War as Political Psychosis

An approach to the political psychopathology of war

Image courtesy of X user @Sprinter99800

“Wars do not usually result from just causes but from pretexts. There probably never was a just cause why men should slaughter each other by wholesale, but there are such things as ambition, selfishness, folly, madness, in communities as in individuals, which become blind and bloodthirsty, not to be appeased save by havoc, and generally by the killing of somebody else than themselves “ - General Tecumseh Sherman, Speech to the graduating class of the Michigan Military Academy 1878

"Insanity is when you do the same thing over and over, expecting a different result” - Albert Einstein 

This series of blog posts looks at wars as a modern medicine looks at mental illness, as a set of phenomena that arise from a set of causes. Every illness is unique to the patient suffering the condition, but there are patterns that can be recognised, and behind every disease there are pathological causes that can be uncovered. In the case of war, once it has started there is very little that anyone can do to stop it, we have to wait until both sides are exhausted, and ready to talk about a peaceful settlement, which is clearly what they should have done in the first place. We will see that the preventive options available are relatively simple and certainly far more cost effective than warfare. The difficulty lies in getting politicians to change their mind set.

“War is madness” is a cliche, but it is a valid cliche. 

First, war is madness in the US sense of mad as in angry. War is a political expression of frustration, anger and hatred. Anger is an outgoing emotional reaction to perceived threat, which bypasses reason. Anger gives us a feeling of wishing to hurt of destroy the object of anger, the Other, immediately, although history, reason and psychology teach us that in the process of destroying perceived  enemies, the destroyer is creating yet more threatening Others. 

Second, war is madness in the sense of detachment from everyday reality. In war, we humans divert from the everyday central  human purposeful work, that of trying to create healthy and happy human communities by addressing our individual and societal needs. In war we are expected to turn our hand instead to destroying the lives, health and structures of our perceived enemies.  War is the exact opposite of what the human race needs to be doing in the early 21st century, which is of course, to be working to normalise Earth’s greenhouse effect, to satisfy our human needs for health, education and security, and to protect and restore ecological systems. If work is the setting of needed things in order, war is a form of anti-work.

Third, war is insanity in the sense that Einstein pointed to when he said “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”. This applies very much to the Israel/Palestine situation, where both Hamas and the Israeli Government are participating in an upward spiral of hatred, violence, killing and destruction. The mantra of both Hamas and Netanyahu is that they both have  a right to defend themselves, yet their actions are not defensive, they are clearly destined to produce the exact opposite of a secure and peaceful future for the people they claim to represent; they are simply storing up retribution against themselves.

War frequently arises from a state of mutual paranoia. We might characterise it as Paranoia Mutualis Caesarii - the mutual paranoia of political leaders - which often expresses itself in an arms race between two powers caught in a vicious cycle of increased arms buildup by one side in response to increased arms buildup on the opposite side. This is clearly happening in the case of nuclear weapons, where the USA and Russia achieved a pinnacle of some 60,000 warheads in the 1970s, which were later reduced to the present 15,000 now, which are still clearly an irrational number, far in excess of what might be judged to deter a potential enemy.

In some cases, a description of mutual paranoia would be an oversimplification. Although it is sometimes the case that both sides bear an equal weight of responsibility for a war, the present war in Ukraine shows that sometimes, the immediate cause of war is unilateral, since Putin ordered an invasion on  24th February 2022. The antecedent causes of the war go back to 2014 with the separatist troubles in the Donbas, and to the Maidan Revolution (which Putin and his supporters characterise as a “coup”). Putin also has a range of grievances associated with the expansion both of NATO and of the EU. His mistake was that he chose not to invoke the Articles of the UN Charter which are designed to address precisely the concerns he has, but instead chose to invade. 

Once Putin had invaded, Ukraine had no option but to resist. To stay a free nation, they had to fight. If the Government had fled, and the Ukrainian Army had surrendered, an occupation would have followed, with a smouldering guerrilla war fought against the occupiers and eventually, building after many years to an outright war to obtain freedom. The capitulation of Ukraine would undoubtedly have encouraged Putin to expand into other countries bordering Russia with a sizeable Russian speaking minority.

All of which show that the pathogenesis of war can be both simple (in this case, invasion by a dictator) and complex (in this case, separatist sentiment in the Donbas, foreign intervention, and diverging views as to whether Ukraine should team up with the EU or with Russia). 

Given that wars, whether or not they are arising from mutual paranoia, may be seen as a kind of collective mental illness, the question is, how can the outbreak of collective or political insanity be prevented?

In individual psychology it is a well established principle of anger management that the client must learn to be aware of the early warning signs of an outburst. If we are to apply this successfully to politics, we must be able to identify the main causes of war, and address them in the early stages. In the next blog post in this series, we will look at one of the main causes of the 21 or so wars and conflicts which are burning in 2024 - dictators.

Here is an index of all the topics in this series, in which we look not just at the headline causes of current wars, but also at possible preventive action, bu Governments, by the United Nations, and even, in the case of wars caused by religion, by individual citizens.