There are lots of comparably astute thinkers in the modern age. We ignore them because they don't command the same gravitas as the founders and because in some sense intellectualism is no longer valued in the West.
But it's not hard to say: "if you commercialize war and create an entrenched institution around it, then there are a lot of people (weapons manufacturers, government contractors, military leadership) with considerable money and power who are highly incentivized to perpetuate the state of war, irrespective of its necessity."
One of the most successful con jobs was conceptually linking war and manliness, so that 'pacifist' became a derisive label. I always found it staggeringly obtuse for conservatives (people; not the corrupt politicians and media manipulating them) to simultaneously complain about the debt and endorse pointless wars that end up costing many trillions of their own taxpaying dollars.
And then I realized that rationalizing the right wing platform is a total package deal: maybe you came for your gun rights, red meat manliness, shallow (or deep) streak of white supremacy, and/or your Christian values, but you end up staying for the costly warmongering, poor-to-rich wealth transfer, and excessive broad spectrum deregulation.
I don’t buy that that is any longer a significant contributing factor. Unadulterated societies should graduate from barbarism as they move up Maslow's hierarchy. That the most secure civilization (economically and otherwise) in human history has not managed to completely do so is almost surely the consequence of artificial intervention.
If you compare military ads for example, you’ll see that in the US we glorify and Hollywoodize war (because they know the Call of Duty aesthetic will lure kids into joining) whereas in a place like Ukraine it’s positioned as a grim and unpalatable necessity.
I’m not saying we don’t need a military btw. I am saying it’s potentially an order of magnitude more bloated than it needs to be. Biological aggression alone hardly serves to explain that. Cultural and political manipulation are the dominant explanatory variables.
And this should bother us, because while we’re busy fighting the wanton perversion of our democratic system in this and various other ways, other countries committed to a state-sanctioned technocratic agenda are running laps around us. It’s stupidly tragic.
>I don’t buy that that is any longer a significant contributing factor. Unadulterated societies should graduate from barbarism as they move up Maslow's hierarchy.
That is a very idealistic view. The truth is that the majority of the world still lives a stone's throw from death, and even lower class American neighborhoods are filled with violence that is inseparable from traits that are amplified by male biology - pride, aggression, anger - compounded by physical differences between the sexes which affect psychology - i.e. a lifetime spent weaker or stronger than average.
Don't get me wrong. These drives and emotions have their place, and I would argue that they are also responsible for much of the good in the modern world.
But these biological and social properties continue to force an association between manliness and war, although to some degree propaganda and Hollywood do have an amplifying affect, as you suggest.
The reason it isn't hard to say that (about war and power) is, in large part, because we are preceded by people like Madison.
It is, I have found, very difficult for people to accurately assess what it would be like to not know something they already know. Steven Pinker calls this the Curse of Knowledge.
But it's not hard to say: "if you commercialize war and create an entrenched institution around it, then there are a lot of people (weapons manufacturers, government contractors, military leadership) with considerable money and power who are highly incentivized to perpetuate the state of war, irrespective of its necessity."
One of the most successful con jobs was conceptually linking war and manliness, so that 'pacifist' became a derisive label. I always found it staggeringly obtuse for conservatives (people; not the corrupt politicians and media manipulating them) to simultaneously complain about the debt and endorse pointless wars that end up costing many trillions of their own taxpaying dollars.
And then I realized that rationalizing the right wing platform is a total package deal: maybe you came for your gun rights, red meat manliness, shallow (or deep) streak of white supremacy, and/or your Christian values, but you end up staying for the costly warmongering, poor-to-rich wealth transfer, and excessive broad spectrum deregulation.