The Brutal World of Sam Harris

Gaza today.

Longtime readers know I admire Sam Harris.  His discourse tour with Jordan Peterson is legendary. Waking Up is one of the best books of its kind in this century. The word "spirituality" definitely needs rehabilitating. Harris makes a valid attempt. I subscribe to several sources of Harris's content on YouTube. A recent interview video troubled me deeply as I listened to this guy speak.

Without intending it, Harris shines a light on the world beyond his sacred "consciousness and its contents" I blogged about in 2023. This "beyond world" is where monsters await. It is a brutal world, it always has been and it is nowhere near as civilized as fools would allow. Harris unwittingly issues a damning admission about the state of humanity in this interview. 

The man thinks he's discussing geopolitics and the paradox of tolerance. He's not. He's describing a species that remains fundamentally primitive, dressed up in suits and carrying smartphones that can't just be meditated away. Listen past his articulate rationalism and you hear something older—the logic of might makes right in the face of the abusive.

This is that world according to Harris: "So it was the destruction, the apparent, you know, virtually complete destruction of Hezbollah. Not totally complete but decisive, the bombing of Iran, you know, along with what the US did there. The complete defeat of Hamas. I mean Hamas by all accounts scarcely exists anymore. I mean, there's a few people who are going to stand up and declare victory, no doubt, after Sunday. But if Israel hadn't accomplished all of that on the battlefield that, you know, there would be no deal here. It's not just a matter of diplomacy."

And so it is with every war.

This is the Power God Trip intoxicated with military prowess. Blood first and foremost. Peace earned through domination.  Not direct enslavement but totally submissive to demands.  This isn't political analysis. This is Stone Age logic wrapped in geopolitical vocabulary. In Spiral Dynamics terms, it's Red vMeme consciousness with just enough Orange efficiency and rationality to kill more effectively.

Harris spends half his life exploring consciousness, mapping the terrain of awareness, teaching that the self is an illusion. Yet when he looks at the world of nations and violence, all that refined inner work becomes basically irrelevant to other people.  The Gazans, say.  His meditation practice changes nothing about the bombing campaign killing many thousands of civilians. Nor does it impact or inform his unwavering support for such a campaign. "It's not just a matter of diplomacy."  Understatement of the year.

The consciousness that can watch its breath in perfect calm must also watch bombs fall on cities, and it has no power to stop them. Beyond "consciousness and its contents" lies a world that doesn't care about your spiritual realizations because, when the shit hits the fan, the Power Gods win every time.

If we take Harris seriously—that consciousness and its contents are all we have to work with spiritually—then look at the circular disconnect. The inner world of meditation sits in one room, serene and timeless, or at worst dealing with the challenges of a routine day. Meanwhile, the routinely brutal world of warfare sits in another room, soaked in blood and primal fear. And there's no door between them. The same awareness that reveals the illusory nature of self cannot dissolve the reality of basic tribal vengeance. Awakening is personally liberating but collectively impotent. It always has been.

We have to do better than this.  And there will never be a "good time" for it.  There will always be something heinous committed upon a people by another people.  It will always happen.  At some point, this has to happen and the heinous are not physically rebuked.  At some point, someone has to be better then this or we are going nowhere as a species.

The Harris civilization is thin. Scratch the surface and you find the old operating system still running. Jihadism, tribalism, nationalism—different names for the same root code. When conditions destabilize—humiliation, scarcity, moral collapse—that ancient software reboots automatically. Jihadism isn't an aberration. It's a window into human psychology from ten to twenty thousand years ago. 

Today's jihadi is a Paleolithic warrior with encryption. Tribal belonging, cosmic purpose, enemies that must be destroyed to prove divine favor—this is how humans organized meaning before cities existed. It never went away. It just went dormant under layers of law and commerce.

Harris criticizes the medievalism of jihadism while advocating (or at least supporting) its mirror image. His solution to Red violence is superior Red violence—more force, better weapons, decisive destruction, then negotiate. He dresses it in secular rationalism and Enlightenment vocabulary, but the logic is identical: kill the threat, prove dominance, establish order through fear. That's not transcending tribalism. That's just being better at it.

And maybe he's right (without exactly articulating the argument). Maybe we really do live in a world where the least peaceful countries and tribes will make war last forever when it might otherwise disappear like so many other bad habits of our past. Maybe we really do have to brutally kill those people because they will not leave us alone, eventually they will kill and kidnap you. It's a brutal world, not just around Israel. Sudan, Haiti, south Chicago, everywhere. We've been doing this shit to each other for thousands of years.

Harris thinks he's being clear-eyed and realistic. He's actually revealing that even many of the most sophisticated Western intellectuals haven't evolved too far beyond the tribal baseline. His worldview where Israel is concerned is Red with an Orange toolbox. The rationalism is real, but it serves power, not understanding. We've refined the methods of killing and wrapped them in strategic doctrine, but the underlying impulse—destroy the enemy to survive—remains Paleolithic.

Israel's bombing campaign maximized force protection, which is standard doctrine for contemporary militaries fighting insurgent groups. But Gaza’s density made that approach catastrophic for civilians. There was nowhere for them to run and it wouldn't matter anyway because Hamas would be among them wherever they ran.

The IDF relied heavily on air and artillery strikes, often on targets embedded in or near populated areas, rather than sending soldiers into those spaces to clear them. It kept Israeli casualties relatively low—around 1,000 dead—but the tradeoff was tens of thousands of civilian deaths, most of them caused by those same bombardments.

The military logic was to destroy Hamas’s infrastructure, deny it cover, eliminate fighters and tunnels, and do it with minimal Israeli exposure. The moral cost, though, was as staggering as it is to watch Harris justify it without ever mentioning it. Every flattened apartment block, every destroyed hospital (about 30) or school, became a symbol of what “low-risk warfare” looks like when one side has total dominance and the other is trapped beneath it.

The alternative was to use the IDF in tunnel combat situations and Israel flat-out refused to kill another 1,000 or so soldiers to do what the bombing did.  At least three Gazan hospitals were obliterated with bunker-busting munitions, designed to destroy something deep underground.  Most of the tunnel system was destroyed by bombing wherever the tunnels happened to be, regardless of what was atop the tunnel.  They should have never built those tunnels in the first place.

Maybe he's right. Maybe this is just how humans work. If the most violent people decide how violent everyone else must become, then civilization is nothing more than a temporary ceasefire between eruptions of tribal warfare. The Enlightenment wasn't an evolution—it was decoration. Under the universities and human rights declarations, we're still the same species that settled disputes with rocks and spears.

Most of us still think like our ancestors did a thousand years ago, we've just learned to hide it better. Meditation hides it very well. Harris shows us this far more clearly than he intended. His realism exposes what his spiritual practice cannot fix: individual awakening has near-zero impact on collective behavior. No matter how clearly one person sees through the illusion of self, humanity as a whole still kneels before the old gods of power and revenge.

Of course, it must be added that basic security of a people is a right to attack in defense of themselves. Proportional response or not, Israel did not invade, kill and kidnap Gaza first. Gazan citizens remained quiet for years as tunnels were installed under the entire strip. These are seemingly sinister moves.  

So I get the need to do what Harris says here. I get the military need to do what was necessary to destroy that sinister force. Maybe that has happened but I doubt it. This goes back many centuries. This blow will create martyrs to build the negative energy for the next blow. War without end.

But the military threat is not the most insidious aspect of this. Harris invokes Carl Popper's "paradox of tolerance": you cannot be endlessly tolerant of intolerance and survive as an open society. The threat isn't only external—it's walking through the front door using our own values as cover.

Harris points to organizations like CARE (Council on American-Islamic Relations), which Americans imagine to be the Muslim equivalent of the ACLU. It's not. It's an Islamist front group with direct ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, using liberal tolerance as a shield to advance illiberal goals. When Harris criticizes them, they'll cry "Islamophobia!" and "bigotry!" while championing our virtues of tolerance and non-discrimination. Meanwhile, the actual worldview they want to implement—in their own lives and in ours—is deeply intolerant.

Then there's Qatar, the largest foreign funder of US academic institutions, pumping billions into universities to create Middle East studies programs that indoctrinate students into a distorted view of the region. This isn't generosity. It's strategic infection. They're a state that openly funds terrorism while using our openness to rot us from within. We let them do it because we're afraid of being called bigots.

This is the trap Harris describes, and he quotes David Frum perfectly: "If liberals can't figure out how to police borders, fascists will." We're stuck between useful idiots on the left just letting the barbarians walk through the gate, and fascists on the right who'll show us how to close it properly—meaning brutally, meaning in ways that betray everything we claim to value. Neither extreme works. But those are the only two options when you refuse to defend your civilization until it's almost too late.

He sees this clearly. Open societies have to find some way to defend their values without tipping into xenophobia or jingoism. But we're not finding that way. We're just arguing about whether noticing the problem makes you a bigot.

And yet, beneath all this clear-eyed analysis, Harris reveals something larger than he intends. Beneath the science, the meditation apps, the rational discourse about tolerance and intolerance, we remain primitive. War isn't an accident of civilization—it's the continuation of our oldest ritual, the one we've never stopped performing. We've just gotten better cameras to film it.

In harmogenic terms, we're medieval at best—actually earlier: tribal, Red, the species that survived by being more brutal than the next group. Harris's meditation practice has made him peaceful inside his own skull, but it hasn't changed the species. And his own analysis proves he knows this. Consciousness and its contents might be all we have to work with spiritually, but beyond consciousness lies a world that doesn't meditate, doesn't reflect, doesn't evolve. It just kills and calls it morally right.

That's the admission buried in this interview. That's the verdict on humanity Harris doesn't quite say out loud but demonstrates with every example: we're still too primitive to escape violence. Even massive blow-the-shit-out-of-everything violence. And it is, apparently, okay. The lowest cultural denominator—the most repressive, most brutal society—drags everyone else down into the blood whether they choose it or not. In a world where everyone proclaims freedom, the most violent people decide how violent we all become...or continue to be, despite consciousness and its pitiful contents.

Note: Check out my strictly military perspective on Israel in Gaza here.

(Assisted by AI)