Humans have been waging wars for as long as they understood that acts of organized violence were perfects methods of getting ones point across. Throughout the centuries, humans have perfected their methods of killing and brutality to the point where in today’s time most wars are waged through the acts of deterrence rather than blowing up into full-fledged war. The United States was one of the first countries to adopt the MAD strategy, also known as Mutually Assured Destruction, in the Cold War to deter any actual fighting from ever breaking out between the United States and the Soviet Union (Freedman, 2016). The most interesting aspect of wars isn’t usually how it was fought, or how the fighting was resolved/avoided but mostly it’s what lead to these two parties to meet in the fields of battle to resolve it. The causes of a war are what most researcher and historians spend more time on as they can vary with the depth of research. Most wars have varying causes that led to the fighting, but generally there is a common denominator to all these causes, the human hubris. Hubris is usually considered when one goes one step too far from their ego; where ego is usually the opinion of one self or their importance (“Ego”, Cambridge Dictionary), hubris is when one’s opinion of themselves or their importance reaches a level that cannot be considered reasonable (“Hubris”, Cambridge Dictionary). The reason why hubris is considered as the main cause of most wars is due to the fact that if one is to dissect the most common causes down to their bare instigators they will be able to see that hubris was what truly lead the decision making before war broke out.
War breaks out for several reasons, be it economical, religious, political or even geographical; but when you investigate the causes some more you can clearly see that the real cause was the hubris that the shot callers had, was what really pushed them to war. Let’s take a war over resources, therefore a war caused by economical needs. One country or plot of land has more resources than the other and those without that resource rich land will try everything to steal it from the current owner. One might argue that the cause for this sample conflict was economical and if you really dissect it further it was greed, but the true root cause for this sample conflict was hubris. The leader of the resource poor country believed that his importance and his country’s need for resources far outweighed the importance and the needs of the country that is owning those resource rich lands. In other words, it can be argued that most of mankind’s negative emotions such as greed, hate, jealousy, anger and fear are all fueled by hubris in a way.
One’s hate for another human being, let it be for a difference in skin pigmentation, religious views, economic backgrounds etc, all come down to a false and overinflated sense of self-worth. Therefore, that person hates for others is due to hubris. They hate because they believe they are better than that person or that their religion is better than that of another person’s; or even the country they were born in is far superior to everybody else’s. This overinflated sense of self-worth and self-importance is extremely toxic and has been the root cause of most evil conducted on this planet. Take World War II and the Holocaust for example, Adolf Hitler, the leader of the NaZi party and Germany, instigated war against the world on the basis that he and his ‘Aryan’ people were far superior in most possible ways and therefore he and his people had the right to be a global superpower and colonizer (Meinecke, 2007). Furthermore, during the Holocaust, Hitler believed that non-Jewish people were far superior and far more important than that of Jewish people. This belief of his lead to one of history’s worst atrocities where around six million European-Jews were executed solely for their heritage. They had committed no crime to warrant such brutality, they were merely slaughtered (Meinecke, 2007).
Hubris doesn’t always lead to wars with such monstrous figures and events such as Hitler and the Holocaust, but the end results are always the same, some party is always affected more negatively than the other. The fact that hubris could be the cause for the majority of wars and atrocities that follow, makes it hard to agree with when you see that hubris could of helped make the holocaust a reality but also it could be the cause for the independence for many countries today, such as the United States and Greece. So, it’s hard to see how something can cause wars of independence and wars amongst the world. No matter what opposing view can be thrown as alternative causes to the war(s) if one is to search well enough; they will surely find that somewhere down the line, there was someone who believed their idea, their cause, their race/religion/political background was so much more important than that of their fellow man that they would need to fight to prove it so. Also, ever since mankind learnt that violence is generally a very easy and generally quick way to squash quarrels, prove superiority, keep your subject in check or whatever the quandary might be in this case(s). War is usually considered a last resort kind of response, but it isn’t always the case (Mouch, 2006). Certain prizes are too good to pass from, such as the resources that a certain underdeveloped country might have that one’s own country doesn’t process… yet; or the chance to decrease certain limitations one’s country may have from being landlocked, by invading a neighboring country and using their access to the sea. Such was the case of the Polish Corridor situation of 1939, where Nazi Germany invaded Poland to reacquire access to the sea that Germany had lost in World War 1 (Britannica, 1998).
This is what happens when one’s ego is left unchecked, it evolves into hubris and many people suffer because of it. Whether this suffering is caused by crime, violence or war is beyond the point. The fact of the matter is that people suffer, they get manipulated to follow a wrong path or they are caught in the crossfire. No matter how noble your cause was such as the U.S. Civil War, which put quite simply was an effort to begin the process of eradicating slavery (Pappas, 2011), or World War II (from the Allies point of view), people will always suffer because of mankind’s quick jump to violence and war as a rapid solution to complex problems. This paired with the intoxicating effects that near absolute power and wealth possesses, has created a recipe for disaster anytime war is even considered as a possible solution.