The Psychology Of War

Former military psychologist Lawrence LeShan wrote The Psychology of War: Comprehending its Mystique and its Madness in 1992, and it was updated in 2001 and 2002. I read the 1992 version and would like to see it updated again, in light of the Iraq war and the possible confrontation with Iran.

At the heart of the book is the distinction between sensory wars and mythic wars. Sensory wars are those such as Vietnam and Korea, where we're fully aware of the grim reality. These wars are entered regretfully, in order to solve a specific problem. There are no war songs, no heroes, we don't believe that much will be different after the war, negative information about our side is well known, and people can freely oppose the war. The present situation in Iraq demonstrates this type of war perfectly.

Examples of mythic wars include World Wars I and II, and the Civil War. They are characterized by a belief that the war is an epic struggle between good and evil that will determine the course of mankind forever. The whole country rallies around the war, and any antiwar thoughts make one a traitor. There are songs and heroes, and negative information about our side is suppressed, because we're good and the other side is evil. It's us versus them, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

Mythic wars are obviously dangerous because they cause us to throw logic and common sense out the window. Remember the justification for starting Gulf War II? Bush didn't say it was to stabilize oil prices, and he didn't even really say it was to find weapons of mass destruction per se. He said it was to strike the axis of evil, the people who hate America because we love freedom. When you present a war like that, it become socially unacceptable to oppose it. In Gulf War I, Saddam Hussein said "This is the mother of all wars. It is led by the Satan, Bush" (of course, that would be Papa Bush).

The book explores the social and psychological reasons why people seem to be addicted to war. And in fact, we are addicted to war, though we might forget it from time to time. War heightens our sense of individuality as well as group acceptance, eases pain and stress, and even lowers the mortality rate of cancer and many other diseases. While it may be hard to believe, LeShan gives plenty of anecdotal examples.

While LeShan acknowledges that he's not going to end all wars with a book, he provides an outline of an educational system that he believes will be a start. Then he ends with a strong call to action: "The time is now. Every war we have fought and will fight since 1945 increases the chance that someone will again use the atomic bomb, certainly destroying our civilization and in all probability destroying our species. The day the first bomb was dropped was, in Buckminster Fuller's words, 'The day that humanity started taking its final exam.' We had better pass."