The Art of Manliness - Why We Fight

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.300 We often suppose that wars are fought over things like resources, border disputes, and

00:00:15.920 ideologies. My guest calls this the spreadsheet approach to war and argues that in reality,

00:00:21.740 such factors only come in as justifications for the much deeper drives at play.

00:00:26.380 Mike Martin is a senior visiting fellow in the Department of War Studies, King's College,

00:00:31.060 London, and the author of Why We Fight. Today on the show, he draws on his background in biology

00:00:36.040 and experience serving in the British Army to offer an explanation as to why individuals and

00:00:40.440 nation-states go to war. Mike argues that there are two fundamental impulses behind the drive to war,

00:00:46.120 the drive for status and the drive for belonging. We discuss these motivations and how leaders and

00:00:51.200 ideologies corral and amplify them. We end our conversation with how this view of war could

00:00:55.460 prevent conflicts and allow them to be fought more successfully, and also be a lens on how

00:01:00.240 to help men flourish in a healthy way. After the show's over, check out our show notes at

00:01:04.460 aom.is slash why we fight.

00:01:20.020 All right, Mike Martin, welcome to the show.

00:01:21.780 Hey, good to be here. Thank you for having me.

00:01:25.160 So you wrote a book called Why We Fight, where you take a deep dive in exploring why humans engage

00:01:31.940 in warfare. I'm curious, what led you down that path to write this book?

00:01:36.120 Primarily, it was to explain my own experience of fighting in a war. I spent a couple of years in

00:01:42.600 Afghanistan as a British Army officer. And previously to that, I'd studied biology at university.

00:01:49.240 And it seemed to me as I was fighting this war that it didn't really make sense. It wasn't

00:01:55.300 logical. It didn't, there was no, you know, wars just don't make sense in the sense of people die,

00:02:01.620 everything gets destroyed. And so I set out to try and explore why it is that humans fight war. And

00:02:07.980 not just occasionally, we fight them all the time.

00:02:11.220 Well, I'm curious, when you were fighting, when you were an officer in the British Army,

00:02:15.240 what was your experience like? Because you talk about in the book, you were really jonesing to

00:02:19.540 sign up, like you wanted to sign up, you wanted to experience that.

00:02:23.560 I think, firstly, I need to say that I don't think that that's that rare, particularly at a time,

00:02:29.960 so I joined the army in 2007. So we knew we were going to war, right? Okay, Iraq was tailing down 0.89

00:02:36.860 for us at that point. But Afghanistan was just getting going. So you only joined the British Army

00:02:42.020 at that time, with the knowledge that you were going to war. And what I actually found was that

00:02:47.640 a lot of people had joined because they were going to war. People joined, did one or two tours,

00:02:53.240 and then left because they'd done what they wanted to do. And so it was a motivating factor. And

00:02:59.060 actually, armies have this all the time, their recruitment goes down in peacetime,

00:03:03.560 because people join armies because they want to fight.

00:03:07.700 And I think you talked about, there's a moment where you, it was actually exhilarating. People

00:03:12.700 often talk about how war is like, oh, that'd be scary. It is scary. But at the same time,

00:03:16.400 it can also be really exciting.

00:03:18.860 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

00:03:25.380 like you're on a knife edge, and you can go one way or the other. And so, and again, you know,

00:03:31.620 just to repeat, this is not me. You look up and down the line of people who are firing their

00:03:35.780 weapons or there are, you know, bullets flying overhead. And a lot of them are having the time

00:03:41.560 of their lives. And of course, that, you know, if someone gets injured or something, then that

00:03:44.340 totally changes the dynamic, of course. But people are in a state of mental clarity, I guess, partly

00:03:52.680 because the outside world is stripped away. Like you're in something very, very binary here, isn't

00:03:58.580 it? They survive or you survive. It's also something that perhaps you might have spent several years

00:04:03.020 training for. I mean, some of the people who I got into fireparks with in Afghanistan spent 20 years

00:04:07.540 in the army and never been shot at, never fired their weapons in anger. And then all of a sudden,

00:04:11.720 they were doing what they were meant to be doing. But there was also a, you know, you asked a little

00:04:18.860 bit about in your last question. A lot of those people, and predominantly they were young men,

00:04:24.180 right? A lot of those young men wanted to test themselves. They saw combat as, if you like,

00:04:35.700 a, is it a way of becoming a man perhaps, a way of proving themselves, a way of demonstrating that

00:04:42.980 when the bullets start flying, they can, they can deliver. Like they are a man, they are able to

00:04:51.020 get into that bracket of people who've done that. You know, these days, quite a rare experience,

00:04:56.340 probably less so if we go back, you know, a few hundred years. And I think all of these things

00:05:00.840 come together to create a drive towards fighting in combat and a sense of it is something that they

00:05:10.520 need to do or that they want to do. And obviously everyone doesn't feel this, but these people felt it,

00:05:15.860 these young men particularly felt it, everything is something that they need to do in order to

00:05:21.480 prove themselves. I'm curious, when you signed up, like, what did you tell people your motives were?

00:05:27.900 Did you, or even yourself, did you say like, I'm fighting for freedom? I'm fighting for democracy.

00:05:33.440 Was that the thing you told yourself or did you just say, I just want to experience the excitement of

00:05:38.300 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

00:05:44.580 difference between a British and American audience. I think the way the Brits and the Americans see

00:05:48.120 their armed forces and talk about their armed forces is a bit different. I think the American,

00:05:52.560 and this is just cultural differences, right? I think Americans slightly talk more about things

00:05:58.320 like that when they're talking about fighting, whereas Brits talk a little bit less about that

00:06:01.740 kind of stuff. But even so, I think I'm probably one of those people who always wanted to be a soldier.

00:06:07.400 And I think there are quite a lot of people like that. And I suppose maybe, maybe had there not

00:06:15.160 been a war on when I, that Britain was fighting in when I was in my, you know, 20s, it's interesting

00:06:22.120 to ask what would have happened? Would I have still gone into the army if it was a peacetime army? Would

00:06:26.100 I have tried to find that thing somewhere else? But I think what I said to people was that for me,

00:06:31.260 it was, war's always been fascinating. Afghanistan was a particularly fascinating and complex

00:06:37.180 conflict. And I think probably the word I would have used is adventure. I suppose that's the kind

00:06:44.680 of closest proxy to it, which, you know, again, when we're describing these other people, I guess

00:06:51.340 we're sort of thinking about how we want ourselves to be perceived as well. If I think about the 22

00:06:57.140 year old Mike or the 23 year old Mike. So there was probably a bit of that going on. Probably my

00:07:02.720 feelings were a bit stronger than that, but I use the word adventure and I'm fascinated by it as a

00:07:07.000 way of slightly socializing the drives that I had towards going and fighting in a war and,

00:07:14.820 and, and proving myself, you know, as we, as we discussed. So as you said at the beginning,

00:07:19.400 war is, if you take a step back, it's really weird. It's really bizarre. Countries amass large numbers of 1.00

00:07:25.740 people. They spend tons of money. People die. They just blow stuff up. It's just weird. And so when

00:07:33.560 social scientists try to explain like why humans do this, what are the standard explanations for why

00:07:40.120 humans engage in warfare?

00:07:41.560 Hmm. Yeah. Well, the social scientists, right? So they have a, the kind of rational view of the

00:07:51.420 world. It's called the rational actor model. And the idea is that you can quantify stuff in the

00:07:57.040 world. And I'll come on to some of those things in a minute, and then you can put them into a model

00:08:00.480 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

00:08:05.280 a war. And there was this huge, long couple of decades worth of social science research looking

00:08:10.880 into this wider complex happen. And so they would look at things like political fragmentation.

00:08:17.860 And they would look at things like prevalence of extreme ideologies, resources, inequality,

00:08:26.060 things like that. And of course, all of these things are factors that lead to war. Like if a country

00:08:31.280 is more unequal, or the resources are held in a small elite, then yes, all of the things being

00:08:38.080 equal, it's more likely to go to war internally. Or if there's two countries that have a border

00:08:44.820 dispute, or they have a history of going to war, then they're more likely to go to war. So of course,

00:08:49.000 all of that is true. But it still misses the essence, right? And it comes back to this thing,

00:08:54.160 you know, you said it doesn't make sense because of countries and whatever. On an individual level,

00:08:58.020 it really doesn't make sense. So me, as an individual, this is where my sort of background

00:09:02.780 in biology really came to the fore. I'm an evolved being, I've evolved to survive and reproduce.

00:09:08.960 So why am I risking my life to go and fight for, you know, in the modern age, I didn't get anything

00:09:16.360 out of going to Afghanistan as a British Army officer, apart from my salary, right? Obviously,

00:09:20.420 again, life experience, all the rest of it, but I didn't end up with more women or more resources or

00:09:25.040 anything. It was just a job, right? But yet, I still had that drive towards it. And so the real

00:09:29.720 question for me is, why are individuals driven to fighting wars? If they're compelled to, fine,

00:09:35.020 but volunteer armies exist and have existed for thousands of years. So why do individuals go and

00:09:39.760 fight in wars, particularly when, you know, in the extreme case, we think about France in the First

00:09:44.040 World War, the death rate for young men, say, aged between 16 and 35, was about 30%. So you have a

00:09:52.280 one in three chance of dying for a kind of hard to quantify benefit, of any benefit, but particularly

00:10:01.000 in terms of survival and reproduction. So that really doesn't make sense. And I think that the

00:10:04.720 social scientists who are looking at these wars and reasons and causes for war in terms of models and

00:10:11.160 really spreadsheets, I sort of call it the spreadsheet approach to war, are missing this

00:10:15.340 essence right at the heart of it, which is not only why do countries go to war, why do individuals go to

00:10:20.380 war? It just simply doesn't make sense. And as you mentioned, your biology background helped you

00:10:25.480 explore this. And you, you make the case that evolutionary psychology can help us understand

00:10:30.100 why individuals fight. So what, how can evolutionary psychology help us understand why humans fight in

00:10:36.880 wars? Well, if you have something that exists in a population that has a negative selection pressure,

00:10:45.160 so in this case, a drive to go to war, right? And obviously, it's lots of different drives,

00:10:49.020 but let's just say that there is this thing. If war has such a huge death rate, you would expect

00:10:53.720 it to be selected out. The things that contribute towards young men going to fight in wars, you'd

00:10:58.540 expect them to be selected out of the gene pool. But we don't see that. We still see war at, you know,

00:11:04.640 a very high prevalence, right? We see wars, you know, wars are starting all the time, there's loads of them.

00:11:09.080 And so the only reason things that have a negative selection pressure can exist in the gene pool is

00:11:17.820 if that particular trait also has something very, very positive for an individual's surviving

00:11:23.860 reproduction. And that positive outweighs the negative that you get from going to war. So war is

00:11:32.160 a byproduct. So we have this wonderful thing that's evolved that's helping us do X, Y, and Z. And I'm sure

00:11:36.880 we're going to come on to those things in a minute. But as a byproduct, unfortunately,

00:11:41.340 those things that we've evolved to seek because they help us survive and reproduce actually as a

00:11:46.640 byproduct cause us to go to war. And that causes a 30% death rate. But the thing that they originally

00:11:51.980 evolved for help us even more survive and reproduce than 30%. So therefore, they remain in the gene pool.

00:11:57.740 So that's how evolutionary in sort of big ideas terms can help us understand how something like going

00:12:04.080 into war has evolved and has remains in the gene pool.

00:12:08.540 So the main thesis of your book is that humans engage in warfare, because we have these evolutionary

00:12:13.640 urges, because they help us survive and reproduce. These urges are the two main ones that you argue

00:12:19.760 are the drive for status and for belonging. Let's talk about this status drive first. If we look back in

00:12:27.140 our evolutionary past, what sorts of things did we compete over? And how did achieving status help us

00:12:34.300 get those things?

00:12:36.140 So humans are animals, right? And so we compete. I mean, you only need to take a sideways glance at

00:12:42.340 human society to see that we're competing all the time for everything. Sports, jobs, promotions at work.

00:12:49.460 You run a podcast, you're looking at how's my podcast doing against other people's podcasts.

00:12:53.920 And so our society is built on competition, because humans compete with each other. And if you go back,

00:13:01.980 say, 100,000 years, so we've got bands of hunter-gatherers, there were basically, there's two types of

00:13:07.180 things that animals compete for. Humans are just the same. There's real resources, that's like food,

00:13:12.460 water, sexual partners, you know, prey, perhaps. And then there's what are called surrogate resources.

00:13:18.880 And surrogate resources are things like land or territory and status. And the beauty about

00:13:24.600 surrogate resources, once you have those resources, they enable you to have access to real resources.

00:13:30.520 So if you have land, for instance, if you control territory as an animal or a human,

00:13:34.620 you might get the water that's on that territory, or you might get perhaps there's a, you know,

00:13:39.240 it's used by some animals that you have as your prey. So you don't need to compete for the prey

00:13:44.000 itself, you just compete for the surrogate resource, and then you get what you actually want,

00:13:47.400 the real resource. And status is the same. We compete for status as humans, because predominantly,

00:13:54.460 because it enables us to do lots of things, you know, higher status people survive longer,

00:13:59.040 they tend to get more food, all that kind of stuff. But the real thing that higher status gave us in

00:14:04.160 the evolutionary environment as men, was access to more women. So higher status men tended to have 0.98

00:14:10.800 more sexual partners, more wives, if we think about polygamy, like the idea of monogamy being the 1.00

00:14:17.140 standard pattern in society is relatively new one. For most of our evolutionary history,

00:14:23.480 and you can tell this by looking at the structure of human DNA, we've been polygamous. And what

00:14:30.820 higher status men allows us to do is work out who gets more women and who gets less women. And you

00:14:37.460 think, well, why is that? Well, there's a very, very simple reason for that. And that's because

00:14:41.320 if you imagine a man and a woman, obviously, we've got equal numbers of men and women in society. If 0.62

00:14:45.120 you imagine a man and woman having sex and getting pregnant, the woman is then taken out of the field 0.96

00:14:50.560 of reproduction for about, let's say, two years. So pregnancy, childbirth, and then lactation. So

00:14:56.160 let's call it two years. And the man, you know, 10 minutes later, can go and impregnate another woman.

00:15:02.420 And what that means is that although we've got equal numbers of men and women, women of reproductive age,

00:15:08.880 who are not tied up with child rearing are a rare resource compared to the number of men.

00:15:15.500 So there's an oversupply of men. And if you have an oversupply of something, then you need to sort out

00:15:19.700 who gets more access to the rare resource. And so that's what status enables us to do.

00:15:25.100 And we have a set of hormones that enable us to do that. And testosterone is the key hormone. So

00:15:32.960 everyone thinks that testosterone is about controlling, particularly male aggression.

00:15:38.880 That's not actually correct. What testosterone does is it drives us to seek higher social status.

00:15:46.260 And it's just that sometimes, or a lot of the time, being aggressive is a good way of getting,

00:15:51.440 or certainly a way of getting higher social status. And so the average man has 20 times

00:15:56.440 the testosterone of the average woman, because for men, having a higher social status has a much

00:16:02.540 higher evolutionary payoff because of, you know, higher status men end up having more wives. 1.00

00:16:09.240 And if you put it in really, really stark terms, if the top 50% of men have two wives,

00:16:14.780 that means the bottom 50% of men have no wives. And so there's a real selection pressure to be a

00:16:20.620 higher status male, because it literally enables you to continue your evolutionary line.

00:16:26.240 And so this thing that drives us to survive and reproduce then plays a role in war that we can

00:16:32.080 talk about later, if you like.

00:16:33.940 Okay. So humans, particularly males on an individual level, have this strong drive for status because

00:16:39.700 having status anciently meant you would have more access to resources, land, and women. So being high 0.79

00:16:46.380 status increased the likelihood you would survive and reproduce. And anciently, gaining high status

00:16:51.760 often meant engaging in violence. And today we still have that status drive. We just have more ways

00:16:57.520 that you can gain status that don't resort to violence. So you can start a successful business,

00:17:02.740 be a rock star, make lots of money, be good at sports, et cetera. But even though we have more

00:17:08.180 routes to status, you know, going to war, that's still a way to gain status.

00:17:11.760 So let's talk about this second drive that all individuals have that contributes to groups

00:17:17.340 engaging in warfare. And that's the drive to belong to groups. And what's interesting about

00:17:22.860 this is it seems that the drive for status and the drive to belong to groups, they kind of conflict,

00:17:29.240 right? Because we have this individual status drive to be better than everyone else in the group,

00:17:34.080 but we also want to belong to the group. So what's going on there?

00:17:37.780 Yeah. Well, so you are right, they do kind of work against and with each other. But that's what

00:17:43.180 evolution is like, right? It just evolves certain traits or involves multiple traits at the same

00:17:48.180 time that sort of pulls humans in different directions, which is why humans are both selfish

00:17:52.600 and selfless at the same time. But the belonging things, again, quite simple, we live in groups to

00:18:00.460 survive. Predominantly, it's about safety. And again, go back 100,000 years, we're on the African

00:18:05.760 savannah, and maybe a group of 20 of us, we're probably all kind of related, maybe a couple of

00:18:11.160 people have joined the group. But basically, that group keeps us alive, because the environment is

00:18:17.080 full of wild animals, other groups of humans who are, you know, antagonistic to us competing with us for 0.84

00:18:23.440 resources. And also, you need a group to, you know, it's quite difficult to live, you know, you need to

00:18:30.620 walk long distances, find food, hunt together, all that kind of stuff. So the group is what enables you to

00:18:35.100 survive. And being thrown out of that group is probably a death sentence. In many cases, it will

00:18:42.480 be a death sentence. So there is this drive towards living in groups. And we all have this, right? We

00:18:48.580 all want to support football teams, be in a choir, maybe be in a political party. We're all, you know,

00:18:57.520 in a nation state, right? We all have a sense, most of us have a sense of which country we belong to,

00:19:02.260 perhaps we feel proud of our country or patriotic. In many countries in the world, you might belong

00:19:07.000 to a tribe, or you might feel quite strongly about your ethnicity. Religion is another group,

00:19:12.260 right? We, you know, lots of people feel very strongly Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu

00:19:16.980 and so on and so forth. And so we all belong to multiple groups, really, but it's all the same

00:19:23.860 mechanism. And it's this mechanism that says, and it's evolved for the reasons I've just described,

00:19:28.740 but the mechanism says, find a group and belong to it because groups keep you safe. And they have

00:19:34.600 another of other benefits, like enabling you to get access to more resources, enabling you to find

00:19:39.700 sexual partners, but predominantly a group keeps you safe. So evolution is about surviving reproduction.

00:19:45.780 Live in a group, you're much more likely to survive. It's a very, very strong evolutionary drive.

00:19:51.020 And maybe you've had this experience, Brett, but I don't know if you support any sports.

00:19:56.320 Do you support any sports?

00:19:57.460 Uh, yeah. I'm a fan of the University of Oklahoma football, American football.

00:20:01.520 Okay. Okay. So when you go to an American football match and you guys score a touchdown

00:20:06.820 and you're, all of you, you go mad in the stands, you're like screaming, shouting and up and down.

00:20:12.440 And, and do you get like little shiver down the back of your neck and down your back?

00:20:16.640 Of course. The thing that gives me the biggest shiver is at the beginning of the game, when the

00:20:20.180 marching band comes out, you hear the, uh, the fight song playing and everyone's.

00:20:25.220 Cause that's your song, isn't it?

00:20:26.440 That's right. Yeah. That's, that gives you the words and you're singing it together and that's

00:20:30.300 your clan. That's your crew. And so what you're doing, you know, actually what you're doing in

00:20:34.500 biological terms, psychological terms is you're all demonstrating that you remember that group

00:20:37.940 and you're feeling warm and lovely and high you feeling high. Right. And that is even if something

00:20:44.680 makes you feel good, like eating sugar or having sex or singing the marching song that was sorry.

00:20:50.000 So you call it the fighting, fighting song. That is evolution pushing you to do those things again,

00:20:55.480 because they have an evolutionary benefit. And by converse, if something feels bad or you're unhappy

00:21:00.380 to do it, then that's evolution motivating you in a different way to do different things.

00:21:04.800 And so we all have this strong desire to belong to a group. But the thing about that mechanism,

00:21:11.820 and again, it's controlled by another hormone called oxytocin, which is the same one that's

00:21:16.000 involved in childbirth, but evolution just re hijacked it to become a social bonding hormone. 0.98

00:21:21.760 That oxytocin mechanism cannot only create in groups. It has to also create out groups. And you

00:21:28.480 think about it, that's pretty logical. Imagine if you had a mechanism that just said, trust everyone,

00:21:33.040 make everyone part of your in-group, you know, all sort of sitting around loving each other.

00:21:36.460 The problem with that is some people would evolve a mechanism that said, take advantage of the guys

00:21:42.360 sitting around loving everyone. Basically, they become free riders. The only way that mechanism

00:21:46.340 could evolve is if you put a boundary on the group. So you have a mechanism that says, find a group to

00:21:52.100 belong to and trust and love all those people in that group. But make sure you understand who's in and

00:21:57.700 out of the group. Don't trust people who are outside the group, because you guys are, that's your group.

00:22:02.220 You're the Oklahoma team, but the other guys, they're another group. And we shouldn't let any

00:22:06.420 of the fans from, I don't know, Yale University or whatever, come into the Oklahoma stands because

00:22:12.920 this is our area, right? And so that mechanism, that in-group, out-group mechanism, if you think

00:22:20.180 about it, that's the basis of war, right? That's what we do in war. We separate ourselves out into groups.

00:22:26.040 And the way that mechanism works is if you get antagonism, so you're in an in-group and you get

00:22:34.680 antagonism from an out-group. So the Yale fans are shouting their song at you and you're in the

00:22:39.640 Oklahoma stand, firstly, you feel tighter within your group. Perhaps you feel more likely, more

00:22:46.360 trusting, more friendly, so that you're bantering with people you don't even know, but you know

00:22:50.500 they're in the Oklahoma stand, so they're good guys. But you're getting tighter, your in-group's

00:22:56.500 getting tighter because you're getting all this antagonism from another team. And then you're

00:23:00.280 maybe directing some back as well, right? And then that's causing them to get a bit tighter.

00:23:04.520 Their groups, they feel more trusting. Who are these Oklahoma guys? And what I'm describing

00:23:09.080 really is what we call escalation, right? If you watch the news and they talk about,

00:23:13.000 you know, two countries are squaring off to each other. That escalation in physiological terms is

00:23:19.620 that mechanism where in-groups and out-groups, a bit like a ratchet, are tightening up, directing

00:23:24.540 rhetoric at each other. And that's causing the rhetoric of one group. It's causing the other

00:23:28.460 group to tighten and issue its own rhetoric back. And this process goes backwards and forwards as

00:23:32.720 groups become more and more antagonistic to each other. And you can see it, that escalates.

00:23:37.560 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

00:24:40.680 and fight back. Is that how it works?

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

00:31:37.740 a British citizen.

00:31:39.740 There's a ceiling on his career.

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.

00:32:38.740 And so they decided to fight.

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 0.98

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 1.00

00:34:22.800 the only way to deal with that was to go and attack British and American and other, you know, 0.85

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

00:37:20.700 that group.

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

00:37:30.020 standardize our societies.

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, 0.95

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 0.96

00:38:40.000 taking their little boys away to rape them. Or they were from a tribal militia that was defending, 0.79

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 0.61

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 0.94

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, 0.61

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 0.74

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 artofmanlius.com where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that

00:45:30.940 we've written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven't done

00:45:34.300 so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give you off a podcast or Spotify. Helps out a

00:45:38.360 lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or

00:45:42.220 family member who would think we could get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued

00:45:46.340 support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay reminding you to not listen to AOM podcast, but put what

00:45:51.100 you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2023

Why We Fight

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