Common Enemy. Re-Published.

Now in the final months of his presidency, Obama and his administration have moved to strengthen the guidelines and legal framework for the US government’s extrajudicial killing. The kind that is accomplished by way of flying robots that rain death from the sky. Rather than reduce the extent to which the US military uses this tool in the pursuit of national interests like he said they would before he was elected, the Obama administration ramped up these efforts and have completed ten times more drone strikes than the Bush administration. How they have gone about strengthening the legality of these actions is a secret, as the guidelines were written up by attorneys in a locked room. The details of the framework remain sealed in the executive branch. Our government spent a lot of time criticizing assassinations and targeted killings prior to the invention of unmanned aerial vehicles. But the ease with which we could dispatch with people we deemed an enemy was too tempting for those in power. They became willing to forgo the presumption of innocence and the innocent lives of civilians for measurable progress. To be fair and realistic about politics, you could hardly blame them for not thinking clearly in a time of war which brings pressure from the citizenry to protect American lives at all costs.

I find these policies to be extremely short-sighted and callus. Ignoring the thousands of people that died simply as a consequence of being near some unsavory characters, these policies may serve some short term interest and convince the public that something is being done to thwart those that might hurt us, it is against our long term interests. Any person raised in the remote mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan after the US involvement in the region will have grown up in constant fear of bombs dropping from the sky. Mistakes have been made and innocent people have died. If one of them was your relative or friend, I don’t think we should expect you to be able to rationalize their death. It would be hard to stomach that they died so that strangers who live across the globe could feel like they were thwarting evil. Given the pain of loss and a life spent on full alert, how could we be surprised if someone affected by the actions of our nation wouldn’t start to foment feelings of resentment? In a survey done in 2010, 92% of Afghan citizens were unaware of the coordinated attacks in September of 2011 that led to the invasion slash nation building endeavor we have undertaken. Besides the fact that the goal of those attacks was to entice the US to overextend itself militarily and economically, surely we could have foreseen that this cycle would only repeat itself in a few decades time.

Trillions of dollars spent so we could find one man and bring him to “justice”. Ahhhh retributive justice, an American pastime. We tend to think of ourselves as benevolent. Most of our movies involve the protagonist, having been wronged, taking revenge on his adversary and returning violence for violence. The bad guy always perishes in some horrific way. Yet, we walk out of the theater always feeling like the hero had been justified in seeking retribution. Fairness is innate to human nature. But I would dare say that clearly human nature could use some tweaking. Perpetuating the cycle of retributive justice will only inspire the same thoughts in the minds of those who are affected by these drone strikes wherever in the world they may be.

In addition to creating future combatants, solidifying the validity of these extrajudicial killings is almost palatable when the people behind the trigger can be trusted to show restraint with this god like power. Now that the legal team and the intelligence community have shielded themselves from oversight by Congress or the Judiciary, are we sure we can always trust future administrations to exercise the same restraint? When one considers the cast of characters soon to be in charge of these operations, maybe ensuring that the Executive branch is insulated from oversight of their flying remote controlled missile launchers program was not such a good idea. Especially since this administration has already killed 8 US citizens without a trial. That Constitutional line has already been crossed and I am not hopeful for the next guy.

Criticism of my pacifism is fair. What other options do we have if we must root out every small death cult from every nook and cranny all over the globe? Better them than us I am sure many may think. But what if we just left the Taliban lie from the beginning? Our belief systems form the basis of our behavior. The reason so many who have experienced a religious awakening are so drastically changed is because the firmware has been overwritten. The organization of neurons upstream of all the others are altered I am guessing. Organizations, institutions, nations, and individuals are always engaged in a debate about who is right. Conflict arises when we reach an impasse. We kindly asked the Taliban to turn over that colossal douche and they refused. Given human tendencies and notions of justice, the response we took in overpowering their limited force and exiling them to their infamous caves was appropriate. Yet given all that we now know about human nature, I would dare say that a little more conversation would have been prudent. When beliefs conflict, a stalemate is only acceptable when you are arguing over things like whether New York or Chicago have better pizza or the best rock band of the 2000’s. Stalemate should never be reached in matters of life and death. If your cause is just and your logic sound, you can win any argument given enough time. Even with people who believe irrational things and no longer value their own life.

I am aware of the counterpoint. That this would never work in the “real world.” Violence in support of a just cause is justified in our society. That may well be for those that are here today, but what about those in the future? These actions will do nothing but ensure a new generation of those who abhor us and everything we represent. It was not because we were pillaging a weaker nation for their natural resources like in the old days, (though have you seen the trillion dollar mining deals in those mountains..) it was because we did not have the patience to convince those whose worldview is flawed of their ignorance. Unwilling to invest in persuading those of our logical superiority. The cognitive biases innate to human beings make convincing religious fundamentalists nigh on impossible. Yet here I stand. My unshakable faith in a God that chose me to serve his purpose crumbled after removing just a few stones in the foundation. Going forward our goal has to be to convince rather than coerce. It will save lives today and many more in the future.

You may wonder why I just hindsight is 20/20’ed  the response to 9/11 and the Afghan conflict. After pondering this geopolitical conundrum, I wondered what would I say to a hardened Taliban leader to sway his mind. Surely you would have to start at the beginning. Truck in charts, graphs, and data. We would cover the history of the Universe, the history of biology, the history of homo sapiens, and the future that lie ahead. I would hope that his US counterparts would be listening as well. I think it would take a few days of undivided attention and my personal story for them to embrace the pointless existence we find ourselves in. Only then could he accept the trivial nature of the cause his life was devoted to. Accepting that there is no life beyond this, that there is no inherent purpose to existence can lead one only to conclude that nothing is not worth dying for. Spawning from the void only to eventually return increases the value of human life exponentially. This same logic should go to all potential future conflicts. I watch as nation states continue to play the same old games in the battle for resources and supremacy. Projecting power, asserting influence, and aligning yourself with those whose interest is opposed to your opponent is still the modus operandi. With a population projected to reach 11 billion by the end of the 21st century, you can imagine a whole Guns of August situation being fairly likely if the game of geopolitics continues to be played the same way. The next global conflict could set the human race back indefinitely and rob untold numbers of people from a prosperous future. Unrelenting persuasion has to be the tool of the future.

I am not old enough to really have an opinion about Ronald Reagan other than from what I have gathered from books and articles. Regardless of how you feel about him, the former leader of the free world used a speech at the United Nations in 1987 to bring  attention to a cold hard truth: “Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” Pretty weird that a born again Christian who sailed into the White House on the wings of the Moral Majority would admit to the existence of other intelligent life forms in the Universe. A truth that would pretty much rob his belief system of all its validity. Regardless, the man was right.

Humans are preprogrammed to have an adversary it seems. Social dynamics and sexual selection compel us to segregate ourselves and use little differences to justify animosity towards a select few in our world. These dynamics apply to nations as well. If the interests of one nation are opposed to another’s, that nation seeks to find partners whose interests are aligned against their opponents. Or you could just call it finding a common enemy. The amount of resources we devote to this process is staggering. The military intelligence industrial complex is incredibly vast. Not just in our country but increasing exponentially wherever power is sought. One has to wonder, why are we gearing up for another conflict with an enemy when all we have to do is find a common one? Reagan and Bill Pulman from Independence Day were right: An external threat would unite us all into acting together. Of course the laws of physics make the appearance of an alien race here to suck our planet of its resources about as unlikely as it gets despite what you heard on Ancient Aliens. (side note that any civilization who could pull that off surely would have found another way to extract material from their own solar system rather than schlupp all the way over here.)

There may not be a hostile alien race headed our way but what all world powers on Planet Earth throughout history have failed to realize is that we already have plenty of common enemies. Poverty and hunger are common enemies of humanity. Stress is the number of one driver of aging and acute stress can have lasting impacts for generations. Food stress has been shown to decrease the academic performance of children. Those living in poverty have higher levels of corticosteroid levels in their blood than those that do not have bend over backwards to make ends meet. A constant state of stress drains the mental resources of those caught in the poverty trap and inhibits human beings from flourishing in areas other than paying bills. Crime and poverty are inextricably linked. Jungle militias, Daesh, organized crime, and revolutionary forces all are the result of exploitation and lack of resources. Years of cumulative stress drive human beings to improve their station. As would be expected. Millions of years of mammalian evolution gave rise to the system of stress to compel an animal to address its needs. Stress is pain and homo sapiens instinctively flee pain and seek pleasure. No one in a state of contentment revolutionizes anything.

Recently, researchers at New York’s Mount Sanai hospital compared the grandchildren of two groups of Jewish people: one whose grandparents had not lived in Europe at the time of World War II and the other whose ancestors lived through the worst of human stupidity. They found distinct genetic changes that could only be attributed to the stress of the Holocaust. The group that inherited the genetic changes had an increased rate of stress disorders in their demographic. The meticulous population and agricultural records of a small, genetic isolated city in Sweden named Överkalix proved that famine during developing years can decrease lifespan significantly. A paper from the Molecular Psychiatry journal established a link between mental illness and poverty. You are not only your DNA, you are also your experiences. There is another set of chemical information that is coded on top of your DNA named the epigenome. This system responds to the environment to regulate the expression of your genes. Constant levels of stress chemically alter your epigenome and those alterations can be passed onto future generations.

Besides entitlements, we spend most of our money on defense. Defense against nation states, terrorists, and even pirates. Incredible amounts of money on policing drug dealers, thieves, and criminals. Though its certain that evolution will continue to produce assholes who just want to watch the world burn, those who pose a threat to us do so out of lack of opportunity if you ask me. The uneven distribution of resources that has been a hallmark of civilization throughout recorded history you could argue is the cause of all our strife. Poverty and the stress that comes with it is the enemy of every nation. It perpetuates detrimental genetic changes that will cost society in the future. It wastes the intellectual capital of the masses by forcing them to focus primarily on where to find their next meal. It preoccupies their minds with the inevitable unforeseen illness, injury, or expense that could break them. Of course most people in dire circumstances are not compelled to turn to violence, crime, or extreme ideology to improve their situation. Yet, for a certain percentage of them it most certainly does. Humanity is a game of statistics. The dynamics of genes, circumstances, and statistical likelihood ensure that innocent people are going to get hurt, oppressed, or killed. We seem to have convinced ourselves that we lie outside the animal kingdom. The evidence speaks otherwise.

There are the existential threats that threaten us all as well. All nations have a common enemy in a 400 mile wide rock zipping around our solar system right now. The one that is going strike the Earth any day now (relatively speaking). Ensuring the perpetuation of the species, inconsequential or not, will require immense resources to find and alter the course of the many giant asteroids on a collision course with Earth. We all face the threat of global pandemic and scant resources are devoted to it. We have a common enemy in climate change. I wish environmentalists would stop going on about saving the Planet. The threat of climate change is to humanity not the Planet. Mother won’t bat an eye at our demise and will chug along for hundreds of millions of years regardless. Save the US.  The stress that it will place on the most vulnerable of us will eventually threaten the safety of everyone. I would wager that the hundreds of millions in poorer countries who will be forced out of their homes will probably react to their innate ape desire for fairness and turn towards the industrialized world with malice if nothing is done. Continuing to spend almost half of our collective resources protecting the future of our resources against someone else instead of seeking collective will to solve obvious and fixable problems is untenable.

Finally, to me our greatest common enemy is the mystery of existence itself. Seven billion of us thrown into this mess of a planet at once. Without a reason and without a choice. Our level of ignorance continues to grow as the more we learn the less we understand. What is out there? Who is out there? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What is consciousness? The answers of these profound questions shape what it means to be human. They give context to our existence. Given the pervasiveness of unsupportable ideas throughout the world, elucidating the mysteries of existence should be our highest priority. The world being on the same page about reality would diminish the amount of conflict around the world. But at this point I would even go for working from the same book. Think of the time we collectively spend making accommodations for the unsubstantiated beliefs of ancient cultures. There is a whole bunch of people filling positions in the White House right now as a testament to that. We must argue, persuade, and reason until all concede to the proper context for humanity. Humanity: the inevitable result of the laws of physics imprinted by the Big Bang, the product of biochemical evolution and predictable rates of genetic mutation, passengers on our giant spaceship spinning around a ball of gas that is one of trillions, in a galaxy one of two trillion, in a Universe where the depth of time is unknowable, with no god to help us.

Surely, we all shall die and cease to exist. Then surely our time is best spent cracking the infinite puzzle before us than in the pursuit of cultural superiority. The latter is temporal, the truth, eternal. There are those that romanticize the mystery that is existence. That like a dog chasing its tail we would not know what to do with ourselves once we caught it. That the journey of discovery is the highest aim and ignorance is an acceptable position. I call bull shit. What has made humanity so successful is our innate curiosity. A curious that must be satisfied. Kingdoms rise and fall, global powers wax and wane. Uniting those powers in pursuit of this, the highest of causes, would bring stability to our increasingly globalized world. It will require vast resources and the collective will of humanity to even scratch the surface of the unknown. And at the risk of sounding cliche, it starts with you and me. For those who have seen the light, it is our obligation to no longer let the falsehoods of strangers go untested. Instead of socializing over pop culture, food, and our mundane jobs we should spend that time getting down to the nitty gritty. We must ask the big questions, challenge preconceived notions, stand up to bad logic, and deconstruct silly ideas whenever encountered. There will never be some moment of mass conversion. Our controversial ideas, which also happen to be least wrong, have to be spread organically among human beings who trust each other. We must win in the marketplace of ideas and we can not compete unless we visit that marketplace from time to time. Black, white, brown, or purple. Rich, middle, poor, smart, average, intellectually challenged. Contemporary, former, or future world power. It matters not. There are common enemies that can unite us all.