Evolution and rational war

Author: Alfredo Colunga 

THE HUMANKIND AND THE RATIONAL WAR

We have reached a fourth evolution in the living social system. According to this, the system is not only able to have memory regarding already captured energies and those out of the system. In this new stage, competitors will be able to establish energy models which are foreseeable to be captured. This means, a capture pattern.

Competence systems (the companies and states) have a perception of their consumption, their consumption rhythm and can also have a perception of the remaining available energy and even of their competitors’ consumption rhythm.

What happens is that under certain circumstances the available energy remaining seems limited, a good that according to the implied living systems will not increase but on the contrary, as the case of non-renewable goods, it will diminish with time. The combination of consumption analysis and the available energy counting offers, as final result, a prediction regarding the survival possibilities.

What is the result? The result is a new type of evolution: war. War as an action taken not to consume but to stop others from accessing to this consumption.

The knowledge of the available energy and the perception of its limitation by acts in competence have dramatic consequences on the evolution of the living beings competing for this energy and more specifically, it has marked human evolution.

War has characterized human evolution for long periods of time. From this point of view, war over land responds to a double motivation:

• The existence of an essential, limited and non-renewable good and
• the consciousness of such limitation.

These goods will be a reason for war, specifically the raw materials and in other stages the energy outside the system-another raw material-.

Land was the reason for generalized wars along thousands of years, until productivity rose and the energy obtained from it –food, livestock- stopped being a critical factor. Nevertheless, the reason for war has not changed since then. War, conceived as the tool to fight for limited and non-renewable energy, is a rational act.

Rational war is characterized by the following elements:

• the existence of a limited good in dispute
• anticipation to this limitation
• competence for this good not by means of consumption but through activities (using attack tools) which stop others from consuming.

Rational war alters and accelerates evolution. I will give two examples which in my opinion clearly explain this.

Let’s imagine a deserted island. Ten mussels arrive on it. There are one hundred food servings for mussels on the island. What will happen? The ten mussels will live on the island for eleven days, ten of them well fed and happy.

Let’s suppose now that ten people arrive on the island and there are one hundred food servings there. Could these people reach any democratic solutions?

The answer this time will be, naturally, that it depends on what we call food for one hundred. Such food may be 100 food sources, each capable of feeding a person indefinitely or we could be simply referring one hundred food servings.

In the first scenario, things could be organised. Having one hundred food sources available, the ten people cannot only reach agreements but, at least for some time, grow and multiply.
However, if we are talking about one hundred food servings, once more, these people will not be able to reach any democratic sharing solutions. These ten individuals cannot aim to cooperate for survival, as sooner or later, the one hundred servings – or even one thousand, if that changed something – will run out.

So, maybe unconsciously at the beginning, but clearly more strategically as time goes by, these ten people trapped on this small island will start to measure forces to interrupt and take control, in their own benefit, over the food source of others, in order to enlarge their own survival as much as possible.

Let’s become writers for a moment: if the parties are sensible, we will observe how surprisingly and mysteriously dark murders will start to take place on the island. Those individuals with lonely and shy personalities will disappear in strange circumstances together with their food servings.

Gathered round the first corpse, the survivors will understand that it could have happened to them and they will experience the need to form their own group or join an existing one in order to get protection. Supposing that there is no leader, who gathers round a group from the beginning, the leading group could be finally formed by smaller ones.

Faced with how closed the situation is and seeing that the early bird catches the worm, sooner than later an open war will start. If after one of the group wins, the scarcity of food reserves persists, and if such group has already got a well established leader, this will be the one administering his/her assistant’s survival by simply taking care of avoiding pacts. The more scarce food is the higher probability there is of assassination or leader’s isolation.
We can see how the ability to evaluate the available energy can radically transform the evolutionary process.