Every War Starts Inside Someone
On ego, war, and the ethics of defense
I wrote a note long ago about narcissism in leadership and, in particular, the narcissism of war, but I have more to say about the nature of war and, in particular, the definition of sanity and the ethics of combat from a philosophical and psychological perspective.
Not sanity in the clinical sense, though that will become relevant shortly. I mean sanity in a broader, more visceral sense. The kind of spiritual or metaphysical sanity that has nothing to do with diagnosis and everything to do with whether a person (or in this case, the leader or ruler of a nation) is capable of seeing beyond the boundaries of the limited ego. Because here is what I keep returning to as I watch the world arrange itself into fresh configurations of violence: war, in almost every case, is a failure of this kind of sanity first. The missiles come second.
The ego, as I’ve written about extensively, is not inherently a problem. It is the self’s organizing principle, the structure through which we navigate a world that would otherwise be overwhelming. But the ego in its compulsively defended state, the ego that has calcified around a wound, that has decided its survival depends on the subjugation of some perceived other, that ego is a form of ordinary insanity. Not psychosis in the clinical sense, and not necessarily a diagnosable personality disorder, but the particular madness that takes hold when a self becomes so defended it can no longer see clearly, feel honestly, or act from anything other than the imperative of self-preservation.
Every war I have ever studied is, at its foundation, a story about this.
