"What do these battles have in common: the war on drugs, the war on cancer, the war on poverty, the war on obesity, and the war on terror? If you guessed they're all wars we've largely failed to win, you're right. Consider the War on Drugs-launched in the 1970s with billions spent and countless lives impacted, yet addiction rates remain stubbornly high. Or the War on Poverty, declared in the 1960s, which made progress but never eradicated poverty."
"As linguist George Lakoff said, "Metaphors frame the way we think and act." When we declare war on social problems, we create an adversarial mindset that often leads to punitive measures rather than collaborative solutions. Similarly, public health expert Richard Horton argues, "Health is not a battle to be won; it's a system to be built.""
"Would we have reached the moon if JFK had declared a "War on the Moon" instead of inspiring us with a vision of exploration and achievement? His words-"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard"-organized and measured the best of our energies and skills."
Framing social problems as wars mobilizes resources but also invokes combat metaphors that encourage punitive, adversarial responses instead of cooperative, systemic solutions. Massive investments in initiatives labeled as wars — against drugs, poverty, cancer, obesity, or terror — have yielded limited eradication of the underlying issues. Metaphors shape the way people think and act, steering policy toward confrontation and enforcement. Treating health as a battle obscures the need to build resilient systems. Visionary, aspirational language focused on exploration and construction can better organize sustained effort and collaboration than militaristic metaphors that normalize destructive strategies.
Read at Psychology Today
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