We do not need war

It is something of the core nature of narrative human consciousness that reflexively defines itself by and through difference and ontological separation from an Other or World that we perceive and process information in ways that obscure the bigger picture of competition, adversarialism and war. That gestalt information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) system of interpersonal (as much as intertribal) differences we inhabit optimally primes itself for self-propagation through difference and dissonance. This is a discontinuity that we fail to acknowledge and for this reason it is a rock that we endlessly torture ourselves upon. It is a collective failure of insight and intellect that leads us all into conflict and an elusive peace, like freedom, remains distant because few of us are willing or able to acquiesce to the dissolution of self during life that might keep this mechanical logic of death and catastrophe at bay.

We do not actually need war anymore. It was part of the integrated matrix of tribal, cultural and cognitive development (as adaptive evolution) that we have undergone over the last ten-or-so thousand years of accelerating, convergent technological civilisation. War may have been inevitable in many ways as our species came into conflict over resources and then began to fight over the symbolic ideological abstractions that flowed like raging rivers from our collective creative yet insecure social minds. What we often fail to notice is that conflict and mechanised, industrialised warfare has become its own self-propagating force and abstract information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) reality in this world and now represents a terrible game that we have all been playing for so long, that infuses our worlds with meaning and substance, that we do not recognise that having arrived in the 21st Century, we – to repeat – do not actually need war anymore, it needs us. It’s well past time to cut that cord of dependency, I’d say; time to grow the hell up.