Are World Leaders Evil or just Incredibly Stupid?

World leaders are, by and large, either evil or stupid. If they are not in fact evil, then they must be incredibly stupid. Honestly, I don’t know which would be better. The most powerful people in the world are also those with the apparent intention to destroy it. Whatever the options may be, for whatever problem, they seem to inevitably choose the one that, through either evil or stupidity, will do the most damage, harm the most people, kill the most lives.

The response of the most powerful world leaders to war is always more war. One would have thought that we as a species would have learned by now that this is almost never an effective solution. In some ways, it seems logical, that if one party acts with violence, then the way to stop them is with more violence, with greater violence, enough violence to paralyze their ability to enact further violence. It can seem only natural, too, in a primal or childish sense, that if someone hits you, you hit them back, and harder. But it is also logical and natural that responding to violence with violence produces escalating violence. Something that world leaders seem not to have learned as children, probably because they never had to fight, and because in their adult lives, in their careers as politicians and military commanders, they have other people do their fighting for them, is that fights rarely end when you hit the other kid back. What generally happens is an escalation, where they hit you again, so you hit them again, then they grab a weapon, and you grab a weapon too, so now you can really hurt each other, and maybe other kids get involved, on both sides, and they’re whaling on each other with weapons too. What you have in the end is a floor covered with injured and maimed kids, crying over broken bones and bruises in puddles of blood, instead of just one kid who got hit once.

I’m not a pacifist. I don’t want to harm people, and PTSD and other factors make me generally non-confrontational, but I’m not a pacifist. If someone were to hit me, in my mature adult life, there’s a decent chance I’d hit them back instinctively. That, however, would be an automatic reaction in the moment, without time for forethought. If I had the time and presence of mind to think about what might happen if I hit back, like that the asshole that hit me could have a gun or a crew of other assholes with them that could kill me rather than leave me with just the pain of one hit that I can recover from, I think I’d have the sense to not respond in a way that could escalate things to my, or others’, death.

In times of war, especially in a modern context, there is time to think. Maybe not for soldiers, once they’re already in the heat of battle, but the leaders who put them into those battles do have the time and removal to think, analyze the situation, and pick the best solution. They are too often given the benefit of the doubt. When the people of a country are attacked, and their government and military respond by attacking, more violently, excuses are made for them, saying that they’re caught up by emotions, or that they’re only doing what is logical and natural. The flaw with that rationalization is that it is coming from the point of view akin to the mind of a child who has just been hit. It applies less well to supposedly intelligent adults in charge of massive military forces and weapons of mass destruction. If the people of your country are attacked by a paramilitary force, and your response is to then attack every person that could conceivably be tangentially related to that paramilitary force, you are only creating more violence, and that violence will rebound on you, or rather your people, worse than initial attack. Likewise, those who, with all forethought and purported intelligence and experience, decide to help in enacting that increased, indiscriminate violence, say through supplying weapons or other military support, will further increase, spread, and ultimately produce further victims of violence.

In his speech, announcing his intention to provide billions (more) in military funding to foreign governments, namely Israel and Ukraine, Biden said that, “It’s a smart investment that’s going to pay dividends for American security for generations, help us keep SAmerican troops out of harm’s way, help us build a world that is safer, more peaceful, and more prosperous for our children and grandchildren.” This is the logic of a person, of a culture, of a system, that is either evil or incredibly stupid. An intelligent person with experience and historical knowledge would know that the US providing weapons and other military support to fuel wars in other countries has not and will not lead to safety, security, prosperity, or peace, for anyone. It has and will lead to more violence and insecurity, more wars and more death. To excuse this as the product of incredible stupidity is too generous, because no one in that position, or all of their advisors and staff, can be that stupid. They must know that they are propagating further violence, war, and death. They must then be evil.