Coherent breathing and science

In a scientific study conducted in England with 400 participants, a comparison was made between slow and fast breathing. The participants were divided into two groups. Both were asked to do 10 minutes of breathing exercises every day for four weeks, one group at 5.5 breaths/minute (a breathing rate used in coherent breathing), the other at 12 breaths/minute (this breathing rate represents the lower limit of breathing speed in the average population). The results showed that the subjective perception of stress and depression decreased in both groups, while the values for well-being increased. However, there were no significant differences between the slow and fast breathers. 

Since the slow breathing method was named „coherent breathing“ in the study, the study would prove that coherent breathing, in which you are supposed to take between 3 and 6 breaths/minute, is just as effective as breathing more than twice as fast. There are a number of other studies and overviews that show that slow breathing improves well-being and reduces stress arousal.  

So what should we think of this study? I claim that title and text of the study wrongly refer to coherent breathing. Coherent breathing not only means breathing slowly and regularly, but also relaxing the exhalation and regulating the depth of breathing in such a way that breathing is controlled primarily via the diaphragm. We know from practice that some beginners in the method find these elements of coherent breathing easy, while many struggle at first: They do not succeed in relaxing the exhalation, the inhalation takes too long, abdominal breathing is unfamiliar, the breathing rate is too slow, so that the necessary stretching of the breath creates stress, etc. There are remedies for all these initial problems, which are taught by a competent instructor. After a few practice sessions, these difficulties are overcome in almost all cases thanks to the special interventions and suggestions. 

In the study, the participants were initially given information about the method, but there was no opportunity to ask questions in case of difficulties. We can therefore assume that some of the participants of the study had problems with relaxing the breathing and were therefore unable to gain better recovery results. As simple as the method of coherent breathing appears, because only three or four basic elements need to be considered, there are many pitfalls in practice. Everyone has their own breathing habits that have been ingrained over years and decades. It therefore takes time, motivation and consistent practice to change them in a favourable direction. The discussion of the study results in the publication also addresses this fact and cites studies in which coherent breathing was practised under individual guidance, with clearly positive effects. While the study criticized the insufficiently "robust" design of these experiments, these studies also provide important findings. 

A further point of criticism of the study that I (like the authors of the study) have is the fact that the average number of practice sessions was 20, i.e. that it is not possible to speak of a consistent practice discipline, which is particularly important at the beginning in order to make lasting changes of firmly established breathing habits. In addition, no one knows whether the method was practiced correctly at all or only somehow. 

The participants were also not informed as to why they should take 5.5 breaths/minute. With coherent breathing in particular, it is important for many beginners to understand why they should breathe in this way and not in a different way so that they can motivate themselves to practise coherent breathing. For some people, motivation comes from experience: they like an exercise because they feel the positive effects. For others, it comes from mental understanding: they recognize that the exercise could be valuable from a theoretical point of view and then practice it.  There are always beginners who refuse to adhere to a strict guideline such as that required for coherent breathing. Only when they understand the reason they are prepared to train with it. Such resistance, which we know from teaching coherent breathing, was not taken into account in the study. So consequently, the authors of the study also assume that appropriate "psychoeducation" would have led to better results with coherent breathing. 

Furthermore, the study authors point out that there is a study that shows that a breathing rate of 8 breaths/minute produces better results for vagal activation, i.e. for stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, than 12 breaths/minute, which in turn performs better than 16 breaths/minute. It therefore proves that the slower you breathe, the greater the effect on relaxation and on lowering blood pressure. In the study discussed here, the positive results for the "placebo" group, who breathed at 12 breaths/minute, can be attributed to the fact that many were able to experience a reduction in their otherwise even higher usual breathing rate as relaxing and mood-enhancing. Both study groups obviously benefited from the breathing awareness, regularity and deepening of breathing. Both groups were also instructed to breathe through the nose, which has multiple health effects, including improving oxygen uptake and regulating anxiety and stress management in the brain. 

The next point of criticism relates to the lack of physiological evaluations of the breathing exercises. The study results come from questionnaires completed by the participants. They are therefore subjective mood reports, and there is no data on heart rate, heart rate variability, blood pressure or sleep quality. It is often impressive for beginners in this method to see in real time, how their breathing pattern and their heartbeat synchronize, and those who like to go deeper can measure their heart rate variability and its improvement over the time of practice. In this study, it could well be that the physiological status of those who practiced coherent breathing was improved without being noticed.  

To summarize: The study discussed raises more question marks than it answers - and these are suggestions for more and more detailed research. Anyone working in this field can derive from this study the many benefits of working with conscious breathing. 

Further reading:
Coherent Breathing

  

Capitalism and Socialism: Fear Orientation vs. Shame Orientation

 Our Future and Four Horror Narratives

Looking into the future is sometimes done with hope and confidence, but sometimes also with concern and fear. These worries and fears are based on current experiences and facts that we have gathered from various information channels. The emotional charge of these images of the future comes from our childhood and prenatal experiences, as well as from collective traumas from history.

We can distinguish four different scenarios, all of which overlap and interact with each other somewhere, but which are also served, propagated and reinforced separately by political parties and groups: 

• the scenario of a desolidarized society
• the scenario of a society flooded from outside
• the scenario of dwindling prosperity
• the scenario of a destroyed nature.

The first narrative is about social inequality. It is an ancient theme of humanity that has arisen at least since the transition from tribal cultures to arable cultures about 10,000 years ago. Many fairy tales and legends deal with the hard-hearted rich and the suffering poor. Since industrialization, the problem has massively intensified, and political movements under the banner of socialism and communism have emerged, dedicated to the struggle for greater social justice.

Since that time, the facts show a permanently increasing divergence between the accumulation of wealth by the very few on the one hand and the working poverty, old-age poverty, single-parent poverty and unemployment poverty of the very many on the other, with a middle class in between that is increasingly in danger of slipping into poverty. The climate crisis adds another dimension to this development, because it has a completely different impact when someone has to survive the heat in a crowded slum under a corrugated iron roof or in a secluded and fully air-conditioned villa by the sea. Life courses, dates of death, and causes of death are significantly influenced by position in the social fabric, which is defined by the imbalance in the disposal of material resources. Those who are rich not only live better, but also longer.

The Indispensability of Social Balance

Reason tells us that a certain degree of social balance is needed for people to be able to form a community. Not everyone needs to earn the same amount or have the same wealth, but there must be a framework within which the differences operate, as well as permeabilities that allow for equality or comparability of opportunity. For otherwise there is a danger that society will fall apart and a war of all against all will break out, or that there will be a closing off of the happy few in their fortified ghettos from the mass of the badly off. A dynamic balance between performance norms and individual strengths and weaknesses is necessary to reduce the stress of survival for the individuals and to make the creative potential that is in all people available for each other and for a humane development.

It is also easy to understand that during crises and disasters, those who are socially and monetarily weaker suffer even more severely than those who can do better because of their means. At the time of the rush of refugees and asylum seekers to Central Europe, there were the wealthy who fled from the refugees to their vacation domicile on the Balearic or Canary Islands. There were and are similar departures in the current pandemic times. The climate crisis, like any other, is always also a social crisis.

Horror Scenarios and Ideologies

Horror narratives are designed to wake up humanity and motivate it to act. But they have a tendency to become loaded with ideologies - as long as there are unresolved emotional energies behind the reasonable concerns, i.e. mainly fears and feelings of shame.

The ideological ballast comes to light where the background and causes of the imbalance are mythologized by identifying apparent masterminds behind developments. Either it is a few conspirators who pull the strings and play with people's fate, or it is "capitalism" that steers humanity to its downfall with its destructive power. When it comes to responsibility for "evil," social revolutionaries tend to use truncated concepts. In this way, the complex systems that drive these developments are reduced to simple images of the enemy, which then appear so overpowering that there seems to be no basis for political counter-activity and anything done to improve the situation or correct the destructive tendencies can be dismissed as a symptom cure. The ideology, which goes back to Karl Marx, says that the whole society must be overturned in order to do away with the specter of capitalism. Until that can be done, everything will only get worse, because even any attempt at reform will stabilize capitalism and make it more resistant.

But the communist revolution, when we overlook the history of modern times, has never really and fundamentally succeeded. Today, the capitalist system operates unabated throughout the world, and one of its strongest powers is the communist People's Republic of China. Communism (or "real existing socialism"), as it has appeared in history, is a system of rule that establishes power structures and controls and suppresses possible opponents. The economy serves as a field of experimentation that is tinkered with using the instruments of power. Experience has shown that any attempt to completely subordinate capitalism to political power has had disastrous effects on economic performance. This was a major reason why the communist system in Eastern Europe went down without a sound in 1989. It was not possible to look that quickly, already many of the former standard bearers of socialism became the most successful capitalists. 

Chinese communism produced famines and other economic disasters as long as attempts were made to eradicate capitalism with political power. Only when more and more capitalist elements were allowed in did economic successes then set in, and with it corruption of previously unknown proportions.

No Communism with Traumatized People

Karl Marx understood much of the nature of capitalism, but his conclusion that capitalism must be eliminated by revolution of the oppressed masses was short-sighted. What Marx overlooked was the interwoven nature of capitalism into the human condition. (Karl Marx was not familiar with psychology and even less with trauma theory). Capitalist thought and action is an aspect of being human and is intimately connected to the emotional drives of fear and greed. Psychologically, capitalism represents the playground of a widespread survival strategy: Coping with the fear of one's own extinction through the accumulation of goods. Paradoxically, fear increases further when more security is to be created from the life threats posed by greed-led acts of accumulation. Fear begets greed, and greed increases fear. Thus, capitalism only mirrors fear management and in reality reproduces it constantly.

As we have seen, we can understand capitalism as the interactive system driven by the emotions of fear and greed, which has developed from it a life of its own that can no longer be controlled by single individuals. Everyone is subjected to it, no one can completely escape its pull, and consequently everyone also participates in ensuring that the power of the capitalist system continues to grow. (We all have to buy food and other goods that are produced and distributed within the framework of capitalism. With every price we pay, we consent to these conditions of production and distribution. We all have to earn our living and sell our labor power, thus agreeing to the rules of the labor market and wage labor).

Capitalism thus arises as a community product that operates supra-individually. It is composed of the sum of people's actions motivated by capitalism. Therefore, capitalism cannot simply be destroyed; this is the illusion through which communist ideas become an ideology. People and their emotional survival strategies remain the same whatever system is installed on the political level. People do not lose their fears and greed as a way of coping with fear, merely if the political and economic system is regulated differently. Every communist dictator and apparatchik is historical proof of this.

So capitalism is not a historical error or an evil power that has come over humanity, but the collective creative attempt of humanity to ensure its survival from a certain stage of complexity of social development (I have described it as the fifth stage of the evolution of consciousness). It takes a delicate balance of individual and social motives at each stage to ensure collective survival. The predominance of individual survival incentives over collective ones in the capitalist system shows its roots in people's primal fears. For fear always calls attention to the threat to one's own life from others. In fear, other people become hostile and dangerous beings to us.

From the point of view of psychology, in capitalism the fear of shame holds sway. Shame demands social consideration in one's acts of survival: When we behave selfishly in an emergency situation, for example, when we crowd onto the last boat before others in a shipwreck, shame calls in. When intensive care beds are in short supply during a pandemic, we must do everything we can to avert the shame that arises when we fail to do everything humanly possible to cure the sick.

The threatening potential of capitalism lies in the fact that it has succeeded in largely disempowering shame. It is not by chance that the most shame-free people are at the top of capitalist machinations. This is precisely why we need shame-driven systems that balance the power of fear-driven systems. Only in this way will there be a balance at the level of survival impulses. 

Here we see the indispensable task of socialism. If the counterforces against capitalism are not maintained and strengthened, fear-driven individualism inevitably takes over, and the principle of solidarity goes out the window. The freely unleashed struggle of everyone against everyone is the beginning of the end of humanity. In contrast, socialism demands solidarity between the stronger and the weaker, between the richer and the poorer. There is a deeply human need for balance between top and bottom, and massive anxieties arise when it is disregarded.  

Capitalism not only promises security for one's survival anxieties by generally increasing wealth, but at the same time feeds them by demanding more and more from people. This is the destrucitve feedback system for which people in industrial and post-industrial society have to pay an increasing toll of physical and, increasingly, mental exploitation. Here, too, a socialized shame reports back, pointing to the shame that, despite the amazing achievements of modern luxury societies, the quality of life and life satisfaction have not increased, but that people are afflicted by new fears, by greed, envy, arrogance and self-doubt.

Fear Orientation and Shame Orientation in Interplay

As long as there is no awareness that capitalism is driven by fear and socialism by shame, the distribution of power will swing back and forth between the two forces. At one time one will rule, at another time the other will rule. For the electorate vacillates just as much between these patterns of emotion, which they both carry within them. In the meantime, many socialists have become a little more capitalist and some capitalists a little more shamefaced. But the basic structure has not changed: The anxieties that capitalism pretends to reduce are actually increased by pressures on individuals. It is similar with the shame that is supposed to be calmed under socialism: It seeks other fields of activity once social balance is realized on a broader basis. 

An example is the (shameless) surveillance of individuals, which was installed in all communist states. It was intended to maintain a sense of shame among people so that they would subordinate their individual aspirations, their egoisms, to the collective. In reality, however, the power-hungry egoists in the ruling power apparatus prevailed over the subjects, often with extreme physical and mental cruelty.  

Another typical example is formed by the forced self-shaming performed as rituals of power affirmation in these systems: The absurd confessions of defendants in the Stalinist show trials and the forced self-criticism of officials under Chinese communism testify to the instrumentalization of shame for the purposes of maintaining power and suppressing individual freedoms.

Contemporary China also demonstrates the interplay between a capitalist and a socialist dictatorship. After recently growing the Chinese economy at record rates and producing more and more billionaires, the government now seems to be steering back in the shame direction. Shame barriers are being imposed on the entertainment industry, large corporations are being reprimanded, and rampant working hours are being restricted. Under the rubric of "general prosperity," the social side of Chinese socialism is being reactivated. 

Beyond the Survival Pattern: Optimism instead of Horror

The horror of the scenario of a society diverging along the wealth gap only clears when the influence of ideology fades from the contexts. Ideologies tend to produce a reality-distorting black-and-white view and friend-foe thinking. The unprejudiced view of reality enables the actions necessary to counteract desolidarization and bring to bear the social intentions inherent in every human being. The commitment to greater social justice at all levels is then not driven by shame, but by the desire for a just and humane society, a deeply human concern. It is a concern that must be formulated, demanded and urged again and again for the sake of a just society.

Much has already been achieved on this path, much is still open and must be tackled with all our strength. Many people are committed to these issues. There is much cause for optimism, and this is the attitude that releases and focuses energies.     

Capitalistic Trauma Trance

"It's the economy, stupid."

Why is economic growth such an effective killer argument when it comes to climate protection measures? 

A simple explanation would say: this is due to the propaganda used to represent the lobbying interests of companies that would see their profits dwindle if they had to change their ways of production. We would not have to be impressed by this. It is part of the business world that production has to modernize on an ongoing basis, and if modernization now consists of producing in a climate-friendly way, then that is simply the task that the company has to face up to.

What often happens, however, is that the ecological debate stops there and climate measures are shot down because economic growth would be jeopardized, jobs would be lost, the economy would shrink, everyone would be worse off, and finally everything would collapse.

The Clinton slogan: "it's the economy, stupid," could be translated this way: It's all about the economy, and if you don't understand that, you're a fool. Or: The economy is the most important area around which everything else revolves and must revolve. Or: The economy affects people most directly and most effectively, and everything else is secondary.

The Trauma of Capitalism

The fact that we understand such slogans and consider them as plausible and correct is related to the collective trauma caused by capitalism. The economy is a subfield in any human society, but since the introduction of the capitalist economic system, this subfield has taken over the central position. This leading role has been deeply engraved in our consciousness. It is integrated into all educational and training processes and is drummed into children and young people from an early age. They are supposed to be made fit "for life" in schools, i.e., they are supposed to be able to exist in the economy and build an "existence." Capitalism has thus succeeded in making human existence dependent on economic success: If we don't make it in the economy, we lose our existence.

What has happened here? Of course, people always knew that their survival depended on having enough to eat and a safe place to stay. But they also knew that they could never do it alone, instead that they could only succeed if everyone stuck together. 

In the early days, our ancestors could and had to provide themselves in their communities for everything that was necessary for survival. Especially since the Neolithic revolution, the economy has become increasingly complex due to the progressive division of labor. A system of interdependencies emerged, which was then intensified by the capitalist system with its principles of profit maximization and competition. Whereas in the Middle Ages it was regulated how much a craftsman could earn, under capitalism the one who produced the cheapest and most efficiently was supposed to outdo the other competitors. A relatively balanced system of mutual dependencies, in which social balance plays an important role, becomes a system of competition according to the motto: everyone against everyone. Whoever fights too little goes down. You perish before I perish. Existential fear provides the underlying drive for economic action and is implanted in every participant in the economy. 

As I have proposed elsewhere, capitalism is a fear-driven system that imposes a chronic stress burden on everyone. The hidden ideology of this system suggests that survival is permanently precarious. One can never try hard enough to finally be safe from going under. People are forced to "voluntarily" inflict violence on themselves, not at gunpoint, but with the fear of survival implanted. 

The Capitalistic Trance

From a purely logical point of view, the environmental problem that mankind has maneuvered itself into takes precedence over the economic problems. For on a planet that can no longer be inhabited, no economy can be run either. The economy would therefore have to do everything in its power to avert this global threat, and for this it would need the compelling guidelines from politics. But because in capitalist thinking, short-term gain is always better than a long-term perspective, the representatives of the economy drum out their slogans about the primacy of the economy and its growth, no matter what other costs this causes and what problems arise from it in the longer term. Because the general public, or the state, is liable for damages resulting from economic processes; these need not concern the representatives of the economy. 

But why is politics not in a position to prescribe to the economy the framework conditions that are necessary so that the environmental catastrophe can be averted? Apparently, like most people, it is just as much under the pressure exerted by survival anxiety, the driving force of capitalism. Collective traumas lead to collective dissociations, and dissociations lead to trance states. As soon as there is talk of threats to the economy, most politicians enter a trance state in which they forget everything else they are responsible for. 

For most, waking up from this entranced state apparently only occurs when experiences occur that are so powerful that they can no longer be ignored. Disappearing glaciers or abnormally hot summers are unpleasant experiences, but we can live with them. A storm that knocks down your house or a flood that washes away everything you own can no longer be so easily ignored. 

The danger is that, just as climatic conditions and all the phenomena dependent on them change, we slowly adapt to the changed circumstances and therefore delay everything that would be necessary in terms of new laws and new habits of behavior. We behave like the frogs in the glass of water that is slowly heated, and we do not notice the misery we are in until we are already scalded. (By the way, the story with the frogs is a fake, frogs are not that stupid, they jump out of the water as soon as it gets too hot for them).

We have a choice: the trauma trance, driven by capitalist fear of survival, or waking up, driven by the will to survive and by responsibility for humanity and the planet.

The Role of Collective Trauma in the Actual War

Cause for horror

Every war is cruel and inhuman. The war that broke out these days is, beyond the inhumanity associated with any war, a cause for horror and dismay for all those who believe in the power of peace and non-violent conflict resolution and who hoped that in the millennia of civilizational progress the primitive law of the strongest would be overcome. It is cause for disillusionment about the power that individuals, supported by compliant elites and enthroned by manipulation and dictatorial tricks, can bear violence in the 21st century. The Russian autocrat has unleashed an aggressive war of aggression against his "brother nation," driven by sheer greed for power and by a nationalist ideology with a contorted view of history. 

We feel thrown back to the 18th or 19th century, where wars were started when a neighbouring state was weak and one's own army was well equipped. Potentates put their troops on the march to expand their own power realm and increase their historical glory. These were gruesome wars, but they mostly affected the civilian population only marginally. Unlike today, almost every war of aggression in those days resulted in coalitions in which the relevant great powers pursued their interests. Another difference was that wars were fought on battlefields, not in major cities.

The Russian aggression of February 24, 2022, was possible because it was clear that the West did not want to interfere militarily. The European continent has two world wars behind it and intensive learning and reappraisal processes have taken place in many countries. The horrors of the wars have left deep scars on souls and led many people to believe that international conflicts must be resolved nonviolently, without the sacrifice of human lives. The threshold for entering into warlike actions is high in functioning democracies, because it is probably impossible in any country to mobilize majorities for a war of aggression. 

But how do democracies deal with dictatorships in which wars can be waged without regard for their own populations? The response options are limited to economic sanctions and moral ostracism. The situation is reminiscent of that before World War II, in which the dictatorship in Germany took advantage of the dithering of the English and French democracies to invade Czechoslovakia, first in the so-called Sudeten territories, including guarantees for the integrity of the rest of Czechoslovakia, only to occupy it six months later. Dictators have an advantage in action over more discussion oriented democracies. They have the disadvantage that the decisions that are made are driven by the emotions of individuals who are highly prone to error.

Sooner or later (more likely over the long haul), the model of Western democracies is so attractive that more and more people living under different conditions will aspire to it. One component of the current war lies in the dictators' fear of this attraction, which would go to their own heads. Putin wants to dictate to Ukraine what form of life and government the country "wants" to have, so that he can, in a sense, create a buffer zone against the democratic bacilli coming from the West, for which there is much fertile ground in Russia as well. 

Shameful Finding

We must experience the present state of humanity, that is, of the community of people, as shameful. How can it be possible that a long-term ruler with his military machinery starts a war of aggression in the 21st century and nobody can put a stop to this outrage? Unfortunately, we are still a long way from a world order in which states are deprived of their monopoly on the use of force. There is no world police force that can arrest individual state perpetrators of violence and take away their means of violence. Individual states function only because of the internal monopoly of power among the forces of order. How can a world function if there are no forces of order responsible for the whole world to stop such inhumane aberrations?

Collective Traumas and their Devastating Effects

Putin has named the denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine as the aim of this war. Everyone knows that Ukraine is not ruled by Nazis and is no potential military threat for highly armed Russia. So these are propaganda lies. At the same time, it becomes clear what historical trauma is behind the aggression. Putin has pointed out that he avoided a mistake made by his predecessor Stalin, namely naively believing in World War II that Russia would not be attacked by Nazi Germany. Then, when German troops unexpectedly invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and inflicted defeat after defeat on the Russian army, the shock was great and could be dealt with only slowly after the situation turned in favour of the Soviet army starting in late 1942 and finally Germany was defeated in 1945.

The collective trauma has obviously not been overcome, and Putin sees himself as the executor of a victim-perpetrator reversal. He finds the Nazi opponents in Ukraine and wants to eradicate the "Nazis" there before they can become dangerous to the Russian fatherland. Moreover, the Ukrainian "brother people" are to be saved from wickedness of their leaders. 

But the Ukrainians suffer from an even earlier trauma, the Holodomor between 1931 and 1933, which can be considered as genocide. About 3.5 million Ukrainians fell victim to the Soviet agricultural policy with the collectivization of agriculture. About 10% of the population was exposed to starvation at that time. In addition, there were extensive "purges", i.e. the execution or internment of artists, teachers, scientists and intellectuals, as well as lower and middle party cadres. Historian Gerhard Simon writes: "For Stalin, the Holodomor was not only an instrument to discipline the peasants, but also to destroy once and for all in Ukraine all dreams of autonomy or even independence." (Source here) 

These events dug a deep hole in the collective Ukrainian soul. This was also one of the reasons why many Ukrainians joined the invading German soldiers in WW2, fought for them and also assisted in mass murders of Jews, albeit instigated by the German Nazis. This turn of events in turn resulted in the hatred of many Russians for Ukrainians. 

Putin has Studied his Hitler

Here also lies a root of today's Russian propaganda, which accuses the democratically elected government of Ukraine of Nazism and uses this insinuation as a pretext for forcibly invading the country, invented and presumably fed by an unreflective and unprocessed history. The Nazis, who invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 out of greed for power, are to be punished and avenged in Ukraine - with tricks copied from the Nazis: Using fake news to feign Ukrainian attacks in order to have a justification for attacking. So Putin has learned his Hitler: Assume that the victim of your aggressiveness is under attack, if necessary staged, then you have the right to destroy the state with your superior military machinery. Of course, Putin uses a propaganda trick because there would be no signs or reasons why Ukraine should attack Russia.

Even the goal of demilitarizing Ukraine, which the Russians have taken up, is justified by an apparently deep-seated fear of external aggression - not surprising for a country that has been invaded from the West several times in history. This time, however, the tables are turned and the aggression goes from Russia to the south and west.

We don't know if Putin really believes what he is talking about, in any case his propaganda serves the dark stains of the Russian soul that characterize the thinking and feeling of many of his compatriots, who have little idea of history and its complexity and of the effect of collective traumas. In addition, Russia's own population has long been inundated with false news and manipulative propaganda. Dictators need stupid people as followers and also count on their stupidity; that is part of their impudence. 

Disillusionment

The sobering insight is: we have to change our ways and scale back our expectations of humanity's progress in reason. A world order based on the principles of non-violence, characterized by freedom and self-determination, can only exist to the extent that it is shared and respected by all concerned. It is enough for a ruler or a regime not to share these principles, but to subordinate them to its own striving for power, to undermine their validity and their effectiveness. In the long run, nonviolence will triumph over violence, but with infinite casualties. In the short term, Russia's arbitrary unilateral aggression means that the arms spiral must continue to go upward around the world and that we continue to need a balance of terror to prevent global nuclear war from breaking out.

In the combat zones in Ukraine, not only people are dying and not only material goods are being destroyed, but the order of values that mankind has painstakingly acquired and fought for over centuries is being attacked. The opportunity, however, lies in making ourselves aware of these values and in representing and defending them with commitment. We must not allow the level of humanity we have achieved to be thrown overboard by potentates flexing their muscles with the pathos of smear dictators and projecting their destroyed inner selves into brutal destruction in the outside world.

Collective processing of historical traumas is an indispensable basis for making it impossible for autocrats to play the piano of unprocessed collective emotions and to channel these energies in aggressive directions.

Collective Regression and Repetition Compulsion - Aspects of the Ukraine Invasion

The cruel events in Ukraine confront us with primitive forms of conflict resolution, namely the idea of using force and superior military strength to subjugate an opponent and impose one's own wishes on him. The law of the strongest had already largely disappeared from the civilized world, overcome by legal systems at the state level and by international treaties and supranational organizations at the global level. But not all players abide by the rules, and when one of the powerful ones breaks away and violates the rules, the entire system disintegrates and has to reorganize itself.

The logical consequence is then that the other players must regress to the more primitive level in order to restore balance there. A state currently uses its armed forces to expand its own borders and subjugate another country. This is a form of power politics that has been outlawed worldwide since World War II, because any rational person can learn from the massive destruction of that war that violence does not solve problems but increases them. It should also be clear from historical experience that wars of aggression lead to the escalation and engagement of other powers and bring no long-term gain. But when a state uses more primitive means to advance its own interests, the other states must counterattack at that level, whether they like it or not. If they do not, they themselves become victims of the attack machinery. 

So there must be armament everywhere. Money that could be used for the further development of the social and health system, for education and for the development of new technologies against climate change must be put into weapons, where they serve no other purpose than that of deterrence. Weapons are developed and built with a great deal of intelligence and raw materials, at best for then rusting away over time. This is valid until a more stable world order with effective control mechanisms is implemented and, at the same time, democratic mechanisms are installed everywhere to prevent megalomaniacs and paranoids from rising to political leadership positions.

The Repetition Compulsion 

What is happening right now has all already happened in a similar form, in the middle of Europe and elsewhere in the world. There would be no need to repeat again what we know from history including all the tragic consequences. We already know how it will end. But if the past has not been processed and understood, it sets the directions and steers action rather than the apparent rational calculations used to weigh the costs and benefits of aggression.

We know from trauma psychology that unprocessed traumas urge repetition and re-enactment, and this is true of collective traumas as well. So we are witnessing a gigantic collective compulsion to repeat, its destructive force and its compulsiveness. As the omnipresent object of comparison Adolf Hitler shows, there is no turning back on this track, there is only final victory or final defeat.

The Logic of Evolution 

Life progresses from one stage of development to the next. The later stages incorporate the achievements of the earlier ones and organize them into new structures with new qualities. This is the course of things and the inherent urge of all life to grow, or, in the language of physics, the generation of order from chaos (negentropy). Such developmental steps are most clearly visible in children and adolescents. They show up, for example, at birth or during adolescence.

It is similar with societies and mankind as a whole. They, too, move from one level to the next in order to better master new challenges. The model of the evolution of consciousness describes the development of these successive organizational models and their inner interrelationships. In the process, advances in complexity and differentiation occur. In the favorable case, these processes proceed organically. 

Regression and Instability

But there can also be disturbances when it comes to progressing to a new stage, so that the process gets stuck. The preserving elements and the elements pushing on come into conflict. When the preserving forces get the upper hand, regressions occur, that is, withdrawing to earlier levels of development. If we look at the model of the development of consciousness, it sometimes seems as if the regression happens by several levels at once. It is as if we suddenly have to set new priorities, priorities that have been long forgotten to us for a long time and that seem outdated and primitive. We realize that we are suddenly sliding back, in feelings and in thinking. We have fallen under the influence of collective traumatizations. We lose the stability of the developmental stage we have already reached.

Traumatization and excessive stress lead to regression. Let's take the example of diseases: when viruses or bacteria cause inflammation in the body, it switches to emergency mode, and we regress and become weak and helpless like small children. Regression serves to ensure survival by simpler means. All resources are expended to remove the danger and return the body to healthy self-regulation. 

Societies also react by regressing to earlier levels of stress and conflict management when massive threats occur that cannot be mastered, or seemingly cannot be mastered, by existing means. In the current case, we can see that it does not take real threats at all to activate primitive reaction patterns. Already fantasized threats are sufficient, as they are known as trauma consequences. Dictators and authoritarian leaders tend to distort reality and blur the lines between fantasy and reality, in their propaganda and in their worldview. The fears to be mobilized by such conflations come from the past, from the field of collective traumas.

Forced Regression

The regression into which the states of the West are moving is forced, but it can be reversed if it is done with awareness and not as a trauma reaction. Societies that are sufficiently grounded at the level of systemic consciousness can even suspend certain basic rights in an emergency and then return to normal once the emergency is over. Advanced systems are more flexible; regressive systems are more rigid. 

The rearmament results as a system constraint, which on the whole is useless, but has become necessary so that the aggressor will be deterred from continuing his repetition compulsion. The perfidious thing about the present situation, then, is that policymakers have no choice but to strengthen the armed forces; anything else would be irresponsible and grist to the war-mongers' mill. The appeasement policy of the 1930s motivated Germany to launch World War 2. This experience must not be repeated.

Breaking the Power of Collective Traumas

We escape the pull of the repetition compulsion only if we perceive the power of collective traumas and face them consciously. All the feelings that are stored in these fields must be accepted and experienced. On the rational level, it is important that there are no cognitive distortions and other sprinklings of trauma energy. In this process, the view of history moves away from blame and moral judgments and toward a deeper understanding of the connections between actors, systems, and patterns of mentality. The findings of the historical sciences form the standard for a rational and balanced evaluation of historical processes. For example, research commissions staffed by historians from the countries between which a conflict has existed or exists, or museums in which different views of history are presented, serve this purpose.

As long as the past rules the present, no free relationship to the current reality is possible. This also makes it difficult or impossible to resolve actual conflicts. Any form of sustainable peacebuilding is based on coming to terms with collective traumas. Peace with one's own past is the indispensable prerequisite for peace in and with the present (this is true on the individual as well as on the collective level). Peace in the now is the basis for the ability to act in a constructive and creative way to shape the future in a humane way.