The War for Your Nervous System

How propaganda recruits us, and how rootedness helps us stay human in a world at war

In a world at war, the most important battlefield is not only land or air.

It is your attention. It is your nervous system.

Because before a nation can be moved into violence, ordinary people have to be moved into a story. A story that makes some lives feel distant. A story that makes aggression feel like protection. A story that makes dissent feel like betrayal.

This piece is about that recruitment. How it happens, how it works on the body, and how it narrows our compassion without asking permission.

It is also about rootedness. The kind of rootedness that refuses to outsource humanity to headlines. The kind that can hold complexity without hardening into contempt.

And it begins, as so many things do for me, with a tree.

Watch or Listen

The Whole Story

As my partner and I arrived at the bottom of the Rio Grande Canyon outside Taos, New Mexico this past week I almost immediately sensed we’d come to the right place for the moment. A chance to, at least for an afternoon, leave behind a world where I felt something in me starting to fray.

Not a dramatic unraveling, not a public crisis, just that quiet interior shift where your attention gets hijacked. Your jaw tightens without asking permission. Your breathing climbs into your chest. You find yourself doom-scrolling with the same compulsive energy you used to reserve for old addictions, and you can tell, somewhere in the animal part of you, that you are being hunted.

So we took a day. We stepped away from the noise, the screens, the constant feed of fear and certainty masquerading as information. We drove out, and we walked. Although on this trail, it was more scrambling over rocks on a rugged riverside. The kind of hike that gives you no choice but to not just touch earth, but to grip onto it.

There is a kind of sanity that returns when you let your body remember that you are not an app. You are not a headline. You are not an argument.

Then she said: “Check out that tree.” It was old, gnarly, narrowed by time and weather, twisted in on itself like it had been shaped by a hundred storms it never asked for. It was not a picturesque Instagram tree. It was not a tree trying to impress anyone. It was simply a tree that had lived.

We just sat there. I found myself completely enchanted by this sacred presence. She started to wonder if our hike had ended. If the rest of the afternoon would be one long gaze at the Ent-like creature before us, my own personal Treebeard.

At some point a thought rose up in me so clearly it almost felt like it belonged to the tree itself. As if the wind carried a sacred wisdom from the branches to not just my ears but my soul.

This tree cannot be recruited. It can be bent by wind. It can be stripped by heat. It can be carved by drought and flood, but it cannot be recruited.

It does not get swept into frenzy. It does not outsource its attention to whatever loud force is trying to hijack the moment. It is rooted. It stays with its place. It does what it is here to do.

And then the next thought followed. If this tree has been alive long enough, it has been rooted through most of the history that led us to the war we are watching unfold right now.

Coups, revolutions, oil deals, propaganda cycles, presidents, generals, speeches, sanctions, and the long, slow conditioning of a public that has been trained to accept violence as inevitable. This tree has been here through all of it.

It does not solve any of it. But it witnesses something most of us have forgotten. Time is longer than a news cycle. History is longer than our selective memory. And the human soul, if it wants to remain a soul, has to learn how to become unrecruitable.

Because that is what is happening to us right now. We are being recruited. Not only into a particular opinion about Iran, not only into a particular political posture, but into a particular way of being human. Or to say it more honestly, we are being recruited into being something less than human.

So when the world goes crazy, the question is not only, “What should I believe?” The question is, “How do we stay human?” And the question underneath that is, “What are they trying to recruit me into becoming?”

Because that recruitment always has a destination. It is trying to recruit you into a smaller circle of compassion. Into numbness. Into tribal certainty. Into a nervous system that cannot hold complexity. Into a spirituality that baptizes domination. Into a life where you can watch other people’s bodies be broken and still feel like the “good guys.”

That is the recruitment. And the only thing that can withstand it is rootedness. Not rootedness as escapism. Not rootedness as “I don’t care.” Rootedness as resistance. Rootedness as refusing to let empire colonize your imagination. Rootedness as staying awake.

The Recruitment Machine

We tend to talk about war as if it is primarily a military event. But war is also a narrative event.

War requires consent. Even when leaders act without public support, they still require a social atmosphere where dissent is manageable, where the public is disoriented, and where “complicated” is treated as treason.

So the first battlefield is not the desert. It is your attention. And the recruitment machine has some predictable strategies:

1) Narrative compression

The story is always made smaller. History is chopped into a convenient starting point that makes “us” look reasonable and “them” look insane.

It is remarkable how often the official story begins at the moment someone else reacts, and how rarely it begins at the moment we acted.

This is one of the core tricks of propaganda. If you can control where the story starts, you can control what looks like self-defense.

2) Moral laundering

Aggression is dressed up as necessity. Preemptive violence is described as “stability.” Economic domination is described as “freedom.” The killing of strangers becomes “national security.”

And if anyone asks questions, the question itself is treated as suspicious.

3) Dehumanization

If you want to make violence palatable, you have to make the targets feel less real.

You do it with language, with stereotypes, with selective footage, with simplified archetypes. They are “fanatics,” “terrorists,” “savages,” “threats.”

Meanwhile, our own violence is always “surgical.” Our bombs are “precision.” Our deaths are “tragic accidents.”

Their deaths? They’re just “collateral.”

4) Belonging pressure

The machine does not only persuade you. It threatens you.

If you do not repeat the story, you will lose your place at the table. You will be called naive. You will be called unpatriotic. You will be called antisemitic or anti-American or sympathetic to terrorists.

And because we are human, because we all perpetually feel a tension between belonging and authenticity, many people will choose belonging over truth.

And that is why this is recruitment. It is not just information. It is formation. It is trying to form you into the kind of person who can live with what is being done in your name.

1979 and the Myth of the Reset Button

With all that in mind, if you grew up in the United States, odds are high you were taught that the Iran story begins in 1979. The hostage crisis becomes the first page. It becomes the moment the movie starts. That is the convenient starting point.

And yes, the hostage crisis was real. It was traumatic. It mattered. Human beings were taken. Fear entered families. The nervous system of a nation got lit up. But that is exactly why it makes such a useful recruitment tool.

Because when you start the story at 1979, Iran appears as the aggressor and the United States appears as the injured party. The moral roles get assigned before anyone asks a single historical question. We are recruited into a simple script. They are irrational. We are rational. They are fanatics. We are defenders.

This is narrative compression. It is the propaganda move where history is chopped down to a size small enough to fit inside a slogan. And when you compress the story enough, you can justify almost anything.

Starting the Story Where It Actually Starts: 1953

So if we want to stay human, we have to do something both simple and uncomfortable. We have to widen the timeline. We have to refuse the myth that history began at the moment America felt threatened.

With Iran, one of the clearest places to widen back to is 1953. In 1953, the United States and Britain backed a coup in Iran. Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, had moved to nationalize Iran’s oil industry.

That word nationalize can sound like a policy detail. But it is not. It is the dangerous idea that the people of a sovereign nation should benefit from their own resources. And empires do not like that idea.

So the coup happened. And whether you tell the story through MI6, the CIA, Operation Ajax, oil interests, Cold War narratives, or the mechanics of destabilization, the moral shape remains the same. A foreign power helped remove a democratically chosen leader because that leader threatened economic control.

Then the Shah’s rule was strengthened. A long arc of resentment, distrust, and defensive posture followed.

This is not to say Iran has done nothing wrong. It is to say the villain does not enter the story out of nowhere. When you destabilize a society, when you humiliate a people, when you teach them through decades of policy that sovereignty is only allowed when it serves Western interests, you plant seeds. And those seeds grow.

This is what the tree was reminding me. You cannot keep pouring poison into the soil, then act shocked when the fruit is bitter.

Reagan, the Hostages, and the Shape of Power

There is another chapter here that sits in the category of contested history, and I want to name it with care.

The “October Surprise” theory claims that members of Reagan’s 1980 campaign interfered behind the scenes to delay the release of American hostages, undermining Jimmy Carter.

Official investigations have said the evidence falls short of proving an agreement. So I am not going to state it as settled fact. And still. The hostages were released at the precise moment Reagan took the oath of office.

As a child I was told it was because Reagan was strong and Carter was weak. But as I take a closer look at history, the official narrative sounds more and more like propaganda. Like recruitment.

And the fact that we find ourselves having to even ask these kinds of questions itself reveals something true about the world we live in. Power uses people. Suffering becomes leverage. Human bodies become props. And political mythology needs a villain and a hero so badly that it will shape reality to fit the script.

That is not an Iran problem. That is an empire problem.

The Offer That Didn’t Fit the Script

Another detail that matters in this moment is that in 2015, Iran entered into a comprehensive nuclear agreement with the United States, the EU, and other world powers: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

This agreement included extensive verification and inspection protocols by international monitors. According to those monitors, Iran was complying with the terms of the deal.

In 2018, the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the agreement, despite Iran’s compliance and despite objections from our European allies. As best I can tell, Trump’s actual reasoning for the withdrawal? Because the agreement was achieved by the Obama administration, and in Trump’s mind, an Obama deal is always a bad deal.

What’s more, after that withdrawal, Iran indicated, even in the days before the latest war began, a willingness to negotiate terms even more comprehensive than the original deal. Those offers were not seriously engaged with by the United States or Israel.

And when a story is being sold to you as inevitable, any evidence of alternatives matters. When leaders publicly say they are open to verification and inspection, and that gets treated like a footnote, we should ask why. When there were agreements on the table in the past, and they were dismantled for political theater, we should ask what kind of “security” is actually being sought.

Because sometimes war is less about eliminating a threat and more about sustaining a story. A story where certain leaders need an enemy. A story where certain industries need contracts. A story where fear keeps the public manageable. And if that is true, then refusing the story becomes an act of staying human.

“They Are Crazy”: How Trauma and Reaction Get Weaponized

And that leads us to one of the cruelest dynamics of history. When you traumatize a people, you create conditions where traumatized responses become more likely. Then you point to those responses as proof that your violence was necessary.

This is how the story stays self-justifying. When an outside power humiliates and violates a society, that society does not become calmer. It becomes more reactive. It becomes more defensive. And the wound becomes a recruiting tool for extremists, for fundamentalists, for nationalists, for anyone who can offer a simple explanation and a strong identity.

This is how radical movements gain power. They take legitimate pain and convert it into ideology. They take fear and convert it into purity. They take humiliation and convert it into domination. And then, decades later, the empire looks at the extremists it helped fertilize and says, “See? They’re crazy.”

That is recruitment too. It recruits you into forgetting causality. It recruits you into acting as if our hands are clean.

Israel, Trauma, and the Tightrope of Truth

Now, here’s the larger irony: in mainstream American discourse, Iran gets cast as irrational: “crazy,” “fanatical,” “unhinged.” Israel, meanwhile, gets treated as automatically justified: a rational ally doing what it has to do. But the fringe on both sides are driven by trauma.

While Iran’s is rooted in Western intervention, Israel’s is rooted in her history. Antisemitism is not an idea. It’s a force. It is centuries of scapegoating, expulsions, pogroms, ghettos, and then the Holocaust: industrialized evil on an almost incomprehensible scale.

When children grow up inside a story that says, “People will hate you for being Jewish, and nothing you do will change it,” that’s not just a belief system. That’s the traumatizing of a nervous system. Trauma changes how bodies interpret the world. It makes threat feel omnipresent. It can make preemptive violence feel like protection. It can make domination feel like survival.

And when trauma becomes collective, when it is carried generation to generation, it can harden into national identity: We are always one inch away from annihilation, so anything becomes permissible.

That means there are fanatics on more than one side of this conflict. There are radicals on more than one side. But only one side gets the benefit of the doubt, over and over, even when its aggression is louder, more organized, and far more resourced. That is how recruitment works.

That’s because trauma doesn’t just create villains. Trauma creates narratives that decide, ahead of time, who gets understood and who gets demonized. When a people’s fear is familiar to us, when their story fits our inherited moral map, we call their violence “security.” When a people’s fear is foreign to us, we call their violence “terror.”

So no, Iran is not “crazy.” Iran is traumatized and becoming more so by the day. And Israel is not “crazy.” Israel is traumatized. And trauma, when it is unhealed and politically weaponized, can make almost anything feel justified.

To make matters worse, Israel’s history is now being weaponized so that any honest discourse gets deem antisemitic. This is part of what makes honest conversation about the Middle East so combustible right now. There are real histories of persecution and genocide. And there are also real histories of colonialism, occupation, displacement, and state violence.

The recruitment machine loves nothing more than a conversation so charged that everyone retreats to slogans. Because slogans don’t require grief. They don’t require listening. They don’t require the terrifying work of holding multiple truths at once. If we want to stay human, we have to be willing to do that work anyway.

So let me say something as clearly as I know how. Critiquing the actions of the nation-state of Israel is not the same thing as blaming Jewish people. Jewish people are not a monolith. Jewish people are not responsible for the policies of a government.

Antisemitism is real, rising, and deadly, and it must be confronted wherever it shows up. And at the same time, the state of Israel, like any state, must be accountable for what it does. Because trauma does not justify atrocity. The trauma of the Holocaust does not justify apartheid. It does not justify the systematic destruction of another people.

In fact, if you know what it feels like to be dehumanized, scapegoated, hunted, told you do not deserve to exist, then the moral demand is the opposite: you refuse to do that to anyone else. Israel’s own Scripture says this.

But instead, we have Benjamin Netanyahu and his four decade advocacy for war with Iran, consistently framing Iran as an existential threat requiring military action. It’s the same argument he made about the Palestinians in Gaza where we watched mass civilian death, collective punishment, and the destruction of infrastructure required for life: with American weapons, American funding, and American political cover.

Ultimately, when trauma is unhealed, it doesn’t disappear. It gets weaponized. It becomes a shield for policies that would otherwise be morally indefensible. And that is exactly why staying human matters here: because if we cannot tell the truth about suffering and power at the same time, we will get recruited: either into supporting the Iran war, dehumanizing Palestinians, or into collapsing Jewish people into a caricature. None of those paths is human.

The Money Pipeline: How Influence Gets Purchased in Plain Sight

But there’s more, because alongside trauma, there is another force at work: money. Organized, targeted, and designed to make political dissent expensive.

OpenSecrets shows pro-Israel groups spending about $60.5 million in outside spending in 2024. That is real money aimed at winning races.⁠⁠ It sits in the same weight class as the entire ‘environment’ bucket ($75.4M), and it is more than double the combined spend on gun control and gun rights ($27.0M).⁠⁠ This is what I mean by recruitment. Not just ideas, but incentives. Money shaping which truths are safe to say out loud. The point is, there is a well-funded ecosystem whose job is to reward compliance and punish deviation: especially in primaries, where a relatively small amount of money can reshape a race.

This is the part of the story that reporter Ryan Grim ran into so hard that what began as, “I’m covering the Squad,” became a book that is, in large part, about the pro-Israel political ecosystem surrounding them: specifically the implicit threat of what happens when you speak too loudly, or even just refuse to speak the approved lines.

In interviews about The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution, Grim describes how pro-Israel groups’ spending doesn’t just support candidates, it disciplines the boundaries of what elected officials are willing to say about Israel.

And it isn’t theoretical: the machinery has explicitly targeted members like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, so much so that in their electoral defeats, you can see the warning system working exactly as designed. And when politicians learn, again and again, that criticizing Israeli policy can trigger millions in spending against them, many will choose a safer path: silence, slogans, or moral confusion.

And that doesn’t even touch on individual donations like the $250 million Miriam Adelson gave President Trump during his 2024 reelection campaign. The donation, a thinly veiled bribe that gave her so much control of the US’s policy towards Israel that Trump actually namechecked her at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

So money is also recruitment.

The American Religious Recruitment: Armageddon as Strategy

And then there’s the faith element. Now, before I talk about theology, I want to name something that often stays in the shadows of “serious” political analysis.

A lot of what drives war is not only geopolitics. It is story. It is myth. It is what people think God wants. And that is why religious imagination becomes one of the most potent recruitment engines in American life.

If you can convince a population that violence is destiny, you don’t have to persuade them with evidence. You only have to activate their faith. So when we talk about “staying human,” we are not only talking about ethics. We are talking about what kind of God we are being invited to worship.

Is it the God of domination, the God who blesses empire, the God who needs enemies to prove strength? Or is it the God whose name is Love, whose way is compassion, whose kingdom looks like bread shared and swords laid down? That question is not abstract. It shapes whether we become healers or accomplices.

There is another layer of recruitment that I cannot ignore, because it has shaped American political imagination for a long time. There is a strain of American Christianity that has made peace with violence. Not reluctantly. Not with grief. But enthusiastically.

It has turned the Middle East into a stage for end-times fantasies. It has treated war like prophecy fulfillment. It has imagined devastation as destiny. And I want to say this plainly. That is not Christian faith. That is a death cult wearing Bible verses like jewelry.

Whatever you believe about Jesus, whatever your relationship to Scripture, this much is clear. The call of spiritual maturity is not to accelerate catastrophe. The call is not to bring about the end so we can escape. The call, if it has any resemblance to the heart of Jesus, is to bring heaven to earth. And heaven looks nothing like war.

When religion blesses domination, it is recruitment. It recruits people into calling violence holy. It recruits people into feeling righteous while harming others. It recruits people into being less human.

The Shadow Economy: Sex, Secrecy, and the Leverage of Shame

There is one more layer I want to name with caution. It sits downstream from the recruitment tactics we have already named, and it lives in the shadows.

In 2025, Drop Site News reported on longstanding allegations that Benjamin Netanyahu used the possibility of exposing Monica Lewinsky related material as leverage in negotiations over convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.

I cannot prove that allegation in a court of law, and Drop Site does not present it as a settled fact. But if their reporting is even close to true, it tells us something important about the moral weather. Netanyahu is not opposed to blackmail as a tool of statecraft.

With that in mind, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were public friends for years. Trump even publicly said Epstein liked women almost as much as he did, and liked them young. Moreover, the newly released Epstein documents keep putting Trump’s name back on the page.

Epstein was also closely connected to prominent Israeli figures. Reporting tied to the released material describes an unusually close relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. It also describes connections to senior Israeli military intelligence figure Yoni Koren.

So here is the question I cannot shake. If Epstein built a world where sexual exploitation created leverage, and if political leaders have shown themselves willing to use sexual leverage as a tool, then can we really rule out that some of what we are watching is being steered by blackmail?

I am not claiming I can prove a direct chain from file to phone call to policy. I am saying that power has a long history of using shame as a steering wheel. Staying human means we do not dismiss that possibility just because it makes us uncomfortable, and we do not declare it proven just because it fits our fear.

What Rootedness Looks Like (and What It Is Not)

Which brings me back to the tree, the one that stayed rooted at the bottom of the Rio Grande Canyon, the one that invited me to stay rooted in a world gone crazy.

So what is rootedness? Rootedness is not passivity. Rootedness is not a trendy version of “stay in your lane.” And rootedness is not spiritual bypass, where we go touch grass so we don’t have to confront power.

Rootedness is the inner stance that lets you confront power without losing your soul. It is the ability to stay present when the machine tries to speed you up. It is the ability to keep your compassion wide when the machine tries to narrow it. It is the ability to say, “Yes, this is terrifying,” without letting terror dictate what you call true. Rootedness is how we refuse recruitment into being less than human.

It is not cynicism. It is not “both sides” as a way of avoiding moral clarity.

Rootedness is the ability to stay present when the machine tries to speed you up. It is the ability to hold complexity without collapsing into paralysis. It is the ability to tell the truth without turning truth into a weapon. It is the ability to grieve without hardening. It is the ability to act without becoming what you hate.

Rootedness is how we stay human.

And it is learned. It is practiced. It is built like muscle. This is what I’ve been trying to do throughout this piece.

Grief: The Antidote to Becoming a Monster

It is also important to note that one of the reasons the recruitment machine works so well is that it offers people a way to avoid grief.

Francis Weller talks about what he calls the gates of grief. One of them, the one I think many of us need to stand at right now, is grief for the suffering and injustice of the world.

This is the grief we feel when we watch children pulled from rubble. When we watch propaganda turn human bodies into statistics. When we realize that entire populations get treated as expendable, while the people who profit keep calling it security. It is grief over everything recruitment attempts to do.

That means this kind of grief does something inconvenient to those who are out to manipulate us. It keeps the circle of who matters from shrinking. It makes strangers real. It makes bodies count. It makes it harder to speak in abstractions like “strategic interests” when those “interests” are measured in actual human lives.

And when you feel this kind of grief, it is not a weakness, it is evidence that your heart has not fully been colonized.

Because if you cannot grieve, you are easily recruited. Unwept sorrow becomes conspiracy. Unheld fear becomes scapegoating. Unnamed powerlessness becomes a hunger for domination. And if you watch enough violence, if you let enough injustice pass through your eyes without grief, something in you begins to die. You become less human.

Grief keeps you human. Because grief hurts. Grief makes you porous. Grief makes you feel what you would rather numb.

And for those who’s hearts are hardened, Weller describes grief as a powerful solvent. It softens the hardest places in our hearts. It loosens the calcification that forms when we keep swallowing pain without metabolizing it.

So when we can stay with this kind of grief, when we allow it to break us open, this kind of grief becomes a kind of moral clarity. Not the holiness of certainty. The holiness of a heart that refuses to shut down.

So What Do We Do When the World Goes Crazy?

I don’t trust clean answers for moments like this. But I trust practices. I trust rootedness. I trust the slow work of becoming unrecruitable. Here are three movements that feel faithful to me right now.

1) Tell the truth with receipts, and without contempt

Refuse narrative compression. Refuse the myth that history began yesterday. Learn the timeline, then share it. Not as a weapon. As an act of human dignity. Because propaganda thrives on amnesia. Truth is a form of resistance.

2) Train your nervous system not to be hijacked

If your body is constantly in fight-or-flight, you will be easy to recruit. You will crave certainty. You will crave a villain. You will crave a tribe.

Rootedness starts in the body. Breathe. Walk. Touch bark. Look at the sky long enough for your eyes to remember distance.

This is not self-care as consumerism. This is spiritual warfare against dehumanization.

3) Grieve what is real, so your love stays wide

Let the grief come. Grieve the dead. Grieve the lies. Grieve the way violence becomes normal. Grieve the way trauma multiplies. Grieve the part of you that wants to stop caring because caring hurts. Grief is how you keep your humanity intact.

Tell the truth. Train your nervous system. Grieve what is real. That is how we stay human.

Three Embodiment Practices To Help You Stay Rooted

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.