We need wars.
But not just any wars!

Intragroup cooperation as a parameter of natural selection in cultural evolution

Wars are a uniquely effective way to promote social cohesion. They provide opportunities to unite and put aside internal conflicts They are replaced by pursuit of collective goals. -- Robert F. Murphy (an anthropologist)

Ability to cooperate with strangers

Our species has a special ability. Members of a large scale Homo sapiens communities are able to cooperate as a community to attain collective goals even if they don’t know the others personally or a person-to-person cooperation would be impossible between two of them. Still, the larger such a group is, the more difficult it is to initiate such cooperation. Jens Notroff, lead author of the article “Building Monuments, create communities,” stated that works such as medieval cathedrals or Göbekli Tepe are ways of uniting people into a community that achieves common goals. The Great Wall of ancient China, the Apollo program during the Cold War, all such projects are ways of building a large-scale community driven by a single goal. When you think about it, this is a striking observation.

All similar success stories are based on the development of cultural mechanisms and institutions. The farther back in time, the fewer they are and the less efficiently they work. A Stone Age hunter would not have been able to become a part of either chains of command or conceptually assimilate the concept of the rule of law. We can. That’s why we are able, thanks to the global cooperation that first came into being in 1945, to build the International Space Station, an astounding worldwide effort.

The theory of multilevel cultural selection suggests that the evolution of culture is only possible when societies compete with each other. As result, those that fail to produce appropriate norms of cooperative behavior collapse or are subjugated. Practices and norms of complex societies, while costly, spread as the societies that employ them conquer and destroy those that have not developed them. The bystanders emulate and imitate with full resolve, of course. War against an external enemy has the following consequences1:

• It reinforces egalitarianism among members of own group. Studies show that people affected by the war directly, were more inclined to participate in the life of the community, vote in elections and belong to organizations (including political ones).
• In the communities affected by war, more non-profit organizations were formed: agricultural cooperatives, mutual aid groups, etc.
• There is an increase in membership in religious congregations. Participation in rituals provides protection from fear, mutual aid, builds a sense of community.
• At the same time, it increases the tendency to compete with members of outside groups.

The conclusion of the above observations is that our species has developed genetic and cultural adaptations for warfare. These psychological mechanisms make it possible to generate a collective response to the situation of war. Chances of survival for any community are increased by tightening the interdependence of community members.

An endemic state of war was present in all parts of the world. In Europe after the 10th century A.D., however, the constant war was a driving force for rapid cultural evolution. While sil=milar impulses emerged in many areas and times before, European societies had a very special trait. The difference was that structure was not clan-based. The stimulation of the development affected institutions and organizations whose continuance and growth was based on the cooperation of people who were not related by kin, were individualistic and were driven by guilt and not shame as their main motivational personality mechanism.

One of the remarkably contrasting reactions of “Western” people to war, or the emergence of communities competing for the same resources, is the surge in the tendency to punish individuals and groups which enact free-rider tactics. A more predictable response to external conflict of such persons is to implement more egalitarian workers salary. Another regularity observed by anthropologists is that in the absence of competition with external groups (war being the most violent and largest one), many Western organizations quickly degenerate into dysfunction.

One of the key resilience mechanisms which prevents the deterioration of social order is to create conditions for investing in the future. If social practices and laws help individuals to enjoy the effects of their work, they do not hesitate to work hard toward acumulating personal prosperity. In primitive societies, which Thomas Hobbes called a state of “war of all against all,” there is no room for entrepreneurship, investing in the future. One can never be sure if the fruits of one’s labor could be protected from theft, requisitions by state. Such societies are also incapable of creating grand projects such as Apollo program or developing national pride.

The myth of the noble savage

Stanisław Lem exceptionally well pointed out (I will slightly colorize his statement here) that a man who criticizes civilization with its achievements and blessings, should put the money where their mouth is and remove the fillings from their teeth, stop using their smartphones and Internet, take off clothes (made with fossil fuels), and then proudly march on all fours into the woods and stay there.

Lawrence H. Keeley, the author of War Before Civilization. The Myth of the Noble Savage2, rephrased Lem’s sarcastic remark with professional and scientific terms. Keeley shows how violent and deadly life led primitive societies. An example is the Oneota Indian community in North America, occupying the Illinois River valley around the 13th century A.D. Archaeologists investigating a cemetery belonging to one of the settlements excavated a total of 264 corpses: at least 43 of them (16%) bore traces of violent death.3

Another example comes from prehistoric times. Archaeologist James Chatters found the remains of twelve men and sixteen women at a site dated as 9,000 years old. Twelve (all males) and three female skeletons, respectively, bore signs of cranial4 damage or deep wounds.5 These and other discoveries seem to suggest that primitive people lived in a permanent state of life-threatening violence, raids and ambushes.6

We, however, have been surrounded by the myth of the gentle savage (a.k.a. noble savage) since about the end of the 17th century. This myth is a manifestation of a bundle of negative and often highly critical views of civilization and progress, as well as one’s own identity. This ideology of self-depreciation seems to be a manifestation of the confrontation of two ideologies present in Western European countries. The first is the justifications of royal absolutism, which is represented by Hobbes and his famous work Leviathan. The second is a counter-cultural ideologies extolling life away from civilization and complex societies built in the Western world.

“Are we the baddies?”7 (opinion)

Our culture, including popular culture, is contaminated with a cultural virus. It makes us think that people and their civilization are inherently evil. This counterculture current/virus seems to attract all kinds of idealists and self-proclaimed rebels. I would even venture to say that the presence of this self-humiliating idea (striking this chord to receive a response from those who have “progressive worldview”) is an essential element in recognizing a film or literary work as a carrier of “the ugly truth about ourselves” or aspiring to be elevated to a timeless bestseller status.

We see the theme in the all-too-familiar legend of Pocahontas, one iteration of which is the recent film Avatar (2009, directed by James Cameron). The theme of similar stories is usually orchestrated like this: “humans and their civilization are the bad guys. Elves, blue aliens and other non-humans are the true and pure civilization of the of ancient wisdom. They lead a noble existence in tune with the sacred mother-nature”. Such general theme is overused by Andrzej Sapkowski in his Witcher saga. Should the characters start a philosophical conversation, it converges toward self-depreciation of human achievements:

“Your greater cities,” complained the dwarf to the accompaniment of the parrot’s scolding curses. Every single one of them you have built on elven and our foundations. Under the smaller castles and towns you have laid your own foundations, but for building facades you still take our stones. At the same time, you keep repeating that it is thanks to you, humans, that progress and development is taking place.8

I admit that I was mesmerized by such visions myself, even until quite recently. It was the overwhelming influence of literature and films that misled me. To fans of the Witcher Geralt saga I can suggest an experiment. Please read the entire saga again. This time, pay special attention to all instances of in the “propaganda against human civilization enslaving and murdering beings who are superior in their cultural and ethical progress”. (I think the trait is a severe case of racism, but as it is self-directed, it is considered “legitimate”, more on p. 280). Not until the last volume of the saga we learn that the noble elves have themselves conquered another world, originally owned by humans. The elves of that world have murdered, humiliated and exploited for their otherness. In the world elves perpetrated a bloody holocaust on humans. Its survivors served the elves as slaves. In a struggle to rule the world, the elves committed deed-for-deed exactly the same atrocities as “xenophobic human savages” have. Still, alas, only humans were condemned and lectured.

The beautiful vision of a people living in harmony with nature includes the denial of worldly goods (no fertilizers and aforementioned dental care), living in harmony with nature, generosity and selflessness, fighting climate change, unlearned wisdom, and so on. These and other qualities are attributed to the Germans and were described in the treatise Germania by Roman moralist Tacitus (c. 55-120). The unrealistic vision served as criticism of the Rome’s society of the time. The insertion about climate is a little joke of mine. The jest has a very specific purpose. It points out the following eternal regularity:

Just as there are prestige products and brands (e.g. BMW, iPhone), there are prestige ideologies.

Prestige is fodder for both thundering, haughty moral authority figures and their listeners, who are able to savor the sense of being the vanguard of morality and progress. Acute disdain toward one’s own group identity is a timeless tool of such moral influence.9 It provides a sense of being a moral elite. It allows to grandstand and give lectures to the lesser ones from a position of moral high ground. The manipulator who controls this process, usually is able to infuse his victims and disciples with the same sense of superiority over everybody else. After becoming their moral beacon, such a person usually manages to maneuver the mesmerized elite into any activity, from starting a religious sect to outright treason (“VII.7.D).

The vision of a beautiful life on the womb of mother nature fails to take into account the striking barbarism in which much of the primitive peoples lived. The condition resulted, among other things, from limitations in their ability to produce food and in general from insufficient access to resources for survival. These shortages resulted in cannibalism (common throughout the world), human sacrifice (similarly) or specific historical events such as the floral wars in South America, and slavery, practiced in all cultures from dawn of time.

Such idealistic visions provide moral power and arguments in disputes over the right to control a territory with all resources within it. The visions are thus a serious tool of influence in politics and geopolitics (see p. 517). In the case of aboriginal peoples of North America, popular rhetoric includes accusations such as “whites stole the natives’ lands,” which are rudely countered by documentation of wars between tribes and confederations of tribes. During these wars the contested territories were subject to constant “population exchanges”10, long before the arrival of Europeans.

In Western countries, Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was appointed as the prophet of the vision of savege peoples as “peaceful children of the earth.” The vision’s most famous manifestation is the moving speech of Indian activist and actress Sacheen Littlefeather, who in 1973, represented Marlon Brando and refused to accept an Oscar statuette for the best male role. This took place during the famous Wounded Knee occupation. It was a protest against the government’s violation of treaties and acculturation openly carried out through instruments of racism and institutional discrimination. At stake was, among other things, the destruction and disregard of the traditional clan structure by government agencies (see essay “VII.3).

Civilization impulse. War, stomach or economies of scale?

Historians are fond of writing books on the philosophy of civilization. Many have tried to determine the nature of the impulse that contributed to the formation of complex agricultural societies. One theory comes from historian Karl August Wittfogel, who published the following thesis in 1957: Great empires were initiated by the need to control floods and build irrigation.11 However, there are alternative explanations. One of them is formulated by Charles Darwin under the name of group selection:

Although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another.12

A matter of scale

In the modern world, virtually all people live in countries with populations exceeding one million. One obvious observation will be that the scale gives a competitive advantage over smaller communities. Now a life-and-death question is in order. What are the thresholds numbers for such ultracooperation?

At the smallest possible scale, a hunting team, their group of, say, ten hunters, is able to kill an animal weighing 400 kilograms without much difficulty. That’s about 40 kilograms of meat per hunter. Chances of a hunter acting alone as a rule has no chance for killing such a prey. This principle is known in economics as increasing results through scaling up.

In competition between tribes, the advantage is gained by the tribe that puts more warriors into battle. But Lanchester’s square law, formulated in the early 20th century, proves something counterintuitive: the relationship is not linear. Being outnumbered generates an effect squared (see box on p. 664).

The principle is especially important on large plains. Flat terrain, such as the steppe, generates very high evolutionary pressures that place a premium on increasing group size. It is thus a strong incentive to develop advanced methods of military organization. Here we go! We have just discovered the nature of the forces of psychohistory that brought the Mongol Empire into existence, mentioned in the essay on asabiyyah (“VII.3).

The centralization of political or military power gives a tremendous advantage. However, as we have already learned from previous texts on cultural evolution, the feat of upscaling numbers is an almost impossible task for representatives of primitive tribes. The reason is conceptual deficiencies and cultural programming. The primitive tribes are unable to produce institutions such as chains of command, a social system stabilized by the rule of law. Warriors’ motivational system, unlike soldiers of conscript armies, is based on displaying bravery and courage, and in the perspective of the community, on defending the honor of the family or tribe. A modern soldier, on the other hand, is part of an impersonal institution. In it team performance and discipline are the most important traits and values. These are qualities that a warrior would find unnatural and unworthy.

Conquerors versus the benevolent caretakers of the people

Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side (…).Abraham Lincoln.

Powerful societies cannot be ruled by naked force. Brutal and cruel rulers invariably alienate their subjects. Their crude cultural tools to enforce unity and cooperation were less effective than other major inventions of cultural evolution. And this is the reason why early, archaic principalities and proto-states, were the more more vulnerable and crumbled after the ruler died.

Around the fifth century BC, a very unusual, abrupt change in the model of government took place. And it happened almost simultaneously across the entire supercontinent of Eurasia. Moments before this change, cruel conquerors boasted of subjugating neighboring peoples by sword. They boasted of tens of thousands of captured slaves, of piles of skulls of defeated enemies. They were erecting buildings to show off their might or their status as half-gods or gods.

Suddenly, everything changed. Rulers, instead of boasting about their power and conquests, began praising their regimes with a promotional package sung from a completely different key. In the motherland of Christianity we hear:

He who rules over men must be just, Ruling in the fear of God. And he shall be like the light of the morning when the sun rises, A morning without clouds, Like the tender grass springing out of the earth, By clear shining after rain.’13

Historian Will Durant, on the other hand, describes Cyrus the Great, ruler of the Persian empire, as follows:

He was the friendliest of conquerors, and built his empire on magnanimity. Knowing of his forbearance, his enemies did not fight him with the desperate courage of those who have a choice to kill or die.

From the Chinese cradle of civilization come to us the teachings of Mencius, the greatest propagator of Confucius’ teachings:

He who rules by practicing the virtue of benevolence, is invincible. (仁者無敵)

The teachings of Confucius are, in their essence, a model of governance: they instruct the ruler how to build economic and military power by becoming a father-figure to his hard-working subjects.

One of the most telling signs of the new spirit of the times is the anecdote about Confucius traveling with his disciples. He stumbles upon a woman sobbing over a tomb. When asked, she explains that her son has just been devoured by a tiger, and the same fate has already befallen both her husband and another cousin. “Why don’t you leave such a dangerous area and move to a neighboring country?” the question is asked. The woman answers simply: “I will stay, for here the ruler loves his people, and cares for them.” At this Confucius is said to have said to his disciples: “Remember this teaching, my adepts. A tyrant is a hundred times more terrible to the people than a man-eating tiger.”

Ruthless tyrants were unable to cope with the counterforce of the new mental wiring of populations. In China, the totalitarian regime of the First Emperor lasted only 30 years. The geopolitical vacuum is filled by the Han Dynasty, whose founder, although he established his empire by the sword, has enough sense to listen to the words of a Confucian scholar. The words of reprimand echo through the next thousand-years of the formation of China’s statecraft traditions:

Though you conquered the empire on horseback, how do you intend to rule it from a horse? (馬上得天下, 可以馬上治之乎?)

Meanwhile, in Rome of the second century AD, the era of god-emperors ensues. Edward Gibbon calls it the Golden Age, in which the

The Roman Empire was ruled by absolute rulers who were bestowed with wisdom and virtue.14

Universalist religions with omniscient gods

In China, the kings of the Zhou dynasty (8th-3rd century BC), and later emperors of subsequent dynasties were the link between the supernatural world and the earthly world. They were divine sons of Heaven. Their legitimacy was of supernatural origin. Still, it depended on their degree of adherence to virtues, the most important of which, from the point of view of regime permanence, was the just mentioned benevolence (ren 仁). The era’s “checks and balances” was the virtue of De (德), usually translated as morality, but in essence it is equivalent to Christian idea of divine providence. In Christian system, a monarch is bestowed by God with legitimacy and assistance as long, as the ruler conforms to moral code. In China, the Mandate of Heaven (tianming天命) is provided to the ruler through the chokepoint of deceased ancestors. Should the ruler insult the ancestors (their moral principles of benevolence toward the population, to be exact), he loses both moral and political legitimacy.

The strategic marriage of secular and religious (political and spiritual) power is an eternal principle of power. Confucian scholars who came into alliance with the imperial family of Han have developed and adapted the ancestral worship of the imperial family under their control. Alexander the Great proclaimed himself a himself a divine being. He claimed to be the son of Zeus-Ammon. His contemporaries, who did not understand the laws of human nature, naively considered this a sign of extreme hubris. Napoleon Bonaparte was to comment on this ignorance:

If I were to declare myself the son of God the Father, I would be certainly mocked by the meanest of the brunches when parading through city streets.

A door open to all

A new model of identity is emerging. The ethnic-tribal one is being replaced by universalist religions. An individual can be a part of a group not by birth, but by an act of conversion, that is accepting a new set of moral guidance. Their common feature is the proclamation of universal egalitarianism: enlightenment is available to everyone. Both Buddhism and Christianity are based on such a vision of the social world. The new vision of equality is the force that give rulers the power to create ideologically coherent meta-ethnic empires:

There is no longer Jew or Gentile, there is no longer slave or free man, there is no longer male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.15

An omniscient moralizer

In a fascinating book by anthropologist Ara Norenzayan, we find an apt yet obvious observation:

Watched people are nice people.16

These words are almost verbatim copy of another idea, found in the novel Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein:

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

Both insights refer to the realm of risk calculation. In this essay, risk refers to bearing responsibility for “desertion” or other violation of the rules governing the community. Gary Stanley Becker, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1992, stated:

People act as if they are calculating, even if they don’t do it consciously.

“Big gods,” who can see our intentions and secretive thoughts (they can verify whether our intentions are sincere), and who can punish and reward, serve two functions. First, they are a risk-reducing factor in interactions between strangers (see p. 398). Their second function is to reward cooperative behavior and punish desertion. The principle of human nature is simple, and it doesn’t matter whether the observers are neighbors, supernatural beings, or a social monitoring system being set up in China:

As long as people feel someone’s eyes on their necks, they behave better. And groups of people who behave nicely toward each other win over groups, who don’t.

Once belief in an omniscient, moralizing and punishing god for transgressions is perpetuated, being godless becomes costly. This is due to regularities observed experimentally (p. 413) and in nature. In small communities, the mechanism of social control is triggered by a circle of other community members. In large communities, in which religion functions, the propensity for cooperation and fairness is greater. Religious people behave better, which community members are well aware of. As a result, to illustrate, in the United States a declared atheist has virtually zero chance of winning a presidential election.

“Bad wars” and “good wars” in New Guinea

Groups of organisms that cooperate better, win against groups that are less cooperative.Charles Darwin, 1871

A highly controversial principle of war states that once a society loses the ability to impose on its members the discipline necessary for maintaining social coherence and to warfare, loosening discipline would lead to a general loss of the ability to cooperate and ultra-cooperate. The law materialized as a line from a song by the band Yves Klein Blue:

What this generation needs is a war.

This is exactly the thesis propounded by Ian Morris in his book War! What Is It Good For? Morris divides wars into two types: productive and destructive. The former make the communities affected by them larger and safer. The latter kind brings destructive chaos and degeneration. The essence of the distinction is how war affects institutions created in the course of cultural evolution.

An example of a “bad war”

Peter Turchin, in his book Ultrasociety, even presents a very clear example of a conflict that do not change in any way the functioning of the numerous communities that are engaged in the struggle. The example is the state of permanent “war of all against all” in the area of New Guinea inhabited by the Mae Enga people. The wars have caused heavy losses of lives and the annihilation of entire villages. They were barely escalations in perpetual violence, they have generated no social or cultural change. The wars were not an incubator of invention of a new military technology. They were not able to create new forms of social organization. Cultural evolution was in complete stagnation.17

Cultural evolution caught in the act

We now move just a hundred kilometers. In the Sepik region, a remote corner of the New Guinea rainforest, forced by social and natural conditions, the population limit of a village was about 300 inhabitants, of which about 80 were men capable of fighting. Each village consisted of several patrimonial clans. Larger communities provided more security, but an invisible ceiling was blocking the population growth.

The exceptions to the rule were the clans of the Ilahita group. In them, cooperation between clans was regulated by religious rituals to deities that were not caretakers to a single specific clans. The rituals imposed entire packages of obligations that applied to entire villages. This innovation promoted the extension of these obligations to those outside the clan. In Ilahita, to provide two examples, although everyone raised pigs, eating one’s own pigs was forbidden by custom. Also, rituals had to be performed by someone from outside the own clan. This was enough to create customs of interdependence. Cooperation between clans was necessary to maintain supernatural providence over clans. Let me make sure that you remember the crucial trait of the European social engineering. Enforcing creation of non-clan social structures was the prominent outcome of the Catholic Church’s social program (see the essay Christian grand design…).

For the Ilahita people, the change was brought by the pressure of conflict: the neighboring, more powerful Abelam people were encroaching on Ilahit territory. Abelam was seen as more powerful, and the source of this power was identified as their magic. The superstitious people recognized that the Abelam people had found a way to access a mightier source of supernatural power through rituals. We must remember that death from natural causes, such as infections and snakebites, is seen in New Guinea world as the result of killing by [use of] magic.

It was clear for Ilahita people that it was necessary to start worshipping the same deities that the Abelam people. These were clan gods, exactly the same type as those that functioned in the Ilahit community. However, linguistic differences meant that an evolutionary magic happened. A cultural transmission error (just like a mutation during DNA replication). The originally Abelam clan deities, after being taken over by the external people of Ilahit were established as the gods of entire villages and the entire Ilahita people. The result was the unification of rituals within the Ilahita people in a way that opened doorway to deeper cooperation at the level of entire villages and the entire people. As a result, the communities and villages became capable of increasing their size beyond 300 people. In the process, infant survival rates and adult life expectancy increased.

It is a general principle that the norms of group life affect fertility, and therefore collective survival capacity. These norms promote the coordination of defenses against intrusions and invasions, increase fertility (prohibition of contraception or sexual practices that do not lead to procreation), or increase life expectancy. Other groups around observe the laws and practices and meticulously emulate or imitate them18 in the process which name we have already learned: prestige biased cultural transmission.

Summary

To dissipate conflicted thoughts about “backwardness” of religions, it is worth adding here that civilization is, in its essence, an ethical and moral progress which results in decreasing violence and the need for it. To paraphrase Aneurin Bevan’s incredibly accurate observation (“Freedom is a by-product of economic surplus”), one can seemingly arrive at a paradox. But in fact the insight is one of the most important truths about the evolution of cultures and on human nature:

Our ability to cooperate and ultra-cooperate and all moral and material progress of mankind are the products of wars. The good wars.

Let’s look at a particular manifestation of this paradox of human nature, the British Empire. It is perhaps the greatest aggressor and oppressor of weaker peoples, and at the same time the greatest drug dealer in the history of mankind. However, exactly the same Empire, in parallel to its less glorious activities, was the entity that, at its own expense and with tremendous effort, realized in 1837 and subsequently enforced worldwide abolition of the institution of slavery. The last reparations (property rights are the foundation of civilization!) for institutionally carried out expropriation of slave owners were paid... eight years ago, in 2015!19 ■

Practical advice, insights and examples

A. Big Brother is watching

In a society devoid of religious institutions an omnipresent surveillance systems, such as China’s Social Credit System, can be seen as an alternative to the omnipresent and all-knowing God. The equivalent of Hell and Heaven is the score balance for pro- and anti-social behavior, pp. 410-414.

B. A permanent state of creative warfare

In George Orwell’s novel 1984, a permanent state of war is the order of the day for whole generations. The all-out war was maintained by the totalitarian government in order to make the citizens act in a mental state of utmost discipline. Everybody in the nation was oriented to contribute to the collective effort.

The inspiration for this novel came to Orwell from his work in war propaganda office during World War II. Orwell personally observed and experienced how the official state narration was orchestrated. Is this propaganda justified in that it supports struggle for a just cause? “Just”? Is manipulation or enslavement a fair price for being able to defend ourselves collectively?

Our understanding of these intricate paradoxes of human societies is illuminated by Professor John Maersheimer. The issue is anout balancing the well-being of individuals with that of the community as a whole. According to Maersheimer, leaders playing out geopolitical rivalries lie and send thousands of young people to their deaths... but they do it for the good of the whole community. Who will judge that these or other acts of lying were carried out in good or bad faith? Who has the right to judge, by the way?

C. Reclaiming the Falklands-Malvinas strengthens the Pinochet regime

In 1982, Argentina was ruled by a military junta led by Leopold Galtieri. The junta was criticized for mismanaging the economy and violating human rights. Policymakers thought that reclaiming the islands would unite Argentines and direct the nation toward supporting the government in patriotic fervor. The calculation proved accurate.

Decision-makers on the other side of the conflict seemed to follow a similar reasoning. Throughout the years-long negotiations, the British side gave clear signals of its lack of determination to stand its ground. This is evidenced by the complete lack of response by the UK government to Argentina’s 1976 seizure of the islet of Southern Thule, located in the South Sandwich archipelago, some 2,000 kilometers southeast of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas). Argentina’s successful takeover of the islands could have, and almost had, lead to the downfall of Margaret Thatcher’s government.

The question of the islands’ affiliation is an ever-ready-to-use tool for Argentina’s modern regimes to improve “approval ratings” before elections.

“The Malvinas belong to Argentine”, one of the many propaganda signs erected along Highway 7 running through Argentina’s pampas.

D. “Aristocracy is always right”20, and the cultural virus which provides prestige will always prevail

The hallmark of a toxic worldview or ideology: it not only validates life choices, but elevates the prestige or social position of the person holding the set of worldviews. This is why even a most substantive and factual criticism will be received emotionally, as an attack that undermines the status and prestige.

This is potentially the second factor, besides the issue of hormonal addictions (p. 234), that can cause extreme emotional reactions and refusal of fact-based debate in people subjected to strong indoctrination in sects. Blocking the capacity for rational introspection and dependence on the approval of the immediate environment are two tools of the brainwashing process.