Chapter Two : Angry Apes with Nukes

Written by Annie Nymous on . Posted in 6: Anatomy of War

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. 

 

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines the term ‘instinct’ this way:  a: a largely inheritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without involving reason. b: behavior that is mediated by reactions below the conscious level.

 

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. 

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Anatomy of War

Written by Annie Nymous on . Posted in 6: Anatomy of War

Anatomy of War

 

On Feb 21, 2023, Vladimir Putin, the president of the Russian federation, announced that he would be submitting a bill to the Duma (Russian Congress) to formally withdraw his country from the last remaining nuclear arms limitation treaty between the world’s two largest nuclear superpowers. 

The withdrawal was a formality.

Both parties had actually abandoned the treaty 3 years earlier when they halted inspections needed to verify compliance.  The treaty was already dead. The announcement in 2023 was a formal acknowledgement of the death. 

For three years, the governments formerly bound by this treaty could do anything they wanted.  They just couldn’t do it openly.  They were playing a game, pretending to have a treaty.  Now, the charade was over.  They could stop pretending they had a small number of weapons and build as many as they wanted.  Neither side had any requirement to report their activities anymore so they could start building weapons that they had agreed not to build, for the treaty, including weapons that only killed the living beings in the areas bombed, leaving all the buildings and infrastructures intact.  

As a result of treaties that had existed for more than 50 years, more than 200,000 nuclear weapons had been ‘removed from service.’  The countries told their people that this made the world safer, as the ‘declared nuclear arsenals’ were smaller.  But we might argue that even this was just an façade:  The governments removed the cores of these devices and put both the cores and devices into storage.  The bombs were still there.  They could ‘put them back into the active arsenals’ by reassembling them. 

But none of this matters anymore. It is as if the treaties never existed. Even if the governments that took these devices out of the active arsenals were serious and had totally destroyed the devices so they could never be brought into service again, they can now fire up assembly lines and start mass producing them.  Technology has advanced a great deal since these old devices were made, decades ago. The first generation of nuclear bombs—including the devices used against that vaporized Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were obsolete remnants of past technology less than 5 years after they were exploded.  Second generation bombs, the simple ‘hydrogen bombs’ that we were raised to be afraid of, were replaced by third generation devices in the mid 1950s. 

We don’t know how many generations of nuclear bombs have come and gone sense, because governments have learned it isn’t a good idea to give out this information to the public.  But we can be sure that the bombs that military contractors are building today are cheaper, lighter, and more efficient than any that have existed before.  They aren’t making them by hand, with custom built parts, like they did in the 1950s. They draw up the parts on computers, feed the specs into the machines, and stamp them out like cookies from a bakery.

Nuclear weapons are just one of many tools that can wipe out life here on earth, if the people who have incentives to make war unleashed them. 

During COVID, governments developed new gene splicing techniques of fantastic complexity.  They were doing this, or at least so they said, to manufacture MDNA vaccines.  MDNA stands for ‘Messenger DNA’ and is a special kind of DNA that the nuclei of cells sends our to the cytoplasm to tell the structures in cytoplasm what proteins to make.  The goal was to develop MDNA that would locate very specific DNA patterns in the nuclei of cells, attack them, and kill the cells that contain them.  Now that they have this technology, they can weapons it.  Who knows what kinds of MRNA weapons governments are developing?  How many other ‘super weapons’ do they have, or will they have, if they keep working on them.

Even if there were no super weapons, and we only considered the effects of ‘conventional weapons,’ war is more dangerous then ever before.  In previous world wars, bombs were dropped by slow moving planes from great height, so most of them did not kill anyone.  Now, bombs are so smart they can hit the radio antenna of the cell phone in your pocket.  In fact, militaries now have guided bullets:  a tiny computer and three CCD ‘eyes’ and it can find its way to the center of your brain. 

We all see the incredible effectiveness of modern ‘conventional’ warfare in the current conflicts. Armies can turn a normal city into rubble in an afternoon. 

 

The ONLY Approach With Any Hope Of Working

 

War threatens the existence of the human race. 

We aren’t going to be able to save ourselves with superficial tools. 

The problems are structural. 

We must deal with the structural causes.

We were born into societies that work according to very specific rules.  The world is divided into entities that we were raised to call ‘countries.’ Each country has very specific internal rules that were created by the founders of that country or by the most recent group of people who took over (or otherwise gained control over) that setup its current rule system. The people of each country go to schools that teach them that the people who created the systems of their country did it all out of love and concern for them:  they wanted them to have freedom, justice, liberty, equality, brotherhood, and all good things, so they created rules to make this happen.   They didn’t want people messing up the system they created, so they set up safeguards to prevent it from being changed.  The rules are fixed and the people in the country must accept them. 

The leaders and rules of the countries work together to create a system of rules for the world as a whole that is often called ‘the principles of international law.’  The most important rule in this area is called the ‘rights of conquest.’  Any person or group that is able to conquer a part of the world has rights to make rules in the conquered area.  Once they have conquered land, they can declare independence for the conquered area and make new rules for it, or they can incorporate the conquered territory into an existing country and extend the rules of that country to the conquered area. 

Once the territory has been conquered, the conquerors have a right called ‘sovereignty’ over it.  In current earth societies, sovereignty is the absolute and unquestioned right of all of the people who lead the entities called ‘countries.’  Sovereignty means ‘absolute and unlimited rights.’  It includes the right to use the land for anything, even things that have great potential to harm the world as a whole (say by spewing pollution into the common atmosphere) and even things that can destroy the entire planet (building nuclear arsenals).  It includes the power to organize the economy to direct wealth that would otherwise be available to give the people better lives toward a military industrial complex that may well be larger than any other industry in that ‘country.’ 

This is the kind of society that exists on earth today. 

This is one way to organize a society of sapient beings. 

But it is not the only way.

Scientists estimate that our universe has somewhere around one septillion star systems.  (This is 1025 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 systems.) If even in infinitesimally tiny percentage of these systems—say one in a billion or even one in a trillion—has intelligent life, there would still have to be more worlds inhabited by sapient beings than we could ever count. 

Imagine you could travel to some of these other worlds and see what kinds of societies these beings had built. (To get the mental picture, imagine that you focus on the ones where the beings are humanoid and have the same size and physical form as we have; as most of the beings on the TV show ‘Star Trek’ have.) 

What do you think you would find?

Do you think they would all work identically to the systems on earth?

Do you think that each of them would all divide their world into territorial units similar to the ‘countries’ on earth and accept the basic principle of the ‘right of conquest?’   Would their primary law—their prime directive if you will—be that of sovereignty and independence for the individual countries?  Do you think they sit down with maps to draw lines and turn these imaginary lines on maps into real lines on their world, fortified with machine gun nests, land mines, and marked by razor blade covered wire that will cut any person or animal that tries to cross to shreds?  

Is this the only way that sapient, intelligent, thinking beings can organize their existence?

Or, after you have looked at a few worlds that have these aggressive and violent societies, might you expect to find one that was built on logical and scientific principles?  Might you expect to eventually find a world that was organized so that the people could work together with all other members of their race, without imaginary lines or borders to limit their options?  Might you expect to find at least one that organized their land use policies so that they could keep the land healthy, so it would produce more, rather than rape it for resources to give them advantages in war? 

Before you get too deeply into this thought experiment, consider that we know for an absolute fact that other kinds of societies are possible.  We know this because other kinds of societies have existed even here on the single example of a world with sapient beings we have to study, the earth. Starting in 1492, waves of people called ‘conquers’ (conquistadors) went out from the Eurasian landmass (which had all been taken over by the ‘country based societies’ some time before) to conquer the rest of the world.  Once the conquerors had taken control of an area, they destroyed all remnants of the civilization and culture that had been there before.

 

Here is a quote from historians of the conquest of Mexico:

At the time of the arrival of the Spaniards, great quantities of these manuscripts were treasured up in the country.  Numerous persons were employed in writing, and the dexterity of their operations excited the astonishment of the Conquerors. The first archbishop of Mexico, Don Juan de Zumarraga,—a name that should be as immortal as that of Omar,—collected these manuscripts from every quarter, especially from Tezcuco, the most cultivated capital in Anahuac, and the great depository of the national archives. He then caused them to be piled up in a “ mountain-heap,” — as it is called by the Spanish writers themselves, —in the market-place of Tlatelolco, and reduced them all to ashes . 

The unlettered soldiers were not slow in imitating the example of their prelate. Every chart and volume which fell into their hands was wantonly destroyed so that, when the scholars of a later and more enlightened age anxiously sought to recover some of these memorials of civilization, nearly all had perished, and the few surviving were jealously hidden bv the natives.

This is from Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva Españaby Bernardino de Sahagún, book 10 chapter 27.

Now, if you read modern scholars, they claim there is ‘great controversy’ over whether these people had languages capable of rendering permanent records and abstract ideas at all.  In the book ‘The Iroquois League,’ Lewis Morgan discusses the records of the North America and shows that people trained to read these records could recite long, extremely detailed histories that match oral histories (memorized by people who didn’t have the skills to read the complex records directly) word for word.

 

The people in the areas that were conquered in the waves of conquest that started in 1492 and continued until all significant vestiges of the other cultures were wiped out (about 1900 by our calendar) lived differently than the people who carried out the conquest.  We know there were many millions of people living in the areas that were conquered; we also know that they had lived in these areas in societies that were dramatically different than the societies that conquered them for many thousands of years.

If we accept that the pre-conquest American people were true human beings, or even if we apply lower standards and call them ‘thinking beings’ (so we can compare them to possible thinking beings we might find on other words), we must accept that other ‘societies of thinking beings’ are possible.  (Other than the societies we inherited.)   We have only one example of a ‘world with thinking beings’ for study but, even with a single example to study, we must conclude that thinking beings are capable of organizing themselves/ourselves in different ways. 

How many different kinds of societies are possible?

How do they all work?

Say we had a book that explained all societies that are possible for thinking beings with physical needs. Since the type of society we have now is a possible society.  What if we could compare this type of society to the others?  How would it compare?  Do you think that objective analysts (perhaps scientists of societies that live on other inhabited worlds) would consider it to be the epitome of perfection, a model that a group of thinking beings forming a society would want to understand and follow to the letter, to make sure their system would work better than any other?  Or do you think they would class it as the work of only partly-evolved beings, barely capable of understanding that they had the ability to manipulate key variables in their societies? 

What if you could travel to many other worlds with intelligent life and study them.  Once in a while, you would come across societies that operated like the earth societies of the 21st century operate.  How do you think it would compare to the other societies you saw?

If we could study a great many societies, we would be in a position to be objective about the societies we inherited. We could compare them to other systems. But we really don’t need comparisons to accept that the societies that we have inherited have some very dangerous characteristics.  They are violent, destructive, and dangerous.  They give vent to and actively encourage incredibly dangerous behaviors.  They not only tolerate destruction of the world around us, they encourage it with massive subsidies.  (The book, Anatomy of Destruction, a part of this series, goes over these subsidies and shows how they work.)  War has been a part of these societies since they first appeared, about 6,000 years ago, on this world.  These societies clearly have some sort of structural forces that push toward organized, planned, intentional, and well funded and virtually endless orgies of mass murder and destruction.

We can’t leave these structures in place and expect to ever eliminate war. 

If we ever want a world without these organized wars, or even a world where the wars don’t threaten our race, we must deal with the structural issues. 

 

What is War ?

 

Anatomy of War is a part of a series of books about possible societies.

I deals with the ‘anatomy’ or internal forces that work to create a very specific kind of conflict.  I will not define ‘war’ formally here, but I want to describe it: 

War, as the term is used here, is a violent conflict carried out by large groups of people with the organizations commonly called ‘countries’ behind them.  (Two or more entities that claim to be or aspire to be ‘countries.’)  War is a well organized activity that is planned long in advance.  War, as the term is used here, is always an extremely expensive activity and it requires a large and well organized funding system (normally a taxation system) to support.

Not all violent conflicts meet this description. 

Humans, and thinking beings in general, may disagree about many things.  They may be stubborn and refuse to back down.  They may get emotional and instincts may kick in that push them to want to kill the people on the other side of the dispute. Families can have feuds that can last generations and lead to the death of hundreds of people.  Gentlemen may have duels to the death.  Gangs can have rumbles.  Sports fans may riot against fans supporting other teams, and hundreds may be killed.  These are not wars, as the term is used here.  Many different kinds of violent conflicts that are not wars can take place and altering the structures of society will not be able to end all disputes or conflicts.  However, only societies with certain very specific structures can have ‘wars’ as the term is used above. 

I do not and will not claim that there is some sort of a magic wand that, if waved, will cause people to never disagree.  As long as we have individual minds, we will disagree.  As long as people are resolved, or stubborn, these disagreements will occasionally lead to violent conflict.  I do not claim we can change this.  I do claim, however, that the kinds of conflicts that threaten the human race at this time—the ‘wars’ as the term is described above—do not have to be a part of the human experience.   These conflicts have very specific causes that we can identify and eliminate. 

 

Territorial Sovereignty Societies In Nature

 

We did not choose the conditions of our birth. We were born on a world at a time after certain key decisions had been made and certain key structures built. We didn’t choose the type of society that would be in place when we were born.   The books in this series use the term ‘territorial sovereignty societies’ to refer to societies built on the idea of dividing the areas with this society into individual territories which are then considered to be totally independent with the ability to make decisions without having to consider the rights of any people outside of that territory, the rights of future generations, or the needs of their race as a whole. This kind of absolute independence and total authority is called ‘sovereignty.’  In territorial sovereignty societies, the people of each territory claim to have and use militaries to enforce their sovereignty over that territory. 

The next chapter shows that humans are not the only earth beings with territorial sovereignty societies.  It goes over studies that show that other animals, including our closest evolutionary ancestors, organize their existence around the exact same principles.  Of course, since these other animals don’t have the power to speak and express any ideas or principles, they don’t have formal statements that humans have to describe their system.  (For example, they don’t have written signs that tell other members of their species that if they cross certain lines they may be killed; they don’t have uniforms that identify the border patrollers or ‘treaties’ that describe the behaviors that will be punished by death.)   But observers watching them can easily see that they are clearly working to mark and protect a certain territory with firm borders; they then organize patrols to detect members of their species that are not members of their troop/clan/tribe/nation who may threaten their absolute rights to their territory.  Once they have done identified threats, they organize parties to track down and attack the individuals they think of as threats. When these battles take place, it is clear to observers that they are willing to give their own lives, if necessary, to make sure they send a message to any members of their own species that are on the other side of the line:   They use their teeth, claws, rocks, sticks, or whatever weapons they have to tear these other individuals to pieces. 

When we compare the territoriality and warfare activities of humans with the same features in our closest evolutionary ancestors, it is hard to accept that the first humans to have evolved on this world invented these societies intentionally. In other words, it would be hard to make an argument that ancient ancestors, upon becoming ‘human’ for the first time, used their newfound reason and logical thought capabilities to sort through all possible societies they could form, rate them and compare them, then decided they wanted to have territorial sovereignty societies.  Most likely, this did not happen. 

Most likely, as they went through the final stages of evolution, the basic features of the societies of their evolutionary ancestors remained in place.  As they grew more intelligent, they were able to build better tools.  But they still felt the pressure to have territorial identity (called ‘patriotism’ in humans), to build borders, and to inflict painful deaths on any who violated the rights their instincts told them they had over the territories that their ancestors had marked.  As they evolved, they developed better and better weapons to wipe out the ones on the other sides of the lines.  They gained the ability to express the things their instincts or mental wiring made them feel:  They could say they were attacking the outsiders because the outsiders were horrible monsters, full of hate, and would destroy them if they could.  They were fighting for their own land.  When they were intelligent to work out formal principles of religion, they could justify and rationalize their feelings that a part of the world belonged to them:  they could claim that whoever or whatever created the land had a destiny in mind for it and made this destiny manifest by giving the groups that were supposed to have the land the ability to take it from the ones that weren’t supposed to have it. 

It is possible that this is how we got the societies we have now:  we may have inherited them from our evolutionary ancestors. 

Regardless of the way we got them, however, we must now realize that we can’t keep them forever.  The basic conditions of these societies are unsustainable.  We can’t keep attacking and killing people who have done nothing to harm us, and whose only ‘crime’ was being born on the wrong side of an imaginary line, with ever more powerful weapons, forever.  We can’t keep raping the world with ever more efficient tools, then use these tools to wipe out the people outside of lines (which will always be the majority of the human race) forever.  The conditions of these societies can’t be sustained.  That is what unsustainable means.  These societies are going away.  Even if we loved them with all our hearts, even if we were wiling to overlook the incredible inefficiency of these societies (we can obviously have more wealth if we cooperate than fight), even if we are willing to accept the millions of yearly deaths as a kind of populating control method, even if we don’t mind the pollution and the need to watch our loved ones die of cancer and other diseases caused by the toxins in our air, water, and land, we still can’t keep these societies forever.  We either replace them with sound societies or they destroy us. Those are our only two choices.

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