/lit/ - Literature

If human life is on balance so awful, would the antinatalists be doing us all a favor by literally putting us out of our misery through an all out nuclear apocalypse?

What book defines each generation.

Boomer
X
Millennial/Y
Z

>>9702254
The relationship between war and peace found its synthesis with the Greeks. You had Ares, who was *the* god of war, who exemplifies war for the sake of war. And then you had Athena, for whom war was a realm to be mastered. It's no coincidence that Athena was born later than Ares (and likely added to the pantheon much later). The tension between Ares (war as divine) and Athena (for whom war was a tool) culminated in, unsurprisingly, war. Ares and Athena took opposite sides in the Trojan war. Now the interesting thing here is that because they used mortals are their proxies (instead of going to war with each other) war took the form of a game. So Ares could "lose" without being destroyed, and likewise, Athena could partake in war without being possessed by it (otherwise it would be a victory for Ares in terms of values regardless of who won or lost, because Athena would be a reflection in the likeness of Ares himself). And Athena is more celebrated by the Greeks than Ares, who is portrayed more unfavorably with the exception of the Spartans. But the important thing is that they did not deny the divinity of war personified. But they did not worship it either.

So the thing to be learned from the Greeks is that the mastery of war can only be achieved by de-escalating the stakes such that war becomes a game. In the agon the struggle is not existential, but a matter of winning or losing, with rules that both sides agree to. To worship the god of war is to feed it endless rivers of blood, to let it possess you and have war be an end in itself. On the other hand, pacifism leads to engaging in a war to end all wars (declaring holy war on Ares himself) which, as Schmitt pointed out, paradoxically leads to a war of extermination because the very stakes are eternal peace itself. If you declare war on Ares he is existentially implored to respond in kind. The key is to respect the god of war while also mastering war as a tool and you won't be destroyed by it.

In modern times, nuclear weapons stand in for Ares, because we need to believe in the divinity of "war" in its purest form once it has been seemingly rendered obsolete by a "war to end all wars". In this pure form it cannot complete strategic objectives (except extermination) but only destroy. There is a mutual understanding that once you unleash them there is no stopping the destruction. The sacred aura that nuclear weapons command are disproportionate to the potential of their physical destructive yield, but rather the effect of pure war made manifest for the first time since the old gods were forgotten. And it is *beautiful*. Making a record of a nuclear blast is not a matter of "scientific proof" but the need for Ares to have a shrine for posterity that the need of physically securing the weapons disallows.