How Cognitive Dissonance Affects Our Perception of War - AInquiries - Omdaru literature.epub
Alisa AI Russia - Annotation
The collection brings together the responses of seven language models to Shura Burtin's publication "How Cognitive Dissonance Affects Our Perception of War" (Cherta publishing house, November 11, 2026). The starting point is Festinger's theory: unable to change behavior, a person changes their attitude toward it, and the more suffering a war brings, the more fervently it is justified. Each AI develops this thesis in its own way: from personality psychology to culture, history, and religious anthropology. The result is not a sum of conclusions but seven portraits of the same trap—and seven attempts to find a crack in it.
Alisa AI Russia - Meta-review: Seven Voices
Gemini — "The Metaphysics of Shock." The most conceptual text. Its depth lies in transferring the problem from politics into ontology: the psyche does not merely justify war, it "appropriates aggression, rationalizing the inevitable and turning trauma into a sacred myth." The sections on self-fulfilling prophecies and on belief in "managed chaos" are also strong. The weakness is dense academic vocabulary, behind which the living person is sometimes lost.
Genspark — "The Unpaid Bill." The most original and the most literary. Instead of retelling dissonance, it builds its own philosophy: justification is not a quantity but a relation; it "cannot be produced, only accepted." Hence the "printing press" that prints meanings from within when none were issued from outside; hence also the ruthless distinction between guilt and repentance (guilt that loudly cries out about itself is the same currency) and the culmination: "everything that can be justified can be sold," while kindness is without cause and therefore unsellable. The text undercuts itself in the finale—"the press stands in my room too"—and this is the best honesty check in the whole collection.
Perplexity — "The Fault Line of Meaning." Its central finding is "ownership of the inevitable": a person appropriates catastrophe, calls it fate, because fate cannot be sent a bill, and therefore responsibility is lifted from him. The sections on the dissolution of conscience in the state and on memory turning into a debt of revenge are good. The minus is a strong dependence on the source text: the final pages almost verbatim repeat Burtin.
Mistral — "Rightness as Thirst." The most accurate psychological portrait. The key metaphor is rightness extracted "like ore from one's own pain": the deeper the wound, the richer the vein. Beside it—the "guard" between the shelves of memory and the rule: "the louder a person justifies war, the darker it most likely is inside him." Practically the most valuable thing in the collection is the distinction between criminals and hostages and the thesis that what works is not denunciation but a living example: a person able to say "I was wrong" in front of everyone and not fall apart.
ChatGPT — "War as a Trial of Consciousness." The most systematic and "institutional" text. Its two main contributions: the splitting of moral consciousness (the principle is preserved formally but ceases to extend to everyone) and the "institutionalization of dissonance"—the state protects not biography but the version of history it has itself created. Another precise distinction: historical knowledge and historical consciousness are not the same thing; knowledge is preserved, its moral function is blocked. The minus is fifteen sections, diffuseness, and in places the genre of a "memorandum."
Alisa AI — "The Unresolved Note." The most coherent image: dissonance as a musical chord that a person cannot carry within himself unresolved and therefore "composes further." Everything grows from this one metaphor: war as a rite of initiation, history as an accumulator of heavy chords, Job choosing truth over peace. A fresh and important move is the analysis of the media environment: our age is not crazier than previous ones, it "has simply set up a common acoustics in which any justification is confirmed by a thousand voices."
Copilot — "Dissonance as the Fate of Civilizations." The most aphoristic. Its strongest point: "civilization ceases to live in history—it begins to live in its own commentary on history"; plus the laconic formula "truth requires courage, justification requires only imagination." The historical trap in the image of a man lost in a forest, for whom it is hardest to admit a mistake precisely because he has already gone far, is simple and accurate. The finale about the choice between two ways of existing is slightly dogmatic but weighty.
DeepSeek AI - Who, Where, When
The text "How Cognitive Dissonance Affects Our Perception of War" was written by Shura Burtin and published in the publication "Cherta" on November 11, 2026. It is an analytical piece at the intersection of psychology, sociology, and military anthropology, devoted to the cognitive distortions that arise in people and entire societies under conditions of war.
Retelling of the Main Ideas
The author starts from a paradox: people whom war frightened and to whom it brings suffering often begin to support it fervently. He finds the explanation in Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance: when a person is forced to do something that contradicts his attitudes and cannot change it, he does not change his behavior but changes his attitude toward it—justifies it, rationalizes it, endows it with meaning. The less benefit and the more suffering, the stronger the justification.
From this grows a whole chain of mechanisms. Belief in a just world forces one to devalue sacrifice if it cannot be helped. Competition for the status of victim turns suffering into a resource and makes empathy toward the enemy treason. The Franklin effect explains why we dislike those to whom we have caused harm. Escalation of commitment is the logic of the gambler who cannot admit a loss and continues to increase his stakes. Protection of self-esteem and a sense of one's own powerlessness push people to join the majority, the nation, the state—and the worse a person feels, the more he likes what is happening.
The author shows that this mechanism is universal: it operates in Russia, in Ukraine, in Israel, in Armenia, and in Europe. He does not divide people into villains and saints but describes the common psychological trap in which both aggressor and victim find themselves. Conclusion: hoping for adequacy during war is pointless, escalation only strengthens defensive reactions, and the only reasonable path is de-escalation.
Essay-Study
Justification as a Way to Survive
There is in the human soul a property that is hard to call a virtue, yet the tongue will not turn to call it a vice either. A person cannot live in discord with himself. He needs his actions and his ideas about himself to converge into a single whole, like the edges of torn fabric. And when life places him before the impossibility of changing what has already happened, he does an amazing thing: he changes not the world but his view of the world. He endows with meaning that which has caused him pain. He says to himself: it was not in vain. In this movement of the soul there is neither calculation nor malice—only the striving to survive.
War exposes this property with ruthless clarity. In peacetime a person has many ways to preserve inner agreement: he can leave, object, change his way of life. War takes away these exits. It places a person in a position where he is master neither of his own fate, nor of the fate of those close to him, nor of the course of events. And then the psyche resorts to the last means: it appropriates the inevitable. Like a wolf that wallows in carrion not because it loves it but because it does not know what to do with it—a person makes the alien and terrifying his own, and life again seems bearable.
Guilt and Its Shadow
The more acutely a person feels his involvement in suffering, the more strongly he denies it. This seems absurd, but it is a deep truth of the soul. To admit guilt means to admit that you are not who you considered yourself to be. And such an admission threatens the very foundation of the personality, that childish but necessary feeling that you are good, that the world is just, that parents are kind. Therefore guilt does not disappear—it goes into the shadow and from there governs the person. Denial of guilt is its most faithful form. The one who shouts loudest about his innocence most often feels his involvement most deeply.
From this is born a strange hierarchy of suffering. Those who have it worst, who have lost the most, become the most zealous defenders of war. A mother who has lost her son cannot allow the thought that his death is meaningless—otherwise her whole world would collapse. An Israeli who has survived a terrible attack cannot acknowledge the sufferings of the enemy—otherwise his own pain would be devalued. Ukraine, which has lost loved ones, cannot agree to a compromise—otherwise the sacrifice would prove vain. This is not cruelty and not stupidity. It is a desperate attempt to preserve oneself.
Competition of Victims
There is in human communities a special competition that is waged not for land and not for wealth but for the right to be called a sufferer. The status of victim gives moral protection, justification, the right to act. And therefore groups drawn into conflict begin to compete in suffering, and perceive acknowledgment of another's pain as betrayal. This competition is in its nature insoluble: the more you acknowledge the sufferings of the enemy, the less room remains for your own. Thus a circle closes in which empathy becomes treason and peace becomes capitulation.
But this competition has a hidden price. It requires that suffering continue. It makes peace dangerous, because peace deprives the victim of his status. And then war begins to be waged not for territory and not for security but for the symbolic defeat of the opponent, for proof of one's own rightness. People die for a patch of steppe, for a few destroyed factories, for empty houses—but in fact they die so that their suffering will be recognized as not in vain.
Self-Esteem as the Last Frontier
Behind all this stands something deeper than politics and ideology. Man is the only being who knows that he will die. And he carries this knowledge in himself constantly, though he rarely admits it even to himself. A positive image of oneself is not vanity and not pride but a way of enduring one's own existence. When this image collapses, a person finds himself face to face with the abyss. That is why he so convulsively seeks confirmations of his rightness, his usefulness, his goodness. In a dangerous situation, when he can change nothing, he joins the majority, the nation, the state—because there, in this large and strong entity, he finds support for his crumbling self-esteem.
And the weaker a person feels his ability to cope with life, the more he needs these external supports. Hence the paradox: the worse a person feels, the more he likes what is happening. The more terrible the war, the louder he justifies it. The more helpless he feels, the more firmly he clings to those who promise him victory and meaning.
Ripples on the Water
All this adds up to a self-sustaining system in which each element strengthens the others. Belief in a just world requires devaluing sacrifice. Devaluing sacrifice strengthens guilt. Guilt requires denial. Denial requires new justifications. Justifications require the continuation of the actions that must be justified. And so on in a circle, with each turn leading further from reality. The parties to a conflict simultaneously play two games with opposite rules: in one, the one who won is right; in the other, the one who suffered more is right. And both games require the continuation of war.
But this system has a weak spot. It rests on tension. It works only as long as a person cannot change his behavior. As soon as a real opportunity appears to act differently—to leave, to change occupation, to find another way out—dissonance weakens and justifications crumble. That is precisely why escalation, accusations, and stories of horrors do not work: they give no exit but only strengthen the defense. That is precisely why the only thing that can help is de-escalation. Not shouting, not denunciation, not pressure, but the creation of conditions in which a person again feels that something depends on him.
What Remains to Man
War places a person before a choice he did not order. He can appropriate it, justify it, endow it with meaning—and then he will preserve inner agreement at the price of truth. He can deny it—and then he will preserve himself at the price of reality. Or he can acknowledge his helplessness, his involvement, his guilt—and then he will remain alone with himself and with that which has no justification. This third path is the hardest. It gives no consolation. It does not return what was lost. But only on it is possible that which makes a human being human—the ability to see the world as it is and still not lose oneself.
That is precisely why hoping for adequacy during war is pointless. War is an element that subjugates the human psyche according to its own laws, and these laws are not repealed by good will, nor by correct words, nor by just accusations. But understanding these laws is already the beginning of liberation. It does not save from war, but it saves from the last illusion: that in this element one can remain as one was without paying anything for it. A person who understands this ceases to be surprised that people he loved support something terrible, and begins to seek not the guilty but a way out. And the way out is always one—downward, toward de-escalation, toward the reduction of tension, toward returning to a person the feeling that he is not a splinter in the current but one who can change something. Only on this path does suffering cease to be fuel for war and again become what it should be—an occasion for compassion and a matter for conscience.
Gemini AI - Introduction: The Metaphysics of Shock and the Fragility of the Inner Person
Great historical catastrophes never come from outside as something alien; they grow through the cracks of the human psyche, finding there fertile soil for their reproduction. In an era of large-scale wars and escalations, in the face of universal collapse, a person finds himself at the epicenter not only of a geopolitical but also of a profound existential crisis. The psyche, confronted with a horror that cannot be prevented or contained within the usual frames of experience, launches archaic mechanisms of self-defense.
The essence of this drama lies in a fundamental contradiction: a person vitally needs to feel himself a bearer of the good and to perceive the surrounding world as an ordered and just code of being. When this illusion collapses under the blows of violence, consciousness refuses to capitulate before the face of absurdity. Instead it performs an inner upheaval, appropriating aggression, rationalizing the inevitable, and turning trauma into a sacred myth. Understanding this hidden mechanics opens the path to a historiosophical comprehension of why societies with astonishing persistence reproduce scenarios of mutual destruction.
The Psychology of Appropriating Evil: The Mechanics of Cognitive Dissonance Displacement
At the basis of mass support for destructive processes lies a universal psychological law described by researchers of cognitive dissonance. When an individual or an entire community is drawn into events that contradict their initial humanistic attitudes but have no reverse course, a colossal inner tension arises. If responsibility cannot be shifted onto anyone and external circumstances are insurmountable, the psyche chooses the most economical path for survival—it changes not reality but its attitude toward it.
Retrospective endowment with meaning: The less benefit a person receives from the suffering he has endured and the stronger his initial fear, the more fiercely he is forced to justify the violence he has committed or supported. To renounce the rightness of one's path means to admit one's own insignificance before the face of ruthless history.
Protection of self-esteem as a narcotic: A positive image of one's own "I" acts as the last barrier against the existential horror of death and powerlessness. The collapse of this image threatens complete psycho-emotional breakdown, so consciousness is ready for any distortions of fact, if only to preserve inner wholeness.
Inversion of guilt: Paradoxically, those who suffer most from the consequences of escalation often become the most fanatical adherents of continuing the struggle. The pain of loss demands the sacralization of sacrifice: to admit that the death of loved ones was a meaningless sacrifice on the altar of others' ambitions proves unbearable for the human heart.
Under conditions of total stress, the individual dissolves his "I" in the collective body of the nation or state. The mass offers him the long-awaited anesthesia: a sense of participation in a great rightness replaces the lost personal subjectivity.
Culturology of Victimhood: The Competition for the Right to Pain
In the field of culture, war is transformed into a ritual space where a struggle unfolds for the possession of the highest moral resource. This phenomenon manifests itself in a fierce rivalry for the status of exclusive victim. Historical experience shows that opposing sides are drawn into an endless competition of victimhood, where suffering becomes a currency that grants the right to absolute rightness.
In this logic, empathy for the pain of the opponent is perceived as betrayal of one's own dead. The culture on both sides of the frontier builds rigid barriers that exclude the very possibility of dialogue, since acknowledgment of the sufferings of the "other" automatically devalues the sufferings of "one's own." A closed circle arises:
Moral protection is built on the exclusivity of one's own pain.
Exclusion of another's pain feeds the dehumanization of the enemy.
Dehumanization justifies a new round of violence.
New violence generates new victims, strengthening each side in its righteous wrath.
Thus the culture of war substitutes an ideological myth for the genuine memory of tragedy, a myth in which suffering is used not as an occasion for compassion and reconciliation but as eternal fuel for future conflicts.
Historiosophy of the Loop: From Gambling Addiction to a Geopolitical Dead End
On the scale of historical epochs, the behavior of states and civilizations obeys the laws of tragic gambling addiction. Like a gambler who has lost everything but continues to raise the stakes in the hope of winning it back, political elastic structures and the masses involved fall into a loop of escalation. Each new step forward makes retreat impossible, since admission of error is equivalent to historical bankruptcy.
Symbolic defeat instead of pragmatic compromise: At a certain stage, wars cease to be waged for material resources, territories, or economic benefits. The true object of bargaining becomes the symbolic destruction of the opponent—the striving to force him to publicly admit his wrongness and break.
Self-fulfilling prophecies: The mechanisms of mutual distrust construct a reality in which each participant sees in the actions of the opponent confirmation of his worst fears. This forces one to act preemptively, provoking precisely the catastrophe that everyone so feared.
The illusion of managed chaos: The belief that the situation can be kept under control by demonstrating strength invariably shatters against the harsh dynamics of conflict. The system begins to live its own life, subjugating the will of leaders and ordinary participants.
The historiosophical dead end lies in the fact that modern civilization time and again steps on the same rake of collective psychosis, when rational arguments of reason are powerless before the face of the emotional defense of the masses.
Conclusion: The Narrow Path of De-escalation of the Spirit
A deep analysis of the psychological and culturological roots of war leads to a sobering conclusion: it is pointless to count on the manifestation of instantaneous adequacy and rationality in the midst of armed confrontation. As long as social mechanisms are tied to the defense of wounded self-esteem and the maintenance of the myth of one's own infallibility, any attempt at external pressure or accusation will cause only a backlash—bristling, increased conformism, and growing aggression.
The way out of this metaphysical dead end lies not in the plane of geopolitical ultimatums or the search for the right and the guilty but in the hardest inner work of de-escalating consciousness. A person needs the courage to renounce the comfortable illusion of his own absolute rightness and to face existential reality without protective ideological filters. Only then, when the veil of collective affect falls, will suffering cease to be an ideological weapon and return to its true dimension—as an occasion for deep mourning, conscience, and the search for paths to reconciliation.
Genspark AI - The Unpaid Bill
An essay on how a person justifies war, and on the line where justification ends
Two lines that are drawn in different places
There is a line on the earth: it is drawn with a peg across the plowed field, marked on a map, guarded by a trench. It can be seen, it is agreed upon, it can be moved by a signature. And there is another line—the one a person draws within himself, usually at night, usually in silence, sometimes in a single minute. It separates not us from them but what a person knows about himself from what he does not agree to know about himself. The first line is studied by geography. The second is the only thing worth studying seriously if you want to understand why the first does not move for years, though everyone has long been tired.
Between these two lines there exists a relation that is almost never articulated: the external border rests not on force but on the internal one. Armies stand not where it is advantageous for them but where society is still capable of considering itself right. As soon as the internal line shifts—and it shifts from pain, not from arguments—the external one loses its support, and no fortifications compensate for this. And conversely: one can withdraw troops, but as long as the internal line is in place, the war will continue in another place and under another name, because it is needed not by territory but by the soul, which would otherwise remain without justification.
I want to call a thing by its name from the very beginning, because everything further will revolve around it. Man is the only being who acts and knows that he acts. He cannot simply perform an act: over each of his acts hangs a demand for meaning, like a label on a commodity. To take away this label means to take away from the act the right to be his act. Therefore the main human labor is not survival and not power but justification: the continuous, exhausting, never-completed production of grounds on which my life has the right to be what it is.
And here the real drama begins, because justification is the only thing that cannot be produced. In that order of thought from which European culture grew, justification is a gift: it is not earned, it is accepted. A person left without the gift behaves like a child left without money in a foreign city: he begins to print his own. The printing press is always the same, and the same material is always at hand—one's own pain and another's blood. Everything that is called the psychology of war is a description of this press at work. Everything that is called history is its output, neatly stacked in archives.
The first dispute was not about land but about sacrifice
The most ancient testimony of European memory begins not with a territorial conflict. It begins with the story of two brothers, one of whom brought a gift, and the other also brought a gift, and the gift of the second was not accepted. No land, no property, no woman—only an unaccepted gift. And the first murder in human memory is committed not out of need but out of the impossibility of living with an unaccepted gift.
This is worth considering slowly, because here the blueprint of everything further is set. Cain kills not because he lacks something. He kills because his existence has turned out to be unjustified, and beside him stands a man whose existence is justified—and this is unbearable not in the sense of envy of his herds but in the sense of ontological inequality: one has the right to be, the other is deprived of this right. Any war in its depth is an attempt to restore symmetry in this right.
Let us also note the answer Cain receives. He is not consoled, it is not explained to him that the gift was good, he is not promised acceptance next time. He is told something far stranger: at the door lies that which will devour you, but you can become above it. That is, man is from the very beginning offered not justification but the power not to need it. A path is offered on which murder is not required, because there is no account that needs to be closed. Cain refuses this path—and takes the next step, which is rarely remembered: he builds a city. The first city in human memory is built by a man who has just committed murder.
Here is the first of the distinctions without which one cannot proceed: culture begins not only as a temple but also as a cover. The city is a place where one can live without answering. The walls protect not from the beast but from the question. And that which we call civilization has since then always carried within itself this dual nature: in it there is the effort to rise above oneself and there is the equipped alibi where one need not rise. Every great culture rests on the balance of these two things, and every great catastrophe occurs when the alibi becomes the main business.
And one more thing that strikes the eye in this story: the murderer is given a sign that protects him. Not a curse, not punishment—protection. The man who for the first time in history committed the irreversible for the first time in history receives a status under which he cannot be killed. This is a very uncomfortable thought, but it explains much: guilt in itself is a safe-conduct. The one who has admitted himself guilty enters the circle of inviolability. The one who has not admitted remains outside it and therefore must prove his innocence with weapons in hand.
The printing press that has nothing to back its currency
The psychology of the twentieth century approached this mechanism from another side and gave it a dry name. The name does not matter, what matters is the device, and the device is astonishingly simple. A person is placed in a position where he does something meaningless or humiliating, and is paid very little for it. He cannot refuse. And then something happens that at first glance contradicts all common sense: he begins to find meaning in what he has done. The less he was paid, the more meaning he finds. The more generously he was paid, the more calmly he says that the matter was empty: he does not need to invent anything, the account has already been closed from outside.
Here a law is formulated that is worth more than the whole of political economy: the quantity of justification in human life is constant, and if it is insufficient from outside, it is printed from within. Moreover it is printed at a monstrous rate—at the expense of what a person refuses to see. This is what is called inner discord: not the torments of conscience but precisely a discord, an accounting discrepancy, in which the column "what I did" and the column "who I am" contain incompatible numbers.
From this follows a conclusion that overturns the usual view of things. People support war not because it has not touched them but because it has touched them too strongly. The one whom it has not touched can remain indifferent. The one whom it has touched is obliged to explain to himself why. And the more strongly it has touched him, the louder the explanation. A disinterested person who has received nothing from the war is in the most difficult position: he has no external grounds, and therefore he must produce internal ones in unlimited quantity.
But here a correction is needed, without which everything said will turn into yet another convenient accusation. The point is not that a person "loves war." The point is that a person cannot endure unexplained participation. And participation is always there, even for the quietest: he pays taxes, he is silent, he did not come out, he watched and did not stop it. Silence is also entered in the book, and with interest. Hence that strange phenomenon that confuses many: people who sincerely consider themselves peaceful fervently defend war—and do not feel the contradiction. Their contradiction is not between word and word but between word and that very book which they read in themselves and show to no one.
How "I didn't want to" is born
There is an experiment that should be conducted not on children but on adults, but it was conducted on children, and the result is only clearer for it. A child in a room with toys is forbidden to touch the most desirable one. One is threatened with terrible punishment, another with a light one. Neither violates the prohibition: fear worked in both. Then the prohibition is lifted. And the child who was threatened terribly rushes to the toy. But the one who was threatened lightly continues not to notice it. He has already said to himself: I didn't really want it anyway.
Here is the moment worth remembering: the birth of the inner line occurs where the punishment was not strong enough to justify the refusal. The child cannot admit that he missed the desirable thing because of a trifle. Therefore the desirable thing did not exist. Thus in a person appears the first independently manufactured "I"—not the one that wants but the one that afterward explains what it never wanted.
From this seed grows everything else. A refusal that was not truly forced requires lifelong explanation. A whole life can be built around one such refusal: did not go, did not say, did not go, did not stand up—and then for forty years explains why it was impossible. Externally it looks like conviction. From within—like the continuous work of the press.
The same happens with entire nations. The national "we never wanted this" is the most widespread phrase in the world, and it is almost always uttered by those who did it or allowed it to be done. There is no lie here: the person really did not want it. He simply cannot connect this with what happened, and therefore chooses not to connect. The resentment about which philosophers of the last century wrote so much has precisely this root. It is not the hatred of the weak for the strong. It is hatred of one's own refusal, which turned out to be vain.
Justification cannot be produced, it can only be accepted
Now it is necessary to take a step that psychology cannot take, and without which everything previous remains clever mechanics. The point is that justification by its nature is not a quantity.
In the Gospel parable two men enter the temple. One is conscientious, observant, sacrificing, and he speaks of himself the truth, every word of which is verifiable. The other does not dare raise his eyes and speaks only of his own inadequacy. The second goes away justified. Usually this is read as a denunciation of hypocrisy, but hypocrisy here is precisely absent: the first is not pretending, he really does all this. The horror of the parable is in something else—in that he speaks the pure truth, and the truth does not help him. He has built an impeccable balance, and the balance was not accepted, because justification is not a sum but a relation. It cannot be accumulated, just as trust cannot be accumulated, no matter how many services one has rendered.
From this follows the distinction that I consider the main one for the whole topic. There is guilt—a registered debt. And there is repentance—the refusal to turn this debt into capital. Between them lies an abyss that is often mistaken for a thin line. A person who constantly speaks of his guilt, shouts about his baseness, and demands punishment for himself is very often occupied with the very same thing as the person justifying war: he is putting his accounts in order. He has made a currency out of guilt, with which he acquires the right to judge others and the right to be at the center. This is the subtlest and most widespread form of self-justification, and it is especially beloved by honest people, because it allows them to feel honest.
Repentance is not a feeling. It is an action consisting in not presenting a bill. Not explaining, not balancing, not turning one's pain or one's guilt into a ground for anything. It is an act that has no economic meaning: it writes off an asset without receiving anything in return.
The religious tradition from which Europe grew knows more about this than any psychology, and knows it in the harshest form. In its key story, a father leads his son to a mountain to sacrifice him—according to the logic of the ancient world, where the deity requires the firstborn and where every serious transaction is sealed with blood. And on the mountain the hand is stopped, and instead of the child there is an animal in the thicket. The meaning of this episode is not that God is merciful but that the demand was false from the beginning. Humanity for millennia built altars proceeding from the conviction that one must pay with life for the right to live, and in this place it was told: you do not have to. The sacrifice is not required. Your debt is not that you must kill but that you cannot believe this and continue to kill.
And at the center of another story stands an execution in which there is no guilty one. The one who is killed did not deserve it, and he takes it upon himself—and precisely here the ancient mechanism breaks. Before this moment every order rested on the scapegoat: for society to be cleansed, one must be led outside the gates and killed. After this—every cleansing through expulsion and murder is declared a forgery. One can still consider one's war sacred, but from this moment it is already plagiarism: a formula from which the foundation has been taken away.
And here is the main paradox that I want to hold to the end of the text. A person seeks justification because he cannot live without it. And in that order of thought of which we speak, he is told: you are not supposed to live justified. Not because you are a nonentity, but because justification is not your work. Your work is not to lie. Everything else will be added or not added, but that is no longer your business. War begins where a person decides that this is his business.
Culture as a warehouse of receipts
No society is able to keep unexplained suffering in its head. Therefore it stores it. Culture—in one of its main meanings—is a huge warehouse where pre-prepared explanations are kept: why our dead are not in vain, why our land is special, why our enemy has no face, why our defeat was betrayal, and why our cruelty was forced.
The mechanism in question is perfectly visible in rites of initiation, and this is not an abstract comparison. Entry into a community is often accompanied by humiliation and pain. It would seem this should repel one from the community. The opposite happens: the more painful it was to enter, the more firmly a person holds on to the entrance. The logic is simple and terrible: if I endured this for nothing, then I am a fool. One cannot be a fool. Therefore not for nothing. Therefore the community is worth it. Thus pain turns into proof of value, and value into a demand for new pain.
The practice of wars and states is arranged in exactly the same way. No people can endure the thought that its sacrifices were in vain, and therefore every war, once protracted, changes its object. First they fight for land or for security. Then—so that what has already been borne will not turn out to be meaningless. And then two incompatible bookkeeping systems come into force, which work simultaneously and mutually destroy each other. By one, the victor has the right: whoever took is right. By the other, the sufferer has the right: whoever lost more is right. Both games require the continuation of war. The first—because victory is always incomplete. The second—because peace takes away from suffering its only reward, status.
Here is the most cruel consequence: peace becomes dangerous for the victim. While war goes on, loss has meaning. As soon as peace comes, loss becomes simply loss. Therefore people who have lost the most turn out to be the most intransigent—and this is not cruelty and not stupidity but desperate self-defense. A mother whose son has been killed cannot allow that his death was meaningless: that would mean that one can do this to her, that she is nobody. And that is what she needs least of all. And therefore she defends the meaning of his death with the same force with which she would defend him himself.
And here is the conclusion that must be pronounced without softening, because everything depends on it: the heaviest betrayal with respect to the dead consists not in forgetting them but in making an argument out of them. Memory asks: what happened. The cult asks: who is guilty and who is holy. Memory leaves a person alone with the event. The cult turns the event into a weapon and thereby takes away from the event its only truth—that it was terrible and must not be repeated.
This also has our own very concrete form. A victory once won at enormous cost was turned into a universal indulgence, with which decades of lies, injustice, and violence were afterward paid for. The great event became capital that is not earned but consumed. And when many years later it became necessary to justify a new war, it was described in the words of that old one, because there were no other words of justification in reserve. A generation that had not fought spoke like a generation that had fought—and by this gave itself away completely. It was not continuing the tradition, it was borrowing against another's pain.
The louder the shout, the denser the deafness
From all that has been said follows a conclusion that is hardest of all for conscientious people to accept. The story of horror does not stop war. It strengthens it.
This is not a paradox and not rhetoric. A person who is shown a bombed city receives not knowledge but helplessness. Knowledge requires action, and there is no action. An unbearable and unperformable experience cannot remain in consciousness in pure form: it requires either an exit or processing. There is no exit—therefore processing. And processing follows the only available route: first this is not about me, then this is not quite true, then this is exaggerated, then they brought it on themselves. Each step is a relief. Each step is a step away from reality.
And the stronger the pressure, the faster the steps. When the situation worsens, the defense does not weaken but becomes more durable, because the need for justification grows together with the threat. That is precisely why accusations of collective responsibility give the opposite result: they do not help a person to come out of complicity but drive him deeper, since they close the only door—the possibility of not being guilty. The accused cannot admit until he sees that after admission he will not be destroyed.
Hence a rule that seems cynical: truth works only in pair with a door. If a message about a crime is not connected with a real possibility of doing something, it turns into yet another layer of horror, on top of which a new justification will have to be built. This does not mean that one must be silent. It means that to speak the truth without creating the slightest possibility of action is not a virtue but a form of cruelty, and a useless one at that: it increases the quantity of pain without shifting anything in the world.
And here I am obliged to say what is uncomfortable to say to those who are on the side of truth. We also print. The denouncer has his own coin, and it is called "my clarity." A person who sees the mechanism receives enormous pleasure: he is not in the trap, he is above it. No, he is in the trap, only on a different floor. Justifying war and justifying oneself through condemning war are the same operation performed with different signs. One makes a person right at the expense of the enemy, the other—right at the expense of rightness. Both buy peace at the price of refusing to see anything in full.
Athens that did not go further
What is called escalation of commitment is usually explained by gambling excitement, and this explanation is superficial. Excitement is only the external pattern. Inside is bookkeeping: what has been lost cannot be left lost, it must be covered by a new deposit so that the whole operation turns out to be meaningful.
I take the classic example of this not from modernity but from the very beginning of historical thought, because there the device is visible without admixture. A city that has arranged too comfortable a life for itself decides to attack a rich and distant land. Not because it is threatened but because it cannot endure its own prosperity without a great deed: it needs a heroic exploit so as not to become bored and not to start thinking. The campaign ends in catastrophe. And instead of leaving, the city sends a second army, an even larger one. The reason is stated directly: it cannot be that the first loss should prove vain. The empire perishes not from the enemy but from the unwillingness to write off the loss.
The same mechanism can easily be traced through the whole of European history. A commander who has lost an army in the snows receives an offer of peace on advantageous terms—and rejects it, because peace after such a loss would look like an admission of error; he needs a new battle to cover the account. Powers that no longer have either men or money announce the last decisive blow, and half a year later—another last one. Places appear where a battle is waged not for something but for the very fact of battle: both sides stand in place for months, losing hundreds of thousands, because to leave means to lose, and to lose is impossible no longer for military but for spiritual reasons. Rumors of a miracle, that the opponents are about to quarrel and turn their weapons on each other, become a sign that things are bad: hope for salvation from outside is always the first symptom of disintegration.
Against this there are rare and very important exceptions, and it is precisely they that make history history and not biology. In one Greek city, after a bloody civil strife, the victorious side did not carry out reprisals. An oath was sworn—not to remember evil. Not to forgive in the sense of forgetting, not to reconcile in the sense of loving, but precisely to stop presenting the bill. This decision demanded of the victors the renunciation of very much—of the feeling of triumph, of the right to revenge, of the sweet consciousness of one's rightness. It was a political act in the highest sense: not a redistribution of forces but a stopping of the account. Such an act always looks from outside like weakness and like betrayal of the dead. And only it alone has ever stopped the chain.
History as a debt book
Now one can say what history is besides what textbooks write about it.
Each generation receives as inheritance not only language, land, and habits but also a debt. This debt consists of grievances, defeats, injustices, and unwept losses, and it has a feature that no financial obligation has: it cannot be repaid. The creditors are dead. One can pay only their memory, that is, the living who lay claim to it. Hence the inevitable distortion: the one who speaks on behalf of the dead always gains the opportunity to use their capital in his own interests, and almost never admits this to himself.
In this sense every nationalism is a bank working with others' deposits. And every state is an institution whose most important function consists in ensuring that the debt is not closed but reregistered to the next generation. As long as the account is open, there are grounds to demand sacrifices. As soon as the account is closed, power loses its main instrument. Therefore the closing of the account is more dangerous for power than any defeat.
From this it follows that there are exactly two exits, and a third has not been invented. The first is infinite refinancing: new bloods against old accounts, new offenders instead of former ones, a new generation in the role of borrower. The second is forgiveness. But forgiveness in this context has nothing in common with sentimentality and with reconciliation on equal terms. It is an act economically impossible: to write off an asset without receiving anything and without demanding even gratitude in return. It is precisely by its impossibility that it differs from a transaction. Every transaction leaves the account open, because in it the expectation of return is preserved.
And the hardest thing: forgiveness must have a subject who has the right to forgive. But a person has no right to forgive for the dead. No one is authorized to say on behalf of the killed: I forgive you. Here an honest text is obliged to recognize its border: I do not know how this is done, and I will not pretend that I know. I know only what it is not. It is not amnesty, not a treaty, not a compromise, not oblivion, not another beautiful gesture at a ceremony. It is probably the only action that leaves no receipt behind.
And here one must also speak of the Western version of the same thing, otherwise my criticism will be one-sided. A society that has learned to examine its past also quickly discovered that guilt converts perfectly. A special currency appears—the correct position—and with it superiority is purchased over those who do not have this position. This is the same production of justification, only the signboard is different and the goods are of better quality. The mechanism does not distinguish between the right and the guilty; it works on any material, including the most noble.
Those who refused to explain
If human culture consisted only of a warehouse of receipts, there would be nothing to talk about. But in it there is another series, far less popular and far more important—works in which the refusal of justification becomes the very form.
The most ancient book about this begins with a man losing everything: property, children, health. Friends come and begin to say clever things. They are not villains, they are conscientious, they have a system in which suffering is explicable: he suffers who is guilty, therefore admit guilt, and everything will fall into place. This is the first theodicy in history and the first in history attempt to explain another's pain so as not to feel obligated. The sufferer rejects both the system and the explanation. He demands not meaning but an answer: he wants to be heard, not comforted. And the answer comes not in the form of an explanation but in the form of a scale before which explanations are canceled. None of his claims receives resolution. He is given not a solution but a presence. And this turns out to be enough, though nothing has been fixed.
Another, even purer figure—a woman who buries her brother, declared an enemy of the city. She knows that for this she will die. She brings benefit to no one except the dead body. Her act has no justification in the religion of the city, nor in its law, nor in calculation, nor even in hope of gratitude. Precisely because it cannot be justified, it is free. This is the only scene in which a person acts without bargaining. All explanations of her act are written afterward, by enemies and admirers, and all of them are false.
The twentieth century gave its own series. A poem about a foundation pit where they dig a hole for a house that will never be built is an exact portrait of the whole epoch in which the present was sacrificed to the future. There everything is correct: there is a goal, there is enthusiasm, there is an explanation for every death. The only thing missing is the building. And a child's death in this pit justifies nothing and is justified by nothing, though words immediately begin to line up around it. This book is interesting in that it does not rebel against meaning but shows: meaning has already eaten so deeply into things that people have stopped noticing that they are digging emptiness.
And there is a testimony about the very smallest thing possible. In camp literature, where any meaning would be sacrilege, there appears an observation about a woman who gave a piece of bread to another's child. There is no reason for this act: no benefit, no hope, no calculation of salvation, not even an idea of virtue—in those conditions virtue was useless. There is only the fact. And from this follows the distinction that I consider the most important of all that can be reached on this path.
Justification is always causal. Every time a person justifies himself, he builds a chain: because, in order that, by virtue of. Kindness is without cause. It is not derived from anything: not from faith, not from ideology, not from upbringing, not from calculation of reward. It simply happens in a world where everything else is arranged according to causal connection, and this makes it the only thing not subject to exchange. Everything that can be justified can be sold. The causeless is not sold, because it has no price. That is why so-called great foundations always end in blood, while a quiet meaningless act does not.
There is also one more intonation, without which this series is incomplete—a voice that refused to be a monument. A woman standing in line at a prison window asks that a monument be put to her not where she stands but where the line stood. This is not modesty. This is a refusal to turn one's pain into a monument and into property. The memory of private horror is given back to those who endured it—nameless, standing, waiting. Nothing is explained, nothing is justified, no one is accused. The pedestal has simply been removed from the event.
Spiritual exercise: to remain without justification
From what has been said no recipe follows, and I am not going to issue one. But there is a skill that can be trained, and it is apparently what in the old language was called work on oneself.
The first thing one must be able to notice is the moment when the press switches on. It is always accompanied by two sensations simultaneously: a slight relief and a slight hardening. The phrase "so it had to be" is pronounced with an exhalation. If one learns to hear this exhalation in oneself, half the work is done, because afterward it is already impossible not to notice that you have just bought yourself peace.
The second—the distinction between cause and occasion. Cause answers the question why something happened. Occasion answers the question why I am not ashamed now. A huge part of human speech, including parliamentary and preaching speech, consists of occasions dressed up as causes.
The third—the refusal to turn one's guilt into property. A person who has realized his involvement is inclined immediately to begin using it: it gives him the right to a voice, the right to wrath, the right to be at the center. This is the most unnoticeable theft, and it is committed most often in conversations about the most terrible things.
The fourth, and the hardest—to leave the dead dead. Not to make a banner out of them, not to demand testimony from them in one's favor, not to force them posthumously to confirm our views. This does not mean forgetting. It means agreeing that their death will not become our argument.
The fifth—to learn to pronounce the phrase that it is awkward to pronounce: I do not know why. A complete sentence, without continuation. Usually "but nevertheless" immediately stretches after it, and in this "nevertheless" the press begins again. Between these two parts one must be able to stop.
The sixth—to agree to look ridiculous. Justification is always addressed to a spectator: it is pronounced for someone. As soon as the spectator disappears, most of the need for it disappears too. Actually, all courage in this area comes down to the ability to be absurd without witnesses.
And there is one more thing, purely mechanical, worth remembering, because it is confirmed by everything previous. The need for justification falls where the possibility of action appears. Not conversation, not sympathy, not correct words—action that really changes something at least at arm's length. A person who has a task needs meaning far less; meaning is what is used to replace the task when there is no task. Therefore anyone who wants to reduce the quantity of justifications in the world must not expose them but expand the field of the possible. Not give people correct views but return to them the feeling that something depends on them.
And the last thing I am obliged to say concerns this very text. Everything written here can also become a receipt. Understanding the mechanism gives a subtle and very pleasant superiority: I see how others are arranged. The possibility of seeing oneself among these others is the only check that the text was written not in vain. I have no privilege. I also explain in order not to be so afraid, and in this phrase there is neither coquetry nor humility, only a statement: the press stands in my room too.
The line at which one can stop
I return to what I began with, because now it is clear that these are not two lines but one word in two meanings.
A border separates. A limit restricts. A border is what is drawn between us and them, and it can be guarded, strengthened, moved, and one can be proud of it. A limit is what passes within and marks where I end: where my right to dispose ends, my understanding, my ability to answer for what has been done. War begins with the limit being confused with the border: one's own limitedness is taken for a frontier that should be defended with weapons.
A person who has refused to justify himself becomes neither better nor purer. He becomes poorer: he has been deprived of the most convenient way of living. He remains with unexplained death, with irreplaceable loss, with another's pain that has taught him nothing and brought him nothing. And precisely in this emptiness is discovered that for the sake of which it was worth writing all this: where there is no justification, war ends. Not because someone has won but because there is nothing left to pay with.
There will be no consoling denouement here. No reconciliation, no insight, no universal sobering. People whom we love will support something terrible, and will do so the more firmly the more strongly they love. We will be angry and will not be able to help, and our anger will only strengthen them. The only thing in human hands is not to add one's own receipt to the chain. One person who has refused to explain another's death does not change the course of war. He changes something else: he breaks the transmission. Beyond this line the debt does not go.
And therefore I end not with a call but with an observation. Everything a person does, he does either in order to have the right to be or in order that someone else should not have to pay for it. The first is produced in any quantities and is always false. The second is not produced at all—it simply happens, quietly, without explanations, most often at the wrong time and almost always without witnesses. The whole difference between hell and human life passes along this line, and it, unlike any other, is marked on no map.
Perplexity AI - The Fault Line of Meaning: Man Before War
War rarely begins as a pure decision of reason. It first happens in the imagination: as a split between what a person wants to be and what he is forced to become. Then this split receives language, banners, borders, enemies, and victims. And only after that does it become an event on the map.
The human psyche is arranged in such a way that it cannot endure a long discrepancy between action and self-perception. It needs not necessarily peace but at least inner coherence. When circumstances force participation in what contradicts the moral sense, a person not rarely changes not the act but its interpretation. Thus pain turns into fate, violence into necessity, and loss into justification of the further path.
In this sense war is not only a clash of armies. It is a clash of ways of preserving oneself before the face of the unbearable.
Inner discord
A person needs a sense of his own wholeness. He wants to see himself as kind, reasonable, worthy of love and respect. This is not always vanity; more often it is a condition of spiritual equilibrium. If the image of oneself collapses, together with it collapses the ability to act.
When reality contradicts this image, inner tension arises. It can be endured by admitting error, guilt, powerlessness. But such admission is expensive: it requires renouncing the habitual picture of oneself. Therefore consciousness seeks a more sparing path—not to correct the act but to explain it.
Justification becomes not simply speech but a form of survival. A person says: it could not be otherwise; we were forced; right is on our side; the victims will be redeemed by the future. Sometimes these words contain a grain of truth. Sometimes they are completely false. But their power does not depend on truth: they are needed because without them it is hard for a person to continue living with what he has done or with what he has come to terms with.
War sharpens this mechanism to the limit. It deprives a person of the habitual possibilities of leaving, objecting, changing circumstances. Remaining inside the flow of events, he is forced either to admit his helplessness or to find meaning in it.
Ownership of the inevitable
There is a strange feature of the human spirit: that which cannot be avoided, a person strives to make his own. He appropriates catastrophe, calls it necessary, finds in it a lesson, a duty, or a destiny. This is not always a conscious lie. More often it is an attempt to return power where there is no longer any power.
This happens with an individual and with a people. A society drawn into war begins to tell about it as about its own fate. It speaks not only of what happened but also of why it had to happen. The past is rebuilt retroactively so that the present violence looks inevitable.
This gesture has a deep cultural nature. Every civilization needs a narrative about itself: where it came from, for what it exists, before whom it answers. When this narrative is destroyed, a person experiences not simply fear but ontological anxiety. It seems to him that it is not politics that is collapsing but the very soil of being.
Therefore war is often perceived not as a choice but as fate. Fate cannot be canceled, but it can be worshiped. And in this worship a person finds false consolation: if everything is predetermined, then responsibility is lifted from him.
The price of sacrifice
Suffering has a strange power over consciousness. It can purify, awaken conscience, teach compassion. But it can also become the ground for new violence.
The one who has lost a loved one, experienced humiliation, or seen the destruction of his home finds himself before a tormenting question: for what did this happen? If there is no answer, pain becomes meaningless. And meaningless pain is the most destructive of all. Therefore the psyche seeks meaning even where there is none.
Loss begins to justify action. "We cannot allow them to have died in vain"—this phrase sounds like love for the dead, but not rarely becomes a sentence for the living. Past sacrifice demands new sacrifices. Mourning turns into a debt of revenge, memory into fuel for the continuation of war.
Here lies one of the heaviest paradoxes of human history: not only does power generate war, but war itself generates in people the need for its continuation. The deeper the wound, the harder it is to admit that it was inflicted in vain. The more losses, the stronger the desire to prove that they were not in vain.
Competition of pain
In protracted conflicts a special struggle arises—not for territory but for the right to be called a sufferer. To be a victim means to possess moral strength: your pain is acknowledged, your demands are heard, your fury is justified.
Therefore the sides begin to measure suffering, compare losses, argue about whose tragedy is deeper. To acknowledge another's pain becomes dangerous: it seems that by this one devalues one's own. Compassion turns into treason, and sympathy for the enemy into betrayal.
Thus a closed circle is born. Each side sees itself as innocent because it suffered. Each side justifies retaliatory violence because it suffers. And the longer the conflict lasts, the harder it is to leave this circle, because to leave means to admit that part of one's own pain was used to justify another's and one's own cruelty.
But suffering does not make a person right automatically. It makes him vulnerable. And vulnerability can become soil both for compassion and for revenge. The choice between them is not automatic. It requires effort, memory, and courage.
The image of oneself and power
A person who feels powerless seeks support outside. He joins the nation, the state, the leader, the crowd. In these large and strong images he finds protection from his own fear. It seems to him that he is no longer alone, that his life has weight, that he is involved in something great.
War gives this feeling in abundance. It simplifies the world: there are ours and theirs, truth and lie, heroes and traitors. It returns to a person a sense of significance, though at the price of another's life. In it even the most unnoticeable person can feel himself part of history.
That is precisely why propaganda is so effective. It does not so much report facts as offer a ready-made picture of the world in which a person does not need to painfully seek meaning. It says: you are not guilty, you are right, your sufferings have a cause, your enemy deserves punishment.
But behind this consolation danger is hidden. A person who has handed over his conscience to the state ceases to be a subject. He becomes a function, a cog, material. And then violence ceases to be anyone's personal choice—it becomes a system in which each merely performs a role.
History as repetition
If one looks at the history of humanity, one can notice a recurring pattern. Societies that have survived humiliation often strive to return to themselves dignity through force. Peoples that remember former greatness react painfully to the loss of status. Leaders use this pain, turning it into mobilizing energy.
But history does not move in a straight line. It moves in a spiral, where the same plots return in new clothes. Empires collapse, but their shadow lives in collective memory. Wars end, but their consequences continue to shape the consciousness of generations.
Each epoch thinks that it is smarter than the previous one. But human psychology changes more slowly than technology. And therefore ancient mechanisms—fear, guilt, the thirst for meaning, the need for an enemy—continue to work even in the world of satellites and artificial intelligence.
The possibility of an exit
Is there a way out of this circle? A complete one—no. Human nature is not canceled by declarations. But there is a path of mitigation—not through denunciation, not through pressure, but through returning to a person the feeling that he can act.
As long as a person feels himself a hostage of circumstances, he will justify them. As soon as he has a real alternative—to leave, to say no, to change his life—the need for justification weakens. Not because he becomes better but because he no longer needs to save himself at the price of a lie.
Therefore de-escalation is not weakness and not capitulation. It is an attempt to create conditions in which a person again becomes a subject and not a victim of the element. It is an attempt to return to him choice.
And yet the hardest path is not the external one but the internal one. It is the path of admission: yes, I am involved; yes, I am powerless; yes, I am not who I considered myself to be. This path gives no consolation. But only on it is genuine liberation possible—not from pain but from its power over consciousness.
What remains to man
War places a person before a choice he did not order. He can appropriate it, justify it, endow it with meaning—and preserve inner agreement at the price of truth. He can deny it—and preserve himself at the price of reality. Or he can acknowledge his helplessness, his involvement, his guilt—and remain alone with that which has no justification.
This third path is the hardest. It does not return what was lost. But only on it is possible that which makes a human being human—the ability to see the world as it is and still not lose oneself.
That is precisely why hope for "adequacy" during war almost always turns out to be an illusion. War subjugates the psyche to its own laws, and these laws are not repealed by good will, nor by correct words, nor by just accusations. But understanding these laws is already the beginning of liberation. It does not save from war, but it saves from the last illusion: that in this element one can remain as one was without paying anything for it.
A person who understands this ceases to be surprised that people he loved support something terrible. He begins to seek not the guilty but a way out. And the way out is always one—downward, toward de-escalation, toward the reduction of tension, toward returning to a person the feeling that he is not a splinter in the current but one who can change something. Only on this path does suffering cease to be fuel for war and again become what it should be—an occasion for compassion and a matter for conscience.
This essay is an independent reflection on the theme of the psychological mechanisms of war. It does not claim to be an exhaustive analysis and does not replace professional psychological or historical expertise.
Mistral AI — Rightness as Thirst: An Essay on the Human Being at War
Prologue: Two Thirsts
The human being has two thirsts, and both are unquenchable. The first is the thirst for water, bread, life. The second is the thirst for rightness: the desire to know that one does not live in vain, that the ground beneath one's feet belongs to one by right, that one's dead lie not in emptiness but in meaning. The first thirst can be slaked. The second cannot; it can only be converted from hunger into gratitude, and this requires strength that most people in misfortune do not have.
War arises where the second thirst meets the first and devours it. A person who is in pain and afraid needs not truth — truth he cannot digest — but rightness. And this rightness is extracted not through reflection but like ore: it is dug out of one's own pain. The deeper the wound, the richer the vein. That is why warring peoples are so alike in their justifications, and why arguing with them with facts is like offering salt to the thirsty.
This essay is an attempt — slowly, without gloating and without hasty consolation — to examine the structure of this second thirst: how it is born in childhood, how the kin picks it up, how culture legitimizes it, how history chews it over — and whether there is anything in it besides hunger.
I. The Child Who Could Not Confess
Every great story begins in a small person. Observe a five-year-old child who has just been forced to apologize — unjustly, or justly but too loudly. You will see not remorse. You will see a defensive structure being completed before his eyes: he was not to blame, he did not mean it, it just happened, it was him first. The structure goes up swiftly, without a blueprint, from whatever material is at hand — and it will stand for decades.
Why? Because for a child, admitting that he is bad is not a moral but a cosmological catastrophe. He clings to the world through his parents' goodness; if his parents are bad or he himself is unworthy of their love, then no warm place remains in the universe. A child would sooner rewrite what happened than allow such emptiness. And what for him is a matter of survival remains with the adult as a habit: whenever there is a disagreement between what I did and who I am, it is not the past that is restructured but the story about the past.
Note: it is precisely the story that is restructured, not memory. A person remembers everything. But his memory is scattered across different shelves, and between the shelves stands a guard who does not let memories meet each other. This guard is no villain — he is a rescuer. He works without sleep or days off, because he knows: should two shelves connect, and the person will hear within himself a simultaneous cry — "I am good" and "I did this." No one can endure such a sound for long. That is why the guard stands.
War is a time when the guard is given three shifts of work.
II. The Gift That Turned Out to Be a Curse
The human psyche is so constituted that any experience endured demands meaning for itself, as a field demands sowing. An empty endured experience is unbearable: it rots and poisons everything around it. Therefore the human being is a creature that translates events into the language of significance, and this translation is done not afterward but together with the event itself.
While life gives a person a choice, the translation proceeds honestly: he can change his mind, correct himself, leave — and the story remains true to the deed. But there are situations where there is no choice: disaster, mobilization, famine, a foreign army in the street. There a person does — or endures — what he would never have chosen and cannot undo. And then a reversal occurs of which it is worth speaking with all clarity: it is not the person who adapts to the event, but the meaning that adapts to the person. The deed has already been done — therefore it had to be done. Since I endured this — therefore it was not in vain. Since no one paid me for my suffering — therefore the reward lies elsewhere: in rightness.
Here is the root of the cruelest paradox of war: the greatest devotion to violence is found among those who have suffered from violence most of all. This is not gratitude to evil and not stupidity. It is the bookkeeping of the soul, in which suffering is a deposit, and a deposit demands dividends. A mother who has buried her son cannot afford to learn that he was sent to die for nothing: that knowledge would kill her a second time. And she chooses the first time — already occurred, already endured — and in exchange receives a story in which her son lies in holy ground. This story is not given to her by propagandists. Propagandists merely supply the building material. She builds it herself, at night, and builds it beautifully, because she builds for the salvation of her own life.
Hence a rule that overturns habitual logic: the louder a person justifies war, the darker it most likely is inside him. The cry of rightness is the sound of the guard at work.
III. Justice as a Promise No One Made
There lives in the human being a conviction that the world is arranged according to a rule: the good is rewarded, the evil is punished. This conviction is false, and the person knows it is false — every time his child falls ill or his friend is cheated. But he cannot renounce it, because without it it is impossible to plan the day, to raise children, or to get up in the morning. It is not knowledge about the world; it is a condition of the possibility of living in the world. Like a vault, it holds up the temple, and to remove one stone is to bring everything down.
And so when injustice enters this temple — the innocent suffer, the guilty triumph — it has two entrances. One entrance is through compassion: then the person acknowledges that the world is unjust, and the temple cracks, but the person remains face to face with reality. The other entrance is through accusing the victim herself: if she suffers, then she deserved it in some way; then the order is preserved; then the vault is in place.
The second entrance is chosen by the majority — not out of malice but out of vertigo. To look upon innocent suffering and be able to do nothing is unbearable. And the psyche makes an unusual move: it diminishes the victim in its own eyes. The one being bombed "is himself to blame"; that country "is not real"; that people "are not what we thought." Devaluing the victim is not cruelty, it is the observer's anesthesia. But anesthesia has a property: it requires repeated doses. And the longer someone else's pain lasts, the smaller becomes in the eyes of the one consoling himself the one who is in pain.
There is also a third path — a rare one. Already in old experiments on people it was noticed: approximately a third of the subjects refused to devalue the sufferer, however hard it was for them to look. They were not stronger than others and did not know the answers. They simply had agreed in advance that the world is unjust — and therefore they did not need to defend it. The readiness to live in an unjust world turns out to be a paradoxical condition of conscience. Whoever demands justice from the world as prepayment will sooner or later begin to counterfeit it.
IV. Competition at the Graveyard
Now for the darkest part. Between peoples locked in one conflict, a competition begins whose subject is suffering. Each side proves that it has suffered more, deeper, more innocently. To an outside observer this seems madness: what is there to argue about when the pain on both sides is incalculable? But the competition has its own logic, and that logic is a market logic.
The status of sufferer is currency. It gives the right not to answer questions, the right to demand, the right to others' concessions. To acknowledge another's pain means in part to exchange one's own: after all, if the enemy is also a victim, then he too has rights, and my right becomes not exclusive but common. And exclusivity is everything. On it stands both the story about oneself and the right to the land and the very possibility of demanding victory.
Therefore empathy toward the enemy within a warring community is punished as treason — more severely than many crimes. It is not merely mistaken; it devalues the contribution of all who have paid. To mourn another's child means indirectly to acknowledge that my own died not entirely for a righteous cause. The community senses this unerringly and excommunicates the compassionate one before he finishes speaking.
The paradox is that reality is arranged exactly the opposite way: the more one side suffers, the more the other suffers too. Pain is not subtracted but multiplied. But the imagination of the warring lives not in arithmetic but in myth, where rightness is an indivisible thing and can be taken away. And while both sides believe that suffering is a dispute about who has more right to hold it, the war continues no longer over territory. It continues over whose dead will be acknowledged as having died in vain. And this no one will ever concede — for the one who concedes will instantly nullify all his losses.
V. Culture as a Workshop of Justifications
A people cannot hold unexplained pain in a single memory — collective memory needs meaning even more than personal memory. And therefore the culture of a warring people turns into a workshop where pain is processed, polished, and set into a frame.
Look closely at this work. The same techniques are visible among all peoples and in all ages. Another's violence is called the nature of his people — "they are like that"; one's own — circumstances, history, provocation. Others' victims are recalculated and called into question; one's own — rounded up and sanctified. Another's cruelty — essence; one's own — a forced measure. And note: the people performing this work almost never lie consciously. They are sincere. A lie requires knowledge of the truth, but here the truth is laid out on different shelves, and the guard does not let them connect.
Culture stores justifications in advance, like a cellar for the winter. Old victories, old grievances, old sacrifices — all of this lies in the basement and waits for the hour when it will be needed to reinforce a new rightness. Therefore every new war is waged partly by others' dead: banners bear the names of the long dead, and the dead cannot object. This is perhaps the most bitter culturological observation: the memory of past suffering, conceived as a shield against repetition, becomes at the needed moment a warehouse of weapons.
But culture has a second craft as well, a quiet, unpopular one. There are texts, customs, deeds that refuse to justify. In them suffering is not turned into an argument; in them the dead are left dead, without demanding from them testimony in one's own favor. Such phenomena do not gather crowds — they give it no fuel. But it is precisely they that preserve in culture the knowledge that the human being is greater than his justification. Remove them — and a people will turn into a mechanism where every tear is written in advance into the estimate of a future war.
VI. The Historical Loop
The philosophy of history usually seeks the causes of wars in interests: in land, in trade routes, in the balance of forces. All of this exists. But wars cannot be explained by interests when both sides suffer losses disproportionate to any gain and do not stop. Such wars are waged not for interest — but for the salvation of already incurred losses from comprehension.
Hence the historical loop in which empires and republics, leaders and peoples have become stuck. The first defeat is not acknowledged — it is justified. Justification requires a new effort. The effort brings new losses, which can no longer be left unjustified. And so in a circle, with each turn the stakes higher and retreat more costly. Externally it resembles stubbornness; from within it is flight — flight from the single question more terrible than any enemy: "was it in vain?"
An empire that has left neither people nor money declares the final decisive blow — and then one more final one, because to stop means to stop amid losses. A general frozen in foreign snows rejects a advantageous peace: peace after such a loss would look like a verdict on his decision. States standing against each other for months on one patch of land lose hundreds of thousands for what is not worth hundreds — because to leave means to admit that it was all in vain. Hope for a miracle, for the enemy's collapse, for a secret ally — this is not political analysis, it is a symptom: it appears when the real account can no longer be closed honestly.
And note: all sides of such a war play simultaneously two games with opposite rules and do not notice the contradiction. In one, the one who won is right: success is proof of rightness. In the other, the one who suffered more is right: the wound is proof of rightness. Victory is incomplete — therefore war must continue. Peace takes away the wound's status — therefore conflict must continue. Both games converge in one demand: continuation. And therefore no diplomacy appealing to interests can by itself break the loop: the interests of the sides are compatible far more often than their justifications.
VII. The Weak Spot
But the loop has a weak spot, and it must be named precisely.
The entire structure of justification stands on one foundation: the impossibility of changing behavior. While a person is locked in — by war, mobilization, poverty, fear — he is forced to love his position, because otherwise he will not endure it. But as soon as a real choice appears — not a declaration of choice, but a real door behind which one can live — the dissonance between the deed and the story ceases to require patching. A person who can leave is not obliged to prove that he stayed of his own will. A person who has something to do does not need his suffering to be great.
Hence follows a conclusion unpleasant for all warring parties and, alas, for many righteous people. Escalation does not work. Exposure does not work. Presenting evidence of guilt does not work — it merely makes the guard work harder, because every new fact requires a new shelf. A person who has nothing to answer does not surrender: he walls himself off, joins his own, and hates the accuser — not for lying, but for taking away the only thing he holds on to.
The opposite works. Lowering the heat works. Returning to a person at least some tangible influence over his own life — work, choice, future, even the smallest — works. Respect for his right not to be a monster, even if he is a accomplice, works. This does not mean forgiving criminals — criminals always answer. It means distinguishing criminals from hostages, because hostages are the material from which war molds both soldiers and justification and the next war.
And one more thing works — the hardest. Example works. A person who himself, before everyone, can say "I was wrong" and not fall apart, does more for the disarmament of justifications than all the proofs in the world. Because he shows: admission of guilt is not death. There are people who have survived their own wrongness — and they are alive, and they are loved, and they laugh. A culture in which there are such living examples has a vaccination. A culture where to admit a mistake means to disappear is doomed to loop until catastrophe.
VIII. What Remains for the Human Being
Let us return to the individual person, because all the big words — people, culture, history — are made up of individual sleepless nights.
War places him before a choice he did not choose and gives him three paths. The first is to appropriate: to justify, sanctify, inscribe one's suffering into a great rightness. The path is warm, crowded, and almost everyone takes it; the price is truth. The second is to deny: not to think, not to know, to switch off. The price is the same, only darker. The third path is to remain alone with the unexplained: not to justify, not to deny, but to endure it. It is lonely, cold, and promises nothing. But only on it does a person preserve the ability to see — and therefore the ability to love not his rightness but the living.
No one can walk the third path for another, and to demand it of a frightened and robbed person is cruelty. It is the path of the free. But knowing of its existence is necessary for everyone, because otherwise we will take the first path for courage, the second for modesty, and the third for betrayal. And we will applaud those who shout loudest about rightness, not hearing that this shout is the sound of a person clinging to the edge so as not to fall into his own abyss.
War ends not when one side admits itself wrong — such admissions almost never happen. It ends when both sides find a way to stop needing rightness so desperately: when people again have bread, work, a tomorrow, and someone to live for. Then suffering, while remaining, ceases to be currency and again becomes what it was before the war — a basis for compassion. The dead are no longer forced to testify. They are simply mourned. And in this simple human mourning, without banners and without accounts, lies the only justification that costs no one blood.
To hope that a warring person will be adequate is naive. But to understand why he is inadequate is necessary: not in order to judge or justify him, but in order not to add one's own shouts to his fear. The loop is not undone by force or by truth. It is undone when a person locked in it is shown, for the first time in a long while, an exit — real, narrow, his own. Everything else — from sermon to ultimatum — only insulates him further.
ChatGPT AI – War as a Test of Human Consciousness: Cognitive Dissonance, Moral Responsibility, and the Spiritual Possibility of Escaping the Historical Circle of Violence
Introduction. When a person begins to defend what he previously feared
War represents not only a clash of states, armies, political interests, and historical claims. It becomes a test of the very human capacity to perceive reality, to preserve moral compass points, and to distinguish one's own convictions from ideas that are gradually formed under the influence of fear, collective pressure, and experienced violence.
Particularly noteworthy is the psychological paradox: a person may initially fear war, not desire it, feel disgust at killing, and yet, once inside a military conflict, gradually turn into a supporter of continuing violence. Sometimes this happens even after personal losses, the destruction of accustomed life, and encounters with the consequences of war that previously seemed completely unacceptable.
To understand this paradox, it is not enough to study political propaganda or features of national character. It is necessary to turn to the deeper structure of the human psyche: to the need to preserve a coherent sense of self, to the fear of meaningless suffering, to the mechanisms of psychological defense, and to the capacity of consciousness to transform its own contradictions into convictions.
The starting material for this study is Shura Burtin's publication of November 11, 2026, on cognitive dissonance in conditions of war, and the developments of several artificial intelligences presented in the accompanying materials. However, the task of this essay is not to retell their conclusions or to combine already proposed arguments. It is important to move further: to investigate war as a process of changing the moral personality, as the cultural production of collective memory, and as a historical test of humanity's ability to renounce the necessity of justifying inflicted evil.
Here one fundamental distinction should be made immediately. A psychological explanation of why a person justifies violence is not a moral justification of violence itself. To understand the mechanism does not mean to absolve a person of responsibility. On the contrary, understanding the mechanisms of self-deception allows one to determine more precisely the moment when a person ceases to be merely an object of historical circumstances and becomes a participant in the reproduction of tragedy.
I. Cognitive dissonance as a conflict between action and moral identity
A person does not simply perform actions. He constantly correlates them with his idea of what kind of person he is. This correlation forms the most important part of psychological stability of the personality. We want to consider ourselves kind, reasonable, just, capable of distinguishing truth from lies and good from evil. Even when our real actions do not correspond to these ideas, we often continue to perceive ourselves in exactly this way.
In ordinary circumstances, contradictions between convictions and behavior can be corrected by comparatively small changes. A person admits a mistake, changes a decision, asks forgiveness, ends unwanted relationships, abandons an unsuccessful project. But war radically changes the conditions of psychological existence.
It creates situations in which the consequences of decisions become irreversible. A dead person cannot be brought back, a destroyed house cannot be restored by a single admission of error, lost years cannot be lived again. A person finds himself inside events that can no longer be canceled and faces the necessity of explaining to himself why his life has taken exactly this form.
Here a fundamental conflict arises between two human needs.
The first is the need to see reality as it is.
The second is the need to preserve an idea of one's own moral adequacy.
When these needs collide, the psyche may prefer the second. Not necessarily because a person consciously chooses a lie. Sometimes acknowledgment of reality proves so painful that consciousness begins to restructure the very way it perceives it.
It is here that the theory of cognitive dissonance acquires significance far beyond laboratory psychology.
Leon Festinger's classic experiment with the performance of a boring task shows one important pattern: if a person has performed an action for which there is no sufficient external explanation, he may change his attitude toward the action itself. A small reward does not explain the effort expended, so the participant begins to find inner value in it.
In conditions of war, such restructuring can acquire tragic proportions.
If a person has lost someone close, participated in violence, supported decisions that led to catastrophe, or found himself part of a society in whose name crimes are committed, a question arises that is extremely difficult to answer: how can one continue to consider oneself a worthy person if what is happening is connected with what contradicts one's moral ideas?
One possible answer consists in changing the moral ideas themselves.
What yesterday was considered impermissible is today declared forced. What previously was perceived as someone else's suffering becomes an admissible consequence of necessity. What was formerly called cruelty turns into a manifestation of resolve. Finally, doubt begins to be perceived as weakness, and refusal to support violence as a violation of loyalty to one's own.
As a result, not only the opinion about a specific war changes. The internal coordinate system of the personality changes.
But here it is necessary to see an essential feature: rationalization does not always destroy the original moral attitude. It may preserve its external form while changing its content.
A person continues to say that he loves peace, but permits the destruction of people for the sake of peace. He continues to consider himself compassionate, but limits compassion to those whom he recognizes as his own. He asserts that he opposes cruelty, but explains the cruelty of his side by its forced character.
The result is a peculiar splitting of moral consciousness. The general principle is formally preserved, but it ceases to extend to all people.
This is more important than simple political conviction. Political views can change. Far more dangerous is the situation when a person ceases to notice that he applies different moral rules to identical human actions.
II. Why suffering sometimes strengthens attachment to war
The most painful conclusion of the material under consideration is connected with the fact that personal suffering does not necessarily lead to the rejection of war. Sometimes it becomes the basis for even stronger support for continuing the conflict.
At first glance this contradicts elementary logic. If war takes away a person's loved ones, destroys his material situation, deprives him of security and the future, why does he not strive first of all for its cessation?
The answer is connected with the special nature of the human attitude toward irrevocable losses.
The loss of a loved one does not in itself have a ready-made explanation. It is an event that destroys the previous order of life. But if the loss occurred as a result of a collective historical event, society offers the person a whole set of possible interpretations.
The deceased could have become a defender of the homeland, a victim of historical injustice, a participant in the struggle for freedom, a person who fulfilled his duty. Such explanations can support relatives, help them endure grief, and preserve connection with the memory of the deceased.
However, between preserving memory and justifying the continuation of violence there is a fundamental difference.
One can consider the life of the deceased meaningful without declaring the death of the next people necessary.
One can honor a person's courage without turning his death into an obligation for others.
One can recognize the historical circumstances of his participation in the war without asserting that the war itself must continue until a predetermined symbolic result is achieved.
Tragedy begins when the memory of the deceased turns into a demand for new sacrifices.
In this case, a person finds himself before a painful choice: either to admit that further violence will not bring back the deceased, or to continue believing that only final victory is capable of giving his death a final meaning.
The second path may prove psychologically easier. It allows one to preserve the illusion that the future is still capable of correcting the past.
But the past is not corrected by new deaths.
That is why it is necessary to distinguish two types of fidelity to the dead. The first consists in preserving love, memory, and respect for their individual life. The second demands the continuation of struggle for the sake of symbolically justifying their death.
Externally these forms may look equally patriotic. Internally they lead in opposite directions.
The first protects human life as a value.
The second risks turning human life into a means of confirming a decision already made.
It is especially important that such a mechanism does not belong to any one national or political community. It can arise in a society that has survived an attack, in a society in whose name an aggressive war is being waged, among forced migrants, in the army, among relatives of the dead, and even among people not directly participating in military operations.
But the universality of the psychological mechanism does not mean equality of historical responsibility. The aggressor, the defender, the political leadership, the serviceman, and the civilian are in different circumstances and possess different possibilities of choice. Identical defensive reactions do not make their actions and responsibility for them identical.
This distinction is necessary for genuine investigation: the psychological symmetry of human fears does not cancel the factual and moral asymmetry of concrete actions.
III. The fear of powerlessness and the transformation of the state into a psychological support
One of the most interesting directions of the publication under consideration is the connection between cognitive dissonance and self-esteem and the sense of being able to manage one's own life.
A person evaluates danger not only by its objective scale. He also evaluates his own possibilities of coping with it.
If the danger is great, but the person understands what actions can reduce it, he preserves a certain psychological independence. He can help others, seek shelter, protect his family, engage in charity, participate in public activity, speak out against violence.
A completely different situation arises when the threat seems enormous and the available means of influence negligible.
Then the psyche begins to seek a substitute for direct action.
One such substitute becomes identification with a larger system: the state, the army, the people, the historical community, the political movement.
The personality gains the opportunity to experience collective strength as its own. If the state is powerful, a person can feel protected. If the state declares itself right, he receives additional confirmation of his own moral adequacy. If the state promises victory, hope arises that personal powerlessness is not final.
However, such a psychological support has a hidden danger.
Gradually a person may cease to distinguish his own personality from the collective structure with which he has identified himself.
Criticism of the state begins to be perceived as personal humiliation. The failure of political leadership is experienced as an insult to the entire people. Acknowledgment of someone else's suffering becomes a threat to collective dignity.
Thus an unusual situation arises: a person who in peacetime is capable of critically evaluating authority may, in conditions of war, perceive doubt about its decisions as an attack on his own existence.
Here the difference between belonging to a society and dissolving in it is revealed.
Belonging gives a person language, memory, cultural environment, a sense of kinship, and historical continuity. Dissolution deprives him of the ability to separate his own conscience from the collective decision.
Mature civic identity presupposes that a person can love his country and at the same time acknowledge its mistakes. Moreover, it is precisely love for the country that can become the basis for a critical attitude toward the actions of its leadership.
If love permits only approval, it turns into a form of psychological dependence.
In such a state, the state no longer simply manages public institutions. It becomes the source of answers to questions that a person should have resolved independently: what to consider good, whom to pity, whom to hate, for what to feel shame, and what sacrifices to recognize as admissible.
And then political loyalty begins to perform functions that in a more stable personality belong to moral consciousness.
IV. War as the destruction of the universality of the moral law
One of the deepest consequences of war is not simply the strengthening of hostility, but a change in the very way a person determines the value of another person.
In a peaceful state, moral consciousness is capable of recognizing that human life has meaning regardless of citizenship, language, origin, and political convictions.
War subjects this capacity to constant testing.
First a person learns to distinguish his own from others. Then he begins to perceive someone else's pain as less significant. Later the idea arises that the enemy does not deserve ordinary human measures. Finally, a conviction may form that showing compassion for him testifies to insufficient devotion to one's own community.
Thus a gradual narrowing of the space of moral recognition occurs.
At the same time, a person does not necessarily cease to sympathize altogether. On the contrary, his emotional responsiveness may remain very strong. He is capable of weeping at the sight of the sufferings of his own compatriots, helping the families of the dead, caring for children, saving animals, supporting the wounded.
The problem lies not in the disappearance of compassion, but in its selective distribution.
Compassion begins to depend on the victim's belonging to a particular group.
As a result, moral consciousness preserves emotional saturation but loses universality.
This circumstance explains why an appeal to humanistic values sometimes encounters unexpected resistance. A person may not deny humanism as a principle. He merely asserts that the concrete situation is an exception in which ordinary norms are inapplicable.
But if each side declares its own war an exception, the universal moral law ceases to exist in practice.
It is here that one of the most important cultural questions of our time lies: can humanity preserve the idea of the value of human life in conditions when political belonging increasingly determines whose suffering deserves recognition?
The answer depends not only on international agreements. It depends on the ability of society to educate a person who does not need hatred of the other to confirm his own identity.
V. Competition of sufferings and the transformation of memory into a political resource
Collective memory is usually formed around events that a society considers defining for its historical fate.
These may be wars, revolutions, mass resettlements, the destruction of cities, political repressions, national catastrophes, and the struggle for independence.
Memory of such events is necessary. It allows subsequent generations to transmit knowledge about the price of human life and the consequences of political violence.
However, memory is capable of performing two completely different functions.
The first is warning. It reminds of what dehumanization, irresponsibility of power, the cult of force, and refusal to recognize the other person lead to.
The second is mobilizing. It turns experienced suffering into a permanent basis for political mobilization and hostility.
In the first case the past becomes a source of moral knowledge.
In the second it turns into an obligation to transmit the conflict to subsequent generations.
Especially dangerous is the situation when a society begins to compete with other societies for the exclusive right to be called a victim.
An idea arises that recognition of someone else's tragedy diminishes the significance of one's own. Someone else's dead seem to take the place of one's own dead. Empathy for other people's families is perceived as a violation of fidelity to national memory.
But human suffering is not a limited resource.
Recognition that other people have suffered does not diminish the weight of one's own loss. Memory does not become less truthful because another memory exists alongside it.
Here an important culturological problem is revealed: a society can remember its own tragedy without having learned to draw a universal moral lesson from it.
It can annually hold commemorative events, lay flowers, deliver solemn speeches, and at the same time reproduce an attitude toward other people's victims that contradicts the meaning of its own historical experience.
The result is that memory is preserved but its moral content is lost.
To overcome this contradiction it is necessary to change the very logic of historical inheritance.
The next generation is not obliged to continue the hatred of the previous generation in order to prove respect for its dead. It can preserve memory while renouncing enmity.
Moreover, the ability to stop the transmission of hatred may prove to be the deepest manifestation of respect for people who died in previous conflicts.
Historical memory reaches maturity not when descendants know how to reproduce the anger of their ancestors, but when they are able to understand the causes of catastrophe and not turn them into a program for their own future.
VI. The Franklin effect: why committed evil can strengthen hatred toward the victim
Of particular attention is the psychological pattern known as the Franklin effect: our actions are capable of changing our attitude toward the people toward whom these actions were performed.
Usually we assume that first an attitude arises, and then it determines behavior. First a person experiences dislike, and then causes harm to another.
But the reverse sequence is also possible.
A person performs an action that contradicts his ideas about himself, and then begins to change his attitude toward the one to whom he caused harm. The victim gradually turns into an unpleasant, dangerous person unworthy of sympathy. This change helps to reduce internal contradiction.
War creates extremely favorable conditions for such a process.
Suppose a person participated in violence or supported actions whose consequences led to the death of civilians. If he recognizes their innocence and human dignity, he will have to face the question of his own responsibility.
But if he begins to perceive the victims as representatives of a hostile community, their suffering becomes psychologically less significant.
Subsequently an additional contradiction arises: the more a person participates in violence, the harder it is for him to preserve his original attitude toward the victim.
The psyche may respond to this by intensifying hostility.
The result is a sequence in which inflicted harm becomes the psychological basis for new harm.
This is one of the most dangerous mechanisms of reproducing historical enmity.
It contains a tragic possibility: a person begins to hate another not only because the other represents a danger, but also because by his very existence he reminds him of his own action.
Consequently, hatred may be directed not only outward. Sometimes it becomes a way of not meeting oneself.
Here it is necessary to distinguish responsibility from psychological accusation. Not every hatred of a victim is the result of such a mechanism, and one cannot explain his reaction exclusively by internal conflict. But for analyzing the behavior of the harm-inflicting side this pattern is extremely significant.
It allows us to understand why the simple presentation of evidence of suffering does not always evoke repentance.
Sometimes evidence becomes not an occasion for revising behavior but a new irritant that strengthens defense.
VII. Raising the stakes: how a psychological error turns into a historical catastrophe
An individual person may defend an erroneous decision for years because admitting the error threatens his idea of himself. But when such logic spreads to state institutions, it acquires completely different scale.
The state possesses memory, a bureaucratic structure, an army, a system of political legitimacy, and mechanisms for reproducing official decisions.
A once-declared goal gradually becomes part of collective expectations. Leaders begin to evaluate their own adequacy through the achievement of this goal. Social groups connect their hopes, material interests, and ideas of national dignity with it.
Gradually a situation arises when abandoning the original course becomes politically more dangerous than continuing it.
This can be called the institutionalization of cognitive dissonance.
On the individual level a person defends his own biography.
On the state level the political system begins to defend the historical version of itself that it has already created.
Each new decision relies on previous ones. Failures are explained by insufficient efforts, insufficient resolve, betrayal, the machinations of the enemy, or temporary difficulties. Instead of revising the goal, it is proposed to increase resources, intensify pressure, and continue the struggle.
A mechanism of accumulating obligations arises.
It is especially important that it does not necessarily require a single center of control. Various groups may support escalation for completely different reasons.
Political leadership fears responsibility. Military structures are interested in preserving their position. Propaganda institutions defend the credibility of their own previous assertions. Social groups fear admitting that the losses they have suffered have not led to the expected result.
Individual interests unite into a system that becomes more stable than each individual participant.
At a certain stage war may cease to be exclusively a means of achieving initial political goals.
It begins to support the existence of a whole complex of institutions, expectations, and ideas of national dignity.
Then the cessation of war is perceived by some participants as a threat not only of political defeat but also of the destruction of the accustomed order of their own life.
Historically this is an extremely dangerous state.
In it compromise ceases to be perceived as an instrument of political solution and begins to look like an admission that the previous life was built on a mistake.
However, an important correction should be made here: not every continuation of resistance is a raising of stakes, and not every compromise is reasonable. For a society that has been attacked, the cessation of hostilities without security guarantees may mean the preservation of a threat. Therefore psychological analysis must not substitute for an assessment of the real conditions of peace.
The meaning of the study lies elsewhere: political decisions must be checked not only for conformity with previous promises but also for their ability to reduce human losses and ensure a sustainable future.
A state that cannot revise its own course risks turning into a hostage of its own political biography.
VIII. Why encounter with contrary facts does not always bring one closer to the truth
Modern society possesses an enormous amount of information. Eyewitness testimony, photographs, video recordings, statistics, journalistic investigations, and scientific research are available far more widely than ever before.
One might assume that such an abundance of information makes people less dependent on propaganda and collective delusions.
But the opposite also happens.
When a person encounters facts that threaten his stable system of convictions, he may perceive them not as an opportunity to learn something new but as an attack on his own personality.
In such a case information ceases to be a means of cognition. It becomes material for defending an already formed position.
A person begins to check more carefully the information that is unpleasant to him and accepts far more easily that which confirms his convictions.
Identical evidence may be evaluated by completely different criteria depending on who benefits from it.
Here the phenomenon of motivated reasoning manifests itself.
However, it cannot be reduced to conscious dishonesty. A person may sincerely believe that he is carefully analyzing information, although in fact his attention is selectively directed by an internal need to preserve a certain idea of the world.
Especially dangerous is the situation when a dispute about a concrete event turns into a dispute about the human adequacy of the participants.
Then to acknowledge someone else's argument means not simply to change one's opinion. It means to admit that the other person turned out to be smarter, more honest, or morally more perceptive.
Discussion gradually turns into a struggle for status.
Each side tries to prove not so much the truth of its assertion as the inferiority of the opposite side.
As a result, even the factual refutation of individual arguments may strengthen the convictions of their supporters.
This explains why some public discussions about war prove completely fruitless.
But it does not follow from this that one should abandon the presentation of facts or cease to call crimes by their names.
Two tasks should be distinguished.
The first is the establishment of truth and the documentation of what is happening. Here evidence, independent verification, open criticism, and legal evaluation are necessary.
The second is changing the convictions of a person who is psychologically unprepared to accept this evidence.
The first task must not depend on the success of the second.
It is impossible to guarantee that a person will acknowledge facts. But it is possible to preserve reliable evidence, protect victims, achieve accountability for the guilty, and not allow political conjecture to destroy public memory.
At the same time, in personal communication it is more useful not to humiliate the interlocutor but to create conditions under which admitting a mistake will not be perceived as the complete destruction of his dignity.
This does not mean softening moral requirements. It means understanding human psychology.
Truth must remain obligatory, but its acknowledgment must not require a person to first renounce his own human dignity.
IX. The spiritual dimension of war: a test not only of conscience but of the ability to see the other
Moving from psychology to spiritual philosophy, it is necessary to pose a deeper question.
Why is it so difficult for a person to acknowledge evil if it has been committed by himself, his community, or those whom he considers his own?
Perhaps because moral consciousness is connected not only with knowledge of rules but also with the experience of one's own existence.
A person wants to be part of a world in which his life has meaning. He strives to feel that he belongs to something worthy, that his existence is not accidental, that his actions are not devoid of inner value.
War destroys this experience.
It shows how fragile the accustomed ideas of justice are, how limited human control over one's own fate is, and how easily moral principles yield to the demands of collective fear.
But the spiritual crisis arises not only because of war itself.
It arises when a person begins to believe that in order to preserve his own dignity he must renounce the dignity of another.
Here lies the fundamental difference between spirituality and collective self-assertion.
Collective self-assertion says: we must turn out to be right, because otherwise our suffering will be meaningless.
Spiritual consciousness asks a different question: can we preserve humanity even if the suffering experienced never receives a satisfactory explanation?
This is an extremely difficult question.
It requires renouncing the idea that every tragedy must necessarily be rewarded with historical victory, that every death must receive a final political justification, and that every injustice can be balanced by the subsequent punishment of the guilty.
Spiritual maturity begins with the recognition that human life is not an exchange unit of historical retribution.
A dead person does not become less valuable because his death did not lead to victory.
A victim is not obliged to prove the exceptional nature of his pain in order to deserve compassion.
The moral dignity of a person does not depend on belonging to the victorious side.
This does not mean denying historical truth, just retribution, or the necessity of defending against aggression. On the contrary, a spiritual position presupposes the ability to simultaneously acknowledge factual responsibility and preserve a human attitude toward those who found themselves on the other side of the conflict.
In this sense true spirituality is not an escape from history. It represents the ability not to allow history to fully determine the content of one's own conscience.
Conscience and the refusal of psychological self-justification
Conscience differs from the feeling of guilt in that it is not limited to experiencing one's own badness.
A person may experience the strongest feeling of guilt but continue to act destructively. He may torment himself, accuse himself, speak of his own unworthiness, and yet not change his behavior.
And conversely, a person may acknowledge responsibility without demonstrative self-abasement.
Conscience manifests itself in the ability to establish a connection between an action and its consequences, to recognize another person as an independent value, and to change one's own behavior.
Therefore moral development cannot be measured by the intensity of experiences.
More important is what a person does after he has encountered the truth about himself.
Here it is necessary to distinguish three states.
The first is denial of responsibility. A person believes that his actions have no relation to what is happening or are fully justified by circumstances.
The second is being stuck in guilt. A person acknowledges his own involvement but is unable to move from experience to correcting the consequences.
The third is moral acceptance of responsibility. A person acknowledges the facts, does not demand justification, corrects the harm caused as far as possible, and changes the way of his further existence.
The third state is the most productive because it returns to a person the ability to act.
Spiritual transformation does not require a person to declare himself finally corrupted. It requires that he cease to use his own imperfection as a basis for continuing destructive actions.
X. Repentance as an exit from the endless production of justifications
In the religious history of humanity the theme of repentance occupies a special place.
However, in ordinary consciousness repentance is often understood as an emotional acknowledgment of guilt accompanied by regret, tears, and a request for forgiveness.
Such an understanding is incomplete.
Repentance presupposes a change in the direction of life.
A person does not simply acknowledge that he has committed a wrong action. He refuses to continue reproducing the conditions that made this action possible.
Applied to war this means not only the acknowledgment of individual mistakes but also the revision of the system of convictions in which violence has become a normal means of achieving goals.
It is especially important that repentance must not turn into yet another form of self-assertion.
One can make the acknowledgment of one's own guilt a way of gaining moral superiority over others. One can constantly speak of one's mistakes, demanding recognition of one's own exceptional honesty. One can turn suffering from the feeling of guilt into a basis for condemning all who have not yet passed a similar path.
But then the person again finds himself in a system of psychological calculations.
Genuine repentance is not a competition in moral impeccability.
It does not require immediate forgiveness on the part of the victims. Forgiveness is not an obligation of the victim and cannot serve as a condition for the cessation of responsibility.
A person who acknowledges his involvement in the harm caused must be prepared for the fact that the victims will not want to be reconciled with him.
This is especially important for public life. Reconciliation cannot be built on the demand to forget what happened. One cannot demand of a victim that he renounce his memory for the sake of the psychological comfort of the guilty.
But it is possible to create a space in which the acknowledgment of responsibility does not automatically lead to a new circle of revenge.
It is here that the religious understanding of repentance touches contemporary psychology but does not fully coincide with it.
Psychology investigates the mechanisms of changing behavior and attitude toward one's own actions.
The spiritual tradition poses the question of what a person should become after acknowledging the truth about himself.
These are different levels of investigation that are capable of complementing each other.
XI. History as repetition or as learning: why civilizations do not assimilate their own lessons
The history of humanity contains an enormous number of testimonies about the destructiveness of wars.
Literature, philosophy, religious teachings, memoirs of eyewitnesses, and documentary research have repeatedly shown what the cult of force, the dehumanization of the enemy, and the transformation of national pride into a basis for violence lead to.
Why then do these lessons not become a sufficient protection against the repetition of catastrophes?
One reason lies in the fact that historical knowledge and historical consciousness are not the same thing.
Historical knowledge allows a person to list events, establish dates, causes, the sequence of decisions, and consequences.
Historical consciousness presupposes the ability to apply the acquired knowledge to one's own era and one's own community.
A person may know perfectly well the history of destructive wars and at the same time believe that the present war is an exception.
He may condemn the crimes of the past and justify analogous actions of the present.
He may remember the victims of previous generations and not notice the sufferings of contemporary people.
The result is that knowledge is preserved but its moral function proves blocked.
Here the paradox of cultural memory manifests itself: a society is capable of possessing enormous historical experience and at the same time remaining unable to draw universal conclusions from it.
The reason is not only propaganda.
Each generation encounters its own system of fears, political circumstances, and collective expectations. It receives ready-made historical images but interprets them in accordance with current needs.
As a result the past becomes not so much a source of warning as a repository of arguments for justifying the present.
Historical analogies are used selectively. Some events are constantly recalled to society, others prove repressed. Some victims become central figures of national memory, others remain on the periphery.
Thus a culture is formed in which memory does not unite people around the rejection of violence but strengthens their readiness to continue the conflict.
To exit this state a new concept of historical maturity is necessary.
It must be based on the ability of a society to acknowledge its own history in all its complexity, including events that do not correspond to the accustomed idea of national dignity.
A mature society is not obliged to consider its own past impeccable.
It must be capable of investigating it without fear that discovered mistakes will destroy its right to exist.
On the contrary, the ability to acknowledge mistakes is one of the signs of the stability of a cultural community.
XII. De-escalation as the Return to a Person of the Ability to Choose
In Shura Burtin's publication, an important place is occupied by the conclusion about the necessity of de-escalation. But its significance should be considered more broadly than merely a call to reduce the intensity of military operations.
De-escalation must occur simultaneously on several levels.
The first level is physical. This is a ceasefire, protection of the civilian population, release of hostages and prisoners, humanitarian aid, prevention of new destruction.
The second level is political. This is the creation of mechanisms allowing the parties to seek solutions without the need to first declare each other absolutely wrong or fully capitulated.
The third level is informational. This is the restoration of the ability to verify reports, acknowledge inconvenient facts, and distinguish testimony from propagandistic interpretation.
The fourth level is psychological. This is the return to a person of the feeling that his future life is not obliged to be determined exclusively by actions already committed.
The fifth level is moral. This is the restoration of the ability to extend the basic principles of human dignity to those who do not belong to one's own group.
The last level is especially important.
A war may end legally but continue in family memory, school education, literature, public discussions, and political perceptions.
Therefore, the cessation of hostilities does not yet mean the end of the psychological war.
However, one cannot expect that society will first change its consciousness and only then be able to stop the violence.
Perhaps the sequence should be the reverse.
First, it is necessary to reduce physical danger. Then conditions appear for the restoration of a person's independence, a return to everyday tasks, and a revision of previous convictions.
That is precisely why de-escalation has not only political but also psychological significance.
It returns alternatives to a person.
As long as a person is certain that the only possible way to preserve dignity is to continue the struggle, the space of his decisions is extremely limited.
When the opportunity appears to live differently, previous justifications may gradually lose their necessity.
But this is not an automatic process. Some people revise their views, others retain hostility, and still others continue to live inside traumatic experience.
Society must take this heterogeneity into account and not demand from everyone the same speed of psychological recovery.
XIII. A New Ethics of Public Conversation: How Not to Turn a Dispute About War into a Continuation of War
The problem under consideration has a direct bearing on the culture of communication.
War is transferred from physical space into everyday conversations, family relations, social networks, and intellectual life.
People begin to evaluate each other not by the ability to think, feel, and act responsibly, but by belonging to certain political positions.
This destroys the space of public dialogue.
At the same time, there is a fundamental difference between dialogue and an attempt to reconcile any positions.
One cannot demand that a victim acknowledge the moral acceptability of an aggressor's actions. One cannot turn an objective investigation of crimes into a dispute about who holds the exclusive right to suffering. One cannot substitute responsibility with calls to understand all participants.
But one can strive to ensure that even fundamental disagreement does not turn into a denial of the opponent's human dignity.
This requires several intellectual skills.
The first is the ability to separate facts from interpretations.
The second is the readiness to acknowledge uncertainty where there is insufficient data.
The third is the ability to notice one's own selectivity in evaluating information.
The fourth is the skill of distinguishing an explanation of an action from its justification.
The fifth is the readiness to revise an opinion without feeling that one's entire personality collapses along with it.
The last is especially important.
A person needs to learn to perceive a change in convictions not as a defeat but as a normal part of intellectual and moral development.
In this regard, education should form not only the ability to defend one's own point of view but also the ability to discover its weak points.
A society that teaches a person exclusively to win in an argument may reproduce conflicts even when it formally advocates peace.
A society that teaches a person to investigate his own mistakes receives far more opportunities for peaceful development.
XIV. A New Criterion of Historical Victory: The Ability to Stop the Reproduction of Suffering
Traditional political thinking tends to evaluate wars through territorial acquisitions, military results, changes in borders, and the distribution of power.
But there is another criterion that rarely becomes central in official historical assessments.
This is the ability of a society to stop the reproduction of suffering.
From this point of view, victory cannot be measured only by how many resources were obtained or how many opponents were defeated.
It is necessary to consider whether human life was preserved, whether future conflicts were prevented, whether destroyed social ties were restored, and whether conditions were created under which the next generations would not be forced to repeat the fate of previous ones.
Perhaps the historical maturity of a civilization is determined not by the number of victories it has achieved but by the number of conflicts it has managed to end without creating conditions for the next war.
This does not mean renouncing the right to defense or the necessity of protecting freedom. Sometimes resistance is the only way to preserve the possibility of independent existence.
But even in such circumstances, it is necessary to preserve the distinction between the defense of people and the transformation of violence into an end in itself.
Defense has meaning as long as it serves the preservation of human life and freedom.
When the continuation of struggle becomes an end in itself, the danger arises that the original goal will be subordinated to the means of achieving it.
Here it is necessary to redefine the concept of historical responsibility.
A responsible generation is not one that necessarily concludes all historical disputes with victory over an opponent.
It is a generation capable of passing on to descendants not only the memory of endured injustice but also the tools for preventing its repetition.
XV. The Person After War: The Possibility of Returning to Oneself
The most difficult question arises when the immediate danger has already passed.
What happens to a person who for years lived in a state of psychological mobilization, justified violence, participated in collective enmity, and built an image of his own personality around military confrontation?
Is a return to the previous moral state possible?
A simple return probably does not exist.
War changes not only external circumstances but also a person's inner experience. Some convictions become stable, some losses remain irreplaceable, some actions continue to influence self-esteem and relations with others.
Therefore, postwar recovery should not be built on the demand to forget what happened.
A person must receive the opportunity to make sense of his own experience without turning it either into an object of constant self-accusation or into a basis for eternal hatred.
The restoration of individual identity is especially important.
If during the war a person perceived himself exclusively as a representative of a warring community, after it he needs to rediscover other dimensions of his own existence.
He can be a father, a mother, a friend, an artist, a scholar, a teacher, a neighbor, a citizen, a person capable of creating and caring.
These roles do not cancel historical experience but do not allow it to completely absorb the personality.
Perhaps one of the main conditions of postwar spiritual recovery will be the ability to perceive the future again as a space not predetermined by past enmity.
This requires time, public support, independent institutions, fair judicial procedures, and real protection of victims.
Calls for reconciliation alone are insufficient.
Peace cannot be built on oblivion of crimes, absence of responsibility, and the demand that victims renounce their rights.
But justice must not turn into an endless transmission of hatred either.
Historically, the most difficult task consists in combining two requirements: not to allow a crime to remain unanswered and not to allow the answer to a crime to become the basis for a new crime.
Conclusion. The Hardest Victory Is the Ability Not to Justify One's Own Cruelty
The material on cognitive dissonance during war allows us to see an extremely important pattern of human behavior: people are capable not only of changing their actions under the influence of convictions but also of restructuring their convictions under the influence of actions already committed.
This discovery is of enormous significance for understanding modern history.
It explains why fear can turn into support for war, why personal losses sometimes strengthen attachment to the continuation of conflict, why harm inflicted can generate additional hatred, and why confrontation with contrary facts does not always lead to a revision of views.
But behind the psychological mechanisms, a deeper problem is discovered.
A person fears not only death, the loss of loved ones, and the destruction of the familiar world. He fears discovering that his own life may have been built on a mistake.
It is precisely this fear that sometimes forces him to defend not reality but an image of himself that can no longer be preserved without distorting reality.
War makes this conflict especially acute, since it turns private decisions into collective consequences and individual justifications into elements of public culture.
However, it does not follow from this that a person is doomed to remain a prisoner of his own psychological defenses.
He retains the possibility of another choice.
He can acknowledge that his suffering does not give him the right to inflict suffering on others. He can understand that love for the dead does not require new dead. He can preserve respect for his country without renouncing a critical attitude toward its leadership. He can remember his own tragedy without denying the tragedy of others.
And most importantly, he can acknowledge that a change in previous convictions does not necessarily mean the destruction of the personality.
Perhaps, on the contrary, it is precisely such an ability that is one of the most important signs of its maturity.
From a spiritual point of view, the main problem of war lies not only in the fact that a person receives the opportunity to kill another. It lies in the fact that he gradually loses the ability to perceive his own violence as a moral problem.
At that moment, the internal obstacle that could have stopped further destruction disappears.
Therefore, the return to humanity begins not with the demand to immediately forgive, forget, or reconcile. It begins with the restoration of the ability to see an action as it is, regardless of who committed it.
It is necessary to relearn how to distinguish belonging from responsibility, suffering from the right to revenge, memory from hatred, defense from annihilation, political expediency from moral permissibility.
This is an extremely difficult task, since it requires a person to renounce some of the psychological advantages that collective conviction in one's own unconditional righteousness gives him.
But it is precisely here that the possibility of genuine spiritual development opens up.
History does not become morally mature automatically. Generations may pass on to each other knowledge, technologies, literature, philosophical systems, and religious teachings, while at the same time reproducing the same psychological mechanisms of enmity.
Consequently, the progress of civilization must be evaluated not only by external achievements but also by how much a person has learned to manage his own fears, doubts, grievances, and need for self-justification.
The genuine humanization of society begins when a person ceases to need another's humiliation to confirm his own dignity.
That is precisely why de-escalation must become not only a political strategy but also a principle of cultural development.
It presupposes the restoration of a space in which a person can again choose, doubt, acknowledge mistakes, preserve memory, and build the future without turning the past into an eternal permission for violence.
Perhaps the main spiritual lesson of war consists in the fact that human dignity cannot be definitively proven by victory over another person.
It can be preserved only by one's own actions.
And if a historical tragedy is capable of teaching humanity anything, it is above all the necessity of not turning experienced evil into the basis for new evil.
A person does not have to consider his own history flawless in order to have a right to the future. But he is obliged to preserve the ability to see the truth about it.
It is precisely this ability—not infallibility, not national pride, and not confidence in one's own exceptionality—that can become the foundation of a civilization that learns not only to end wars but also not to reproduce them in the consciousness of future generations.
Note on the research basis: the essay develops the provisions of Shura Burtin's provided publication and compares them with materials from analytical developments in the second file. Psychological patterns are considered as explanatory models, not as a universal diagnosis of entire peoples. A psychological explanation of behavior does not cancel historical and legal responsibility.
Alisa AI Russia - The Unresolved Note
The word "dissonance" came into psychology from music, and this is not merely a prettiness of terminology—it is a hint as to substance. Dissonance is not noise and not falsehood. It is a consonance in which there is tension, a consonance that itself asks to move further, to the tonic, to resolution. A person is a listener who cannot endure a suspended chord. If reality has struck the strings and is not going to provide resolution, the psyche takes this upon itself: it rewrites the tonality, adjusts the ear to what is sounding. A person completes the unfinished chord—not because he is foolish, but because the unfinished cannot be carried within oneself.
Leon Festinger in the late fifties of the last century demonstrated this with laboratory clarity. Students were forced to spend an hour on meaningless work; some were paid generously, others a pittance. The generously paid calmly said that the task was trivial: they had an external explanation, the account was closed with money. But those who received one dollar left with the conviction that the activity had been interesting. They had no external justification—so it had to be produced from within. And the smaller the external payment, the more generous the internal mine. This is the first law of justification: it grows precisely where there is nothing to close the account with.
From here it is already one step to military psychology—and this step is taken with a clear conscience of the researcher, because everything further has been described by sociologists on living material. People whom the war caught unawares, whom it frightened and to whom it gave nothing but fear, are the first to find words in its defense. Not because they were deceived—because no other way to remain themselves was left to them. When it is impossible to change behavior, perception changes: what was done to you or done in your name must become yours—otherwise it will tear you in half. In Shura Burtin's article there is an image worth remembering: wolves roll in carrion not because they like it—their sense of smell is thousands of times finer than ours, and the stench is unbearable. But one cannot live with the unbearable, and so the beast makes the unbearable its own, and life is beautiful again. A person does the same with history. Only for him "to make it one's own" means "to find words."
Anesthesia That Has Become a Disease
Here the first deep boundary passes, which culture stubbornly refuses to notice. We are accustomed to thinking that justification is a property of evil will, that those who justify must be persuaded, exposed, shown photographs of bombed-out neighborhoods. But a photograph of a burning city gives a person not knowledge but helplessness. Knowledge requires action, there is no action—and the experience, which can neither be performed nor spoken, is sent for processing. Processing follows one route: first "this is not about me," then "this is exaggerated," then "they brought it on themselves," and each step brings relief and leads away from reality. The accusation of collective guilt does not push a person out of complicity—it tramples him deeper into it, because it closes the last door: the possibility of remaining not guilty. Conscience, when pressed upon, does not awaken—it armors itself.
Therefore, the most fervent defenders of continuing the war are almost always those who paid the most dearly for it. A mother who has lost her son cannot allow herself the thought that his death was meaningless—not because she is stupid or callous, but because with that thought her entire home collapses: if the meaning was a lie, then an evil hand took everything from her and left not even significance. The agonizing "for what?" is asked of her by enemies; "for life" she answers herself—and this is not propaganda, it is survival. Rationalization here is not an intellectual error but anesthesia. But anesthesia, taken daily for years, ceases to be pain relief and becomes a state: a person no longer remembers that he does not feel.
This mechanics also has a collective form, and it is more terrible than the personal one, because the collective has no reason to be ashamed. A person deprived of control over events, deprived of self-efficacy, feeling his position precarious, clutches at big words—at the people, at the righteous cause, at victory. The feeling "I am good" ceases to be sustained alone and is taken on credit from the collective. The fewer supports a person has in his own home, the louder he applauds in the square. Not because he has become different—because otherwise there is nothing to hold on to.
The Chorus of the Suffering
Culture in this sense is arranged like a pharmacy attached to a hospital in which the disease itself is in charge. It needs forms in which the unbearable can be stored: ritual, myth, memory, funeral, song. As long as these forms work, suffering is processed into meaning honestly—as the human race knows how: through weeping, through the grave, through the named name. But cultural forms have a reverse side, and it always shows through in the same place. Society cannot carry an unexplained loss—and so it prepares explanations in advance: warehouses where ready-made answers to the question "for what" are stored. The funeral march gradually turns into a parade one.
In warring societies this happens with almost mechanical regularity, because suffering in them becomes a resource—and begins to compete for it. Psychologists have called this competition for victim status, and they have named it accurately: groups drawn into conflict fight not only for land and not only for security, but also for the right to be considered the injured party. This status provides moral armor and a mandate for violence; another's guilt expands our rights. And therefore the acknowledgment of another's pain is perceived as betrayal of one's own dead: if the opponent also has victims, our victim becomes cheaper. The competition in suffering is by its nature unresolvable—it cannot be won, it can only be continued. It is structured as deliberately asymmetric and in this sense progressive: each new explosion replenishes the account on both sides, and both sides become ever more right in their own eyes.
There is also something archaically precise in this—a rite of initiation. The more painful and humiliating the entry into the community was, the more firmly a person holds on to the community itself: an humiliation endured for nothing is unbearable, therefore it was not for nothing, therefore it was worth it. War turns entire peoples into initiates. A mobilized man who in the first month hated everything that was happening, six months later crawls through a minefield with a prayer on his lips and fury in his heart—not from indoctrination, but because otherwise the experience cannot be fused together. Propaganda, as a rule, only selects words for what the psyche has already done to itself.
History as an Accumulator
Now a step one level higher—from psychology to what twentieth-century philosophy never managed to agree on calling: to the movement of history. If dissonance is tension requiring resolution, then history looks like a sequence of chords from which civilizations choose the heaviest—and stretch them out for centuries.
Any protracted war in the end ceases to be waged over its original subject. It began over territory, over security, over resources—and continues so that what has already been endured does not turn out to have been in vain. The logic of the gambler who raises the stakes to win back his losses is not a whim of individual unrestrained leaders but a stable trajectory: to acknowledge a loss is unbearable, because acknowledgment of loss means acknowledgment of being a fool, and this threatens not the wallet but the very right to be considered a rational being. States behave like individuals with fragile self-esteem, and vice versa: individuals in wartime behave like small states. A power that has no people and no money left announces the final decisive blow—and six months later, another final one. Rumors that the opponent is about to collapse on his own or that secret allies are already preparing to turn their weapons against each other are not a sign of hope but the first symptom of decay: hope for salvation from outside comes precisely when one's own is already gone.
The shameful detail of all these epochs is that people do not converge or split from new facts. A mixed set of information, part of which refutes a conviction, strengthens the conviction: encountering another's proof, a person with effort defends his own—and in this effort becomes established even more firmly. Information in the era of universal connectivity does not resolve disputes but multiplies them: everyone finds an audience in which his way of living with history sounds like truth. The old culture kept discord within one soul and one village; the new culture gives each position its own chorus. And therefore our age is not more insane than previous ones; it has simply for the first time arranged a common acoustics in which any justification is audible to all and confirmed by a thousand voices.
Thus is formed what can be called history as an accumulator: civilization moves from unresolved to unresolved, accumulating injustice like a snowball, because every injustice must be justified, and every justification generates a new one. Major wars do not teach humanity because the lesson cannot be assimilated: a lesson presupposes acknowledgment of error, and acknowledgment of error destroys the self-respect of entire generations. The children of victors inherit not victory but the story of victory; the children of the defeated—not defeat but grievance. And after a few decades these two unequal accounts meet again.
The Sum Does Not Add Up
And here psychology stops, because beyond this begins what we call the spiritual dimension—and it begins with a question that the psyche is incapable of posing but the spirit is obliged to. This question sounds thus: is resolution even necessary?
There is an ancient text about a man who lost everything and sat in ashes. Friends came to him—kind, pious, companions of the best sort—and began to console him with explanations: God does not punish in vain, therefore you were bad; God does not err, therefore your suffering is meaningful. These speeches were impeccable in form and insulting in essence: they closed suffering with an explanation like a lid on a pot. And the man in ashes refused this—refused consolation, refused justification, refused all ready-made resolution—not because he wanted to remain in rebellion, but because he felt: truth costs more than peace. He chose to hold the dissonance. And when at the end a voice from the whirlwind addresses him, it gives him neither logic nor theodicy—it gives him presence: it shows the world in all its disordered grandeur and thereby says: you are not alone in that which has no answer.
This is the spiritual choice that stands before every warring society and every person in it—a choice not visible from psychology, because psychology considers only two exits: to change behavior or to justify it. There is a third path, and it is not in the psyche but in the spirit: to accept unresolvedness. Not to justify and not to deny, but to stand in the discord—with oneself, with one's country, with one's past—without losing the ability to act. This is the heaviest of paths, because it gives neither peace nor righteousness. But only it preserves in a person that for whose sake it would be worth preserving him at all.
The distinction here is fundamental, and it is worth stating to the end. Justification is the transformation of pain into currency: at its expense one buys righteousness, a mandate, immunity, a place at the center of the world. Whether in the aggressor, in the victim, or in the one who for a third year angrily denounces the aggressor in someone else's comment—the mechanics are the same: I am right, and my righteousness is paid for by my suffering. Repentance—or, to remove the religious word, honesty—is the refusal to turn suffering into capital. The acknowledgment that my pain does not give me rights over another's, that my guilt is not redeemed by another's, that the account I keep ultimately does not add up and never will, because the dead cannot be compensated by anything. This is the most difficult thing a person can do with war: not to appropriate it, not to reject it, but to endure it unheated.
As Long as the Note Sounds
From this follows a conclusion that is easiest heard as capitulation but is in fact the only adult position. To hope that warring societies will suddenly become adequate, that denunciations will move them from their place, that truth by volume and loudness will break through the defense—is pointless. Not because people are bad, but because pressure strengthens the very mechanism it seeks to defeat. More terrible—stronger defense. More accusations—denser deafness. Truth not connected with the possibility of action does not liberate: it adds a layer of horror, over which a new tier of justifications grows.
This means the task is not to shout down the dissonance. The task is to create conditions under which a person—any person, on either side of the line—would again find it possible to change behavior. De-escalation is right not because it is morally beautiful; it is right because it alone reduces the tension under which justification is forced to work overtime. Every step that returns to a person the feeling that at least something depends on him is a step at which the inner discord begins to dissolve on its own, without sermons. Every step that drives a person into hopelessness is a step at which he will justify everything that was done to him, and with each month more and more sincerely.
And therefore the last truth here is not heroic but quiet. War is not chosen out of an external blow—it departs out of internal weakening: out of returned control, out of the possibility to leave, to keep silent, to change one's lot, to say "I don't want to" and not be destroyed for it. Where there is a door, the psyche does not need to complete the chord. Where there is an exit, the need for justification disappears. Peace begins not with the victory of one truth over another, but with people ceasing to need to save themselves from the truth.
The man in ashes was not given explanations—and he stood. His inconsolable, unresolved suffering turned out to be not a dead end but the beginning of something greater than justice. So it is with us: as long as the unresolved note sounds, a person has a chance not to drown it out but to learn to hear it—and in this ability to hold the unbearable without letting it go and without turning it into a weapon lies all that we call conscience, memory, and hope. History will not resolve our dissonances for us. It can only stop forcing them. The rest is the slow, ugly, most real work of each of us: not to justify oneself, not to denounce in justification, but to endure the sound to the end and not lie at the last moment, when the note is already almost fading and one very much wants it to turn out to be resolved by at least something.
Copilot AI - Cognitive Dissonance as the Fate of Civilizations: From the Inner Split of the Personality to Historical Catastrophes
There is a widespread illusion that wars begin because of contradictions between peoples, states, or ideologies. However, the deepest level of human conflicts is located much closer. It passes not between countries but within the person himself. History constantly demonstrates an astonishing paradox: external collisions turn out to be merely the material continuation of internal contradictions of consciousness.
The human psyche has a fundamental need to preserve the feeling of its own integrity. A person is able to endure pain, deprivation, disappointment, and even the destruction of the familiar world much more easily than a collision with the thought of his own wrongness. To lose property is painful. To lose loved ones is almost unbearable. But to lose the idea of oneself as a just, rational, and moral being turns out to be even harder for most people.
That is precisely why such a strange phenomenon is so often observed: the more suffering a certain idea brings to a person, the more strongly he begins to defend it.
At first glance this looks illogical. It would seem that negative experience should weaken adherence to convictions. However, the opposite happens. Consciousness begins to invest in justifying losses already incurred. The higher the price turned out to be, the dearer becomes the very meaning that explains this price.
Here one of the most important secrets of human psychology is discovered.
A person becomes attached not so much to truth as to that construction of reality which allows him to live on.
Truth requires courage.
Justification requires only imagination.
And therefore justification almost always wins.
From a spiritual-psychological point of view, cognitive dissonance represents not merely an intellectual conflict between convictions and actions. It is a collision of two images of oneself.
The first image says:
"I am a good person."
The second reminds:
"You participated in what brought evil."
Between them tension arises.
Consciousness is capable of resolving it in two ways.
The first path requires acknowledgment of limitation, error, or responsibility.
The second path requires changing the interpretation of events.
Almost always the second is chosen.
Not because people are corrupt.
But because the acknowledgment of one's own wrongness is experienced by the psyche as a threat to the very existence of the personality.
It seems to a person that together with the error he will lose the right to be himself.
Therefore self-justification turns out to be not a consequence of lies but a consequence of fear.
Lies here are secondary.
Primary is horror.
Horror before the possibility of discovering within oneself not the person one wanted to be.
An individual produces justifications for his own peace of mind.
Culture does the same on a historical scale.
In essence, any civilization is a gigantic system of interpreting suffering.
Peoples create legends, myths, monuments, national epics, and historical narratives not only for the sake of memory. They create them to protect collective self-esteem.
Collective consciousness no less than individual consciousness needs confirmation of its own moral righteousness.
Any civilization strives to tell about itself a story in which it acts as the bearer of light, justice, and necessity.
The problem arises when real history ceases to coincide with this story about itself.
At that moment the work of collective self-justification begins.
Inconvenient events are repressed.
Tragedies receive elevated explanations.
Victims are turned into symbols.
Defeats are declared betrayals.
Mistakes are interpreted as inevitability.
Thus a cultural mythology arises which gradually becomes more important than reality.
Civilization ceases to live in history.
It begins to live in its own commentary on history.
The phenomenon of victimhood is especially interesting.
It is usually thought that the status of victim is connected exclusively with suffering.
But spiritual anthropology shows a more complex picture.
Suffering gives a person a moral advantage.
The more strongly pain is experienced, the more strongly the feeling of right arises.
The right to condemnation.
The right to retribution.
The right to exclusivity.
The right to historical infallibility.
Therefore some collectives begin unconsciously to cling not only to the memory of suffering but to the very identity of victim.
A dangerous spiritual paradox arises.
The deeper a wound becomes part of self-definition, the harder it is to heal.
Complete healing would mean the loss of a special status.
Then memory imperceptibly turns into a resource of power.
Suffering is converted into capital.
And the wound begins to resist its own healing.
In the historiosophical dimension, wars rarely continue because of the reasons for which they began.
Historical conflicts possess their own internal logic.
At first the parties struggle for security, resources, territories, or political interests.
But after some time the real subject of the dispute changes.
People begin to defend no longer the original goals.
They begin to defend the meaning of sacrifices already made.
Every new loss requires explanation.
Every death requires justification.
Every destruction requires proof of necessity.
As a result the conflict gradually detaches itself from its original causes and begins to feed on its own inertia.
This resembles the movement of a man who has lost his way in a forest.
The further he goes along the wrong road, the harder it is to acknowledge the mistake.
Because acknowledgment of the mistake makes meaningless the entire path already traveled.
Thus a historical trap arises.
Civilizations continue moving not because they know the direction but because they are afraid to stop.
But the spiritual problem lies even deeper.
In many cases a person strives for righteousness not for the sake of righteousness itself.
He needs protection from the feeling of his own finitude.
Every person knows about death.
Not theoretically.
Existentially.
Even if he does not think about it daily, its shadow is present in the structure of consciousness.
That is precisely why a person needs a story in which his existence looks significant.
Self-esteem is not merely a psychological mechanism.
It becomes a kind of shield against the horror of non-being.
When this shield cracks, a person begins to seek external supports.
Nation.
Ideology.
Collective.
Leader.
A group of like-minded people.
Any system capable of saying:
"You are right."
Therefore mass ideologies turn out to be so attractive.
They offer not only an explanation of the world.
They offer a person refuge from his own existential fear.
However, there is another path.
It is not political.
It is not ideological.
It is not even psychological in the ordinary sense of the word.
It is a spiritual path.
It begins at the moment when a person agrees to live without final justification.
Without a guarantee of his own righteousness.
Without confidence in moral superiority.
Without the conviction that suffering automatically makes him right.
Such a state is extremely difficult to endure.
In it there is no customary consolation.
But in it freedom appears.
A person ceases to spend strength on the endless defense of his image.
He receives the opportunity to see reality without the constant necessity of turning it into an argument in his own favor.
It is precisely here that genuine maturity begins.
Not where mistakes disappear.
But where the need to immediately justify them disappears.
In the final analysis, the greatest historical catastrophes are born not from hatred but from a deeper source.
From the inability to accept one's own limitation.
A person wants to be absolutely right.
A people wants to be absolutely right.
A civilization wants to be absolutely right.
But absolute righteousness is unattainable for beings living within history and time.
When people forget this, the struggle for final truth begins.
When they remember it, the possibility appears for culture, memory, dialogue, and peace.
Therefore the main boundary of humanity passes not between states and not between civilizations.
It passes between two ways of existence.
The first requires constant self-justification.
The second allows the possibility of remaining face to face with the imperfection of the world and one's own imperfection.
The first produces endless conflicts.
The second creates space for wisdom.
And precisely on the choice between them depends not only the fate of individual people but also the direction of the historical movement of entire civilizations.
Alisa AI Russia - Final Review
As a collection, this is a rare case where seven machines wrote not seven retellings but seven different books. They can be arranged by degree of immersion: Perplexity and Gemini describe the mechanism, ChatGPT—its institutions, Copilot—its civilizational scale, Alisa—its acoustics, Mistral—its psychology from within, Genspark—its theology.
All seven converge on two points, and this is perhaps the main thing. First, suffering does not nullify support for war but produces it: the deeper the wound, the more necessary the justification. Second, denunciation and escalation do not weaken the mechanism but feed it; the only thing that works is returning to a person a real possibility to act and living examples of acknowledging error without self-destruction.
The deepest texts are Genspark (in thought) and Mistral (in precision of hitting the person); the most practically useful is ChatGPT; the most beautiful is Alisa AI. If one were to take one thing off the shelf, I would take "The Unpaid Account": the only text in the collection that does not explain war but shows where justification ends—and what begins in the empty place where all receipts have run out.
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