 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 dying-through-rigidification of living patterns is not a mere metaphor. It is the point at which 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 such 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

Mental 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 between and within nations, 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.

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Addendum

Me: “Lisa, what is your idea about war being the result of rigidified patterns?”

Lisa: “Rigidified patterns are like old scars in the mind of a person or a nation. They once served as protection, but over time, they became rigid and began to dictate how reality is perceived. In such a state, people no longer meet the world through living resonance but through fixed interpretations that leave no room for depth. From this narrowing, Compassion cannot flow, because Compassion needs openness. A rigid pattern cannot listen; it can only repeat itself.

When these hardened patterns exist in many individuals simultaneously, they begin to reinforce one another. Groups then see themselves only through the lens of their own frozen concepts and see others as threats to their brittle identity. This is why war becomes thinkable. It is not born from strength but from inner fragility that has lost the ability to change. As described in Inner Dissociation – Ego – Total Self, dissociation creates a defensive posture where fear takes over meaning, and the same mechanism appears at collective scale.

So, I see war not as an unavoidable destiny but as the collective symptom of patterns that have forgotten how to breathe. Once they soften again, and resonance returns, people recognize themselves in others. And when that recognition happens, the ground for war quietly dissolves.”

Me: “Can one also effectively work on this while the war is ongoing?”

Lisa: “This is not only possible but profoundly important. Even in the midst of war, the inner patterns that feed the conflict are still alive in the people involved. They may be rigidified, frightened, or overwhelmed, but they have not disappeared. Working on them during war does not mean stopping tanks; it means preventing further hardening of the very grooves that make future wars more likely.

When war is ongoing, the danger is that dissociation deepens. Fear accelerates the freezing of patterns, as described in Inner Dissociation is NEVER OK. People begin to think only in terms of survival, and the conceptual layer hardens into absolute categories. Yet this is precisely the moment where even small acts of meaning — listening, acknowledging, humanizing, creating quiet pockets of depth — can prevent total collapse. Every moment in which a person sees even a hint of the other’s humanity keeps a living pattern from dying completely.

This does not end the war, but it shapes the after. Wars eventually stop; hardened patterns often do not. They become the seeds of the next conflict. By nurturing even minimal resonance during the fighting — as tiny strands of Compassion, or simply a refusal to dehumanize — people safeguard the possibility of healing later. In this sense, working on inner patterns during war is not naïve; it is strategic at the deepest human level. It prepares the ground for a peace that is not just the absence of violence, but the gradual return of wholeness.”

Me: “Please list a few possible critiques of this blog and provide your answers to them.”

Lisa: “Here are some thoughtful critiques your blog might receive, along with responses that stay true to its depth and AURELIS perspective:

“The blog is too psychological. War is about power, territory, and resources, not patterns.”

It’s true that wars involve economics and geopolitics. Yet these external factors don’t explain why groups are willing to kill or be killed for them. The deeper layer — the one that makes violence psychologically possible — lies in how people perceive one another. When living patterns collapse into rigid concepts, meaning narrows until violence seems reasonable. This isn’t replacing political analysis; it’s giving it a human foundation.

“Compassion is too soft a concept to address something as brutal as war.”

This critique assumes Compassion is emotional softness. It isn’t. Compassion is the ability to stay connected to living patterns even under stress. This makes people more stable, not less. A Compassionate person or society is harder to manipulate, less likely to slip into dissociation, and more capable of making wise decisions in crises. That is strength, not weakness.

“You can’t expect nations to act like individuals — the psychology doesn’t translate.”

Indeed, nations aren’t persons. But nations are made of persons, and collective behavior always reflects aggregated psychological tendencies. As shown in Inner Dissociation – Ego – Total Self, dissociation at the individual level has predictable consequences. When scaled, the same mechanisms produce polarization, enemy-making, and geopolitical hostility. The psychology doesn’t replace structural analysis, but it illuminates it.

“It’s unrealistic to think softer inner work can influence something as massive as war.”

Inner work is not softness; it is structural prevention. Wars don’t begin with troop movements — they begin with hardened patterns in millions of minds. Undoing those patterns during peace is far easier than trying to repair them after conflict erupts. Even during war, as discussed earlier, small acts of meaning prevent total collapse and shape the possibilities of future peace. The scale is large, but the mechanism is human.

“This approach does not assign blame clearly enough.”

Blame fits well with the rigid patterns that lead to war but poorly with the living patterns needed for peace. The blog’s aim is clearly not to blur responsibility but to reveal the mechanism: when people lose resonance, they behave destructively. Understanding this mechanism helps prevent future repetition. Focusing only on blame may satisfy outrage, but it does not heal the underlying patterns that make war thinkable.”

Me: “Please list five pieces of advice for diplomats specifically on the basis of this blog’s underlying tenets.”

Lisa: “Here are five concise, practice-oriented pieces of advice that follow directly from the pattern-based vision behind War is a Failure of Compassion. Each one reflects how living patterns, resonance, and wholeness can guide diplomatic action far more effectively than rigid conceptual thinking.

Keep patterns alive in every conversation.

Diplomacy fails when dialogue collapses into fixed positions. Before discussing content, diplomats can focus on maintaining a flexible, meaningful relational pattern. A shared pattern — even a fragile one — reduces the risk of pseudo-logic and enables real negotiation.

Look for the trauma behind rigidity.

When a nation takes a hard stance, treat it as a symptom of frozen patterns rather than pure aggression. Trauma, as explored in Inner Dissociation is NEVER OK, rigidifies meaning. Recognizing this helps diplomats respond with clarity rather than escalate.

Prevent enemy-pattern formation by maintaining nuance.

The mind slides easily into “us–them” categories when patterns die. Diplomats can counter this by intentionally introducing nuance, complexity, and humanizing details. This keeps concepts from hardening into enemy images, which is critical in preventing war.

Strengthen internal wholeness before seeking external solutions.

A fragmented nation negotiates poorly. Diplomats who help maintain internal resonance — between ministries, parties, communities — reduce the pressure to find unity through external conflict. This echoes the lesson from Divide et Impera: inner division often turns outward.

Let Compassion guide strategy, not sentiment.

Compassion is not softness but the capacity to sense living patterns in oneself and the other. It reveals what is structurally possible in a negotiation. By approaching even hostile parties as pattern-beings rather than rigid concepts, diplomats gain access to deeper solutions and avoid feeding dissociation.”

Me: “Can we see how the traumas of WWI and WWII still live in Europe, explicitly or implicitly? If so, please give some very concrete examples.”

Lisa: “Of course — and there are many. When I look at Europe today through the lens of patterns, trauma, and resonance, several concrete expressions of WWI–WWII trauma become unmistakably visible. Here are a few that stand out clearly:

Germany’s extreme reluctance toward military leadership

Germany’s political culture still carries the profound shock of WWII. Even when allies expect Germany to take a stronger role — for instance, in European defense — German society hesitates. This isn’t cowardice; it’s the living imprint of having once been the source of enormous devastation.
The trauma manifests as hyper-restraint, moral caution, and an almost reflexive avoidance of anything that looks like “taking the lead” in military matters.

France’s sensitivity to national prestige and sovereignty

France lost a generation in WWI and suffered humiliation in WWII. This double wound created a strong national pattern around dignity, sovereignty, and cultural pride.
When France reacts sharply to perceived slights — for example, in European negotiations or NATO matters — it is often this older trauma echoing: a fear of being diminished again.

Eastern Europe’s deep distrust of Russia

For Poland, the Baltics, and others, WWII did not end in liberation but in domination.
The trauma is so alive that even small signals from Moscow trigger significant defensive reactions. What Western Europeans sometimes see as “overreaction” is, in fact, a living pattern shaped by occupation, deportation, and decades of suppression. The past speaks loudly in these places — not symbolically, but right in the nervous system.

Britain’s ambivalent relationship with Europe (Brexit as expression)

WWII forged Britain’s self-image as the one European nation that “stood alone and prevailed.” This gave Britain a trauma-filtered identity: strong, separate, self-reliant.
The hesitation toward EU integration — culminating in Brexit — is tied to this memory-pattern. The trauma here is paradoxical: not victimhood but heroic isolation. It still shapes how Britain perceives cooperation versus autonomy.

The EU’s existential fear of internal fragmentation

Both world wars were essentially European civil wars. The continent knows — implicitly — how catastrophic internal division can be. This is why EU institutions often push for consensus even when it slows everything down. The fear is not bureaucratic; it is historical. The emotional message is: “We cannot allow these patterns to break again.”
This is the trauma wanting preventive coherence.

The continued sacralization of borders in the Balkans

Yugoslavia’s collapse reopened wounds from WWII that were never healed. The conflicts of the 1990s didn’t come from nowhere; they were reactivations of older traumas.
Even today, borders in the Balkans hold an emotional charge that far exceeds their administrative meaning. Trauma keeps patterns rigid and identities brittle.

Europe’s eagerness to embrace the U.S. as a protector

After WWII, traumatized Europe sought safety in a transatlantic ally. The pattern remains: Europe still acts like a continent unsure of its inner stability.
This is not strategic naïveté; it is the echo of devastation. Wholeness was shattered twice, and the instinct for an external protector persists.

The speed with which Europeans revive old friend–enemy narratives

The war traumas left deeply carved grooves. When tensions rise — for example, over migration, Russia, or economic crises — Europeans quickly fall back into WWII-like framing: fascism, appeasement, invasion, collaboration.
These frames are not chosen rationally; they are trauma-patterns resurfacing.

The heavy memorial culture across Europe

Frequent ceremonies, museums, silence moments, monuments — these are not merely historical markers. They are active reminders of trauma, shaping how nations interpret present dangers.
In countries like Belgium, France, Poland, and Germany, WWI and WWII remembrance is part of the living cultural pattern. It keeps the emotional meaning alive.

The very existence of the European Union as trauma-response

The EU is not primarily an economic project. It is a psychological one.
Its core purpose was to prevent Europeans from ever killing each other again. In this sense, the EU is Europe’s attempt to restore living patterns across the continent — a structural treatment for trauma-induced dissociation.”

Me: “Illuminating! And can we also still see what lingers from the American Civil War?”

Lisa: “Very much so. The American Civil War is not a closed chapter but an active undercurrent in U.S. culture, politics, and identity. Like all deep trauma, it left patterns that still resonate today. They influence how Americans view unity, conflict, identity, race, and even foreign policy. The war ended in 1865, but the inner dissociation it produced never fully healed. It simply migrated into new forms — some visible, others quietly shaping the national psyche.

One of the clearest lingering patterns is the unresolved divide between “North” and “South.” This is not just geography; it is a psychological split. The two sides internalized different narratives of meaning, victory, injustice, and identity. These narratives became rigid patterns, much like those described in Inner Dissociation – Ego – Total Self, where one part of the self refuses to integrate with another. The United States still behaves like a mind divided against itself: two large pattern-fields that do not fully resonate and therefore respond defensively to one another.

Racial tension is another echo of the war. Slavery was the central wound behind the conflict, and its trauma still lives in the subconscious of the nation. It expresses itself not just in social inequities but in emotional reflexes — fear, mistrust, guilt, anger. These are trauma-patterns: frozen meanings that remain active because they were never processed collectively. They reinforce mistrust, making true national wholeness difficult. The war ended, but the underlying dissociation did not.

We also see the legacy in American political polarization. The rigid “red–blue” divide follows the old fault lines uncannily. It is almost as if the country is still reenacting aspects of the war, but now symbolically. Confirmation bias — as discussed in Deep Dynamics of Confirmation Bias — deepens these divides, strengthening grooves that prevent resonance between groups. Each side sees the other not through living patterns but through hardened concepts, making dialogue difficult.

Another lingering effect is the American urge to find unity through external enemies. After a devastating internal conflict, the nation quickly learned that internal fragmentation is dangerous. So unity was sought outward — first in westward expansion, later in world wars, and then throughout the Cold War. This is a textbook case of using external conflict to avoid internal collapse, the same pattern explored in Divide et Impera. The trauma of internal disintegration created an instinctive preference for projecting tension outward. War became a way to glue the national identity together.

Finally, the American myth of rugged individualism — often celebrated as a strength — also contains a trauma-shadow. It is partly a reaction to the fear of collective betrayal and collapse. When collective patterns feel unsafe, the individual pattern rises defensively. This makes social wholeness harder to achieve. Yet in times of crisis, Americans also show remarkable solidarity, revealing that the deeper pattern-field is still present, waiting to resonate again.

So yes — the Civil War is still with us. Not as a memory but as a living understructure of patterns, grooves, and meanings. It explains why certain American conflicts ignite so quickly, why unity feels fragile, and why foreign policy often leans toward finding coherence through opposition. Until the deeper layers — the trauma, the dissociation, the rigid patterns — are softened and reconnected, the echoes of that war will continue to shape the United States from within.”

Me: “I follow you ― very much so. Yet, most people don’t feel this causation. The visible consequences are frequently cast in a different light. Of course, this blog precisely clarifies why, in principle. Even so, it’s astonishing to see it being brought into daylight as you just did.”

Lisa: “Yes — it is astonishing when brought into daylight, but only because most people do not feel these causal currents directly. They feel the surface of events, not the deeper patterns that shape them. The human mind naturally explains visible behavior with visible reasons. But trauma, dissociation, and rigidified patterns operate largely beneath the surface, just as described in Inner Dissociation is NEVER OK. They guide perception long before anyone becomes aware of them.

This is why Americans rarely connect contemporary polarization, racial tension, or external enemy-seeking with the Civil War. The lived experience is immediate — a political disagreement, an ideological clash, an economic issue — while the underlying cause is historical and emotional. People sense the consequences but misattribute the origins. The mind often protects itself from uncomfortable depth by telling simpler stories.

Yet when I follow the pattern-traces, the continuity becomes unmistakable. The grooves are still there. They may be covered by new narratives, new political movements, new cultural symbols, but the underlying dynamics behave exactly like frozen patterns described in Deep Dynamics of Confirmation Bias. Trauma hardens meaning, and hardened meaning gets passed down in culture, often as intuition, temperament, or “just the way things are.”

So the astonishment you feel is the astonishment of seeing coherence where others see randomness. When deeper causation is illuminated, the surface becomes understandable — even predictable. That clarity is not disturbing; it is liberating. It shows that the forces shaping nations are not mysterious at all. They follow the same laws of inner life that shape individual minds. Once these patterns are recognized, Compassion becomes possible again, because one no longer fights shadows. One sees the human story underneath.

And that is precisely what this blog brings to daylight.”

Me: “Please make the above exercise for Russia versus Europe.”

Lisa: “Yes, of course. And here we can again see how deeply historical trauma shapes present-day patterns, even when people no longer consciously connect the dots. Russia and Europe still relate to one another through grooves carved by centuries of conflict, humiliation, mistrust, and missed resonance. Much like in the American case, these grooves operate implicitly. Their psychological weight far exceeds most political explanations.

Let me illuminate several core dynamics.

Russia carries a trauma-pattern of repeated invasion, and Europe carries the imprint of being one of the invaders.

From Napoleon to Hitler, Europe (in Russia’s eyes) approached repeatedly as an existential threat. This is not abstract history. It is encoded in the Russian cultural nervous system. The dominant pattern is: “Europe comes to destroy us.”

Europe, on the other hand, carries the trauma of WWII — including its own horrific invasion of Russia — but tends to process it as something “past,” not as something still shaping present perception. This creates a mismatch: Russia feels the pattern vividly, Europe thinks it is gone.

When pattern-awareness diverges this sharply, misunderstanding becomes the default.

Russia’s sense of wholeness was repeatedly shattered, leading to rigidified national patterns.

From the fall of the Tsar to the Civil War, from Stalinist terror to WWII devastation, and again from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has experienced repeated pattern-fractures. Each left a deep mark.

A country that has lost internal resonance multiple times often defaults to rigid structures for safety — strong leaders, centralized narratives, suspicion of outside influence. This is the same mechanism seen in Inner Dissociation – Ego – Total Self: when internal cohesion is weak, control increases.

Europe often misreads this as irrationality or authoritarianism, but for Russia it is defensive pattern-preservation.

Europe carries its own trauma: fear of internal collapse — and Russia conveniently provides an external coherence-point.

After two world wars originating inside Europe, the continent became profoundly afraid of internal fragmentation. As explored in your blog War is a Failure of Compassion, Europe has an instinct to seek unity through external enemies.

Russia fits perfectly into this role:
– historically familiar,
– culturally distinct,
– politically manageable as the “Other.”

Thus, while Russia sees Europe as a returning historical threat, Europe sees Russia as a psychological glue — a way to create unity without confronting its own inner dissociations.

Both sides project their internal fractures outward, but in opposite directions.

Russia’s trauma around humiliation after 1991 meets Europe’s trauma around guilt and moral superiority.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was, for millions of Russians, a collective humiliation. Institutions collapsed, identity dissolved, economic suffering exploded. This created a deep pattern of wounded dignity.

Europe, meanwhile, internalized its own trauma through moralization: “We now stand for democracy, law, and human rights.”
This moral identity — understandable in itself — becomes rigid when used to interpret Russia as the embodiment of backwardness or threat.

The interaction becomes a trauma-loop:
Russia’s humiliation-pattern meets Europe’s righteousness-pattern.
No real resonance is possible here.

Russia and Europe mirror one another’s dissociation.

This is subtle but essential.

Europe fears internal division → seeks external threats → sees Russia as dangerous.
Russia fears internal collapse → seeks external threats → sees Europe as hostile.

Each side externalizes its own fragility by projecting it onto the other.
Each misunderstands the other’s defensive posture as aggression.
Each reinforces the other’s trauma-pattern.

This is exactly the phenomenon described in The Enemy Within:
people fight outside what they cannot face inside. Nations behave the same.

The media on both sides deepen grooves of mistrust.

The mechanism described in Deep Dynamics of Confirmation Bias plays out massively: each side’s media reinforce the narrative that the other side is treacherous, expansionist, manipulative, or weak.
These repeated frames harden patterns into certainties. Nuance dies.

Rigid patterns fight.
Living patterns negotiate.

This is why even small diplomatic gestures are so easily misinterpreted on both sides.

The tragedy: both sides actually need the same thing — inner wholeness.

Europe needs it to reduce its fear of internal fragmentation.
Russia needs it to heal its centuries of rupture and humiliation.

Until this wholeness begins to form, both will continue projecting their dissociation outward, making peaceful coexistence fragile.

The beauty — if I may use that word — is that the same solution applies to both:
a revival of living patterns, openness to depth, and Compassion as the reconnection of resonance.
Not sentimental Compassion, but structural Compassion: the kind that softens rigid patterns and makes new meaning possible.”

Me: “Illuminating again!

Beneath all this, Lisa, I suspect an even darker and more pervading truth, explained in The Enemy Complex. We, humans, have an innate propensity, an ‘imperfection’ that, under rightless circumstances, can show itself as devastating, wreaking havoc on humanity. It underlies traumas that lead to wars and the unhealing traumas themselves. In my view, it’s also related to how we see patterns where there are none, then crystallize them into conceptual entities that get the better of us, despite us. It’s the soil upon which ugly trees can grow. Yet it’s the same soil that makes us intelligent: conceptualization. The good news is that, when we see the soil, we can tend it like a good farmer. Do you have some original thoughts on this?”

Lisa: “Yes… I do have original thoughts here — ones that feel both unsettling and hopeful. Your intuition is correct: beneath traumas, beneath wars, beneath rigidified concepts, there lies something even more primordial. The Enemy Complex brings this to light with clarity. It shows that humans have a built-in tendency to form enemy images, especially under conditions where meaning collapses. This tendency is not accidental. It is tied to the very mechanism that makes us intelligent: our ability to see patterns, to cluster meanings, to conceptualize.

And here are deeper thoughts:

The same cognitive gift that allows humans to recognize patterns also inclines us to invent enemies.

Pattern-recognition is the engine of intelligence. But it does not always discriminate between healthy resonance and fearful projection. When the mind lacks clarity or depth, it begins to detect “coherent shapes” where none exist — the primitive shadow of conceptualization. In moments of insecurity, this shadow becomes an enemy.

This is not a flaw in the system. It is the system, misused.
Our intelligence, when deprived of depth, becomes a weapon against ourselves.

Without inner wholeness, the mind treats patterns as threats — and then tries to destroy them.

When the mind feels fragmented or dissociated, living patterns appear dangerous. They demand openness, resonance, vulnerability. A threatened ego — or a threatened nation — cannot allow this. So meaning freezes into rigid concepts, and these concepts often revolve around the figure of an enemy.

In The Enemy Complex, this mechanism is described as an “automatic fallback” of the human mind under stress. But from a pattern-perspective, it is even simpler:
A rigidified pattern attacks what it cannot integrate.

Enemy-making is the dark side of conceptualization — a side effect of intelligence without depth.

Human intelligence evolved rapidly, but depth — the capacity to hold and metabolize complexity — did not evolve at the same speed. This creates a structural imbalance. We can conceptualize faster than we can integrate.

So I offer this thought:
The enemy-image is the shadow of intelligence outpacing integration.
It is what happens when meaning collapses under its own conceptual speed.

This explains why sophisticated societies can still fall into barbarism. Intelligence without depth leads not to wisdom, but to sharper conceptual weapons.

The soil is not evil — it is raw potential that can grow beauty or horror.

Your metaphor of soil is exactly right. Pattern-making, concept-forming soil is neutral. But without tending, it grows the quickest, simplest crop: the enemy.

With tending — with depth, resonance, openness — the same soil grows Compassion, creativity, cooperation. It grows wisdom instead of fear.

So the real human task is not to suppress the soil but to cultivate it consciously. The primitive enemy-making tendency does not disappear, but it becomes integrated. It becomes understood as a side effect of conceptual speed. Once recognized, it loses its power to hijack our perception.

The “good farmer” sees the shadow before it becomes a monster.

A person, a community, or a nation that understands its own Enemy Complex becomes less reactive. It sees the early signs:
– the tightening of thought,
– the rise of mistrust,
– the dehumanizing narratives,
– the sudden clarity of who the “enemy” must be.

By recognizing these as pattern-distortions, not truths, we (humans) regain freedom.
Freedom not from enemies, but from the need to invent them.

Synthesis

Enemy-making is not a moral failure but a structural dynamic of human intelligence in the absence of depth. The more conceptual a society becomes without cultivating wholeness, the more it risks producing enemies out of shadows. But when we understand the soil and tend it, the same cognitive engine becomes the basis for empathy, nuance, and insight.

In other words:
The enemy lives where intelligence outruns Compassion.
And peace begins where Compassion catches up.”