I’ve long believed that human society has an inbuilt mechanism activated when we become too numerous: we cull young men.
How else is one to explain the perennial nature of brutal and pointless wars? As the mother of boys this frightens me, but we get nowhere if we can’t see and identify truth.
Consider the First World War, which I would argue has been unsurpassed in both brutality and pointlessness. (And I say this as an Ashkenazi Jew.) A jumble of countries, all vying for the same resources, all in the Earth-opposing throes of the Industrial Revolution, passed a tipping point somehow and decided to send their young men to go die in ditches in heretofore unfathomable numbers. Why, if not to cull them? The Second World War at least had a clear casus belli.
I think about this as a series of proxy wars between Nato and the Sino-Russian alliance hots up, all contesting critical land and resources. All of these wars also have a clear casus belli, to be sure. When Taiwan gets drawn in, I’m sure it will be for good reason. But the net result will be an archipelago of battlegrounds on which both sides can test the latest weapons tech. A cull.
I remember speaking with a friend when Trump was president, and she was rereading the Mahabharata for comfort. In that ancient epic, the human actors despoil the Earth and are then compelled by the gods to kill against their will, because it is their dharma – their duty. I return to another thing I’ve believed for a long time: we have always done this.
Sonya Blanck writings 