On the Seduction of War

The drama of vanquishing a loathsome enemy seems to activate the same neural circuitry in which lust resides.

There’s a funny Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove when the guys in the Pentagon realize that there is no stopping the imminent nuclear catastrophe, and they shift their focus to the question of how the human race will be reconstituted. Dr. Strangelove assures them that an elite group of men and women—with ten extremely nubile women for each man—could live at the bottom of a mineshaft and perform prodigious reproductive labor. Upon hearing this, the gloomy atmosphere lifts. Maybe the end of the world isn’t such a dreadful thing after all.

I’ve long suspected that war—the psychological and moral drama of killing a loathed enemy and exulting in the triumph of one’s superior strength—may activate the same neural circuitry as lust.

In my younger and more carefree days, I remember the experience of seeing a beautiful woman at a cocktail party and going into a trancelike state that seemed to shut off all critical thinking. Schopenhauer characterized this trancelike state as an expression of the Will (die Wille) that governs all living things to do nature’s bidding.

It seems to me that war has the same seductive power over people’s minds, which probably explains why war propagandists never change their script—i.e., the same drama always works in the way the mere sight of a beautiful girl always induces the same trancelike state in the mind of a man.

Reflecting on the evil of war, James Madison wrote the following:

In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people! No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Man is a tribal animal that is always driven by the will to expand his tribe at the expense of others. I recently had a conversation with evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein in which he told me something I have long suspected—namely, that humanity is now suffering from a fatal "evolutionary mismatch" in which our archaic biological imperative to extend the power of our tribe at the expense of others is being equipped with ever more sophisticated weapons, with ever greater destructive capacity. Weinstein is gravely concerned that if we don’t learn to recognize this mismatch and make a conscious effort to counter it, we could face an extinction of our own making.