Logic and reason tells us that the human race, as a whole, does not benefit from organized mass murder and destruction.  Its costs, to us all, far outweigh the benefits.  Organized cooperation would bring benefits to all. 

War can only continue if the people who run the war machines can stifle this way of thinking.  Reason and logic are their enemies.  To keep wars going, they need to use smoke and mirrors to divert us.  Don’t look at the people on the other side of the line as humans that are the same as you; look only at the fact that one or two of them committed acts that harm some people on our side of the line.  (Ignore the fact that thousands of murders and other violent acts take place each year perpetuated by people on our side of the line by other people on our side of the line.  Focus only on the single act—which may well have been staged—in which someone on our side was harmed by someone from their side.  In reprisal for this, ‘we’ (the people in our parcel) must wipe all of ‘them’ (the people in their parcel) from the face of the earth. 

Orwell talked about the ways that the people who want war are able to do this.  They get us to split our minds and use a process called ‘doublethink.’  One part of our brain thinks only about hate, fear, and dwells on the animal instincts that push us to destroy any outsiders.  The other part thinks logically.  We are taught, he claims, to think that crossing over is a kind of mental crime, that he calls ‘thought crime.’  We must not use logic when thinking about our need to destroy the enemy. This risks us having sympathy for the enemy, that would harm the war effort.  It makes us a traitor and is the ultimate crime. 

We need to design better weapons.  We must be taught that feeling has no place in this.  It is all science.  Let our feeling interfere, and consider the amount of pain and suffering that will take place when the bomb is used on actual people, and you won’t ever build the bomb.  People who let their feelings interfere in the science of weapons design are just as much traitors as those who let logic interfere with their patriotism. 

Orwell coined the term ‘crimestop’ to refer to the mental tools that we use to keep these two sides of our minds separate.  The most dangerous criminals were those who didn’t want to or couldn’t master these tools and use them.  They allowed logic to interfere with their hatred.  This is an infection that spreads like a virus.  Orwell claims that the people who benefit from war want it to never end.  Never ending war requires that we never allow our logical side to take hold.

Orwell was trying to get people to look inside themselves.  He wanted his readers to think about their training and the hatred their leaders and media encouraged.  Their minds belong to them.  If they give in  and refuse to use logic when dealing with topics related to war, they have turned over control of their minds to others. 

 Slightly more than 2300 years ago, Socrates was put to death for ‘corrupting youth’ with his ideas about building sound societies.  The courts found youth were being ‘corrupted’ because the ideas Socrates presented undid some of their childhood training.  They were trained to believe there are two kinds of people on the planet:  their people and foreigners.  Their people were good, kind, benevolent, generous, honest, and wanted only the best for the world around them.  The others were evil monsters trying to destroy everything the good people were trying to create. 

Socrates recognized that this training was largely responsible for war.  If people were trained to be violent fanatics, starting with earliest possible age, they would be more likely to be violent fanatics than people without this training.  The people who ran the war machines were only threatened by Socrates ideas because they were true. 

The training systems in the society he inherited (the same as the society we inherited) were basically indoctrination centers.  They took people who might have spent their lives trying to find ways to make he world better into mass murderers.  Many others have made the same point:  schools run by the same organizations that make war (governments) are very dangerous.   The governments have incentives to create biased education systems that reinforce our natural tendencies to divide the world into parcels and inflect miserable and painful death on members of our own species that happened to have been born outside of the parcel that contains ‘our people.’   

We now have tools that we can use to mitigate this problem.  If we want to gain time so we can get to sound societies, we need to understand these tools and take advantage of them. 

The risks of war never end so, I a real sense, the wars never end.  We learn about the violent phase in schools.  We learn the dates of the first shots and the treaties that end the violence.  But the pressures for war simmer all the time.  The people who run the countries are always pressing each other, trying to gain some advantage.  Most of the time, one side backs down before shots are fired.  But the fact that no actual violence is happening at a certain time doesn’t mean that there is no war.

Since the nuclear age began, we have learned this is true.  During several periods, tensions have increased to the point where the risks of nuclear conflict became so great that people actually instructed children in how to act if they should see the flash which was the first sign that a war had broken out, and would be followed within seconds by a blast of heat and pressure that would break all windows in their school and set everything on fire.  (I went through these drills. Duck under the desk and cover my head with my jacket to avoid being cut to pieces by the flying glass.  Then, when the debris had settled, walk calmly in a single file—holding the hand of the students in front and back of you to avoid getting lost in the smoke—to the designated fallout shelter.) 

Getting through 50 years doesn’t just mean preventing a ‘conventional’ war that might escalate to a nuclear war.  We have to understand the tensions and the reasons they exist.  This is one aspect of war reduction people have studied. We have tools that can help. These tools include disarmament treaties and testing treaties with verification, international agreements brokered by Global Non-Governmental Humanitarian Organizations like the International Red Cross and Geneva convention, and global ‘world courts’ that can settle disputes non-militarily. 

We have seen that these tools can’t work by themselves to end war permanently.  But if we are on a path toward societies that don’t have the stresses that push toward war, and all we need to do is give us time to get the a safe place in this voyage, these tools will be important. We need to explore what has had some effect in the past and figure out how to use knowledge of both successes and failures to move us forward.

Territorial sovereignty societies divide the human race into classes.  One class, called ‘the working class,’ does not have any significant source of income other than their wage earnings. 

This is not a characteristic of all possible societies.  Natural law societies, for example, divide the wealth that flows from the world differently.  (Since no one owns the world, no one owns the things it produces.  The people have meetings and make joint decisions about what to do with this wealth.  Of course, they reward people who do ‘jobs’ that benefit everyone, to encourage people to do these jobs.  But they do not divide their people into ‘classes’ and require one class to work to avoid death for themselves and their families.)  

Unfortunately, quite often there just aren’t enough jobs for all of the people who need jobs.  This leaves people ‘unemployed.’ If unemployment increases beyond a certain level, the economy collapses. 

 

 

The people who run the societies we inherited know this.  The people who work for a living—estimated to be more than 90% of the global population—know it too.  Wars create more jobs than any other human activity.  In fact, we don’t need a ‘hot’ war for this: anything that increases military tensions drives up demand for things that would otherwise not be needed.  (The global military industrial complex employs more people on earth than any other industry.) 

Politicians running for office know they can get votes if they can show they are aggressive and will take actions that will drive up tensions between countries. 

If we want to create a society that can function without war, we need to understand these things.  We must know how to build such a society and make plans to move toward it.  In the meantime, while we are in transition, we need to understand the forces the push toward war and mitigate them as much as possible, so that we can prevent the destruction of our world, from war, long enough to get to a sound society.

Territorial sovereignty societies accept that the people who run the entities called ‘countries’ can authorize their people to rape the land of any resource wealth it contains and sell this wealth for money, which they can then keep. (The ‘people’ with the right to rape the land are normally ‘corporate people’ but this issue encourages war whether the rights belong to corporate people or human people.) 

They sell the resources they take from the land for money and then use that money to buy luxuries and hire servants to minister to their every need.  The more money they can get for resources, the more they can take advantage of the rights they get.  They want ‘demand’ for the things they take from the land.  They want people to be so driven to get these resources that they will do anything and pay any price to get them. 

In times of war, resource prices go up.  Often, they skyrocket.  The people who have gained rights to rape the world know this.  They want war.  Quite often, the people who control the resources have massive amounts of wealth they can do to help them to instigate wars and create tensions that make war more likely.  They gain from this:  resource prices go up whenever war tensions go up, even if the tensions don’t lead to war. There is evidence that the people who control resources sometimes even stage phony ‘atrocities’ to drive up tensions that might lead to war. 

We need to understand this relationship.  If we can understand the relationship between war and resource prices, we can use tools to limit the benefits to resource extractors from international tensions.  For example, a switch from extractive to renewable energy supplies clearly has an impact:  if we get more energy from solar and other renewable supplies, prices of extractive energy supplies (oil, coal, gas, uranium, for example) fall.  The relative benefits to those with extractive rights fall. 

The people with rights to extract got these rights somehow.  They enforce these rights using understandable methods. The book Anatomy of Destruction, a part of this series, goes over this system and shows how it works in general.  But if we want to understand war, we need to understand that the anatomy of destruction and the anatomy of war are related.   We need to understand this relationship and understand the tools that we have to take action in these areas to gain the time we need to deal with the structural problems. 

 We all learned about the role of the entities called ‘countries’ in war. That is what war is:  a series of battles between ‘countries’ over the rights of different countries to certain parts of the world. 

But other entities stay in the background.  They are leading players in the activities we call ‘war.’  They often gain far greater benefits from the war than the entities called ‘countries.’  Generally speaking, corporations win no matter which country wins: they often supply both sides. Often, corporations work aggressively to create wars that wouldn’t otherwise have happened.  For example, the struggles between enormous countries led to many of the wars of the 1700s:  The Dutch East India Company (the most likely responsible organization for the ‘Boston Tea Party’ which was an important event for the global conflict that led to the existence of the United States), the French East India Company and its ally the Company of New France fighting with the Virginia Company and the Ohio Company of Virginia (leading to the ‘French and Indian War’ that spread to a global conflict), the immense struggles between the British East India Company and the tribal authorities of India and Pakistan (which determined the control of large parts of Asia), are just a few examples.  More recently, we have the battles over whether Russian corporations (Rosneft, Surgutneftegas, Gazprom, LukOil, Transneft) or ‘western’ corporations (the Dutch company ‘Shell,’ British Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, Chevron) will have the right to supply the industries of Europe) are key issues leading to the 2022 to present battles between America and western interests and Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. 

We can’t really understand the issue of war without understanding the roles that corporations play in this activity. 

Other books in this series explain the long-term solution to this problem: 

First, we have to open our minds. 

We have to realize and accept that the societies that we have are not gifts from some god (perhaps one whose name is ‘God’) and therefore unquestionable.  We have to be willing to accept that we are flawed beings that are inheriting systems that were created by other flawed beings.  They evolved—we evolved—from beings with even lower capabilities, and have not attained perfection.  Once we have the right state of mind, we need to look around us, figure out how we got here and exactly where ‘here’ is. We need to understand the options, the possibilities, about going forward.  We need to find a sane system and begin moving toward it. 

We need to have some sort of tools to allow the people of the world to work together in some sort of organized way.  People have to know there is a path to a better systems.  They have to know there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  They have to know that they can help: there are things that they can do to move us closer to that light.  

The other books in this series explain these matters. 

They show it is at least possible for the human race to get onto a path to sound systems. 

This is part of the solution.  But it is not all.

Once people know there is a path, and we are on that path, they will have reason to believe it makes sense to take steps to try give us more time, in the hope that we can get to the point of light while our race is still intact. 

Hope is a key part of the solution.

If there is no hope—if no one truly believes, in their hearts, that we can ever get onto a different path—no one will try.

Of course, if no one tries there is no chance of success.

This means that there are two parts to the solution. 

We must do both:

 

Part One:  Hope

 

First, we must have structures in place that make it clear that there are other paths into the future (paths that don’t takes us to extinction) and that it is at least possible for us to get onto one of these other paths.  The more people think this is possible, the more people will be willing to actually do something.  The more hope they have that success is possible, the more effort they will be willing to put into the project.  The creation of hope is therefore a key part of the solution.

The book Preventing Extinction builds on the discussions of the book Possible Societies.  Some may say that, even if we try, there is little chance we will make it.  They won’t be willing to help.  Maybe most people will not try.  But maybe, just maybe, some will.  Maybe they can put that little point of light on the far distant horizon.  Maybe, when young people see that little point of light they may be inspired to help. If the system is ready, the rules are in place, and there is a simple and effective way for them to contribute, maybe, just maybe, a few more will pitch in. 

At this point, we have to depend on the hope that the initial analysis was right: 

Are humans really capable of building other societies? 

Can humans ever have societies built on something other than territorial sovereignty?  (In other words, can true human beings live in system where the land is not divided into ‘countries’ that are independent and sovereign?  History appears to tell us at least one other option is possible:  natural law societies are built on entirely different premises.)

If we know we can have two societies, one of which has countries and organized war but also has rapid progress with the other stagnant with no countries, is it possible to mix and mach?  Can we build a kind of ‘hybrid’ system that is the best of both worlds?  In my mind, this is only a technical issue. It is not a problem of whether it can exist:  we know it can. (The book Forensic History shows that our history is far longer, far richer, and far more varied than the standard books called ‘history books’ that are used to teach children in school would have you believe.  In fact, many people have understood this issue and tried to solve it.  Although they didn’t totally succeed, they did make substantial process in some important areas.)   We know it can be done.  All we have to do is solve the technical problems to make it a reality.

You may compare this to the problem of going to the moon and back.  Kennedy made his speech announcing the project on September 9, 1962; the landing took place on July 7, 1969, exactly 2,500 days later. The hard part is accepting it is possible.  Until people accept it is possible, they won’t try.  Once they have accepted this, however, if the technology is available, the work can be done quickly.  Humans are very, very good at making progress toward a technical goal, if they now they can get there and the first steps have been taken.  This is what we do best.  Hope may come hard but, once the hope is there and people start to try, we can make progress very quickly.

 

Global Non-Governmental Humanitarian Organizations

 

The book Preventing Extinction show that a path that takes us to a sound society will take us along a certain route.  It starts with the very basics:  Formation of an organization that represents the interests of the human race, and is so structured so that no government or other militant group can direct or interfere in its operations.  I have already set up an organization that I hope can eventually be a seed from which this organization may grow, and provided funding for it with my own and other people’s money.  Preventing Extinction shows how that the people of the world can work to make this organization grow, if we want this to happen.  The more people know about it, the more will help make it grow.  At some point, people will see that it really is possible for the people of the planet earth to work together for at least something. 

The organization, called the ‘Community of humankind’ is designed to operate in ways that will prevent any person or group smaller than the entire human race from preventing it from acting as a tool called a ‘Global Non-Governmental Humanitarian Organization.’  It won’t have any specific projects to support.  It is designed to be a kind of blanket organization that won’t do anything specifically itself, but will direct money from the flows that it controls to projects voters want funded.  To vote, you will have to meet one requirement:  be a human being.   Its main purpose will be to create an organization that will let every person on earth know that there really is something that we can do, acting together, to make a difference in the world. 

Preventing Extinction shows that, at first, this organization will be insignificant in its effects.  Mathematicians use the term ‘epsilon’ to refer to ‘the smallest possible non-zero amount of change.   At first, it will be epsilon.  But, as small as epsilon is, it is far, far greater than zero.  Any number, no matter how small, is infinitely greater than zero.  Epsilon can grow to ‘miniscule,’ which can grow to ‘tiny,’ which can keep growing until it gets to a size that we can see.

Forensic History shows that people have used this particular method to help solve a great many problems.  In fact, some of the largest, most important, and influential organizations in the world started out as miniscule Global Non-Governmental Humanitarian Organizations.

 

 

Minimally Sustainable Societies

 

If we are heading toward a sound society, we will make progress slowly and incrementally. We can measure this progress and make estimates of how long it will take to get to certain important waypoints. If the destination society is non-destructive, as we move toward it, we will see rates of destruction fall.  At some point in our journey, we will be at a place where the rates of destruction are so low that the combined effects of progress, empathy, willpower, the healing power of time are strong enough to overcome the effects of the destruction.

We could identify a point that we might call ‘minimally sustainable societies’ that represents the point where the condition of the human race is not getting progressively more dangerous each day that passes.  It is a point where we will be able to see that, although the problems that threaten us are not solved, they are at least moving in the right direction.  A society is ‘sustainable’ if the conditions in that society can be sustained:  these conditions are not moving toward a catastrophic event that will destroy the society.  Minimally sustainable societies are not non-destructive societies.  But, if we start at the societies we inherited and move toward non-destructive societies, we will eventually pass through minimally sustainable societies. 

Of course, it is not easy to estimate the amount of time it will take to get there.  But Possible Societies shows that, if we arrange the different kinds of societies in a logical way, we will find that minimally sustainable societies are not a great distance away from the societies we inherited. We can use historical comparisons (like the Red Cross, as described above, one above, and the marked history of success of Global Non-Governmental Humanitarian Organizations in general) to make estimates.  These estimates show that we could at least potentially get to minimally sustainable societies within about 30 years after the first steps have been taken. 

If you are looking at serious problem, and want to get people to actually make an effort to solve it, it helps to have some numbers and general goals.  When Kennedy wanted to people to work on his moon project, he didn’t ‘I hope we can make some progress toward the goal of getting to the moon some time in the future.  He had an exact date:  he wanted it done before December 31, 1969.  With this date in mind, people could make plans.  A lot of things had to be done.  Their plans had to mesh and come together.  They had to meet certain very specific deadlines for it to work. 

If we really are serious about at least trying to solve the problem of war, we might do something similar.  We may make some projections about the exact conditions that need to be reached to have minimally sustainability.  (This a technical question: scientists can determine the standards in the same way they determine the standards needed to get a man to the moon and back.) 

The hard part is getting to minimally sustainable societies.  Once we are there, we will all see that we are on the right path. We will all see that, unless we have some unexpected catastrophic event, we will make it.  We may say that getting to ‘minimally sustainable societies’ should be a timed event.  It should be something comparable to ‘getting a man to the moon and safely home by December 31, 1969.  We may not make it.  But if we have something to shoot for, we can then do an analysis of the details.

Let’s say, for the sake of example, that we decide we want to try to get there in 50 years.  In one respect, 50 years is nothing:  humans have been on this planet for thousands of 50 year periods; we have had territorial sovereignty societies for more than 120 of these periods.  One more doesn’t seem like much.

On the other hand, 50 years is a lot.  Some of us watch the world news every day and live in constant fear that it will be the last news show they will ever see.  We have all been through events that scared us.  We may not make it 50 years. 

But what if we knew this: What if we knew that if we could keep from destroying ourselves for 50 years, we would be home free? Suddenly, the idea of nuclear disarmament doesn’t seem so silly after all.   It doesn’t have to work forever.  It doesn’t have to change human nature.  It only has to get us to the next waypoint.

If we are in a position to look at the problem of war this way, we can then look at each of the individual forces within the societies we inherited that lead to war.  We can figure out what we can do to weaken them. A few examples:

We live in societies that can’t function unless they have a ‘low unemployment rate.’  War related industries create hundreds of millions of global jobs.  If the threats of war were to end, suddenly, hundreds of millions of people would be thrown out of jobs.  These people wouldn’t be able to afford to walk away, happy that the world is now safe. They would have to find other jobs. But there wouldn’t be enough jobs for all.  They would have to take jobs away from others, by offering to work for less. Wages would collapse and this would make the problem even worse:  Spending would collapse and people wouldn’t be able to buy the things they need. Producers would not be able to justify operating their factories and would close them, laying off the workers.

This is one of the forces that pushes us toward war.  I am far from the first person to discuss this:  many people in the past have analyzed it and come up with solutions. Of course, there is no point in trying any of these solutions if the underlying problems that lead to war still exist and there is no hope of having a world without these problems.  But, if we have time, we can deal with it. 

The rest of this book deals with the very specific problems that push toward war in territorial sovereignty societies.  What if we wanted to find ways to keep these problems at bay and didn’t have to worry about solving them forever, we just needed something that would get us through the next 50 years?  You might realize that the way we approach the problem of war will have a big effect on how much effort people will take to try to solve it.  If we say:  ‘we need war to be solved by someone through some method they must figure out (and we won’t help) at some vague time in the future,’ we can’t expect anyone to really try too hard.  However, if we have a plan that a scientific analysis shows will work, if there are steps to be taken and we know exactly what they are, and we know that we can get there if we can meet our deadlines, the problem looks quite different. 

Suddenly, the impossible seems possible.  Suddenly, that trip to the moon doesn’t seem like such a pie-in-the-sky idea after all.

If we can get this state of mind, we will have accomplished one of two goals that we much reach to actually end war.  We will have hope.  We will see it makes sense to try. 

 

I know what you are thinking:  this lady is crazy. 

We are allowed to talk about war as long as we keep our thoughts vague and don’t actually try to understand anything that might change anything.  We are allowed to say how much we hate the idea of war in general and allowed to say how much we support ‘our’ troops in the current war.  We can say how glad we are that the bad guys were defeated in each and every specific war that is named. 

 

it and how much we support our troops in the current war.  We can say things against it as long as they are vague and can’t clearly chanage anything, like ‘they should do something about it’ or ‘why can’t they just get along?’ or ‘We should hit them hard and destroy them; that will end the war faster and be the most humane way to deal with the problem.’  But we can’t actually think about the

How deep does this instinct go?

Is it so powerful that no force on earth can control it?

Or, might it be possible that we have it within ourselves to control it?

We have information that can help us show that, in fact, it  is totally under our control.

Two kinds of societies have existed in the history of the human race.  One of them was highly, aggressively, and violently territorial. The people in these societies formed into a kind teams that organized in a horrific competition against the people on the other team.  These societies teach their children that they need to be a part of the team. They teach a kind of territorial identity that panders to and encourages their territoriality.  They use various tools to stimulate the emotions of children and adults to make them identify with a territorial entity.  Their songs stimulate solemn marching (a key aspect of territorial patrolling behavior in our primate ancestors) and martial conflict noises, which are then associated with the most wonderful and beautify melodies ever composed.  Their histories tell of victory over victory, with the side the was evil (always the side that lost) crushed and humiliated.  Their icons represent signs of battle, crests, swords, arrows, and blood contrasted against the purity of white linen and blue sky.

These societies nurture, promote, and encourage the territorial instincts.  Children grow up accepting that the society not only allows people to give in to these impulses, it actually encourages these behaviors and everything associated with it.  It encourages them to actually work with others to help them do the same things, to build weapons, to become part of the border patrols and armies that defend the territories, to become part of the industrial complex that supports the fighters.

We might expect that societies that add these overt encouragements to the territorial instincts to be fanatically territorial.

These aren’t the only kinds of societies that have existed, however.  In the book ‘Ancient Societies,’ Lewis Morgan discusses another type:

The experience of mankind has developed but two plans of government, using the word ‘plan’ in its scientific sense. Both were definite and systematic organizations of society.

The first and most ancient was a social organization, founded upon gentes, phratries and tribes.

The second and latest in time was a political organization, founded upon territory and upon property.

Under the first a gentile society was created, in which the government dealt with persons through their relations to a gens and tribe. These relations were purely personal. Under the second a political society was instituted, in which the government dealt with persons through their relations to territory, e. g.—the township, the county, and the state. These relations were purely territorial.

The two plans were fundamentally different.

Humans have been on this earth at least 70,000 years.

The second type of society Morgan discusses, the society ‘founded on territory and property’ is relatively recent.  The book Forensic History goes over the data that we have about the human experience and shows that the societies built on ‘territory and property’ (to use Morgan’s term) leave very abundant and obvious artifacts of their territorial way of life.  We don’t find these artifacts anywhere that are older than about 6,000 years old, which tells us that they only existed for a tiny fraction of the time human beings lived on the earth.

If people lived differently in the past, this must mean that humans (or at least intelligent beings with physical needs) can live differently.  It is possible.  The highly territorial possessive societies (societies where people mark off terrtiory and consider it to be their property) are not the only kinds of societies that are possible.

Many people in the past have discussed these ‘other kinds of societies.’  Socrates discusses them at great length in his books Politikas (Πολιτείες ), Timaeus and Critias.  Thomas More discusses them in the book ‘Utopia.’

Many scholars during the period of history called the ‘conquest of the Americas’ discuss the societies of people who lived in the Americas for the period before the conquest. William Prescott is one of my favorite in this area.  He goes through enormous volumes of evidence from people who were actually there, including written records written by the people themselves, to reconstruct their ways of life in ways that make them very relatable.  Rather than showing the pre-conquest Americans as animalistic beings that weren’t really capable of organizing anything (a picture the coquors who wiped them out would prefer people accept) he discusses their way of life, their family structure, their police, courts, and other systems they used to maintain order, their markets, commerce, and their money, and other things that allow the readers to put themselves in the place of these people and understand the world the way they understood it.  (You can find two of the books that do this, The Conquest of Mexico and the Conquest of Peru, on the PossibleSocieties.com website and many places on the internet.)

Although the societies of these people did have territorial aspects, they didn’t practice territorial sovereignty:  they didn’t accept that the people who ‘conquered’ each part of the world were the owners of that part of the world with absolute rights to do anything they wanted with it.  As a result, the specific types of war that pose the most threats to the human race at this time (organized systems where people who claim sovereignty over a part of the planet use the wealth of that part of the planet to gain sovereignty over more land) weren’t really possible.  Sovereignty over land is essential to the highly-organized systems where all people born into an area are expected to contribute to the military apparatus and the entire economy is organized so it can provide support for the fighters.

If we want to understand the way the process of ‘war’ works in societies that actively encourage people territoriality and facilitate military organizations, and compare it with the way conflict works in other societies, we need names for these two kinds of societies.  The book Anatomy of War, and the other books in the Possible Societies series, use the term ‘territorial sovereignty societies’ to refer to the societies that are built on a kind of absolute and total form of territoriality. It will use the term ‘natural law societies’ to refer to societies built on other principles.

I want to discuss these ‘other kinds of societies’ (natural law societies) here so you can see that there are important differences in the way the people in different societies manifest the territorial instincts that all people seemed to have inherited from our animal ancestors.  The basic issue here is pretty simple:

If a society actively encourages territoriality, teaches children it is a basic reality of existence that we all must accept, and teaches them that they have a responsibility to respond to territorial realities of their territory (country), we might expect people to have less control over their territorial instincts, and less ability to use normal human empathy together with logic (we really are better off if we cooperate rather than divide into groups to kill other groups) to mitigate their violent instincts.  The people of a society that has less emphasis on territoriality, and doesn’t encourage and promote it, would be expected to have a greater ability to control themselves and work together rather than devote their time, wealth, resources, and skills to organized violence.  (This doesn’t mean that they won’t have conflict, only that we would expect them to resist highly organized violent conflict and try harder to solve problems without violence.) 

This is a testable theory.  If two kinds of societies have existed, one where territoriality was formalized, institutionalized, taught to all children, and highly organized, but another with less of these features, we could compare them.  If the one with institutionalized territoriality has larger, more violent, and more destructive wars, we would have to conclude that the organization of societies makes a difference.

Why does this matter? 

War now threatens our existence as a race.  We now have weapons that can destroy the entire world. If we want to survive as a race, we need to look for tools we can use to change the important variables that lead to war.  The other books in this series deal with the big picture and the idea of societal change.  We can do this, but it will take time.  This book deals with what we can do over the short term. If we live in societies where children are indoctrinated to be irrationally territorial (to be so territorial that they would rather see the human race destroyed than see their territorial group lose its ‘sovereignty’), and we want to reduce the threat of war to give other steps we take time to take effect, we can study the indoctrination techniques.   We can learn how to create tools that can allow people to resist these techniques and think rationally.  

 

Ancient Societies

 

The information below comes from analysis of the societies that existed before the territorial sovereignty societies that now dominate the entire world conquered the Americas, starting in 1493, and before territorial sovereignty societies conquered Afro-Eurasia starting about 4,004BC.

Much of it comes from analysis in the 1877 book ‘Ancient Societies’ by Lewis Morgan.  Although Morgan is the titular author, it includes hundreds of references from other books that deal with the same topic by many other authors from the very earliest human works that still exist to the date of its publication.  Morgan tries to balance the perspective, looking at the societies he called ‘gentile societies’ (this book calls ‘natural law societies’) from within these societies, then looking at territorial sovereignty societies from the perspective of people born and raised in natural law societies, then at natural law societies from the perspective of people born and raised in territorial sovereignty societies, then from the perspective of people like himself, who were comfortable in both kinds of societies and spent their lives going from one to the other.  He has a unique perspective so, before I go over the information itself, I want to give a little information about his background so you can see his point of view:

Morgan was born of an extremely wealthy family in 1818 in the state of New York.  His family had supported the winning side (the ‘continental army’ that became the army of the United States of America) in the war of independence from England (often called the ‘revolutionary war’).  The continentals had made promises of vast land grants to attract support for the war effort.  After they won, they made good on these promises.  They confiscated land of people who had remained loyal to the British and gave this land away to the people who had supported them.  Some bands and tribes of the massive ‘Iroquois confederacy’ (dominant from east central Canada to the Carolinas) had supported the losing side and lost their land.  The British troops had been protecting their supporters but when they were pulled out in 1784 after the peace treaty, the Americans took over control of these lands.  They gave some of this land to their supporters as ‘bounties.’   (All fighters who came from other countries were promised a certain amount of land, with a minimum of 50 for an inexperienced boy to to 50,000 areas for experienced command-level officers).

The Morgan family was given large amounts of this land.  The Morgan land was adjacent to the land one of the bands of the Seneca, a member of the Iroquois confederacy, which had supported the continentals in the war. Morgan’s land was intermixed with land that belonged to the Seneca and Lewis Morgan grew up in a mixed community. Both English and the Iroquois language were spoken there and he was fluent in both languages.

When he went to college he moved away from his mixed community to a predominately ‘white’ area. At the time, there was a great movement for ‘removal’ of all people with native heritage (‘Indians’ as the government called them) from all lands east of the Mississippi.  The principle of ‘manifest destiny’ was the rallying cry of the people who wanted removal:  they claimed that the creator had a destiny in mind for all of the land he had made. He wanted this particular land to belong to the whites.  He had made this destiny ‘manifest’ (self-evident) by giving the whites the power to take it.  It was, therefore the will of the creator of the world that this land belong to the whites and they had an obligation to their creator to carry out his well and remove the undesirable people.

Morgan had lived with these people.  As you will see by the quotes below, he felt that they had a very high level of civilization.  In fact, in certain areas, he felt it exceeded the level of civilization of the societies in the final stages of conquest.   Many others who lived with the Iroquois felt the same way and believed that the conquering people could gain a great deal by studying the systems these people had built up over the course of thousands of years.  Morgan stressed the need to act quickly.  The conquerors were aggressively trying to either remove, assimilate, or exterminate these people and wipe out all traces of their culture.  They had both oral and written histories that were being actively destroyed.   He looked for any information he could find about the way of life of these people.  He set up a club that he called a ‘literary group’ to find information about this topic and collect it into a kind of library for the members.  They named it the New Iroquois Confederation.  (The hope was to be able to restore this once enormous confederation to unity; it had been torn apart into individual pieces by the long series of wars between 1754 and 1815.)

After he graduated from college, Morgan went to law school.  His New Iroquois Confederation now had several chapters in various areas. He formed a chapter at his law school with a legal focus.  Corporations in the United States had gained great power and authority in the new administration and they were working aggressively to dispossess the American native people of the lands they had been able to retain.  The NCI lawyers would look for cases where they might be able to help through the legal system.

In 1844 Morgan traveled to Albany New York to do legal research to help in a case to help the Cayuga people keep at last some of the land they had been granted in treaties. While he was in the archives, he met two Senecas doing research for a case of their own.  One of them was Jimmy Johnson, a tribal leader in the Seneca community who didn’t speak any English.  The other was Johnson’s 16 year old grandson, Ely Parker, who was there because he could speak and read English and could translate the legal documents for his grandfather.  Morgan was drawn in to because Parker didn’t have enough education to understand the complex legal texts of the treaties.  Since Morgan was fluent in Iroquois, and understood the legal texts, he agree to help Johnson and Parker with their research.

Their case involved a dispute with a land developmentcompany called the ‘Ogden Land Company.’ The company had been able to swindle the tribe out of large amounts of land using a trick that many corporations had been using to steal land at the time:  They talked to various members of the tribe and gave them money or alcohol if they would agree to put an ‘x’ on a piece of paper in the presense of a notary. (The notary verified the ‘x’ as a signature, making it legal.)   This piece of paper said they had agreed to ‘sell’ their tribal land.  After they got signatures of a large number of members of the tribe, they claimed they had bought the land.  At the time in question (the 1830s), state legislatures had jurisdiction over land ownership.  The companies could have their lobbyists induce the legislature to certify the results of the ‘sale.’  Then, the companies could take the case to court to get a court order to remove the ‘trespassers’ and ‘squatters’ who lived on ‘their’ land. The United States is built on a rule of law that allows the owners of land to make these petitions and requires the government to take whatever steps are necessary to protect the rights of owners. If the court orders these people removed, the state has to remove them.  If the state can’t remove them, because it doesn’t have enough military strength to do so, the state can petition the Federal government to assist and the Federal government has to comply.  If the nations army is needed to remove these people, the army must be brought in and take whatever steps are necessary to ‘remove’ the ‘trespassers.’

The Ogden Land Company (OLC) had done this.  They had already gotten a court order to remove the Seneca from their land.  The state authorities couldn’t enforce this order themselves and where petitioning the Federal government to move in the army. Johnson and Parker had decided to try to fight the case in court.   They were in Albany doing research for their case.

Morgan got interested in the case.  He wanted to help and wanted his friends in the New Confederation of the Iroquiis (the club he had formed) to help.  The NCI included a great many lawyers and some very powerful politicians and businessmen.  At the time, there was little real public awareness of the way the American native people were being treated.  Even the tribes that had supported the United States in the war, and fought with the continents against the British, were being dispossessed and removed from their land.

Morgan and the other members of the NCI started a media campaign to make the public aware of what was happening. They had great success and got a great many people on their side, including some very high officials in the state and Federal governments. Then they fought the OLC in court. It was a long court battle and lasted many years.  (Eventually the case set the first real precedent that granted real rights to American Native people, Fellows v. Blacksmith, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 366 (1857)). The case was extremely difficult:  it was the first case of its kind ever tried.

The case was built on the principle that the Iroquois people had a constitution and was a real government that had real requirements for land tenure.  (The Iroquis had a constitution, written in their original hyroglyphic language in 1570; it was translated into English in 1820.)  He decided his best approach was to work directly with the people who had been raised with this system and had understood it the same way the whites understood the laws and rules of their own system.  To do this, he had to move in with them and live with them.  Johnson invited him to move in with him and his family on the Seneca land.  Morgan became deeply involved with the political structures of the Seneca and their parent confederation, the Iroquois. After some time, he decided that he could understand their system better if he became a part of it.  He applied for membership.

The Iroquois cultures are based on affiliations that are similar to the affiliations in the white institutions called ‘extended families.’  (Morgan’s books explain this in detail.)  To join, he had to be adopted into one of these extended families. Johnson proposed to adopt him into his own family.  Johnson’s extended family affiliation was called the ‘Hawks.’ On October 31, 1847, Morgan became a member of the Hawk clan (extended family), a division of the First Phatry, which was a division of the Seneca nation, which was itself a division of the Iroquois confederacy.

All other members of Johnson’s extended his family became his own family.

His Iroquois name was Tayadaowuhkuh, which means ‘bridging the gap.’  The Iroquois people thought of him as a liaison between themselves and the white culture.

In 1851 Morgan published a book about the way his adopted culture worked, called the ‘League of the Iroquois.’  You can download this book in a PDF from the PossibleSocieties.com website, resources section, books about natural law societies.  Morgan explains that, in the Iroquois society, the family structure and family affiliations are the foundation for the government structure. (He opposes this to the societies of the whites, in which the government structures are based on territorial divisions.)  His adopted family, the hawks, had their own administration system that dealt with its roughly 350 members. The hawk clan (or ‘gens’ as he calls it) was a division of a larger exttended family group, called the ‘first Phatry.’  It also had its own councils and chiefs to deal with matters dealing with this larger unit, which included about 2,500 members.   The First Phatry was one of four Phatries in the even larger extended family, the Seneca people.  The Seneca were one of six tribes or ‘nations’ that made up the Six Nations Confederation.

Morgan proposes that the Iroquois system of administration and government was highly advanced, well defined, and functioned smoothly.  Its purpose was to provide services that the people needed and to resolve disputes to prevent conflict.  He claimed that this system had great advantages over the ‘territory based’ cultural and governmental systems of the whites.

Morgan considered himself to be a scholar and student of life.  He continued to do research on the societies of the American native people. He realized that the system of the Iroquois was not unique.  Several other massive confederacies existed, at the time of the conquest, that seemed to be built on the same principles.  He traveled to the areas where the remnants of these societies still existed at the time.  He studied their cultures from the inside, becoming one of them, attending their meetings, and watching, without making any attempt to impose any outside values on them.  He just wanted to know how they worked.

He also corresponded with other members of the NCI, his college friends, and researchers doing work in the same field in other parts of the world, including Australia, New Zeeland, and other places that were inhabited for thousands of years before the conquest of these lands began.  He wanted to find out how these societies had worked before the conquerors had arrived.

He eventually came to the conclusion that these systems were a kind of stage in the development of humans. The systems in Europe, Asia, and Africa had not always been built on territorial divisions.  The societies built on territorial divisions had only existed for about 6,000 years, a tiny fraction of the time humans had lived there.  Just as there was a ‘period of conquest’ in America, when the territorial societies were taking over land held by the non-territorial societies, there was a period of conquest in Europe, Africa, and Asia.  People had discussed the differences between the previous societies and the new ones in ancient texts.

In 1877, Morgan’s book ‘primitive societies’ was published.  This book proposed that there are two archetypes of human societies.  One is built on territoriality.  The other is built on family affiliations.  He claims that territorial societies have military advantages:  they can organize for conquest and generally win in wars against people with the other kinds of societies. But the ‘family affiliation societies’ (or ‘gentile societies’ as he calls them) have certain advantages that societies built on territoriality can never have.

The Gentile Society

To understand this kind of society from his unique perspective, we need to understand a few of the terms.  He uses the term ‘gentile societies,’ to refer to the societies that humans had before we had societies that divided the world into territories.  (In other words, he uses this term to refer to the societies the books in the Possible Societies series call ‘natural law societies.’)   The primary unit of these societies was something called a ‘gens.’  Although he mostly uses American societies to illustrate the idea of ‘gentile societies’ (or ‘societies built on the gens’) the word originates from Afro-Eurasian texts.  Here he discusses the origin of this term:

Gens, γένος in Greek and ganas in Latin and Sanskrit have alike the primary signification of kin. They contain the same element as γίγνομαι, gigno, and ganamai, in the same languages, signifying to beget; thus implying in each an immediate common descent of the members of a gens.

A gens, therefore, is a body of consanguinei  descended from the same common ancestor, distinguished by a gentile name, and bound together by affinities of blood.

The ‘gens,’ he claims, was a primary unit of society before societies built on property and territory took over an area.  The idea of the gens was the foundation of the societies of all of the American societies before the conquest, at least as much as he could determine from information available in the 1800s.

Morgan started out studying what he calls the ‘gentile society’ from the perspective of the Iroquois people.  (He was not alone in his admiration of the systems of the Iroquois.  Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and many others discuss their accomplishments, and particularly the way they were able to create domestic tranquility that the people of Europe were unable to create.)

Morgan writes:

The gentile organization opens to us one of the oldest and most widely prevalent institutions of mankind. It furnished the nearly universal plan of government of ancient society, Asiatic, European, African, American and Australian. It was the instrumentality by means of which society was organized and held together.

Commencing in savagery, and continuing through the three sub-periods of barbarism, it remained until the establishment of political society. The Grecian gens, phratry and tribe, the Roman gens, curia and tribe find their analogues in the gens, phratry and tribe of the American aborigines. In like manner, the Irish sept, the Scottish clan, the phrara of the Albanians, and the Sanskrit ganas, without extending the comparison further, are the same as the American Indian gens, which has usually been called a clan.

As far as our knowledge extends, this organization runs through the entire ancient world upon all the continents, and it was brought down to the historical period by such tribes as attained to civilization.

Morgan’s premise is that there are two entirely different kinds of human societies.  One of them, the original system that he claims was the only archetype on earth for most of human history, is the ‘gens.’

Territorial sovereignty societies

The second kind of society, the kind that dominates the world now, is built on wealth and the idea that everything on earth is for sale and can be purchased and then owned.

As soon as parts of planets are available to be purchased, people will find ways to use pressure and violence to convert ownership of them.  A common form of conquest involves attacking the inhabitants of an area and subjecting them to the maximum misery possible.  After a period of time, the attacker then approaches their leader and offers to stop the violence if the leader will ‘sell’ the land of his people to the attacker.  The historical records then show that the land has been sold and the current owner can establish a chain of title that goes back through time to the very first owner, who obtained it by conquest.

We live in a world that is built on this ‘territorial’ and ‘property based’ archetype.  This book uses the term ‘territorial sovereignty societies’ to refer to societies built on this archetype. Societies built on territorial sovereignty provide the greatest possible rewards for the most violent and destructive acts within the capabilities of humans.  They therefore have the strongest possible incentives that push people to act violently and destructively.   We live in these societies and were raised and educated in them.  The people who run these societies need the people in them to be wiling to make incredible sacrifices ‘for their countries.’  They will need everyone to contribute wealth for the military machine or they won’t be able to defend their territory.  They need taxes that can be so high that more wealth goes to paying for mass murder than any other activity.  They need people willing to kill if asked to do this; preferably, they want people to want to kill and be willing to turn into savage animals, if necessary, to wipe out people identified as ‘enemies.’  Since more than half of the population consists of women and children, these people will have to be killed and the children who will be expected to be soldiers have to be educated in ways that make them willing to do this. They will have to fight under miserable conditions, sleeping in wet trenches full of mud, feces, and rats, with their own comrades crying out in agony while they die from their wounds, and be under constant threat of the same injuries themselves.

It is hard to instill this state of mind in children.

Yet the people who run territorial sovereignty societies must do this.

If they can’t, their territorial unit will be conquered.

Decision Making in Natural law societies

Lets consider a few realities of what we may call the ‘government’ of the natural law societies, as described by Morgan.  We know that in territorial sovereignty societies, the organization that defends the territory (often called the ‘military’) and the organization that runs the civil administration (builds roads, schools, parks, and makes laws) are united.  The organization called a ‘government’ directs the military.  In many cases, the military and government are the same thing.  (Militaries often take over governments and then control the country.)

Natural law societies worked differently.  All humans seem to have territorial instincts.  But the individuals who organize violence to protect their territorial rights are not always in charge of the civil administration.  Often, they have no power at all to ‘govern’ anything.  Let’s consider Morgan’s words in this area:

Nearly all the American Indian tribes had two grades of chiefs, who may be distinguished as sachems and war-chiefs.

The office of sachem had a natural foundation in the gens [the people themselves]  The choice was by free suffrage of both males and females of adult age.  All the male members of the gens were equally eligible for this office. To make a choice between them was the function of the elective principle.  The right of deposing sachems, which was not less important than that to elect, was reserved by the members of the gens.

Although the office was nominally for life, the tenure was practically during good behavior, in consequence of the power to depose. The installation of a sachem was symbolized as “putting on the horns,” and his deposition as “taking off the horns.”

All the members of each gens were personally free, and they were bound to defend each other’s freedom; they were equal in privileges and in personal rights, the sachem and chiefs claiming no superiority; and they were a brotherhood bound together by the ties of kin. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens. These facts are material, because the gens was the unit of a social and governmental system, the foundation upon which Indian society was organized.

A structure composed of such units would of necessity bear the impress of their character, for as the unit so the compound. It serves to explain that sense of independence and personal dignity universally an attribute of Indian character.

He goes on to discuss the role of the other grade of chief, which he calls the ‘war-chief.’  His discussions in this area are complex so I want to summarize them.

Each gens consisted of a very large extended family.  (It was built on blood ties along the female line, as he explains.  All women were in the same gens as their mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, and nieces.  Since people could not marry in their own gens—this was considered to be incest—the fathers were always of a different gens.)  Each gens had a large number of people, generally between 350 and 1,000. All tribes had more than one gens and most had many of them.  (This is necessary because marriage inside a gens is incest.  They couldn’t remain a cohesive unit if they didn’t have other gens for mates.)   Each gens worked a piece of land in common.  It didn’t belong to any member of the gens and no individual had any natural right to determine what happened to its wealth.  Since the men who lived with the gens were not from that gens (they were always from some other gens), they were a sort of outsiders when it came to deciding what happened to the food and other things that came from the land. There was no formal system that cut them out of the decision making but the natural social realities of such a society would generally make the input of men almost irrelevant:  the women were a cohesive unit who had all lived together since birth; their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and other female relatives had made decisions about that land’s production when they were children and, when they grew up, they took over these decisions themselves.  If men brought in food (say after a hunt) they would give it to the gens of their families.  Remember that their wives and children were never of the same gens as the father:  this would be incest.  So, the men would never really be in a position to determine who got food or anything the land produced, even if they got it themselves in a hunt.

If you read books written by people who lived in territorial sovereignty societies, you will see that most of the territorial disputes they did involved claimed rights to hunting grounds.  Each tribe claimed a certain hunting ground.  Other hunters wouldn’t always respect these claims.  From time to time, the men would go out and patrol their hunting grounds. The second class of chiefs in these societies consisted of the people Morgan called the ‘war-chiefs.’ Here, Morgan explains the general idea:

Military operations were usually left to the action of the voluntary principle.   Any person was at liberty to organize a war-party and conduct an expedition wherever he pleased.   He announced his project by giving a war-dance and inviting volunteers. This method furnished a practical test of the popularity of the undertaking. If he succeeded in forming a company, which would consist of such persons as joined him in the dance, they departed immediately, while enthusiasm was at its height.

When a tribe was menaced with an attack, war-parties were formed to meet it in much the same manner. Indian tribes, and even confederacies, were weak organizations for military operations. War-parties were constantly forming and making expeditions into distant regions. Their supply of food consisted of parched corn reduced to flour, carried in a pouch attached to the belt of each warrior, with such fish and game as the route supplied. The sanction of the council for these expeditions was not sought, neither was it necessary.

Note the similarity between the descriptions in this society and in the descriptions of the war parties of the chimpanzees.   Note that there were civilian authorities consisting of councils but, Morgan notes: The sanction of the council for these expeditions was not sought, neither was it necessary.  In fact, Morgan makes it clear that members of the civilian administration could not go to war at all:  they had to resign their civilian position to do this:

The duties of a sachem were confined to the affairs of peace. He could not go out to war as a sachem.

There was a clear difference between the civilian authorities and the military leaders. The military leaders were not even official leaders:  they were volunteers.  They didn’t present logical arguments for their behaviors (or at least not according to Morgan).  They didn’t ‘declare war’ on some other tribe.  In fact, they didn’t really seem to care which tribe the others were from. They stood up and indicated that they wanted to go out and fight (often in extremely brutal and savage ways, reminiscent of the brutality and savagery of the chimpanzees) by dancing.  Others joined in if they wanted.  If not enough people joined in for a war party, there would be no war party.

You can also find parallels with the chimpanzee in their fighting.  Once the war parties are formed, they are savage and barbaric. Chimpanzee patrols claw, bite, and beat any members of what they consider to be enemy troops until they are dead. Once they are dead, they don’t stop their savagery:  they tear their bodies to pieces.  Morgan and many other authors attest to the same behavior among Indian War parties. Normally, humane and reasonable people, when their instincts (or whatever it is) drives them to go out and patrol territory, they become animals.  Morgan notes:

The greatest blemish in their character is that savage disposition which impels them to treat their enemies with a severity every other nation shudders at. But if they are thus barbarous to those with whom they are at war, they are friendly, hospitable, and humane in peace. It may with truth be said of them, that they are the worst enemies, and the best friends, of any people in the whole world.

You might almost say that these people seemed to have split personalities.

Normally, they were reasonable and humane in extremes that researchers found hard to even believe. But from time to time, they seemed to get overcome with impulses that pushed them to turn into savage beasts.

This savage behavior was not the result of logical analysis and directed policy.  They did not seek or require the permission of any civilian administration to go on a patrol.  One person who felt this impulse to patrol got up and started the rhythmic movements of what outsiders called the ‘war dance.’  No words were used.  Others felt the same impulse and joined the dance.  Then, if the numbers who wanted to go out and patrol was large enough, they would simply leave, without preparation.  They would go out, seek members of their species that were not members of their tribe to kill.  When they found them, they would tear them to pieces.  Then, they would return home and go back to their normal lives as if nothing had ever happened.

They had two sides of their personalities.  Most of the time, they acted rationally and reasonably.  They wanted peace and tried to find ways to create it.  They actually seem to have done a far better job, in the whole, than the members of the societies that followed them.

They did have conflicts. But they were far different than the well planned, well funded, well organized, conflicts that people in the societies we inherited call ‘wars.’ The society wasn’t behind these conflicts.

People who gave in to whatever force pushed them to join war parties had to give up their rights to participate in civil administration.  The civilian administration was devoted to peace. Morgan notes:

The confederacy which they organized must be regarded as a remarkable production of wisdom and sagacity. One of its avowed objects was peace; to remove the cause of strife by uniting their tribes under one government, and then extending it by incorporating other tribes of the same name and lineage. Such an insight into the highest objects of government is creditable to their intelligence. Their numbers were small, but they counted in their ranks a large number of able men. This proves the high grade of the stock.

The Theory

We still have some impulses that we inherited from our animal ancestors that we can’t fully control.  Our animal side wants to believe that the borders are real things, that people on the other side are evil monsters who we are required to tear to pieces.  It wants us to be so passionate in this feeling that we are actually willing to build nuclear bombs and destroy the entire world rather than allow the people born on the other side of the line to escape what our animal side tells us they are due.

We also have a logical side.

It tells us that people are people.

The imaginary lines that we fight over, kill over, die over, and build weapons that can destroy the world to protect are just that:  they are imaginary lines.

They exist only in our minds.  If we stopped believing that there is a difference between ‘our people’ (those born inside of the territory our ancestors have conquered and passed down to us) and ‘foreigners’ (those who are not like us because of their place of birth) tomorrow, we would be scratching our heads in wonder about why people could have ever built the ridiculous barriers that they see around them.

Why do we isolate ourselves behind imaginary lines and think that there is such a thing as ‘our people’ and ‘not our people (foreigners)?

Here is a theory to explain this behavior:

We have instincts that we inherited from our evolutionary ancestors that pushed us to do these things.  If these instincts were repressed, or at least countered by a formal acknowledgement that they existed, they may lie dormant in the background. A few people might act on these impulse still. But there wouldn’t be any organized structure to try to make all children ‘patriotic’ and turn them into weapons who would be willing to organize to wipe out any groups of people who were born on the other side of lines that the leaders identified as threats to their sovereignty the founders of their system claimed over a part of the planet earth.

Human Nature

There are two sides to our ‘nature.’

We have an animal side.  We share certain impulses with all other animals and a unique set of impulses with our territorial ancestors.

We also have a rational side.  This is unique to humans:  we are the only animals with the brain components capable of processing abstract thoughts, turning them into mental ‘words,’ and then communicating these ‘words’ to others.  We can think and plan on a conscious level.  Researchers have used MRI and other data to map these brain components and determine which ‘thoughts’ originate in each of them.  We have unique brains, able to process data that no other animal’s brains can process. Some of our behavior is the result of the animal impulses.

Some of it is the result of cognitive thought:  intention, self-directed analysis, reason, and scientific processing of information that humans alone can do. Often, the things our cognitive minds tell us to do conflict with the things our animal sides push us to do.

One example here is reproduction.  All animals have forces that push on them to reproduce and care for their young.  In many cases, it is clear that these impulse push them to do things that are not in their own personal best interests and that they would not do if they were entirely rational and reasonable.  I want to give an example from my own experience:

I hate scorpions.  I have been stung by a scorpion called a ‘bark scorpion’ twice. These are the most deadly scorpions known and inject an extremely powerful neurotoxin.  It starts with the most painful sensation imaginable in the part of the body where the sting took place, in my case, my finger.   This pain spreads through the hand and arm and eventually the entire right side of my body.  The pain is accompanied by paralysis:  I can’t move my right side at all.  It grows and grows into incredible ferocity.  There is no respite through sleep:  no matter how tired I was, it couldn’t sleep through the pain.  The intense part of the pain lasted for three days and it began to subside.  I gradually gained use of my right side again, but the pain continued for seven days.  After going though this experience, I became averse to scorpions.  My mind would send me into wild panic when I saw one. Then, I picked up a rock that had a scorpion hiding on the other side and got attacked  again.

Then, whenever I saw a scorpion, I killed it without remorse or compassion.  (Normally, I have an aversion to killing any animal.).  One day, while I was walking in the desert, I saw a scorpion on a large flat rock, in the middle of the day.  This is unusual:  scorpions are nocturnal and normally avoid exposure by staying close to cracks where they can hide if threatened.  (I am not the only animal that has had bad experiences with scorpions.)   I moved in for the kill but I didn’t kill her immediately.  I wanted to see why she had exposed herself to certain death by acting as she did.  When I got close, I saw that she had babies.  A lot of them.  Scorpions carry their babies on their back.  She had so many babies that they wouldn’t all fit.   She would take a step and some would fall off.  Then she waited patiently for them to climb back on.  A few more steps and she would have to repeat.

She clearly saw me.  She knew she was dead.  Scorpions can actually move very quickly and, if she had made a bolt for it, she may have gotten away.  I wanted to see how devoted she was to the little mites that were here babies.  She was in the bright sun and I thought she may not have seen me, so I moved so I was between her and the sun and she was in my shadow.  She was waiting for her babies to get on her back.  She clearly knew I was there.  I raised my foot to step on her to see if she would abandon her babies and run for her life.  She wouldn’t.  I almost felt sorry enough for her to let her live. She was just trying to take care of her family.  She had made some mistakes in her life.  (She should not have been out in that exposed area in the sunlight.  Obviously she had made a decision to change her residence that was not sound.)  But I could empathize with her position and I respected her devotion for her babies: they were more important to her than her own life.

Humans have the same devotion.  Since scorpions don’t have the brain components needed for rational thought, she clearly didn’t do an analysis of her situation, determine it was in her best interests to protect her babies, and then act as she acted. She had some sort of primal pressure that all animals share, to some degree, that pushed her to risk her own life for her family.  A large part of human behavior may be explained by comparing humans to other animals.  We all have impulses to do certain things.

We evolved from territorial animals, some of which show the same fanatical group territoriality that humans show:  they are willing to fight, kill, and die, if necessary, to defend their group’s territory.

Why do we do it?

It clearly isn’t in our own personal best interests to act this way.  If you go to war, you will be forced to do some very unpleasant things.  (I didn’t even want to kill the scorpion.  I can imagine the mental anguish that the solders at Mei Ly felt when they were ordered to kill babies.)   In addition, you will know that the people on the other side are willing to kill you to save themselves and their babies.  And they are a lot smarter than scorpions.  They can plan traps, they have grenades, they have rockets and can be hiding behind rocks with guns themselves.  The impulses that push us to engage in the behaviors that chimpanzee analysis’s call ‘group territoriality’ clearly do not come from a logical and scientific analysis of the situations that we find ourselves in.

Our logical minds, in fact, tell us that the war harms everyone involved.  Humans can produce great wealth if we work together and cooperate.  Other books in this series look at the big picture. Forensic History goes over the objective scientific evidence to show how we got from the earliest events we have evidence about to where we are now.  We have tools we can use to study these things.  They give us totally consistent and reliable information that can be checked and rechecked and will always give us the same answer.

We were not formed as perfect beings.

We evolved, over an incredibly long period of time, due to scientific processes that work in very understandable ways.  Our evolutionary ancestors did things that gave them advantages, but which are harmful to us.

Some animals can gain advantages by being territorial. But in other animals, the costs of territoriality exceed the benefits and, if they don’t lose their territorial instincts, they go extinct.  Perhaps, at some point, the territoriality was an advantage.  Perhaps, at one point troops of chimps that had impulses to patrol borders and tear to peaces any members of their spices that were not identifiable members of their own troop, had higher birth rates and greater survival rates than troops without these impulses.  Perhaps the genes that led to these impulses spread through conquest, as the groups with these impulses wiped out those without them.  Perhaps, as a result of this, chimpanzee numbers skyrocketed.  Then, chimps with these impulses had to compete against others with the same impulses.  From time to time, a member of a troop would get a mutation that led to new patterns within its brain:  it was able to design and build weapons that the others couldn’t understand. This chimp felt the incredible pressure to kill and destroy (perhaps; we are speculating here) and built the weapon. Its troop took over and the genetic mutation that led to the brain component that made this new weapon possible spread.  It became the norm.

This happened again and again.  The chimps became smarter and smarter.  Each time, the slightly smarter chimps wiped out the slightly less smart chimps.  (We have impulses to wipe out members of our own species that are not members of our own people.  We only want to kill them if we identify with them, but think of them as slightly less human than we are.)

About 350,000 years ago, our ancestors gained the specific advantages that allowed them to spread from the temperate regions where they had lived before to all of the landmass around them.  They had clothing and fire.  They could live in the frigid tundra of Siberia and in the blast furnaces of the Sahara.  About 70,000 years ago, they were everywhere in this land mass and dominated nature almost totally: they were the dominant species wherever they were.  They now had only one competitor to conquer:  other members of their own species.  They needed weapons that could wipe out this dangerous enemy.

Scientists can trace the progress from this point in ‘ages,’ which may be thought of as weapons ages.’  It starts with the ‘stone age.’  People learned how to anneal rocks, work them, and turn them into weapons that were far superior to ‘natural’ rocks.

Stone age people didn’t just pick up rocks and throw them at their enemies.  They manufactured extremely high quality stone implements by annealing and other processes.  Annealing rocks involves using fire to induce rapid temperature changes (skilled craftsmen know how to determine when the temperature is right) to change the hardness of the rocks. The tool makers soften rocks by annealing, work the softened rocks into the right shape, and then harden them by different heat treatments.  Annealed rocks can be sharper than razor blades.  Properly treated rocks are far sharper and will hold their sharp edges far longer than natural rocks.  During the ‘stone age,’ skilled workers manufactured extremely sophisticated weapons in large quantities.  Many of these ‘stone age weapons factories’ are currently being studied.

The next ‘ages’ are metal ages, where people made weapons using different processes, each of which led to harder, stronger, and better weapons than the one before it.

Copper, tin, and zinc are easy to remove from rocks and make into tools.  But these metals, by themselves, are far softer then rocks and don’t make good weapons. If these metals are mixed, however, metal workers can make brass and bronze, both of which can be used to make high quality and very strong weapons.  Iron is one of the hardest metals to remove from natural rocks, but metals made from iron are far stronger than those made of brass or bronze.  The most recent metal age is the steel age:  steel is an incredibly strong metal and most modern weapons are made mostly of steel.

Their weapons improved.  But the reason they wanted these weapons remained the same.  When it came to the motivations behind war, they were still apes.  They were just apes with better and better weapons.

Now, we are basically apes with nuclear weapons.

Why do we need these devices?   No one has presented a rational reason for them.  Having them is only harmful.  To see how crazy this situation is, consider that, once we had enough weapons to wipe out all life on earth, we kept building more.  When one side had enough to wipe out the world twice over, the other side felt it needed to be able to wipe out the world three times over.  It kept going and going and, at least as of March of 2023, the militaries of the earth are still building more.  And the nuclear programs are the tip of the iceberg.  Military contractors get paid hundreds of billions of dollars each year to design, test, and build other weapons that are just as dangerous.

Why?

Clearly there is no logic behind this.  We don’t develop weapons to destroy the world 1,001 times over because scientists have determined that the human race is better off with this amount of weapons than we would be if we only had the ability to destroy the world 1,000 times over.  The pressure to build these weapons comes from somewhere outside of our rational minds.

This pressure pushes us to do things that our rational minds tell us we can’t keep doing if we are to survive as a race.  Our minds are fighting themselves.  He more we cooperate, the better off we are.  But war precludes cooperation.  Each of the territorial entities (countries) has only a tiny percentage of the human population.  The territorial impulses tell us that these are the only people we can trust and safely work with.  This means that the great bulk of the population is always in the other camp, the camp that we don’t trust and won’t work with.  We would be harmed by this ‘cutting off of cooperation’ even if there were no costs to war.

But our logical minds see that war is always costly. During world conflicts, as much of half of the wealth the human race creates is devoted to supporting the military, extracting resources for raw materials needed for weapons, making weapons, repairing damage so facilities can be used, and other expenses that would not exist if the wars didn’t exist.  Even before we had the technology to destroy our entire race, we could see that war was the most costly activity the human race engaged in. Now that we have weapons that can destroy us all, we can see that war has infinite cost:  if war wipes out the human race, nothing the human race has ever done matters.  The cost will take away everything we have and everything our ancestors have devoted their lives to building.  Our entire existence will be meaningless.

Our logical minds tell us this.

Our animal sides push us to keep accepting that we have a ‘territory’ that we are required to defend and protect (a ‘country’ or ‘nation’ or whatever you want to call it), by any means necessary.  If we must kill to protect our country, we have killed for a noble purpose; if we must die, we have died with honor.  The animal side, if nurtured and encouraged, can take over. It can push us to keep building more and more powerful weapons, even when we have enough to destroy our world thousands of times over.  It is not rational.  It is not reasonable.  It is not even, really, human, in the strictest sense of the word:  we are acting like savage apes that towers over our reason.

What To Do

The book Preventing Extinction, a part of this series, lays out the general road that, if taken, will lead, eventually, to sound societies.

Here is the basic idea:  humans have always been divided in some way.  There had never been a union.  In the days of natural law societies, we were divided into gentes, phratries, tribes, and confederations.  In territorial sovereignty societies, the land is divided into ‘countries’ and, at birth, children are assigned to a country. Each country loudly proclaims its own sovereignty and independence and takes up levies from the people as taxes to pay for militaries to defend and protect this independence.

There is no community of humankind, working to advance the interests of the entire human race.  We, the people of the planet earth, have no advocate.

In fact, the human race has never had any practical tools to create this union of humans, at least not, until very recently.  Technology has given us tools that we could use either to unite us or to further divide us with ever more dangerous conflicts.  So far, the people who run the societies (the leaders of the ‘sovereign nations’) have chosen to use these tools to help them make war better than their rivals.  The tools have proven very useful for this.

We can start to understand that the animalistic generals and presidents and other members of the entities called ‘governments’ don’t speak for the human race.  They speak only for their ‘countries,’ which logic tells us are figments of their own imaginations.  They muster the primitive to action using fear and hatred.  These are the term that we use for the feelings we inherited from our aggressive, violent, and animalistic ancestors.  The entities called ‘governments’ of the entities they call ‘governments’ would prefer that the people they rule not give in to their human side.  They don’t want us to be logical, reasonable, or even scientific (except when working to build weapons for them).  Any thoughts in this area harm the animal sides of our nature to which they want to appeal.

The book Forensic History shows that many people in the past have seen the fundamental conflict in our dual nature.  Read the books in the references from the time of Socrates to, Thomas More, to George Orwell, and you will realize that this duality holds promise for our future.  Others have seen that, while the militant entities called ‘governments’ are working to enflame irrational fear and hatred of any born on the other side of an imaginary line, others have tried to create organizations that play to our human side.

We are greedy.  We want good lives.  We can have better lives if we work together and cooperate with other members of our species than if we devote our wealth to harm the ones we have been told we are supposed to hate and fear.

The model the book Preventing Extinction proposes has been tried before. It was tried by Socrates, by Alexander the Great, by the leaders of the Inca, by Henri Dunant (the founder of the model GMO that Preventing Extinction proposes we emulate). But I propose that the practical tools needed to build on this model have simply not existed until now.  Humans have been divided by language and culture in ways so profound it was easy for leaders to make us think that each different skin tone, nose size, face configuration, or other difference made the others appear to be different ‘races.’  Each government could tell its people that they were the only true ‘human race.’  All other races were sub human. Since the people couldn’t travel and communicate with others to learn otherwise, the people believed this. Then, when the leaders wanted to make war, they could simply invent some stories of atrocities committed by the claimed sub-humans and the ape part of the minds of their followers would aspire to tear these claimed sub-humans to pieces as punishment for their attempting to harm the only true humans that ever existed.

The proposal of Preventing Extinction starts with the creation and funding of an organization that is designed to be in instrument of the human race as a whole.  It is not a ‘union of states’ that is designed to advance the interests of the states against other states, or a union of nations that is designed to advance the interests of the united nations against nations that are not part of their union. States and nations are not parts of all human societies, they are only parts of societies that have extreme forms of territoriality.  The organization will not be administered by a government and not be affailiates with a government; it will not have any ability or authority to ‘govern’ anyone at all.  It will be the kind of organization that has only come to exist, a kind of organization called a ‘non-governmental organization.’

The non-governmental organization will be built on a model that was put together by the great pioneer of non-governmental organizations, Henri Dunant.

This organization has already been formed and provided with initial funding.  It is called the ‘community of humankind.’

To really understand how the community of humankind works, you have to understand some fairly complex principles that are discussed in the books of Possible Societies.  It is possible for a society to be built on the idea that humans are the absolute owners or ‘sovereigns’ of the world:  it was given to use by its creator and we have both the rights and obligation to hold dominion over it and subdue it (conquer each part of it and then rape it of its wealth which is then used to enrich the conquerors).  We know such a society is possible:  we live in such a society. It is also possible to form a society on the premise that humans are at the mercy of nature, that nature is our master, and that we have no right or authority to do anything to the world that changes its condition or accept any ownability of it whatever.

Possible Societies shows that it is also possible to build a society where a group of people have worked out the different rights to the world that can be ownable.  They have determined that if certain specific rights to the world are ownable, this will lead to harm to the world and the human race.  (For example, if you can own the right to destroy a forest for profit, converting it from a living thing to a pile of lumber sitting on a devastated landscape, you will have incentives to do things you would not have incentives to do if this right were not ownable.)  However, there are also possible ownable rights that, if owned, will lead to enormous benefits to the human race.  (Solar photoelectric panels—in fact all ‘silicon based’ or electronic devices—are made literally of sand: sand is 87% silicon dioxide and 8.3% aluminum, the same percentage as the devices.)   If you can own the right to build a factory that turns sand into photoelectric devices (and LED light bulbs, smart phones, television sets, satellite transponders for global communications) and to sell these devices for profit, you have incentives to turn something with little real value to humans (sand) into things with great value to humans.  You can make yourself rich doing things that make the human race better off.  In some cases, ownership harms the human race. In others, it benefits the human race. If we understand which rights, if owned, will make the world better and which rights, if owned, will harm the world, we can set up systems that divide the rights to certain parcels of land, allowing people to own the rights that, if owned, bring benefits, and denying the ownership of other rights.

Preventing Extinction explains how to use a non-governmental organization (notice how the term ‘non governmental’ is stressed) to make this happen, on a property by property basis.  It takes a holistic approach to dealing with the problems of the human race.  It doesn’t seek to do good things and hope that this leads to a sound society.  It works backwards from an understanding of the idea of a sound society. The destination is identified. The organization itself is one of the tools used to move the human race toward that destination.

The organization called the ‘community of humankind’ is designed to allow people who own property in our world today to use that property to benefit the human race.  They can put their property into the system in a way that will strip off certain rights to that property that, from then on, will not be ownable or buyable. These rights will not belong to anyone, not even the human race as a whole.  But they will be under the care, custody, and control of the human race as a whole, though a set of processes explained in Possible Societies and Preventing Extinction.  Certain streams of money will be in this category:  some of the unearned wealth of the world (the ‘free cash flows’ of bountiful properties) will be unowned and unownable.

At the present time, the human race is not a ‘community’ because there are no organized institutions to tie us together to turn us into a community of humankind.  If a share of the bounty of the world around us is unowned and unownable, but under the care, custody, and control of the human race, we will have something to tie us together.  We will control a collective stream of wealth.  We will be in a position to make collective decisions about our collective welfare, without having to go through any kind of militant organization (a ‘government’).

This, of course, is an extreme oversimplification of a network of steps that, if taken, will allow the human race to begin to move toward unity and allow us to stop devoting our wealth to organized military conflict with other members of our species.  It allows us to get onto a road that leads to a sound society.  That is the long term goal.

As noted above, however, two problems are so serious that we need to take steps to try to mitigate them and reduce their severity right away:  war and environmental destruction.

The rest of this book is designed to explain steps that can be taken to mitigate the first of these problems, war.

The most important of these steps is to create hope.  We create hope by showing people that the extreme territoriality that lies at the foundation of the problem of war is NOT an inherent part of the human condition.  In fact, it isn’t really a human problem at all.  It is a part of our animal side. It is a reality of the human condition that is under our control.  Our human side can fight it.

For people to truly see this, they need to have a tool like the organization discussed above, the community of humankind.  They need to know that they have an alternative to using their lives and wealth to support the entities they were raised to call their ‘nations’ in their conflict with other nations.  They need to know that there is an organization that was designed, from the ground up, to unite the human race in a way that turns us into a community of humankind, and to foster and encourage the human side of our character. They need to know that they can help move their race—the human race—move toward this goal in a real way by taking real steps.

The first thing we must do is to help put together this organization and make sure that it is formed as a result of collective (not selfish) action.  I am in the process of creating this organization.

Humans are not the only living beings that have territorial sovereignty societies.  Our closest genetic relatives on earth have societies that manifest the same principles.  

This is important because it can help us understand why humans do one of the strangest things that we do:  we get incredibly irrational, even crazy, about what we may call ‘territorial identify.’  We identify with a territorial group.  We will go out and do things that we otherwise would not do, including kill other people who have done nothing to harm us, if they infringe on, violate, or even simply belong to a group that is thought to threaten the integrity of the groups territory.  In fact, people seem so highly motivated by our territoriality that we will even give our own lives and build devices that will destroy the world many times over, if we feel this is necessary to protect the integrity of the territory with which we associate and identify.  

Why do we do this? 

Normally, humans are greedy. We want the most in value or wealth we can get.  The entire human race will have much more if we work together with other members of or species, wherever they are, to help create more value.  It might seem, therefore, that we aren’t concerned with the interests and needs of our race but only our own personal needs and interests.  Perhaps there is some sort of transfer of personal wealth that can happen in times of war then?  Perhaps there is some way for you to take from your enemy things that she has that you need, and for her to take from you things that you have that she needs, and thus, somehow, everyone comes out ahead, just as would happen in a voluntary trade? 

But this isn’t the way war works.

If you to go war with a gun, and you are trying to kill the person on the other side, and she has a gun and wants to kill you, there isn’t any way for you to get wealth from her from this activity. You will both have to allocate wealth to the weapons.  You will have to forego the time you would have been able to use to create wealth to pursue the war.  You will both have to leave your families without wealth so that you can support yourself in the field.  There just isn’t any natural wealth transfer that enriches the people who fight the ware. 

Some people do come out ahead from war, but they are a tiny, tiny percentage of the population:  the people who run the war can conquer territory, confiscate it from the current owners, and sell it.  This happens frequently but it is rare that even the victors come out ahead after all of the costs of war are paid.  The great, great, majority of the people who are involved in war, and whose support is necessary for the war to take place, lose from the war.  Many lose everything:  they perish knowing that their families will be left homeless and without support and will also perish.  They know that there is an endless series of war and, within a short time, people will be too focused on the next war to remember the last. 

War does not make the world better. It does not make the vast majority of the people who sacrifice for the war (paying taxes for to support it) better off.  It doesn’t make the vast majority of the people who fight it better.  It isn’t the result of a logical analysis of the best interets of the parties involved, it is done for some other reason. 

What reason?  

An objective scientist, looking at the earth from another planet, may not be able to see it.

But if you have grown up and lived on the earth, and gone from war to war to war, and see how people act, you can get some idea.  The people go sort of crazy.  They seem like they are looking for someone to hate.  They live in a society that teaches children that there are two kinds of people.  There are ‘our people,’ who are deserving of liberty, justice, equality, and the right to pursue happiness. Then there are the outsiders, the foreigners.  Historically, these people have not been trustworthy.  They have been dangerous, deceitful, untrustworthy, and treacherous.  We fear them and are right to do so:  many times they have attacked us and tried to take the things that we cherish.  We hate them for the things they did to us. 

These feelings are not logically derived.  Logic tells us there is no ‘them’ at all.  We are all humans and all have the same needs and wants.  These feelings come from some other source. 

What other source?  

Here is a theory:  Humans did not appear intact here on earth.  We evolved from other species that were not as intelligent as ourselves.  Perhaps there is some sort of genetic force that determines how the things we call our ‘emotions’ work.  Perhaps we have hard wiring that tells us we are supposed to feel certain things. There are times when we will get with people of the opposite sex and feel a strong desire to do things that our logical minds tell us aren’t particularly sanitary, for example.  Do we kiss because logic tells us it is a good way to accomplish some goal?  Or do we do it because feelings come over us that make us feel it is natural and right to kiss?  We know that sex will likely lead to babies and lifelong emotional commitments and our logical minds tell us that we would be better off if we didn’t have sex.  But the feelings are very strong.  They push us to keep going.  Logic tells us that these feelings are inherited.  Our ancestors had them in varying strength.  In some of them, these feelings were not strong enough to overpower their own self interest.  They didn’t have babies.  Whatever DNA sequences were responsible for their relatively weak sex drive died with them.  Those wired for a strong sex drive passed had lots of babies and the genes spread. 

Perhaps there was a time, in our evolutionary past, when the strong territoriality feelings/instincts/emotions or whatever you want to call them brought benefits to the group that had them. Perhaps this wiring is beneficial in certain higher mammals.  Perhaps we inherited the wiring for these behaviors in the same way we inherited the wiring for a strong sex drive. 

The territorial wiring may have been an advantage at some point in our past.  But at a certain point, it becomes a liability.  We may not be able to tell exactly when we crossed over from these initiates being an asset to a liability, but now that we have the technological capability to build nuclear bombs, the feelings that tell us to take advantage of this technology and actually build them bombs, with the intention of using them, are very dangerous feelings. 

It makes sense for us to consider the above theory.  We can test it.  If we find that other animals appear to have the same general forces/feelings/emotions/instincts as we have to define at territory, identify with it, and then fight other members of our species who are not members of our own group, but are otherwise indistinguishable from ourselves, with the intention of killing them, we may have a place to start in dealing with at least one of the forces that pushes us toward war. 

 

CHIMP Societies

 

These quotes are from a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.[https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1701582114]

 

When male chimpanzees of the world’s largest known troop patrol the boundaries of their territory in Ngogo, Uganda, they walk silently in single file.  Normally chimps are noisy creatures, but on patrol they’re hard-wired. They sniff the ground and stop to listen for sounds. Their cortisol and testosterone levels are jacked 25 percent higher than normal. Chances of contacting neighboring enemies are high: 30 percent.  Ten percent of patrols result in violent fights where they hold victims down and bite, hit, kick and stomp them to death.

Chimpanzees are one of the few mammals in which inter-group warfare is a major source of mortality. Chimps in large groups have been reported to kill most or all of the males in smaller groups over periods of months or years, acquiring territory in the process.

Male chimpanzees are homebodies and remain in the group they were born in their entire lives. Because they can live for more than 50 years, patrolling when they’re young produces future benefits. However, if they don’t patrol, there aren’t any consequences — no sidelong glances, snubs or being chased out of the group, said anthropologist David Watts of Yale University, who worked with Langergraber on the study.

However, if they don’t patrol, there aren’t any consequences — no sidelong glances, snubs or being chased out of the group, said anthropologist David Watts of Yale University, who worked with Langergraber on the study.

“We know from a lot of theoretical and empirical work in humans and in some other specialized, highly cooperative societies — like eusocial insects — that punishment by third parties can help cooperation evolve,” Watts said. “But it doesn’t seem to us that chimpanzees punish individuals who do not patrol. Sometimes individuals will be present when a patrol starts, and thus have the opportunity to join the patrol but fail to do so. As far as we can see, these individuals do not receive any sort of punishment when this occurs.”

Chimpanzees are highly intelligent, but they aren’t capable of what’s called “collective intentionality,” which allows humans to have mutual understanding and agreement on social conventions and norms.  

“They undoubtedly have expectations about how others will behave and, presumably, about how they should behave in particular circumstances, but these expectations presumably are on an individual basis,” Watts said. “They don’t have collectively established and agreed-on social norms.”

Humans can join together in thousands to fight global wars.  himpanzees don’t have anywhere near that level of cooperation. 

“But this tendency of humans to cooperate in large groups and with unrelated individuals must have started somewhere,” Watts said. “The Ngogo group is very large (about 200 individuals), and the males in it are only slightly more related to one another than to the males in the groups with which they are competing.

“Perhaps the mechanisms that allow collective action in such circumstances among chimpanzees served as building blocks for the subsequent evolution of even more sophisticated mechanisms later in human evolution.”

 

This particular study was funded by the Institute of Human Origins at the Arizona State University and other groups interested in this general topic:  How did humans come to organize ourselves as we do now?   You can find the academic part of the study at [https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1701582114] but the quotes above can tell you a lot about the particular conclusions that seemed surprising to the Institute authorities.  Of particular note is the surprise they show that males that do not participate in the patrols are not punished for refusing. This is an important difference between chimpanzee territorial defense and human territorial defense.

When humans defend our territories, we do this through a very large, well organized, and well funded institutional system:  everyone born inside the territorial boundaries is required to help.  Although males do the bulk of actual fighting, all individuals in the territory must contribute by paying taxes.  The taxes are used to support, train, and equip the full time armies. 

People must make these contributions. 

We are not allowed to refuse to contribute for any reason. 

Henry David Thoreau wanted to make a point that he was against war, so he refused to pay taxes, because the taxes support war.  The authorities put him in jail.  If he had actively interfered in war, the authorities may not have simply put him in a nice warm cell with food.  Many times, when wars start, the authorities make up lists of people who may cause problems for the war effort; they round them up and put them into camps.  People don’t have to actually do anything to interfere to be put into these camps:  in some cases, all persons in certain groups are rounded up, ordered to report to a designated spot, and move to some remote location to prevent them from interfering. 

(Qqq persons of Japanese descent)

In the course of conflict, no crime is more serious than refusing to carry out orders.  If ordered to kill for your ‘country,’ you must kill. Officers can shoot soldiers who refuse to kill when ordered to do so, without benefit of trial or having to make excuses. 

In human societies, people have to contribute to the wars. 

This is not true in chimpanzee societies.  In them, individuals who don’t contribute don’t even get a ‘sidelong glance or a snub.’

 

Instinct

 

We might get some insight into the incredibly serious problem of war by considering the similarities between the territorial defense behaviors humans and the similar behaviors of our closest genetic relatives in the animal world. 

What motivates them to do these things? 

We can rule out a few things. 

For example, we can rule out training and indoctrination.   If children were raised and trained to act this way, we would expect to see evidence of the training.  We would also expect to see sequences for individuals who don’t respond to the calls to battle.

We can also rule out logic:

Humans have brain components that chimps don’t have that allow us to put together abstract ideas in our minds and plan consequences of things that haven’t happened.  We have the mental ability to work out what would happen if our enemies were allowed to take control of our territories.  We can calculate the potential advantages and disadvantages of cooperation and, if we see that we are better off fighting, we can decide to fight and organize to fight.  The chimps don’t have the mental tools to do this analysis.  They didn’t do a logical analysis of the different courses of action open to them, hold discussions and elections, and then, having decided on war, organized the attack.  A few individuals had some sort of feeling that made them think that they had to go out and risk their lives attacking the members of their own species who were not identified members of their own clan/tribe/nation.  They stood up and made their intentions known in some way.  Others responded to the call. There would be an attack.  Those who volunteered would go out, at the risk of their own lives, to track down and kill individuals that their internal impulses, or feelings, or mental wiring, or whatever you want to call it, made them feel this strong urge to kill.    

We might use the term ‘instinct’ to refer to an internal pressure to do something that is motivated by something other than logic or reason. 

 

 

Some force pushes them to split off territory for their group, define and mark borders, patrol the borders, and then organize to kill any individuals from outside their clan/troop/nation that threaten their absolute mastery of the land inside their territory. Whatever this force is, it is not the result of reason or conscious analysis, so it would be called ‘instinct.’

They appear to act this way because of instinct.

Now consider this question:  why do WE act this way? 

Could it be that we, having descended from other primates, still have some of the inherited instincts of these primates?  Might it be that the pressures that push us to divide ourselves into groups based on fixed territories, mark the territories, and then defend them, aren’t the result of logic and reason? Might it be that these behaviors really aren’t in our best interests or the best interests of our race and we don’t have them for logical reasons?   Could it be that these instincts lie in our subconscious, totally inactive most of the time.  But there are signals that, if given, will make us want to stand up and get in line to enlist in the armies, then go out on patrol to kill members of our species that are not members of our identified group, even if we have to track them deep into their own territory to do this?  

This would explain a lot. 

The activities that take place in war just don’t make sense.  Logic tells us that we will all have more wealth and our race will be better off if we can find ways to work together with others, wherever they are.  Logic tells us that the location of your mother when she gave birth to you, relative to the location of a set of imaginary lines, has no real impact on anything important about your existence.  Other people in the world are not tied together in some way because of this fact, any more than they would be if they were born under the same astrological sign.  (We don’t have wars against people with different signs.  Why not?  Wouldn’t it be just as logical to have these wars as wars against people born inside of other sets of arbitrary signs?) 

If logic ruled our behavior, entirely, it is hard to see how there could ever be such a thing as a ‘war between countries.’  For such a thing to exist in a totally logical race, the people must have some logical reason for believing that everyone born in a certain area has some defect that is so serious that they can’t be allowed to be left alive, while everyone born in a different area (in ‘their own country’) does not have this defect and, in fact, has logical reasons to work together to make weapons and support armies to exterminate the defective ones.  

We do not have wars (at least wars between countries or other territorial entities) for logical reasons.

We have these wars for some other reason. 

The term instinct, as defined above by Miriam Webster, is a kind of catch all term.  If it isn’t based on logic and reason or due to analysis done on a conscious level, it is ‘instinct.’  Whatever it is that drives war, it appears it would fall into this category. 

When researchers look at the behaviors of chimps, they see reflections of the behaviors of humans.  Both species have the same evolutionary ancestors. If they inherited the instincts from their ancestors, we may have inherited the instincts from the same places. Perhaps the mental wiring found its way into our minds just as it did into theirs. 

We have brain components that they don’t have. Perhaps there are two sides to our nature.  We have one side, the human (the ‘thinking being’) side, that uses logic and reason.  We have another side, the territorial side, that makes us feel it is necessary to divide ourselves into groups based on territory, define borders, and attack and kill ‘members of our own species that are not members of our own tribe/clan/nation.’  Our logical side tells us that this territorial side is dangerous.  It tells us that we don’t benefit by dividing the world this way and giving in to the pressures to engage in ferocious and irrational violence against people in other territories. But, perhaps, the human side doesn’t always win out.  Perhaps there are triggers that push our logical side away and make us forget we are humans.  We see people standing up and getting in line to kill outsiders and there is something about us that makes us want to get in line and make a commitment.  From then on, our goal will be to seek out the ones whoever it is that leads our group identifies as ‘the enemy’ and wipe them from the face of the earth, even if we must give our own lives trying.