What Is Peace, Really?
Europe says it wants peace. But peace has become a brand — not a practice. A word used to mask fear, project virtue, or justify silence.
I remember a line from an old song, rasped out by Thåström of Imperiet in the 1980s: “Är det verkligen fred vi vill ha — till varje tänkbart pris?”
Is it really peace we want — at any price?
It wasn’t just a lyric. It was a warning. Because peace, too, can become dangerous when it is used to avoid conflict rather than resolve it. When it becomes a way to surrender truth in the name of harmony, or a tool to suppress dissent in the name of order.
What is peace, really?
Most define it as the absence of war. But that’s not enough. Real peace is not just silence. It’s not compliance. It’s not stillness imposed from above.
Real peace is:
- The presence of justice.
- The freedom to disagree without fear.
- The space to remember who we are, and still welcome others.
It is not uniformity. It is not amnesia. It is not obedience.
We live in a time where leaders shout about war but brand themselves as peacemakers. Where NATO expands in the name of defence. Where sanctions starve civilians in the name of freedom. Where the word “peace” is printed on missiles and survival brochures.
Peace has become sterile. Marketed. Safe. Hollow.
But true peace is not safe. It requires self-reflection. It demands that we look in the mirror and ask:
- What are we afraid to give up?
- What lies are we still protecting?
- Who do we become if we stop pointing outward and start looking inward?
Sometimes, war feels easier than peace. Hatred gives us direction. Enemies give us purpose.
And peace? Peace asks us to love. To forgive. To compromise. To be vulnerable.
So maybe the real question is not how to achieve peace, but whether we even want it. Because peace means giving up our favourite myths. That we are always right. That we are always the good guys. That power equals security.
Maybe the reason we keep choosing war — again and again — is because we are terrified of what peace might demand from us.
But if we don’t ask, now, what peace really means — someone else will define it for us. And they will call it peace, even as they destroy everything it ever stood for.
Let us not be fooled by a peace that costs our dignity. Or our truth. Or the future.
Let us want peace — but not at any price. Let us want peace that is worthy of the name.
The Lost Boys of Europe
Europe is looking outward for threats. It prepares for war. It builds fences. It urges citizens to stockpile survival kits. It warns of invasion and destabilisation. But the real imbalance is happening within.
There is a generation of young men in Europe — native, migrant, and everything in between — who are angry, aimless, and unheard. They are not forming political parties. They are not writing manifestos. They are burning cars, brawling in the streets, getting radicalised online or falling into silence. And the truth no one wants to face is this:
They don’t know who they are.
We have failed them. Not just through policy, but culturally. We have taught them that masculinity is dangerous. We have ridiculed strength, silenced fatherhood, erased rites of passage. Then we are shocked when that erased identity comes back in the form of rage — or worse, violence.
In my own childhood, I remember anger without direction. The feeling of not quite belonging. I was a half-Swede, first-generation. That kind of disconnection leaves a mark. Today, it’s not just a mark. It’s an epidemic.
The Mask of Rage
We call it antisocial behaviour, but that’s just the surface. Behind every shattered bus shelter, every street fight, every senseless attack, there is often a boy who was never shown how to become a man.
These are not just “bad kids.” They are boys without fathers, without structure, without respect — taught nothing but shame, shown nothing but failure, told that they are the problem before they ever had a chance to become the solution.
And when they feel invisible, they will make themselves seen — through chaos if they have to.
Antisocial behaviour is not just a problem of crime. It is a mirror.
It reflects a society that no longer mentors its sons, but medicates them, isolates them, or criminalises them instead.
Punishment alone won’t solve this. What looks like rage is often a form of mourning — mourning for identity, belonging, and a role in the world.
A boy who knows who he is doesn’t need to burn down the world just to feel real.
No Maps, Just Screens
One of the darkest symptoms of this collapse is incelism — boys and young men who feel unwanted, unseen, and permanently locked out of intimacy.
Culture now bombards adolescents with hypersexualized, algorithm-driven visions of what love, power, and belonging should look like — especially through platforms like Netflix, where teenage characters are cast, styled, and scripted with the emotional depth of adult fantasies, not teenage reality.
The message is clear and relentless:
You should be wanted. You should be having sex. You should be in control.
But in reality, many boys are awkward, isolated, struggling. No one teaches them how to develop character, how to risk rejection with dignity, or how to form meaningful bonds. So the gap between what they are shown and what they experience becomes unbearable.
And in that gap, some give up.
Others lash out.
Incelism isn’t a philosophy. It’s a funeral for a boy’s sense of worth.
The Diversity Delusion
We are constantly told that diversity is our strength. And yet, in the same breath, we are told that diverse communities are vulnerable and must be protected from criticism, pressure, or responsibility.
How can something be both a strength and a fragility?
This contradiction is not harmless — it creates a distorted moral hierarchy. Native populations, especially struggling young men, are seen as a threat. While “diverse” populations are treated as untouchable — often patronised, not empowered.
But true strength is not above criticism. And real inclusion isn’t possible when you protect one group and silence another.
We cannot build a shared society while pretending that one half must always apologize and the other half must never be questioned. That is not justice. That is imbalance. And imbalance breeds resentment.
At the same time, power has taken on a different face. Women lead nations, ministries, and institutions — and in doing so, often adopt the old masculine modes of control: cold efficiency, distant authority, no softness. Men are told to be less, while women are told to be more like men.
Balance is gone.
This is not a complaint. This is an observation. And a warning.
A culture cannot survive if it turns one half of itself into a threat, and the other half into an imitation.
We must bring boys back into the culture with purpose, not shame.
Give them something to serve, to protect, to believe in.
Offer them strength with direction, pride with humility, identity with belonging.
Because if we don’t, someone else will.
And that someone might not offer peace.
Europe is not just losing its voice.
It’s losing its sons.
The Labelling Paradox: How Societal Power Dynamics Create Deviance
Deviance is rule breaking. It is not enough to break a rule or a norm to be deviant, you also have to be named a deviant. Society’s reaction to deviance makes a person deviant, not the act itself. Someone has to decide that the act is deviant and if others agree with the label, a deviant has been made and a deviant act named. It’s usually someone from a class with more power who does the labelling.
Labelling is always about power. And it’s not just about rich and poor, it’s also good-looking and ugly, slim and fat, old and young, educated and uneducated and the list goes on. Labelling asserts power. Many people try to take back power by using the labels in a positive way and it has had some effect, for example, queer or slut or differently abled.
Deviance is a result of naming not behaving. People behave all the time. It’s by labelling the behaviour that society creates deviance. People’s reaction to the behaviour creates deviance. Any behaviour can be labelled as deviant depending on culture and also norms in a specific area within culture, for example, deviance is different in the city compared to the village. People might still disagree on what is a deviant act even if they live in the same reality.
To understand deviance, we have to understand why people feel the urge to label people who are different. Why do they think their worldview is correct and label the deviant as immoral? They impose their morals on those who have less or no power to reject it. Naturally, the labelling is done by the people in power on the poor, or by men on women, or by adults on children or ethnic majorities on ethnic minorities. Labelling demonstrates power over another. In an affluent neighbourhood, deviance can be seen as part of growing up, an innocent act, but in a poor neighbourhood, the same act can be seen as a sign of delinquency and a roadmap to a life of crime. Labelling affects people even as they try to reject it. A child who has been labelled a delinquent is stigmatised in all society’s institutions. Teachers look down on them and employers don’t want them. A child who gets to sow their wild oats as the saying goes without being labelled a deviant and potential lifetime criminal will go on to a bright future and be liked by teachers, employers and people in authority.
Emile Durkheim’s perspective
Emile Durkheim, a French sociologist, believed deviance serves a purpose in society. He stated that it reaffirms boundaries as it affirms cultural values and norms. The response to deviance clarifies moral boundaries and brings people together. Deviance also encourages social change and as Durkheim believed, without deviance we wouldn’t have society. He believed we need badness to have goodness.
Durkheim believed deviance clarified norms and reinforced conformity, it also strengthened bonds between people uniting against the deviant, finally, he also believed it deviance can lead to positive societal change and challenge people’s views of what’s right and wrong. Unfortunately, this kind of bonding can also turn into a lynch mob as they are united against something, not for something. It’s ok to be against something, but have a solution as well, not just a label.
Immigration and deviance
An immigrant culture creates deviance. Immigrants are different and the native people, in an act to retain control and power, name deviant people. Naming is catching someone and when someone is caught, it’s hard to get away from the label. Deviance comes from being socially marked as a deviant. Putting a label on a deviant person causes the person to see themselves as deviant. They conform to the label. Who is strong enough or deviant enough to resist being labelled? Deviance is necessary for change and innovation, both are needed for a society to keep reinventing itself and not go stale. In a society with unclear rules, anomie can take over and cause chaos. Anomie is social unrest and today we can see clear examples of anomie in, for example, Sweden.
Sweden has so many criminal groups it has lost count and these groups as well as individuals are constantly testing the rules. When hard crime by children is met by a talk with parents while drinking juice and eating buns the rules are stretched further and further. While telling the Swedish people not to put group against group, the government is doing exactly that and it has created areas where the Swedish police has lost authority and power. Sweden is like a permissive parent who has lost all respect.
The only way to start changing this is to start treating everyone equally. When there is little disapproval from the people that matters, nothing will change. Parents who feel excluded from Swedish society won’t change their children’s behaviour as they feel the same exclusion. Anomie in Sweden then seems to be due to a lack of integration. A weakened bond between the individual and group to the community causes deviance. Language is a major issue when it comes to lack of integration. Everyone should be incentivised to help make integration a natural two-way process. If criminals are met with empathy and understanding, if they are labelled victims, more deviance will occur.
Deviance is supposed to clarify rules, everyone in society will then learn what is unacceptable. Anomie in Sweden is not just down to lack of integration. The digital age has made many people superfluous, ethnic Swedes who used to work in factories, young men who used to be called for army training and those with no education or low education are no longer needed. All of this mixed with a lack of a two-way integration process, exclusion and no-go areas cause social unrest and if not dealt with, a civil war.
Shift in labelling
The shift in labelling of deviant people from bad to sick has made society more understanding and deviant people can now get help instead of punishment. Normal or abnormal behaviour depends on the label attached to the person or the act. If society doesn’t like or understand a behaviour, they stick a label on it, for example, mental illness. The labelled person will find it hard to be seen as normal once the label has been attached. A mental illness is for life.
The person who is continuously rejected in their attempts to be normal, to rid themselves of the label, eventually gives up and relaxes into the role of a sick person in need of help. People who are considered mentally ill have a feeling that others are conspiring against them and they are right. The people close to the person think they are helping by putting a label on behaviour they don’t understand, but naming a person mentally ill instead of accepting that someone is different becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. A person who is different is not sick, but if labelled as such, it’s hard to reject the label.
Power dynamics in labelling and dissent
It’s the powerful who label and they also have the power to resist being labelled. Anomie is the nature of capitalism. The rich hide their greed and put attention on the lower classes’ criminality by strict laws and policing. Society labels the lower classes much more than its middle and upper classes.
Today, to be deviant is also to dare to speak up against the mainstream narrative, but it’s not easy as there are so many labels that make a deviant an outcast almost immediately as they are named, for example, covidiot, climate denier and conspiracy theorist.
Dissenting voices are not always right, but their presence is a safeguard against authoritarianism, stagnation and close-mindedness. Listening to understand is a powerful approach that enhances problem-solving.
Involution Labs 