Can men live without war? (1956)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
But, those fretting about the necessity of war need not have worried, as subsequent events proved. War between nuclear powers doesn't happen any more, but instead we've had endless proxy wars. Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine....
It didn't happen yet, but there are no is reasons for nuclear war to be avoided indefinitely.
Not that they didn’t make one hell of a dent sometimes, mind you.
We’d more likely end up with an extra mutation or two, similar to the Moties [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye] and some solid species level PTSD from the whole mess.
Why do you think the doomsday prepper genes haven’t been bred out yet? I’m guessing because sometimes, they were the only ones left standing!
To do that would likely require liquifying the mantle entirely, or some similar scale event.
The last big one was approximately 66 million years ago due to perhaps the Chicxulub impact, and it wiped out most of the dinosaurs - but modern birds are descended from them, and the crocodiles and alligators survived (well, VERY similar looking ancestors) /just fine.
None of them could build space stations, nuclear reactors, bunkers, etc. That we know of at least. None of them could grow hydroponic food, or communicate at near light speed to the other side of the planet, or even know what any of that means.
The entire span of time something vaguely resembling human has been around is also 1/10th of that time, but there have been MANY smaller events with large scale extinctions.
I'm not saying it would be a good time, but there is no way every single human is getting wiped out by anything except a nearby Gamma Ray burst/Supernova, surprise planetary collision, or something of similar destructive scale. Things way beyond even our wildest dreams of destructive power.
Even if we launched every nuke every country has ever produced, while civilization as we know it would be done for, humanity would definitely persist. Even if the next war would be fought with clubs instead of nukes.
And even if all the oxygen in the atmosphere turned to cyanide - guess what, we do (technically) know how to deal with that, there are populations of people who are currently protected from that, and while most of humanity would die while we scrambled to adapt, humanity itself would not perish. At least not just from that.
I said good luck exterminating humans.
Hell, not that long ago the most technologically advanced society of the time (Nazi Germany) with a massive and state of the art army tried to exterminate a subset of humans (Jews, Homosexuals, Roma) using massive force, the latest technology, and with a near single minded focus.
And while they did kill a lot of people and perpetrate terrible crimes, they also failed rather completely at the task. Even in areas where they were literally burning everything to the ground.
What makes you think they would have been more successful if they’d also been trying to kill themselves at the same time? Hence impeding their abilities?
And humans are, near as we can tell, the most lethal animals on the planet overall.
Humans survive implausibly terrible situations on the regular, and are currently living in every major ecological niche in the environment except perhaps the very deepest parts of the ocean. Though if we count military submersibles and oil rig diving bells, they too are ‘occupied’.
Would lots of people die, and would it be terrible if an environmental catastrophe occurred? You bet. But killing all humans is even less plausible than killing all ticks, or all roaches. Humans, the most lethal species on the planet, keeps trying and failing to do so.
Short of melting the mantle underneath us anyway. We do have some folks living in a space station. Probably not enough though.
That is why eating too much Tuna will give you mercury poisoning. And the Nazis literally used nerve agents (Zyklon B) among other things. Nasty nerve agents (and most household pesticides) came out of WW2 research largely done by the Nazis (through Bayer, as it turns out).
And the moment anyone got wind of an attempt to try to do such a thing, enough humans would go to ground you’d never actually succeed. Hell, enough are probably already under ground for whatever reason you’d never succeed even if you did manage to catch the whole world by surprise and somehow actually release it all at scale.
The Nazi’s did not fail because they failed to try to kill humans at scale. Frankly, they did it at the largest scale since probably Ghenghis Khan. Certainly in a far more industrial fashion.
The issue is that it’s actually really hard to kill a lot of humans. Something that personally warms the cockles of my very human heart.
Embrace your ancestry of murderous (and loving) hominids, and aim to use it to make things better. Rejecting it is a false path.
Your comment made me notice that the motto was recently removed from the ZH Wikipedia page, so I just restored it - thanks.
70 years is a blip. Compare that to the 6 known close calls where all-out nuclear war was narrowly averted and we’re not looking great. (What is that about once a decade?)
I’d say there’s a 50/50 chance I’ll see a nuclear war in my lifetime. And if it gets out of hand billions of people will die.
I’m not sure the invention of nuclear weapons was a net positive for the world.
It was never an option that nuclear weapons wouldn't be invented. The only question was who will invent and use it first.
The fact that we’ve had conflicts that didn’t go nuclear is even more to my point.
This is also why online commenters thinking that the Ukraine war will not go nuclear are misguided.
Imagine this scenario: the war in Ukraine goes for some more time, Russia starts to have economic problems and is desperate to settle it (without having to compromise), force Ukraine to surrender and demand sanctions to be lifted. So he uses a couple of small tactical nukes along the frontline to cripple Ukrainian forces. Civilian deaths are in tens of thousands.
Ukraine can't respond, but apparently some threat has been declared from US to prevent this scenario - NATO / US launches conventional strikes on Russian military installations within Ukraine. Russia is not able to respond symmetrically, so it drops a tactical nuke on a military base within NATO territory (in Eastern Europe, far from major population center) as a kind of last warning to step back. There are multiple ways how this can go from then on, but there are scenarios ending in a major or all-out nuclear exchange. Without the need for misunderstanding and madmans.
USA Policy is that all nukes are nukes. The idea being that we've never wargamed a scenario where small nukes were used that didn't turn into the treadmill of larger and larger nukes anyway. (Well, they used a 50 ton nuke. We should respond with a 500ton nuke, then they respond with a 10,000 ton nuke. Then we respond with a 100kTon nuke. Then they respond with a 1Mton nuke....)
So the minute a 'Small Nuke' is used, we should just respond with the biggest nuke. No point dilly dallying, if we are all going to die we might as well get it over with faster and in a way that is to our advantage.
--------
The issue is that Russia or China may not see it that way. They might see the small nukes as a different thing that doesn't deserve the response of the larger nuke.
It's not that the world is composed of madmen. It's that the world is composed of people with different points of view.
As such, Russia stockpiles tactical (aka: small) nukes. USA stockpiles strategic (aka: large) nukes.
------
Also note: we stopped making larger nukes for political reasons. There seemed to be no end to the size of 'Large' nukes. The H-Bomb seemed to scale as large as we ever wanted.
A collection of 10x 10 MTon nukes would deal more damage than a single 100MTon nuke anyway. But there's nothing stopping us from making 10x 100Mton nukes.
There's a difference between stated policy, actual policy, and what people will actually do when in a given scenario. For example, the PRC has a stated nuclear no first use policy, but I don't think anyone really believes that if the Indian army were advancing on Beijing that nukes would actually be off the table.
> The idea being that we've never wargamed a scenario where small nukes were used that didn't turn into the treadmill of larger and larger nukes anyway. (Well, they used a 50 ton nuke. We should respond with a 500ton nuke, then they respond with a 10,000 ton nuke. Then we respond with a 100kTon nuke. Then they respond with a 1Mton nuke....)
> So the minute a 'Small Nuke' is used, we should just respond with the biggest nuke. No point dilly dallying, if we are all going to die we might as well get it over with faster and in a way that is to our advantage.
The French nuclear doctrine is actually the exact opposite of this: they have a small nuke (the ASMP-A) that's explicitly designed as a nuclear warning shot to make everyone stop and think for a second before escalating into full scale nuclear war.
In any case the U.S. has stated that it won't do that unless it was a close strike against a very close ally (NATO partner or similar, or their deployed units). Most likely won't reciprocate to a nuclear strike against just Ukraine (provided it were of "limited" scope such as a warning or sequence of tactical shots).
Yeah, it's one of those crazy nuclear doctrines. Another is Launch on Warning, or the idea you can use nukes tactically without escalation.
Now, think about what's the point of publishing such strategic information? Isn't it a huge disadvantage when the enemy can anticipate how you will respond? In reality, you declassify information which you want that your enemy knows. These mentioned policies are meant as a deterrence, they're a bit of "playing madman" captured as a policy, because they're thought to provide an advantage when the enemy believes them.
I believe that the US has war game scenarios where one side uses a nuke, without the situation escalating into an all-out war, but these are extremely sensitive and thus highly secret. You don't want your enemy to believe there is some way where they can get away with using nukes, so in public you only mention the doomsday scenarios.
So, overall, I believe that the actual nuclear doctrine differs from the one published and should be less crazy. Note also that the head of states are not bound by the doctrine.
> The issue is that Russia or China may not see it that way. They might see the small nukes as a different thing that doesn't deserve the response of the larger nuke.
Part of it is again the deterrence aspect. Russia has a clear conventional disadvantage in comparison to US / NATO, so threatening with tactical nukes is a way to deter NATO from directly engaging Russia. It is in Russia's advantage to at least pretend that they think that tactical nukes can be used without major escalation. Just like US wants others to think there's no way to win a nuclear exchange, Russia wants you to think there's no way to win a conventional conflict (because it will soon escalate to nukes).
I'm not saying it means they're completely bullshi*ing, but there can be again a gap between what they think and what position they're trying to project.
> Also note: we stopped making larger nukes for political reasons. There seemed to be no end to the size of 'Large' nukes. The H-Bomb seemed to scale as large as we ever wanted.
Nukes become impractically large / heavy in that size, and as you mention, more numerous smaller nukes do more damage.
10 * 10 Mt is more destructive than 1 * 100 Mt, but 1000 * 100 Kt is much more destructive still.
It may be wishful thinking, because in reality in may drive these countries even closer, especially if using nukes will help Russia achieve its goals.
EDIT: also the Sino-soviet war of 1969
According to Paine, Washington responded with a firm no. Paine didn't specify the targets the Kremlin wanted to nuke: I'm guessing Beijing's new (and consequently small) nuclear stockpile and nuclear production facilities rather than cities.
As a result, conventional war only takes place now on tier 2 (non-nuclear) lands. If there are sabers to be rattled between two tier 1 powers, the rattling will happen on tier 2 land, usually with tier 2 powers being the primary warring parties (proxy war). You also see tier 1 powers making the occasional move but always against tier 2 powers only, e.g. Russia -> Ukraine. If Ukraine had nukes there would be no war in Ukraine. Notice how it’s war IN Ukraine: on tier 2 land. If Ukraine managed to make it a war IN Russia, they’d be nuked to oblivion.
And as for consequences I do not think the West would do anything about that. US won't go on full scale nuclear war with Russia over some insignificant country at the end of the world, that isn't even a NATO member. So the worst outcome of nuking Ukraine for Russia is to get even more economic sanctions, that's all.
The worst outcome of nuking Ukraine for Russia is to get even more economic sanctions, that's all.
The response won't be nuclear, per its stated posture on this. But it's hard to imagine the United States would do basically nothing of substance in response, and it hasn't ruled out a violent conventional response. And at least back in 2022, Biden took care to put this messaging out indicating there would be a "consequential" response, per his interview with Scott Pelley:
"And I wonder, Mr. President, what you would say to him if he is considering using chemical or tactical nuclear weapons?"
"Don't. Don't. Don't. You will change the face of war unlike anything since World War II," Mr. Biden said.
When Pelley asked what the consequences would be if Putin crossed that line, the president wouldn't say.
"You think I would tell you if I knew exactly what it would be? Of course, I'm not gonna tell you. It'll be consequential," Mr. Biden said. "They'll become more of a pariah in the world than they ever have been. And depending on the extent of what they do will determine what response would occur."
US won't go on full scale nuclear war with Russia over some insignificant country at the end of the world
First, while it isn't a NATO partner or of similar status, Ukraine is absolutely not "insignificant" to the at least the current administration in the U.S., and the whole Atlanticist crowd. It would not have stuck its neck out (and expended its political capital) as far as it has on Ukraine's behalf thus far, if that were the case.
And while it won't go nuclear over Ukraine -- it is definitely concerned about its strategic posture and global stability, and the detrimental consequences of giving Russia perceived "pass" to use nukes in any offensive context. And would basically have to make some kind of genuinely serious response. Which some people close to the administration have quietly hinted could be a conventional military response.
Russian military doctrine includes nuclear first strike when there's an "existential threat" to Russia, even if that threat is from conventional military attack. If Russia can use nukes against Ukrainian army entering the Russian territory, then for sure it would use them against NATO troops doing the same.
Also, in such a dire situation, Putin and other Russian leaders are crazy enough to use not just tactical nukes but to start full scale nuclear war without any hope of winning, just to "go with a bang".
One can imagine scenarios of varying effectiveness, but this a separate matter. The point is -- the Biden administration has made it clear to the Russians that there would be a significant response, with strong hints that it would be military in nature and not limited to extra sanctions.
If Russia can use nukes against Ukrainian army entering the Russian territory, then for sure it would use them against NATO troops doing the same.
The response doesn't need to involve NATO troops in Ukraine.
Meanwhile it'd be kind of hard to use nukes against stealth bombers, cruise missiles, drones and SF operations.
Stop repeating your propaganda.
Stop repeating Russian propaganda.
Also if we are here: Do you Russian think, Russian soldiers like to die in meat waves?
Yes, I have a few Ukrainean friends, initially they liked Zelensky, but now they hate him. I also visited Kiev in 2020
Stop repeating western propaganda.
> Do you Russian think, Russian soldiers like to die in meat waves?
I don't think they like or want to die, but SOME of them really want to participate in the war. This applies to both sides.
Not sure if you just tried to assume my nationality by using "Do you Russian think", but you are wrong.
In the end, Russia made their own decision to invade, and the Ukrainians' own decision to resist.
This doesn’t mean the Ukrainians don’t have agency or don’t make their own decisions, but the US and to some extent EU have a huge amount of influence.
By the way, South Korea has already sent hundreds of thousands of artillery shells to Ukraine at the request of the US. They’re now considering sending weapons and this might trigger Russia to send missiles or nuclear tech to North Korea.
Russia is as far as the world knows is just buying weapons from North Korea.
By calling Ukraine proxy you deny its own agency.
It's actually the other way around. North Korea getting new tech is prompting South Korea to respond in turn. That's why Russia and Ukraine became 'proxies' for the Koreans, North or South.
That might change as more nations acquire nuclear weapons. Or maybe the pathway to world peace is to give every country nukes.
Think about a petri dish and how bacteria grow on it until they saturate the entire surface area and then the resources run out, unless half of the bacteria destroy the other half, and then they can survive longer. War is the result of humans fighting over the metaphorical petri dish of land, resources, and also power. From this high level perspective, humans go through periods of growth, tension, war, and then the winner gets to continue surviving, only to repeat the cycle eventually.
Unless we discover infinite energy and resources somehow, we are going to be forced to clash in this way, and the ultimate way to resolve these conflicts is war. That said, we can have long periods without it because we discover new technologies that alleviate these tensions for some time, but I think a great war will be inevitable, the question is how long will our current peace streak last?
People do all of that in modern economies without resorting to physically eliminating each other.
To get millions of individuals to coordinate over long times, mobilizing massive resources etc. in order to exterminate other millions (to grab their resources, subjugated them or whatever) is not "natural" or biological in any sense.
War is a cultural adaptation that worked for aeons because it did not threaten the survival of the species. In a technologically advanced civilization this is no longer assured. Vannevar Bush was simply a century or so ahead of his time. In the arc of human history this is just a blip.
That's very promising since some of the most undesirable characteristics can be bred out within a few generations. Actually that might have been what happened to some isolated cultures (even if nomadic) where they had nothing to fight over for thousands of years.
While other isolated or marching cultures bred out any non-violent tendencies in the opposite way themselves.
Maybe not so promising after all.
> That's very promising since some of the most undesirable characteristics can be bred out within a few generations.
One can hope :)
This has a lot of pathways, tech efficiency, slower population growth, more resource acquisition (asteroid mining etc). It's definitely possible in the large scope, but I suspect there will be periods of spiking demand that still cause lots of short term conflicts.
Famines and mass migration are very likely with climate change going the way it is. Over the course of 100 years I suspect the resource problem will alleviate but until then there will be a lot of conflict.
The only real long term trick is creating larger and larger gulfs between the resource demand and availability, buffers that can withstand the smaller scale changes. But, unfortunately, our current dominant systems of power view buffers like that as either weakness or opportunity that are antithetical to progress.
>the glamour of war is gone
>Peace is indeed in sight if we are wise.
Times have changed. The horrors of war are forgotten or far away.
War is entertainment and many people have their favorite team.
Why should you be wise when warmongering serves your career?
---
Did not know: William James was a member of the American Anti-Imperialist League
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Anti-Imperialist_Leag...
Putting the fate on mankind in this basic premise is the flaw behind the entire building of such bombs in the first place.
Nothing short of idiocy.
The US president who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t even fully understand that he was bombing civilian targets. How could he be so stupid? Do you even have to ask? Think quietly for five minutes about the average intelligence of politicians. About their ability to think calmly and consider facts when making decisions. If you do that you’ll never work on weapon systems again.
It's cheap and easy to pretend to take the moral high ground and refuse to work on weapons when you have nothing at stake.
Tell it to Disney or Adobe
In the novel's far future time of 1990 it's effectively a religious text and all the young men are volunteering to have their limbs removed as a protest against wars that were fought with those limbs.
It gets a bit philosophical, and takes a very 1950s detour into the philosophy of rape, but is overall a very interesting read, sci-fi catch-22 in many ways.
i wonder how much of our current views be seen this way another 50 years from now.
however i think some things will most likely be for certain, like how there are key parties who economically depend on war or planning for it. there have been countless seeds of conflicts sown around the time when this article and the essay it refers to were written. they are still being played out and i won't be surprised if they still influence some things decades from now.
another think i find repeating from the past into the future is the nature of aliances switching over time. predicting one major conflict between two currently strong allies in my bingo card.
our brains remain wired like the tribes that fought for survival. one might continue to find "us vs them" problems when there exists none.
If that was literaly true then there would only ever be a single organizational structure for human society, like bees, ants, chimps or whatever.
When you look at recorded history alone, societies have organized in many different ways and the complexity and variety is only exploding over time.
Organized war has generally been part of societal behavior, but that has been because perceived benefits always exceeded the attributed cost. From the nuclear age forward the calculus has changed. It only gets worse with each new potentially lethal invention.
The reality of a finite planet, where organized, technologically assisted violence can wipe out billions will eventually sink and lazy ideological thinking, vested interest in warmongering etc. will disappear.
Logically, given the trajectory of human development, for war-as-we-know-it to persist we'd have to wipe out modern civilization in a final global war and go back to primitive societies that can afford this "game".
this implies that we have zero agency over what we do. i did not mean that with my remark.
> societies have organized in many different ways and the complexity and variety is only exploding over time.
completely agree. but i think a significant driver of the way we organize ourselves is the underlying approaches to how we made groups to sustain.
from my narrow worldview, it would be too soon to rule out any violence from our future. but overall the trajectory has been for the better imho.
There are plenty of online expat communities. You can find maps, living arrangements, and machine translation all online
In general, the internet has made it so that people are a lot less dependent on their immediate community. So in the future, if the government starts making a bunch of hostile demands and tries to draft people, I'm not sure if that will be as effective as what it once was historically
I'm fairly confident that the progress mentioned in the article is meant as technological and maybe social progress. How would either of those happen without being driven by humans, or another hypothetical technological species?
In terms of war, I don't see how it's debatable. It may not be the only driver but it's definitely a strong one. It may not be progress towards something you (or I) desire but it's progress nonetheless.
A few examples: - Germany rose to power in the 1800s, with a culmination at Sedan in 1870, driven by the humiliation Napoleon inflected on 60 years earlier. In 1870, Germany was a behemoth of technology (especially chemistry) & industry - France won WW1 with such heavy losses that its people said “never again” (they called WW1 the “Great War” or the “last war”). War left an indelible mark (one wished it had left the same mark on the German).
Many such examples. Countries compete and war is a great impetus to modernize the Nation.
Don't like the status quo? Use force to try to change it.
Do like the status quo? Use force to try to keep it that way.
We don't have a stable equiliubrium where no force exists in the system. Many in this thread effectively say "You can do what you like, but I am above using force".
They can say that because their existence is secured by the force of others. There are enough people willing to take by force that if you have no force your stuff and land get taken.
This was how the world worked for all of human history until 1945. The only thing that changed it was nukes, the ultimate force.
In theory you could have a global government with a monopoly on force that enforced no more war. But that still depends on force.
Is there any convincing argument for getting out of this equilibrium?
I played this older computer civilization-like space game. In it, there was an hyperaggressive race that always went to war with everybody. They always died out first.
I think conflict will always exist, but violence? I am not sure. I think it comes down to availability of information. People don't like a*holes. Once world becomes a global village, and almost everyone will run a SW on their phone that keeps tabs on other 8 billion people, starting a war will become nearly impossible.
(Oh and History teaches that)
And yet they manage to get elected to office and hired as CEOs.
If I can go to war with Oklahoma and get a 2nd/3rd car, when I already own a car, why would I risk losing my life? I can't drive 2 cars at once.
You know that guy on five dollar bills? He was involved.
It's always land. This is because land is scarce. You can keep things that aren't scarce without force.
> Is there any convincing argument for getting out of this equilibrium?
The total destruction of artificial scarcity?
The question you want to ask is there ever a point where population's psychical space demands overcome the space required to feed those people? We are nowhere near this limit.
I presume land ownership is according to a power law (~money). Perhaps just need to "depopulate" extremely large land owners?
Not realistically achievable within my kid's lifetimes.
Not sure if our economies can survive that way though.
That said, >100 years in the future it could be possible to make more land with rotating habitats in space, which would functionally eliminate land scarcity.
Can men live without war?
Aren't men fighting over women to begin with?
Can women live with war?
Can war live without women?
Can war live without men having anything to fight over?
The cost of conquering land and managing it yourself must be cheaper than letting the other country manage the land and production process and then importing the goods you want.
The cost of conquering the land can be split into two parts. First, the initial offensive representing capex and the ongoing defense costs against attackers represent opex. If it turns out that the foreign country is both fleecing you on imports and is spending less in defense per acre than you would, if you managed the land, it would be profitable for you to conquer the land and install a defense force that spends more to protect the same plot of land. Since your spending budget is higher per acre, the original country would lose if they tried to recover the territory.
Now consider the opposite scenario. The original country does not fleece you on imports and has a lean army. Then it would not be profitable for you to conquer the land, since you have higher opex and the benefit is insignificant.
Of course none of this stops crazy dictators from attempting world domination, but it can tell you that on average, people should be uninterested in war.
The thing is if as few as 1 in 1000 have ill intentions we'll quickly find ourselves back in a system with a MIC.
Internal strife shows this. In Africa where farms were taken with force with no planning on what happened next the agricultural economy collapsed.
Not the nukes. The Bretton Woods principles. It was not a kumbayah exchange of platitudes. It was an agreement to let things be settled in the free market.
Want more oil from Nigeria? Offer them more money than the other buyers. Want to fish the waters around Tuvalu? Radio them and offer more money. Want Congolese cobalt? Same idea.
This was the brainchild of John Maynard Keynes, not Ayn Rand. It was not a matter of market fetishism. It was based on the sensible idea that the market place is a better way to settle these things than the battlefield, something even a Marxist should be willing to admit.
That could have brought us to a world wide peace in 1945, but only the First World went along with this idea. The Second World rallied around endless revolution and war until we get a worker's paradise. And the Third World tried to stay out altogether. (Reminder: by the original definition, Switzerland was in the Third World).
We had another chance in 1989. And we blew it.
Now we can try again.
> Want more oil from Nigeria? Offer them more money than the other buyers.
How about I offer them some lead to sweeten the deal? As in, take my lower offer or else?
> Want to fish the waters around Tuvalu? Radio them and offer more money.
Or I'll just go fishing because what ever Tuvalu can do to me?
> Want Congolese cobalt? Same idea.
The idea works when the players have no better choice than to play by the market rules, win or lose. At small scale, most people figure it's better to lose the deal than be thrown into jail for being extra convincing - but this is only possible because of a legal and enforcement system that's stronger than any individual or group. At larger, international scale, nukes provide a backstop that keeps everyone in check, by keeping total war absurdly expensive for everyone.
> It was based on the sensible idea that the market place is a better way to settle these things than the battlefield, something even a Marxist should be willing to admit.
The market will tell you that peaceful solution is only better if the war is really expensive. Large power imbalance can easily make war the cheaper option.
In general, any solution that requires people to just go along with it is doomed to failure - someone eventually will figure it's in their benefit to defect. Stable solutions are ones that, by design, align with default human behavior. Like MAD.
Worth also mentioning that there isn't just "war" and "peace", except in international laws. Soldiers on the ground are just the realization of threats of use of force, which themselves are a last-ditch diplomatic technique. There are other such techniques - sanctions, for example, are just as brutal as war. All that is implied in international negotiations, not invoked explicitly unless parties can't reach a reasonable agreement without threats of violence.
The problem with MAD is that it is human nature not to assume that your own destruction will occur. Which ends up meaning that these gentlemen's agreements like open skies and free inspections are more necessary than you'd intuitively assume. MAD only works if the human on the other side truly believes that he will be destroyed.
--
[0] - Which is why I'm worried about recent developments in detecting underwater objects by gravity or whatnot. A critical part of MAD is nuclear SLBM-carrying submarines. Those subs, lurking in the darkness, are what guarantees that no matter how fast and effective your first strike is, you'll still get glassed in retaliation. Being able to detect those subs breaks MAD.
If you can thug your way into Tuvaluan waters, so can anyone. At that point you get into a conventional arms race with everyone else who wants to get into a race for empire in the Pacific.
Much cheaper to agree to buy the fishing rights at auction.
In point of fact, any guarantees against any of the above are typically based on a threat of violence at some level.
Yes, that's history of mankind in a nutshell. That's what nukes put a stop to, at least between the nuclear powers themselves[0].
Ironically, auctions are a non-market solution to the same problem you mention: tragedy of the commons and arms race are fundamentally the same thing; they're solved by having an external entity that's more powerful than the players involved set the rules and enforce them. If you follow the recursion, the buck always stops at threats of violence.
Also worth remembering that for any set of rules you want everyone to follow, the rules tend to benefit the winners, and the losers have a lot of incentive to tear the whole game down.
Ultima ratio regum, and all.
--
[0] - In my books, only nuclear powers are truly sovereign nations; everyone else is at their mercy. For politicians and diplomats, it's not something you bring up in a polite company, but the implied threat and order of things is always there in the background.
How does your thesis explain the countless violent coups orchestrated and death squads funded by the First World, for example Guatemala 1954?
You need a hegemon for peace. Are you familiar with Japanese history? It was not until unification that the wars stopped. Finally there was a hegemon who brought peace by acting as the ultimate arbiter of power. The same thing happened to the "first world". A dominant hegemon emerged in the form of the US. This hegemon set the rules and made it so nobody needed to worry about their neighbors. A hegemon is the only way you can get peace in an environment that is otherwise anarchic.
Beyond the top of the list they have so few viewers, subscribers, likes and followers that it doesn't account for direct family. It means not even journalists bother to watch a video or read a post let alone read the election program. Usually there is a single news article about a person without much if any coverage of the program.
People love to pretend their circular argument is not a fallacy.
Plenty of people would bother to look at other candidates if they got a lot more attention and a lot more votes. Someone will have to start voting for them before that will happen.
This someone is you.
If you refuse to vote for a candidate that has no chance to win they wont have a chance next time. One extra voice or vote is actually a big deal for them.
The search engines are full of articles about "most significant candidates"
If you look at this list here,
https://ballotpedia.org/List_of_registered_2024_presidential...
You cant say "It’s not like any of the choices are great."
Correct would be to say: No one in the whole world has any idea what the other choices are.
In the US there is a special kind of war to even get on the ballot.
https://ballotpedia.org/List_of_registered_2024_presidential...
You can help gather signatures, promote write in candidates.
I just imagined all those countless election programs should be loaded into some LLM, make it question the humans and point them to the text that fits them best.
edit:
Ill do one from the top of the list:
Aaron Avouris Libertarian Party
this him?
https://www.facebook.com/aaronavouris
278 friends
https://www.youtube.com/user/aaronavouris
2 subscribers?
https://www.fec.gov/data/candidate/P00015297/
lol?
edit2:
Because I cant help myself:
vote Afroman
My suspicion is, this is in the genes too, and I feel this is almost the bigger part of the problem.
> My suspicion is, this is in the genes too, and I feel this is almost the bigger part of the problem.
My more specific suspicion is that some of it is that those who can 'go with the flow' are more likely to survive various 'cleansing's over the ages, and perhaps in fact the most 'opportunistic' (i.e. those that are not -quite- megalomania tier) find those opportunities and become that sort of 'old money bottom feeder' type.
I don't see why that necessarily follows. What you describe is the ability to defend oneself: If you become so weak and/or pacifist that you can't even employ violence against attackers, then, yes, someone else will take your lunch.
Whether or not the ability of effective defense also requires the drive to attack others out of greed is, I'd say, still an open question, even though lot's of people have their own preferred answers.
I'd argue, evolution iself shows lots of counterexamples: If the assumption would be true, then only predators should have survived until today. But that's not the case: We have lots of herbivores that can defend themselves against predators but aren't ones themselves.
Whether or not this holds for humans is a different question and the current "experimental evidence" isn't exactly encouraging: Attempts to build a different society were either not strong enough to defend themselves (paris commune, spanish republic) or were strong enough but got corrupted once again by the drive for greed and power (christianity, the soviet union).
Still, on the other hand, I think overall, humanity has become less aggressive and the social value of war has changed: It used to be a virtue in itself (as discussed in the OP) and today is mostly outlawed and, if at all, seen only as a valid tool for self-defense. That could at least make one hopeful, even though enough decidedly nondefensive wars are still being waged in the world.
> My more specific suspicion is that some of it is that those who can 'go with the flow' are more likely to survive various 'cleansing's over the ages, and perhaps in fact the most 'opportunistic' (i.e. those that are not -quite- megalomania tier) find those opportunities and become that sort of 'old money bottom feeder' type.
That's the darwinist explanation. I still think there are some specific psychological mechanisms that facillitate those social dynamics (and I'd be interested to know if they have a neurological/genetic origin - which might have evolved due to the selection dynamics you derscribe)
Some of those I can think of:
- Ingroup/outgroup bias:
That one is well known, basically the tendency to sort the people we interact with into two groups - often by completely arbitrary attributes. Our sense of empathy and compassion for both groups is wildly different.
(In reaction to this tendency, I actually find the cheesy "we're all brothers/humans/citizens of Earth/children of God/etc" calls actually quite smart: In essence, they try to trick the ingroup/outgroup mechanism by just defining everyone as the ingroup. It's a simple strategy, but there is no obvious reason why it shouldn't work.)
- "Groupthink" (when interacting with the ingroup)
The tendency to judge decisions differently if you do them as part of a group or for someone else within that group instead of yourself - and it has the unfortunate tendency that it lets you do far more morally questionable and risky decisions without appearing as morally questionable.
A harmless example would be buying christmas presents: There is lots of stuff that you would never buy for yourself, because it would seem like selfish and frivolous spending - but you readily buy the same thing for someone else as a gift, even if the purchase would objectively be just as unnecessary.
A more serious example would be conquests: Everyone understands that just breaking into the house of another person and taking their stuff for yourself is morally repugnant. But if your group violently takes land, it's suddenly justifyable, because it's for the good of the group and not for any individual person.
(Thanks to ingroup/outgroup bias, both sides of the conflict will experience and judge this in a radically different way: The conquering group will be quick to justify and forgive itself while the group that was being attacked will see it as a grave injustice and breach of moral)
- "Sadomasochism" (when interacting with the outgroup)
I don't mean that in a sexual or deviant sense, but just as the property that knowingly causing harm to others or imagining how someone else is being harmed can sometimes feel good - which really is odd if you think about it: We're well aware of how bad harm feels and usually we avoid it at all costs. So, naively, we would think that there is a simple connection in the brain that says "(things that you know causes harm) -> stay away from". But in reality, the relationship is much more complex and depends on the context and who is experiencing the harm.
- "Leader worship"
One example I have seen of this that came to my mind was when a new pope was elected: Some relatively unknown (outside church circles) and colorless cardinal went in; then it was announced that this person would become the new pope; when he showed in public the next time, millions of people around the world already had made an intense emotional connection to that person and were ready to take their word as law - only by announcement of his new office and without actually knowing him.
I think you can see the same psychological effect in many parasocial relationships, bei it for streamers, celebrities, royalty, politicians or religious gurus.
I feel as if those mechanisms form some of the "environment" in which a "dark triad" person could actually gain and realize power. They also form an environment in which millions of people would be ready to do something as paradoxical and self-destructiva as to wage war.
As soon as you stop striving with all your might, you could be screwed.
There's still too many people who are greedy, hateful, and power-seeking. That kind cannot be allowed to gain power and run amok, that's what war is.
Every decade, as more of those who were alive then have passed, the less force remains of the kind that's needed to prevent running amok at large scale.
The standard today for world leaders now, as we have seen, is much lower than needed. The whole of society has declined in lockstep so it can't be perceived as an outlier. There are now such defective chains of command all over the place where those with false leadership ability are most likely to rise through the ranks. And these are ones who would have never been worthy of consideration after World War II, whether it was the winning or losing side rebuilding afterward. Everybody wanted real prosperity, not that fake leadership thing any more. Now too many people can't tell the difference again.
Everyone who went through World War II knew instinctively they had to keep up even more challenging work (non-military instead) under peacetime every year for the rest of their lives, just to avoid another war. Even though "total world peace" had not 100% been achieved, the effort must strongly be concentrated on avoiding another world-destroying war first and foremost while some of the same efforts will help to top off peace on their own.
>And our striving is by no means hopeless.
Speak for your own generation kind sir, I remember what you're talking about, it's difficult to be so sure any more :(
great way to make bug-controlling supervillains, wouldn't recommend it
How well did that work out?
Someone that actually hired me at a past job, at her next job wound up hiring someone who performed a very intentional set of revenge porn acts on me. [0]
Of course, I dare not speak up on social media, as it would impact my ability to find a job in the future. At 'best' I would be a drama magnet, at worst claims could be made and it would be a mud-slinging fest.
I still have siblings that dislike when I speak up about how at my first high school, a starting basketball player slammed my head into a locker a half dozen times, I was told afterwards that I was not allowed to go to the school nurse, with no regard given for anything I slurred post-concussion... and that my parents didn't do anything about the injustice because it was a catholic school and mum was so catholic she dressed like a nun.
So, I just have to let it sit.
And it all works out, because Carhartt is shit now anyway.
[0] - Which gives me the dubious claim of having someone blocking me on LinkedIn, lmao.
And I am sure that Swiss men don't feel like peace is any threat to their manliness either.
Instead of becoming a president and starting wars of aggression, why not try sports? How about becoming an academic, an expert in some esoteric field, and spend your days acquiring intellectual territory and terrorising your intellectual opponents?
Or use your greed to start a business that somehow ends up benefiting us all even whilst making you richer than all of us.
Being good at athletics requires specific good genetics.
> acquiring intellectual territory
Analytical intellect is not a valued trait in the current society. It will not increase your status in most cases. It actively works against you in certain social structures. Unless your intellectual territory grants you significant material benefits, there's no use out of it.
What society? I see plenty of people in whose eyes intellect is valued. Who cares about the rest?
War is good business. Political power is absolutely something worth being bought/sought. Long as that is the case, the power hungry gonna seek power to wield, and they'll wield it to to their own ends; and realistically, once they're locked in as having it, it isn't for you or anyone else ultimately.
A body like interpol would investigate the entire world, to surveil if anybody is trying to make firearms.
People would make bows and spears, but it would be more difficult to conduct war.
It would not make war and violence impossible, but it would certainly be a better world.
EDIT: lots of pedants:
obviously there would be an joint army answering to an international body whose only mission is to seize and destroy weapons.
firearms includes bombs and other lethal ammunition, of course. Not knives.
I’d say in an ideal future humans wouldn’t want to create weapons.
But in an ideal future…?
But not bombs, knives, chemicals or sources of radiation?
Well.. good luck.
Guns are more likely to be involved in suicides, accidents, and crime than to prevent or stop a crime.
But the system isn't perfect.
Neither will anything else. Ultimately it's your life and you're the only one that's going to have to defend yourself at a random time. If a crime is committed against you then you're just a statistic for the government. Nothing more.
Small scale 'war' should also be avoided. Guns make personal conflicts much more deadly.
Tyrants hate that.
Before firearms the world was mostly ruled by "nobles" (i.e., those who had extorted enough from the peasants to afford weapons and armor, and had the free time for the required years of training).
Now, it isn't. That didn't happen because the "nobles" suddenly decided to turn into nice guys.
Oh, buddy, do I have some news for you
the genie left that bottle more than a hundred years ago
And requiring global controls on 3D printers, CNC machines, any pressure bearing metal, and a range of chemistry and fertilizers.
All this after a door to door search for weapons and ammunition. What army exactly is going to be kicking down my door to confiscate these at gunpoint?
And that body would need firearms.
Firearms aren't the problem. It's states because states use firearms to get resources with which to conduct war. But states are unavoidable because without states we'd have caudillos -- warlords, heads of tiny states that will in due time coalesce into large states, and we're back at square one.
A single world state wouldn't be a solution for the same reason that larger states have at times fallen apart into smaller states: there will be resentments and tyranny. Indeed, a single world state would have to be tyrannical just in order to stay together, and its government would be highly non-representative for natural reasons, namely that having it be highly-representative would mean it having -impractically- hundreds of thousands of representatives.
You're not the first to think that extreme violence could bring peace, but it's an illusion. Huge majorities of humans must know internal peace and have tremendous wisdom for us to enjoy peace on Earth.
A few years of having the greatest power on earth turns 99% of otherwise good men into non-humans. That’s just the fact of life, explained thousands of times throughout history. That’s why you have to elect a new guy every few years, cause the old one starts to lose it. Try removing him if his gang is the only gang with firearms.
Our predicament in relation to our war "habit" is similar to many other challenges we are facing: malignant social patterns that got established before a succession of dramatic technological recolutions are now mutating into existential risks.
It is anybody's guess how things will play out. Cultural evolution is our superpower but we are not exactly in control of it. We still in a transition zone where old moralities feel secure in their "it was ever thus" denial.
It is conceivable that we'll outgrow this phase and survive. A pacified humanity is not utopic, its the only solution to a long term sustainable existence. We thus might work backwards from what we know is the only meaningful endgame and see what it takes to get there.
But we might also implode before we solve that.
What is definitely part of inate individual behavior is competitiveness and occasional propensity for physical violence. The road from this simple trait to organize millions (and now billions) of individuals to apply lethal, technologically assisted force on millions of other individuals is long.
Modern organized war is business, politics, ideology and none of that is biology.
The logic that says that the latter follows from the former is simply not there. Social organization varies enormously in time and space and it takes a lot of "cultural bs" to get to a society that celebrates organized war and considers it inevitable.