Thoughts on warfare
From someone fighting in a war
I am sharing some thoughts I put together privately on the nature of war and warfare. These should be considered tentative beliefs, and open to feedback and modification.
Peace only comes through recognising the spiritual aspect of warfare, and the role of genetics in the creation of psychopaths and a "pathocracy". All war is deception, and our ego is what blinds us to the ruthless cunning of deceivers. Maybe rather than a "high tech" future as commonly envisioned, we need a "high empathy" or "high ethics" one? Adding more mechanisms and machinery only amplifies the crisis of a lack of conscience, and one that is deeply wired into society at the genome level.
There are some very difficult matters of what "defence" truly is and how it is framed. The total absence of violence would paradoxically create an extremely fragile society where the first predator would run amok, and potentially wipe out the human species "dodo style".
There are "systems of systems" of stressors, and it seems to me that "success" in defence is the constant acquisition of learning and genetic/cultural adaptivity to these stressors, but in a way that avoid ruinous outcomes. In a very strange sense, "war is peace" as a kind of long-run equilibrium — but only to the extent that it is very limited (enough to sustain learning) and non-terminal at a civilisation level.
Imagine if investigators into air crashes had zero practical experience because disasters became so rare; this would then “arm a hazard” of some kind of correlated and cascading failure due to misguided attempts to fix problems resulting from “unconscious incompetence” at foreseeing the effects of interventions. The first air crash would have novice investigators making rookie errors, and they likely would cause more harm than good. Conversely, too many crashes at once would overwhelm the capacity and capability of even the experienced, and would contribute no learning to future aviation safety.
Defence may have a similar property; better to have smaller and frequent survivable skirmishes than one massive cataclysmic conflict? The trade-offs and constraints of violence exist, and wishing the urge to predate others away is foolish. As a computer scientist I am always looking for “invariants” — things that are “conserved” under change. What does defence actually conserve?
My tentative answer is that it protects both the genetics and culture of “gentle-men”; those who are caring, empathetic, and nurturing — rather than apex predator psychopaths who can only operate in the context of parasitic relationships to ordinary humans. This is distinct from individual rights, and “the realm” in which they live. In a very limited sense the eugenics people focus on interesting questions, just they have psychopathic values and thus criminal answers.
Why is “love” a taboo word in the context of the military-industrial-academic complex, but brotherly love a common subject of the poems of soldiers? This disconnect tells us something important, I feel, as the loving thing to do is to defend the weak from predation using force. Yet the professionalisation of weaponry use has denuded the general population of experience and accountability for the exercise of lethal power. Maybe the American ideal of an armed populace leads to a safer level of “tolerable trigger trouble”? This is the kind of antifragile system that promotes longevity of those who are most responsible and reasonable.
I am personally watching the novel bio-information attack of the “scamdemic” and how it evades people by working around their psychological, biological, and spiritual defences. The fallout is so awful because people have adopted leaders and rules in place of what you describe as our God-given or inalienable rights and responsibilities (aka natural law, not to be confused with Common Law). Thankfully the Internet is allowing us to bypass the mind control bombardment that broadcasting enables, and social media has given every citizen their own “memetic machine gun”.
We have to learn how anything and everything can be weaponised; how the ego construct of the public facilitates attack (in either direction) by subversion and infiltration; and how to respond at a fundamentally different level as a result of Satanic methods having been applied to us.