The Psychology of Peace
14th February 2025
The other week I went to the Imperial War Museum to see their exhibition ‘War and the Mind’ which was exploring the psychology that prompts people to go to war, the psychological impact on both combatants and noncombatants, how army leaders maintain moral, ditto for civilians in war zones, how people try and look after their own mental well-being etc. Towards the end of the exhibition one display focused on how the UK government set out to persuade British people to reshape their view of German people (distinguishing between war criminals and the ordinary person) and to understand the need to provide both jobs for the German populace and an education for the children so that they wouldn’t behave as their forebears had.
This struck me as so important. We can’t make peace until we see the other as someone of equal value as ourselves, until see the other as our neighbour to be loved. There can be no place in peace for revenge or hostile discrimination. Yet even in the UK there are still people willing to make jokes about Germans referencing the war, to make jokes that are predicated on the British being some sort of superior victor – or a British Bulldog.
Such attitudes then filter into other areas of life – that Britain is obviously a world leader in any and every field of endeavour, that we have nothing to learn from others, that we have no need to cooperate with anyone else, that the way we do things must be the best – the only – way.
This blinkered view that can only see self as right and everyone else as wrong, is repeated in other nations and other conflicts around the world. Can there be peace in Gaza until everyone sees the other as a brother or sister? Can there be global cooperation and agreement until everyone sees the good in everyone else?
So the question is how do we change we think and act both as individuals and as communities and nations?
The Green Tau 