Escalation has a Logic. So Does Resolution.
When people lose a shared sense of reality, escalation is rarely the result of bad actors. It’s a design failure.
This piece shows why, when people are under pressure, actions often come before reflection, and why late-stage calls for discipline or “better leadership” rarely land. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, and social movement research, it traces how legitimacy, identity threat, and context shape what actions become available long before anyone makes a conscious choice.
You see the same patterns whenever people are pushed to act quickly, under stress or threat.
Peaceful protest in distorted times is about refusing the distortion, not just refusing violence.
That line sounds moral. It isn’t. It is a claim about how legitimacy, behavior, and escalation actually work when shared reality collapses.
Distorted times are not defined only by misinformation. They are defined by competing realities, each internally coherent, emotionally justified, and experienced as defensive.
Minneapolis makes this visible. Police, activists, residents, politicians, and media actors all narrate themselves as protectors. Many experience their stance as harm-preventing rather than harm-causing.
When multiple sides experience themselves as protagonists, escalation begins to feel reasonable. Harm becomes explainable. Systems fracture not because people intend destruction, but because the mechanisms that once coordinated meaning no longer hold.
Peaceful protest, when it works, interrupts this process.
Not by suppressing conflict, but by refusing to amplify distortion.
Distortion Is a Civic Failure, Not a Media Glitch
Distortion tends to take hold when identity overtakes outcomes.
Research demonstrates that moral conviction reduces openness to compromise, even when people share the same facts, because moralized beliefs are experienced as non-negotiable rather than practical ¹. When those beliefs are threatened, people do not simply disagree. They feel endangered.
Related research shows that identity threat reliably activates defensive biological responses, narrowing cognitive flexibility and increasing readiness to escalate ². In those conditions, escalation is often experienced as protection rather than aggression.
Humiliation compounds this effect. It has been shown to reliably increase retaliatory behavior at individual, group, and geopolitical levels ³.
Once conflict becomes existential, about dignity, belonging, or survival, resolution often becomes psychologically unavailable ¹ ². The question shifts from what would work to what would preserve identity.
Distortion, then, is not just about lies, though lies are present and consequential.
It is about the loss of shared interpretive ground, where even accurate information no longer coordinates behavior.
Nonviolence Is a Strategy for Legitimacy
Nonviolent resistance is often framed as moral restraint. The evidence points to something more practical.
Across hundreds of resistance campaigns, nonviolent movements were significantly more likely to succeed than violent ones ⁴. Not because they were more virtuous, but because they changed the nature of the conflict.
Nonviolence expands participation, increases scrutiny, fractures elite alignment, and raises the cost of repression ⁴. In doing so, it moves conflict away from force and toward legitimacy.
Institutions can absorb force.
They struggle to function when legitimacy erodes.
A Concrete Case: Why the Montgomery Bus Boycott Worked
The Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) is often remembered as a symbolic moment. It is better understood as a case of carefully prepared collective containment under sustained provocation.
Black residents of Montgomery faced routine humiliation, economic retaliation, surveillance, and credible threats of violence. Bombings occurred. Organizers were arrested. Fear was constant.
Violence would not have been surprising.
It also would have undermined the movement’s leverage.
What made the boycott effective was not restraint in the moment, but preparation before ignition.
Before the boycott began, organizers established clear roles, redundant logistics, explicit norms, and collective rituals that reduced ambiguity and internal threat. Lower threat made regulated behavior more available.
Over 381 days, there were no riots despite bombings, no mass retaliation despite arrests, and no collapse into disorder. This was not because participants were unusually disciplined. It was because the context supported regulation.
The boycott succeeded not because it “stayed peaceful,” but because it kept the conflict on the legitimacy ledger, forcing institutional response ⁵ ⁶.
The achievement here wasn’t restraint alone. It was the ability to hold coherence under conditions designed to destroy it.
What Changes After the Tech Revolution, and What Doesn’t
By 2026, protest unfolds inside a different surface environment:
Visibility is algorithmically mediated
Actions are recorded, clipped, and recontextualized instantly
Provocation scales faster than coordination
False narratives move at machine speed
Surveillance is ambient
Escalation now happens quickly and publicly.
What has not changed:
Legitimacy still determines outcomes
Fear and constraint still narrow interpretation
Behavior is still released by context before intention
Technology accelerates the loop. It does not alter it.
Translating Montgomery to 2026
A modern peaceful uprising cannot rely on intention alone.
It must be designed to survive distortion.
Role clarity becomes narrative containment.
Logistics become cognitive friction reduction.
Mass meetings become nervous-system infrastructure.
Discipline becomes legibility under surveillance.
The goal remains unchanged: keep the conflict on the legitimacy ledger, not the engagement ledger ⁷ ⁸.
Why Peace Often Fails in the Moment
Most calls for peaceful protest focus on behavior too late.
Under acute threat or constraint, behavior is often not chosen. It is released ¹⁰. When time, certainty, or perceived control are limited, emotional processing can dominate action before deliberative reasoning fully engages ¹⁰.
Crowd behavior responds to perceived legitimacy and containment, not to abstract values ⁹.
Without preparation, escalation is not a moral failure.
It is a highly likely outcome of context ² ⁹ ¹⁰.
Conclusion
In distorted times, peaceful protest is not passive or nostalgic. It is a refusal to supply the emotional fuel that polarized factions and algorithmic systems require to sustain escalation.
Violence obscures conditions.
Peaceful protest reveals them.
Peace is rarely summoned in the moment.
It is made possible, or impossible, by what has been designed in advance.
When a society loses its mirror, restoring the conditions for shared meaning is not idealism.
It is the work.
References & What Each Source Supports
¹ Moral Conviction & Identity Lock-In
Paper: Limits on Legitimacy: Moral and Religious Convictions as Constraints on Deference to Authority
Theme: Moral conviction constrains compromise and institutional legitimacy
Skitka, Bauman & Lytle (2009)
Demonstrates that when beliefs are held with moral or religious conviction, people are less willing to defer to authorities, procedures, or outcomes they perceive as violating those convictions. Moral conviction operates as a constraint on legitimacy, reducing openness to compromise even under shared factual conditions.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(4), 567–581.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-09092-004
² Identity Threat & Defensive Escalation
Paper: Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Sacred Values and Vulnerability to Violent Extremism
Theme: Identity threat releases defensive, high-cost behavior
Pretus et al. (2018)
Experimental and neuroimaging evidence shows that social exclusion and identity threat increase willingness to fight and die for in-group values, partially sacralizing previously non-sacred beliefs and reducing deliberative social reasoning.
Frontiers in Psychology, 9:2462.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02462
³ Humiliation as an Escalation Accelerator
Paper: Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict
Theme: Humiliation amplifies retaliatory aggression
Lindner (2006)
Demonstrates that humiliation is a powerful predictor of retaliatory aggression across interpersonal, group, and geopolitical contexts, particularly when dignity and status are threatened.
https://archive.org/details/makingenemieshum00lind
⁴ Why Nonviolent Movements Succeed More Often
Paper: Why Civil Resistance Works
Theme: Legitimacy and participation outperform force
Chenoweth & Stephan (2011)
Analysis of 323 campaigns shows nonviolent movements are more likely to succeed due to participation scale, legitimacy effects, and elite defection, not moral appeal.
https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/pantheon_files/files/publication/IS3301_pp007-044_Stephan_Chenoweth.pdf
⁵ Nonviolence as Legitimacy Exposure (Birmingham Case)
Paper: Letter from Birmingham Jail
Theme: Creating visible asymmetry forces institutional response
King (1963)
Articulates nonviolent direct action as a strategy designed to create a public legitimacy crisis, forcing institutions to confront injustice when negotiation has failed.
https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
(Historical context: Birmingham campaign, 1963.)
⁶ Legitimacy, Elite Fracture & Movement Dynamics
Paper: Dynamics of Diffusion: Mechanisms, Institutions, and Scale Shift
Theme: Movements succeed by shifting elite alignment and institutional incentives
Tarrow (2010)
Shows that movements generate change by diffusing contention across institutional levels, altering elite incentives and legitimacy calculations rather than overpowering opponents.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414009350673
⁷ Visibility Without Spectacle
Paper: Social Movements and Governments in the Digital Age: Evaluating a Complex Landscape
Theme: Legibility without violence in networked protest
Tufekci (2014)
Shows that while digital media increases visibility and rapid mobilization, it can weaken movements’ ability to convert attention into sustained legitimacy and institutional pressure without organizational capacity.
https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/online-articles/social-movements-and-governments-digital-age
⁸ Algorithmic Amplification of Distortion
Paper: The Spread of True and False News Online
Vosoughi, Roy & Aral (2018)
Emotionally charged and false content spreads farther and faster because platforms optimize for engagement and arousal rather than accuracy.
Science, 359(6380).
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559
⁹ Crowd Behavior, Legitimacy & Containment
Paper: Recent Developments in the Social Identity Approach to Crowd Behaviour
Theme: Crowd behavior is shaped by legitimacy and policing context, not inherent irrationality
Drury (2020)
Current Opinion in Psychology, 35, 12–17.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352250X20300221?via%3Dihub
¹⁰ Emotion Before Cognition Under Constraint
Paper: Emotion Circuits in the Brain
Theme: Contextual constraint shifts behavioral control before deliberation
LeDoux (1998)
Shows that under threat, uncertainty, or time pressure, faster emotional processing pathways can guide behavior before slower deliberative systems fully engage.
Annual Review of Neuroscience, 23, 155–184.