This past weekend’s military parade wasn’t just a public display of tanks and troops, but a psychological spectacle meant to reinforce a particular kind of power. From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, it serves as a stark case study in what happens when a system–be it an individual, family, or nation–tries to manage internal instability through external control.
Military parades project order, force, and hierarchy. They are about submission, about staying in line. The leader is elevated, emotionally distant, and flanked by weapons, not people. The people watching are not participants, but subjects required to admire, obey, or stay quiet.
This isn’t connection; it’s coercion masquerading as celebration.
In IPNB, health is defined by integration: the ability to differentiate parts of a system while maintaining their connection. A well-regulated social system allows for difference, dialogue, vulnerability, and fluidity. It adjusts when stress appears. It adapts.
The military parade, however, revealed a system that can’t tolerate ambiguity. It performs safety through dominance. It displays unity through forced symmetry. But beneath that surface is fear of dissent, loss, and the unknown. A nervous system, whether personal or collective, when under chronic threat, becomes rigid and disconnected. It loses its capacity for curiosity, creativity, and compassion. It starts to confuse order with health, loyalty with love, and silence with safety.
The parade wasn’t a national celebration. It was a fractured collective watching a single man rehearse his fantasy of control.
The mood wasn’t jubilant; it was tense. Turnout was low. Many people–Including the chairs of the House and Senate armed services committees, the Senate majority leader, the majority whip, and even Lindsey Graham–simply didn’t show up. Absence can be a form of protest too, especially when engagement would mean entering a space designed to suppress authentic response.
From an IPNB standpoint, the absence of shared joy, spontaneous expression, and mutual engagement speaks volumes. Where there is no safe relational field, there can be no integration. And where there is no integration, there can be no real strength, only the brittle illusion of it.
This kind of top-down, spectacle-driven approach is the opposite of healing. It replicates trauma dynamics on a societal scale. Those at the top stay defended and disconnected. Those at the bottom are expected to absorb, submit, or disappear.
But IPNB also teaches us that systems can change. Integration can be cultivated, even in environments shaped by neglect, fear, or abuse. And one of the first steps is to tell the truth about what we’re seeing. Not with spectacle or silence, but with clarity, care, and connection.
We don’t need more parades. We need more spaces where people can speak, listen, and belong without being punished for their presence.
