Banality of violence: What Gandhi and a physicist can teach us about the war on Iran

It has happened. On 28 February, the United States and Israel launched a joint assault on Iran – codenamed Operation Epic Fury by the Pentagon and Operation Roaring Lion by Israel – killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with some of the country’s senior military and security leadership.

Iran retaliated swiftly, firing waves of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel and at US military bases across the Gulf, striking targets in Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and beyond.

Several US service members have been killed. The death toll, as of this writing, stands at over 200 in Iran, at least nine in Israel and is rising.

And yet, just days before the bombs fell, the world’s media was transfixed not by the moral weight of what was coming – but by the apparently faulty toilets on the USS Gerald R Ford, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the most expensive warship ever built.

We have become a population that finds more interest in the plumbing of the aggressor than the humanity of the victim.

What we describe as civilisation has become a thin veneer for a global decline into immorality. For centuries, we have mistaken the “balance of power” for peace, allowing mightier nations to use their strength to subjugate the weak for resources and markets.

This systemic decay has now reached a horrible threshold. And even as US envoys held nuclear talks with Tehran – with Iran reportedly agreeing, just days before the assault, never to stockpile enriched uranium – the bombs were already being prepared. The talks were, it seems, never meant to succeed.

This is the banality of violence: the conversion of a machine of obliteration into a viral joke about a “s***house”. While we laughed at the clogged pipes of a $13bn armada, we remained silent about the thousands of lives it was poised to extinguish – and now some of those lives are gone.

We had become so inured to the deprivation in Palestine and the gathering drumbeat of catastrophic aggression that we found more interest in the plumbing of the aggressor than the humanity of the victim.

Compromised elites

The Epstein papers further reveal the depth of this rot. They show how prominent figures – including linguist and renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky and spiritual wellness guru Deepak Chopra – maintained close ties with a man of extraordinary depravity.

We are forced to ask: are we a lost species?

The answer is no. But the way forward requires a radical shift in how we define our existence.

A scientific foundation for conscience

In his latest work, Irreducible (2024), Federico Faggin provides a scientific basis for our survival. He argues that we are not biological machines but conscious beings whose inner lives are irreducible and inextricably connected through a universal field.

To Faggin, any act of violence is an act against the self, because it ignores the fundamental interconnectedness of all life – human, animal and plant.

This framework provides the modern foundation for Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha (truth-force), ahimsa (non-violence) and swaraj (self-rule).

Gandhi understood that if humanity is truly singular, then violence is an illogical attempt to solve a problem by attacking one’s own body.

Satyagraha explains that if you use violence to defeat an oppressor, you simply become a new kind of oppressor. Truth – satya – is the weapon to defeat the oppressor. During the 1930 Salt March, Gandhi used no weapons. He used the truth that the British salt tax was an immoral plunder of a basic human right.

Ahimsa, Gandhi taught, is the greatest force at the disposal of humankind. If we are all part of a singular humanity, then killing is a suicidal act that destroys the soul of the killer as much as the body of the victim.

Swaraj was Gandhi’s ultimate goal. He argued that if you cannot control your own impulses toward greed and violence, you will always be a slave to an empire or an oligarch.

It was precisely this self-governance that was absent in those named in the Epstein papers. It is what appears to be absent in the those who ordered the strikes on Tehran.

Reclaiming our humanity

These very human principles show that we are not so depraved as a species as to fail to understand where we went wrong, nor so lost as to be without a map.

The assault on Iran – launched even as diplomats were talking, even as an agreement appeared within reach – is perhaps the starkest modern proof of what happens when power operates without conscience.

By replacing the “balance of power” with a balance of consciousness, we reclaim our humanity from the oligarchs. We are the universe’s greatest power. Our evolution lies in the willingness to finally recognise that there is no “other.”

For those in Malaysia now reviewing the education system, those involved may want to consider adding a new subject on humanity – grounded in the above – at all levels of schooling. The children watching the news this week will need more than maths and science to make sense of the world they are inheriting.

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