The People We Would Need to Become
Final post in this short series on what kind of human development might make war, domination, and dehumanisation less likely to succeed.
Someone once told me about a previous generation of their family.
A man and woman had built a good life:
children,
professional success,
a large house in the country,
land they farmed.
Then war came.
The Nazis passed one way.
The Soviets passed the other.
Their house was seized and turned into a school.
Their land was turned into a housing development.
They were sent to Siberia, stripped of everything.
Later, when they finally returned, they would sometimes say:
you live on my land
your school is on my land
What stays with me is not only what the aggressors did.
It is what everyone else had to do internally for this to become normal.
Their neighbours moved onto stolen land.
Parents sent their children to school in their neighbours’ confiscated home.
Teachers taught there.
Officials administered it.
Tradesmen repaired it.
Managers managed it.
And whole communities found ways to call it unfortunate, rather than wrong.
That is the question that stays with me.
What has to happen inside ordinary people to let them go along with this?
Some combination of fear.
Silence.
Obedience.
Self-protection.
Moral numbing.
Rationalisation.
The wish not to know.
The wish not to pay the cost of resisting.
That is why resilience to oppression is not only military or political.
It is psychological.
It requires people with enough personal power to remain fully human under pressure.
Not power over others.
The power not to be easily terrified,
not to be easily deceived,
not to be easily divided,
not to be easily recruited into hardness, hatred, or moral sleep.
Perhaps that is one of the deepest costs of war trauma travelling down the generations.
It does not only come after war.
It can become one of the psychological conditions that makes future war more likely.
Not the war to end all wars.
The wounded ancestor of the next one.
So perhaps one of the great civilisational tasks is this:
to grow human beings mature enough to notice what is happening,
feel the injustice,
contain the fear,
think clearly,
and still take measured action.
In ourselves.
In our children and grandchildren.
In the people we lead, teach, employ, manage, and influence.
Because one day it may be your land.
Your house.
Your child.
And then you will need the people around you to be capable of more than silence.
So perhaps the final question in this series is not only what aggressors do.
It is this:
what are you doing to grow your own psychological and emotional maturity?
And where in your life are you still making compromises just to go along?