Department of War?

In 1947, B.F. Skinner conducted a simple experiment with pigeons. Grain was released into a food tray at timed intervals, independent of the birds’ behavior. Yet the pigeons developed elaborate rituals: some turned three times, others bobbed their heads or flapped their wings. They came to believe that their peculiar movements summoned the reward. The experiment revealed a pattern of magical thinking, the misattribution of cause and effect when coincidence masquerades as causality.

This same error is common in human language and politics. Words become talismans, their rearrangement confused with transformation. To rename the U.S. Department of Defense as the Department of War is not to alter its function but to invoke an imagined clarity. It is language applied as incantation, the belief that description reshapes reality. The system itself, with its entrenched incentives and inertia, continues unaffected.

Politics thrives on this kind of superstition. A leader’s gestures, slogans, or renamings are received as causal forces, as if ritual alone could direct outcomes. The presidency of Donald Trump exemplifies this. His elevation did not arise from reasoned governance but from the projection of a ritual performance mistaken for power. Those who supported him either embraced this illusion knowingly, out of cynicism, or unthinkingly, out of credulity. And the minority who remained lucid, who might have spoken against the tide, found their voices nullified. Under a tyrant, the rituals of meaning belong only to him, and the rest are trapped in the superstition of the system.