A Wish, Not a Plan

Some of the leaders we keep producing are deeply damaged human beings, and the damage is what makes them dangerous. The pattern is too consistent across history to be accidental. Severe early childhood trauma, in some children, cross-wires the nervous system so that the suffering of others becomes a source of arousal and reward.

Some of those children are also brilliant. Beneath their public confidence sits a profound powerlessness — the four-year-old who could not stop what was happening — and the only thing that can soothe that wound, even temporarily, is power over others. So they reach for power, and their intelligence helps them get it. Once they have it, the killing has no natural endpoint, because the wound never fully closes. Hitler. Stalin. Mao. Saddam. The list runs the length of recorded history.

These people will keep appearing. And because they are often charismatic and persuasive, their followers will keep appearing too. There will always be damaged children, some of whom will rise; and there will always be unhealed populations who hear in the demagogue's voice a story that sounds like their own grievance. Any plan for ending war that depends on never again producing a Hitler is a wish, not a plan. The honest plan has to assume both the leader and the audience will keep reappearing, and design around that fact.

Which leaves us in this position. The weapons can end us. The leaders who would use them recur. The populations that would follow them recur. This is not a good recipe.

Doing nothing is not a neutral choice. Doing nothing is the most dangerous policy available, because it is the policy currently producing the outcome we already have.

So we have to treat this the way we treat every other serious problem. Identify it, generate proposals, test the most serious ones, learn from what fails, keep trying. We did this for polio and smallpox. We do it for poverty and climate and disease. We do not say no cure has worked, therefore no cure can work, therefore we will stop looking. On war, that is exactly what we say.

Einstein and Freud gave us a starting place. They told us what they thought would work, but the work has not been done. It deserves to be tried — and if it cannot be done, then the next serious proposal deserves to be tried, and the next, until something works. We do not get to declare the problem unsolvable. We have to keep going.

— Scott