All’s fair in love and war
I.
The difference between the left and the right as regards war is that the right thinks war is about access to women, whereas the left thinks war is about access to resources; as usual, the left tells a half-truth—war is about access to markets, land, oil; and yet it is only about these things insofar as they support and extend the ability to acquire women and raise families—women are also a resource, yet the left will never admit this is so; as feminists say, “You don’t own me!”—so we should not treat women as property to be acquired.
The left cannot acknowledge that wars are about women—effectively a scale-up from the tribal village punch up over wives and girlfriends—because they are neurotic. The fact that the world is like an ancient Greek play disturbs too much—as such, it involves rape, bridal capture, incest, adultery, infanticide, eyes torn out, and so on…It’s all rather distressing! So the left instead says that wars are caused by parasitic elites—cruel aristocratic warriors; greedy merchants; irrational priests—and if we just removed the elites we would “war no more”.
Usually, they quote the Bible, “Beat spears into pruning hooks”—although there is another book in the Bible, Joel, where this is reversed, “Beat pruning hooks into spears”. Hence there is no peace without war—no war without peace; really, all peace is a preparation for war—and all war is a preparation for peace. The extent to which you prepare for war in peacetime determines the outcome in war—and this in turn determines the peace.
The Manichaean view, whereby war is seen as “evil”, would result in an end to genuine progress; and you can no more stop war than you can stop the tides—nor, indeed, can you stop peace. Just as the tide reshapes the shore, war conditions the peace—and the changes to the shore condition the impact from the next wave. To attempt to stop the process altogether, as pacifists wish, would just lead to an almighty regressive explosion and, indeed, nobody is more provocative than a pacifist who lies down in the middle of the motorway (he promotes anger and violence)—hence the challenge is to use war creatively to move us to a higher level, just as the peace can be used creatively, through better preparations for war, to end the next conflict more swiftly.
Hence almost all masculine activities—especially sports—are a preparation for war; and the top athlete gets the girl (see above). Men like Napoleon Chagnon pointed this out long ago, pointed out that Amazonian tribes war with each other for women—and the left responded that the wars were really about machetes or trade routes (the left cannot cope with biology, since biology is holistic and immutable—hence it is an analogue to the divine). On the other side, anthropologists like Margaret Mead produced post-war pamphlets about “the end of war” and “how we learned war”—the argument being that Eskimos, though they fight each other within their tribal bands (for women, Margaret), do not wage war as we understand it (it might be to do with their extreme geographical remoteness from each other, Margaret); and so it follows war is “learned”.
Really, it is microcosm-macrocosm: the fight in the schoolyard or in the tribe is just the microcosm for war—the whole tribe in arms (as translated into the modern state, being the way more elaborate tribes organise themselves—so as to be barely tribal, though be in no doubt that the preponderance of English and the English common law helps the British “tribe” to reproduce, even if these innovations were spread by “non-tribal” states).
II.
Neurotics are sexually conditioned, so that they associate femininity with the pleasure experienced during sex—hence they think like women, the cues associated with the feminine being positive for them, and women demand peaceful non-competitive solutions to problems where nobody gets hurt and where reality can be changed with words (although they do not really want that, it is just a challenge they issue to men—so, in fact, this demand is another variation on deception in war, the sex war).
Hence leftists think that if we remove the priests, aristos, and merchants war will end; and yet they do not understand that these functions have come about to facilitate the struggle for life—the struggle for women—and that to remove them totally would just doom your tribal family to extinction. Hence leftists think like women—i.e. unrealistically; and, further, they are hypocritical: they are happy when martial strength is used, as it is in the Ukraine by the West, to advance their causes—even as they disdain overt masculinity at home (it makes them feel uncomfortable—so please put your pronouns in your bio).
There is an episode in the cartoon series Futurama where civilisation collapses because an ultra-realistic sexbot has been created that combines with an AI environment to bewitch the whole population. “It turns out that everything in civilisation—art, music, science—was just done to impress the opposite sex,” explains a character—hence, with the ultra-perfect sexual partner now in the shops, advanced life collapses because there is no incentive to create novelty or maintain civilisation.
This view is too nihilistic; it is related to Schopenhauer’s idea that people only have children because they are driven by a blind sex drive—i.e. people do not really think, in his view, “we will have children” they just answer the call for hedonistic satisfaction without regard to the consequences. If Schopenhauer is right, then so is Futurama—if there were a sexbot that was so perfect, nobody would do anything anymore (in the cartoon, they just stay in their decaying rooms, dishevelled, smooching their electronic sweethearts).
However, Schopenhauer is wrong—and wrong because he was perverse and twisted himself (without a family, notorious for his bitterness and hatred of his mother). It is true that there is a hedonistic sex drive, but humans have long known that sex leads to babies—their copulation has not always been “blind” as Schopenhauer would have it. Rather, they are also partly motivated by the desire for children, to continue their line, to continue their tribe—they are also motivated by aspirations that are higher than sexual satisfaction; basically, Schopenhauer modelled his view as regards human sexuality on dogs, on animals with a short time horizon—on women perhaps...
Hence the Futurama-Schopenhauer scenario is unlikely to come to pass: it is only the nihilist who thinks that all that exists is the hedonistic sex satisfaction urge—and if that is so then, of course, the perfect sexbot is an acceptable substitute. Naturally, the leftist pacifist is also such a nihilist; he wants to “relax” into peace and love—sit in your own filth and satisfy the sex drive, no need to do anything else (as the hippies did). So you don’t even have to imagine a “perfect sexbot”, there are people who settled into hedonistic sexual satisfaction—never showered—decades ago, no need for a computer at all.
The image that heads this piece causes great distress in people—well, in neurotic people. It was originally posted to 4chan, where the anons commented: “You might as well give up, you might as well kill yourself—you will never be like this guy, no matter how many self-help books you read and no matter how much you go to the gym. Some men are born this way.” This is a neurotic reaction: people cannot cope with beauty and perfection and so they try to deal with the negative emotions the image induces through displacement (incidentally, this image is non-sexual; and that is not unconnected to the nihilist’s distress—why so?). Actually, men can improve to quite a considerable degree—it is women who are stuck with their appearance for life, their only asset—and so the 4chan reaction was feminine; it assumed you cannot improve and that life is a static binary—good/evil, war/peace—and not a dynamic process. This is only true for women, not for men.
Envy and resentment—if you think the picture above is unattainable for you, then you will want to destroy it (everyone can destroy and pull down easily enough); and so we see that when neurotic people are confronted by sublime beauty they cannot deal with its perfection and instead resolve to destroy it—they cannot say, “It’s a beautiful image,” because that would require humility; it would require them to acknowledge that which is superior and acquired by effort, to admit their imperfection. Yet beauty remains.