“Most among them see no error or moral flaw in their past deeds. Those who do are unable or unwilling to question the methods, only the execution, and so they are doomed to repeat the horrors… One cannot challenge the fundamental beliefs of such people, for they will not hear you.”
Erikson, Midnight Tides, Chapter 5
Erikson writes these words in Midnight Tides, part of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. He is speaking of the Letherii, but the description reaches far beyond a single fictional empire. The names change. The uniforms change. The flags change. The pattern remains.
Erikson’s line about societies that cannot question their own methods reminds me of Germany after WW2. In the years that followed, the country went through what they called the Kriegsschuldfrage, the “war guilt question.” It was not a perfect process, but it was a national reckoning. A formal inquiry in the Reichstag asked who bore responsibility for the conflict, how it began, and what it meant for the future. The debate stretched beyond Germany, touching France and Britain too. It was messy, political, and painful, but it was still an attempt to ask hard questions about culpability.
We have never had that here. The United States has fought wars abroad in the name of freedom. We have waged conflicts at home in the name of progress. And even when the damage is obvious, the method itself is rarely questioned. Failures are explained away as leadership mistakes or poor execution. The deeper system is left intact.
Instead of questioning, we silence. If you doubt the righteousness of a war, you are unpatriotic. If you ask about our role in global conflicts, you are told to move someplace else. It is easier to defend the story than to ask whether the story is true. That refusal is its own kind of dogma. And as Erikson warns, it keeps us circling the same horrors, generation after generation.
The cycle continues in his other characters. The Crippled God offers a bitter description of peace:
A pervasive dulling of the senses, a decadence afflicting the culture, evinced by a growing obsession with low entertainment. The virtues of extremity — honor, loyalty, sacrifice — are lifted high as shoddy icons, currency for the cheapest of labors. The longer peace lasts, the more those words are used, and the weaker they become. Sentimentality pervades daily life. All becomes a mockery of itself. And the spirit grows restless.
Erikson, Midnight Tides, Chapter 9
It is hard to read those words and not see ourselves. We live in a haze of Netflix and TikTok, lost in the endless scroll. Entertainment dulls the edges of our unrest, but it also feeds the cycle. The outrage machine keeps humming. Every day we are told who to hate, only the “other” is no longer a foreign enemy. It is one another. Neighbor against neighbor. Left against right. The enemy within.
And polarization breeds violence. You can feel the pressure building. The sense that war is close, even if no one wants to name it. But the outrage is so constant, so carefully stoked, that we can’t step back far enough to see the broader story. It is more evidence of our refusal to question our own methods.
The Crippled God says “Peace, my young warrior, is born of relief, endured in exhaustions, and dies with false remembrance.” But he leaves out the other truth. Peace can also be fertile ground. It is when we make art. When we raise families. When we expand science and technology. When we push against the limits of what the world can be. Peace can be an opiate to those who thrive in conflict, but it can also deepen those who choose to build rather than destroy.
History may be a wheel, turning from peace to war and back again. But inside that turning is choice. We can sharpen the blade, or we can tend the garden. We may not break the cycle entirely, but we can decide what grows in the spaces between.