What drives people to war and how does it change them?

[Ryan_m_b]

@atty: not sure I remember anything about that, but I agree with Ryan. We make the infrastructure we live in nowadays and we don't do it with the fractal redundancy that nature does. So instead, we have what Ryan calls "nodes" in our infrastructure.

It is truly quite worrying. A recent example is how the floods in the far east resulted in all the stores around me to cancel all deals on computer products. Apparently because amongst the floods some factories and warehouses that supply a significant fraction of the worlds hard drives were ruined and there may be a supply problem.

Such a network might be highly efficient but it makes us vulnerable, I'd hate to think what would happen if a number of key locations around the world were disrupted because of man-made or natural disasters and large industries started to unravel (the by-the-skin-of-our-teeth food distribution we run in the first world seems very vulnerable). We wouldn't be able to restructure over night or even in a short time.

 

[Pythagorean]

We have a researcher here, David Newman, that looks at the US power grid as a complex system (he worked on the monumental east coast power failure) and that's essentially the problem. Too many nodes in the current power distribution scheme.

 

[Bobbywhy]

Humans are not the only social animals that wage war. Here are two excerpts from the article "Ants & the Art of War" by Mark W. Moffett in Scientific American magazine, December, 2011:

“Scientists have long known that certain kinds of ants (and termites) form tight-knit societies with members numbering in the millions and that these insects engage in complex behaviors. Such practices include traffic management, public health efforts, crop domestication and, perhaps most intriguingly, warfare: the concentrated engagement of group against group in which both sides risk wholesale destruction. Indeed, in these respects and others, we modern humans more closely resemble ants than our closest living relatives, the apes, which live in far smaller societies. Only recently, however, have researchers of ants begun to appreciate just how closely the war strategies of ants mirror our own. It turns out that for ants, as for humans, warfare involves an astonishing array of tactical choices about methods of attack and strategic decisions about when or where to wage war.”

“Viewed from the ant perspective, the human practice of conscripting healthy youngsters might seem senseless. But anthropologists have found some evidence that, at least in a few cultures, successful human warriors tend to have more offspring. A reproductive edge might make combat worth the personal risk for people in their prime – an advantage unattainable by ant workers, which do not reproduce.”

 

[Ryan_m_b]

Talking about ants makes me think of the Argentinian ant. It's rapidly spreading across Europe because instead of fighting each other they cooperate, making a large supercolony.

 

[LaurieAG]

If you look at the Instinct chapter in Charles Darwins 'The Origin of Species' you will find nearly 4 pages on ants. It's an interesting perspective with several major differences, he observed soldier ants etc that he theorized were neuters because he argued that there would be too much variation in the community if the soldiers were fertile (which was not the case in any individual ant community where all of each class were physically identical). He also covered ant slavery in another chapter.

 

[mheslep]

... or stock market crash to take out civilization?

The fact that we are fast becoming a global economy with so many critical failure nodes would suggest it is. I find it hard to imagine that at any other point throughout history would there have been a time where disasters both man made and natural had such an effect across the globe.

Can you imagine a stock market crash that would "take out civilization"? Really? Does this mean you equate economic depressions with the end of civilization, an actual return to barbarism?

 

[mheslep]

We have a researcher here, David Newman, that looks at the US power grid as a complex system (he worked on the monumental east coast power failure) and that's essentially the problem. Too many nodes in the current power distribution scheme.

Is that the same David Newman who made a career out of Y2K "dire consequences" at Columbia?
http://www.summitconnects.com/Summit_Magazine/magazine_contents/VOLUME3.HTM

 

[Pythagorean]

Is that the same David Newman who made a career out of Y2K "dire consequences" at Columbia?
http://www.summitconnects.com/Summit_Magazine/magazine_contents/VOLUME3.HTM

Definitely not

 

[LaurieAG]

Can you imagine a stock market crash that would "take out civilization"? Really? Does this mean you equate economic depressions with the end of civilization, an actual return to barbarism?

If banning the more toxic aspects of derivatives and severely regulating what's left to return market stability is an actual return to barbarism then most people would be all for it. The problem is equating the era of unregulated derivatives to some sort of civilisation, maybe a new way of life for those who benefit but it is immoral that the rest of us barbarians cannot share in the benefits of this new civilisation even though we pay for it.

 

[PatrickPowers]

I was just reading about Remembrance day on Wiki and saw the figure that nearly 90 million people were killed in WWII and WWI... and I just can't understand how such things are possible.

How is it that people are tricked into throwing their lives away, or slaughtering their fellow man for the sake of some politician's political goals? That's what all war comes down to, money and politics, and I don't understand why people are so eager to die and kill so some guy in a suit in the capitol can profit from it all...

There must be something fundamental about the human psyche that draws men to battle, and somewhere along the lines they go from normal people to monsters. Can someone explain?

Sure.

For a long time war was the best way to get rich quick. Make weapons, learn how to use them. March in, steal everything you can, then threaten to do it again unless they pay you every year. As recently as 1810 or so the French government was funded largely by loot and tribute. Nations were on the gold standard, so if you conquered a country you forced them to give you all of their gold. The political things were usually thin excuses. People generally went to war to get rich.

There were exceptions. World War I happened for no particular reason other than tradition and resentments left over from previous wars. Everyone thought that it was inevitable, so it was.

This continued until modern weapons made war too expensive, ending with nuclear weapons. Then you had wars of national liberation, fortunately not too bad because WWII caused colonialism to collapse without too much bloodshed. But of course colonialism was all about money too. Once the AK47 became common colonialism wasn't profitable anymore. The people were able to defend themselves.

We are left with wars over territory, such as Israel, Somalia, and Rwanda. Then there was Afghanistan which was a rare political war, and Iraq which was for control of the oil supply. Then the Iran/Iraq war, which I don't understand.

When ants go to war its about territory, so it is basically economic. They need the territory to gather food.

 

[PatrickPowers]

Yes. It's biology: survival of the fittest. That is our inheritence. Strip all the politics, all the social values, mores, laws, customs, religion from man and you're left with raw Darwinism that very much still controls his behavior and is always seething right below the surface of social conformity, ready in a instant to erupt and exude violence in an effort to protect his genes for promulgation to the next generation.

You have been misinformed into thinking man is some holy creature above the animals. This is wrong. He is very much still an animal and bound to the same laws of Natural Selection. So when he is confronted by a challenge, a disagreement, a threat to his survival or reproductive success, his Darwinist inheritance will compell him to fight if he is capable of doing so.

Thank goodness someone is mining the store by willing to fight to the death and by doing so impart strong, healthy and favorable traits to the gene pool.

And I can't imagine any real Biologist in this forum disagreeing with me.

I have a degree in biology and say that cooperation is generally the superior strategy.

I haven't even seen a fist fight for the last thirty years, so your view of reality seems melodramatic and unrealistic.

 

[mheslep]

These homicide rates below include times of war.

Figure 2: Long-term homicide rates per 100,000 population in Scandinavia and England, North and South. Calculated from Manuel Eisner, "Modernization, Self-Control and Lethal Violence: The Long-Term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in Theoretical Perspective," British Journal of Criminology 41 (2001): 618–638.

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.1/images/monkkonen_fig02b.gif
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.1/monkkonen.htmlHere are war deaths alone from the 1940's.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

Can you imagine a stock market crash that would "take out civilization"? Really? Does this mean you equate economic depressions with the end of civilization, an actual return to barbarism?

No and I don't think I did. Rather, if a significantly sized critical node was disrupted there would be huge knock on effects in the world economy, this becomes highly dangerous when it causes a perfect storm of disasters. Like if the worldwide food distribution system was disrupted, unemployment soars in most countries and so on. What you get is widespread civil disturbance as well as famine, infrastructure damage and a nightmare of a mess to sort out before you start climbing back towards a prosperous society again.

 

[mheslep]

... if a significantly sized critical node was disrupted there would be huge knock on effects in the world economy, this becomes highly dangerous when it causes a perfect storm of disasters. Like if the worldwide food distribution system was disrupted, unemployment soars in most countries and so on. What you get is widespread civil disturbance as well as famine, infrastructure damage and a nightmare of a mess to sort out before you start climbing back towards a prosperous society again.

Ok, that's possible, but I don't see anything quantifying how "critical" a food supply node might be, nor how fragile are the backups or alternative paths. For instance, is there a single historical instance of famine caused by (edit: the failure of) worldwide food distribution?

 

[Ryan_m_b]

Ok, that's possible, but I don't see anything quantifying how "critical" a food supply node might be, nor how fragile are the backups or alternative paths. For instance, is there a single historical instance of famine caused by worldwide food distribution?

To flip that question on its head is there a significant period of history involving worldwide food distribution? Or a global economy? I'm not saying yes or no either way because I haven't done much research into it but a global economy is an unprecedented thing. It's difficult to model it on the basis of what has come before, even with global empires with immense trade the situation does not resemble that seen of today with so few entities representing significant avenues for revenue to flow through.

 

[Pythagorean]

Alaska has built whole communities that rely on long-distance outside shipping. If flights freeze for just a week or two, some towns would have issues. A large majority of people in big cities don't know how to get food besides at a store, and those stores depend on shipping and transit. Shipping and transit depends on many circumstances (that's logistics!) that become even more apparent with weather in rural settings (many towns only have one bush plane delivery a week). Our grocery stores here were just finally enforced to expand their stores to ~6 weeks of supplies (was ~3 weeks before). And people who can afford to will start panicking and hording long before that 6 weeks is up, bringing the effective supply cache down for the average towny.

If petro stopped flowing in Alaska in the winter (the railroad tracks and the pipeline break at the same time) we would have a serious problem with heating most people's homes. We would have a long time to wait for people to drive or boat up oil from the lower 48. Think Canada would help us out?

Of course, I'm not talking about the fall of civilization, but this a lot of people suffering from growing dependent on a small number of nodes in a system. If you have a lot of redundant nodes backing each other up (like the internet) than you're very difficult to take down.