Tenth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work

After reading last week’s post you may be thinking that War is such a wonderful thing that we should just forget about peace and just promote nonstop full-time worldwide warfare –and then no one need ever be out of a job ever again.  While this is a strategy that governments have flirted with throughout time, the cold hard fact is that War has reached the very end of its usefulness in human life.  Always possessed of a hideous side beneath the mask of glory,War has become so dysfunctional and destructive that we are fast approaching the point where one of us has to go –either humanity or War.

But what went wrong?  How could such a longstanding relationship have turned so sour?  And what about all the things we just last week claimed make war such an ideal employer?

1. It creates jobs:  True, but by crippling bodies and destroying infrastructure, it can ruin productivity at the same time.  And War also “cooks the books” so to speak when it comes to lowering unemployment.  Sometimes it does that by creating more jobs –and sometimes it does that by killing off the potentially unemployed.
2. It matches people with jobs:  True, but the vast majority of wartime jobs are generic “cannon-fodder” positions, base-level soldiers with no particular prior skills, qualifications or future prospects.
3. It makes jobs meaningful:  It is true that War can bring out the finest and highest in human nature, bravery, honor, ingenuity, courage and so forth.  But War also notoriously brings out the worst and the most base in human nature, including rape, torture, murder, and genocide.  And in terms of helping us discover which ideology is better than which other ideology, war is actually a terrible method..  Figuring out which ideology is better by fighting a war is like figuring out which computer is better by using each one to bust open boulders.  The characteristics that lead it to win such a contest have nothing to do with the important aspects of the computer, and even the computer that emerges victorious is likely to be damaged beyond repair by the exercise.

Even with all these nasty characteristics, War presents itself well enough and performs well enough as an economic engine that it has remained a perennial part of the human experience for untold generations.  Yet there has been a fundamental shift in recent times that has made War unsustainable.

NEXT WEEK:  Why War must be stopped.