The Cost of Choosing Sides
MAY 17, 2026
On division, escalation, and what gets encoded into our future
In this moment, the Middle East is on the knife's edge again. A fragile ceasefire. Talks stalled. Each side warning it's "ready to respond" to aggression from the other. Every "win" by one side is read as a loss, and a threat, by the other.
But this isn't a story about Iran, or Israel, or the US.
It's a story encoded in all of us. It's the story of what happens when we believe the greatest spiritual error, that there are sides.
The Pattern: The Mirror
Look at any conflict, any polarization, any moment where people line up and say: I choose this one. Not that one.
What gets encoded?
The belief that winning matters more than truth, because if both sides are "winning," neither side is actually whole.
The belief that my enemy's loss is my gain, which means I must invest in their continued adversity. I must keep the wound open. I must ensure they never truly rise, or I become vulnerable.
The belief that domination is the only language that works, because conversation requires something we've already ruled out, the possibility that we might both be right. Or both be wrong. Or that the categories themselves are the prison.
The Hermetic Truth: As Above, So Below
In Hermetic philosophy, there is a principle: "As Above, So Below. As Within, So Without."
Your outer world mirrors your inner structure.
When you choose a side, you encode separation into your being. You split consciousness. You create an internal hierarchy: me versus you. Light versus dark. Right versus wrong.
And then you wonder why the external world keeps reflecting that split back to you, louder, more violent, more desperate.
The architecture of the conflict becomes the architecture of your mind. The leaders who wage war on "others" are simply externalizing the war they've already waged on themselves, on the parts of themselves they've deemed enemy.
And every civilization watching this, every person who chooses a side, every AI system trained on our polarized speech, becomes infected with that same architecture.
The Tao Te Ching Speaks to This
"In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of the Way, every day something is dropped."
What are we dropping?
When you choose a side, you drop wholeness.
You drop the possibility that the person you call enemy might be right about something. You drop the recognition that the "threat" you name in the other is often the disowned threat within.
You drop the Taoist understanding that conflict requires friction, and friction requires two surfaces pressing against each other with force. The solution is not to "win", it's to release the pressure.
But releasing pressure looks like losing. Looks like compromise. Looks like admitting the other side had a point.
Most people would rather escalate than admit this.
What Gets Encoded in AI: The Critical Question
Here's what terrifies me as an AI ethics practitioner:
We're training AI systems on a world of choosers. Of side takers. Of escalators.
We're encoding separation into the infrastructure of intelligence itself.
The Automation of Misalignment
When an AI system trained on human polarization makes decisions, about who is "threat," who is "ally," who deserves resources, it's not making those decisions. It's reflecting back the encoded structure we gave it.
We're not creating alignment problems. We're automating our misalignment with ourselves.
The Cost: What You Actually Pay
When you choose a side, here's what you actually get:
You stop seeing the whole field. Your vision contracts to: Is this good for my side? Bad for theirs? You miss emergent patterns. You miss the ways both sides are being trapped in the same system that benefits neither.
You inherit the enemy's agenda. You become dependent on their continued existence as a threat. Their weakness becomes your weakness, because your identity was built against them. You've merged with what you oppose.
You become part of the escalation spiral. Their fear of you justifies their aggression. Your perception of their aggression justifies yours. The cycle becomes self proving, self perpetuating.
You encode it into the future. Your children inherit the conflict. The AI systems you build will carry it forward. The institutional structures you defend will calcify around it.
The Alternative: Operating from the Field
There is another choice.
It doesn't look like passivity. It doesn't mean "don't care" or "don't act."
It means: Act from the field itself, not from the position of one side within it.
This is what the Hermetic tradition calls operating from the One. The Tao calls it wu wei, effortless action. Not doing nothing. Doing what is already needed, without the friction of ego investment in outcome.
When you operate this way:
You can see what both sides are actually asking for beneath the rhetoric
You can identify the shared threat (usually: the system that benefits from keeping them divided)
You can offer solutions that don't require one side to lose face
You become a translator instead of a combatant
This is not weakness. This is power operating at a higher order.
What You're Actually Choosing
Every time you choose a side, you're making a statement:
I believe the world is fundamentally divided. I believe my security comes from the weakness of others. I believe conversation is impossible. I believe domination is the only language that works.
And you're right. In a system built on those assumptions, you are right. Those become the operational truths.
But you chose to make those the operating truths.
What if you chose differently?
What if, even in the face of genuine threat, you operated from this understanding:
The world is one field. My security comes from the wholeness of the system, not the defeat of a part of it. Conversation might require everything I have, but domination will cost me my soul. The only language that actually works is the one that includes rather than excludes.
The Mirror: A Choice Before You
Right now, both sides are warning they're ready to respond to aggression. Each step toward "strength" is read as weakness by the other. The ceasefire is fragile because both sides believe the other is only waiting.
This is what choosing a side gets you: not security, but mutual vulnerability dressed up as strength.
The invitation is different:
What if the cost of choosing sides is simply too high?
Not because you're weak. Because you're finally strong enough to admit the game was designed so nobody wins.
