https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2025/12/24/18882397.php
Archaeological excavations and observations of reality suggest that war is only caused by states and rulers.War has returned to Europe, and those in power even want to expand it. We must be ready for war by 2029, we are repeatedly told, and so the financial and industrial foundations for a major war against Russia are already being laid. The biggest obstacle to this is the desire for peace among most EU citizens. We are repeatedly told that this is not natural, as peace is a historical anomaly to which we have become too accustomed. War is the defining feature of history, and we as EU citizens must bid farewell to our illusion of peace. However, research suggests that it is not war but peace that is the natural state of humanity, from which we have strayed too far—due to hierarchies and fear.
by Felix Feistel
[This article posted on 12/19/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, http://www.manova.news.]In Germany, there has been open drumming for war for years. The threat of a militaristic Russia, led by a Putin obsessed with conquest, is being painted on the wall as something that must be resisted. To this end, heavy investments are being made in armaments — more than a trillion euros in debt was approved by a Bundestag that has since been voted out of office. But what use are all these weapons when they are aimed at a population that has no interest in war? For this reason, there is repeated debate about reintroducing conscription, forcing citizens to take up arms and go to war. Those in power want to go even further. Months ago, Caren Miosga asked Joschka Fischer quite bluntly on her talk show how to get “this pacifism out of people’s DNA.”
The message often put forward is that we have become too accustomed to peace. War and chaos, it is said, are now the new normal, and we must get used to them. In any case, we have lived too long in an illusion of peace, at least here in Europe. War, Cardinal Heiner Wilmer explained, is the normal state of affairs, and this is often the subliminal message in media reports. However, Europeans and Germans have taken refuge in the illusion of an ideal that can never be realized.
The propaganda ties in with a very old idea. According to Heraclitus, war is “the father of all things.” According to him, war determines man’s position in the world. And his observation may well be conclusive, because after all, the great Greek civilizations, the Roman Empire, and other empires in the Mediterranean region emerged from wars. Wars shaped and formed these civilizations, expanded them, and ultimately contributed to their downfall. Countless myths and legends tell of war, such as the legend of the beautiful Helen, for whom the Trojan War was started. War must therefore have appeared to Heraclitus as the “father of all things” — namely, all cities, armies, and royal houses — and as a strict ruler of the people who are subject to him and his power.
War seems to be a kind of primordial state of humanity. This idea was popularized above all by the political theorist Thomas Hobbes in his work “Leviathan.” According to him, in the times before the state, humans lived in a state of lawlessness, which was determined by war of all against all. Only the heavy hand of a ruler ended this war and brought humans into a peaceful state system.
The tenor of the argument is that humans must be led by a leader, a king, and forced to live in peace. Since Hobbes, this conviction has spread throughout large sections of the academic community and the political elite. It is also very convenient, as it provides legitimacy for the exercise of power and rule.
And that was precisely the intention of Hobbes, who used this work to curry favor with his king and the church, which he believed were the forces that held society together.
But on closer inspection, his work completely misses the mark. For no one in history has caused as many destructive wars as statesmen, princes, and emperors.
The greatest wars in human history—from the conquests of Rome and Alexander the Great to the Crusades, the two world wars of the last century, the Iraq wars, and the war in Ukraine—were started by state structures and their leaders and could only reach such proportions through the organization of state apparatuses. No single person could have caused such destruction without the state infrastructure. So it’s a crazy claim that princes and states guarantee peace.
But the work also contains a second, very mistaken assumption, namely that of a warlike state of nature. This idea is so widespread today that most people use it to justify the need for state power. If there were no state, the reasoning goes, people would attack each other, kill each other, rob, steal, plunder, and pillage. And even if almost no one would expect this behavior from themselves, the “other” is always considered a potential source of such behavior. But this state of nature, this war of all against all, has never existed.
In fact, archaeology points in a completely different direction. As Harald Meller, Kai Michel, and Carel van Schaik write in their book “The Evolution of Violence,” humans have been rather peaceful creatures for 99 percent of their existence in history, the “most peaceful apes” of all. Hunters and gatherers tended to avoid each other in conflicts, but generally approached each other with curiosity. They exchanged and traded, including members of the community, and went hunting together. Of course, there were individual conflicts among them, and murders also occurred; but organized warfare, the authors note, is a phenomenon that only began with the advent of settled life about 12,000 years ago — in the last one percent of human history.
However, it was not the settling down itself that was central to the development of wars. There is archaeological evidence of civilizations that, despite their settled nature, not only did not wage war, but also built large cities where people lived together peacefully, organized themselves, and managed their lives in a way that even enabled social housing of high quality by the standards of the time.
This is also how David Graeber and David Wengrow describe it in their book “The Origins of Humanity: A New History of Mankind”. Examples of this can be found in South America as well as in present-day Turkey. Excavations show that these cultures had no representations of violence. No skeletal remains were found that indicated violence, and no weapons were discovered either.
So it was not the formation of civilizations alone that brought about war. Another factor was decisive, namely the development of hierarchies. There were no signs of such hierarchies at the excavation sites: no royal houses, no temples, or other indications of hierarchical relationships. In “The Evolution of Violence,” hierarchies are also cited as a central factor that causes wars.
Wars have only existed since humans developed domination and power, property—especially in unequal distribution—and elitist castes. These dominate the history books simply because written history is younger than the beginning of wars, and because the rulers of each civilization write history—and here, of course, the victors of these wars.
It is no wonder that history books are dominated by the heroic narratives of victorious rulers. For it is in this way that they have attempted to create a certain image of themselves.
War is not a normal state of affairs, as psychologist and hypnotherapist Oliver Ruppel explains. This is because humans are peaceful beings in their original state. Peace is in our DNA — as Caren Miosga has also recognized. And no amount of propaganda, not even thousands of years of war, is enough to override this. War has therefore always been perceived as the scourge of humanity. For a long time, it was commonplace, but it was never experienced as normal or desirable. But why then do people constantly wage war? Oliver Ruppel describes that war is essentially a product of human fear. Only those who live in constant fear can be persuaded to go to war, fight other people, and kill them. Humanity today lives in a collective fear that has long since become chronic. That is why we no longer perceive it at all: it has long since become the norm, and with it the war and violence that result from it.
Somewhere in history, humans must have suffered a primal trauma that legitimized violence and war as a survival strategy and normalized it over the generations. It stands to reason that this trauma has something to do with the domination of individuals over others.
This domination may in turn have been a trauma survival strategy that has long since taken on a life of its own. At the same time, domination is traumatic for those who are subjected to it. For it forces them to deny their own selves in order to bring their own behavior into line with the interests of the foreign ruler. Subordination and conformity are thus enforced—or else disobedience and revolution, which are fought, suppressed, and thus eradicated by the rulers, leading in turn to new traumas that can be sublimated, at least in part, outside the sphere of domination—for example, in the form of wars against other rulers.
According to Chinese teacher Prof. Jiang, the invention of the school plays an important role in the possibility of waging war. This concept, invented by the ancient Greeks, forces young children to be separated from their parents during their formative years — leading to isolation, abandonment, and a lack of attachment. This creates trauma, which is compounded by additional trauma—subjugation, abuse, and violence—in order to make children controllable and prone to violence. This is a necessary prerequisite for creating soldiers who are willing to go to war. Although the methods have been refined today, the basic function of traumatizing children through state violence in schools continues.
Our entire society today is based on trauma that has been going on for thousands of years, passed down through generations and increasing with each generation due to continued oppression by states and governments.
This traumatization creates fear, and it is fear that maintains the system of domination. This fear, in turn, can be channeled by those in power in their own interests—for example, into obedience to authority and thus also into war against other rulers or states.
In industrial capitalism, too, this fear can be put to good use for the system. For it not only drives people into selfish competition, which places their own advancement and material hedonism above the welfare of others and cooperation with others, but also leads to increased consumption. In this way, capitalism produces its own traumas. The fear of material ruin forces people into behaviors that they actually dislike: they must split off and suppress themselves in order to serve a larger, abstract system and not perish in it. These traumas, in turn, lead to emotional pain, which they try to cover up with consumption. Since this does not work in the long term, this consumption must be renewed again and again—and so the eternal machine of production and consumption turns.
It is this fear that is expressed in the fear of losing state power. Because selfishness and competition seem normal to us today, many believe that humanity would continue these behaviors in even more extreme and ruthless ways if the state were to disappear as a regulating force. But Dutch philosopher Rudger Bregman has already contradicted this: in his book “Be Kind, Be Human,” he describes how people who find themselves in a situation where state power is lost—such as during the Hurricane Katrina disaster in the US in 2005—do not at all attack each other and fall into a primitive state of war of all against all.
On the contrary:
In real crises, people help each other, support each other, and show cooperative behavior—despite being shaped by domination, war, and capitalism. Only in apparent crises and fake disasters—such as the fake pandemic—do people turn against each other.
Here, too, the state went to great lengths to instill fear in people in order to turn them against each other. This immense propaganda effort, combined with state violence, is necessary to drive people into a battle of all against all and into war. Very few people would exhibit such behavior on their own. It is all the more tragic that it is precisely these people — psychopaths and sociopaths — who are primarily in leadership positions. This is because the structures are designed in such a way that such people rise to the top — which says a lot about the origins and functioning of the state, corporations, and institutions.
But human beings are peaceful creatures by nature. The natural state of human beings is peace. It is regrettable how far we have strayed from our human nature. It is time to return to it.