The Inevitability of War (not yet)

 Here's why Abraham Lincoln is the greatest President:

He had the will to kill 625,000 people without flinching in a war he started himself. He had the will to impose martial law and prohibit criticism of the Presidency. He had the will to claim emergency powers for himself that were in no way emunerated by the Constitution.

War is the extension of politics by other means, and however much we ignore it, war is as inevitable a part of human life as politics. In the same way that sex is the ultimate irrationality of life, war is the ultimate irrationality of death. It is impossible to treat every human life as sacred unless human beings agree on what sanctity is, and when the world is constantly reminded of its disagreements, there is no future in which the world does not go to war.

With every new leap in communications technology, there is a new means by which the world is reminded of its disagreements, and until the death of those we love chastens us, we fight our disagreements as though they can be fought to true victory. Soon, it will be as much social media as sarin gas. One hundred years ago, it was as much newsreel footage as machine guns. A hundred years before that it was as much newspapers as artillery. A hundred-fifty years before that, it was as much pamphlets as muskets.

And inevitably, some ideas communicated are right, and some are wrong. The righter the idea, the more provocative it's found by those in the wrong.

There's no such thing as an idea that is 100% right or 100% wrong. Every idea is just an idea, even proven ones inevitably have exceptions, and every concept we hold in our head is an extreme simplification; an abstract two-dimensional blueprint that only takes on real life in dimensions well past any of which our brains can conceive. There is no dimension which any human perceives that can predict chaos, and war the ultimate human event which exists in all its dimensions.

It may be senseless, but war is the ultimate human event. Preparation for war is how large parts of societies must always organize themselves, and when the heightened drama of war comes, our conduct within it is the story which everyone who remembers us tells those who come after.

Human beings, like every animal, are wired for their survival to be threatened. In peacetime, eventually our idle minds go to seed, and we become depressed without knowing why. In war, the vast majority of us forget our troubles, because what matter the troubles of living when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death?

We may be different from every other animal, but we are still half animal, and since our destructive side cannot find release in anything but the wild, eventually the wild comes for us.

I've written this many times, but human beings seem to have a homing device. When life gets too comfortable, when we reach what should be our moments of greatest happiness, we get too far from nature, and nature seems to have installed a homing device into us at the genetic level. Our lives are better than ever, and it's always a disappointment. All we can think of is 'why is life not better than it is?' And so we require explanations. We require people to blame. And by blaming factors and people that are not ourselves, we gain self-esteem that we lacked in our dolor.

We gain self-esteem merely from the impression that we're finally smart enough to understand our problems. We gain further self-esteem by accusing those whom we see as the culprits. And we gain self-esteem still further by the esteem of others who agree with us and love us more for how we explain problems they share with us, and for our courage in calling out the people we view as responsible for the problems.

But inevitably, that in turn provokes people who disagree. The people who disagree have their own similar process of actualizing their self-esteem by which they identify their own culprits and band together to oppose them, and the culprits are inevitably us. And with enough back and forth provocation, the end result is inevitable, and happens over the course of every lifetime.

But war clarifies all these questions, because when life is on the line, it eliminates all the inessential. You may wish you could take back all those fingers you pointed, but even that doesn't matter now. All that matters is life itself, because survival is in no way guaranteed, either for us or those we love much more than ourselves.

And for a brief moment in history, society after society feels as though it's achieved a kind of ideal vision of what it should always have been, full of unity and purpose and meaning as everyone works together save themselves. People band together in a common mission that they should always have had in peacetime, but never do. It is only in those moments when life itself may end that people act as they think they should in life. But this greatest vision of ourselves comes crashing down in agony. While we may be banded together as soldiers, factory workers, fund raisers, doctors, farmers, teachers, utility and doc workers; we've all banded together as a society, so that we can kill another society. Our soldiers are literally sent abroad so that they can kill and burn and rape, and the rest of us do our part to make sure that they can do their job as best they can, because we know that this is what the other side is doing too, and if they do it better than us, we will die.

There's no explanation for why, but when you read history, it can't help but stick out: people are particularly prone to smash things up at the moments of their greatest well-being. The Enlightenment should have been the great moment when humanity embraced reason, yet it ended with guillotines and cannonade. The industrial revolution should have provided everything we needed to live, but it also made machine guns. The scientific and information revolution could have made the ideal society, and yet its weapons are pointed at us every day for decades; and we hear the clock counting down every day to the moment when they're finally put to use. For all our advancement, we are no more civilized than the great ancient religions who foresaw that all things which give light too give darkness.

Everyone on earth should read an abridged version of the India's ancient national epic: the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is the story of great virtue, but great virtue is only proven by provoking equivalently great vice. I found it impossible to read of the virtue of Prince Yhudishtira and not think of Abraham Lincoln - he had all the same qualities of modesty, prudence, slow deliberation on every decision, and leadership by setting an example of vulnerability and humility.

But like Lincoln, it is his very virtue that provokes the vice of others, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to read of Prince Duryodhana and not think of Trump: the arrogance, the petulance, the lust, the hotheadedness, the impatience with governing...

The more virtuously Yudhishtira acts, the more his virtue provokes vice in those who are jealous of him, until such a time that Yudhishtira's karma is so strong with light that his decisions literally obliterate all the men of the earth in a great battle that ushers in a new era of greater virtue.

Is that greater era worth the price? Well, it's certainly not to the people who died in the war, and I'd imagine it's not better to their wives and children, at least not for the moment, but it does enable a new ethos to take root by a new generation, chastened by tragedy into demanding less even as they get more.

War is always not worth it for the people involved in war, both the dead and the mourners. But we do not exist on earth as ourselves, we are the earth's property, and at a moment of its choosing, the earth flushes us out of consciousness like turds.

We are, at most, only one third ourselves. One third of us belongs to us, one third of us belongs to the cosmos, and one third of us belongs to the earth. Forces around us both above and below have their own agendas which we're only privy to as a minority partner controlling the least profitable third of the business. These forces around us don't just control our bodies, they control our thoughts. It is not our intellects that control which ideas appeal to us, it's our temperaments, it's our physiological wiring, it's whichever direction a few neurons choose to go on any given day, which is influenced by the nerves and blood which allow them to do its job.

So therefore, the chaos of nature calls to us at the moments we're most shielded from it. There seems to be a homing device in humans that returns us to the madness of evolution.

We sit in our comfort and we think we are at a great remove from the jungle and forest, but privilege reminds us of what we still don't have. It teases us with how close we are to better lives. Whether you're liberal or conservative, alt-right or intersectional SJW, that homing signal is the pull all Americans feel right now. If we've achieved prosperity, it's made us less satisfied, not more. At the beginning of 2020, even after three years of Trump, America was a better country than ever before, yet we've all been miserable since around 1998.

War is every bit as awful as it sounds, and every bit as unavoidable as we'd like to think it isn't. We will go to war, and the more virtuously we act, the more likely war becomes. It is inevitable, it is written, it is in the code of the human psyche, and whether now or in fifty years, the human psyche will shortly remind us that we are part beast.

What else can I end this with except what might be the greatest, most meaningful line in all Shakespeare, from Act V of Hamlet: "If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come – the readiness is all."