The Importance of Having Enemies

A cockpit does not tolerate ambiguity. Some inputs keep the aircraft stable. Others destabilise it. Human societies face the same problem — and modern culture has become strangely uncomfortable with admitting it.

We are not all the same — fortunately. Pretending otherwise does not produce harmony. It produces confusion.

If one looks at the world with a minimum of clarity, three categories appear naturally.

There are friends: those who share a common ground. Sometimes it is a set of values, sometimes habits, sometimes culture. Often it is simply the quiet understanding that certain things matter in the same way.

There are neutrals: people with whom we do not particularly resonate, but who do not act against us. The world would function perfectly well if most interactions remained in this category.

And then there are foes or, more plainly, enemies.

Not rivals. Not competitors. Those are different creatures.

A foe is someone who deliberately acts against what friends share: values, common ground, property, family, order.

Modern education — at least in parts of the West — has grown uncomfortable with this category. Pupils are often told that we are all equal, that it is always better to turn enemies into friends, that conflict is mostly a misunderstanding.

It is a comforting message.

It is also false.

A burglar is not the equal of the person he robs.

A mafia boss is not the equal of the executive who pays taxes and builds a company.

Equality before the law does not mean equality of conduct.

For my part, the frontier between friends and foes rests on two pillars: rules and culture. In this regard I consider myself profoundly European.

Rules matter to me — not primarily for their prescriptive side, but because they are a declaration. A society that writes rules has made the effort to decide, collectively, what it considers acceptable and what it does not. Law is not merely constraint. It is a statement of civilisation.

Culture is the other frontier. Not necessarily my culture — but a cultura nonetheless. A society without cultural depth tends to flatten everything. And when everything is flattened, judgement disappears.

This is why I tend to consider foes those who are deliberately unruly, or those who simplify complex matters to the point where culture itself is discarded.

But these are reflections that belong to peaceful times.

I was born in peace. For most of my life, the protection of tangible things — family, people I care about, property, the quiet continuity of life — felt almost abstract.

And thanks to the past peaceful times we have to educate ourselves to new paradigms: enemies, in the way we used to imagine them, mostly belong to fairy tales.

In stories there is always a hero and a villain — often the most charismatic character in the scene, elegantly dressed in black, recognisable by the archetypal symbols that have always marked him as such.

Reality is far less theatrical.

In the real world, good and bad are rarely separated by visible symbols. The difference is often hidden in traits that are almost imperceptible.

And the difficulty of judgment does not belong only to warfare or technology. Indeed, it belongs to everyday life.

Consider the businessman who appears respectable, disciplined and successful, yet quietly exploits his employees, creates a toxic environment and constantly searches for small shortcuts. On the surface the signals are correct: the language is polished, the results may even look convincing. But the underlying pattern reveals something different.

Or the person who calls himself a friend, who shares conversations and confidences, yet does not hesitate to distort the truth when it serves his own interest.

Or the partner whose jealousy is initially mistaken for care — a form of attention that slowly reveals itself as possession, sometimes even turning violent.

In all these cases the signals are ambiguous.

The surface suggests trust.

The pattern suggests something else.

Recognising this difference requires the same ability that intelligence analysts, pilots or commanders rely on: the capacity to read patterns rather than appearances.

For a long time many of us tolerate such behaviours. We normalise them. We interpret them as imperfections that can be managed.

But there is often a moment when the interpretation shifts. The behaviour is no longer classified as unfortunate or disappointing.

It becomes something else. It becomes misaligned with what we consider acceptable. And when that shift happens, something unexpected occurs: clarity appears.

The act of classification becomes a form of liberation.

To stop pretending that a false friend is a friend.

To stop excusing behaviour that quietly erodes trust.

To stop interpreting possession as affection.

In some cases the correct classification becomes unavoidable. The person is no longer simply difficult or disappointing.

He becomes an enemy.

Not necessarily in the dramatic sense of conflict — but in the analytical sense of someone whose actions systematically work against what we value.

Seen this way, the concept of enemy is not primitive. It is a form of clarity. And that clarity applies to many areas of life where ambiguity is often tolerated longer than it should be.

Every decision system — whether military, technological or human — depends on the same capability: the ability to distinguish between signals that appear trustworthy and signals that only imitate trust.

And sometimes the most difficult step is simply naming what we see.

This is precisely why — for instance — intelligence exists.

Intelligence, in its most essential sense, is the ability to reconstruct patterns of behaviour — not necessarily symbolic ones — that reveal a coherent picture of someone acting against us. It is the discipline of reading signals before they become obvious.

Cybersecurity works exactly this way: no attacker announces himself. Analysts reconstruct traces, correlations, anomalies.

The same applies to physical threats. A submarine is dangerous precisely because it cannot be seen. A stealth aircraft exists to remain invisible to the systems meant to detect it.

The interesting aspect of enemies is that they can exist much closer to us than we expect. And, you bet, they will not cooperate with us to be visible.

Sometimes they also appear inside the very structures meant to protect order.

Bureaucracy is a good example.

Rules, in their origin, are coherent with the judgement and reflection from which they emerge. They exist because a society has decided that certain actions are good and others are not. In the classical tradition — one could think of the Greek idea that the law is just because it expresses a rational order — rules exist to serve what is right.

But systems evolve. And sometimes they deviate. When the original judgement fades, ideals begin to harden into ideologies. Ideologies then collapse into slogans. At that point the rule slowly mutates into something else.

It becomes bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy is not the presence of rules; it is the multiplication of them without judgement. It often originates from the least orderly impulses — fear, opportunism, intellectual laziness — and over time it creates stratifications of dogma increasingly distant from the inspiration that produced the first rule.

This is why one can encounter enemies even in places that appear respectable.

The rediscovery of physical and concrete threats around Europe may therefore have an unexpected side effect: it may also train us to recognise the same patterns within everyday life.

The abusive manager who intimidates subordinates.

The official who hides behind procedure to avoid responsibility.

The public discourse that simplifies complex matters until judgement disappears.

These phenomena are harder to classify than a visible enemy. Yet, much like bureaucracy, they proceed slowly and almost invisibly, altering values, principles and ideals from the inside rather than from the outside.

Perhaps the return of visible threats will teach us something that previous generations understood instinctively: vigilance.

A more attentive, more pragmatic, less ambiguous posture toward the world around us. Not at the expense of intellectual depth — quite the opposite. Because it is through deep understanding that ideas and ideals are rediscovered.

This is why the rediscovery of enemies matters.

Not because conflict is desirable, but because clarity is necessary. A society that refuses to recognise hostile patterns eventually loses the ability to defend what it values.

Europe is now unfortunately rediscovering that peace is not a natural state. It is an achievement that requires maintenance. Conflicts at our borders are forcing us to reconsider something simple: if something truly matters to us — our families, our institutions, our way of life — then it is probably wise to start asking a very old question again:

How do we protect it?

Every stable system eventually reaches this moment.

It must decide what it stands for.

And, just as importantly, what it stands against.