“Survival is more important than economic prosperity,” these are the words uttered by the realist political scientist John Mearsheimer (2001). The following scenario makes the point: if an army is juxtaposed between a riverbank and an enemy, the army will fight to the death to overcome the enemy since victory or death is their only choice. This urge to live is a biological fact that can be traced back to the amoeba, which is programmed to survive by adopting the four-fs: feeding, fornicating, fleeing, and fighting (Dawkins 1976). Of course, fornicating implies sexual reproduction, so it is being used metaphorically here in reference to the amoeba. Furthermore, this drive to survive can never be transferred to AI-driven machines. The clearest proof of this is that all the automated rovers put on distant planets with AI capability have yet to build a civilization from scratch, as occurred in Mesopotamia starting in the 10th millennium BCE by Homo sapiens.

The Old Testament, the historic foundation to many current-day religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism—provides a moral outcome to justify war against an enemy when that enemy becomes an existential threat (see Footnote 1):

“Now go and completely destroy the entire Amalekite nation: men, women, children, and babies; cattle, sheep, goats, camels, and donkeys.” (Samuel_1 15:3)

Throughout recent history there are examples of this outcome being actualized against an enemy:

(1) Nat Turner’s Slave Revolt was a revolt by enslaved people that killed white men, women, and children in Virginia in 1831. In response, Turner was hanged and white mobs killed black men, women, and children, many of whom were not involved in the revolt. The Virginians saw the rebellion as an existential threat to slavery.

(2) In August 1941, the United States imposed an oil embargo on Japan. This compelled the Japanese to attack the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, after which the US declared war on Japan. The war ended after the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, which caused the instantaneous death of thousands of men, women, and children. The Americans saw the Japanese attack as an existential threat to democracy.

(3) Between 1941 and 1945, Adolf Hitler was shipping Jewish men, women, and children to concentration camps for extermination. Hitler saw the Jewish people as an existential threat to the Aryan race of Nazi Germany.

(4) Between 1963 and 1973 the United States dropped 388,000 tons of napalm onto Vietnam, which burned to death thousands of Vietnamese men, women, and children. The existential threat here for the Americans was communism vs. capitalism.

(5) On October 2023 Hamas who administered the Gaza Strip invaded Israel killing hundreds of men, women, and children. In retaliation, Israel invaded Gaza killing thousands of men, women, and children. This conflict is based on an existential threat involving religion.

(6) It is well-known that in the case of China there was a century of humiliation beginning with the first Opium War involving the British Empire (1839-1842) and ending after WWII (1945), after which China underwent a massive recovery. An existential threat of current-day China is being returned to a state of humiliation by any foreign power, especially a power originating from the Western World.

What is clear from the forgoing is that the propensity to kill populations of men, women, and children is part of the human condition going back to the Old Testament and earlier (Poznik et al. 2016), and this drive was programmed by evolution for survival (Dawkins 1976; Mearsheimer 2001; Poznik et al. 2016). Some have argued that the next hegemon—the People’s Republic of China—will be different because of their Confucian traditions (Sachs 2024) but history would suggest otherwise. The challenge for human-kind is how to manage the drive to kill members of our own species when perceived as an existential threat, which is always based on ideology.

Footnote 1: The existential threat to the Israelites was idolatry. See the story of King Manasseh (Chronicles_2 33:7-11).