I started thinking about writing this as I was getting off the train this morning, two years after the Middle East exploded again in violence.
In the crowd on the ramp I watched the backs of heads in front of me, popping up and down as they descended from the platform in the morning sun, hair and skin of different colours and shapes illuminated in gold.
Wherever on earth your genes are from, the back of your head is vulnerable, isn’t it? There were so many of them, bobbing almost comically.
And a small voice inside me said: what if someone opened fire on us right now? There would be nowhere to run.
And the Dad of my mind, used to dealing with the small voice, said well, then we’d be stuffed! But come on, who’d shoot at us? Here in Melbourne? And why would they do that?
This isn’t the Middle East, said the Dad of my mind.
And so on with my ordinary Melbourne day I went, here in safety, among millions of people who will probably not shoot at me. Among millions who vote, pay tax and generally drive safely. Millions who live in peace.
If we all have similar genes spread over tens of milennia throughout the world – hence the different hair – how can a peaceful Melbourne and a violent Middle East exist on the same globe?
Can we really blame human nature for the cycle of violence there? And for yet again another global rise of fascism?
I’ve been thinking about this since I started reading Rutger Bregman’s Humankind. Its main contention is that we aren’t all murderers waiting to happen.
Yes you read that correctly. Aren’t.
The pale stale myth of Veneer Theory – that we are all evil under a veneer of civility – has long served capitalism and fascism very well, but that doesn’t make it true.
The vast majority of humankind is kind. We just want to get up, go do something peaceful and not too meaningless, and come home to love and sleep. Bregman lays out convincing evidence of this peaceful nature of ours.
I was thinking today, after surviving the train station ramp without being shot at, that Melbourne is one of many places on earth that serve as proof that peaceful cohabitation is possible. That there isn’t more of it – World Peace, essentially – is down to a small number of people. A warmaking minority.
Billions want peace. People with billions at their disposal (money, populations, media reach) do not.
We are let down by so few with power over so many. Only a tiny warmaking minority of humanity wants to control us and make us kill each other.
But that tiny minority somehow keeps this huge peaceful majority split into pieces scattered across the globe.
Maybe, I thought, Divide and Conquer is not just military strategy. Maybe warmakers can do this by exploiting the human trauma system that buys our survival of adversity at painful prices for our bodies, minds and relationships.
This is my wheelhouse as a trauma therapist: under traumatic stress our memories fragment, sometimes even our selves do. The system works brilliantly, keeps us alive, but not healed.
The fragmenting keeps us ever-vigilant. On we go in pain, always ready to fight or flee. Surviving, but not thriving.
So too at the global scale, where entire populations are shaped over generations by trauma of all kinds: war, disaster, disease, famine, poverty and the smaller scale but more damaging interpersonal traumas like childhood sexual abuse and family violence, which are more common in more stressed populations.
Trauma affects who gains power over those populations.
Want to prevent world peace? Just keep traumatising and so fragmenting the world’s peaceful majority and you can make all the war you desire.
Add in the fragmenting power of social media and we have never been more fragmented.
Thus do the warmakers keep the pieces of the world’s peaceful in isolation, each piece wary and suspicious of the other pieces.
It used to be just the piece in the next county or country, across the imaginary border drawn up by warmakers past, but now the technology can be manipulated so we have more borders than ever, more ways to other the peaceful stranger towards the violent fantasy of them we are sold.
We could sigh and say it was ever thus.
But it wasn’t.
Humans evolved to cooperate when there was enough to eat, and only to compete and fight each other when there wasn’t enough to eat.
There is now comprehensively enough to eat on this planet.
The warmakers know this. They want us to believe this is how it has to be, that violence is who we are and have always been.
What – to put it professionally – a crock of shit.
I don’t know how to fix this, but I refuse to be told it has to be like this.
It does not have to be like this. Please repeat and remember.
Otherwise we start assuming this awfulness is just who we are, and that’s it, we’re done.
The warmakers triumph.
So.
What will we the peaceful in pieces do for the peace that so many of us everywhere desire and deserve?
How do we resist our further fragmentation by the violent power-grabbing few and their ever-more powerful technology?
Can enough of us get it together in time to make a more peaceful world?
A world where more of us can descend a ramp in the morning sun not thinking about getting shot, but just thinking about lunch, or sport, or the weekend? Or going home to love and sleep?
Addition 16/12/25: time for some answers
I think we can. I dare to think we can. Because in my work I see what happens when new connections are made and grown.
When fragments come together, old trauma frozen in time – as if it’s happening over and over again – can be released by our brains to join the rest of our history. In the past. Where it belongs.
We need to belong to survive, and as fragmented groups our shared unprocessed trauma is a powerful magnet in awful times. United by a frozen misery our nervous systems can’t let go of, we will do anything for each other – within that group.
But to belong to our planet as a species? We need the past to be the past. We need to be united by hope for the future of this blue speck in the dark.
And for that we need to make connections beyond our fragmented little groups, so we build trust with other members of the world’s peace-desiring majority.
So we feel safer together.
Many powerful people – mostly men, yes, but also mostly traumatised men – do not want this. Their trauma unhealed meets with their power to keep us at war.
You and I don’t have that kind of power. But we want peace, and in this we are not powerless.
Claim what you can of your peace. Heal what you can of your own trauma. There is more trauma-informed wisdom, therapy and care available now than ever.
Defy the culture of scarcity and othering that drives consumption, competition and petty tribalism.
Dare to connect with others, in intimate local groups but also in networks powered by shared hope and desire for peace; gathering is the oldest power we have.
Dare even to connect within yourself. That’s where love for others really begins. And wonderfully, where that ends is…in peace.
Because peace comes from healing. From pieces of us brought together and held there by the love of us.
Stubborn, ceaseless love, that will hold our pieces together when we are gone.
Imagine that, our kids’ nervous systems resting in our peace, the peace of the living we made and left behind for them.
Resting in peace you don’t have to wait to die for.
That’s possible. I refuse to believe it isn’t.
#psychiatrying
My Doctor's Handwriting 