War and the Illusion of Power
Image by Brandon Mowinkel.
Economic decline. Weakening poll numbers. Political desperation. War has long been the answer. It provides an enemy to rally against, a spectacle of power, a demand for unquestioning obedience, and a ready distraction. Yet political calculation alone does not explain war’s persistence. The impulse runs deeper.
In Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World, American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton offers a psychological and historical analysis of modern power politics. He describes the superpower syndrome as “a national mindset—put forward strongly by a tight-knit leadership group—that takes on a sense of omnipotence, of unique standing in the world that grants it the right to hold sway over all nations.” The orientation is not simply political; it is psychological. According to Lifton, the American superpower does not only seek dominance; it seeks to shape and control history itself. Behind this lies less a strategy than a psychic disposition. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally expansive sense of entitlement, a belief in a special mandate to pursue its aims. Lifton writes, “A superpower is entitled to dominate and control precisely because it is a superpower.” A circular, self-serving, solipsistic fantasy, deeply hypnotic in its appeal.
Lifton notes that psychiatric experience with individuals reveals a pattern: beneath grandiose claims of omnipotence often lie profound feelings of powerlessness, emptiness, and insecurity. Megalomania frequently masks deep vulnerability. The superpower syndrome contains the same contradiction. Its outward display of absolute power is driven by an underlying fear of weakness, a fear so intolerable that it must be eliminated at all costs.
A nation haunted by such insecurity must continually prove its strength, demonstrate its authority. Military force becomes the instrument of that assertion. The result is what author Tom Engelhardt describes in his book The United States of Fear as a “permanent state of war,” in which military conflict becomes not the exception but the norm, sustained by the corporatization of the military, militarization of the economy, and ultimately by capitalist war-profiteering.
Ancient cultures understood war more honestly. In myth, war belonged to the gods, not to presidents, state departments, or corporations. Not to a handful of men behind closed doors. For the Greeks, the god of war was Ares; for the Romans, Mars. He promised no liberation, no democracy, no security. He did not stand for a noble struggle of good against evil, nor for peace. The god of war stood for one thing and one thing only: war itself.
The attributes associated with this ancient god were unmistakable: blind, raging, feral, wild, untamable, overpowering, excessive, insane, bloody, accursed, horrible, vehement, foul, loathsome, obscene, disgraceful, rough, disordered, unarticulated, savage.
Mythology did not try to disguise war as modern states do. Department of Defense. Security forces. Peacekeeping missions. All serve as linguistic camouflage for war and its brutal realities of blood, destruction, loss. Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” strips away the mask to reveal war’s harrowing images:
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The dying soldier’s face exposes the lie. There is nothing honorable, noble, or glorious in such a death. The notion of a civilized war collapses the moment one looks closely. It collapses in the white eyes of Owen’s dying soldier, and it collapses again when images appear of lifeless bodies of elementary school girls buried beneath rubble in southern Iran. No doctrine or calculation can account for such scenes. No theory, no statistics, no secular rhetoric can justify them. In the presence of the dead, the abstractions fall away, the illusions shatter.
As soldiers and civilians continue to die across the world in endless wars, citizens have a moral obligation to imagine and remember war in all its violence and devastation. This requires refusing its sanitization, rejecting its rationalization. War is not heroic, not redemptive, not civilizing. American psychologist James Hillman argued that war is, above all, a psychological task, something that must be imagined and understood before it can ever be resisted. The task requires seeing through the rhetoric of pride and power, abandoning the illusions of omnipotence, and confronting the underlying fear and vulnerability. Only then does the truth of war become impossible to ignore.
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