Causes of War and Threats to Peace

Causes of War and Threats to Peace

War is one of the responses by which one society tries to reduce the capacity of another society to obtain its objectives, when one or several of these are conflicting with those of the first society. By this response, society A tries to get the society B to do what is not convenient for B, but of convenience to A. In other words, A tries to get B to do something unnatural, namely NOT to try to reach its own objectives. This is in direct contradiction with the definition of an intelligent system of a human being, and resisted by B.

Societies, since they are intelligent systems (IS), always act as best they see fit to reach their objectives. When there is a conflict, the first thing they do is to appeal to a super society. If such a super society does not exist, it is inevitable that the societies do what they consider best to reach their objectives. Sometimes this will be a war. A society, by waging war, takes a natural response, namely trying to reach its objectives.

We see that it is no wonder that two societies with conflicting objectives go to war. In a nation, the governing sub society makes the decision to attack or cooperate according to how it sees the best way to reach its objectives. Once it has taken the decision, the general population acts according to the emotions evoked by the governing subsociety and according to existing habits and regulations for civilians and the military forces. The governing subsociety will present the adversary as cruel, greedy, barbarian, and nasty. It will appeal to patriotism and ideals. For all this it will use existing communications media that appeal to emotions and preexisting mental inclinations.

Below we mention subjective causes for war...

... middle of paper ...

...r are highly fragmented due to severe lack of funding and other factors, but they are rich in ideas and sometimes energy. The former are compromised, since their funders prohibit looking too closely at the fundamental causes of war, for which governments are so often responsible. But, they have the power to change events.

Human survival "as we know it" depends, in our view, on increasing the effectiveness of both kinds of peace groups before the next world war comes, despite their sometimes antagonistic biases. Lacking success there, we expect that there will be survivors even of a World War III, and that they will build a better civilization. The scale of modern weaponry and the exotic redundancy of biological, nuclear, chemical and even more secret weapons does, however, raise the prospect for the first time in human history of actual extinction of the species.