The drums of war are beating again in America. This time, with yet another nation in the Middle East, for no real reason anyone thoughtful can discern.

How did America end up being the world’s first poor rich country? Because, my friends, violence is a poor investment. Violence makes us poor, and peace makes us rich. But America, and too many Americans, seem incapable of grasping this beautiful and timeless lesson of history. America is a society that goes on investing in violence, first, most, and last — so how can it build a single thing which actually improves anyone’s life, from more hospitals to schools to retirement and childcare and education systems? Let me say it again. One of history’s greatest untaught lessons is as simple as it is beautiful: prosperity comes from peace, and poverty comes from violence.

So I want to spend a moment discussing what I’ll call America’s system of violence — and how it made America poor. The link isn’t just economic — we have war machines, or we have a functioning society — it’s more subtle. It’s moral, psychological, social, too. Let me explain what I mean by that.

America owns history’s most perfect killing machine. Ever. Period. It’s so sophisticated and advanced that it beggars belief. If we went back a millennium or two and asked Caesar or Alexander or Genghis Khan what they thought the perfect killing machine was, they’d probably marvel in awe, and say something like: “Something that can rain death from the sky, invisibly, with precision, that could make people disappear, in great explosions of flame. Nobody would ever doubt our power again.”

And that is precisely what America has built. It’s military has been transformed from something vaguely conventional — soldiers, rifles, tanks — to something surreal, fantastical. A glittering fleet of drones that can kill anyone, anywhere on earth, in seconds, with zero warning, with eerie accuracy, with total impunity, all piloted from the comfort of an air-conditioned office somewhere nobody really knows. Imagine that for a second. It’s the perfect killing machine.

Now consider the great lesson of the 20th century. Violence doesn’t pay. Where did violence take countries in the 20th century? Nowhere. Germany annihilated millions, in horrific atrocity — and found itself ruined in the process. Russia sent millions to gulags — and saw itself ultimately break apart. Countless nations tortured, abused, and wounded millions. For what? For nothing. Mostly, they stayed poor, or went backwards. That was the story in Asia, Africa, and in Eastern Europe, too.

I want you to see what a great lesson this really was. From the beginning of human history, there had only been one real path to prosperity — and that was violence. Take whatever your neighbor had. Begin to build an empire. Amass their gold, salt, spices, water, women, children. Enslave the men. Put them to work. You will be rich. You will live in palaces, surrounded by fine things, and never do any work at all — except the work of conquering even more people, every once in a while.

Cycles of violence were the story of human history, in a nutshell, from the dawn of civilization — to the 20th century. Ancient Rome prospered that way. So did every empire. Until, by the 1600s or so, the people who would be Americans in the “new world” did something truly repugnant and horrific — they began an international slave trade. They hoped to build a free nation in this new promised land. But they ended up just repeating history — raiding one continent, Africa, of people, to fill up another with slaves. Those slaves picked the cotton and tilled the fields and built the plantations and so forth — and so America grew rich.

(So rich that it became another empire, ultimately. But the way that it became an empire was the old way, the same way, the ugly way, the only way that history had understood — through violence. Through the whip and the lash. Did you know slaves who tried to run away would be maimed? Think about that for a moment. Think about living in a society where people laughed at the clubfooted slaves. That is who we were, not so long ago. That is how we became this empire we struggle to be now.)

And then the 20th century came along. Empires began to fall. World War I was the end of the age of empire. And in its turbulent wake began to arise the great civil rights movements of the 20th century. Gandhi marched to the sea. The suffragettes organized. A few decades later, Mandela was to kneel. Then Martin Luther King was to touch the world’s heart. And so on.

The 20th century was witness to the first genuinely remarkable steps in human progress. No, not iPhones and cars. Those are just things. I mean real human progress. Women gained the right to vote. Then minorities gained rights. Global democracy was formed. International human rights were declared. And so on. Across the world, a curious thing began to happen. Peace began to break out. No — not everywhere, not consistently. I don’t mean “peace” as the absence of war: I mean it as a sentiment, a mood, an understanding between people. The world began to understand, haltingly, that violence resulted in nothing but backwardness and regress.

The world didn’t make much real progress, in fact, until the 1990s or so — which is when, for the first time in human history, billions began to live on more than a dollar a day or so, with actual rights, in democracies, for the very first time. The story of the Industrial Revolution as the crucible of prosperity is wrong. The story that human beings had played out so far was a tale of a kind of circular tragedy. I enslave you, conquer you, pillage your home and nation and belongings. I grow “rich” — for a time. Then tomorrow, you do it right back to me. And so empires rose and fell — but the world never really went anywhere much until the 20th century, and the late one, at that.

Finally, by making peace, people had learned the true path to prosperity. What was it? It was always so simple it had defied understanding. If people cooperated — instead of conflicted — they could build things that lifted everyone up. Things like schools. Town squares. Roads. Which became universities and trains and bridges. Which became things like healthcare systems, retirement systems, education systems, transport systems. Through cooperation, people could have better, more, and richer public goods — things for all to enjoy. And it’s through better public goods that life began to finally soar upwards.

The best exemplar was Europe. There, from the ashes of war, in just one human lifetime, living standards reached their highest living standards, ever, period. People lived the happiest, healthiest, richest, sanest lives…ever…anywhere. Why? Because just seventy years or so of investing and then reinvesting gains in public goods had led to a kind of Big Bang — all the dimensions of progress simply exploded, whether longevity, happiness, or income...in a way previously unseen in human history, ever. Think about all that for a second. All those millennia of futile violence. And how simple and beautiful the answer to prosperity really was.

Europe’s lesson began to filter through, haltingly, to other places. Canada copied the European miracle thanks to its own visionaries, and saw its own miracle happen. Britain, too, tried, as did Australia, for a time. Today, finally — now that they have enough not to starve — developing nations are beginning to take notice. Even Rwanda and Costa Rica and India are aspiring to expansive public healthcare systems.

Wait — what? What about America? How come it doesn’t have a functioning healthcare system. But America doesn’t have any real public goods at all. No functioning education, healthcare, retirement, transport, childcare, elderly care, safety nets…anything…at least not without life-crippling “debt.” Why is that? Have you ever wondered? Do you see the link yet? Let me put it another way.

How come America could build history’s most perfect killing machine — a system so terrible and powerful that even Alexander or Genghis or Caesar would marvel and shudder, raining death from the skies — but couldn’t build a single working social system? What the?

That’s not some kind of strange, weird coincidence — it’s a relationship. America couldn’t build working public goods because it was busy building killing machines. It’s not so much about “money” — that’s a social fiction, and the truth is there was always “money” enough. It’s about a philosophy, an attitude. If you’re focused on conflict, you can’t cooperate. If you are still premised on the old logic of violence and empire — I need bigger guns, to conquer and dominate and enslave you — you cannot obey the logic of cooperation. People obeying the logic of conflict will become hostile, aggressive, selfish, and cruel people. Who will barely be able to cooperate with each other, too.

Does that make sense? Do you see the link — and how subtle it is, and how little we think of it?

The price of the perfect killing machine was a functioning society. Not just because America showered trillions on the drones and bombs and missiles — it’s not short of trillions for anything, really. But because when a society comes to believe that the way forward is conflict, domination, aggression, it will not be able to cooperate. Even within itself. Without cooperation, no public goods are possible.

Hence, even now, Americans never, ever vote to give one another healthcare, education, transport, retirement, and so on. Their attitudes have been corroded. The logic of violence has made them moral weaklings. They have relied on violence and domination and aggression so long that they cannot seem to understand any other way. And when you think that violence is the only way — why bother giving your neighbor healthcare?

Do you see how these things are linked? It’s not just through money. It’s through a psychology, a morality, an attitude, a way of being in the world. A kind of profound moral corrosion takes place when societies focus on building things like perfect killing machines. People begin to internalize the logic of those killing machines. It’s as if they unconsciously think: “Violence is what makes us powerful and rich and strong!!” So why give anyone anything else then?

America is one of a tiny number of nations left that hasn’t learned the great lesson of the 20th century. That lesson was the greatest of all history — at least in my eyes. Because it gave us, at last, something like a grail — a miracle humankind had been searching for since the dawn of time, but never discovered. What’s the secret to lasting prosperity? Peace is. Cooperation is. Prosperity comes from peace which comes cooperation which comes from investment. When all those conditions are present, the European miracle happens — and a Big Bang in living standards takes place.

When a society becomes fixated on violence — where can it really go? When a society is obsessed with conflict the way that America is, where pundits discuss mass murder and bombing and “drone strikes” casually, as if raining death from above were just the weather — where can it go? It has become morally degenerate, badly corroded. Even a good soldier knows that killing must have a price — it can never be something to be taken lightly. Yet a society reaches that point if it invests in violence, for too long. Killing becomes something laughable, meaningless, empty. And it makes endless war — for nothing.

Killing does not get us anywhere as a society. It never did. That old idea that prosperity comes from taking what is theirs was always wrong. It never led to the Big Bang in human progress that cooperation and public goods did — it only led to kings and “nobles”, the most violent in a society, living well, for a few decades, at most.

Violence is a poor investment — it makes us poor. Americans have ended up poor — the average American now dies in debt — precisely because violence is the worst investment a society can make. In any form. In the emotional violence he or she suffers at work, the social violence he or she suffers as communities and towns are ripped apart, and the physical violence of more killing machines. None of those things lift human living standards up even one tiny iota, like even the most crude hospital, school, or handshake does.

America has yet to learn history’s most beautiful lesson. Prosperity comes from cooperation, Poverty comes from violence. And there are days, my friends, I wonder if it ever will, if it can.

Umair

January 2020