Again and again by Charles Eisenstein, 8/1/2025

Again and again
As long as thinking in terms of “us against them” prevails, genocide, as we are now seeing in Gaza, will continue to occur.When something terrible happens, people often react and try to do something about it. When it is excessively terrible, however, resistance often fails because we cannot believe that such a thing is possible in our time. Or, precisely because the horror overwhelms us, we do not even look. In the case of the genocide in Gaza, the horror is well documented. Those who want to see can see. Not all information can be rationalized away by pointing to potentially fake images. This is how “Never again!” has become a cheap phrase that can be safely chanted at demonstrations “against the right” and then forgotten as soon as it really matters. Charles Eisenstein, who likes to argue on several levels of observation, sees the cause of the “again and again” — the continuity of horror in world history — primarily in a way of thinking firmly rooted in our unconscious, in categories of ‘us’ (good) and “them” (evil). If we could heal the wounds of our soul and take back the evil we think we see outside ourselves, there would be a chance for peace.by Charles Eisenstein
[This article posted on 8/1/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/immer-wieder-ist-jetzt-2.]

It is a brutal irony: less than a century after the worst genocide in human history, the Holocaust, which wiped out six million Jews and prompted the world to vow “Never again!”, we are now witnessing a new horror story, this time perpetrated by Jews themselves.

Although it is smaller in scale than other political mass murders since World War II—in Cambodia, Uganda, or Rwanda—it has another distinctive feature besides its irony: it is happening right before our eyes, on camera, blogged live and documented in real time. It is impossible to feign ignorance. At least, so it seems.

In reality, however, the truth continues to be hidden from us, and the methods used to conceal it are not significantly different from those that have always been used. This is the key to understanding why “never again” keeps happening… again… and again.

I have read various sources about the “war” in Gaza: Haaretz (an Israeli newspaper), Mondoweiss, Drop Site News, Chris Hedges, Caitlin Johnstone, Glenn Greenwald, and — to be balanced — the New York Times and The Scroll (a “pro-Israel” publication that presents a right-wing Israeli view of the Palestinian question. I put “pro-Israeli” in quotation marks because this nation is in fact destroying itself in the name of its own preservation.) These publications — with the exception of the last two — have documented in detail the horrors, the propaganda, the strategies, and the political history and context of the genocide.

Yes, I will use that word, even if the goal of the war is not to destroy every single inhabitant of Gaza. The pretext is the elimination of Hamas; the real goal is the ethnic cleansing of the area for Jewish settlements. Genocide is the collateral damage in the ruthless pursuit of that goal.
So far, at least 58,000 people have been killed in military attacks in Gaza (the number is likely much higher, as it does not include those buried under the rubble). Countless others have died of hunger and disease.

Despite extensive documentation of the horrific crimes against humanity in Gaza, many people—including the majority of the Israeli population—either do not believe this is happening or do not seem to care.

This is not because, as Caitlin Johnstone claims, they are “bad people” or “exhausting, insufferable narcissists.” That is not an explanation that points to a way forward, but merely a loop back to the starting point.

If the problem were “bad people,” then only a fool would hope that they would change. But “bad people” don’t change — only non-bad people are capable of that. The solution would then be to suppress them, imprison them, silence them, remove them, control them, humiliate them, destroy them, and make an example of them to deter other bad people. But that is precisely the basic attitude behind genocide.

After all, most Israelis believe that only bad people live in Gaza. At least that is what polls suggest, with a large majority believing that there are “no innocents in Gaza.”
If you do not believe that bad people can be eradicated from the earth forever, then this diagnosis condemns us to experience “never again” over and over again.

Wouldn’t it be better to understand why ordinary people, even friendly and generous people—the kind who feed your cat when you’re away—support or tolerate heinous crimes that take place before our very eyes? If we understood that, perhaps we could prevent it.

Because the carnage is so public, many of us cry out in despair: “How, how, how can this be happening? Why are they doing this? How could we have allowed this to happen?” If anything is to change on this earth, these questions must be more than just expressions of despair. We must take them seriously. We must not be satisfied with convenient, false answers that vent our despair by directing it toward hatred of despicable people.

In fact, those who refuse to acknowledge the reality of what is happening are doing what humans always do. For them, the genocide is not happening before their eyes because they live in a narrative bubble where it is invisible.

They will say, “These videos are staged. These photos are fake. These stories are Hamas propaganda. The doctors reporting from Gaza are anti-Semites.” Or they will say, “That’s what happens in war.” Or, “Gaza shouldn’t have voted for Hamas; they have only themselves to blame and deserve to be punished for October 7.” Or, “If they want the war to end, they should storm the tunnels and drive out Hamas.”

And they actually believe this with all sincerity, even though it is contradictory. Massacres of civilians do not take place AND massacres of civilians are inevitable. Hunger is not used as a weapon of war AND hunger as a weapon of war is justified.

In other words, they are doing what most of us do all the time, albeit in a more extreme form. They select information and interpret it to maintain their beliefs, their identity, and their sense of belonging. I’m sorry, but these people are not just worse people. I don’t mean to be condescending when I say “I’m sorry, but…” I’m genuinely sorry. I wish things were simpler. I wish the atrocities that Johnstone, Hedges, and others so courageously and tenaciously expose were simply the result of bad people doing bad things.

I wish we lived in a world where there were clear heroes and villains — a world of orcs and elves, a fantasy world à la “Starship Troopers,” where the fundamental problem is an identifiable “them.”

But it is precisely this way of thinking that creates the conditions for massacres. Who are the Palestinians if not “the others”? Who were the Jews in 1930s Europe if not “the others” onto whom all the evils of the continent could be projected? Who were the Tutsis in Rwanda, the “counterrevolutionary elements” during the Cultural Revolution, the witches of the Inquisition?
You may say, “There is a big difference between stirring up contempt for a weak, oppressed population in order to enable their slaughter, and stirring up contempt for the power that carries out that slaughter.”

Sure. But take it one step further. What you are saying is, “This person or that person deserves contempt because…” That is the pattern of thinking. There is contempt and there are reasons for it. And so we are left with endless discussions about who deserves contempt and who does not, which wars are justified and which are not. When all parties agree that someone deserves contempt, it is easy for those in power to argue that it is the others. The agreement facilitates propaganda. That is why I say that war is always justified.

We can denounce all collective crimes—whether genocide, abuse, exploitation, ecocide, or oppression—without making an implicit diagnosis of the perpetrator that confirms that some people are inferior to the rest of us. For that is the principle that justifies the creation of the next class of victims.

The “us against them” pattern is older than history. It does not arise solely from “tribalism” and competition for scarce resources. The division into ‘us’ and “them” also occurs regularly within groups. As René Girard has shown, this is the original social crisis that arose even before civilization itself: cycles of revenge, division of society, followed by an outbreak of unifying sacrificial violence, through which social tensions that could divide society are dumped onto a relatively powerless, dehumanized underclass.

If we become accustomed to “us versus them” thinking, populations become vulnerable to manipulation by truly evil people: those unscrupulous, sociopathic individuals who so often rise to power in opaque systems.

All they have to do is point the finger at others (or identify them with the help of sophisticated propaganda and information control).

Mass psychology does the rest. These efforts would have little effect if it weren’t for the ally of our inherited psychology, the ancient tendency to label an external enemy or an internal minority as “subhuman.”

I know from experience that the view presented here will provoke hostility. I would like to save critics the trouble by anticipating the two most important criticisms for them. I call them “sympathetic to fascism” and “anti-Semitic idiot.” Although they come from superficially opposing perspectives, what they have in common is far more significant.

Sympathetic to fascism: Charles, you give Israel a free pass for genocide. If the recent massacres in aid centers, the targeted killing of children, the murder of journalists, the use of hunger as a weapon, or the blockade of medical supplies don’t convince you, then nothing will. By humanizing a nation of child murderers and mass murderers, you raise false hopes that they will end the genocide on their own. You excuse and enable pure evil, possibly because, as a privileged white American, you are not one of its victims. Only by calling evil by its name and stirring up anger and revulsion toward its perpetrators (who deserve nothing better) can we mobilize a mass movement to end the genocide.

Anti-Semitic fool: Charles, it’s sad that you too have fallen victim to pro-Hamas propaganda. The so-called “Palestinian rights” are nothing more than veiled hatred of Jews. What happened to your critical mind? Israel is surrounded by enemies who have sworn to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth. It’s in the Hamas charter. The Iranian leaders have said so. Islamic doctrine also states that it is forbidden for a Muslim to negotiate with a Jew unless it is a ruse. Islam is a religion of hatred and evil. Don’t kid yourself and, for God’s sake, don’t deceive others. Your appeals for peace only play into the hands of an irreconcilable, malicious enemy.

Both critics agree on the fundamental problem: evil people. They merely disagree on their identity. The first criticism is also based on a widespread misunderstanding: that anyone who does not respond with hatred or call for punishment cannot understand how abhorrent the crimes are and must therefore agree that they should continue.

But the reason I call for compassion is exactly the opposite—because I believe these atrocities are happening and that compassion—understanding why—is the only lasting way to stop them. Understanding does not mean excusing.

Once again: There are indeed “bad people,” by which I mean people who are so sociopathic or narcissistic that they have little prospect of improvement, especially as long as they have power over others. However, they are few, a tiny minority. There is no society of sociopaths; there are only sociopathic societies in which historical conditions reinforce humanity’s almost universal “us-them” programming.

“Us-them” thinking is not just about differences. The ‘us’ consists of complete human beings, while the “them” includes those who lack an essential human quality (morality, intelligence, virtue, decency). That is why they are so often compared to animals. To the extent that we judge and condemn others and think that they are made of worse stuff than ourselves, we feed the energy that finds its fullest expression in genocide. Sociopathic and narcissistic leaders reflect back to us in extreme form the everyday dehumanization of those we condemn. They are more a symptom than a cause of the horrors they inflict.

The “us-them” mindset explains why not-bad people do bad things.
Let us now return to the agonizing question: “Why do they do this? How can this happen in plain sight?” The real question is: “Why are so many unwilling to see this?”

Yes, indeed. Why is it so hard to admit that you were wrong? Why is it so hard to admit that you caused harm or stood on the side of the oppressors? The main reason underlying many forms of cognitive bias stems from an original insecurity rooted in our “us-them” thinking.

It is this: perhaps we have misunderstood everything. Perhaps we are the bad people. Perhaps we are less than fully human, perhaps we lack essential human qualities. People have an instinctive fear of being placed in the victim class of subhumans, of being the “others” who are burned at the stake, lynched, ethnically cleansed, or exterminated. In a climate where one side or the other must fall into the category of inferior human beings, we will fight stubbornly to avoid that fate. We will do everything we can to prove that we are right and good, just, ethical, and moral.

This intellectual climate must change if we ever want to fulfill the promise of “never again.”
If we can agree that good people can be involved in terrible things, then we can overcome the shame that prevents us from seeing the terrible things we do.

Because these things no longer mean that we are not good people. We are still worthy of love. We will not be cast out. We will not take the place of those we have persecuted. And the endless cycle of history will end.

This is not just about the genocide in Gaza. All the suffering that power inflicts on people and the planet happens behind a veil of ignorance. The narrative of this ignorance devalues, dehumanizes, and desecrates everything it destroys. But when you ask an immigrant who has been arrested in an immigration raid, or a resident of Gaza, a gang member, an addict, a welfare recipient, a police officer, a soldier, or anyone else who has been placed in this category, “What is it like to be you? What is your story?”, then ‘us’ and “them” dissolve.

You realize that their story could have been your own, had it not been for God’s grace. Compassion and diversity can flourish. You may still have conflicting interests and views, but the search for a solution no longer takes place in a vacuum of ignorance, in the illusion that the other is less human than you are.

The “us-them” mentality is still deeply rooted. People ask, “So what’s your solution for Palestine?” I don’t have one. Or rather, I do have one (I described it last year, a version of “two states, one homeland”), but it is completely unworkable under the current circumstances. Without a break from the “us-them” mindset, no humane solution is practicable, and no practicable solution is humane.

We must therefore change the foundation that makes things feasible. That foundation is our beliefs, our stories, our myths, and the unfinished personal and societal healing that breathes life into them. It wasn’t just stupid, untrue beliefs about us and them that got us into these stories. Behind them lie traumas and an entire evolutionary path of consciousness toward overcoming them.

Since “us-them” thinking—the pattern of exclusion—is so deeply woven into our cultural DNA, this also applies to genocide. Perhaps it will end like the Holocaust: with the perpetrators finding themselves on the losing side of a war against evil and their leaders being led to the gallows amid cries of “Never again!”

To win such a war, one should, of course, portray the supporters of the other side in the worst possible light. As monsters. As evil people. But that would only end this genocide. It would not end genocide as such.

To do that, we must complete the evolutionary journey of consciousness, away from us and them, away from separation. We must work seriously to heal our wounds so that we do not pass them on as resentment and revenge. And we must listen to the avatars of this new consciousness who appear again and again throughout history to use their words and their bodies to bring it about. “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”

Charles Eisenstein, born in 1967, graduated from the renowned Yale University with a degree in philosophy and mathematics. This was followed by in-depth studies in economic theory and economic history. Dissatisfied with the competitive structure of the economic and working world, he worked and lived for a long time as an interpreter in Taiwan. Personal and global crises led him to intensively study body-mind medicine and philosophy. Today, he is considered one of the most important thought leaders for an ecological way of life that is less dependent on money. His most recent publication is “Climate — A New Perspective.” For more information, visit charleseisenstein.org.