Urged on by my cat, who seemed decidedly worried about my 5th-grade granddaughter, I found her weeping over her home-school history lesson. Looking up, she complained through her tears, “Grandma, why is history just a list of wars? I can’t memorize all this!” I knew how she felt. I also thought her question, a good one, smoothly morphed into “What’s going on here? Why is history war after war after war? What is the engine of this history?” As it happens, I can tell you the engine, and Clint Eastwood’s Josie Wales can tell you the appropriate response.
That question is not difficult to penetrate, although the answer is a bit unnerving. Aristotle tells us that man desires happiness, with which Freud agrees. Freud added that man doesn’t know what happiness is and that many men conflate happiness with pleasure. Going further, he noted that many of this subclass find their greatest pleasure in political power, meaning power over other men. This subclass is populated by Alexander, Kublai, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Xi, Schwab, Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos, Soros…
These are the power lusters, the men whose entire being is consumed in the desire for political power. If history is indeed a chronicle of wars, then its engine is these men’s lust for political power.
But why wars? Although Hobbes, Rousseau, et al. were way off course on their “state of nature” theory for organizing society, nature did circle around behind them in an unforeseen matter. The natural order is that every group of people is a society, and every society with a government is a polity. This means that the family itself is a polity, meaning that every human being, without exception, is born into a polity. Only an occasional bull moose is in the state of nature.
A 2nd-century Roman sarcophagus showing a battle. Photo by Legis Nuntius. CC BY-SA 3.0.
The result is that every human being lives in a sovereignty, whether that sovereignty be himself, family, tribe, clan or state, and every one of the 200-some sovereignties on the planet today is in a state of nature, and a power luster pilots the vast majority of these sovereignties. That is the formula for perpetual war, and the takeaway from world history is that perpetual war is structured into the nature of things.
The constitution of the American experiment with its checks and balances was consciously crafted to frustrate the power lusters and keep them at bay, and it served well until the exigencies of The Big One and the threat of court packing induced the US Supreme Court to cave and allow the delegation of legislative power to the executive branch.
Since the Big One ended in 1945, we have had the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War, to name but a few. Today we are in deep do-do. The ruling elite with their prog infantry hold all the high ground, our Constitution stands breached just like our southern border, we are in a proxy war with Russia, a proxy war with Iran, very nearly in a proxy war with China, and on the verge of a knock-down drag-out with Islam, which proclaims a religious duty to conquer the globe for Allah, slaughtering all who decline the invitation, while anti-Israel demonstrations sweep across the planet, in the USA, China, England, Germany, South Africa, Turkey, etc., manifestly displaying Islam’s globalist credentials.
Half our people are deluded, our federal government has been seized in a coup and turned against us, we are occupied territory, things are getting tough, and Josey Wales says, we gotta get mean. He’s right. Wars are the natural order of things, and my granddaughter will have many more she must remember.