Memorial day would be far more conducive to peace and prosperity if we used it to remind ourselves of the reality, that human beings are slightly smarter vicious tribal apes. For most of our evolution, until about 20,000 years ago, we lived in small tribes where tribal warfare was the optimal evolutionary strategy and one of the main reasons we are social and have evolved big brains to begin with. As Steven Pinker tells us:
“… men go to war to get or keep women –not necessarily as a conscious goal of the warriors(though often it is exactly that), but as the ultimate payoff that allowed a willingness to fight to evolve. Access to women is the limiting factor on male’s reproductive success. Having two wives can double a man’s children, having three wives can triple it, and so on. The most common spoils of tribal warfare are women. Raiders kill the men, abduct the nubile women, gang-rape them, and allocate them as wives.” ( Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” 1999, p. 510)
First you increase the economic pie available to your tribe/gene-pool by coordinating a raid and killing other men and children, and then you increase your reproductive success by raping the women. To be successful in war you need a strong sense of unity which translates itself into the strong nationalist/militaristic/patriotic tendencies we are so susceptible to and has the planet littered with nuclear weapons and “civilized” taxpayers believing we actually need them. The bond men make as co-warriors is likely stronger than male/female love. A female is easily replaceable (another raid, etc.) but the loss of that co-warrior that will help get the next female and/or defend you when you only get one chance at life is probably even more important. Just like natural selection has shaped us to enjoy sex due to the vital genetic payoff, it has also shaped us to enjoy war, killing, and torturing. As a recent Live Science article aptly titled “Humans Crave Violence Just Like Sex” discusses, mice have been found to love to fight and gain pleasure in a similar manner to how we love food and sex. Article mentions:
Scientists have known that mice and other animals are drawn to fights. Until now, they didn’t know how the brain was involved.
The new study, detailed online this week in the journal Psychopharmacology, reveals the same clusters of brain cells involved in other rewards are also behind the craving for violence.
“Aggression occurs among virtually all vertebrates and is necessary to get and keep important resources such as mates, territory and food,” said study team member Craig Kennedy, professor of special education and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. “We have found that the reward pathway in the brain becomes engaged in response to an aggressive event and that dopamine is involved.” ……. “We learned from these experiments that an individual will intentionally seek out an aggressive encounter solely because they experience a rewarding sensation from it,” Kennedy said.
Given its importance, war/patriotism easily fills us with a great sense of purpose. England’s prime minister during WWII and national hero Winston Churchill shows us how inspiring, exciting and purposeful WWI was to him when he mentioned:
“I think a curse should rest on me — because I love this war. I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment — and yet — I can’t help it — I enjoy every second of it.”
And in another occasion:
“My God! This is living History. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling… Why I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me…”
Towards the end of WWII, Russia’s Red Army is estimated to have raped over 2 million German women. The Allies weren’t much better. We shouldn’t be shocked when men murder and rape, the real miracle that has taken thousands of years of cultural evolution to create, are the modern cultural values we absorb that program us into respecting the body/property/thoughts of all human beings regardless of age, sex, and race.
In August 10, 1915, British physicist Henry Mosely, who would have probably won the Nobel Prize that year, died in perhaps the stupidest and most disastrous conflict mankind has been involved in, The First World War. Bright and pious German/French/British/more students, fathers, engineers and doctors, who even shared a common European Christian faith, reverted to their tribal ape-like nature, and for God, honor, flag and country, slaughtered each other leading to about 18 million deaths. Yet this horrific conflict and much that grew from it like the birth of the Soviet Union, The Second World War and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and its numerous ramifications, were overwhelmingly an outgrowth of economic ignorance and human nature/tribalism. Had world and entrepreneurial leaders understood “free-markets”, the vital role that economic freedom plays, and the fact that “empire” or overseas colonies and overall militarism are horrible for the economy, the conflict could have been easily avoided. Today we find ourselves in a similar situation. The world is littered with nuclear weapons controlled by tribalistic ideologues/apes who know nothing about evolution, human nature, history, or economics. Numerous economic fallacies in their world-views inevitably take mankind towards economic warfare via tariffs/sanctions, escalations, alliances, increasing polarization and rate at which sparks ignite, until the statistical certainty that another all-out disaster occurs, and the Trump administration is accelerating this process tremendously with nearly weekly sparks in its dealings with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. And of course, anyone who finds fault in this is a traitor (against the in-group/tribe) Mankind is already fortunate to have made it this far without a nuclear war. For example, during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, had it not been for Russian submarine commander Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov’s sole dissenting vote in a decision to launch a nuclear strike against the USA, mankind might have already suffered a nuclear holocaust. The horrific mindset of top military and political leaders is perfectly captured in Daniel Ellsberg’s great book “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner”. Ellsberg writes:
Bernie Shriver who pressed the development of our ICBMs[Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles] asked Lemay[Curtis Lemay, top US military leader, largely responsible for the bombing of Japan in WWII] .. “What is your requirement for a large warhead, that is, what is the largest yield you need, what would be large enough” , Lemay answered, “one bomb for Russia” *
In a wonderful discussion of Ellsberg’s book, famed intellectual Noam Chomsky summarizes:
“The things that I learned in the book were hair-raising. For example, I learned… that during the Eisenhower period and basically carried on, there was one war plan, and the war plan was that if there was a confrontation with the Russians in Berlin,whatever, maybe a small confrontation, then immediately we wipe out every city in China… There was no alternative plan, that was the plan… A war could be set off just by inadvertence. There is case after case…where we came extremely close to war just by inadvertence. Sometimes reckless actions on the part of leaders, but sometimes just accidents that happen…When the first early warning system was established to detect incoming misiles…It turns out this new sophisticated system…In the first day of operation it detected a Russian missile attack with 99.9% certainty…That kind of thing happens over and over and the war plans are setup so that if somebody acts on that 99% a billion people die…Page after page of the book contains graphic example of this kind of, you can only call it insanity” — Chomsky
Let that sink in. Over some tribalistic scuffle in Berlin, “One bomb for Russia” and the incineration of hundreds of millions of Chinese and a probable terrestrial life-ending environmental catastrophe. The upper echelons of the US military/leadership is packed with people who see the world similarly, and human beings being equal, so are the corresponding Chinese and Russian military apes. For example, during the Vietnam War, President Nixon mentioned to then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that “I’d rather use the nuclear bomb” and “The only place where you and I disagree … is with regard to the bombing…You’re so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.” For 15 years during the Cold War the “secret” nuclear missile launch codes for American nukes was 00000000. In 2014, 34 nuclear missile launch officers have been implicated in a cheating scandal and have been stripped of their certification. As technological progress continues to accelerate, it is just a matter of time before any disgruntled group can manufacture a device as damaging as a nuke, or cause enough havoc in a few major cities to cause devastating disruptions to global trade which can be just as damaging to the social order as if entire cities are wiped out. The world had plenty of so-called “experts” and scholars in 1914 and 1939 when the world wars got started. Nothing has changed! In a 1978 interview, 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics F.A. Hayek more or less predicted that mankind had about 20 years left to overcome the economic ignorance/tribalism that would inevitably bring about the destruction of the world:
“If the politicians do not destroy the world in the next twenty years there is good hope…but the chances that we destroy the world within the next twenty years are fairly high”
Hayek has been wrong thus far, but by how much? We either have some popular movement where enough people gain vital familiarity the with Mises/Hayek intellectual combo or we are all going to die, it is that simple.
