Workshop 8

HOW TO RESTRAIN THE NATIONS' LEADERS IN LEADING THEIR PEOPLE TO WARS?

COLLECTIVE INSANITY IN CONFLICT AND WAR

 

"Life in the habit of war corrupted the normal desire of the human heart, and as a result the effect of every humane and sane act is lost. An act of this kind only arouses suspicions and raises the anger of people who see it as a manifestation of betrayal of the homeland".                    —Albert Einstein, in time of WW1

 

PREFACE

This chapter proposes the establishment of a global mechanism that will force parties in armed conflicts to negotiate directly with each other. Writing it all along, I was preoccupied with the task of minimizing the expected reactions of readers, who would write this off as unrealistic utopian wishful thinking. Conventionally minded persons, I surmise, will immediately respond as always when presented with a new idea that aims to improve something in the world they take for granted and accept as normal. Their instinctive reaction will be that if it were possible, an authority on the subject would have come out with it before. Most academics, I am afraid, would likely respond, “If that idea were good, I’d have thought of it myself. Therefore, it should not be good. If it were good, I would have known about it already from solid academic sources.” 

You will have to see for yourself how realistic my proposition is. I believe it is not utopian because making it work does not require people to be different or better. The proposition is for you to pass on in the direction of world leaders and for these leaders, as they are for better or worse, to implement. To the best of my understanding of politically minded readers and politicians, this proposition is not something beyond their level of acceptance.

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In April 2022, two months into the Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine, Antonio Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), met with Putin in Moscow and then with Zelensky in Kyiv. Afterward, he told journalists, among other things, “War today is a crime.” However, there were no reports that in his face-to-face meeting with both leaders, he had told them, “War today is a crime,” and suggested that they start talking with each other to settle their differences instead of, or even alongside with, fighting the war. Why? Why didn’t he? Since he publicly stated that war was a crime in his view, why had nobody asked him that question? Why did he not say it straight to Putin and Zelensky?

 Your guess is as good as mine. If you ever have the opportunity, ask him or someone who has been in similar situations. Perhaps he would answer that the UN Charter does not allow the Secretary-General to intervene with heads of state in such matters. I would not accept that as a good excuse. After the meeting had officially ended, he could still smile his diplomatic smile, even touch Putin’s shoulder, and say something like, “Mr. Putin, allow me to tell you something outside of my role as UN Secretary-General, man to man. Why won’t you just call the Ukrainians to talk about resolving the problems between you? Maybe they will agree. You shall immediately gain many points in world public opinion. What could you possibly lose by trying?”

However, the UN Secretary-General did not ask Putin and Zelenski why they would not try to talk matters over between them. Nobody, as far as I know, wondered why he did not. As a preferable means to achieve one’s goals in conflict, war is considered perfectly normal everywhere. Therefore, I see no other possibility than to conclude that people who regard war as the worst thing that could happen to them, who value and desire just and lasting peace and yet refuse to resolve their conflicts as humans by communication rather than by lethal force as animals, are an apparent and most grave case of Collective Insanity.

Part of the explanation for why war is currently viewed as the natural human condition is the popular folksy notion of human nature. People who have never seriously thought about what their own nature is easily agree with the ancient Romans that homo homini lopus est—men to men are wolves. They have the entire history behind them to support their view. In contrast, social science assures us not only that nothing in our nature prevents us a priori from solving our conflicts through means other than mutual killing but also that human nature in conflict is nothing like animal nature. To be willing to fight and kill, normal people must believe that they are doing the right thing. They must believe that their war is not a crime and must have justification for it. I too have the entire history behind me to prove this. The “normal desire of the human heart” is not that of predators; if they fight, they must believe they have a good reason for it, a justification.

Homo homini lupus est is rubbish. The strongest argument for this assertion is your own nature. Check with yourself and your circle if your attitude and behavior in conflict is determined by your predatory or fight-or-flight instinct or your moral belief that you are right, that others wronged you. If you fight a war as a member of your party, family, clan, nation, or religion—you know you are justified in fighting for self-defense or whatever with God and/or justice on your side.

I have one more bit of explanation as to why the call to resolve sociopolitical conflicts by talking instead of or alongside fighting has not come many wars ago from academic voices of political science. Mainstream social science has been faithful to the methodological dogma that conflicts and wars have abstract causes. Aldous Huxley’s “intellectual sins,” quoted earlier, “indulging instead in oversimplification, overgeneralization, and overabstraction,” applies to academic social science. For many years, psychology seemed irrelevant to political science, which searched “the broad social context”: economic interests, imperialism, natural resources, colonialism, classes, cultural reasons, religion, geopolitical processes, you name it. No matter how you name it, all these words stood for living people who were fighting, killing, and being killed in wars.

Mainstream political science remains concerned with the indirect causes of wars. The direct causes of wars, though, are people. The real causes of wars are warriors: those who fight, those who give them the orders, and those who support them. They believe in their causes. They shoot and bomb, kill and injure, and even volunteer to commit suicide attacks for their good causes, like the perpetrators of 9/11. And only living people—women, men, and children—suffer and get killed; interests and social processes seem immortal. Without addressing the direct causes, political science has been like medicine before the discovery of germs and viruses, which are the direct causes of contagious epidemics.   

People like Mr. Antonio Guterres, you, and me, who agree that war is a crime but do not demand that warring parties try to resolve their conflict without resorting to mutual mass killing and destruction, are part of the problem. If you feel the need to understand more fully and exactly why, my advice would be to first ask yourself why you have not demanded that. Whatever the reason, once you become aware of it, I do not see any good reason to be against the possibility that someone puts that idea, “in conflict, talk with your enemy,” on the table of Mr. Guterres and other world leaders, public opinion leaders, mass media voices, and the rest of us. 

It could look like this: Within the UN, a professional body of mediation experts will be responsible for inviting representatives of nations in conflict and parties in armed civil conflicts to the negotiation table. Those that refuse to negotiate with their enemies will be subjected to sanctions by the UN. 

I leave it to you to imagine the effect it will have. In my country, the official stand for many decades now has been “We shall never talk with terrorists who wish to annihilate us.” However, I am pretty sure Israel will not disobey the UN’s regular practice of negotiating with its enemies. In the short run, it would be much nicer to live in a country where not all that people are informed about, talk about, or think about are threats, battles, war crimes, casualties, and “their” bestial viciousness and how dangerous it is for our very survival. Besides our regular diet of outrageous horrors, we will be informed about leaks to the press from negotiations between our teams of representatives and the teams of Palestinians, PLO, Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria, Iran, and others.

Social science will offer its support. It knows that warring parties dehumanize each other and that direct meeting works for the humanization of the enemy, reducing prejudice, fear, and hatred. Social science practitioners will rush to offer their services as facilitators and mediators. Even if nothing results from these negotiations, their very existence will be a refreshing change. We will know that we are living in a world in which state leaders, in conflict with other state leaders, are not allowed by the international community to wage war on people without at least trying to resolve their problems with their enemies like human beings. In no time, conventional wisdom will get used to it and regard such an arrangement not only as reasonable but as natural.  

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