Minds At War

War is obviously terrible: If your body managed to retain its integrity throughout war, your mind probably did not. Even the toughest souls were torn apart in the face of the agony and death caused by it. It sucks the mutual empathy out of people, letting one quiver in hate for the enemy. Hateful thoughts lead to hateful deeds, bringing about the perpetuation of this vicious cycle.

However, before the bloody machinery grinds its wheels, there is some more innocent force instigating the process: the seeking of control. From controlling something as simple as one’s daily food supply, an aspiring governor is unlikely to be satisfied with that minimal sense of control. In order to secure one’s daily calorie supply, even in times of drought or winter, one also needs to control a city. But what is a city against a nation? Helpless. So, one seeks to control a nation. As the radius of the circles one draws constantly increase, the self-protective reflex unchecked brings countless individuals on collision course – another chapter in the countless books of war is opened up.

War, the antagonistic struggle for survival, has been part of the human condition as far back as our roots reach into the animal kingdom. For over 99 percent of our species’ past, the Hobbesian state of nature in all its brutality prevailed: Small groups of apes at each others’ throats while being exposed to the forces of nature in the wild. Incessant violence and war are the default mode, in which everyone is wrestling with nothing but their extremities as weapons in the attempt to eke out another day of existence.

However, we have come a long way from these unimaginably brutal days in the merciless savannah to fervently fighting out ideological battles in the comment sections of cyberspace. Yet, we have not been relieved of war, although the way in which it is carried out transformed significantly.

Nowadays, war is harder to be recognised as such, because we are used to seeing it carried out in the external world. However, what I want to posit is that we are part of a historic trend that saw the primary domain of war shifting from the external, physiological towards the internal, psychological. Concurrently, this has been paralleled by a development away from the obvious, immediately perceptible mode of war towards the nebulous and perceptually elusive mode of war; a guerilla-sation of warfare.

Of course, technology plays the protagonist’s role in this historical change: Without it, we would still be throwing fists at each other in the darkness. Power instrumentalises its environment according to its incessant need for expansion of its control, forging penetrating weapons out of the ground beneath our feet. The weapons of maximal impact were once in our muscles, moved from weapons in our hands to weapons deployed through machinery: The cannon ball laying fortresses bare soon morphed into a nuclear bomb forcing a whole peoples into submission.

None of the 660,000 inhabitants in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the slightest clue that their existences would be wiped out at a button press a few moments after. With an increasing degree of technical sophistication in the weaponry we send to the battlefield, the source of exercised violence becomes ever less localisable. Our perceptual systems are not fit for sensing the threat of a probable drone strike, even less so for the subtle radicalisation of our opinions through malevolent algorithms.

In the aftermath of the monumentally destructive WW2 culminating in the subjugation of the atom, a “nuclear peace” amongst the greatest powers on the planet ensued. The personal costs of inflicting open war upon other powers were simply too high – so, instead of dying down altogether, operations of war simply continued ever deeper beneath the surface of public awareness. Instead of trying to externally impose power by open, easily visible force – more or less face to face at gunpoint – key players on the geostrategic chessboard increasingly bet on subversive intrusion; controlling psychologically.

The lines between war and propagation of ideology generally become more blurred, as the means of consolidating power moved ever more from the dirty battlegrounds of martial violence towards the metaphysical realm of competing ideas and information. When an all-out attack on another

player becomes untenably costly, more indirect means of undermining the enemy will be searched for. Hacking key nodes in the enemy’s digitalised infrastructure represents a more promising risk- to-reward-ratio than putting ten thousands of soldiers’ lives on the line in a foreign country. The strength of the former move, along with disinformation campaigns and election interferences, lies in the covertness that only war from a distance allows.

We live in an era of unprecedented peace globally since the Second World War, but we should not lull ourselves into a false sense of security. We are the result of a chain of historical contingencies, in which war played a defining role for our destiny. More importantly, though, the autonomous shaping of our destiny by the taming of our proclivities for war, hinges on our understanding of it. If we fail to see war as war, we risk futilely engaging in it in our ignorance.

Since the nature of war shapeshifted into a more parasitic beast, pulling our strings from afar, instead of presenting itself with a bang, we should adjust our perception of what war and power is according to its increasingly subliminal ways. A well-crafted algorithm concealing its subversive nature can be more powerful than any standing army could ever be.