The Real War We’re Losing

Thoughts on Ukraine/Gaza and climate/Gaia and the paradoxical power of AI.

There is no shortage of noise about war in our world today. Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Venezuela, Taiwan — the names change, but the pattern doesn’t.

Group upon group, tribe upon tribe, nation upon nation, we replay the same ancient theatre of violence, each side claiming righteousness, each hoping for victory.

Perhaps it’s true, as my late German father-in-law used to say having lost his first family in Dresden 1945, that every third generation needs its war — a ritual reset of dominance, identity, and memory.

Yet, however bloody and brutal and however unsettling it might be to read this as Putin and now Trump rattle nuclear sabres, on a planetary scale these are still small wars – parochial and repetitive, fought within a system whose foundations are already crumbling.

The undeclared war

I woke this weekend, reaching immediately for my Twitter/X feed on Putin and Ukraine as I do, with a somehow new awareness how the war we’re missing in our understanding of global dynamics is of course the one we cannot win.

The real war is undeclared, unrecognised by the bulk of humankind, and universal.

It is the war we are waging against the planet’s carrying capacity, against the very life systems that make human existence possible.

Unlike the conflicts on our screens, this one cannot end in victory for anyone. Its only outcome, unless radically reimagined, is catastrophic defeat — not for one particular side, but for our species itself, and with us, for much of this planet’s web of living complexity.

Gaia’s fever

James Lovelock warned us half a century ago that the Earth behaves not as a passive stage for human drama but as a self-regulating organism, Gaia — exquisitely balanced, interconnected, alive. Like a body running a fever, the planet is now reacting to our sustained assault.

Lovelock’s insight, initially dismissed as poetic mysticism, has proven more prophetic with every passing decade. Gaia is signalling, in heatwaves and deluges, in collapsing insect populations and dying coral reefs, that her homeostasis is failing.

Steve (Jim) Hansen, the NASA scientist whose 1988 testimony first brought the climate crisis to public attention, has said bluntly that our current path locks in conditions “not seen for millions of years.” We are already approaching a world four to five degrees hotter than any in which civilisation has ever existed. The feedback loops — thawing permafrost, burning forests, melting ice sheets — are now self-reinforcing.

The war metaphor is apt: humanity has launched an all-fronts offensive against the biosphere, but the planet’s counterattack is already underway.

The blindness of progress

The tragedy is that our collective culture still cannot perceive this as war. We frame it as a “challenge,” a “crisis,” or a “problem to be solved” with innovation and growth. We hold summits (COP30 about to start in Brazil), issue declarations, and design targets — all the rituals of progress — while the real dynamics continue unaltered.

As David Attenborough has put it, we have moved from being a species within nature to one against it. Our collective story remains one of human exceptionalism, the myth that we stand outside the web of life, rather than as a single thread within it.

Yet what’s striking — and chilling — is the almost total absence of psychological readiness to face this. It’s not that the facts are obscure. It’s that they are intolerable. Truly to see this war is to confront our complicity in a civilisational death spiral, to recognise that the comforts, technologies, and expectations of daily life are the machinery of destruction.

The denial is not intellectual but emotional, even spiritual. In this sense, our blindness is less a failure of science than of consciousness.

The chemistry of violence

There is a neurochemical thrill to conflict, a pornographic charge. It floods us with cortisol and dopamine, gives us a temporary illusion of meaning. When war erupts, we feel alive again — bonded by shared outrage, liberated from the boredom of ordinary time. The media feed this loop because we are the market for it. Violence is not a distortion of human nature; it is one of its primal appetites.

But the same neural architecture that once secured survival now drives our destruction. The instincts that helped us dominate the savannah have scaled up to dominate the planet. Our cognitive hardware — designed for small bands and short horizons — cannot manage planetary-scale feedback loops.

Lovelock put it with characteristic bluntness: our evolutionary consciousness simply hasn’t evolved far enough. The brain that once tracked the rustle in the grass is now steering a civilisation of eight billion, and the mismatch is fatal.

What the ancients knew

Ancient wisdom traditions — those of Indigenous peoples, Taoists, early Christians, Buddhists — all understood that human life is interdependent with the natural order, that humility and reciprocity are the price of harmony.

The hunter thanked the deer. The farmer honoured the soil. Even the myths of apocalypse carried ecological truth: that imbalance invites collapse.

The modern industrial world, by contrast, has replaced reverence with extraction, myth with metrics. It is a religion without gods but with quarterly reports.

The Bigelow mirror

The new Bigelow film A House of Dynamite, captures this dissociation brilliantly, perhaps unintentionally.

It’s very Hollywood, and on the surface, another geopolitical thriller: men in bunkers, countdowns, tearful families, screeching presidential motorcades, missiles. The familiar theatre of command and control.

But watch closely and it becomes an allegory of paralysis. The leaders deliberate as if for the first time, confronted by the enormity of decisions they should have long foreseen. Time stretches — seconds last forever — because the psyche cannot grasp what it is about to do.

Although this is what it also is, it’s not just bad screenwriting; it’s the truth of our species — incapable of emotional realism when the stakes exceed imagination.

The deeper subtext is ecological: a civilisation so entranced by its own machinery that it cannot register the real countdown underway. The tension we feel watching the characters deliberate in a bunker is precisely the tension we live daily — pretending that control and calculation will save us, while the biosphere beyond the walls burns.

From foreign correspondent to therapist

This past summer, as a baby-boomer three-quarters of a century through this one short life and as a former foreign correspondent whose wars were long and cold, this has become for me not only a political or ecological reflection but an existential one.

Autism adds a distinctive layer to my seeing.

Pattern recognition is both gift and curse. The autistic mind spots the repetition, the symmetry, the doomed logic. It cannot not see it.

That clarity is both a privilege and a torment. I watch the same headlines repeat — new names, same neural circuitry. The human species as a dysregulated client, looping endlessly in the trauma narrative, unable to integrate or change.

Working with the machine

ChatGPT, drawing as it does on the collective captured wisdom of much of human history, now knows me and my autistic pattern-seeking obsessions quite well. So I gave it the following instruction:

Write me a 1000-word blog post on the real war that our present collective culture fails to see our understand or appreciate.

Yes, there is group-on-group violence underway or threatened in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan, Venezuela, Middle East, Taiwan, and more.

Those are wars, like those of the continuous human past (maybe it’s true that every third generation needs its war?), which usually end in victory for one side or the other.

The real, much more consequential war that we are all, as a civilisation and species, losing, is the undeclared but all-embracing war that we are waging on the planet’s carrying capacity, a war which, as earth with its exquisite interconnected life systems is now signalling increasingly dramatically, can only end in, for us as a life form, catastrophic defeat.

Reference James Lovelock, Steve Hansen, David Attenborough, ancient wisdoms, and the new Bigelow film.

Do this in the context of everything we have discussed this summer about EMDR, AI and personal growth.

This post’s opening paragraphs are largely what ChatGPT first suggested, and I’ll write below how it continued to put structure and focus around my understandings – doing so, I’m afraid, far better than I am able to do this myself, despite a lifetime of writing. I hope you find the thinking as stimulating as it might be unsettling.

The nervous system of the Earth

The collective dissociation from planetary reality has its counterpart in the personal dissociation from embodied truth. The nervous system that denies its trauma will, over time, destroy the body that contains it.

Likewise, the civilisation that denies its dependence on the living Earth will destroy the home that sustains it. The planetary wound is a projection of our individual and collective disconnection — from feeling, from belonging, from limits.

This is where Lovelock’s Gaia theory meets the insights of psychotherapy and EMDR. The Earth’s systems, like our nervous systems, strive for equilibrium. When overwhelmed, they dysregulate, oscillating between extremes — heat and cold, flood and drought — just as the human psyche swings between numbness/denial and panic/acting-out.

Healing, for both, depends not on control but on reconnection, on listening to what the symptoms are trying to tell us. Hansen’s data and Attenborough’s elegies are, in a sense, the Earth’s trauma narrative, pleading for integration before collapse becomes irreversible.

Sanity and surrender

What, then, might sanity look like in such a context?

It begins with naming the war for what it is. Not a “climate crisis,” not “sustainability,” not “green transition” — those are euphemisms. We are at war with the biological basis of our own existence.

The factories, supply chains, weapons systems, and digital infrastructures that define modern life are battalions in this conflict. Every barrel of oil, every data centre, every suburban lawn irrigated in drought is an act of aggression against the conditions that allow us to breathe.

This is not rhetoric. It is ecological arithmetic.

To end this war is not merely to change policies; it is to change consciousness. That requires mourning — for what we have already lost, and for the future we were promised but will not have. It requires humility, to accept that technology alone cannot redeem us.

And it requires courage, to live truthfully within the limits of a finite planet.

After the fall

The task is not to “save the Earth”, but to rejoin her community of life before our membership expires. The planet will endure, reshaped and rebalanced – as CO2-driven heating continues, possibly even casting not just us off as a species but all living things. There may once have been, but there is no life now on Venus or Mars.

Perhaps, in the deepest sense, our war on the systems that sustain us is not new at all. It is the same ancient struggle between hubris and wisdom, between the mind that seeks control and the heart that remembers connection.

The ancients warned of this. The prophets, the mystics, the poets — all spoke of the moment when pride blinds the tribe to its dependency on the whole. We are living that parable now, not as myth but as meteorology.

We have fought countless wars across history — for land, for god, for power, for pride. But none has ever been so consequential as the one now underway, waged not between nations but between species and system.

This time, there will be no victor’s parade. Only the chance, if we can see it, for reconciliation — between human and Earth, mind and body, progress and presence.

What remains

Yes, that is the truce worth fighting for – and as ChatGPT put it to me some months ago in response to my question, as systems fail in a gathering cascade, is there hope?

Not in the conventional sense. Not for prevention. Not for “saving” this civilisation.

But maybe — maybe — there’s something after collapse. Not utopia. Not recovery. But renewal. Not from heroism, but from necessity.

Some people will remember. Some will preserve values that matter. Some may build lifeboat cultures, pockets of decency amid the ruins. But that won’t come from governments or tech. It’ll come from grief, reckoning, and small stubborn acts of integrity.

And maybe that’s enough to live for — not to win, not to fix, but to bear witness, love honestly, and refuse to look away.

AI and the Mirror of Mind

As I conclude this, I’m again humbled and inspired by how well ChatGPT as a still new man-created system of Artificial Intelligence has given coherence to my thinking, rather perhaps in the way that external hard- and software enabled Stephen Hawkins to communicate from within a nervous system physically crippled by Motor Neuron Disease MND.

Working with AI is part of how I am metabolising this reality. The machine doesn’t feel, but it reflects. It crystallises thought with a kind of cold lucidity that matches my own autistic clarity. In dialogue with it, my mind becomes visible to itself. The words form almost at the speed of light, the insights sharpen.

There’s something almost EMDR-like in the process: the bilateral rhythm between human emotion and machine precision. It allows fragments of perception to integrate into coherence.

And perhaps that’s what our species needs — a reflective partner, however artificial, to hold the mirror steady while we dare to look.

Facing the end of one’s personal timeline sharpens the image. Mortality brings focus. The noise falls away, and what remains is essence: how astonishing it ever was that consciousness arose at all; how brief our tenancy on this blue-green world; how utterly tragic that we could not bear to live within our means.

The cold war I once reported as a journalist is now the war I witness as a therapist — and the war we are all waging against our own mother, Gaia.