Beneath every headline war lies a deeper, unacknowledged conflict: the ego's battle against honest self-examination. External wars, geopolitical crises, and civilizational collapse are not separate problems but expressions of the same unexamined inner condition. True resolution does not come from diplomacy or technology but from turning inward and confronting the restless, self-deceiving ego that generates conflict at every scale, from individual anxiety to global destruction.
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Originally published in The Sunday Guardian on 22 mar '26
There is a war that every human being is losing, and it is not the one making headlines. Missiles strike oil fields in the Middle East, and within days the consequences travel: energy prices spike, supply chains fracture, and LPG cylinders quietly vanish into black markets before they reach the families who need them. A news channel runs the footage on loop, part alarm, part spectacle, while somewhere a trader books his profits. This is not an aberration. Every war in history has produced its class of sudden winners; the profiteer and the arms manufacturer are not exceptions to the system but its most honest expression. The ego, operating at every scale simultaneously, extracts what it can from the destruction it either causes or watches with interest.
The operating premise of statecraft, that nations have interests, interests conflict, and war requires management through diplomacy and deterrence, has been in place as long as statecraft has existed. It has produced an unbroken succession of wars. Not because it is entirely wrong, but because it addresses the symptom while two other wars proceed untouched: the war within each human being, the unresolved conflict between what the ego is and what it insists on being taken for; and the war of civilisational self-destruction, the slow erosion of the systems that sustain life on this planet, advancing without an enemy to name, requiring precisely the cooperation and long-term intelligence that the ego will not supply.
