Chronic Stress and Welcoming War
Eight out of the forty-seven years of the Islamic Republic's history were spent in war with Iraq—nearly one-sixth of its existence. While post-war state apparatuses frame conflicts exclusively through epic heroics, the profound trauma and grief of war cannot be erased by manufactured pageantry. Yet amid heightening threats of military conflict, segments of Iranian society have openly welcomed war. This essay examines this phenomenon through the lens of neuroscience and social psychology.
In popular neuroscience, Daniel Goleman coined the metaphor "Amygdala Hijack" to describe situations where intense emotional arousal or imminent threat triggers an instantaneous, instinctive survival reaction.
Under ordinary conditions, sensory data reaches the prefrontal cortex—the brain region responsible for executive functions, rational analysis, impulse control, and problem-solving. But when a stimulus is perceived as an acute threat, the amygdala activates rapidly, triggering a surge of adrenaline and cortisol that temporarily suppresses prefrontal executive oversight. Consequently, individuals react through instinctive, survival-driven impulses rather than measured reasoning.
A Society Under Chronic Stress: A Social Psychological Model
Extending this neurobiological framework to collective human systems reveals striking dynamics. When an entire society endures decades of structural pressure, acute economic volatility, and existential uncertainty, chronic stress becomes a structural condition. Chronic stress severely degrades cognitive flexibility, lowers tolerance for ambiguity, and impairs emotional regulation.
At the collective level, complex realities are reduced to linear, binary narratives. "Us versus Them" polarizations intensify because stressed minds crave predictable simplicity. Dogmatic, absolute, and authoritarian narratives gain sudden appeal—not from reasoned ideological conversion, but because psychological certainty temporarily relieves overwhelming anxiety.
When applied to a society under prolonged authoritarian control, institutional trust severely erodes. Cycles of collective fury and social burnout alternate between explosive protests and profound exhaustion.
Societies function much like neural networks: sustained states of perpetual alarm inevitably induce systemic exhaustion. To escape overwhelming anxiety, a traumatized collective grasps at whatever disrupts the status quo—especially after peaceful, reformist avenues have been repeatedly foreclosed.
When citizens face compounding economic despair, social suppression, and the unhealed grief of thousands of casualties, expecting passive compliance is biologically and psychologically unrealistic. Human evolutionary biology compels individuals facing unbearable chronic distress to reach for whatever shatters the source of their trauma, regardless of subsequent risks.
In this context, segments of society welcoming foreign conflict—however tragic, destructive, and dangerous—reflects a predictable, survival-driven human reaction to unbearable chronic trauma. The challenging question remains: Can psychological equilibrium ever be restored to such an exhausted society?