The opposite of war is not peace.
It is the human ability to meet threat without becoming less human.
I have been thinking about that partly through my clinical work, and partly through something much smaller and more personal: a recent attempted romance scam.
What struck me was this:
in the face of someone who may have been trying to deceive me, use me, or take from me, I still had a choice about the kind of man I became in that moment.
I could become naive.
I could become dysregulated.
I could become ashamed.
I could become cruel.
I could become seduced by story.
I could lose contact with reality.
Or I could try to remain myself:
kind, but not gullible
clear, but not brutal
boundaried, but not dehumanising
realistic, but not cynical
aware, but not panicked
firm, but still human
That feels important to me.
Because perhaps this is also the larger civilisational question.
What would human beings have to become for threat to stop recruiting us into hatred, hardness, domination, and the need to turn other people into enemies?
The question is not only whether I can protect myself.
It is whether I can do so without becoming smaller, harder, or less human.
Without letting ‘the enemy’ win by reducing me to being like them.
That, perhaps, is one of the deepest freedoms we have.
In psychotherapy and coaching, I often see the long afterlife of threat.
A traumatised person cannot always metabolise fear, grief, shame, or helplessness.
So those states get passed on:
through silence,
through hardness,
through volatility,
through emotional absence,
through the inability to soothe,
through the inability to stay human under pressure.
And if enough people are shaped that way, whole societies become more recruitable by fear, grievance, obedience, and dehumanisation.
So perhaps one of the deepest anti-war projects is developmental.
Not making people softer.
Making them stronger in a different way:
harder to deceive
harder to recruit
harder to dominate
harder to break
and less willing to surrender their humanity in the presence of threat
That is not passivity.
That is maturity.
And I suspect it may be one of the most important forms of strength we can build.