Another important aspect of Hayek’s thinking is the fact that human beings are slightly smarter tribal apes whose nature and instincts were molded to survive in an often-times vicious tribal world. For most of our evolution, until about 20,000 years ago when the evolution of the market process began to accelerate, the vast majority of us lived in small tribes where tribal warfare was the optimal evolutionary strategy and one of the main reasons we are social and have evolved big brains to begin with. As Steven Pinker writes:

“… men go to war to get or keep women –not necessarily as a conscious goal of the warriors(though often it is exactly that), but as the ultimate payoff that allowed a willingness to fight to evolve. Access to women is the limiting factor on male’s reproductive success. Having two wives can double a man’s children, having three wives can triple it, and so on. The most common spoils of tribal warfare are women. Raiders kill the men, abduct the nubile women, gang-rape them, and allocate them as wives.” ( Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” 1999, p. 510)

First you increase the economic pie available to your tribe/gene-pool by coordinating a raid and killing other men, and then you increase your reproductive success by raping the women and making them your wives. To be successful in war you need a strong sense of unity which translates itself into the strong nationalist/militaristic/patriotic tendencies we are so susceptible to and has the planet littered with nuclear weapons and “civilized” taxpayers believing we actually need them. The bond men make as co-warriors is likely stronger than male/female love. A female is easily replaceable (another raid, etc.) but the loss of that co-warrior that will help get the next female and/or defend you when you only get one chance at life is probably even more important. Just like natural selection has shaped us to enjoy sex due to the vital genetic payoff, it has also shaped us to enjoy war, killing, torturing and easily segregating ourselves into the in-group/us vs. out-group/them. As a Live Science article aptly titled “Humans Crave Violence Just Like Sex” discusses, mice have been found to love to fight and gain pleasure in a similar manner to how we love food and sex. Article mentions:

Scientists have known that mice and other animals are drawn to fights. Until now, they didn’t know how the brain was involved. The new study, detailed online this week in the journal Psychopharmacology, reveals the same clusters of brain cells involved in other rewards are also behind the craving for violence. “Aggression occurs among virtually all vertebrates and is necessary to get and keep important resources such as mates, territory and food,” said study team member Craig Kennedy, professor of special education and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. “We have found that the reward pathway in the brain becomes engaged in response to an aggressive event and that dopamine is involved.” ……. “We learned from these experiments that an individual will intentionally seek out an aggressive encounter solely because they experience a rewarding sensation from it,” Kennedy said.

Given its importance, war/patriotism easily fills us with a great sense of purpose. England’s prime minister during WWII and national hero Winston Churchill shows us how inspiring, exciting and purposeful WWI was to him when he mentioned:

“I think a curse should rest on me — because I love this war. I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment — and yet — I can’t help it — I enjoy every second of it.”

And in another occasion:

“My God! This is living History. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling… Why I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me…”

Towards the end of WWII, Russia’s Red Army is estimated to have raped over 2 million German women. The Allies/US weren’t much better. We had our own tribalistic/quisi-religious/ape-shit reasons for incinerating Japanese cities and needlessly nuking two of them. As our great ape/leader at the time, President Truman, wrote “The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast” We shouldn’t be shocked when men murder and rape, the real miracle that has taken thousands of years of cultural evolution to create, are the modern cultural values we absorb that program us into respecting the body/property/thoughts of all human beings regardless of age, sex, and race.

Generally speaking mankind has been an orgy of tribalism, war, religious mysticism and oppression. The rapid evolution of the market process and technological progress it has brought us, especially in the last 100 years, has made our wars increasingly disastrous and it is a statistical certainty that unless a basic understanding of how economic freedom and human nature really work spread fast enough we will destroy civilization. Hayek was not very optimistic. (23 secs)

The horrific mindset of top military leaders/apes is perfectly captured in Daniel Ellsberg’s great book “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner”. Ellsberg writes:

Bernie Shriver who pressed the development of our ICBMs[Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles] asked Lemay[Curtis Lemay, top US military leader, largely responsible for the bombing of Japan in WWII] .. “What is your requirement for a large warhead, that is, what is the largest yield you need, what would be large enough” , Lemay answered, “one bomb for Russia” *

In a wonderful discussion of Ellsberg’s book, famed intellectual Noam Chomsky summarizes:

“The things that I learned in the book were hair-raising. For example, I learned… that during the Eisenhower period and basically carried on, there was one war plan, and the war plan was that if there was a confrontation with the Russians in Berlin,whatever, maybe a small confrontation, then immediately we wipe out every city in China… There was no alternative plan, that was the plan… A war could be set off just by inadvertence. There is case after case…where we came extremely close to war just by inadvertence. Sometimes reckless actions on the part of leaders, but sometimes just accidents that happen…When the first early warning system was established to detect incoming misiles…It turns out this new sophisticated system…In the first day of operation it detected a Russian missile attack with 99.9% certainty…That kind of thing happens over and over and the war plans are setup so that if somebody acts on that 99% a billion people die…Page after page of the book contains graphic example of this kind of, you can only call it insanity” — Chomsky

Let that sink in. “One bomb for Russia”, one bomb that can destroy a sizable chunk of the planet, and whose environmental effect will surely affect all life on the planet. And over some minor scuffle in Berlin, the incineration of hundreds of millions of Chinese and a probable terrestrial life-ending environmental catastrophe. Companies like Microsoft, Google and Toyota hire people from every nationality and ethnicity and all produce/trade/interact/cooperate peacefully. The idea of a “Russian” employee or competitor attacking an “American” one is just absurd, yet our tribalistic governments are sort of cultural relics sustained by massive economic ignorance and ethnocentrism.

The upper echelons of the US military is packed with apes who see the world similarly. For example, during the Vietnam War, President Nixon mentioned to then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that “I’d rather use the nuclear bomb” and “The only place where you and I disagree … is with regard to the bombing…You’re so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.” For 15 years during the Cold War the “secret” nuclear missile launch codes for American nukes was 00000000. In 2014, 34 nuclear missile launch officers have been implicated in a cheating scandal and have been stripped of their certification. It is already incredibly dangerous that a monopolistic and thus inevitably inefficient, tribal-minded bureaucracy like the US military has nuclear weapons. As technological progress continues to accelerate, it is just a matter of time before any disgruntled group can manufacture a device as damaging as a nuke, or cause enough havoc in a few major cities to cause devastating disruptions to global trade which can be just as damaging to the social order as if entire cities are wiped out.

A basic understanding of the never-ending cycle of production and consumption that all life and social orders must be involved in easily shows how horrific military spending/consumption is. Every year over one trillion dollars worth of civilian wealth in terms of homes, cars, energy, medicines, food, etc., (an amount similar to the entire productive output of Mexico which has the world’s 15th largest economy at $1.04 trillion GDP), is consumed by the millions of people employed by the United States national security bureaucracy and its associated contractors as they produce push-ups, military drills, nukes, and other weapons of destruction. In 2015, the world’s ten biggest corporations as measured by the amount of research and development spending they undertook, companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Volkswagen and six others, consumed about 109 billion dollars as they sustained some of the brightest and most productive people in the world. The US National Security bureaucracy consumes that much wealth in less than 1.5 months. Perhaps even more startling is the fact that for the year 2012 the entire planet’s top 2,000 R&D-spending companies spent about 700 billion in R&D which is still 300 billion less than what our National Security spending was at the time. This happens every year! It might very well be the case that the USA’s National Security related yearly consumption of wealth is similar to that which is consumed in corporate R&D by the entire planet, which is not only a gigantic detriment to the taxpayers who have to forego the enjoyment of a trillion dollars worth of wealth which is then used to sustain all the people associated with the bureaucracy, it also greatly slows down mankind’s technological progress. If military spending/consumption actually led to economic growth, the always-backward-and-poor former Soviet Union and today’s North Korea, with their relatively large militarizes would be prosperous, yet simple economic logic easily helps explain why they were not so. If military spending/consumption is obviously bad for the economy, then all-out war is even more so. How can having even more people stop producing civilian/useful goods (homes, cars, energy, medicines, etc.) and thus reduce the economic pie, to increase the amount of weapons which are then used to destroy lives and infrastructure and wealth possibly be good??!! Although understandably difficult to believe, prominent economists like 2008 Nobel Laureate in economics Paul Krugman lack a basic understanding of the cycle of production and consumption and thus foolishly believe that war and military spending, even in the absurd case when it is not done to actually prevent an invasion, is actually good for the economy. While giving advice on how to improve the slumping economy he mentioned:

“Think about WWII…it brought us out[of the great depression]. If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat…this slump would be over in 18 months,”

Krugman, believing that all we need for prosperity is some “stimulus” or incentive to “create jobs” and “economic activity” via buying and selling, completely overlooks the vital fact that whatever “activity” takes place in the economy must be coordinated in a way that produces more real/civilian wealth than it consumes, otherwise you are just obviously reducing the economic pie, and military spending and even more so war is the most destructive thing one can do. Below is Krugman in perhaps the most economically ignorant and disastrous TV segment ever where he mentions the above and more.

Krugman’s ignorance of such basic concepts is shared by many mainstream economists, especially perhaps the most famous mainstream economist of all, John Maynard Keynes. Keynes too is utterly ignorant of the vital fact that economic activity must be coordinated in a way that produces more than it consumes. He writes:

“…activity of one kind or another is the only possible means of making the wheels of economic progress and of the production of wealth go round again.”

No! Can’t be “ one kind or another”! It must be activity that is part of a finely coordinate profitable order! One that produces more than it consumes! Keynes also preached that just adding more money to banks to lower interest rates created the type of savings which “are just as genuine as any other savings”.