"War comes from our being immature, fearful, and injured, and not being able to conceive of other ways of solving problems. It comes from an immature style of thinking where creativity and overview is scarce"
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Sun frames war less as an inevitability of geopolitics than as a symptom of stunted inner life. The provocation is deliberate: she shifts the origin story away from “ancient hatreds” and strategic necessity and toward a psychology of underdevelopment. “Immature, fearful, and injured” is a compact indictment that reads like a diagnostic triad: war as the externalization of unprocessed threat and unresolved pain. The intent isn’t to excuse violence as mere trauma response; it’s to strip it of grandeur. If war is immaturity, the usual costumes - honor, destiny, national pride - look like adult-sized props on a frightened child.
The subtext also targets institutions. Nations go to war, but nations are made of people, and Sun suggests the same defensive reflexes scale upward: when leaders and publics can’t tolerate ambiguity, can’t imagine compromise without humiliation, they reach for the blunt instrument. “Not being able to conceive of other ways” is quietly damning because it treats militarism as a failure of imagination, not just morality. That’s a harder critique: it implies that peace requires creativity, not only virtue.
Her final clause - “creativity and overview is scarce” - points to the real mechanism: tunnel vision. Injury narrows attention; fear shrinks time horizons; immaturity confuses impulse with necessity. In that light, “overview” becomes a civic skill: the capacity to hold complexity, see interdependence, and resist the seductions of simple enemies. Sun is writing from a late-20th/early-21st-century sensibility that reads conflict through trauma, systems thinking, and emotional intelligence, insisting that the opposite of war isn’t just diplomacy - it’s grown-up consciousness.
The subtext also targets institutions. Nations go to war, but nations are made of people, and Sun suggests the same defensive reflexes scale upward: when leaders and publics can’t tolerate ambiguity, can’t imagine compromise without humiliation, they reach for the blunt instrument. “Not being able to conceive of other ways” is quietly damning because it treats militarism as a failure of imagination, not just morality. That’s a harder critique: it implies that peace requires creativity, not only virtue.
Her final clause - “creativity and overview is scarce” - points to the real mechanism: tunnel vision. Injury narrows attention; fear shrinks time horizons; immaturity confuses impulse with necessity. In that light, “overview” becomes a civic skill: the capacity to hold complexity, see interdependence, and resist the seductions of simple enemies. Sun is writing from a late-20th/early-21st-century sensibility that reads conflict through trauma, systems thinking, and emotional intelligence, insisting that the opposite of war isn’t just diplomacy - it’s grown-up consciousness.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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