Why We Fight
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Summary
Mike Martin is a senior visiting fellow in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, and the author of Why We Fight. Today, on the show, he draws on his background in biology and experience serving in the British Army to offer an explanation as to why individuals and nation-states go to war.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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We often suppose that wars are fought over things like resources, border disputes, and
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ideologies. My guest calls this the spreadsheet approach to war and argues that in reality,
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such factors only come in as justifications for the much deeper drives at play.
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Mike Martin is a senior visiting fellow in the Department of War Studies, King's College,
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London, and the author of Why We Fight. Today on the show, he draws on his background in biology
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and experience serving in the British Army to offer an explanation as to why individuals and
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nation-states go to war. Mike argues that there are two fundamental impulses behind the drive to war,
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the drive for status and the drive for belonging. We discuss these motivations and how leaders and
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ideologies corral and amplify them. We end our conversation with how this view of war could
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prevent conflicts and allow them to be fought more successfully, and also be a lens on how
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to help men flourish in a healthy way. After the show's over, check out our show notes at
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So you wrote a book called Why We Fight, where you take a deep dive in exploring why humans engage
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in warfare. I'm curious, what led you down that path to write this book?
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Primarily, it was to explain my own experience of fighting in a war. I spent a couple of years in
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Afghanistan as a British Army officer. And previously to that, I'd studied biology at university.
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And it seemed to me as I was fighting this war that it didn't really make sense. It wasn't
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logical. It didn't, there was no, you know, wars just don't make sense in the sense of people die,
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everything gets destroyed. And so I set out to try and explore why it is that humans fight war. And
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not just occasionally, we fight them all the time.
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Well, I'm curious, when you were fighting, when you were an officer in the British Army,
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what was your experience like? Because you talk about in the book, you were really jonesing to
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sign up, like you wanted to sign up, you wanted to experience that.
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I think, firstly, I need to say that I don't think that that's that rare, particularly at a time,
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so I joined the army in 2007. So we knew we were going to war, right? Okay, Iraq was tailing down
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for us at that point. But Afghanistan was just getting going. So you only joined the British Army
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at that time, with the knowledge that you were going to war. And what I actually found was that
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a lot of people had joined because they were going to war. People joined, did one or two tours,
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and then left because they'd done what they wanted to do. And so it was a motivating factor. And
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actually, armies have this all the time, their recruitment goes down in peacetime,
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because people join armies because they want to fight.
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And I think you talked about, there's a moment where you, it was actually exhilarating. People
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often talk about how war is like, oh, that'd be scary. It is scary. But at the same time,
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Yeah, it's kind of like a Zen-like feeling. So you get into, and it can be scary as well. It's a bit
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like you're on a knife edge, and you can go one way or the other. And so, and again, you know,
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just to repeat, this is not me. You look up and down the line of people who are firing their
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weapons or there are, you know, bullets flying overhead. And a lot of them are having the time
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of their lives. And of course, that, you know, if someone gets injured or something, then that
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totally changes the dynamic, of course. But people are in a state of mental clarity, I guess, partly
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because the outside world is stripped away. Like you're in something very, very binary here, isn't
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it? They survive or you survive. It's also something that perhaps you might have spent several years
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training for. I mean, some of the people who I got into fireparks with in Afghanistan spent 20 years
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in the army and never been shot at, never fired their weapons in anger. And then all of a sudden,
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they were doing what they were meant to be doing. But there was also a, you know, you asked a little
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bit about in your last question. A lot of those people, and predominantly they were young men,
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right? A lot of those young men wanted to test themselves. They saw combat as, if you like,
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a, is it a way of becoming a man perhaps, a way of proving themselves, a way of demonstrating that
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when the bullets start flying, they can, they can deliver. Like they are a man, they are able to
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get into that bracket of people who've done that. You know, these days, quite a rare experience,
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probably less so if we go back, you know, a few hundred years. And I think all of these things
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come together to create a drive towards fighting in combat and a sense of it is something that they
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need to do or that they want to do. And obviously everyone doesn't feel this, but these people felt it,
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these young men particularly felt it, everything is something that they need to do in order to
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prove themselves. I'm curious, when you signed up, like, what did you tell people your motives were?
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Did you, or even yourself, did you say like, I'm fighting for freedom? I'm fighting for democracy.
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Was that the thing you told yourself or did you just say, I just want to experience the excitement of
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it? No, I didn't, I didn't say any of that stuff. And I guess actually maybe there's a little bit of a
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difference between a British and American audience. I think the way the Brits and the Americans see
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their armed forces and talk about their armed forces is a bit different. I think the American,
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and this is just cultural differences, right? I think Americans slightly talk more about things
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like that when they're talking about fighting, whereas Brits talk a little bit less about that
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kind of stuff. But even so, I think I'm probably one of those people who always wanted to be a soldier.
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And I think there are quite a lot of people like that. And I suppose maybe, maybe had there not
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been a war on when I, that Britain was fighting in when I was in my, you know, 20s, it's interesting
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to ask what would have happened? Would I have still gone into the army if it was a peacetime army? Would
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I have tried to find that thing somewhere else? But I think what I said to people was that for me,
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it was, war's always been fascinating. Afghanistan was a particularly fascinating and complex
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conflict. And I think probably the word I would have used is adventure. I suppose that's the kind
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of closest proxy to it, which, you know, again, when we're describing these other people, I guess
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we're sort of thinking about how we want ourselves to be perceived as well. If I think about the 22
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year old Mike or the 23 year old Mike. So there was probably a bit of that going on. Probably my
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feelings were a bit stronger than that, but I use the word adventure and I'm fascinated by it as a
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way of slightly socializing the drives that I had towards going and fighting in a war and,
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and, and proving myself, you know, as we, as we discussed. So as you said at the beginning,
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war is, if you take a step back, it's really weird. It's really bizarre. Countries amass large numbers of
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people. They spend tons of money. People die. They just blow stuff up. It's just weird. And so when
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social scientists try to explain like why humans do this, what are the standard explanations for why
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Hmm. Yeah. Well, the social scientists, right? So they have a, the kind of rational view of the
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world. It's called the rational actor model. And the idea is that you can quantify stuff in the
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world. And I'll come on to some of those things in a minute, and then you can put them into a model
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and it will tell you like, if you have more of a and less of B, then you're more likely to end up in
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a war. And there was this huge, long couple of decades worth of social science research looking
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into this wider complex happen. And so they would look at things like political fragmentation.
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And they would look at things like prevalence of extreme ideologies, resources, inequality,
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things like that. And of course, all of these things are factors that lead to war. Like if a country
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is more unequal, or the resources are held in a small elite, then yes, all of the things being
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equal, it's more likely to go to war internally. Or if there's two countries that have a border
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dispute, or they have a history of going to war, then they're more likely to go to war. So of course,
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all of that is true. But it still misses the essence, right? And it comes back to this thing,
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you know, you said it doesn't make sense because of countries and whatever. On an individual level,
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it really doesn't make sense. So me, as an individual, this is where my sort of background
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in biology really came to the fore. I'm an evolved being, I've evolved to survive and reproduce.
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So why am I risking my life to go and fight for, you know, in the modern age, I didn't get anything
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out of going to Afghanistan as a British Army officer, apart from my salary, right? Obviously,
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again, life experience, all the rest of it, but I didn't end up with more women or more resources or
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anything. It was just a job, right? But yet, I still had that drive towards it. And so the real
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question for me is, why are individuals driven to fighting wars? If they're compelled to, fine,
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but volunteer armies exist and have existed for thousands of years. So why do individuals go and
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fight in wars, particularly when, you know, in the extreme case, we think about France in the First
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World War, the death rate for young men, say, aged between 16 and 35, was about 30%. So you have a
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one in three chance of dying for a kind of hard to quantify benefit, of any benefit, but particularly
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in terms of survival and reproduction. So that really doesn't make sense. And I think that the
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social scientists who are looking at these wars and reasons and causes for war in terms of models and
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really spreadsheets, I sort of call it the spreadsheet approach to war, are missing this
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essence right at the heart of it, which is not only why do countries go to war, why do individuals go to
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war? It just simply doesn't make sense. And as you mentioned, your biology background helped you
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explore this. And you, you make the case that evolutionary psychology can help us understand
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why individuals fight. So what, how can evolutionary psychology help us understand why humans fight in
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wars? Well, if you have something that exists in a population that has a negative selection pressure,
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so in this case, a drive to go to war, right? And obviously, it's lots of different drives,
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but let's just say that there is this thing. If war has such a huge death rate, you would expect
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it to be selected out. The things that contribute towards young men going to fight in wars, you'd
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expect them to be selected out of the gene pool. But we don't see that. We still see war at, you know,
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a very high prevalence, right? We see wars, you know, wars are starting all the time, there's loads of them.
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And so the only reason things that have a negative selection pressure can exist in the gene pool is
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if that particular trait also has something very, very positive for an individual's surviving
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reproduction. And that positive outweighs the negative that you get from going to war. So war is
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a byproduct. So we have this wonderful thing that's evolved that's helping us do X, Y, and Z. And I'm sure
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we're going to come on to those things in a minute. But as a byproduct, unfortunately,
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those things that we've evolved to seek because they help us survive and reproduce actually as a
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byproduct cause us to go to war. And that causes a 30% death rate. But the thing that they originally
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evolved for help us even more survive and reproduce than 30%. So therefore, they remain in the gene pool.
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So that's how evolutionary in sort of big ideas terms can help us understand how something like going
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into war has evolved and has remains in the gene pool.
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So the main thesis of your book is that humans engage in warfare, because we have these evolutionary
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urges, because they help us survive and reproduce. These urges are the two main ones that you argue
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are the drive for status and for belonging. Let's talk about this status drive first. If we look back in
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our evolutionary past, what sorts of things did we compete over? And how did achieving status help us
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So humans are animals, right? And so we compete. I mean, you only need to take a sideways glance at
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human society to see that we're competing all the time for everything. Sports, jobs, promotions at work.
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You run a podcast, you're looking at how's my podcast doing against other people's podcasts.
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And so our society is built on competition, because humans compete with each other. And if you go back,
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say, 100,000 years, so we've got bands of hunter-gatherers, there were basically, there's two types of
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things that animals compete for. Humans are just the same. There's real resources, that's like food,
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water, sexual partners, you know, prey, perhaps. And then there's what are called surrogate resources.
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And surrogate resources are things like land or territory and status. And the beauty about
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surrogate resources, once you have those resources, they enable you to have access to real resources.
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So if you have land, for instance, if you control territory as an animal or a human,
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you might get the water that's on that territory, or you might get perhaps there's a, you know,
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it's used by some animals that you have as your prey. So you don't need to compete for the prey
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itself, you just compete for the surrogate resource, and then you get what you actually want,
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the real resource. And status is the same. We compete for status as humans, because predominantly,
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because it enables us to do lots of things, you know, higher status people survive longer,
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they tend to get more food, all that kind of stuff. But the real thing that higher status gave us in
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the evolutionary environment as men, was access to more women. So higher status men tended to have
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more sexual partners, more wives, if we think about polygamy, like the idea of monogamy being the
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standard pattern in society is relatively new one. For most of our evolutionary history,
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and you can tell this by looking at the structure of human DNA, we've been polygamous. And what
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higher status men allows us to do is work out who gets more women and who gets less women. And you
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think, well, why is that? Well, there's a very, very simple reason for that. And that's because
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if you imagine a man and a woman, obviously, we've got equal numbers of men and women in society. If
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you imagine a man and woman having sex and getting pregnant, the woman is then taken out of the field
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of reproduction for about, let's say, two years. So pregnancy, childbirth, and then lactation. So
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let's call it two years. And the man, you know, 10 minutes later, can go and impregnate another woman.
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And what that means is that although we've got equal numbers of men and women, women of reproductive age,
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who are not tied up with child rearing are a rare resource compared to the number of men.
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So there's an oversupply of men. And if you have an oversupply of something, then you need to sort out
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who gets more access to the rare resource. And so that's what status enables us to do.
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And we have a set of hormones that enable us to do that. And testosterone is the key hormone. So
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everyone thinks that testosterone is about controlling, particularly male aggression.
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That's not actually correct. What testosterone does is it drives us to seek higher social status.
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And it's just that sometimes, or a lot of the time, being aggressive is a good way of getting,
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or certainly a way of getting higher social status. And so the average man has 20 times
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the testosterone of the average woman, because for men, having a higher social status has a much
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higher evolutionary payoff because of, you know, higher status men end up having more wives.
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And if you put it in really, really stark terms, if the top 50% of men have two wives,
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that means the bottom 50% of men have no wives. And so there's a real selection pressure to be a
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higher status male, because it literally enables you to continue your evolutionary line.
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And so this thing that drives us to survive and reproduce then plays a role in war that we can
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Okay. So humans, particularly males on an individual level, have this strong drive for status because
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having status anciently meant you would have more access to resources, land, and women. So being high
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status increased the likelihood you would survive and reproduce. And anciently, gaining high status
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often meant engaging in violence. And today we still have that status drive. We just have more ways
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that you can gain status that don't resort to violence. So you can start a successful business,
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be a rock star, make lots of money, be good at sports, et cetera. But even though we have more
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routes to status, you know, going to war, that's still a way to gain status.
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So let's talk about this second drive that all individuals have that contributes to groups
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engaging in warfare. And that's the drive to belong to groups. And what's interesting about
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this is it seems that the drive for status and the drive to belong to groups, they kind of conflict,
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right? Because we have this individual status drive to be better than everyone else in the group,
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but we also want to belong to the group. So what's going on there?
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Yeah. Well, so you are right, they do kind of work against and with each other. But that's what
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evolution is like, right? It just evolves certain traits or involves multiple traits at the same
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time that sort of pulls humans in different directions, which is why humans are both selfish
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and selfless at the same time. But the belonging things, again, quite simple, we live in groups to
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survive. Predominantly, it's about safety. And again, go back 100,000 years, we're on the African
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savannah, and maybe a group of 20 of us, we're probably all kind of related, maybe a couple of
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people have joined the group. But basically, that group keeps us alive, because the environment is
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full of wild animals, other groups of humans who are, you know, antagonistic to us competing with us for
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resources. And also, you need a group to, you know, it's quite difficult to live, you know, you need to
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walk long distances, find food, hunt together, all that kind of stuff. So the group is what enables you to
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survive. And being thrown out of that group is probably a death sentence. In many cases, it will
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be a death sentence. So there is this drive towards living in groups. And we all have this, right? We
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all want to support football teams, be in a choir, maybe be in a political party. We're all, you know,
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in a nation state, right? We all have a sense, most of us have a sense of which country we belong to,
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perhaps we feel proud of our country or patriotic. In many countries in the world, you might belong
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to a tribe, or you might feel quite strongly about your ethnicity. Religion is another group,
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right? We, you know, lots of people feel very strongly Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu
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and so on and so forth. And so we all belong to multiple groups, really, but it's all the same
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mechanism. And it's this mechanism that says, and it's evolved for the reasons I've just described,
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but the mechanism says, find a group and belong to it because groups keep you safe. And they have
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another of other benefits, like enabling you to get access to more resources, enabling you to find
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sexual partners, but predominantly a group keeps you safe. So evolution is about surviving reproduction.
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Live in a group, you're much more likely to survive. It's a very, very strong evolutionary drive.
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And maybe you've had this experience, Brett, but I don't know if you support any sports.
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Uh, yeah. I'm a fan of the University of Oklahoma football, American football.
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Okay. Okay. So when you go to an American football match and you guys score a touchdown
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and you're, all of you, you go mad in the stands, you're like screaming, shouting and up and down.
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And, and do you get like little shiver down the back of your neck and down your back?
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Of course. The thing that gives me the biggest shiver is at the beginning of the game, when the
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marching band comes out, you hear the, uh, the fight song playing and everyone's.
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That's right. Yeah. That's, that gives you the words and you're singing it together and that's
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your clan. That's your crew. And so what you're doing, you know, actually what you're doing in
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biological terms, psychological terms is you're all demonstrating that you remember that group
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and you're feeling warm and lovely and high you feeling high. Right. And that is even if something
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makes you feel good, like eating sugar or having sex or singing the marching song that was sorry.
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So you call it the fighting, fighting song. That is evolution pushing you to do those things again,
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because they have an evolutionary benefit. And by converse, if something feels bad or you're unhappy
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to do it, then that's evolution motivating you in a different way to do different things.
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And so we all have this strong desire to belong to a group. But the thing about that mechanism,
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and again, it's controlled by another hormone called oxytocin, which is the same one that's
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involved in childbirth, but evolution just re hijacked it to become a social bonding hormone.
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That oxytocin mechanism cannot only create in groups. It has to also create out groups. And you
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think about it, that's pretty logical. Imagine if you had a mechanism that just said, trust everyone,
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make everyone part of your in-group, you know, all sort of sitting around loving each other.
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The problem with that is some people would evolve a mechanism that said, take advantage of the guys
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sitting around loving everyone. Basically, they become free riders. The only way that mechanism
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could evolve is if you put a boundary on the group. So you have a mechanism that says, find a group to
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belong to and trust and love all those people in that group. But make sure you understand who's in and
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out of the group. Don't trust people who are outside the group, because you guys are, that's your group.
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You're the Oklahoma team, but the other guys, they're another group. And we shouldn't let any
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of the fans from, I don't know, Yale University or whatever, come into the Oklahoma stands because
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this is our area, right? And so that mechanism, that in-group, out-group mechanism, if you think
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about it, that's the basis of war, right? That's what we do in war. We separate ourselves out into groups.
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And the way that mechanism works is if you get antagonism, so you're in an in-group and you get
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antagonism from an out-group. So the Yale fans are shouting their song at you and you're in the
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Oklahoma stand, firstly, you feel tighter within your group. Perhaps you feel more likely, more
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trusting, more friendly, so that you're bantering with people you don't even know, but you know
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they're in the Oklahoma stand, so they're good guys. But you're getting tighter, your in-group's
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getting tighter because you're getting all this antagonism from another team. And then you're
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maybe directing some back as well, right? And then that's causing them to get a bit tighter.
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Their groups, they feel more trusting. Who are these Oklahoma guys? And what I'm describing
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really is what we call escalation, right? If you watch the news and they talk about,
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you know, two countries are squaring off to each other. That escalation in physiological terms is
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that mechanism where in-groups and out-groups, a bit like a ratchet, are tightening up, directing
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rhetoric at each other. And that's causing the rhetoric of one group. It's causing the other
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group to tighten and issue its own rhetoric back. And this process goes backwards and forwards as
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groups become more and more antagonistic to each other. And you can see it, that escalates.
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And at some point, unless people de-escalate, that eventually ends up in some sort of conflict.
00:23:42.660
And that can be, whether we're talking about, you know, football fans on the street fighting
00:23:47.140
each other, or whether we're talking about nation states, it's the same mechanism at play.
00:23:52.760
We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:23:58.960
And now back to the show. Okay. So I think we can come back to status drive here. This is how,
00:24:03.700
this is how they, the status and belongings link up and causes people to engage in violence. So I guess
00:24:09.060
what's happening is you have both inter-group competition and intra-group competition.
00:24:15.240
So you men compete for individual status within a group, and this can lead them to want to fight
00:24:21.980
in war to gain status. And then groups, they compete against each other too. And if the group you belong
00:24:28.500
to is insulted or threatened because your membership in the group is part of your identity, right? It's part
00:24:34.500
it's part of your status too. So if the group is insulted, then you're going to want to retaliate
00:24:43.220
There's that, that's definitely going on amongst all the members of the group, but there's also
00:24:47.140
something quite particular about leaders. So leaders, if you think about it, let's say you get
00:24:53.000
to be the president of America. You've probably spent 50 years of your life fighting off status
00:24:58.580
challenges, right? You've had to get elected to maybe the state legislature and then maybe the
00:25:04.260
Senate, so on and so forth. You know, all of your life, you've had to win elections, fight off status
00:25:09.220
challenges from other parties, from within your own party, who wants to lead your party. So by the time
00:25:14.180
you get to president or the leader of any other country, you've spent decades probably fighting off
00:25:19.800
status challenges. And so you, by definition, are a type of human that really seeks status and achieves it
00:25:29.480
as well, right? So come back to the kind of testosterone driving you to seek status. Of course, when you get
00:25:34.500
to be the top of that country, what do leaders do? Well, leaders create frameworks, they have a relationship
00:25:39.380
with their followers, they create frameworks, they create structure for the group. And that's what people want
00:25:46.080
when they belong in a group. They want structure and frameworks and they want to feel safe. And so
00:25:49.960
there's a bit of a relationship between leaders and followers that works really well. They each give
00:25:54.560
something to the other. But those leaders, so we've got leaders of two different groups, those leaders
00:25:59.260
are for status challenges all their life. They get to be the top of the group. And then who are they
00:26:03.240
fighting status challenges with? The leaders of other groups, right? Which in country terms or tribal
00:26:08.180
terms is the leader of another tribe or the leader of another country. And so what you can find is that
00:26:13.000
status challenges between leaders and this in-group, out-group ratchet between different groups of
00:26:20.720
followers of different groups, all of these things are going on at the same time. And all of them,
00:26:27.280
unless people consciously take a step back and de-escalate, both status challenges between leaders,
00:26:33.280
a little bit of what you described, the status challenge between individuals because their identity
00:26:36.780
is fused with the group. And then also this in-group, out-group ratchet effect between just different
00:26:42.440
groups that are butting up against each other. All of those things are happening at the same time.
00:26:46.480
And that's really what I'm describing to you in biological terms, what the news might call an
00:26:50.960
escalatory pathway. Okay. So this is the main thesis of your book, that the reason why countries engage
00:26:56.960
in war, countries might say they're going to war for an abstract ideal like freedom or democracy.
00:27:04.020
And that could be true. Maybe you can say that's going on there. But if you look down to it,
00:27:09.020
like it often comes down to the leader of that country or group, they want status. And because
00:27:14.940
people want to feel like they belong to the group, they will go along with that because they want to
00:27:20.240
belong. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly that. Exactly that. And, you know, it's very difficult to say,
00:27:26.860
you know, if the country says it's going to war because of freedom or democracy, or perhaps it's going
00:27:30.860
to war to defend a religion or something, you know, we hear all this all the time in the news.
00:27:34.220
And that's impossible to prove or disprove, right? It's impossible to say what's going on in the
00:27:41.100
minds of a leader. But we do have something really interesting from psychology called the
00:27:46.100
justification hypothesis. And what that is, is that basically humans don't do things for the
00:27:52.880
reasons that they think they do them. And the reason that we know that is because humans often
00:27:58.980
initiate actions about a quarter of a second before their conscious brain frames the reason and they
00:28:07.320
start talking about why it is they're doing something. And then if you read Kahneman, you know,
00:28:13.180
they're thinking fast and slow. We've got these two systems. We've got the unconscious system that
00:28:17.820
makes decisions very quickly from the gut, if you like. And then we've got the conscious brain that
00:28:22.420
comes along later and rationalizes those decisions, sort of explains to ourselves and to other people
00:28:29.840
why we do them. And if you think about war, if we're driven towards war for reasons of status and
00:28:36.800
belonging, and we might not even be aware of ourselves, right? We're just driven to do it.
00:28:40.120
We do lots of things. We've got no idea why we do it. We're just kind of, our subconscious takes us
00:28:43.860
there. And then a bit like me, age 22, well, why do you want to go to Afghanistan? I'm kind of
00:28:50.760
looking around for a reason. And this isn't a conscious, cynical process. That's just how human
00:28:56.280
brains work. We look for reasons to justify already taken decisions that our subconsciouses have already
00:29:03.080
taken. And in the case of war, well, because we're driven to go to war, partly because of our sense of
00:29:10.680
belonging to our own group, often what we do is we frame the reasons we go to war using the narratives
00:29:17.560
that we use to describe our own groups. So you often find that democracies go to war to, you know,
00:29:23.400
encourage democracy or the rule of law, or perhaps for other things that are the narratives that help
00:29:30.000
them bind together their own societies. That's really what these societal narratives are about,
00:29:35.040
these frameworks like religion or different ideologies. These are the things that help us hold our own
00:29:40.000
societies together. And again, I want to stress, it's not cynical. It's not people thinking,
00:29:44.840
I'm going to go and take the oil and I'm going to tell them it's all about freedom. Genuinely,
00:29:49.700
leaders do believe this, but the way their brains work, often what they are pursuing at a subconscious
00:29:57.380
psychological level is not what they say that they are doing. Although they do believe themselves and
00:30:03.760
they do think that those are the reasons why they're doing those things.
00:30:07.600
No, this idea of a leader's drive for status contributes to why countries go to war reminded
00:30:15.380
me of some books I read by American historians about the revolutionary war here in the United
00:30:20.860
States. And so here in the United States, the common explanation of like the thing you learn in
00:30:25.200
elementary school, like why America fought the British was, well, they got, we got taxed with
00:30:29.940
representation and we didn't like that and blah. Okay. And all these historians say, yeah, that's
00:30:34.520
true. The question they look at is like, why did individual leaders in the colonies decide to turn
00:30:41.520
patriot, right? Like why did, why did some stay loyalist and why did some rebel? And there's a
00:30:47.460
historian, Craig Bruce Smith wrote a book called American Honor. And then H.W. Brands, he wrote a book,
00:30:53.440
Our First Civil War. It's about patriots and loyalists in the American Revolution. And what they did is
00:30:57.420
they looked at individual founding fathers. So like George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams,
00:31:02.500
and asked the question, like, why did they, like, why did these guys decide to turn patriot and become
00:31:07.980
leaders in rebelling against the British empire? And what you find with all of these guys, whether
00:31:13.940
it's Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams, they all experienced a moment where they felt they were
00:31:20.180
disrespected or dishonored by the British. So in Washington's case, he was a general, he was a leader in
00:31:25.880
the British army. And that's how he was gaining status. But he reached a point where he realized
00:31:31.820
that because he was born in America, he was born a colonist, like he would never be considered fully
00:31:40.720
Right. Yeah. And so like, he's like, well, I'm not going any further. I'm going to rebel.
00:31:45.100
Same thing happened with Ben Franklin. He was in London and he was having a meeting. I think he was
00:31:50.060
getting kind of taken to the carpet because people in Philadelphia were rebelling. And, you know,
00:31:55.780
Franklin, he loved the British empire because he gained a lot from it. Like he became one of the
00:31:59.060
most famous men in the world because of the empire. But then in this meeting, he realized these guys are
00:32:04.340
never going to see me as an equal because I'm kind of this backwards American. And then with John
00:32:09.400
Adams entering, you look at his journals and diaries and letters, the guy really wanted to be famous.
00:32:15.500
He really wanted to have a reputation and he saw the revolution as a chance to,
00:32:21.880
to gain that status and recognition. And now all these guys, they would say, okay, it's, it's,
00:32:27.520
you know, democracy, freedom, representation that is probably there, but underlying that,
00:32:33.460
as you're saying in your book is this individual drive for status. You know, they felt disrespected.
00:32:41.200
The two words you mentioned there are like honour and dishonour. Honour is the concept of honour is
00:32:48.640
about people recognising that you are a person of status. And the idea of dishonour is, as you've
00:32:55.260
described, is effectively somebody not recognising the status that you think you should have.
00:33:01.540
And to use a modern example, I'm sure your listeners are aware during the global war on terror,
00:33:08.400
America and Britain and other countries used drones to take out people that they, you know,
00:33:16.720
had intelligence that they were terrorists. And that was seen as a, you know, a successful way to
00:33:22.520
prosecute that war. But there'd been a couple of studies that looked at what that did, because
00:33:29.700
effectively, these drones could hover over a village for 24 hours, or in an area for 24 hours. And so the
00:33:35.180
people in that village would be sort of his, so they'd be aware that everyone knows what a drone
00:33:40.860
is. And there's no way that they can hit back at it. And at some point, that drone might take out
00:33:46.880
someone in the village or something. And that was dishonouring to many people in the Pakistani,
00:33:53.840
Afghan tribal borderlands. That was a dishonourable way to conduct the conflict. And in some instances,
00:34:02.700
just the very presence of those drones, let alone killing people and causing sort of revenge cycles,
00:34:08.440
was seen as a motivating factor to people who felt the need to gain status, because they felt that
00:34:15.040
their families and they themselves were being dishonoured by this kind of zzz in the sky. And that
00:34:22.800
the only way to deal with that was to go and attack British and American and other, you know,
00:34:28.500
countries, soldiers. So this idea of honor and dishonour is something that humans have always
00:34:36.300
had in warfare. And it absolutely speaks to what we've been talking about on the podcast today.
00:34:41.500
So we've been talking about sometimes people will say, or even countries will say, well,
00:34:45.700
we're going to war fighting for this ideology, or it could be a moral code or religion. And like we say,
00:34:52.780
that could be true, right? But underlying that all those things are this drive for status,
00:34:56.820
this drive to belong. But how do these like, these abstract ideas, whether it's an ideology or
00:35:03.720
religion, how do they interact with our drive for status and belonging to kind of ramp up this
00:35:10.860
drive to go to war? I think what they do is they mobilize and they justify. Because if you think
00:35:18.480
about an army's got, I don't know, 500,000 people in it, every single one of them is going to have a
00:35:24.400
slightly different reason that they want to go and fight. And if you have an encompassing
00:35:32.580
ideology or framework, in the same way that, you know, in Britain and America, we're kind of liberal
00:35:40.080
democracies, and we believe in capitalism and democracy and separation of powers, and you know,
00:35:44.980
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And along with many other European countries, we all believe in all
00:35:50.020
those same things. And that enables us to form quite successful alliances over many decades.
00:35:55.360
And it's the same within a country, we have ideas about what America's like, what Britain's like,
00:35:59.800
and we all share those ideas mostly. And that enables us to function as a country. And I think
00:36:05.640
it's the same if you go to war, if you have a, you call them abstract, I guess they are to most
00:36:12.420
people's lives, we have these abstract ideas, what it enables, really, it's the linking factor between
00:36:19.740
individual drives, which are often subconscious, and a direction of travel for a group. It's an
00:36:26.380
expression of something, the lowest common denominator that the group can all agree on. And again, this is
00:36:31.060
all subconscious rather than sort of consciously thought out, that enables them to shoehorn or align
00:36:36.880
all of those slightly different selfish drives and motivations into one kind of direction of travel.
00:36:43.920
And I think war is just an extreme example of what we see in our societies every day with our,
00:36:49.800
you know, our group narratives. I'm sure all the Oklahoma fans have got a bunch of stories about
00:36:55.180
your rivals, about you, about who you are, you've got all your folklore, all of that folklore is just a
00:37:01.940
thing that if you spot another guy in an Oklahoma tea in a bar, you can chat and you've got a common
00:37:07.500
narrative to talk straight away, you can really talk a half an hour about a bunch of stuff that
00:37:12.140
to someone else would be, you know, I would not understand any of it. But you guys have got your
00:37:16.400
same group, you've got your same narratives, it enables you to quite different people to be part of
00:37:21.680
They encourage group cohesion, basically, is what those things do.
00:37:25.020
Yeah, they set the framework, laws, legal systems are another type of framework that we use to
00:37:32.520
So you mentioned in the war on terror, right, there's the Taliban, we went to go fight in
00:37:38.260
Afghanistan because of the Taliban. And if you asked, you know, someone in one of these,
00:37:42.220
a person in the Taliban, like, why are you fighting in this war? They might have told you,
00:37:46.800
well, you know, look, this is for our faith, right? Like we're, you know, sort of, they explain
00:37:51.640
an ideology, but then you talked about like, whenever you actually talk to these guys, like one on one,
00:37:56.020
or whenever British or American soldiers talk to prisoners of war. And you ask like, why are you,
00:38:01.740
why are you fighting? And oftentimes the answer wasn't, well, for faith or whatever. It was,
00:38:07.620
well, I felt disrespected, or it was for my group. I mean, basically, I wanted to belong to a group.
00:38:12.720
So, I mean, I spent a lot of time talking to Taleb. I was a political officer in Afghanistan.
00:38:18.360
I spoke fluent Pushtu, which is the local language in southern Afghanistan. And actually,
00:38:24.440
a lot of the part of the world that we were in in Helmand province in the south was very,
00:38:27.940
very, very tribal. And a lot of those people were fighting, like in their village militia,
00:38:35.240
because they wanted to keep the police out because the police had been stealing their opium or
00:38:40.000
taking their little boys away to rape them. Or they were from a tribal militia that was defending,
00:38:47.540
keeping other people out of their tribes' lands. And so a lot of people were fighting for those
00:38:53.240
tiny sorts of reasons. And they were all Muslim, sure. And I'm sure when they went to, you know,
00:39:00.740
get their weapons or get money or whatever it was from the kind of central Taliban, if I can put it
00:39:06.560
like that in kind of really simplistic terms, I'm sure they expressed some of those more religious
00:39:12.160
or perhaps anti-American, anti-British slogans. A lot of the time, we got caught up in fighting
00:39:18.960
that was between different Afghan groups. So, you know, Tribe A and Tribe B would be fighting each
00:39:24.060
other. And Tribe B just happened to be in the police. And we were working with the police because
00:39:28.620
they were in the government. And so that kind of dragged us into their trial dispute, which,
00:39:31.900
you know, started a long time before we turned up and is still going on now.
00:39:37.160
The Taliban was a really highly decentralized organization that, you know, it's not like we
00:39:45.380
think about an army with a kind of structure and command and control and all the rest of it. And
00:39:50.600
it did come together and coalesce once the coalition started drawing down its troops and leaving
00:39:58.580
the country because a lot of other people could see that that was the way that things were going.
00:40:03.680
The writing was on the wall. So they sort of plumped with the Taliban central structure. But certainly
00:40:07.960
when we were there at our peak between 2010, 2014, it was much more fragmented. And everybody had
00:40:19.040
quite a low level motivation for fighting. Their brother had been killed or their land had been stolen by
00:40:25.000
police chief. And they were kind of shoehorning that personal stuff into a wider narrative of
00:40:29.600
getting rid of the occupiers or fighting for, you know, fighting for Islam.
00:40:35.500
So how can this framework for understanding why we engage in violence help prevent violence? Like,
00:40:41.420
I mean, if we have this case, okay, people go to war or even just engage in, you know, small level
00:40:47.280
group violence because of status and wanting to belong to a group. How can knowing that,
00:40:52.860
how can we use that to prevent violence? Or can we?
00:40:56.660
I think we can. I think if we accept that that's true, that a lot of what's going on is
00:41:03.080
a lot of individual motivations of individual people, then we probably think a little bit more
00:41:09.900
about, you know, if you're fighting an insurgency, how not to dishonor people, you know, because those
00:41:16.440
people are basically creating more enemies. If you're negotiating a peace, then we need to think about
00:41:21.080
appropriate status. And if we're finishing a war, well, who belongs to which group in psychological
00:41:28.080
terms? Because although you and I are members of lots of different groups, there's probably
00:41:31.920
very few groups that we'd fight and die for. And so that's the key, which is the primary security
00:41:37.460
group that people belong to. I think as well, we've got to stop thinking about war in terms of
00:41:44.740
spreadsheets. Like war is emotional, and it's psychological, and it's completely intrinsic to
00:41:50.080
human beings. Like we've done it forever, and at great scale across all human societies for all
00:41:57.080
time. And so clearly, there's something utterly intrinsic to us in the way we want to fight wars,
00:42:03.840
go and fight wars. And I think to reduce it to a spreadsheet where you're trying to say,
00:42:09.760
oh, look, there's a presence of an ideology there. So if we get rid of the ideology, there won't be war.
00:42:13.800
We need to humanize war. War is a human phenomenon. And understanding it as such, I think makes it less
00:42:21.180
likely that we're going to fight them. And if we do fight them, and this is the topic of my book that's
00:42:25.300
just come out, actually, if we understand war as a psychological challenge, we're actually more
00:42:31.400
likely to be able to fight them successfully. And if you can't avoid war, then the next best thing you
00:42:36.720
can do is fight them successfully, because then you get them over with quickly. The worst possible type
00:42:41.480
of war is one that drags on forever, kills loads of people and doesn't achieve any of its goals,
00:42:47.040
thus sowing the seeds for future wars further down the line.
00:42:51.340
It was interesting. My big takeaway from your book, I actually walked away thinking about how I can apply
00:42:55.960
this on a like a local level. But I think a lot of communities, they might be worried about, like,
00:43:01.520
okay, what do we do about young men joining gangs or doing this sort of anti-social stuff online?
00:43:07.840
And I think understanding, okay, men, young men have this drive for status and for belonging.
00:43:13.560
I think oftentimes the solution that people have to these problems, well, if you just tell these
00:43:18.220
young men that they're wrong, and like, here's the better thing they need to do is sort of,
00:43:24.620
I think oftentimes we treat human beings, like you were saying, as these sort of computers,
00:43:29.000
if you just download the right information, then they'll just see the error of their ways,
00:43:32.800
and they'll behave in an appropriate way. Instead, I was thinking, well, how can I help
00:43:37.560
young men or how can we help young men achieve status and achieve that group belonging, but in
00:43:42.900
pro-social ways? Well, so I agree, you have to understand the problem in order to fix it. But
00:43:48.000
you haven't used the phrase, but this sort of toxic masculinity, this idea that, you know,
00:43:54.640
there is a social problem that needs to be dealt with as if it's completely separate from male
00:44:01.380
biology. You know, we have to say that there is a biological thing here that is real. And we should
00:44:07.580
treat it as such. And as you say, shape the way we approach these issues in society, which no one
00:44:13.720
disputes that there aren't issues in society around male aggression, the role of young men,
00:44:19.800
all that kind of stuff, which I'm sure you're tackling on the podcast. But to wish them away is
00:44:25.980
not the way to solve those problems. Yeah, I guess the thing is figure out how to harness it
00:44:30.980
and to a direction you that you think is good or pro-social or whatever you want.
00:44:36.720
Yeah. Yeah. Well, Mike, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more
00:44:40.500
about the book in your work? So why we fight, you can get on Amazon, which is a book we've been
00:44:45.240
talking about. And I've just released a new book called how to fight a war. And probably the best way
00:44:51.160
to keep up to date with me is on Twitter. So at Threshed Thoughts. And I'm sure Brett will put
00:44:58.500
all the details in the show notes. So thank you, Brett. Fantastic. Well, Mike Martin, thanks for
00:45:02.760
your time. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. My guest is Mike Martin. He's the author of the book
00:45:07.560
Why We Fight. It's available on Amazon.com. Check out our show notes at aom.is slash why we fight
00:45:12.720
where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
00:45:21.160
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at
00:45:26.720
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00:45:30.940
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00:45:34.300
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