It is important not to be romanticise war. Most people my age (I was born in 1980) had at least one grandfather who fought in World War II. When I was a child, I relished my grandfather telling me “war stories” of his time in Libya, Greece and Italy. But these were obviously highly sanitised. Once, when I was about 16 and we were watching a very realistic war film about the Normandy Landings, I looked over to him. His eyes were lachrymose and he was completely hypnotised by it. Obviously, there was a terrible side to the War which he had never discussed with me.
So, I do not say it lightly when I repeat the cliché that “What we need is a good war.” We need a good war because evolutionary psychology — in essence, the study of humans as an advanced form of ape with in-built adaptive drives — predicts that we need a good war. We are, I suggest, adapted to have a serious war every one hundred years or so. If we don’t have one, then we reach the situation that the West has now reached: polarisation, ethno-suicide, supreme decadence (including an invincibility complex with regard to war), maladaptive behaviour, and a general sense of dysphoria and ennui.
Before looking at the broader evolutionary mechanisms behind why we are adapted to have a massive war every century, let us look at what a war achieves.
In the absence of harsh selection pressures to be group-oriented, we can expect people to deviate more and more from the evolutionarily adaptive norm which, as I have shown in my book Woke Eugenics: How Social Justice is a Mask for Social Darwinism, is to be conservative and traditionally religious: These strongly genetic traits are correlated with strongly genetic mental and physical health. As this deviation increases, you will get a society that is more and more genetically and mentally diverse, more and more polarised and, generally, less and less cooperative. After a certain tipping point, the deviants may even hijack the culture — as they now have — and push people along a maladaptive roadmap of life. A war forces us to unite or die, it pushes us down Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it makes us less concerned about decadent things (like feelings and being validated); it halts the descent into insanity.
It is also an example of mortality salience; of closeness to death. This is our “evolutionary match” — we are adapted to an ecology where child mortality was as high as 50% — so death induces our instincts, which tend to be adaptive. These include religiosity, which gives us a sense of eternal meaning and tends to sanctify that which is adaptive as the will of God, and group-orientation, essentially conservatism. In other words, we become higher in positive and negative ethnocentrism when we are exposed to mortality. It also increases our desire to have children; hence the documented post-War baby-booms. A war reverses the slide towards leftism which seems to be inevitable, as conservatives are concerned with all 5 moral foundations — in-group loyalty, obedience to authority and sanctity (group-oriented) and equality and harm avoidance (individually-oriented) — whereas the left only care about the individually-oriented ones. This asymmetric empathy means that conservatives continuously cede ground to liberals. A war means that balance is restored.
According to the book Fourth Turning, such a massive war and economic collapse seems to happen every four generations; approximately every eighty years. It may be that there is a sense in which mortality salience remains vivid for as long as there is a generation alive that knew serious mortality salience: they pass on stories about it and behave in response to it. Once this generation dies out — as has the War generation in the West — then mortality salience has completely collapsed. Thus, the reset it required or we are overwhelmed by decadence and dysphoria
That reset should’ve occurred in about 2007, with the economic collapse akin to that of 1929. But we were so wealthy, our resources so abundant, that were able to avoid, or at least postpone, the normal consequences of such a massive economic bust. Multiple lines of research indicate that a war should’ve occurred at this point. Peter Turchin’s 2016 book, Ages of Discord, predicts, based on various markers such as “elite-over-promotion” (too many qualified people for too few places), that there should have been a war around 2020. Finnish scholar Jani Miettinen has advanced a model whereby humans, like animals, change in the average presence of certain hormones — such as testosterone and oxytocin — across four generations. This renders them slightly different in behaviour and size across generations, making them less easily predictable from the perspective of predator and prey, meaning the process is adaptive. When the high testosterone generation gets into power, we have a collapse, a war and a reset. This should already have taken place but it hasn’t, presumably due to our unprecedented resources.
This has two consequences: runaway individualism, until men can be women because they say they are and you can’t disagree as it might hurt their feelings, and a growing portion of the population who have a sense that everything is meaningless. And, of course, society is increasingly polarised and unpleasant.
Hence, it may be that, at the group level, humans are literally evolved to have a massive war every four generations. It is this that keeps them group-oriented, and thus adaptive (as computer-models show that ethnocentric groups defeat and dominate their rivals on average), across time. The attendant economic collapse, under harsher conditions, is also likely to ensure genetic health across time. Over four generations without war, genetic mutations will have accrued, with genetic poor health being associated with liberalism. With a collapse into harsher conditions, these mutants will be purged and group mental and physical health will be restored.
Generation Z do not have grandfathers who fought in a War. When they were born, the country was run by Boomers who had never known any serious mortality salience. This wouldn’t have mattered if the economy had collapsed in 2007, resulting in war a decade later. But it didn’t. This is why we have reached the dysphoria and insanity that we have. The children need some new war stories and for that we need a new war.
