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 dead. 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 the previous blog, What is a Pattern?]

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.”