Why Isn’t There Peace in the World?

It is evident that life on this planet is far more awful than it needs to be because of something very peculiar and sad inside we humans: a constant inclination to unleash conflict, beat up our neighbours, seize their lands and lay waste to their cities. How prosperous we could now all be if we didn’t have to restart civilisation every few decades after yet another eruption of horror.

The question is why we’re like this. When the people we call historians talk about conflicts, the blame is almost always laid at the door of material factors. Dictators come to the fore and territories are taken because human beings are apparently very hungry for money and assets. Greed is the motor of history.

But the truth may be rather different – and far stranger. If we properly explore historical upheavals, the violence and chaos almost never have much to do with anything material, and a great amount to do with psychology, and in particular, to put it very bluntly, with love. People overwhelmingly go to war not for the sake of material accumulation but in order to secure honour, to recover a sense of dignity, to insist on respect, to feel applauded, to be looked up to and to correct an otherwise uncontainable feeling of invisibility, neglect and humiliation – a narcissistic wound shared as much by leaders as by a decisive share of their adherents. There may of course be the odd occasion when there is a particularly pressing practical reason to seize a river or a valley, but almost all the time, the real drive to put on one’s boots and pulverise another country lies elsewhere: in a psychologically-based craving for applause and from a wish to compensate through military means for a devastating absence of an inner sense of love.

Think of Benito Mussolini. A few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, the dictator of Italy ordered his troops to invade neighbouring Albania. Albania’s small army was quickly defeated and within a week the country was formally united with Italy. It was a minor but hugely revealing episode in the long history of human aggression. On the surface Mussolini was acting for material and strategic reasons: he wanted access to mineral resources; there was a particularly good harbour where Italian warships could be based; Albania provided a base from which further incursions into the Balkans could be launched. This is the sort of instinctive analysis that historians always go in for: countries act, even if lamentably, out of practical self-interest.

But this fails to capture the real dynamics at play. Mussolini had risen to power in the 1920s because he brilliantly articulated a conviction that many of his compatriots shared: that they were not properly respected or appreciated in the world. He saw his country – and himself – as slighted and snubbed. And he responded by stressing lost grandeur; he deployed the language, gestures and imagery of domination and authority to ward off a painful inner sense of total weakness. His appeal to his supporters was: ‘you feel rejected, lonely and misunderstood, I feel the same, I love you and together we will fight to be noticed’. Like so many others before and after him, this is ultimately what Mussolini was always shouting to his crowds about from flag-draped balconies.

Deep down, the modern analysis of politics and history rests on a flawed economically-founded assumption: that the most terrible thing in life is not to have as many possessions as another person. But the truth is different: the most terrible thing in a life is actually to be ignored and not respected, especially when one’s parents weren’t kind to one in childhood; a fate worse than death and (in fragile minds) therefore worth causing untold deaths for and dying for. 

That’s why Mussolini invaded Albania – and that’s why almost every other conflict has begun: with a sense in a people that they didn’t feel very good inside, and so would have to destroy others’ cities in a bid to assuage their gnawing inner sense of humiliation. 

If this all sounds a little ridiculous and petty, that’s is a very a good thing indeed. We do ourselves a central disservice when we discuss wars and politics in so-called reasonable terms. The brutality isn’t ever about strategy or spheres of influence, oil or water. We need to frame matters in far more bathetic and urgent terms: it’s about mental illness. 

There is plenty of land and wealth to go around. What there evidently isn’t enough of is sanity and beneath that, psychological security. We will keep fighting and having to destroy and rebuild civilisation until we properly understand what motivates humans; and grasp that there is literally nothing more dangerous in this world than a certain kind of person who wasn’t cherished in their early years, who feels underloved and invisible and who won’t rest – or leave you in peace or even alive – until you’ve noticed them.