The founding member of the Board of Peace and recipient of the inaugural FIFA peace prize has just launched a bombing campaign against an independent sovereign nation. To be fair, it’s a sovereign nation not renowned as a bastion of peace or freedom. The Iranian regime has oppressed its population quite savagely this year. For many years it has been a supporter of international terrorism, a source of instability in the Middle East, and will not relinquish it’s right, as they see it, to build a nuclear weapon. The reason this is so important is because the Iranian regime does not believe Israel should exist as an independent nation, and the possession of just one such weapon threatens Israel’s very existence. These are big issues, and I suspect simply resorting to violence, at this time, will only lead to more violence. But as I wrote last year, you cannot fight fire with fire, more violence isn’t the answer we seek. Will the death of Ayatollah Khamenei lead to a greater conflict as did the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, or will things settle back down in a few weeks, as a new Iranian regime takes charge and negotiates more seriously with the USA. We will have to wait and see.
What I can see is that the lessons of the past are not being learned by the people, on all sides, who are making important decisions. The pages of history drip with the blood of those killed directly by, or as a consequence of past wars. Some people claim that it is in our nature to fight and kill, but this is not true. In his 2025 book Goliath’s Curse, Luke Kemp illustrated how prior to the advent of the state, warring and killing were very rare events in human history. People were then, as we can be today, immensely sociable, intelligent, altruistic, and able to learn quickly from one another. And pre-agricultural societies were much more egalitarian than we are today. Looking back now we think of agriculture and the states that came with it as civilisation. A popular view expressed by Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 book Leviathan is, “[Without government life was] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But this says more about Hobbes than it does about human nature. As it happens, we are only now returning to the heights (a good measure for physical health) our hunter gatherer forebears achieved. Agriculture and the states made possible by it have had a detrimental effect on human lives, one we are only now beginning to recover from. As hunter gatherers, if someone tried to dominate you, you simply moved away. But because of agriculture, people stayed in one place, and only then did states begin to form. The necessary ingredients for state formation are, lootable resources, like rice or grain, and monopolisable weapons, like bronze axes, spears, and swords. Though today we also have new lootable resources like money and oil, and much more dangerous monopolisable weapons. Because humans do have a tendency towards social competition, with these state forming ingredients come dominance hierarchies, where the rich dominate the poor, and men dominate women. These dominance hierarchies then attract, what is known as the dark triad of psychology, the narcissists, psychopaths, and Machiavellian. Young men are trained in tactics and discipline to use the weapons which the state has monopolised. States then cage their land and wage war on other states for resources, ideology, or simply prestige. This has been our history for 5,000 or so years, but this is not us, and does not need to be our future, particularly that we now know what we are doing. In effect you could say ‘elite’ dominance has been our past and true civilisation is actually in our future. But only if we do learn from the past and change our societies.
Albert Einstein did not say, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This is most likely attributable to American feminist writer Rita Mae Brown. Whoever said it, it sums up what we are doing. But, when Albert Einstein was asked what weapons will be used in World War 3, he did say, “I don’t know. But I can tell you what they’ll use in the Fourth – rocks.”
So how do we learn from the past, so that we can change the way we live on this planet and stop using violence to solve problems? The first thing we need to do is to dispel the idea that we are naturally violent. Yes, we are capable of violence, and we do socially compete, but that does not make us inherently violent. We are naturally altruistic and dominance aside trend towards egalitarian societies. We also need to recognise that it is these dominance hierarchies, and the city/nation states we have created as social structures that instigate war and violence through all manner of justifications. One common justification that is still used today is the sense that the people we are fighting are other than us, not even human. Start to see everyone else on this planet as human, and worthy of your respect and of personal safety in your presence. Let go of your fears, fears of other people, fear of scarcity, fear of domination, fear of ridicule, and fear of death. But this isn’t about rolling over either. This is about the allowance to be who you are from a place of confidence and self-assurance, whilst allowing other people to do the same. This still means we will have to find ways to resolve conflicts short of violence, which will require more imaginative thinking than we have used heretofore. But I think we can do it, the European Union is one example of how it has been done on this planet to date. Another thing we can do is reduce inequality in our world. But we can only do this if we first believe that we can, at the very least let’s start there. And of course, it will help if those of us fortunate enough to live in democracies, stop electing people to high office who are shrouded in the dark triad of psychology.
“Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress” Mahatma Gandhi
