Scott VanDenPlas

When I first approached this question, I was not sure of the exact its exact nature, nor how to tackle it. I did know that it was the only question of the three to be tackled head on in Massive Change, so I went out, bought the book, and read it. I believe the limited, and intentional, focus on the economics of war and the war machine is too restricted, and offered an insufficient examination of the causes and future of warfare. I do agree that there is a profit motive in war, and that there have been mutually beneficial innovations from the defense sector and the private sector, but I don’t believe that all war is fought for economic reasons nor that they have entirely economic outcomes. Not only are there ideological and irrational reasons and outcomes to warfare, but there is also a fundamental philosophical question of war. What if the natural state of humanity is warfare? What if war is a consequence of free will? What if the service of life is fueled, motivated, and accelerated by the service of war?

Rousseau’s view of warfare has become stale. War can be fought over natural resources and monetary gains, but it can also be fought over ideological disputes that can be deep seeded and difficult to contain. Ideological disputes are viral, erupting larger the longer the dissension. They can be decentralized with few traditional military targets. What property is extremism fighting for? What economic result are they wishing to attain? We have seen this repeatedly through the 20th century, and now into the 21st, with the capitalist western world fighting the occidental extreme. It is far too simplistic to assume that human beings are purely greedy, and it is also far too easy to lump ideological stances as “assets.”

If I make the assumption that humanity’s natural state is to be at war, it begs the question, what if the service of war _fuels_ the service of life? The slash and burn nature of humanity prepares the fertile soil of future growth. When societies crumble, they either die or return stronger. Warfare has been an essential tool of human growth for thousands, if not millions, of years. Warfare can serve as a healthy check on society and government. An out of control governing body can be destroyed and replaced through warfare. So not only does war fuel the service of life through economic growth and innovation, but it also can act as a societal reset button. It wipes the slate perhaps not totally clean, but in the least cleaner, and leaves the residue of past lessons learned to help guide us and form newer and better systems. I do not want to make the mistake of presenting warfare as the solution to all of our problems, or to imply that the results are always positive. I simply want to make the point that the results are also not always negative.

Now I want to ignore all of that. I want to assume that it is possible to shift from the service of war to the service of life. What would we need to do in order to achieve that? Well, I think the obvious answer would be to reduce the incentive for warfare to a negligible or controllable amount. We would have to, as a whole, abandon large amounts of doctrine, religious and philosophical. We would have to provide political and legal infrastructures based on democratic principals and representative governments. We would have to provide socialized food, education,health care , shelter, clothing, and other necessities to reduce inequality on a very basic level. We need to agree on human rights. We need to agree on sustainable government and sustainable living. In essence, we have to remove the motives for war.

It is difficult to imagine a world where these incentives do not exist because we are just so far away from that point. We live in a world where religious doctrine trumps scientific reason and where might often does make right. We have seen countries like China fail to provide a communist infrastructure, only to transform large swaths of their society into a libertarian’s wet dream. We are troubled from being so close to the current reality that it is difficult to visualize the the history of humanity into scientifically meaningful periods. We suffer from the immediacy of warfare for the same reason. Destruction is now, rebirth is ensuing and evolving… it requires perspective that is not easily conjured.

So what if these cannot be removed? What if ideological extremism only grows stronger and our rejection of the scientific world escalates? If we cannot reduce the fuel for the service of war, then we need to increase the fuel for the service of life so that it out paces and outweighs the value of the service of war.

I’m also not really sure that I believe a god damned word of this. To my earlier question, what if war is a consequence of free will? Well, if this is the case, then the end is certainly nearer than it is far.

Thanks to Rastafabi and Nukeit1 for the images.