Alternative Editorial: Is There War On Planet A?
How often in the course of a day do you find yourself in two minds about something? If you're lucky, it's not life threatening: a choice, maybe, between doing something healthy (maybe good for your body) and less healthy (maybe good for your purse or more fun). Both have back-stories, legitimising one choice over another.
In chasing down these stories we probably discover two very different personalities embodied in our previously singular sense of self. In this example, the first self might look pure, healthy, moral. The second might look gritty, vital, real. Like two archetypes living within the one body. In the heat of the moment we prioritise one and work out the repercussions later.
But sometimes we are faced with a dilemma that freezes us in the moment and makes it impossible to take a clear stand. At that point multiple personalities appear and we are reminded - as Human Givens teacher Pat Williams described - that none of us are a single person. Instead, each one of us is more like a soap opera: multiple characters constantly gathering around a question in our heads, fighting out the right to make a decision.
In psychotherapy, or psychology, this is helpfully simplified as “the many voices in our heads”. They can often be traced to experiences in our childhood causing us to adopt certain behaviours to please those in authority - whether it be parents, teachers, or playground leaders. As children we have to switch fast between one and the other. And we often find it difficult to integrate these personas within a coherent sense of self. It's more important that we survive the multiple calls upon our ability to show up in daily life, through adaptability.
Although these are not clear divisions, the emphasis in psychosocial therapy is to be able to recognise how these are the multiple voices of our culture, competing to have authority in our minds. While it's easy to believe that our soap opera is entirely personal - a dynamic caused by our relationships with family, school and community - psychosocial therapy helps us to see how that extends to our living within an archetypal universe.
This idea builds on Jung's archetypes (Sage, Innocent, Explorer, Ruler, Creator, Caregiver, Magician, Hero, Outlaw, Lover, Jester, and Regular Person) but then helps us name each one as a recognisable actor in our world of meaning. Standing back, naming that cast—and also the soap opera we have created for them to act in—also helps us to observe our own form of agency. It's a way to integrate the conflicting characters into a whole, evolving reality.
We are each a soap opera
For example, when we did a two-year re-imagining project with Scottish social workers, the question 'what kind of a soap opera are you?' caused a lot of hilarity and helped us to understand how each of us were facing the world. At that time the group might have been moving between memories of Upstairs, Downstairs - seeing our world as navigating fixed and hierarchical class structures - and East Enders, imagining a flatter structure governed by force. The emotionally motivated world of Ally McBeal set in a law firm compared to the emotionally demanding world of Friends set in a coffee bar is another interesting comparison from that era. Today, we might be moving between Netflix series.
All soap operas have a similar array of dynamics - a vibrant cast that often blended two or three archetypes into one character and sometimes allowed them to switch mid-stream. A ruler can suddenly become a sage or even a regular person to achieve certain ends of the plot. This dexterity helps us to build our own sense of who we are watching. How many times have we argued about what a certain character was doing, when they made a sudden bold move?
Maybe it's worth bringing all this to mind when we consider the first anniversary of the war in Ukraine. In our mainstream media there is a fairly consistent, rarely diversified stance on how to tell this tragic story. Few would disagree that it is tale of aggression (over here, Putin against Ukraine; in Russia, against NATO) that has escalated to the point where war became inevitable. As Russian forces progress against Ukraine, destroying towns and cities, committing crimes against humanity, for all to see, we have to respond in kind.
As we speak PM Sunak is calling for the right to send fighter jets to Ukraine. President Putin has stepped away from the most recent nuclear arms control pact - one of the first symbols of the end of the Cold War in the time of Mikhail Gorbachev . President Zelensky appears as a hero of our times: even King Charles seems in awe of his bravery. Who can easily voice doubts on his transformation from failing politician to foremost champion of the free world?
In this period, how many men have shifted their comfortable positions from commenting on global conflicts to actually feeling willing to fight for this cause?
On the other hand, how many of us are feeling something else at the same time? Not a protest - that's too hard to do (although these women do) But maybe something more like a parallel world of reason and emotion? This is not the debate around who was the real cause of the conflict here. But something more like: why should war be the answer to these conflicts?
World of pain
Piling into this parallel world are the stories, often told by women, of the agony experienced by the (non-military) civilians who are, for the most part, completely defenseless in this battle between nations. These are not only one set of civilians against another, but civilians who find they have a lot in common across the divide. On the one hand, Ukrainian families broken up by the call to war - mothers often having to flee the invaders with the children, forced to leave their husbands behind. On the other, Russian mothers trying to help their sons evade the call-up. Or left with the desperate task of reclaiming the shattered bodies of their boys from the battlefield when the army is too rag-tag to do that job themselves.
Lurking in the wings of this world of pain are numerous other crowded arenas of debate. One is the anger around the role of the military industrial complex. Check this piece by AG Co-initiator Pat Kane on how the arms industry has long been a casus belli in its own right. How often have we heard that making weapons means jobs? At a time of uncertainty for the global economy, a war often generates legitimacy for investing in these otherwise unaffordable bits of kit.
Another arena is the growing debate around journalism and the role of the media in conflict. During the 90s, AG founders were part of an inquiry led by Johan Galtung into how and why reports of global conflict led quickly to discussions about options for violence without enough attention being paid to peace options. At the time the subject was Kosovo, but it continued into the war in Iraq.
Scilla Elworthy, co-founder of the Oxford Research Group and Peace Plus (later thrice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize) regularly shared with us on-the-ground intelligence she was sending to Downing Street. This suggested Saddam Hussein did not have chemical weapons, with possible openings for conflict resolution. As we now know, that was tragically but willfully ignored, and the media played a big part in closing down the peace options—by never articulating them. Here is Scilla's article on Open Democracy about the alternatives that were always possible.
A third might be the increasingly acute question of masculinity - itself a civilisational issue, generating innumerable inquiries, publications and initiatives. In this field, the questions crudely put might include: is war a function of masculinity? More recently this discourse is leaning towards 'are men the real victims of patriarchy?' Another overlapping question, particularly following the women fighters in Rojava and the increase of women in the Ukrainian army: are women so different from men?
For decades, peace activists have tried assiduously to bring all these arenas of debate into a coherent discourse and offer them as an alternative to war. But they have not succeeded enough to make peace a clear choice in the heat of the moment. As for many of us on this first anniversary of the war on Ukraine, it's difficult to hold these many discourses in our head at one moment, in a way that offers a clear No to any more war - even if that is what we might be yearning for.
The call to protect victims of aggression overrides everything else—even if, in doing so, we might be sacrificing our dearest. This is the poignant reality that a soap opera can convey: the long plot builds up, leading to that episode in which lots of complex factors give way to one person getting murdered. Although we all know they could have been saved.
Structural causes
Mentioned above, Johan Galtung, known as the 'father of peace studies', developed strong distinctions between conflict resolution and conflict transformation. In the former, moving parties in conflict around a table can lead to solutions, but often stores up seeds of future conflict. Negotiation is often a zero-sum game in which the gains of one side are seen as a loss on the other. Everyone is under pressure to compromise.
Galtung also helped us to see how violence arises directly from the structure of our socio-economic-political systems rather than as the straight-forward moral option that our newspaper headlines describe. Not being aware of how structure manipulates outcomes is what makes the dilemma so painful: we can't understand why we keep doing the thing we don't want to do. It also points at the deficit of structures for peace.
For the past five years we have been slowly addressing that question and today there is a suggestion of a structure coming into view on Planet A - go to our landing page for all that. CANs as the incubators of complex, whole community thinking. Citizens Assemblies - amongst many other forms of participatory democracy - as the ability to reach decisions through relational learning. A regenerative economy as the better path to a future that will not rely on the military industrial complex for growth or jobs. [ref] A broader feminization of the system which cares for the most diverse society, including its men.
Here at The Alternative Global, we don't see our current party-political system as being capable of that model. To deliver that we need a parallel polis (see here for Alastair MacIntosh's blog). A coming together of people from all sections of society, determined to regard their differences as a source of riches and abundance, rather than toxic opposition. With the capacity to transform conflict without leading to violence: helping us all to become more than we were before, not less. A space of energy and challenge and reward.
To be honest, it would make a great soap opera.