Times of war are often associated with heroism and passion, especially by those comfortable and removed from war, and who still have ideological sympathies with the apparatus of war and the society it is embedded in.
Yet worshippers of said heroic wars are alarmed to find self-interest and corruption radiating from all corners as aftereffects of the war, long after its fires have died. The idealizers and romanticizers of the heroic condemn the outpouring of these irreverent self-interested actors, as if these impurities are spoiling their romantic drama.
But to look at wartime not as some romantic drama, but a violent, cascading process of mass, circulating trauma, it could be seen that these two states of being - the warlike and the self-interested atomization - oscillate and dance with each other, what with the mass grinding trauma producing generations of radicalized, self-interested "survivalists," behaviors which can be seen in trauma survivors.
And that self-interest, though producing regimes of abundance for some time, lacks its shutoff switch, and proceeds in constant positive feedback with itself, until it hits geo-political or ecological limits, or both, resulting in another era of cascading traumas.
This is an idea that requires great caution, as warfare and trauma in smaller, less complex societies may cause bonding effects among its survivors, but what if this too is a kernel of greater expansion and future calamity?
Part of the problem is the gaps in language and knowledge across time, coupled with the fact that the constitution of a society - and other societies external to it - is always changing. It may be that a past war truly did cement a society and spark its creative powers, but that this state, as worshipped by idealizers of the past, is no longer possible, as the society has progressed further into a state of fragmentation, and that more war will only make this state more acute.
Still, it is worth repeating that these are dangerous judgements to sit upon, considering the stakes. But they are worth working over in the mind, if not to induce some uncertainty, as sometimes inaction is better than misinformed action.
