War - What Is It Good For?

Well, definitely not what it used to be good for. Here are excerpts from two books that I recently read: 1984 by George Orwell and Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. It seems their reasons for war are two sides of the same coin.

1984
The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limt the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling class against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word "war" therefore, has become misleading. It probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and has been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three superstates, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each involatile within its own boundaries. For in that caseeach would still be a self-contained universe, freed forever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This - although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense - is the inner meaning of the party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.


Cat's Cradle
"When Bokonon and McCabe took over this miserable country years ago," said Julian Castle, "they threw out the priests. And then Bokonon, cynically and playfully, invented a new religion."
"I know." I said.
"Well, when it became evident that no government or economic reform was going to make people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies."
"How did he come to be an outlaw?"
"It was his own idea. He asked McCabe to outlaw him and his religion, too, in order to give the religious life of the people more zest, more tang. He wrote a little poem about it, incidentally."
Castle quoted this poem, which does not appear in The Books of Bokonon.

So I said good-bye to government,
And I gave my reason:
The a really good religion
Is a form of treason.

"Bokonon suggested the hook, too, as the proper punishment for Bokononists," he said. "It was something he'd seen in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's." He winked ghoulishly. "That was for zest, too."
"Did many people die on the hook?"
"Not at first, not at first. At first it was all make-believe. Rumors were cunningly circulated about executions, but no one really knew anyone who had died that way. McCabe had a good old time making bloodthirsty threats against the Bokononists - which was everybody.
"And then Bokonon went into cozy hiding," Castle continued, "where he wrote and preached all day long and ate good things his disciples brought him. McCabe would organize the unemployed, which was practically everybody, into great Bokonon hunts. About every six months McCabe would announce triumphantly that Bokonon was surrounded by a ring of steel, which was remorselessly closing in. And then the leaders of the rermorseless ring would have to report to McCabe, full of chagrin and apoplexy, that Bokonon had done the impossible. He had escaped, had evaporated, had lived to preach another day. Miracle!"

"McCabe and Bokonon did not succeed in raising what is generally thought of as the standard of living," said Castle. "The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever.
"But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud."
"So life became a work of art," I marveled.
"Yes. There was only one trouble with it."
"Oh?"
"The drama was very tough on the souls of the two main actors, McCabe and Bokonon. As young men, they had pretty much been alike, had both been half-angel, half-pirate. But the drama demanded the pirate half in Bokonon and the angel half of McCabe to wither away. And McCabe and Bokonon paid a terrible price in agony for the happiness of the people--McCabe knowing the agony of the tyrant and Bokonon knowing the agony of the saint. They both became, for all practical purposes, insane."
Castle crooked his index finger of his left hand. "And then, people really did start dying on the hook."
"But Bokonon was never caught?" I asked.
"McCabe never went that crazy. He never made a really serious effort to catch Bokonon. It would have been easy to do."
"Why didn't he catch him?"
"McCabe was always sane enough to realize that without the holy man to war against, he himself would become meaningless."


It's amazing how similar utopias and dystopias are... and it appears that Cat's Cradle had doublethink as well, in response to the "play" thing. Anyways, have fun finding the interweaving points. The 1984 excerpt I wanted to put down was actually a lot longer, but I didn't think it would hold attention very well. Just go read it for yourself if you're interested.