The Psychologies of War

The Psychological Processes That Lead to War

As I write this article, Russian forces are driving deeper into the eastern territories of Ukraine in an invasion that is now two days old.

There have been reports of multiple civilian casualties and hundreds of thousands of people being dislocated from their homes in an attempt to escape the war and reach areas of safety.

This is not going to be an article about the history of the conflict or who is right or wrong in this situation (that might come in towards the end). In this article, I want to help you understand some psychological aspects of war, those that help start it and those that justify it.

We have been at war ever since we existed. Earlier, they were between different tribes of homo sapiens. Today, they are fought between nations, or even between computers or digital servers.

War never changes. Why?

A Rare Consensus in Psychology

If there is one thing I have learned in my years of studying the subject, it is that there is rarely a consensus about the nature of human existence, our psyche or our drives. Yet, when it comes to the subject of war, psychology comes to a rare consensus across schools of thought.

War comes to us very naturally. Of course, not everything gets called a war. Sometimes we call it a ‘special military operation, a conflict, an imposition of peace by forceful means. War comes with many names.

The psychoanalyst Freud argued that people go to war as a way of expression of the drives that had been repressed by society’s demand for conformity and rule of law. For him, every human being has the drive to kill. This drive is inhibited by the society which outlaws murder or killings by law but these drives cannot be kept quiet forever. Eventually, a society demands blood and thus it goes to war as an uninhibited expression of our internal killer.

Quite a metal explanation I must say.

Have you found yourself getting the weirdest satisfaction from videos of the war, of buildings being destroyed by missiles, of armies and tanks marching through the streets? That is our death drive in action. It sees itself getting expressed, even if vicariously, and that leads to pleasure. We may not like feeling this pleasure, we may reject it, but it still exists.

Social psychologists, on the other hand, believe that war is an escalation of an intergroup conflict. We divide ourselves into in-groups and out-groups and escalate these differences into war. For them, this is not a result of an internal drive to kill but a natural tendency of ‘othering’ those that are different from us.

Despite having differences in why we go to war, both social psychologists and psychoanalysts agree that we turn ourselves into social groups very easily. We must always know who the allies and the enemies of our group are, even if we don’t necessarily know why these groups are our allies or enemies.

Take the example of the recent UNSC vote where India abstained from a vote condemning the actions of Russia. The decision to abstain put some Indians in an uncomfortable psychological space where they were against the Russian invasion but also wanted to support the stand that the Indian government was taking. This led to an internal conflict that required some explanation for why India (or Indians) should not care about Ukraine.

Lo and behold, a list was created of all Ukrainian votes on Indian issues in the past. This went as far back as the 1960s-70s. This small group of Indians were looking for a reason why Ukraine was not an ally and when the complex geopolitical reasons were beyond their understanding; a simpler, more-straightforward reason was created to assuage these psychological conflicts.

War comes naturally to us. Allies and enemies are created out of nowhere in war and most of these creations are purely psychological.

The Wars of Defense

There has been a major shift in how wars are carried out over the last century and this shift has its roots in the First World War.

Before WW1, a country went to war for very simple reasons, it either wanted to ‘civilize’ other territories by winning them over or it wanted to spread the message of peace and love of their religion against heretics. The leaders went to war for largely direct reasons. “We want to go to war, so we will.”

But changed in the few years of the first world war.

We sometimes forget how brutal and devastating the war was. Millions of young men died for the sake of a few inches of territory. There were some villages in the UK whose whole young, male population was wiped out due to the war.

Imagine that, every single young boy in a village killed.

Europe, and the world at large, realized that wars need to be avoided in the future. This cannot continue to happen but our pesky little minds still demanded war (as Freud would say). Peace is not in our ways.

We now needed new justifications for war. Leaders couldn’t just say that they want to expand territory or civilize people. That wouldn’t do anymore.

This brought on the age of the War of Self-Defence.

No country, since the first world war, has gone to war because it wanted to. Every single country has claimed it was forced to start a war for the sake of self-defence.

Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia for some living space for his people.

The US invaded Iraq because they had Weapons of Mass Destruction (they didn’t)

Russia invaded Ukraine because it couldn’t afford NATO on its borders.

There is always a justification for the modern war and it is always one of self-defence.

All propaganda today is centred around how a nation was forced into doing something it didn’t want to do. That is what Putin is doing right now as well.

We cannot know whether he really believes what he is saying or not, but we do know that there are people buying his explanation and supporting Russia in the invasion simply because of the self-defence argument.

The human psyche is bound to sympathise with someone acting in self-defence because deep down, we are all afraid of being destroyed.

We all have the instinct to defend ourselves and it is this instinct that propagandists rely on to sell their interests.

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I have discussed just two tiny psychological processes that go into starting and continuing a war but the truth is, every war is as much psychological as it is physical.

Wars start for psychological reasons and can be ended too with psychological cooperation.

In every war, there is no one psychology that is at play, there are multiple psychologies of the multiple stakeholders and victims of war. There is the mother who lost her son, the young boy who was handed a gun to defend his city, the invading soldier who is walking in stranger lands, the powerful leader sitting on his throne of a lofty tower sending these people to their deaths.

I will be concluding this piece with a brilliant poem that hits close to home in these times.