The Unnatural Act of War
Forward to The Principle of Equality
Throughout human history, violence has plagued mankind. From the ancient Egyptian nomarchs through the magnates in post-Domesday England, humans have struggled to exert control over other humans. Human-against-human violence has been a common result.
Mass conflict afflicts Eastern Civilization as well—not just the West. Even with what we know now of human existence, determining an underlying cause of conflict is difficult. Humans are in the rare company of animals on the planet who will mass kill with impunity.
Is war just a variation of this human aggression, writ large? The question is still open on the causes of war. In this introductory material, I will take a shallow step in the exploration of what it means to be human, and explore potential causes of mass violence in the process. I will focus on the United States for the purpose of explanation given my more comprehensive understanding of the internals of that nation, though the principles here might extend into other cultures as well. From time to time, I will draw inferences as well from Western Civilization, being the history most applicable to the United States present day.
The United States has been at near constant war since World War 2, though we choose to call it by other names. Skirmishes abound, military actions, and the list of non-war terms continues to grow with every determined necessity.
This isn’t unique to the United States. In ancient Egypt, we witnessed a very similar cycle in human social evolution. The old kingdom made use of militias provided by multiple nomarchs. That Egypt was, as the United States currently is, constantly at war. On the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, Greek nation-states were in intermittent conflict with each other, forming and dissolving alliances as necessary, until the rise of the Ptolemaic Kingdom. Infighting among the Greek dynasties led to the rise of Rome and the establishment of Roman control. Rome, like the United States, was also constantly at war. Pax Romana was a time, briefly, when Rome had conquered its major enemies. This “peace” however, was only a redistribution of the massive violence during conquests to more strategic continual violence internal to the empire, and open conflict around its edges. Aside from the term itself, there was nothing inherently “peaceful” about Pax Romana.
Fast forward through history in western civilization, we see the conquest of Normandy in 1066, followed by the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors, and the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire which segued directly into World War 1, followed shortly by World War 2, discounting somewhat skirmishes in between.
There was never a lengthy period of actual peace in all of human written history. Was this due to individual propensities toward violence inherent to the individual? Perhaps. For this to be true, we should see some consistency between intra-state violence and extra-state violence. As we show in the next section, intra-state violence does seem to “boil over” into extra-state violence.
Regarding individual violence, in recent United States history, there has been a continual fluctuation between 3 to 10 murders per 100,000 citizens for more than a century. This trend spiked in the 1930s (Great Depression and Prohibition) and then spiked again during World War 2 and spiked even higher during the Vietnam War. If we assume that the inherent nature of humans is to be violent, then there is little hope. We must cut this exploration short, and resign ourselves to our violent natures.
However, it’s not so simple. In subsequent years, e.g. during the dotcom boom of the late nineties, we see the murder rate fall to its lowest level in the last few decades to 6.9, with a continued downward trend, after a spike during the late 1980s.
It’s telling, looking at these statistics, that the murder rate in the United States increased in times of scarcity, such as during the Great Depression. This is not a fluke. In fact, criminal activity also increases generally when opportunities are diminished. In 2015, a report by the World Economic Forum indicates that not only is there such a link, but also that criminal careers are formed with higher frequency during global recessions.
Recessions mean scarcity, which is a contributing factor to increases in individual and organized aggression and general unlawfulness. This fact isn’t specific to the United States. The World Economic Forum paper in the 2015 study titled Do recessions increase crime? counters such thinking. Nor is the impact of recession and scarcity limited to individual aggression. The Roman acquisition of Greece was driven in part by a motivation to protect the flow of grains. Wars have been fought over control of trading routes for millennia. Even now, Russia seeks to expand its power by acquiring what’s known as the breadbasket of the world — Ukraine. It seems that states and individuals have a similar problem: when scarcity abounds, or even when the fear of scarcity abounds, then we see violence and unrest increase.
If peace is the absence of violence and civil unrest, then to produce truly lasting peace, (real peace, and not the faux-peace of imperialism which we always seem to gravitate toward, and which we already know only shifts where the violence happens) then we must address the problem of scarcity. First, we ask the question of how there can be such a thing as scarcity when, in several nations including the United States, farmers are regularly paid not to grow certain crops in the interest of limiting impact on the market. Today, I can order from Amazon and have fresh food and fruit brought to my home within an hour or two. In many other countries, no amount of hope will produce fresh fruit on millions of tables. Extended the concept to housing, and in San Francisco, there are five homes for every individual in the same city who is considered homeless. And yet, homeless people still wander the San Francisco streets.
Scarcity is the absence of access to a resource. Given the technology today, there would rarely be scarcity except that humans have created such scarcity artificially. This is in part because of the successful globalization of capitalism, which fundamentally drives inequality.
I must make a distinction here.
Capitalism is a tool and is not in itself evil. Only the manner in which we have employed and evangelized capitalism has produced inequality from its implementations. This will become more clear in a later chapter. It is the combination of capitalism with a strong belief in a hierarchy that together work to produce artificial scarcity. Let’s explore what is meant by that strong belief in hierarchy for a moment.
Humans generally organize into a hierarchical social structure. It’s an absolute imperative if you consider that more people, all things being equal, are stronger than fewer people. Yet to combine people into groups requires careful trade-offs of personal to group commitment. Unfortunately, humans tend to align concepts of morality to their grouping strategies or hierarchies. We hold generally to the mistaken idea that there are worthy (those who lead) and unworthy (those who build or worse, refuse to participate in our groups). This persistent myth has allowed false generalizations of the worthy over the unworthy, which has led to the rationalization of denial of access to resources, and hence artificial scarcity, to the common human in deference to those who claim the leadership mantle.
Despite our loftiest ambitions, the world has devolved according to the shared history and understanding of humankind. We witness at the time of my writing this document a return to the strong-man and the might-makes-right mentality we will be addressing further in this document. We have defaulted again to the Pax Romana mentality, grasping the romantic notion that imperial peace actually means real peace.
If we continue on this path, millions will die.
This writing aims to plant a seed of hope.
There is a better way if we can address the underlying causes of scarcity.
What underlying cause do I speak of? Is it an end to capitalism I seek? No. What I seek to end, and what the next age of humanity requires of us to end if we are ever to see it, is the persistent hierarchical thinking which we have too long taken for granted. Without such an idea of hierarchy, how can there be haves and have-nots? Those with resources must have a mechanism for rationalizing their acquisition and hoarding of such resources, and this always takes the form of denigrating those without, using hierarchy as a tool of oppression.
Have I not just spent an entire essay of text describing the nature of violence in human history?
You would be right to question me, and you would also be correct in pointing out such a thing. However, at one time, we were hunter-gatherers. Eventually, through concerted effort and many, many years of focus, humanity shifted to an agricultural basis for providing sustenance, which allowed the rise of empires. Significant, impossible-seeming change has been proven possible in the past. The Equitable Society (see below) really only requires enough people who believe in the principle of equality to come together in support of the work that would be required to make such a change possible.
We can move toward a more equitable society. Sadly, most of our existing government structures are built on the premise of inequality. Such a significant shift in mentality will require the courage to revisit the structure of many institutions. But the proximate step toward such change begins with you. Without believers in equality, there is no hope of making the widespread change we require. As mentioned before, equality is something that humans impose on nature. Without coordinated effort, an equitable society can never be realized.
How close we are to an equitable society? My answer is that we are closer than we had been in the middle ages. In fact, equality is such an enticing concept, and we have so many empathic humans (remember that empathy is a bell curve—entirely another topic not covered here) that we do make some slow progress over time. After all, slavery and indentured servitude are generally frowned upon at least in western civilization, which lead the world in power and influence at the time of this writing. That said, the United States was built according to an unequal vision. We have only to look to the Three-fifths Compromise to understand how significant an influence inequality had in the forming of our nation. This is not an indictment, as the United States democracy emerged leagues ahead of the rest of the world, which existed under some form of imperialism and feudalism. The point is that though we are closer to equality than we ever have been historically, we may never achieve it without some fundamental and significant changes.
Why should I believe you? You are a nobody.
Exactly. I don’t want you to. Follow me on this journey, and by the end, if I haven’t convinced you, then I have failed at my goal. These steps toward understanding were the same for me, and I hope that they are as convincing to you as they were for me. The first thing we must understand, and completely, is that from the perspective of the common human, we have traded the divine right of kings for something equally nefarious: the affluent right of kings. The mechanisms for control are not as direct as they were in the past, but they are still there, and still effective. Such a dubious right is directly contrary to an equitable society. This is where we begin our journey.
I ask you to join me on a journey wherein I will discuss the concept of an equitable society. I will not use terms like socialism, or capitalism (avoid the -isms whenever you can), except in their purest contexts as the economic principles which underpin them. They are tools for understanding, as there never was a pure socialist or pure capitalist society, and I will treat them as such. My commitment to you is to prune away the ideological bluster from the concepts here. And in doing so, I hope that you, like me, will come to understand and believe in the possibility of a truly Great Society of Equals, or, as I call it, an Equitable Society.
