Some Fundamental Truths About the Evolution of Wars and Governments

The first major challenge for the human races which had been evolving on earth was learning the techniques for acquiring the essential things for life such as food, shelter, family and the groups or clans. Once this was mastered at least partially, the next task was the regulation of human contacts.The development of industry demanded law, order, and social adjustment; private property necessitated government.

Not only on earth, but on all evolutionary planets beaming with evolutionary life such as that is on earth, development of antagonisms among the evolving humans are a natural phenomena. That is because, the evolving humans are not yet perfect in their mind levels. This causes the humans to be with varying capacities of understanding each other. Misunderstanding, mistrust and consequent animosities are therefore, natural.

When this is so, human groups have to learn the technique of bringing peace and soon they begin to appreciate the necessity for peace among them. They learn how to regulate themselves so that peace is established among them.

Anarchy causes misery and therefore establishment of law and order becomes essential for the evolving human groups to reduce their miseries.

The need for bringing law and order necessitated formation of governments.

It was essential for the struggling humanity to forcefully adopt the path of civilization as a necessity for their own existence. This is the natural tendency of evolutionary growth in all evolutionary worlds in this universe!

War is the natural state and heritage of evolving man; peace is the social yardstick measuring civilization’s advancement. 

Before the partial socialization of the advancing races man was exceedingly individualistic, extremely suspicious, and unbelievably quarrelsome. Violence is the law of nature, hostility the automatic reaction of the children of nature, while war is but these same activities carried on collectively.

And wherever and whenever the fabric of civilization becomes stressed by the complications of society’s advancement, there is always an immediate and ruinous reversion to these early methods of violent adjustment of the irritations of human inter-associations.

War is an animalistic reaction to misunderstandings and irritations; peace attends upon the civilized solution of all such problems and difficulties.

But there could be no such phenomenon as war until society had evolved sufficiently far to actually experience periods of peace and to sanction warlike practices such as sports and games. 

The very concept of war implies some degree of organization.

With the emergence of social groupings, individual irritations began to be submerged in the group feelings, and this promoted intra-tribal tranquility but at the expense of inter-tribal peace. 

Peace was thus first enjoyed by the in-group, or tribe, who always disliked and hated the out-group, foreigners. Early man regarded it a virtue to shed alien blood.

Modern air travel has reduced the limitations of distances.

But that has not yet enabled man to remove his suspicion about the foreigners!

When the early chiefs would try to sort out misunderstandings among their clans, they often found it necessary, at least once a year, to permit the people to have some other kind of fun-fights among themselves. The clan would divide up into two groups and engage in an all-day battle. And this for no other reason than just the fun of it; they really enjoyed fighting. The nature of enjoying a fight is within the minds of all underdeveloped humans. Humans will remove this trait only when they become perfectly developed in civilization!

Warfare persists because man is human, evolved from an animal, and all animals have a tendency to fight! In humans, this animal tendency of fighting and killing slowly gets removed from the human mind as human perfection of mind takes place with successive generations!

As it stands now, war and fight among humans in some form keep taking place due any one of the following reasons:

1. Scarcity of food: Man will fight to get food at any cost when food becomes scarce.

2. Scarcity of woman or opposite partner: Imperfect man would not mind fighting or killing for fulfilling this!

3. Showing off pride and superiority: Imperfect man does not consider others as equals. They would resort to violent ways to establish their superiority! They will resort to violent methods when their egos are hurt!

4. Imperfect humans have the animal tendency to acquire leadership at any cost. They would not mind resorting to violent means for achieving this. In olden times it used to be slavery. In today's world, it is all kinds of bossism. All imperfect humans would like to become adorable bosses to others. When they get the power or opportunity, they might even become sadistic to trouble those who happen to be under their control! Wars can happen for establishment of leadership!

5. Imperfect animal minded humans cannot forgive the wrongs of others and they get satisfaction only when they take revenge. The human imperfection of revenge is another cause for wars!

6. Imperfect humans cannot tolerate long term peace as their minds do aspire for fighting. Such imperfect humans create war like situations during long term peace times. Sports and games, to some extent, help the imperfect humans to vent their fight loving agitations of mind!

7. Religions of imperfect humans invariably approve war to establish superiority of their own faith. It is extremely difficult for the imperfect humans to understand the true divine nature of God!

Man will never accept peace as a normal mode of living until he has been thoroughly and repeatedly convinced that peace is best for his material welfare, and until society has wisely provided peaceful substitutes for the gratification of that inherent tendency periodically to let loose a collective drive designed to liberate those ever-accumulating emotions and energies belonging to the self-preservation reactions of the human species.

Nature confers no rights on man, only life and a world in which to live it. Nature does not even confer the right to live, as might be deduced by considering what would likely happen if an unarmed man met a hungry tiger face to face in the primitive forest. Society’s prime gift to man is security.

When rights are old beyond knowledge of origin, they are often called natural rights. But human rights are not really natural; they are entirely social. They are relative and ever changing, being no more than the rules of the game—recognized adjustments of relations governing the ever-changing phenomena of human competition.

Natural justice is a man-made theory; it is not a reality. In nature, justice is purely theoretic, wholly a fiction. Nature provides but one kind of justice—inevitable conformity of results to causes.

Justice, as conceived by man, means getting one’s rights and has, therefore, been a matter of progressive evolution.

Law is always at first negative and prohibitive; in advancing civilizations it becomes increasingly positive and directive.

Mankind’s struggle to perfect government on earth has to do with perfecting channels of administration, with adapting them to ever-changing current needs, with improving power distribution within government, and then with selecting such administrative leaders as are truly wise. 

So long as the majority humans remain without achieving reasonable levels of mind perfection, their evolutionary progress is incomplete. The last strains of genetic features they carry from their animal origins need to be polished by successive generations of evolutionary growth. This progress does not happen uniformly across all and therefore human society at any time during its evolutionary progress remains as a heterogeneous lot with varying levels of imperfection. The chances of democratic systems achieving near perfect governance under such a situation is very low and non-sustainable. Yet democracy is the ideal and desirable form of governance for humans who have surpassed their primitive stages of development.

While there is a divine and ideal form of government, it is a futile exercise to give the details of it to humans when they remain vastly under lower levels of mental maturity. The minds of such people will not accept the principles of such a governance even when that is divinely revealed!

So, humans of earth has to go forward to future generations facing all the trials and tribulations which in essence are there own creation. 

But that does not mean that the human race is going to be doomed.

On the contrary, it will progress continuously and every generation ahead would have some improvements over their predecessors! 

It is divinely destined that all evolutionary planets reach to their respective perfection levels at some point of time. No living planets are divinely destined to be doomed! Such a destiny is not in the plans of their divine creators!

Hence, earth too would eventually reach a glorious future. A future time when its peoples and its governments are more or less with the highest possible material perfection!

[Adapted from the Urantia Book-Paper-70]