A Case Against Therapeutic Peace
I must say this beforehand - that is, by "therapeutic", I don't refer to all psychotherapy (although many modern psychotherapy practices do promote the kind of peace I'm against). The word "therapeutic" is used here simply because it's handy: there aren't many words that are more suitable than "therapeutic" for the phenomenon I'm about to describe.
I must first propose an idea: that peace-of-mind is harmful. It's harmful not because the state of being at ease is harmful per se, but the fact that it itself could come from a harmful way of thinking and the peace itself stops us from inquiring its origin. One can, at the very least, identify two different kinds of peace (and here I call them as such): therapeutic peace, whose entirety consists of the pursuit of mental tranquility (or even much more sinister, euphoria), which is (often, if not always) established by oppressing the feeling of dissatisfaction that stems from the discrepancy between the state of the world that satisfies us and the state of the world that actually is; existential peace, which makes no such attempt at consolation, and because it does not console, some may even claim that it is no peace at all - but that, too, could be a kind of therapeutic-centric thinking.
As mentioned above, I believe the immorality of therapeutic peace (largely) comes from the method of reaching tranquility and the fact that that tranquility becomes the justification of such method depsite the method itself could be harmful: by twisting our own mind we satisfy our mental desire while putting our cognition in a state that's forever at odds with the reality. Strangely, by refusing to acknowledge the discrepancy between what's real and what's in our head, we receive and cultivate such discrepancy and thus end up with much more and much bigger and intense situations of them; but by truly accepting and examine it with a total abandoment of the fantasy of a full resolution, we are able to restrict that discrepancy or even have the hope of its reduction. From a certain perspective, the problem with giant infants is exactly this: we choose to favour what we feel over what we actually see - even to the point of choosing what we actively see according to how we feel - we put ourselves in the jail of everlasting misunderstandings, and from said jail all the subsequent confusion and resentment comes.
In terms of actions, the core idea of existential peace is that quote-unquote "bad feelings" are not things that warrants immediate suppression and painting-over. I'm slightly hesitant to directly call all tranquility immoral, considering how we do naturally tend to pursue things that makes us "feel good" (Original Sin?); but if we were to search for a replacment for the sake of morality (and of course, the stability of our mind), we have to learn to examine, to put the judgement of feeling on hold (epoché), and to accept in a way that neither attempts to seek consolation and justification nor submits to the reality's imperfectness.
Last update: 2026.8.28