We Haven’t Learned Anything

We are living in a time where war, once again, feels like part of everyday reality.

There was a moment when many of us believed things would be different. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it seemed like we had finally entered a more peaceful era. As if history had reached a point where large-scale conflict would slowly fade away.

That belief turned out to be wrong.

Right now, depending on how you count, there are between twenty and thirty-five active wars in the world, and more than sixty ongoing conflicts. Most of them barely make the news. Attention shifts between Gaza, Iran, and Ukraine, while countless other regions remain in the shadows. At the same time, infrastructure is being destroyed, people are starving, and entire societies are breaking apart.

Looking Back at What We Call “History”

My own knowledge of history is admittedly a bit outdated. When I was in school, many of the events we now call history were still unfolding in real time. So I recently started revisiting them.

There is a series on Netflix called Turning Point that gives a surprisingly clear overview of what has been happening globally since World War II. The Cold War, Vietnam, everything that followed 9/11. You can argue about how accurate or biased these documentaries are. That’s not really the point. What they show, above all, is something else.

We haven’t learned anything. Not even a little.

The patterns are almost absurd. How wars begin, how they are justified, how they escalate. The similarities are so striking that it becomes hard not to feel frustrated. You want to take a history book and throw it at political and military leaders and shout: just read this before you start the next war. But of course, they don’t.

The Same Reasons, Over and Over Again

If you strip away the rhetoric, the reasons behind most conflicts are brutally simple.

I am better than you. My worldview is better than yours. My religion is superior. You have something I want, and I am strong enough to take it. Or maybe I just want to leave a mark in history, because being in power isn’t enough on its own.

Sometimes it feels less like geopolitics and more like a carefully staged contest of male ego — measured not in arguments or outcomes, but in displays of dominance, legacy, and the need to prove who stands taller, no matter the cost. Or, more bluntly, something far more primitive underneath it all. And everyone else gets pulled into it.

Not Kings, Not CEOs

There is another layer to this that becomes harder to ignore the more you look at it. We are no longer living in the age of kings, emperors, or tsars. At least, we are not supposed to. And yet, some political leaders still seem to act as if they are. As if power were something to expand, territory something to acquire, and history something to conquer.

At the same time, states are increasingly treated like companies. Strategy replaces responsibility. Influence becomes market share. Dismantling the social nets is disguised as cost cutting. And conflict starts to resemble hostile takeovers rather than political failure.

But that is not what modern governance is meant to be. Elected officials are supposed to serve the people. Not the other way around. Citizens are not assets, and countries are not corporations competing for dominance. When those lines blur, decisions change. War becomes easier to justify.

Who Actually Pays the Price

What makes this even harder to accept is who actually carries the burden.

It is not the people making the decisions. It is mostly young men who are sent to the frontlines, forced to do the dirty work, to kill and to survive. They come back, if they come back at all, with physical injuries and psychological trauma that will stay with them for the rest of their lives, impacting the generations to come.

The people in power are not standing in the mud near Kharkiv. They are not fighting under the burning sun in the Middle East. They do not return with PTSD. That part is outsourced.

And sometimes you can’t help but think how different things would look if it weren’t soldiers doing the fighting. What if the most powerful people simply had to fight their own wars? Five rounds, with everybody watching. Whoever is still standing wins. It sounds ridiculous. Just imagine these senior citizens in the ring, dressed like boxers. But is it really so much more absurd than what we are doing now?

A Different Kind of Reality

Back in 2008, a video went viral called “Where the Hell is Matt.” Maybe you remember it. A guy traveling the world, doing this awkward, almost ridiculous dance. In the early videos, around 2005 and 2006, he was alone. Just one person moving in random places across the globe. But by 2008, something had changed. Suddenly, hundreds of people in different countries joined him. They all did the same thing.

They danced together.

By 2012, it even turned into a coordinated choreography. Later, it went back to something simpler again. But the core idea remained. And yes, the videos are a bit cringey. But they show something important.

We are all the same. It doesn’t matter whether we live in the EU, the US, Nord Korea or Afghanistan. Gaza or Jerusalem. South Africa or Australia.

We have dreams, goals, and desires. We laugh, we dance, we sing. That is what defines us as humans. Everything else is secondary. Nobody actually wants war. Nobody wants to see the planet destroyed. Nobody wants the suffering that comes with these power games.

Maybe It’s Time to Change Something

We say we want peace. But somehow, we keep ending up in the same place.

Maybe the problem is not that we don’t know better. Maybe it’s that the people making decisions operate on a completely different set of incentives. And maybe, just maybe, the rest of us need to become louder about what we actually want.

Not in the language of politics. Not in ideology. But in something simpler. In visible, human ways that remind us of what connects us instead of what divides us. It sounds naive. But then again, so does the idea that repeating the same patterns over and over again will somehow lead to a different outcome.

So maybe it’s time to try something else. Maybe it’s time to go outside again. Pick a daisy. Bellis perennis is the daisy that grows on every continent, and whose Latin name could also be translated as ‘war healer’.

And just dance. Together.

For peace.

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This post was previously published on Notes from the Anthropocene.

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