"War is a racket. It always has been."

— Major General Smedley Butler, War Is a Racket (1935)

Housing takes our security. War takes our lives.

The mechanism is the same.

The completion that war prevents:

When we fail, the natural cycle goes like this: attempt → failure → recognition → suffering → adjustment → growth.

You try something. It doesn't work. You acknowledge the failure—painful as that is. You feel the disappointment, the grief, the bruised ego. Then you adjust your approach, learn what the failure taught you, and grow.

The cycle completes. Energy returns. You're wiser than before.

Now watch what happens when the cycle is refused:

Attempt → failure → refuse recognition → attack the evidence → escalate → more failure → more escalation → destruction, repeat indefinitely.

You don’t acknowledge your failures. Your suffering doesn’t get felt. The adjustment never happens. Instead, the energy that would have completed the cycle gets redirected outward—toward destroying whatever made the failure visible.

This is the mechanism psychiatrist M. Scott Peck identified in People of the Lie (1983). A person who cannot tolerate seeing their own flaws will attack anyone who reflects those flaws back to them. The spouse who points out a problem becomes the enemy. The child who fails to maintain the family image becomes the scapegoat. The colleague who witnesses the mistake becomes a threat to eliminate.

The same mechanism operates at national scale.

Vietnam: Completion-refusal measured in bodies

In 1964, the United States faced evidence that its Vietnam policy was failing. The government we supported lacked popular legitimacy. The enemy had deeper roots than we'd assumed. Our strategy was based on assumptions that didn't match reality.

This was a moment for completion. Recognize the failure. Feel the disappointment. Adjust the approach. Perhaps withdraw from a commitment that wasn't serving its stated purpose.

Instead, we escalated.

Rather than adjust our worldview to match reality, we tried to destroy the reality that contradicted our worldview. A minor failure in 1964 became a catastrophe. Over three million dead, by the Vietnamese government's 1995 official estimate—including more than two million civilians. Entire countries devastated. Generations traumatized—theirs and ours.

This happened because acknowledging the failure would have required something the national ego couldn't tolerate: the completion of a cycle that included being wrong.

Peck identified what he called "the twin progenitors of evil: laziness and narcissism"—refusing to do the work that authentic completion requires, and refusing to accept the death of the false self that completion would entail.

Both are completion-refusal. Both prevent the cycle from closing. Both leave energy suspended—energy that has to go somewhere.

It went into bombs.

Over three million bodies. Because completing the cycle of "we were wrong" was intolerable.

The lying proves the knowing

Here's what makes this worse: they knew.

The Pentagon Papers—7,000 pages declassified in 1971—revealed systematic deception of Congress, the public, and allies across four administrations. A 1996 New York Times analysis concluded the documents demonstrated that the Johnson administration had "systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress." The gap between what officials said publicly and what they knew privately was enormous and documented.

There's a legal principle that applies: if a person attempts to conceal their action, it's evidence they knew the action was wrong—a principle courts call "consciousness of guilt." The lying is the proof. The concealment demonstrates consciousness.

If they were acting in good faith—if they genuinely believed they were doing the right thing—why the elaborate deception?

Systems completing in good faith don't require concealment. You hide what you know is wrong. The energy expended on appearance-maintenance is the signature of suspended completion.

This connects to the language analysis from my other articles. Why does extraction require euphemism?

"Collateral damage" instead of "dead civilians." "Pacification" instead of "destruction of villages." "Enhanced interrogation" instead of "torture." "Body count" instead of "human beings we killed."

Plain language would complete the cycle of recognition. The euphemisms suspend it.

The shadow mechanism

What you refuse to face in yourself gets projected onto the world. The conflict you won't complete internally gets acted out externally. The shadow you won't acknowledge in the mirror appears as the enemy across the border.

Jung stated this as psychological law in Aion:

"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves."

This is the completion principle: what remains unfinished internally will be enacted externally. The transformation refused inside will be projected outside—unconsciously, destructively, without resolution.

The nation that cannot face its own capacity for evil will find evil everywhere else. The country that cannot acknowledge its own aggression will see aggression in every other country's actions. The people who cannot tolerate their own shadow will need enemies to carry it for them.

The need to be good becomes the source of doing evil. The crusade to eliminate darkness requires an enemy to carry the darkness. The war for peace requires war.

This is the trap. You cannot bomb your way to virtue. You cannot kill your way out of your shadow. Every external enemy destroyed leaves the internal conflict untouched—which means a new enemy must be found.

Enemy creation as suspension technology

The external enemy solves an internal problem. As long as everyone focuses on the threat outside, no one has to face what's broken inside. The enemy provides a container for the shadow, a target for the aggression, a distraction from the failures that would otherwise demand acknowledgment.

Groups that lack enemies tend to create them. The enemy serves a structural function. The group needs the enemy to maintain its suspension. Without an external threat, the internal tensions would demand completion.

The enemy keeps the group suspended in permanent war footing where internal completion is postponed indefinitely.

This is why peace feels threatening to certain systems. Peace would require facing what war allows you to avoid.

The scapegoat at every scale

The pattern is fractal. What happens at national scale happens at family scale happens at individual scale.

The family that cannot face its own dysfunction selects a member to carry the blame. As long as one person is "the problem," no one has to look at the alcoholism, the abuse, the secrets. The scapegoat absorbs the family's unfinished business, carrying the shame of several generations.

The same mechanism, the same function, different scale:

In the individual psyche, the shadow carries what the ego refuses to acknowledge. In the family, the scapegoat carries what the family refuses to face. In society, the out-group carries what the in-group projects. In the nation, the enemy carries what the country cannot admit about itself.

At every level: what would complete if faced is instead suspended through projection, denial, scapegoating, or destruction of evidence.

The abstraction ladder of violence

Watch how language distances from what war actually is.

At ground level, war is bodies. Human bodies that breathe, feel, bleed, die. Bodies that were held by mothers, that held their own children. At this level, killing is visceral. The horror demands acknowledgment.

Then the bodies become a category: "soldiers." The role abstracts from the individual. You're killing an enemy combatant, not a person.

Then soldiers become numbers: "body counts." The metric replaces the reality. Ten thousand deaths is a statistic.

Then even the numbers are euphemized: "collateral damage." An unfortunate side effect.

Then we leave bodies entirely: "strategic interests," "projecting power," "maintaining credibility." The people dying have disappeared from the language.

Finally, war becomes a line item: defense budgets, contracts awarded, jobs created. The connection between the money and the bodies it will destroy is invisible.

Each level of distance reduces the feeling that would otherwise demand the cycle complete. By the time you're discussing "strategic interests" and "defense budgets," the feelings have been entirely abstracted away.

A child is burning. But on the spreadsheet, it's a line item.

Who benefits

Smedley Butler was a Major General in the United States Marine Corps—at the time the highest rank available. He received two Medals of Honor, one of only nineteen people in American history to do so. At his death in 1940, he was the most decorated Marine in U.S. history, with sixteen medals including five for heroism.

And he wrote:

"I spent 33 years in active military service... And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."

He named the extraction plainly. War is a racket. Someone profits. It's usually the people furthest from the bodies.

The soldiers who fight don't profit. The civilians who die don't profit. The taxpayers who fund it don't profit. The veterans who return broken don't profit.

The defense contractors profit. The weapons manufacturers profit. The politicians who receive their contributions profit. The executives who never see combat profit.

The bodies are the cost. The abstraction is the product. The distance between them is the profit margin.

What completion would look like

Imagine a nation that could complete the cycle.

Recognition: "We were wrong. Our policy failed. Our assumptions were flawed."

Suffering: The grief of acknowledging lives lost for a mistake. The shame of admitting error.

Adjustment: Changing the policy. Withdrawing from the commitment. Apologizing to those harmed.

Growth: Learning what the failure taught. Becoming a nation less likely to repeat the pattern.

This almost never happens.

Instead: double down, escalate, attack the evidence, create new enemies, maintain the image, let millions die rather than complete the cycle.

Because completion would require the death of the false self—the national ego that cannot tolerate being wrong.

The body test

How do you feel when your country goes to war?

If you feel triumphant, righteous, certain—notice whether your body is braced or released. Righteousness often masks the tension of suspended completion. The certainty that justifies killing is usually a sign that something is being avoided.

If you feel grief, even for declared enemies—that feeling is the completion signal trying to break through. The recognition that those bodies are human bodies, like yours.

If you feel confused by the complexity—ask who benefits from your confusion. The fog that makes responsibility impossible to assign serves someone.

If you feel numb—that numbness is the extraction signature. Something in you has disconnected to avoid the completion that clear seeing would demand.

Your body knows. The question is whether you'll listen.

This pattern permeates EVERY domain and layer of our world, we will see the same pattern: natural completion prevented, suspension maintained, extraction enabled. The costume changes. The mechanism remains.

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Sources

Butler, Smedley D. War Is a Racket. Round Table Press, 1935.

Jung, Carl G. Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part II. Princeton University Press, 1959.

Peck, M. Scott. People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil. Simon & Schuster, 1983.

"Pentagon Papers." National Archives. archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers

Vietnamese Government. Official War Casualty Estimate. 1995.