How being ‘future-blind’ guarantees war.
A medical view of the causes, cure and prevention of war.
If you want to examine the medical aspects of warfare, it’s best to start with Hitler, since he was the most homicidal man of the last century.
He organised killing on an industrial scale. Many dismiss him as a one-off psychopath. But for those willing to look more deeply into his causative factors, then the obvious place to start is Alice Miller (who I met). And the obvious place for her was Mein Kampf, where, in chapter 2, Hitler describes his revulsion at his own upbringing. (I reprint the relevant pages in my recent book.)
It is not easy to keep a cool clinical head when hot emotions drive people to violence or to war – but again, studying murderers over a 5 year period yielded interesting insights. And the striking feature of most relevance here, is the consistent finding among all those I examined – they had no interest in the future. Their past had always been implacably awful for them, so the chances of it improving were dismissed out of hand. They no longer cared about the consequences of their actions – whatever impact they might be about to impose, simply didn’t register. A “conscience” is only available to those who retain the capacity to plan ahead – something Hitler pretended to do, but couldn’t.
With this in mind, it is worth asking what futures do today’s various belligerents envisage? Where is the gain for Putin in invading Ukraine? Or for Netanyahu in doing the same to Gaza? Or any other belligerent you care to name. Or are they similarly ‘future-blind’? (And could it be for the same reason? – one I explore at length – in my book.)
General Petraeus was interesting, on TV recently. He said he had asked precisely this question before Bush invaded Baghdad – what do we do next? “We’ll decide that when we get there” was the reply – a reply he now dismisses, as clearly wrong. He was a lower general at the time. But he had also put his finger on a crucial origin of warfare – what do you (or warmongers) envisage for the future?
Listen carefully to what passes today, for future planning. It’s on a par with “We’ll decide that when we get there”. A myopia which is likely to be as wrong, and as costly, now, as it was in Iraq.
“We’ll win”. “We’ll wipe out the enemy” – the latter being alleged “Nazis” in Ukraine, or Hamas in Gaza.
Taking Petraeus’s advice, wind forward a year or two, and what do you see? The land in a neighbouring country flattened, turned to rubble, with no useful economy or wealth remaining. The people there, traumatised in the extreme, full of angry emotions, and hate — just waiting for the chance for their revenge — the opposite of benign future planning.
War is an expensive way of making things worse. Just look at what happened the last time Israel went to war — their economy sank — all those “workers” leaving the sensible economy, and sitting around being unproductive, if not destructive. Talk about a politically induced recession. Russia’s economy is already suffering today, the bank rate there, is soaring. War is a costly way of ensuring negative futures. It needs responsible citizens everywhere, who can see this, to actively oppose it. It is ‘future-blindness’ with a vengeance. “We didn’t see it coming” — could it be that they (and we) chose not to look?
Wind back 75 years for an almost identical replica – and the question of the future was then answered in a radically different way. ‘Future-blindness’ was cured at source. In fact, the answer after World War II (WWII) was diametrically opposed to those we hear today – have we learnt nothing?
Post WWII, the Marshall Plan (see note below) did the opposite to the Versailles Treaty – it did NOT exact crippling reparations, (aka revenge) but, on the contrary, invested heavily in Germany and in us – giving Europe decades of peaceful coexistence. What are the chances for either, in the Middle East, or in Eastern Europe today?
Strikingly, a French General is reported to have commented on the Versailles Treaty at the time, that it was too stringent, too harsh, and that within 20 years that it would lead again to war, which it did. What’s to prevent precisely the same happening, following our two wars today, in Ukraine and Gaza? Planning ahead is something psychopaths cannot do – how can our belligerent politicians escape similar censure?
There is a remedy for war, indeed an explanation of it, which I expound at length in my book. But the upshot is learning how we cope with anti-social outbursts in our very own local and national societies. We have judges, we have legislators, we have security forces, aka police, who, when they can build up enough trust (which is not invariable), can prevent the equivalent of mini-wars. Emotions can run high. People can get seriously agitated, and will be tempted to use force and coercion to bolster their weak position – so constraints must be agreed in any stable peaceable society. Bullies are invariably cowards, they are powered by fear, which needs exposing and thereafter ventilating — so it can safely vaporise.
In my book, I call such peace-ensuring services the equivalent of the “adult-in-the-room”. This is something that can only work by consent which it must do explicitly, and never by coercion. And, since this is precisely what they have been set up to do, then this is something that we, as global citizens, must overcome all our several differences, and then do all we can, for.
Well?
– Bob
PS for those too young to recall the Marshall Plan – here’s a clip –
Did the Marshall Plan succeed?
In the end, a total of $13.6 billion (equivalent to $88 billion in 1997 money; = ~ $166bn today) was appropriated to the plan. The Marshall Plan was a success. By 1950, [only 2 years later], the participating countries had returned to, or exceeded, their prewar production levels.
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Professor Bob Johnson, DSc(hon), MRCPsych, MRCGP, PhD(med computing), MA (Psychol), MBCS, DPM, MRCS, School of Psychology, University of Bolton, BL3 5AB, UK. GMC num. 0400150 https://drbobjohnson.substack.com/
How Verbal Physiotherapy works - link to ebook - https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/892956