Why Men Love War (1984)
This article resonated with me. I was a Marine (no combat), didn&#x27;t like it, but knew and respected the hell out of people who made a career out of it.<p>I learned several lessons in the service, many of which people don&#x27;t want to talk about.<p>It takes only a few armed and motivated men to dominate hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. So disarmament and pacifism is not a workable strategy until the day we start programming people as if they were machines. Somebody has to have the job of being the most violent person in the room.<p>Everybody is violent. We are violent as a species. I think this is the thing that bothers so many people. They&#x27;d rather just turn away, pretend it&#x27;s only others, and so forth. There is a ton of disgust and denial about who we are. We confuse who we aspire to be with our actual state. There may be Ghandis and Jesuses in our midst, but they are an extremely small percentage of the population. We are monkeys that kill things.<p>War is bad because of what is does to all participants, not just because it involves hurting and killing others. War slowly erodes our civilization, making more and more extreme things &quot;normal&quot;. It doesn&#x27;t matter who wins, who loses, or what the cause is. War harms everybody -- perhaps especially the ones who win, who view war as a logical remedy for whatever the next problem that they have. Those who have served avoid war not out of kindness for others, but because of the terrible destruction it will bring on our own society every time it is used.<p>(This, by the way, is another argument for the citizen soldier. Making war a separate profession that most people never experience just makes the self destruction that war does to civilization even worse, by isolating it and keeping it hidden. It also causes all sorts of misunderstandings and prejudices. The volunteer armed forces was a hack in the middle of Vietnam. It worked for a while, but it is having horrible long-term effects. Very bad stuff.)<p>I think the analogy that stuck with me most about this was that war may be the male version of motherhood, that is, the closest we come to being true to our biological selves. Somehow this feels right, although that&#x27;s just intuition on my part.<p>Note: I am as non-violent as a person can get. I&#x27;m not trying to say that any of this is <i>okay</i>, simply that it appears to exist, whether it&#x27;s okay or not.