War

Scene from Gears 5 video game

War is bad. War is terrible. War is awful. Peace is good. Everyone wants peace. No one wants war. That is what I have always heard and it is all surely true. But war continues, not right here, and not right now, but there is always a war going on somewhere.

It occurs to me that war, if not genetic, may be ingrained in our psyche due to zillions of years of social conditioning. We have been fighting wars as long as there have been people (see Ertuğrul). Shoot, that might be what differentiates us from animals. We developed language, language that allows us to communicate abstract ideas to each other, which allows us to organize ourselves to work towards a common goal, like killing all those people on the other side of this hill. War is part of who we are and denying that isn't going to stop it.

After a war, people enjoy the peace for a while, but eventually some little thing irritates us and that starts to grow into a dissatisfaction that grows into anger and eventually you have critical mass of angry people and you go to war.

We watched The King the other night and near the end William admits that he deliberately deceived Henry V so as to set England on a course for war with France - because peace requires a victory.

I started reading Barbara Elliot's story about the reasons behind the fall of the Berlin Wall.  There are a dozen reasons, but they don't really explain it. Barbara's explanation, near as I can make out, is that a critical mass of people finally came to realize that what the state was selling was bullshit and they weren't buying it anymore. Sure there were a bunch of reasons for the state to collapse, but what it came down to was belief, and a great majority of the people no longer believed the communist propaganda that they had been fed all their lives.

Meanwhile, back in the USA, some people are worried about a civil war. I don't think it's going to happen. The number of people who are that angry is very small, most of us have enough to keep us occupied. Yes, the angry people make a lot of noise, but the only people who listen to them are other angry people. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the really angry people (on the left and the right) are locked in echo chambers of their own making.

Maybe this is why we (the USA) are engaged in all these little wars all over the world. The human psyche requires a certain amount of war and by engaging in all these 'police actions' we keep that demon satisfied and keep him from getting loose here in the states.