War, Money and the (Endless) Reproduction of Evil

War, money and wickedness have enjoyed a long and mutually profitable relationship. Conflict concentrates power, power directs resources, and the resulting dependencies establish conditions through which further conflict becomes increasingly difficult to avoid. But the deeper problem is not simply greed, nor the moral deficiencies of particular individuals. It is the development of interdependent economic, political, technological and psychological relationships whose continuity becomes dependent upon the insecurity they ostensibly exist to resolve.

Within these relationships, threat sustains authority, insecurity justifies expenditure, and expenditure establishes capabilities and institutions whose continued existence becomes entangled with the anticipation of further threats. This is not simply an indictment of the military-industrial complex. It too inhabits the circumstances it helps reproduce. Genuine threats demand genuine defensive capabilities, and abandoning those capabilities does not make the threats disappear. Every response changes the conditions confronting others, whose responses subsequently change our own. Even restraint has consequences. Profiting deliberately from destruction deserves condemnation, but identifying villains does not explain why the relationships persist. There is money in keeping the problem alive, including for people who would genuinely prefer it to disappear. Meanwhile, the costs of sustaining security are distributed unevenly, and the insecurities experienced by those bearing them acquire political consequences of their own.

These consequences enter everyday life through economic insecurity, declining public services, institutional exclusion and unequal access to power. They produce genuine material grievances, not imaginary injuries awaiting correction by enlightened administrators. The same arrangements that concentrate resources and authority also distribute vulnerability, shaping how people experience their circumstances and what they expect from those promising relief. Populist movements draw upon these experiences, mobilising legitimate dissatisfaction while directing it towards enemies whose defeat leaves the underlying dependencies intact, or strengthens them. Those with the most to lose can become the most committed participants in arrangements that diminish their own security.

The resulting pattern is neurotic in a systemic rather than clinical sense. A strategy that once provided security, coherence or relief persists as circumstances change, even when its original function has become redundant or destructive. Its continued application alters the conditions it encounters, generating consequences that appear to confirm its necessity. The distinction between historical success and present consequence becomes obscured by the recurrence of the response itself. Failure intensifies grievance, grievance strengthens allegiance, and allegiance sustains further interventions that reproduce the original insecurity. Political identity, material experience and collective expectation become mutually reinforcing, even when their continued reproduction works against the interests of those involved. The grievances remain real throughout, and their persistence supplies much of the energy sustaining the movement. The attempted remedy becomes part of the conditions that continually seem to require it.

These recurring relationships oscillate without requiring regular cycles or predictable periods. Economic insecurity, institutional deterioration, political resentment and technological acceleration continually alter the conditions under which populations align. In highly entropic communicative environments, where information circulates rapidly and meanings are continually recombined, collective identities become simultaneously volatile and susceptible to intense synchronisation. The Kuramoto model of coupled oscillators illustrates how interacting systems with different natural frequencies develop collective coherence through their coupling (Breakspear, Heitmann and Daffertshofer, 2010). Its order parameter measures the degree of phase alignment, not the value, intelligence or consequences of that alignment.

Human societies are considerably more complicated, but recurrent communication, emotional reinforcement and shared antagonism can entrain behaviour across enormous populations. The distinctions between ourselves and others have deep histories in human survival, cooperation and competition. They helped sustain communities under conditions of uncertainty, yet their persistence within technologically interconnected societies produces consequences extending far beyond those earlier circumstances. Technologies that connect populations also accelerate the circulation of fear, certainty and antagonism. The resulting patterns are sustained not simply by what is communicated, but by repetition, timing, expectation and the responses they elicit. Increasing collective coherence does not necessarily produce greater understanding. A civilisation can synchronise its stupidity with extraordinary technical sophistication.

Under particular historical conditions, these tendencies acquire recognisable political forms. Fascism is one expression of a particularly destructive constellation of relationships in which insecurity, identity and authority reinforce one another. Its emergence does not require everyone to become a committed fascist, although enthusiasts invariably materialise when conditions become favourable. Nor does history need to repeat itself precisely. These are stochastic processes: particular outcomes remain uncertain even when the relationships favouring their emergence are recognisable. We inhabit these relationships at different distances and across different durations, inheriting consequences we did not choose while participating in the circumstances that sustain them. Our traumatic history is neither an indictment of humanity nor a destiny we are obliged to fulfil.

That history persists within the institutions, technologies and identities through which we sustain ourselves. Peace is not the elimination of difference, disagreement or uncertainty. It is the continuing capacity to sustain those differences without repeatedly converting them into existential threats. This requires intellectual independence, institutional restraint, technological responsibility and the willingness to examine arrangements upon which our own security depends. Recognition alone does not resolve destructive relationships, but without recognition our attempts to escape them become further expressions of their continuity. The ancient distinction between ourselves and others can remain a waypoint in human development, or become the destination towards which our technologies accelerate us. We cannot escape these relationships by denying them. We can change them by understanding how we participate in their reproduction. The alternative is to become increasingly capable of destroying one another, and increasingly convinced that doing so is necessary.

References

Breakspear, M., Heitmann, S. and Daffertshofer, A. (2010) ‘Generative models of cortical oscillations: neurobiological implications of the Kuramoto model’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 4, article 190. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2010.00190.