The above vignette is nothing new to science fiction fans. The fantastic futures imagined by far more creative thinkers suggest new realities where human beings are finally unobstructed by the myriad challenges of the modern world, if not to then get tangled in entirely new and more complex ones. This, again, is a well-known, historical pattern in that modern professionals need not worry about the horse throwing a shoe during their morning commute to the office, nor are they struggling over inkwells and quills as the rider for the Pony Express stands impatiently by for the message to be sent. We overcame those challenges by creating technological solutions that have in turn generated a new world with entirely different problems. Until this interesting period, humanity designed the tools to act upon reality in the faithful service of the human designer and the local operator. We are now entering a new technological period where artificially intelligent tools will become increasingly capable of autonomous action coupled with emergent and sophisticated responses to challenges, including many that fall outside original programming expectations or design.^[1]

The significance of this technological paradigm shift cannot be understated. We will create AI that exceeds our own imagination, in that AGI (once realized) by definition will reach past our own cognitive limitations in novel, likely unexpected ways.^[2] The previous section outlined the raw framework of how such exceptional AI technology should propel the most cognitively gifted of our species, and hopefully, extend outward for all of humanity in direct and indirect ways. It is dangerous to speculate about the intersection between cognitive ability (intelligence) and abstract, human concepts such as duty, work ethic, initiative, or dedication to some cause. People do all sorts of things in life for many reasons, many of which cannot be rationalized or quantified in some analytically optimized rigor. There are, to tread gently, people that choose to make poor decisions or pursue activities in their lives that do not contribute to any societal benefit beyond perhaps their own immediate gratification. This is a complicated way of explaining how laziness is part of the human condition. We all, in various levels of adherence, exercise ‘lazy’ cognitive behaviors as human beings.

An emerging potentially dangerous phenomenon of AI technology is ‘cognitive offloading’, the behavior where people delegate various comprehension tasks to AI assistants, such as reading comprehension, summarization of multiple documents, critical analysis of data, and possibly a reduced human exposure to complex or eclectic (human generated) writing due to extensive AI engagements. If AI agency becomes the filter for which many people digest most of their information, we may risk losing the necessary exposure to demanding or unorthodox prose and content. If everything we read is generated in the AI-styled generalizations and summarizations now prolific across LLMs and AI tools, people could become less capable of exercising creativity toward challenges that previously, they tackled without AI tools. Human-generated novel content is often developed through brainstorming processes that involve a creative struggle between different actors, perspectives, and ideas.

AI systems tend to generate ideas based on patterns in their training data and programming rewards, which is a different and potentially incompatible process if the desired outcome is divergent over convergent thinking.^[3] The divergent thinkers break from existing standards, norms, and patterns in ways that may be considered disruptive, counterintuitive, paradoxical, shocking, and unprecedented. AI systems operate in opposition to these particular human behaviors, in that current AI outputs pull logical patterns out of existing data. AI might draw from highly creative, unorthodox concepts generated by human actors and offer variations in such ideas, but it does not yet generate divergent, novel content in such a manner that could be equivalent with the human struggle to innovate and imagine. People become proficient at such creative outputs by exercising their minds iteratively to stimulate such meaningful yet creatively destructive ideas; our species thrives on the chaos and paradox that surges inside our heads.^[4] Overusing AI might quiet the storms.

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Researchers are already seeing indications of this trend, with many young people in their schooling becoming too dependent on AI assistance in what previously was exclusively a human-centered rite of passage in education.^[5] One studied, wrote, performed analysis, sharpened necessary critical thinking skills, and struggled to create new ideas under the tutelage of human mentors. Today’s learning process suggests certain “short-circuiting” of these previous and cognitively laborious activities; students bypass the longer pathway of reading comprehension, brain-storming, and analytic rigor by cognitively offloading these tasks to the AI agent.^[6] This speeds up their learning by skipping certain mental steps so the students might move to refinement and polishing of AI generated content, but it risks creating a societal feedback loop of diminished cognitive stimulation. We simply will think less creatively and critically because we will forget the muscle memory of how to do these difficult tasks. As our skills degrade as a society, we will become unavoidably more dependent on AI to compensate, which may become a positive feedback loop that spins out of control.^[7]

What happens when an entire society becomes so dependent on technological advancements that they have inadvertently created a socially ‘learned helplessness’, in that one generation’s useful knowledge is no longer understood or practiced by a future generation that now needs said information? An example of this was in 2001 when U.S. Special Operations forces suddenly needed to revive the lost art of horsemanship for the remote, mountainous terrain of Afghanistan. Another is observed within infantry forces that fear the proliferation of GPS and smart navigation systems has eroded analog map-reading and compass navigation skills. If an organization fails to sustain and curate necessary knowledge to pass onto the next generation, those ideas risk becoming lost like a dead language. Learned helplessness may be an emerging cognitive trap that society is racing toward by using AI excessively and irresponsibly. In other words, prolific AI may make lazy people stupider.

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End Notes:

^[1] Aschenbrener, “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead.” Aschenbrener paints a strong picture of the future where AI could, if in the wrong hands such as China, spell certain doom for the Western World.

^[2] Zweibelson, “War Becoming Phantasmal: A Cognitive Shift in Organized Violence Beyond Traditional Limits.”

^[3] Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective (Springer International Publishing, 2015); Justin Pugh et al., “Quality Diversity: A New Frontier for Evolutionary Computation,” Frontiers in Robotics and AI 3, no. 40 (2016): 1–17. Stanley and fellow AI researchers present the ‘paradox of the objective’ for AI programming and machine learning. They emphasize a divergent, “novelty search” prioritization that positions divergent thinking over convergent, repetitive methodologies.

^[4] Karl Weick, “Reflections: Change Agents As Change Poets- On Reconnecting Flux and Hunches,” Journal of Change Management 11, no. 1 (2011): 7–20; Karl Weick, “The Role of Imagination in the Organizing of Knowledge,” European Journal of Information Systems 15 (2006): 446–52; Donald Schön, “Champions for Radical New Inventions,” Harvard Business Review 41, no. 2 (1963): 77–86.

^[5] Greg Ip, “Will AI Choke Off the Supply of Knowledge,” Technology, The Wall Street Journal (New York), September 7, 2025, Print Edition; Alex Green, “AI Robs My Students of the Ability to Think,” Opinion, The Wall Street Journal (New York), August 12, 2025, Print Edition: A15.

^[6] Barry Pavel et al., How Artificial General Intelligence Could Affect the Rise and Fall of Nations (RAND Corporation, 2025), 34, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3034-2.html.

^[7] Feedback loops can be positive or negative. In a positive feedback loop, the initial change is amplified by the very effects the change created, pushing the entire system away from the initial state (prior to change) and toward a new and disrupted future state. Positive feedback loops accelerate systemic change, such as how ripe fruit release ethylene gas. This gas causes nearby fruit to ripen, which then release more ethylene, causing every fruit on the tree to ripen.

My latest book is just around the corner from launch on Amazon, Casemate, Helion & Co, and fine bookstores like Barnes & Noble. “On Technology & War: The Power of Uncertainty” spans the emergent technological pathways of AI, quantum, the space domain, virtual reality, human modifications, the NEXUS of space-SOF-cyber, and more. It is up for pre-order at Amazon here, and below is a portion from the sixth chapter on artificial general intelligence (AGI) and what it means for new weaponization of something that exceeds our current existential yardstick (nuclear annihilation). Let’s dig in!

Nuclear weapons represent the penultimate destructive device yet designed by humans, capable of wiping out most life on this planet. Despite the sophisticated and layered deterrence framework of submarines, stealth bombers, and intercontinental or hypersonic missiles, these horrific devices do only what they were designed to accomplish. Nuclear ends (or deterrence thereof) are achieved through the ways and means entirely developed and controlled by humans. A nuclear bomb cannot suddenly decide it wants to be something else or pursue some other ends by new ways it creates for itself. If nuclear Armageddon were to befall our species, it would only be our species (or specific world leaders therein) at fault for such a tragedy. AGI will be the first superweapon able to change what it exists for, how it might

Nuclear weapons permanently transformed war, driving societies previously unrestrained in how they might escalate conflicts to the ‘total war’ levels of two World Wars in the twentieth century to no longer seek such destruction. Eccles observed that the Nuclear Age created a new reality where nations would willingly accept greater tactical losses if such actions deterred a nuclear response.^[1] In the terrestrial (classical) domains of air, land, and sea, nuclear weapons have created this additional restraint system that remains highly effective today. However, Russia’s recent efforts to potentially launch a nuclear weapon(s) into low Earth orbit suggest the astrographic space domain differs from Eccles’ nuclear finger trap.^[2] If one nation violates the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and does position nuclear weapons in LEO, such actions are asymmetric in how they cannot be countered by another nuclear rival positioning complimentary weapons into orbit. In the unique domain characteristics exclusive to space, one nation might wipe out all other spacecraft and satellites with no recourse or viable counterstrike, at least with respect to how nuclear weapons are expected to function if applied to orbital regimes. In the unique space context, nuclear weapons do rise to a new level of asymmetry where AGI also should manifest.^[3]

AGI, however, is not limited to certain orbital regimes high above our planet. They are asymmetric right out of the box, so to speak. The first nation able to win the AGI race may immediately reach unprecedented military advantage in ways that no collection of nuclear or conventional weaponry may be capable of deterring (or even detecting). Indeed, the prospect of an adversary winning the AGI race suggests possible nuclear first-strike strategies, in that any vulnerability of a nation about to reach AGI might only exist in the period just before they can capitalize on this AI achievement (RAND’s mushroom cloud computing scenario).^[4] AGI therefore is incredibly dangerous and destabilizing even prior to its manifestation in physical form. It may be the only emerging existential threat that could justify nuclear first strike for some societies and groups. There are three primary reasons for such excessive and destructive strategic reactions.

First, AGI in the hands of a known military enemy or adversary is perhaps the final gamechanger in military escalation. There is no other way to gain military parity with a rival once they win the AGI race. One cannot escape or build defensive ramparts to protect against artificial superintelligence. Although Aschenbrenner and others call for the Free World to surge governmental control and oversight of a ‘Manhattan AI Project’ to win this race to save humanity, he does not include possible nuclear first response in his strategic proposals if an authoritarian or hostile regime somehow wins the race.^[5] There is also the terrifying option that a hostile and nuclear capable regime might engage in a spoiling attack if they felt existential crises in losing the AGI race were sufficiently urgent. These horrific yet plausible pathways reflect how nuclear weapons, despite their penultimate destructive status, will do precisely what they are designed to do if employed against an adversary about to achieve (or declaring achievement) AGI first. The same cannot be said of AGI. Such super intelligence exceeds human limits of comprehension and control. AGI could just as easily turn on its masters, seek to eliminate all of humanity, or determine alternative ends that clearly violate the intent of its AGI human handlers.

AGI should, in terms of how AI philosophers and many leading futurists anticipate such a development, likely lead to what Bostrom terms a ‘Singleton’ entity.^[6] The Singleton is the centralized AGI construct that takes control of a society and quickly solves all major issues, then expanding to ultimately take control of civilization. This invites concepts such as a ‘Singleton Paradox’ into security consideration of AGI, in that Bostrom and fellow AI experts anticipate super intelligence will not want competition; if one AGI rises out of a Berkeley AI lab in 2028 and recognizes a competing AGI is about to manifest out of Beijing, the Berkeley AGI will move to eliminate that rival at all costs.^[7] The Singleton Paradox extends to previously discussed issues of how humans far less intelligent than the AGI would never know if they are being protected, deceived, or imprisoned. This opens up discussions of phantasmal wars as illustrated in the opening fictional vignette.^[8] War taking on phantasmal form and function relates organized violence from a purely physical (kinetic) outcome to one where human participants lose cognitive and social cohesion- their shared sense of reality is shattered or altered permanently.

Unlike previous conflicts that, in how Clausewitz, Jomini, Fuller, and others articulated for a Westphalian, Newtonian, and Baconian context (the Free World), war is exercised to a decisive and violent conclusion in the physical world against state instruments of power (armies) to collapse political will to resist (morale, esprit de corps, societal determination), a phantasmal war does something else. The objective becomes not the physical things and collective will of a society in conflict, but the order and rational of an opponent’s shared sense of reality itself… and by breaking it, those human participants no longer can participate or even comprehend the conflict unfolding. The distinction is between that of how our species has understood reality using our evolutionary yet biologically limited gifts of superior cognition to dominate the entire ecosystem of this planet and that of us creating artificial intelligence that vastly outperforms us cognitively, can effortlessly reproduce and improve itself, and can play our own base motives and behaviors against ourselves.

Said differently, modern societies organize violence between states using national instruments of power to target armies and achieve some change in societal will on the matter in conflict. Although there are rival and competing war theories, this remains the dominant one and how modern wars are interpreted by much of the world in some variation therein.^[9] AGI will not think as humans do, just as AI today does not “think” in any direct human or biologically intelligent parallel.^[10] If AGI does emerge and it exercises vastly superior cognitive skills either for the benefit of select human groups, all of humanity, or toward other goals that require the elimination of humans, why would it limit itself to the ideas of a Prussian war theorist or a Swiss-born, French military general from the nineteenth century? AGI will be alien in how it thinks, what it designs in such thinking, and how it goes about defeating the theories and logics we inferior human beings are forced to work within. Past performance against human adversaries does not guarantee future results against non-human, cognitively superior AGI opponents. If a compromise is needed to alleviate military institutional hyperventilating, some fusion of modern military theory with that of techno-eschatology and AGI theorization found within this chapter may help avoid defeat. Yet we will not know when, where, or how this likely final and existential battle might occur, which frustrates any attempt to build a new and coherent strategy. Yudkowsky and Soares frame this emerging tension with:

This sort of conflict is potentially between humans as they race to realize AGI, and then between humans that possess such AGI power with those that do not, and finally between humans and AGI itself when that artificial entity designs new goals that are incommensurate with human existence as we understand it. Humanity may utilize conventional war thinking for the first challenge and desperately cling to it if their nation fails in the second challenge, but the entire range of competing war philosophies developed and practiced thus far in our violent history will not be relevant with the last challenge of AGI unconstrained. It is in this migration of organized violence from the kinetic and physical to that which constitutes our social construction of reality where war becomes phantasmal.^[12]  

If interested in more on “phantasmal warfare”, check out these published articles (no paywall, free download access):

“War Becoming Phantasmal”- USMC Journal of Advanced Military Studies

and…

“Strong Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Conflict and the Arrival of Techno-Eschatology”- USMC Expeditions with Marine Corps University Press

and…

“The Singleton Paradox”- USMC Journal of Advanced Military Studies

Today, AI cannot produce phantasmal conflict, although the myriad technological and sociological effects of widespread AI usage does carry echoes of what AGI will accelerate in scale, scope, and potency. AGI will be the ultimate war machine for generating phantasmal warfare, not because AGI cannot win in traditional conflicts designed with physical things and kinetic destruction. AGI will instead saturate the physical and social reality that humans rely upon with disruptions, distortions, and misinformation so convincingly real that many will be unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality.^[13] AGI could, for example, simultaneously execute at scale countless unattributable cyber-attacks, collapse financial markets, flood social media with hyper-realistic deepfakes (or entirely AI designed false content), paralyze critical infrastructure, or collapse many of the essential governmental guardrails that regulate a normal society without firing a single bullet. We will dive further into these phantasmal possibilities in this and the next chapter.

Although certain military targets would require kinetic responses, the real battlefield for phantasmal war is within individual human minds and across the entire societally maintained construction of reality. Perception itself would be under constant attack, with an AGI adversary everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, and the total collapse of meaning becoming far more devastating than even nuclear devastation.^[14] Although this seems rather academically obtuse, AGI is the technological gateway to depart from traditional warfare into something far more horrifying within our collective minds. AGI enabled phantasmal war targets an adversary’s societal epistemology, which is their collective ability to distinguish fact from fiction, up from down, and right from wrong. Winning in wars like this has less to do with whether an army is defeated or not, but whether that society even knows what is real and whether they are really free or simply confined in some prison they cannot even comprehend.^[15]

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Nick Bostrom originally termed the AGI ascendency to run all of a society’s governance a “Singleton Entity” and something that true AGI could likely persuade certain nations to permit.^[16] Such phantasmal wars between adversarial Singleton entities might unfold invisibly or occur at such speeds and involve complex technologies that prevent human awareness or witting participation.^[17] AI advocates such as Dario Amodei paint an altruistic picture of AGI and dismiss the notion that any government might hand the keys over to a Singleton entity.^[18] However, he does acknowledge the incredible power that strong AI represents. If some nations refuse to allow AGI control of their national instruments of power, how might they compete with those societies willing to do so? Can human policymakers, even if advised by AGI, compete against a Singleton entity firmly orchestrating the entirety of a postmodern state? The singleton paradox is templated roughly in the late 2030s into the 2040s in Figure 9 as one possible emergent property of our Gutenberg-like pathway for super intelligence.

(Figure 9 is only available in the book!)

Who might protest such a future and prepare instead to fight such existential threat by preventing strong AI from not just escaping the labs, but ever being created in the first place? This results in a third plausible pathway concerning AGI and some ‘total war’ scenarios where everything up to nuclear attacks become justified. Existentially, some populations of humans might anticipate the inevitability of a Singleton domination and attempt some revolutionary response, crafted likely in Neo-Luddite arguments against dangerous technology.^[19] Popularized in the ‘Terminator’ movie franchise, the underdog human protagonists attempt to stop the AGI tides either before a Singleton entity is achieved, or in the resulting devastation and wars between competing Singletons developed by rival nations, these pockets of human resistance attempt to defeat AGI regimes and save the species. They might flourish as decentralized, techno-eschatologically minded terror cells, or function in some global collective where networks of people demand immediate AI regulation and enforcement to prevent such existential outcomes.

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Unlike in Hollywood narratives where the plucky human protagonists somehow triumph by the end of the movie, this will not likely transfer to a reality where AGI carries the cognitive capacity of ten million Einsteins and Newtons if AGI becomes something real versus hypothetical.^[20] Some AI leaders such as Elon Musk wonder if the genie is already out of the AI bottle, and whether or not anyone can stop AGI progression today. We as human beings may bicker and engage in conflict, with some groups seeking to blow up AI labs or assassinate leading scientists, but this likely cannot prevent some organization in some nation eventually generating an AGI outcome. Once this unfolds, the “gloves are off”, and we enter a new battlefield. Cunning human opponents can slow or degrade AGI before it arrives, but will not stand much of a chance once it has a foothold somewhere and carries adversarial intent of its own designs.

Put into terms many military professionals will appreciate, a war strategy designed by ten thousand digital Clausewitz, Jomini, and Boydian surrogates along with new and undiscovered war concepts will be most difficult to offset, particularly when we are still working at human speeds and AGI can do this in milliseconds. If AGI were nefarious or otherwise designed to attack some group, nation, or category of humanity, it will be unlikely for it to assume some easily recognizable strategy. If it were intent upon destructive designs, it would not fall to human foolishness to reveal such machinations until necessary. Instead, it would mask such aspirations in such exquisite fashion that even the smartest human beings might not realize it. We simply fail to understand the incredible intellectual difference between what we might build digitally and what we are capable of. The Hollywood terrifying machine armies are simplistic tropes for entertaining human viewers… AGI will not conceptualize war strategies in such ways. Arguably, they will reach cognitive levels where their war concepts are unimaginable and incomprehensible to us. They will not need Clausewitzian or Jominian concepts because they will produce their own vastly superior versions.

Because AGI will not be forced to operate within the shared human-centric framework of victory and defeat, its mode of conflict will be distinct and unlike what humanity assumes should be the way war is waged. Armies will not be defeated in the field; Rather, no soldier will leave the barracks to join formation because AGI will have distorted the social reality that gets him or her out of bed. In the phantasmal war theorization, the human resistance likely will be defeated without realizing it, unable to even comprehend how or why AGI circumvented their best attempts in war. It likely will not even register that the war is over, or that the humans have already lost. These are profound and existential issues that force us to contemplate new ways to view war.

Citations below:

^[1] Henry Eccles, Military Concepts and Philosophy, 1st ed. (Rutgers University Press, 1965), 115; Zweibelson, Reconceptualizing War, 239.

^[2] Hitchens, “Is Russia’s Cosmos 2553 Satellite a Test for a Future Orbital Nuclear Weapon?”; Jonas Schneider and Juliana Süß, “Russian Nuclear Weapons in Space?,” Stiftung Wissenschaft Und Politik, May 15, 2025, https://www.swp-berlin.org/10.18449/2025C21/.

^[3] This example has an expiration date of when sufficient military and economic power is distributed across the Inner Solar System, or throughout cislunar orbital space involving the Earth and the Moon so that multiple simultaneous space-based nuclear strikes in different orbital regimes would be required.

^[4] Pavel et al., How Artificial General Intelligence Could Affect the Rise and Fall of Nations, 22–23.

^[5] Aschenbrener, “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead.”

^[6] Bostrom, What Is a Singleton?; Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Bostrom coined this term, meaning a hypothetical world order in which a set of a single decision-making agency (set of one) works at the highest level of authority, directing and managing all problems for civilization.

^[7] Zweibelson, “PART I: The Singleton Paradox: On the Future of Human-Machine Teaming and Potential Disruption of War Itself.” Singletons are potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons in the entities can create their own designs and new goals that differ from human creators. This generates multiple security paradoxes if the superweapon tool chooses ways and ends that are unanticipated or undesired by the human operators.

^[8] A phantasmal war is a theoretical future development in conflict where war extends into non-physical domains or manifests in such ways that humans cannot detect it. The lines between reality and virtual conflict blur, while advanced AI might circumvent human decision-makers and deceive large populations while engaging in a new form of conflict. See citation below for source.

^[9] Zweibelson, Reconceptualizing War. The author explains in the first chapter how functionalism is the dominant war paradigm, despite rising competitor paradigms in the last century plus.

^[10] Although neural networks do form the foundation for many aspects of artificial intelligence, neuroscientists acknowledge that this is more of a mathematical approximation of broad cognitive patterns observable in human beings and other intelligent mammals. AI cannot be considered ‘human-like’ despite how it arranges texts to sound both intelligent and empathetic from a human perspective.

^[11] Yudkowsky and Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, 201.

^[12] To reemphasize a point, any human society possessing AGI could engage in phantasmal war against non-AGI equipped adversaries. AGI-equipped societies might go against one another, yet once any society gains AGI, no human will have a monopoly on knowing for certain that they and everyone else might be part of an AGI orchestrated phantasmal conflict beyond their comprehension.

^[13] Kate Reilly and Tracy Davidson, “Family Says Scammers Used AI to Impersonate South Philly Woman’s Granddaughter,” NBC10 News (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), August 14, 2025, Digital Edition, https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/investigators/consumer/philadelphia-grandparent-scam-ai-theft-impersonation-elder-fraud/4254278/. Merely existing AI technology is already pushing the boundaries by manipulating and fooling those vulnerable such as the elderly today. Future stronger AI will undoubtably be far more convincing to many more people.

^[14] Taken literally, many readers might protest and consider the obliteration of entire cities and populations by nuclear attack far more destructive. However, this misses a critical point on what phantasmal war represents. Nuclear devastation can always be added by AGI into the battlefield strategy at any time and with tremendous ease. Yet AGI can also obliterate the social fabric that sustains civilization without launching a single missile, producing total societal collapse and individual inability to make sense of who they are or what reality is. The power to do this is something humanity has not yet had to deal with because no technology suggested such cognitive and computational power. AGI will change this.

^[15] Readers interested in moving further down this rabbit hole might consider arguments on whether humanity is actually stuck within a computer simulation. See: Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?”, Philosophical Quarterly, 2003, 53:211, 243-255. This would play into some AGI long-term output, hypothetically speaking.

^[16] Skeptical readers might consider this test. Name ten wicked societal problems that AGI might solve in days that otherwise would take humanity centuries to address. Curing cancer, eliminating poverty, designing unlimited clean energy sources, or creating human immortality are all examples. Were AGI to do all of these things convincingly, many societies might begin to consider “why don’t we let it run everything for us?” Some adversarial nations might also view this as a race and install AGI as a Singleton as a final defensive effort.

^[17] Zweibelson, “War Becoming Phantasmal: A Cognitive Shift in Organized Violence Beyond Traditional Limits”; Pavel et al., How Artificial General Intelligence Could Affect the Rise and Fall of Nations, 20–21. RAND’s scenario termed the “AGI Coup” has a weak version of what Zweibelson defines in his Phantasmal War article: Strong AI manipulating humanity in such a way our species is unwitting to.

^[18] Amodei, Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better.

^[19] Zweibelson, Reconceptualizing War, 285–90, 292–95.

^[20] The author does not critique Hollywood science fiction script writers on this fault. Even if they were to create a feasible AGI storyline, the appeal of a story about the violent extinction of humanity with no human protagonist competent enough to challenge the antagonist is likely unprofitable and potentially unwatchable.

Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1804517291?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

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Radical Humanism: Revolutionary Change through Activism, Critical Theory Indoctrination, and ‘Wokefare’

The last several chapters provided outlines for both the functionalist and the radical structuralist paradigms where readers examined how different groups of humans comprehend and act in conflict. This war paradigm quickly moves in very different directions. Within radical humanism, truth itself is a social construct, something experienced individually and collectively, yet shaped by who we are and what we believe. In this war paradigm, ever-changing social standards morph everything from economies, politics, justice, and science into various configurations built upon human perceptions, beliefs, and collective activities.^[1] Radical humanism is less developed than the first two paradigms, functionalism and radical structuralism until recently. In recent decades, radical humanism seems to be making strides in offsetting the dominant war paradigm (functionalism) and critically challenging the classical Marxist one (radical structuralism). War and conflict in the twentieth century was largely defined by these other two paradigms. The twenty-first century may become one where radical humanism becomes one of the dominant social frameworks for reconceptualizing war and conflict. That will be one of the central arguments presented in this chapter. However, radical humanism is itself a new and underdeveloped social paradigm in comparison to the others. War itself is turned inside out, upside-down, so that in such radical disorientation, many may not even realize they are in some dangerous conflict.

This chapter follows the similar organization of previous ones where this social paradigm is explained and examples are provided on how such a framework for war exists in minds and materializes in physical reality. Like other paradigms, the radical humanist paradigm offers hybridization and interesting overlaps, tensions, and interplay with other social paradigms. Radical humanism emerged, theoretically at least, first in how young Karl Marx presented his initial ideas on social reality in the mid-nineteenth century, ahead of radical structuralism and as an initial reaction to functionalism. Due to reasons explained in this chapter, this particular social paradigm would gain prominence slowly, gaining momentum after the consequences of the First World War, and only gaining some coherent organizational form and function well into the mid-twentieth century. However, at the time of writing, this paradigm demonstrates an emerging and profound influence upon social reality and contemporary conflicts in ways that suggest this war paradigm is gaining in prominence and popularity. If anything, the twenty-first century might be best defined with wokefare instead of traditional conceptualizations of warfare.^[2]

The radical humanist paradigm is diametrically positioned against the functionalist paradigm in Burrell and Morgan’s social paradigm thesis, and thus presents likely the most difficult war paradigm for modern military professionals to consider. This social paradigm conceptualizes war and organized violence very differently than functionalism does, producing clear difficulties in explaining such ideas and offering valid justifications to that audience. Radical humanism stems originally from German Idealism and Kant’s ontological stance that the ultimate reality of our universe is spiritual, in the conceptualized ideas within our minds and independent of material aspects of nature.^[3] Social reality is understood not through objectivity, but the subjectivity that raises our species out of the natural world into a socially constructed one that we build with language.^[4] This dense soup of language, narratives, symbols, and meaning permeates us all, creating the world we are standing within. Radical humanists consider this same social reality a psychic prison that currently enables capitalistic domination of humanity by manipulating and distorting our perceptions through language and social concepts.

Radical humanists share with radical structuralists a normative philosophy concerning all of humanity; social reality today is corrupted and oppressive, but through social revolution and emancipation of oppressed classes, a new and superior reality can be ushered forth for everyone.^[5] There is no external ‘nature’ of an analytically neutral sort, nor is objectivity something that might be externalized, rendered in any positivist epistemology found in functionalism or radical structuralism. Any ‘nature’ of war is dynamic, changing, informed by social intersections of gender, race, identity, and not to be held to any external or universal ‘truths.’^[6] There are no “eternal realm of values” beyond whatever system that dominates social reality is directing for self-interests.^[7] Instead, the objectivity and scientific constructs found in functionalism are critically examined, challenged, and often inverted so that they might flourish in a radical humanist framing. Such a configuration requires entirely different ontological, epistemological, and methodological processes (while repurposing much of the same terminology).

War is not, as functionalism insists, a natural and enduring right for sovereign states to resolve differences using an organization of violence through state instruments of power. War in those contexts reflects a symptom of the root problems facing humanity. The dominant economic system and political framework supporting capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and all aspects of state power are what “exacerbates inequities and drives environmental crises.”^[8]Climate change and environmental harm become nested in the organized violence using sexism, homophobia, transphobia, toxic masculinity, racism, indigenous peoples’ exploitation, classism, ableism, and a host of other systemic offenses that the entire state system orchestrates and benefits from. Those clear-eyed and ‘woke’ understand the true nature of war and conflict, while those unable or unwilling to understand this perspective are merely part of the oppressive system that must be destroyed and replaced.

People are a critical part of this vast systemic oppression, but the right to live peacefully without harm from war or capitalist domination also extends to animals, plants, rivers, trees, mountains, and oceans. War cannot be eliminated without dismantling the entire capitalist system underpinning modernity.^[9] While this can be pursued using types of appropriate conflict including organized violence, radical humanists consider those specific instances appropriate only if they lead to the collapse of the entire oppressive, exploitive system. War conducted without this radical humanist ‘wokeness’ is part of the systemic oppression where people are exploited, enslaved, oppressed, and manipulated. Only through wokefare may these radicals emancipate and awaken others and begin to tear down the entire system.

Image source: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-30/ucla-moves-to-shut-down-pro-palestinian-encampment-as-unlawful

To define how radical humanists understand war and conflict, we first must outline how they view war as waged by states. Marxism, extending across both radical structuralism and radical humanism, provides this bipolar framing where war used by the state-based system of domination is a preservative, convergent mode of destruction and exploitation. Sanctioned revolutionary and civil wars waged by emancipated social classes becomes the primary transformative vehicle for revolutionary change of the entire social reality. Such war may morph concepts of organized violence, destruction, and ethical rationalization in ways that otherwise exceed any state-based or international community descriptions or definitions. War, when declared and waged by any state system be they capitalist, fascist, or even communist, is part of the “compulsive nature in their inevitable wars and contracts” that these hierarchical, oppressive elites use to sustain power and control.^[10] Conflict when exercised as part of the state-based system for continued oppression has no other outcome; the dominated classes suffer and are sacrificed, while elites gain greater power and markets expand to form ever greater modes of oppression. War is an essential tool for sustaining this ever-expanding system of domination. Revolutionary war becomes the key to unlock humanity’s prison to break this cycle of exploitation, domination, and death.

War, when appropriated by radical humanists, becomes something new and different. Organized violence and conflict once channeled toward changing social reality in meaningful and necessary pathways is the revolutionary vehicle to destroy this cycle of materialistic oppression. War itself can be eliminated if radical humanists stimulate a radical reorganization of humanity away from the modern structures. These are where capitalism, economic exploitation of the oppressed, destruction of the environment, and the suffering of many occur through systemic racism, sexism, gender-based violence and other oppressions.^[11] For example, in pursuing a ‘queering’ of security affairs and peace studies through radical humanism, Cai Wilkinson explains:

War thus is perpetrated through systemic oppression of many social constructs. War cannot be eliminated from human experience unless the entire civilization undergoes profound (radical) transformation that paradoxically is accomplished through war. Such radical transformation is accomplished through emancipation of these oppressed groups by fostering the total dismantlement of the patriarchal state system. Revolutionary change agents must liberate the masses by defeating all means the state has to protest or resist.^[13] Radical humanists, whether articulating from a feminist, queer, environmental activist, indigenous persons’ view, anti-racist, or other Social Marxist-derived orientation advocate: “for a fundamental reorientation of our economies.”^[14] Yet much of this is couched in difficult-to-decipher terms, methods, and models. The entire capitalist system is evil, the state and all police, justice systems, prisons, schools, industry, and academia not pursuing shared progressive values found in radical humanism are all extensions of capitalist villainy, and only a collective linkage of these diverse yet oppressed groups can usher forth necessary revolutionary, radical change.

Social rejection of the entire system requires emancipation of sufficient classes so that the state instruments of power are critically challenged, exposed, and subsequently defeated. Defeat must be total and complete, so that they cannot retreat or reform into new configurations of resistance. To do this, critical theorists in the early twentieth century would distance themselves from radical structuralists that sought Marx’s earlier declarations of economic crises as the spark for class consciousness. The first wave of Marxists, in their opinion, failed. The second wave had to be reconceptualized. The dominating system of capitalist expansion and social injustice instead must be targeted in a variety of direct and indirect ways, in new arrangements of actions and theory that fall beyond the conceptual limits of how functionalism and radical structuralism understand conflict and social reality.

Sabotage, vandalism, defacing state or public monuments, occupation of buildings, violent protests, arson, looting, are just the tangible examples applied in this unique form of conflict. Those rendered intangibly, such as through radicalized education, misinformation, radical legal activities, propaganda, extreme policy reformation, social media influencing campaigns, and other otherwise nonviolent processes present alternative, often disarming ways to engage in conflict. Radical humanists extend new battlefields in ways that are decidedly non-war for their opponents,^[15] capitalizing on this paradigm incommensurability to achieve necessary social change that leads to Marx’s class consciousness and eventual revolutionary social transformation. Attacking an opponent unaware they are under attack is a modern twist on Sun Tzu’s maxim that all warfare is based on deception.

This term ‘critical theory’ is heavily featured in radical humanism, but also is found in postmodern philosophy and in the interpretivist paradigm covered in the next chapter.^[16] Critical theorists attempt to deconstruct the deep, underlying forces and patterns that drive reality and produce particular power dynamics, order such as hierarchical class distinction, cultural and ethnic beliefs that correspond to a host of social facts that carry significant symbolism and meaning. Critical theorists do not subscribe to a neutral or externalized/objective view of power. These frames are instead seen as historical, socially designed and sustained by societies, and frequently hidden from view so that only the critical examination casts light upon what strings are pulling all of our limbs. The term ‘critical’ should not be confused with how functionalists employ ‘critical reasoning’ in a scientific, objective, analytically optimized fashion. The words are the same, but the dictionaries differ here.

Critical theorists consider these various economic, political, social, and technological superstructures as ‘macro-processes’ that both govern and regulate social reality at the grand scale, but also are created and sustained collectively by all actors within a civilization. They do not view language as neutral, and these macro-processes are socially constructed psychic prisons that dominate and oppress users.^[17] Critical theorists within radical humanism will advocate political activism in pursuit of clear ontological assumptions where humanity, once politically educated and emancipated from the status quo, can dismantle and permanently destroy existing social reality to replace it. Modernity, complete with Westphalian state systems, their laws, buildings, statues, values, and symbols must be torn apart. The capitalist economic engine must be shut down, instruments of state power such as armies, police, justice systems, and prisons also obliterated. Class structures must be dismantled, and all of this occurs through political activism, organization of resistance movements, revolution, and organized violence. Yet this form of revolutionary struggle, civil war, resistance and destruction unfolds in ways that fail to match Westphalian state definitions.

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Radical humanism thus breaks with how Marxists in radical structuralism understand conflict, meaning that the last four chapters present multiple perspectives on conflict that are either absent here, or reconceptualized quite differently. We have migrated to the opposite side of Burrell and Morgan’s social paradigm quadrant, where radical humanism represents an entirely different framing of social reality, extending into how they understand conflict itself. To differentiate these Marxists from the classical or state-centric ones found in radical structuralism, the term ‘Neo-Marxist,’ ‘Cultural Marxist’, and ‘Social Marxist’ are interchangeably used in mainstream culture. This is due to how within the twentieth century, this movement emerged in the aftershocks of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution through several different schools and movements.^[18]

We will use the term ‘Social Marxism’ in this research, as the other modifiers present various epistemological and metaphoric limitations. Operators of this war paradigm live in the twentieth century (and beyond), and were initially confronted by two failed communist revolutions as extensions of devastating world wars. Social Marxists view the outcomes in Russia and later in China as failures because they are not what Marx and Engels prophesized, and those societies are, for the radical humanists, evidence that “utopia is blocked by the very working class [Marx] had charged with realizing it.”^[19] Essentially, the wrong people won revolutionary wars, and the right ones remained trapped in their social prisons. Russian and Chinese rural, illiterate peasants revolted, while the proletariat and marginalized members of society residing in Berlin, London, Paris, and New York seemed locked in a deeper capitalistic trap that not even two World Wars could liberate them from.

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Despite sharing overlapping Marxist roots with radical structuralism, radical humanism views all social reality as human-centric, subjective, and contextualized within history that requires a dialectical engagement to advance reality. There is no such thing as some independent, external ‘nature’ of war that governs all conflict. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci declared this with: “It must be made clear from the start that one cannot speak of “nature” as if it were something fixed and objective; in this case, “natural” means what is legitimate and normal according to our current historical consciousness- which, after all, is our “nature.””^[20] Our reality, for radical humanists, is one enabled by the human condition, and such a world is in radical transformation where the historical contexts of a past reality need not be relevant to the one emerging currently. What war used to be has past, and what war must become is still emerging.

To be human is to exist in this social reality, and thus all people are part of a social construction of reality that includes all designs that are inescapable to everyone. We form the world and also imprison ourselves within it. By extension, war is both socially constructed and subjective, shaped by humans as they form (and reform) reality. Yet in the 1920s, communist movements that gained control of societies through revolution appeared to deviate from the way Marx and Engels predicted socialist development. Russian leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution implemented a strong, hierarchically guiding hand from the party elite in Moscow, where new elites appeared to replace the old ones. Crowns were removed but the same systems appeared largely unchanged, causing fractions in what the true revolutionary goals of Marxism ought to be.^[21] A split emerged in the Interwar Period between radical structuralists adhering to Marx’s economic theory of politics (centered on consolidating Soviet power) with that of a new interpretation of Marxism. Marx’s economic-political focus was, for this new faction and set in the context of the twentieth century onward,^[22]the wrong way to enable true global emancipation of society. Lenin claimed socialist victory, while radical humanists saw only disappointment and failure.

Within the radical humanist perspective, reality for our species requires a subjective orientation versus the objectivity and positivist epistemology found within functionalism and radical structuralism. Reality, for Marx in his early period of theorization, posits broad philosophical abstractions that later become economic and historically determined ones in Capital. These social contradictions in reality were (originally) to be resolved through social action, where humanity aims to accomplish a pure rationalization of reason. Thus, “reason itself requires revolution, and every rational individual should lend a hand.”^[23] Conflict and war are, in the existing oppressive and inferior capitalist system, tools used by elite classes to sustain an unfair and substandard form of existence. Enlightened and emancipated society would not need such crude, brutal tools. Later Marx, along with Lenin, Trotsky, and fellow radical structuralists declared only the proletariat class could rise up and destroy the global capitalist system,^[24] whereas radical humanists reviewing the disappointments of World War I, disagreed. Writing in 1933 during the Interwar Period as Fascism swept across Europe and nations once more lurched toward a global conflict between antagonistic states, critical theorist Max Horkheimer wrote: “At no time has the poverty of humanity stood in such crying contradiction to its potential wealth, at no time have all powers been so horribly fettered as in this generation, where children go hungry and the hands of the fathers are busy turning out bombs.”^[25]

For critical theorists, no longer did social reality require what Rapoport called a messianic eschatological transformation (of socialist design) dictated through workers gaining class consciousness and revolting against the state. The historical materialism, operating as external forces to radically change social reality, were flawed concepts. Marx’s theories would be modified by Social Marxists. Indeed, the proletariat was often trapped in ways that the capitalist system took advantage of for stability and order; the poor remained just satisfied and distracted enough to remain docile.^[26] Critical theorists within radical humanism envision a new future world where humanity is emancipated so that it can live unencumbered, happy, and in a truthful reality that lacks any psychic prisons that represent modern society currently. This required a shift to dialectical materialism, based on far earlier Marxist theorization.

As the modern system in power dominates through oppression, humiliation, and degradation, efforts by critical theorists must become radicalized so that the system cannot successfully morph into another adaptive form that sustains these psychic prisons and compensates for change. Radical humanism is political activism coupled with the ontological assumption that revolutionary change comes with the same tenacity of debate, disagreement, disruption, protest, conflict, and destruction that otherwise is used by state systems to continue their domination.^[27] Organizing for peace requires the physical act of protesting, activism, and an ontological assumption that war itself will continue until the overarching capitalist, state system of oppression is finally confronted and broken.^[28] Oppressed classes are forever trapped under the thumb of elites, fractured not just by the economic theorizations by Marx and Engel, but through myriad social, racist, gender-based, cultural, environmental, historical, ideological, and other social forms of bondage and suffering. Most imprisoned do not even see the prison bars. Critical theorists must shine a light upon them and point the direction towards radicalization and emancipation. Peace can be achieved, however revolutionary transformation toward that ultimate goal will require novel war and conflict against the entire system.

The proletariat, foundational to how Marx understood the linkage of capitalism as the latest and final form of social injustice, were themselves trapped in some warped interpretation of social reality and thus could never gain the class consciousness expected by radical structuralists.^[29] Social Marxists might activate this only by addressing the deeper social barriers underpinning modern industrialization that otherwise blocked oppressed groups from realizing their fates. Modern capitalism, nationalism, and industry has evolved so perfectly that the earlier conditions considered by Marx in the nineteenth century were no longer relevant. The giant, oppressive machinery had grown so pervasive that labor and production became how all of social reality was rationalized. Sex, happiness, family, self-improvement, entertainment, science, art, education, and anything else previously assumed to be outside of proletariat labor was now tangled into an inescapable social web. Industry and capitalism was hammered “into their eyes and ears and muscles during their leisure time as well as during work hours.”^[30] The proletariat of the twentieth century made earlier versions of labor obsolete. For radical humanists, conflict and society in the twentieth (or twenty-first) century differs greatly from the nineteenth.

Radical humanists pursue revolutionary transformation from beyond these original requirements of proletariat prioritization that mature Marx suggested.^[31] Herbert Marcuse, a prominent member of the Frankfurt School of Social Marxism that formed , declared that critical theory would: “through the abolition of previously existing material conditions of existence, [bring forward] the totality of human relations… liberated.”^[32] A critical society is one that is not satisfied to remain trapped in the modern capitalistic system of domination and oppression.^[33] It becomes empowered to emancipate and evolve toward a superior social reality.^[34] Radical humanists are entirely cognizant of the revolutionary war requirements within such aspirations. Radical change, coupled with revolutionary wars of social transformation, must offer total liberation and evolution of humanity away from the current destructive, oppressive present form.

Radical humanists view communism^[35] as the ultimate level of future human perfection. Yet to achieve this, revolution through organized violence and class consciousness must be conducted so that the existing system of oppression is completely destroyed. This is tied to economic systems originally defined by Marx, but as Marcuse explains: “unconditional adherence to [this] goal… can be attained only in social struggle.”^[36] The earlier Marxists through World War I were preoccupied with the political economic constructs, thus missing what radical humanists understand as the social struggle to emancipate the oppressed classes and break the modern, capitalist institution. Modernity with scientific rationalism and a capitalistic fetishization produced a new self-destructive, imprisoning social reality where societies sink further and further into oppression and despair. The progress advocated by Enlightenment proponents became, according to radical humanists, a replacement of original natural world disasters with manmade ones. “Wars, concentration camps, nuclear weapons, and now environmental crisis threaten the Enlightenment project not from without but from within.”^[37] The earlier devastation of societies by volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods and famines are now eclipsed by what humanity can do to itself in high technology, industrial war, along with daily capitalistic exploitation of people, animals, plants, and the entire planet. If human existence is to be emancipated from this, radical humanists posit a Marxist inspired path of cognitive and collective liberation from the ‘Enlightenment project.’^[38]

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Just as the ontological order and stability of reality serves fundamentally different ends in how functionalism and radical structuralism produce particular war paradigms, radical humanism uses this subjective social reality for dissimilar reasons with that of the interpretivist paradigm, addressed in the next chapter. Radical humanism, compared to all alternative paradigms with that of the dominant functionalist worldview, is arguably the most antagonistic and incommensurate for those (functionalist) military forces, policy makers, and associated strategists to appreciate. Even the socialist societies such as the Soviet Union (in the twentieth century), China, Cuba, and Vietnam overlap here in how radical structuralism shares some ontological and epistemological commonality with the functionalist paradigm. Of all social paradigms, this radical humanist one is most alien to functionalist operators. Radical humanists view the communist and socialist attempts in various nations thus far as perversions and failures of Marxism, all requiring ‘true’ revolutionary transformation along with all capitalist states.^[39] Inversely, proponents of radical humanist perspectives on conflict and social reality find all ideas, beliefs, and methods within functionalism as false, irrelevant, or obsolete.

Radical humanism, by occupying the subjective side of explaining reality, holds to an epistemology that the world our species occupies and experiences is one that we simultaneously construct and design.^[40] Interpretivists, as the next chapter posits, attempt to understand the nature of this process and generate scientific frameworks that adhere to some sort of universal ordering and consistency. Radical humanists seek something entirely different, hence the ‘radical’ in the social paradigm title. Interpretivists use ‘science’ differently to that of functionalists seeking an objective, positivistic rationalization where social reality is founded upon universal laws and principles deduced by analytical means.^[41] Positivism is not just a western approach to knowledge set in scientific reductionism for radical humanists. Critical feminists applying a Social Marxist lens further develop positivism as a male-centered model where ‘self’ and ‘known, validated, true’ carries the masculine gender. The ‘unknown’ or ‘unknowable’ and thus ‘non-scientific, untrue, or defective’ become feminine, thus sexist.^[42] Positivism in this radical humanist interpretation becomes entirely subjective, fraught with gender and racial biases, requiring critical confrontation and total dismantlement.

Radical humanism departs from objectivity, meaning that Marxists within the radical humanist camp epistemologically disagree with Marxists operating in radical structuralism.^[43] Social reality requires a dialectical engagement so that it radically changes. Radical structuralists posit, as explained in the previous chapter, that ‘true’ science is a scientific socialism, where political orientation toward communist ideals must be interwoven within all scientific affairs.^[44] A key difference here is how social reality changes, whether from external historically determined superstructures, or by humans reconceptualizing reality through their own dialectical engagements and developments. In one, scientific socialism carries a positivistic, external framework that changes humanity as it progresses through time and space, and the other puts humans in the driver’s seat to shift social reality (scientifically using socialism) through our continued engagements with it.

Marxists posit that science “is above all an auxiliary means of production, one element among many in the social process,” and otherwise part of the capitalist system of oppression until science might be rescued by radical humanism.^[45] Yet the radical structuralist stance on science or ‘scientific socialism’ (addressed in the previous chapter and found within the policy statements of communist societies such as China or the Soviet Union) differs with radical humanists. Any positivism, even that of a Sino-Marxist application in contemporary China, is corrupted by patriarchal positivism,^[46] as well as racism, classism, sexism, oppression of indigenous peoples and ways of indigenous thinking, ableism, ageism, and other social applications. Marcuse provides key insights into the radical humanist paradigm on this ‘distortion’ of science with:

Science as practiced outside the radical humanist paradigm is polluted, unable to provide any real value to society beyond sustaining the existing system of domination, capitalistic expansion, destruction, and class oppression.^[48] It is false science, including scientific socialism practiced by radical structuralists. Radical humanist understanding of truth is interpreted within a Social Marxist lens, requiring scientific thinking to extend a realization of socialist transformation or otherwise remain an inferior, corrupt version of what ‘true’ science could become.^[49] Radical humanists take perhaps the most antagonistic stance on modern science, where this mode of rationalization and analytical orientation toward precision and accuracy are entirely designed to sustain the current social system of oppression. People are drawn to scientific reasoning because it smoothly achieves “maximum production with minimum effort, to arrive at maximum economic efficiency…by rationally [identifying and] defining all the operations and actions that lead to the end.”^[50] This maximum efficiency in reaching a convergent end-state may at the micro-level seem harmlessly associated with some scientific experiment in chemistry, or the establishment of a new, useful machine.

However, the macro-level of all scientific activities is the sustainment of a system of social oppression where classes are unwittingly held to structures, behaviors, rules, and social patterns. These benefit the elites, and sustain the entire world in an invisible prison.^[51] Science (practiced outside of radical humanism) is evil, and sustains all systems of exploitation and domination. ‘Young’ Marxist theory, composed prior to 1845, rejects the functionalist belief in external natural sciences as false, coupled to the overarching system of capitalistic oppression and exploitation. “The truth of the object does not lie beyond sensation or in thought but in truer and deeper sensation, in the developed and liberated sense of social man.”^[52] For radical humanists, real truth is above any supposed notion of facts, particularly those derived via scientific means; science is merely an element of truth.^[53] Social man is liberated through revolution that shatters the current oppressive worldview and makes way for a superior one that is communist, classless, devoid of contemporary flaws and irregularities that represent modernity.^[54] Science, once operationalized by radical humanists, leads to a new human reality, one where “existence in free time on the basis of fulfilled vital needs” occurs for everyone. Technological advancements break from their current obligation to feed a system of socially unjust domination and oppression.^[55] Radical humanists reject claims of universal rights, laws, or processes in that everything socially constructed is contextual, and political struggle including war is rationalized not through objective stances but subjective ones.^[56]

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The existing social reality is flawed, and must therefore be transformed,^[57] albeit through a subjective epistemological stance that prioritizes contextuality and dynamic social transformation toward a superior social existence.^[58] Only scientific actions paired with social activism and critical theory that move the needle toward emancipation are ‘true’ manifestations of rational, scientific thought. Radical humanism, established first in early Marxist writings prior to 1850, then in simultaneous yet independent studies by Lukács and Gramsci in the 1920s-1930s, were further developed by the Frankfurt School in Interwar Germany. This school condemned the functionalist position that scientific progress and technical rationalism can separate the subjective world from an objective natural reality, in that the human condition is bound in both.^[59] Therefore conflict such as war cannot be isolated or reduced into positivistic epistemologies or governed by any sort of universal laws. The historical pathway of human existence forms contextually specific, unique, and symbolic relationships including what war is. One cannot separate man from nature, science from art, or the subjective from the objective. Functionalism, in how it correlates reason to universal constructs accessed by individual subjects, is viewed as a product of systemic division and usurpation that sustains modern, capitalist domination.^[60] Science pursued without such radical political activism is just more corruptive, corrosive, oppressive ‘false science’ that sustains the existing social prison.

Scientific activities devoid of the deep social contexts and historical forces are, as Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci stated, “bound to fail, its logical systemization will be a mere façade.”^[61] He goes on to recommend a scientific construct be placed “it its correct historical and theoretical terms…That would be more serious and more “scientific.””^[62] ‘Young’ Marx urged for a transformation of science in both “its methods and its structure…a reformed science will, in studying nature, really be studying the objectifications of man’s socialized senses, hence man himself.”^[63] Marx’s pre-1845 concepts would, in the Interwar Period of Marxist disillusionment, inspire new interpretations, such as how György Lukács, a Frankfurt School theorist and one of the founders of Social Marxism, laid the groundwork for the radical humanist paradigm. Feenberg, a Marxist philosopher of the radical humanist tradition and mentored by Herbert Marcuse, explains how Lukács developed Social Marxist concepts in the Interwar period:

Nature, therefore, is ‘objective’ in the sense that man might discover them, recognizing them the laws themselves do not also change, yet humanity does socially construct the consequences of any natural processes in the social reality they layer atop this physical one.^[65] The subjective ontological foundations that radical humanism rests upon position humanity and nature as collaborative and intertwined. This occurs in such a manner that prevents the positivism and objectivity found in both functionalism and radical structuralism from being entertained in this social paradigm. Marx’s materialism as interpreted in radical humanism breaks from positivism, although this distinction is subtle between how radical humanists interpret Social Marxism and the original Marxist interpretations enacted by radical structuralists that established the first communist societies.^[66] For radical humanists, science itself, currently stuck in an inferior, capitalistic (or corrupted communist), technological rendering, can be liberated and transformed into a fusion of natural and social science as one.^[67] Science in a normative (and communist) future becomes new, different, and superior to any functionalist understanding of science currently. Yet neither Marx nor proponents of radical humanism ever provide any notion of what such a new science might be.^[68] This social paradigm requires a challenging and entirely different way of conceptualizing science, society, and conflict.

Activists use science (again, in a radical humanist framing), yet all scientists are not necessarily activists, meaning they are only (unwittingly) doing scientific labor on behalf of the corruptive, oppressive state. Just as any war waged by the capitalistic state is inherently evil and oppressive, any scientific work done on behalf the same corrupt, oppressive system can only reinforce systemic oppression and suffering. Only enlightened, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-imperialist, pro-revolutionary scientists using scientific methodologies toward activist causes are able to ‘perform science’ in any acceptable manner within this war paradigm. Only an enlightened military leader might ‘perform war’ properly, on behalf of Social Marxist causes. Radical humanists approach social reality as both transformative, subjective, and also emancipating process requiring critique and revolutionary change. Yet they have a more hindering challenge than earlier Marxists of the nineteenth century, in that radical humanists see late capitalism including state-regulated or socialist oriented forms of capitalism as able to suspend class conflict. Advanced capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries “[secures] the loyalty of the wage-earning masses through rewards”, where class antagonisms are not abolished but subdued to a point of simmering latency.^[69] To access these otherwise sleeping masses, critical theorists must illuminate the social straightjackets that are oppressing most classes in racial, sexual, ethnic, ideological, indigenous, ecological, and other ways.

Radical humanists are the only ones able to become ‘anti-racist’,^[70] and any opposition to their ontological and epistemological framework for social reality places antagonists into ‘racist’ categories until they agree to radical humanist positions. This extends into gender, culture, religion, politics, and every possible other social construct where radical humanists critique and challenge virtually everything considered mainstream, democratic, or capitalistic. Women who are feminists but do not embrace radical humanist ontologies and epistemologies are insufficientlyfeminist, thus automatically default to ‘anti-feminist’ or subservient to the misogynistic system. Women attempting to achieve various goals for feminism such as breaking the ‘glass ceiling’ at the office, in government, academia, or in the military are merely “actively maintaining [the corrupt system] and profiting from it.”^[71] These women therefore are just as sexist, misogynistic, or racist as anyone else operating through any other social paradigm. Only feminists interested in challenging and reconfiguring the entirety of society, eliminating all modern institutions that reinforce the imperialist, capitalist, patriarchal and racist system are worthy of the designation ‘anti-misogynist.’ The rest merely are “climbing the ladder” and unable or unwilling to change the social structures to which they have been granted acceptance.^[72] This extends to any minority group member achieving high levels of political, commercial, or military leadership, homosexuals content with gaining status and power without radically disrupting the entire system, indigenous groups collaborating with mainstream society, and all other oppressed groups not compliant with the same radical humanist beliefs and goals.

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They are at war with those unable or unwilling to assume the values, beliefs, and ideals centered in their social paradigm. Humanity is trapped, alienated in false or inferior forms of social reality that must be identified, critically examined, deconstructed, and then destroyed so that our species can evolve into higher forms of social reality.^[73] One may not step into the same war twice for interpretivists (covered in the next chapter), while radical humanists view the river stepping as an individual act of emancipation or continued (unwitting) acceptance that an illusionary river still exists. This remains until sufficient social activism liberates those taking the plunge into the ‘one true river’ that is reached by stepping outside of systemic oppression. Everyone else is stuck in a toxic swamp that consumes humanity, until those that become emancipated might cleanse themselves and step out of the gunk and offer a hand to others. Part of war involves breaking through this sociological barrier, and becoming a free-thinker within the safety of radical humanism. The rest of war becomes a slog-fest of fighting back the institutions of the toxic swamp, eventually liberating humanity and ending the cycle of oppression and exploitation. Again, this requires further explanation and a temporary pause on any ontological or epistemological preferences for those subscribing to a functionalist or radical structuralist position on conflict.

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Functionalists posit social reality as a stable, orderly, and unchanging structure that permits objective analysis and the formularization of universal principles and laws. Interpretivism (covered in the next chapter) rejects this objectivity and external ordering by positing a human-centric structuring of reality toward new and contextually unique accomplishments for societies. Radical humanists differ with both by positing a ‘deep structuring’ that is also a social construction like in interpretivism, but one that is oppressively oriented to sustain elites in power at the expense and detriment of masses of oppressed and enslaved people.^[74] Tarak Barkawi, using critical theory in the twenty-first century to advance academic research of war itself using these constructs declares: “Slavery and empire lie at the origins of capitalism” and “Imperial power reshapes the local forces of order, often through violence, and empowers or constitutes clients, across many territories, in connected ways.”^[75] Such enslavement might be literal, or socially maintained where people are unwittingly (and unwillingly) forced into power structures that prevent them from becoming evolved and emancipated.

Radical humanists understand war as part of an overarching social construction of reality that is dynamic, contextual, and historically centered. They reject the objectivity and universality underpinning the positivist epistemology found outside of the radical humanist positioning in Burrell and Morgan’s quadrant. Thus war, for functionalists, is understood via metaphors, models, and theories that draw from or mimic the natural sciences.^[76] They feature a proliferation of engineering techniques, with significant reference to biological, mechanical, and physics-based constructs; war must have some enduring nature and a rationalized character that morphs with social and technological discovery and growth. Radical humanists interpret human conflict in a subjective, contextual framing where each person is trapped, sociologically and within their distinct psyche. The entire species is held in stasis by those in power, with war being one of many tools to maintain status quo and render the species unable to progress toward necessary evolution and growth (that would destroy the elite advantages).^[77] Radical humanists therefore seek to tear down the entire system to rescue it. If war is a tool of oppression, it can be one of liberation also.^[78]

Radical humanism also carries an ontological assumption of some form of anarchism, where the individual being perpetually resists any larger and socially constructed system of oppression that objectifies and prevents progress. Young Marx, working within radical humanism, tolerated such anarchist constructs as they originate in German Idealism and particularly within Hegelian thinking, yet mature Marx would reject anarchy as a radical structuralist intent on designing state revolution. Lenin, as a proponent of “mature Marxism”, framed this period as manifesting on the eve of the French revolution of 1848, also termed the ‘February Revolution’ and the sudden end of the French monarchy by revolutionary protesters.^[79] ‘Mature’ Marxism (1845 onward) holds to economic political theory that governs class divisions, oppressive state systems, and the eschatological arrangement where modern capitalist states must be destroyed by the proletariat to allow the communist utopia to unfold.^[80] This illustrates a significant difference between early Marxist thinking and his mature work that directly shaped the radical structuralist paradigm addressed in the previous chapter, and inspired communist revolutions such as in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere.

However, radical humanism does not assume the same ontological conclusions that anarchists generally (but not exclusively) adhere to. Many anarchists enjoy operating within radical humanism, in that it still sustains their pursuit of collapsing modernity and overturning the scientific, industrial orders and power structures.^[81] Returning to the goals of anarchists and primitivists discussed in the previous chapter, critical theorists embracing the complete destruction of modern, industrialized and capitalistic society do not welcome certain anarchistic mode of primitive or non-society as appropriate. Radical humanists view the only progress out of capitalist domination as a forward movement toward Social Marxism, not a reversal of course toward earlier primitive periods.^[82] While many Marxists share anarchistic themes oriented toward collapsing modernity, radical humanists expect conflict and crises to transform social reality not into some primitive state, but an enlightened, superior one.^[83] Marcuse explains that: “liberation from the affluent society does not mean return to healthy and robust poverty, moral cleanliness, and simplicity. On the contrary, the elimination of profitable waste would increase the social wealth available for distribution.”^[84] Marcuse and fellow critical theorists wish to assimilate and transform existing technologically advanced and industrialized societies while purging them of their evils. This advances humanity forward instead of collapsing it back into some utopian stone age or anarchistic wasteland.^[85] Radical humanists like radical structuralists, fall under a broad Marxist umbrella, pursuing the emancipation of modern humanity so that it can evolve to a future and normatively superior social reality.^[86]

Origins of Radical Humanism: Early Marxist Theory and the Young Hegelians

Young Marx ultimately started in the radical humanist paradigm, where he focused on individual minds and a social construction of reality that required emancipation for any evolution of humanity beyond current oppressive trappings. Early Marxist thinking sought individual construction of social reality where collectively, large social systems developed to elevate and empower the few at the disadvantage and oppression of the masses. History was constructed through this subjective creation of contextually unique individual experiences that formed a dialectic in a Hegelian sense with the collective social order. Gramsci, as a Social Marxist working with earlier ‘Young’ Marxist concepts stated: “History is a continuous struggle by individuals or groups to change society, but in order to succeed, such individuals and groups must consider themselves superior to society, educators of society, etc.”^[87] One can move humanity toward communist goals by becoming a revolutionary activist, educating, and leading the masses of oppressed and disenfranchised to rise up in revolution. This is done first and foremost through radical cultural and social change, with economic contexts secondary.

The original ideas of these New Hegelians would remain marginalized or overshadowed by the rise in popularity of ‘mature’ Marxist economic political theory associated with the radical structuralist paradigm. The radical humanist paradigm would, in the aftermath of the First World War, gain a new intellectual following of disillusioned Marxists focused not on the economic political theory found in radical structuralism, but the social or cultural superstructures sustained in individual minds and collectively unfolding in social reality. Social Marxists operating within radical humanism remain wedded to Marx’s original ontological premise that humanity must move through total economic and political transformation so that the modern state system is destroyed, classes are eliminated, and the entire species is emancipated to live in what can only be a superior state of being.^[88] Yet this is accomplished not through direct appeals to the proletariat to unite and rebel against the state system, but by critically challenging and disrupting the pervasive social reality that otherwise captures and enslaves the oppressed classes in myriad, intersecting and perpetually divisive ways. Although radical humanism predates radical structuralism chronologically, it lacked social momentum until the consequences of the First World War elevate this social paradigm into shared practice due to philosophical disappointment of Marxism in the dominant, urban and industrialized orientation. The First World War proved to not to be ‘the war to end all wars’, but instead the first total war of modern states, creating new conditions for alternative war paradigms to develop in the devastating aftermath.

The First World War caused significant tensions to rise up not just within the military institution reliant upon a functionalist view of war to explain what went so tragically wrong, but within Marxism where the anticipated collapse of advanced industrial societies experiencing crises and class struggles did not bring forth glorious revolution of the worker classes. For many disillusioned socialists, the stalemate of trench warfare took on deep metaphoric representation of how and why capitalistic states remained largely in power, albeit with some morphing into fascist regimes. Gramsci, writing from prison, offered:

The same reduction must take place in the art and science of politics, at least in those cases pertaining to the most advanced states, where “civil society” has become a very complex structure that is very resistant to the catastrophic “irruptions” of the immediate economic factor (crises, depressions, etc.): the superstructures of civil society resemble the trench system of modern warfare. Sometimes it would appear that a ferocious artillery attack against enemy trenches had leveled everything, whereas in fact it had caused only superficial damage… [Events] do not unfold at lightning speed and with the definitive forward march expected by the strategists of political Cadornism. The events of 1917 were the last instance of this kind. They marked a decisive shift in the art and science of politics.^[89]

The anticipated global revolutions in Berlin, London, New York, and other ‘socially advanced’ cities did not occur, just as the massive offensive attempts by armies to break through the stalemates on either front rarely showed more than the exchange of several yards of dirt and barbed wire to either side. This is where, in the intellectual disillusionment of the post-war period and disbelief that such a ‘total war’ between highly industrialized, capitalistic states did not produce class revolution except in the Czarist Russian backwoods. The Russian proletariat, still emerging from feudalism, failed to inspire these Marxists. Radical humanists began to envision a long war of social transformation of a different kind.

The resistance of modern, industrialized societies to Marx’s clear forecast of messianic, eschatological transformations into communist utopias required reinterpretation. The “structures of society were still capable of themselves becoming heavily fortified trenches” to Marxist ideas, meaning that new ways of pursuing radical transformation were necessary.^[90] The Marxist theories from 1850 onward and located in radical structuralism were no longer sufficient or relevant. Marcuse claimed that while the materialist theory of society in its original nineteenth century context when Marx first conceptualized it was potentially valid then, “[much] has changed since then.”^[91]Classical Marxism was dead, long live the Marxist revolution. Radical humanists began intellectual journeys to reinvigorate societal transformation via different processes overlooked or unimagined by (later) Marx, Engels, and the first wave of communist revolutionaries.

War, for radical humanists, is not understood in any universal or ahistoric mentality, as such efforts merely prolong some overarching social framework that people rely upon to sustain power and control. Many are unwittingly tied to such socializations, with only the ability to break free and liberate oneself available through a confrontational dialectic that provides transformative value; slaves must be shocked into realizing their shackles. We redefine our social reality so that we might understand it, and what we might be told war is likely holds institutional frameworks that otherwise imprison us from questioning this reality. To know that social reality is dynamic becomes the first step for radical humanists in escaping a social prison that maintains everyone else. Feenberg highlights this trend in conflict where, despite modern nation-state and international preferences to keep wars ordered in the political war philosophical configuration in functionalism, many conflicts are not at all like either World War. Most are irregular, feature ideologically dissimilar or even incommensurate adversaries such as fundamentalist ideology, and the clear victory and national level goal attainments of earlier periods of war are now illusive, if not impossible to achieve. Feenberg offers:

Critical theory, paired with social and cultural refocusing of Marxist ideas (and coincidently referencing young Marx over mature Marx and Engels) pursues racial, gender, and cultural interpretations that attempt to spark societal revolution and overthrow institutional systems of oppression.^[93] The shift from a pure economic form of class oppression found in Marx and Engel’s work and exercised by Lenin and Mao to that of Social Marxism of the twentieth century and an expansion beyond economic contexts is essential here to highlight differences between radical structuralists and radical humanists. Marx viewed classes largely in economic and political terms, not through race, gender, or ethnic frames.^[94] Radical humanists in the twentieth century expand revolution into social frames where organized violence pairs with racial, gender, and other social theories of oppression.

Fellow oppressed groups might not be clearly understood through economic alignments, and often the sophisticated framework for capitalism makes many groups unable to critically realize they are even being oppressed. Using critical feminism as an one such example, the desire to dismantle positivist structures that retain power in the oppressive configurations Marx first outlined is insufficient under purely economic orientation for revolution and reform. Kurdish women, as one example, and other indigenous frames for alternative logic are now necessary, in the radical humanist approach, to destroy the patriarchy systemic in all positivistic power structures.^[95] One demolished without including the other is insufficient for radical social transformation. The anti-fascist alignment with militant Black Power groups in the United States in the 1970s reflects another such convergence of social versus economic Marxist theorization.^[96] It matters far less what wealth or status one has if the focus of racial, sexual, ethnic, and other social constructions are critically realized and deconstructed. Without such efforts, the overarching capitalist system finds myriad ways of sustaining an oppressive system that benefits elites and uses conflict to enslave the majority of people.^[97]

Critical theory draws from the post-World War I transformations and the Frankfurt School in Germany, along with a parallel branch of development based on Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Arguably, these separate branches did not influence one another until decades later. Gramsci, writing from Italian prison after being placed there by fascists fearful of his communist activism, reflected on the events unfolding throughout the First World War. Gramsci attempted to make sense of why the Italians were defeated, why a communist revolution unfolded in Czarist Russia, and how this ‘war to end all wars’ did nothing of the sort. The Frankfurt School, comprised of largely Jewish Marxist intellectuals disillusioned with the same outcomes Gramsci struggled with, would also develop new Marxist theorization in parallel, aiming to offer answers to these shared Marxist lamentations. Led by Hungarian Marxist philosopher György Lukács, along with Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Herbert Marcuse, these socialist reformers developed a different interpretation of Marxism that would gain multiple naming conventions including Western, Neo-, Cultural, or Social Marxism.^[98] These two points of origin established a critical theory as the defining approach for radical humanists, including how they would reconceptualize war. Burrell and Morgan summarize:

The overtly political focus and practical activism direction of critical theorists demonstrates a clear branching in the broader Marxist philosophy desiring societal emancipation and evolution away from the current capitalistic, oppressive, hierarchical, and corrosive social reality dominant today. Lukács was foundational in how critical theory developed, spending his energies attempting to rescue and restore Marxism after it encountered significant philosophical and practical problems in the 1920s. Nineteenth Marxist theory professed the direction for communist revolution to be in the highly industrialized cities of modern states, where the worker classes were of sufficient density and organization and class tensions high enough for the necessary crises to trigger class consciousness and societal revolt. Radical structuralists saw the class struggles of society in an economic transformation that would usher in a communist utopia. Radial humanists such as Lukács would declare that this alone is insufficient, as the societal transformations necessary carry with them the deeper issue on “the fate of rationality: the revolution is an affair of reason.”^[100] Dialectical materialism addressing the socially constructed prisons of civilization became the new way to emancipate the oppressed.

Theodor Adorno, arguing within the Frankfurt School movement, viewed the worker classes of the twentieth century as trapped, willingly, in a capitalist system of technological dominance where they would rather continue to be oppressed and receive marginal subsistence than break out and overthrow the system.^[101] Marxist expectations of proletariat revolution unfolding across Europe died first in 1919, and again in 1945, and once more in 1949 with the Chinese revolution completed. The crises of world wars did not generate revolutions in the places or classes as forecasted. They did, however, produce communist revolutions in unanticipated areas, such as the Russian and Chinese less industrialized, largely agrarian societies. The worker classes elsewhere slept, while rural peasants in semi-feudal societies produced what were viewed as disappointing communist manifestations requiring deep introspection. What Marx and Engels promised was not delivered, at least in the places where a developed proletariat structure seemed ripe for class consciousness and rebellion against the oppressive elites. Adorno lamented this with rationalization that perhaps as highly industrialized societies continued to advance, the proletariat and other oppressed classes would progressively weaken in their ability to realize class consciousness. They would instead be dragged down by an increasingly dominant, pervasive system of economic and social injustice that sustains obedience and docility of all trapped under the capitalist spell.^[102]

Marx and Engels looked to Berlin, New York, Paris, and London as ideal hotbeds for this historically deterministic, externally shaped transformation to manifest. Yet in the wake of World War I, the only successful communist revolution unfurled happened unexpectedly in Czarist Russia. Lenin rose the communist flag of victory in the wrong city, with the wrong proletariat, as a result of the right sort of industrialized, ‘total’ war according to these devote socialists. Massing all human capital and resources between industrialized states were supposed to provide the necessary intensity of economic crises to awaken the proletariat in Paris, Berlin, and London. Everything began in the First World War in ways that suggested Marx and Engels’ prophesies. Nothing turned out as the socialists anticipated, with Lenin’s endeavors considered heretical to proper socialist theory as he commenced his revolution. Lenin started his communist crusade as an underdog and maverick, but emerged as the top socialist leader on the planet. Things seemed upside-down and confusing, with the Interwar Period about to become a very different place for Marxists of different stripes.

Marxist reformers such as Lukács interpreted the impact of World War I on Europe as a sign that bourgeois society experienced a cultural collapse prior to the anticipated economic and political breakdown.^[103] Capitalism survived in Paris, Berlin, and London despite the horrific destruction and economic disparities of the First World War. These cultural failings frustrated and stemmed the tidal forces of economic and political transformation through class struggle and revolution. Lukács’ writings in the 1920s, along with other pioneering Marxist thinkers, stimulated a fracturing of the otherwise homogenous Marxist camp centered in radical structuralism. They advocated the historical materialism that the mature Marx and his collaborating partner, Engels pursued in the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, shared their tent with various anarchists and anti-capitalists. Lukács attempted to restore Marxist theory into a humanistic, subjective framework involving dialectical materialism, which Lukács posited was the young Marx’s original intent prior to 1844.^[104] This got Lukács branded an ‘ultra-Leftist’ by those socialists adhering to the later theories that Marx centered on economic determinism objectively and through historical, external forces. He critiqued the functionalist ontology and positivist epistemology (shared by radical structuralists) that the scientific, economic, political, and technological processes in modernity are assumed to be “morally neutral tools beneficial to humanity as a whole when properly used.”^[105]

The limitations of using ‘left’ and ‘right’ in political distinction across some spectrum gain certain clarity when considering the Burrell and Morgan social paradigm quadrant thesis depicted above. Lukács was not ‘further left’ of the late Marxist advocates in some linear relation to conservative or capitalist political views. Philosophically, Lukács and subsequent social Marxists would operate in radical humanism, which was further antithetical with the functionalist paradigm the radical structuralists were in tension with, but also a distinct and dissimilar social paradigm for a different sort of Marxism. It leaps from any linear arrangement entirely. Culture is the political framework, not economics, and oppressed social classes are the central revolutionary force for change, not the proletariat.^[106] Radical humanists disagree with radical structuralists on many things, despite stemming from the same Marxist philosophy in general. Subsequent militant groups and organizations, such as the American domestic terror organization Weather Underground in the 1970s, Antifa in the last few decades, and other militant groups would blend their beliefs and strategies on conflict between these two Marxist-inspired social paradigms to pursue organized violence for specific socially transformative goals. Many would over time migrate between paradigms, or paradoxically sit on both sides of a paradigmatic border.

It is important to distinguish between the radical humanist war paradigm employed by a militant organization, and the academic development of various theories, concepts, and peaceful content of Social Marxists utilized by revolutionary activists. Not all Social Marxists explored in this chapter are proponents of a radical humanist war paradigm, just as many political scientists, positivist historians, or industrial capitalists within the functionalist paradigm have little or nothing to do with state-on-state warfare or fascist regimes seeking conflict.^[107] In all social paradigm contexts including radical humanism, the focus is on clearly defined groups and movements that posit a militant ideology, direct acts of organized violence that cause destruction, disruption, and change in civilization oriented toward group goals and aspirations, and represent some form of human conflict that otherwise does not exist in physical reality outside of the human condition. Radical humanism in particular extends a definition of war that exceeds precise confines established in the functionalist paradigm.^[108]

Burrell and Morgan’s Establishment of a Radical Humanist Paradigm:

Radical humanism pursues their critique of reality along what Burrell and Morgan characterize as two significant avenues of discourse. The first is ‘subjective idealism’ and originates in the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and later Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) where the subjective idealist tradition takes recognized form. Burrell and Morgan explain: “Fichte was a follower of Kant, and his brand of subjective idealism rested upon the assumption that individual consciousness is a continuously creative entity generating a perpetual stream of ideas, concepts, and perspectives through which a world external to mind is created.”^[109] Fichte’s idea that the external world could only be understood in terms of the projection of individual consciousness would resonate with French existentialists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, and later a young Karl Marx.^[110]

Radical humanists consider the dominant functionalist worldview a false or mythological one, where pseudo-scientific rationale and capitalist systems of domination imprison humanity using a wide range of social constructs. Commonly held ideas on politics, economics, liberty, justice, and war foundational to functionalist and radical structuralist users are disavowed. State authority is rejected, due to how the context of settler colonialism, patriarchy, militarism, nationalism and capitalism produces an entire social system that must be challenged and destroyed to save humanity.^[111] This includes Marxist inspired communist regimes, as they are considered corrupted and must be rebuilt from the ground up. Even Clausewitz’s dictum that “war is an extension of politics by other means” is scorned, as we shall see, for alternative ontological stances.^[112] Politics, if anything, becomes a subordinate part of the war phenomenon, manufactured by the overarching system of domination where war is a tool to retain power and compliance. Political acts may appear to declare wars, yet all political activity itself is consumed within this systemic domination that must be confronted by those able to emancipate themselves to see things as they truly are. War exceeds all political meaning, since for radical humanists the political constructs are tied to systemic systems of power and domination that must be challenged and dismantled. Politics becomes not just subordinate to war, but merely one extension of many employed by the vast war machine.

For radical humanists, the world is the product of individual consciousness, yet when humans create this external world, they then unwittingly separate themselves from their true inner ‘Being’ and become trapped within a socially constructed false reality.^[113] Every societal group sustains their own social construction, or ‘language’, where the hierarchical structure of cultured classes influences the collective ‘spirit ‘moves back and forth, from the writer of a play to the actors and then the audience, and society influences all participants in this iterative, cyclic exchange.^[114]Gramsci presents this radical humanist ontology with:

The individual is subordinate to the system that thus produces all individual experience. Social reality is constructed collectively, contextually, where the particular processes or events in one society in time and space cannot be elevated to a universal ordering. Gramsci elaborates with: “The collectivity [of how social reality occurs] must be understood as the product of painstaking will and collective thought attained through concrete individual effort and not through a reliance on a process of destiny that is extraneous to the individual.”^[116] The world is not shaped by external forces as radical structuralists posit, but through each person interacting socially with the collective, iteratively advancing the transformation of social reality through struggles and exchanges.

The class struggle needed is no longer paired with the factory and the worker class, but broadly and systemically across all oppressed classes in social, cultural, and contextually symbolic configurations well beyond the worker class.^[117] We are all enslaved, in some configuration, whether we are working in the factory, prospering in some superficial middle class status that satisfies us to remain within the oppressive framework, or we are unwittingly manipulated so that a better social reality remains inaccessible. We all are in a social prison, whether we admit it or not. Regardless if we are part of a military offensive, or become victims of some invading force, our roles are relegated to supporting this entire oppressive system so that cycles of war and conquest continue. We serve war, and war serves the entire system for social domination of humanity. Two nations might engage in a vigorous war, but the only side that truly ‘wins’ is the overarching oppressive system working in abstraction above all battlefield opponents. War fuels greater systemic power and control. We dance like puppets on string.

War cannot be understood until an intersectional theorization illuminates how race, gender, sexual identity, geography, climate, and alternative (Marxist) economic theories on reality sustain this social prison. We must realize how and why we are interconnected while suffering through wars, commercial exploitation, the injustice of a state legal system. We must learn why are we trapped in an educational system that sustains this entire false reality by conditioning the next generation in an otherwise endless cycle of exploitation. This requires critical examination to expose these manipulative structures. Typically, critical theorists in radical humanism use intersectionality in a negative relationality of interlocked, isolating, and humiliating oppressions systemically designed to fragment those groups and sustain the entire dominant system. However, not all critical theorists operating within radical humanism (or even within interpretivism) assume this ontology. Hudson, using critical feminism, offers that certain indigenous, feminist worldviews carry a positive relationality “of shared security and freedom to relate…a radical departure from the understanding of human security as freedom from want or fear.”^[118] This focus on gender is significant in critical feminist theory on conflict and war in that the functionalist war paradigm addresses state-centric configurations of war with military instruments of power, and thus are gender-agnostic.^[119] MacKenzie and Wegner, also critical feminists, provide another alternative framing of war with:

War is not something under the exclusive control of state authorities or in the tradition of Westphalian, Clausewitzian, and Jominian thinking that underpins the functionalist war paradigm (or that of some Leninist or Maoist variation). Instead, war is a product of systemic oppression and a tool used by the state to extend this system of exploitation, destruction, and humiliation. In a profound departure from functionalist ontology concerning war, radical humanists expand universal rights to existence (including during periods of conflict and organized violence) to animals and nature itself. Using intersection theory via Social Marxism, “[this] approach to intersectionality also demands a move away from an anthropocentric worldview and instead embrace a framework which includes… recognising the rights of nature.”^[121] The earth itself is an entity deserving of clear rights that are at least equal if not superior to that of humans, where war directly threatens and impacts the natural rights of rivers, forests, lakes, oceans, mountains, and those indigenous people most integrated with these spaces. “The environment is a direct target in war” where all violence unfolding in conflict not only violates those rights of the human victims, but the natural rights of other non-human entities.^[122] Capitalism and the modern industrial system for nation states must be challenged and dismantled. The environment itself must be part of the way where conflicts are resolved, and if war itself were to be eliminated, this can only be accomplished by incorporating “environmental justice” that includes “intergenerational equity, equal distribution and benefit sharing… [and] consultation around natural resources and natural entities.”^[123]

Image source: https://theintercept.com/2017/08/31/antifa-violence-gives-far-right-provocateurs-crave/

War, as a continuation of the oppressive capitalistic, imperialistic, industrialized state system cannot be halted without the entire system being defeated. This must include representation of all oppressed groups, from feminists to queer and indigenous peoples, and: “there will be no peace without environmental peace.”^[124] Colonization and imperialism are the roots of all environmental problems, and radical humanists use intersection theory to challenge the otherwise unquestioned functionalist ontological stance that is anthropocentric. Instead, radical humanists declare that forests, rainforests, rivers and wildlife are “natural entities” requiring designation as “legal persons” so that accountability for post-conflict response and compensation are comprehensive.^[125] Radical humanists also link human rights to environmental rights where all entities are living or otherwise an integral part of an entire ecosystem that the state-based system violates and exploits. States, encouraged by multinational companies and the vast military-industrial complex are guilty of perpetually creating cycles of conflict and war for their own profit and power gains. This entire system must be illuminated so that it can be critically challenged and dismantled. Only this might ‘end’ war, and provide compensation and restoration to all entities, whether human, animal, or non-living ones such as rivers, mountains, and the land itself. Victims of war thus include not just people, but animals, forests, rivers, and mountains. Whereas Clausewitzian war theory uses politics across humanity as the organizing logic for why states rationalize organized violence, radical humanists expand war well beyond any possible political limits. Rivers have no political view, yet war victimizes them nonetheless.

This does not suggest radical humanists are ‘anti-war’ aside from being against any state entity attempting to use their military instruments of power to sustain the capitalist, imperialist, colonialist system of domination. Revolutionary war still must unfold, but not tied to the proletariat rising up and rebelling against the bourgeoise. It also is not obscured in Clausewitz’s fog and friction, but within a complex web of stories and context that must be understood outside traditional structures that dominate regular thought.^[126] War is an intersection of systemic oppression across these gender, racial, class, economic, and other lines that sustain a cycle of domination and oppression. War is racist, in that military interventions “place radicalised and vulnerable groups at a disproportionate risk of extreme and long-term violence.”^[127] For many radical humanists, the root of war is not political, but racial, where “human lives are value based on where they are situated along the colour line.”^[128] War is also homophobic, colonial, patriarchal, misogynistic, and one must use Social Marxist theories to disentangle all these corrupt, oppressive logics of war and their gendered, racialized, exploitative consequences. War is everywhere at once, whether kinetic and on declared battlefields, or subtly, in elevators, bathrooms, and boardrooms. Attempts by the state apparatus to control ‘what is defined as war’ is itself an example of this pervasive war, where the dominant system prevents those wounded by these controlling measures from even realizing they are war victims.

Short-term and dynamic revolutions are discarded, with a new revolutionary strategy set upon a slow, methodical creep of radical humanist revolutionary thought over long periods and in contexts unfamiliar to the functionalist and radical structuralist understanding of the battlefield. Using intersection theory to string together all oppressed groups into a cohesive, collaborative, and multi-faceted alignment framework that introduces each oppressed group into all other forms of oppression and domination, nearly everything found in modernity can be linked to brutality, hate, and ignorance. Acheson, in articulating an anti-nuclear weapons argument through radical humanism, provides this Social Marxist technique where nuclear weapons are part of racism, indigenous exploitation, sexism, and many more dreadful things. Protesting nuclear weapons in itself is insufficient unless the rest of social injustices are nested in anti-nuclear activities:

Functionalists consider war as waged between state entities using instruments of state power on battlefields. Radical structuralists move the (essential) terrain to the factory floors, the labor union strike zones, and urban sprawl where clashes between the proletariat and the state police unfold violently. Radial humanists expand this battlefield into every possible social and cultural setting, where the capitalist domination is challenged at every turn,^[130] in myriad ways spanning nonviolence to formal civil war. Marxism, as applied through the radical humanist paradigm, is in many respects ‘restored’ to the Young Hegelian period where revolution is essential from below, but not with such centrality to economic forces as Marx’s mature work migrated. Instead, in his earlier work, Marx envisioned how oppressed classes should gain social consciousness and overthrow the entire capitalistic, modern system.

In radical humanism, we all are trapped by socially constructed chains, yet we can through enlightenment and critical thinking break them to usher in a new, superior world. This is not merely snapping one’s fingers and believing in new concepts. Advanced capitalism imposes upon the worker class a thick social layering of propaganda and consumerism that “colonize everyday life and consciousness” in the Frankfurt school philosophy.^[131] We are consumed by this oppressive system whether we are working at our jobs, attending school, dining at a restaurant, using a public restroom, or in the private confines of our bedrooms. It permeates all aspects of social reality. The irrationality of the First World War (originally, later all subsequent wars) represents this web of social oppression and distortion that the technological-scientific West imposes upon oppressed classes, with many of them unable to realize or challenge it. Revolution requires the individual liberation of each citizen from these social constructions that act as invisible strait jackets and blindfolds, ones that even become comfortable and appealing to some workers content to make limited gains in exchange for sustaining the capitalist system. We are trapped in the current social reality, where overarching forces of economic, social, and political constructs sustain an oppressive existence for most people that do not benefit from capitalism, the Westphalian nation state system, or the benefits of science. Adorno explains:

Science thus is part of a seductive, pervasive system of societal oppression. Despite scientific disciplines seemingly able to improve lives and prosperity, it only does so within a larger system intent on oppressing and dominating the many for the direct benefit of the few. War is an integral feature of this system. Lukács argued in the early twentieth century that people create their social world through their day-to-day activities in production, but in this exchange most people become divorced from the consequences and results of those interactions, meaning that the socialized production of artifacts and the symbols and meaning associated with them are lost on the very people creating them and acting to use them as society requires.^[133] They might enjoy the seductive benefits of scientific progress, economic development within a capitalist system, and the various state-provided comforts of modernity in what becomes a smothering cocoon that prevents any class consciousness from developing. Scientific progress within this view is merely digging our own graves deeper into the soil.

Social rewards are divided through assumed social merit, keeping classes fixed in the oppressive system while the bourgeoise exploit the masses.^[134] The state, science, and economic system work together to sustain the entire system through domination and oppression, yet those being exploited are largely unaware of these consequences or otherwise unwilling to consider breaking free. War, used within this system, is employed between states as yet another part of continuing this exploitative cycle; the state is a war-making institution.^[135] Lukács echoed Marx and stress the political acts of suppression and oppression, where the entitled classes and bourgeoisie create invisible social barriers that maintain a capitalist society and prevent any evolution toward a superior form of civilization. Radical humanists pursue a philosophy of political action, where revolutionary change requires not just the destruction of artifacts and symbols of oppression, but the critique, illumination, and annihilation of social constructs that otherwise perpetuate the statis enslavement of oppressed classes.

Lukácsians reject the positivistic determinism and external, objective rendering of social reality that functionalists adhere to. They see “practical methods for radically transforming society here and now”, where class consciousness could be critically achieved individually and thus through iterations of social activism and deconstruction, collectively across entire social groups.^[136] Radical humanists saw the barriers to achieving Marx’s call for class consciousness not as a struggle against state systems of economic oppression, but the individual person voluntarily, although often unwittingly or non-reflectively, continuing to remain oppressed in such a system because they accept the social reality being offered to them. Adorno offers that Marx, in the nineteenth century, considered ways of transforming the entirety of society in the conditions that existed then. However, since the events of the First World War: “it would be sheer obstinacy to stick to this expectation of Marx.”^[137] Transforming society required new socialist thinking. Critical theory will, in the hands of radical humanists, set each individual free, simultaneously unlocking collective class consciousness. It promises to produce what could not be accomplished in the World Wars nor in existing revolutionary Marxist societies that remained trapped. Humanity would be emancipated, and finally shed the existing skin of capitalism, colonialism, domination, humiliation, and exploitation.

Critical Theory and Radical Humanism: Social Violence Outside of Conventional War

War is used in radical humanism to reconceptualize and re-channel organized violence normally employed by capitalist states against them internally, via class consciousness and social revolution. Nation states maintain their military instruments of power and local laws, justice systems, and police forces to sustain the system of oppression of lower classes.^[138] The bourgeoise sustain this system to their direct benefit, where new laws and regulation encourage conformity across all classes despite the elites benefiting over all others. All state-based concepts of justice, truth, equality, and happiness have been corrupted by positivism and the overarching domination of scientific rationalism.^[139] Critical theory, used within radical humanism, epistemologically becomes a critique of Western modernity and the industrialized world.^[140] Horkheimer, writing in the late 1940s after the Second World War, would reflect the ongoing concerns that Social Marxists had with the continuing resilience of the capitalist system. These remained even with communist revolutions such as in Russia and China that were unable to break away from the authoritarian pull for domination and oppression, and how capitalist with communist states were able to defeat (for now) fascism. Modernity was trapped, utterly, in the monopolistic state-capitalist world that was consumed with markets that enslaved humanity before, during, and after death:

Increased bureaucratization “is a further consequence of the capitalist organization of labor”,^[142] where greater conformity to the rules, policies, and methodologies of the state apparatus further maintains the capitalist system, even in times of great wars between rival states. Current laws are “an expression of the ruling class” that impose upon the rest of society certain norms of conduct that link back to the direct benefit of those elites that socially constructed such laws originally.^[143] Thus, radical humanists in the Interwar Period reform earlier Marxist theory set in radical structuralism into a new war paradigm of radical humanism: communist revolution is paired with cultural contexts first, and broader economic ones second.

Economic crisis becomes nested in cultural crisis, and once the proletariat is activated through critical theory and emancipated from this system, the workers will use violent resistance to pursue revolutionary and civil wars to collapse the capitalist system entirely. Dismantling systems of oppression internationally where states wage war against one another requires a similar commitment by activists to dismantle these systems domestically. To end war and emancipate humanity, one must destroy the modern state system, ideally from within. “For it is by abolishing neocolonialism, capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy that we will find freedom for one and all.”^[144] Critical theorists hold to a Marxist worldview that requires radical transformation of reality so that wars of emancipation permanently end this cycle of wars for capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and hierarchical domination.

Like radical structuralists, the dominant capitalist hierarchy of power and class oppression must be dismantled, but the need to illuminate deeper social ‘prisons’ exceeds Marx and Engels’ original economic-fixated theorization. Marx viewed imperialism as an evil expansion of the capitalist system in search of market expansion and new production; colonists capture new territories as part of how capitalism perpetrates itself. Social Marxists take this further, such as how the imperial conquest of native lands for colonies is interpreted through functionalism as a normal process of imposing political will upon others. Land ‘ownership’ in any economic sense is refuted. “Colonists do not in fact own the land… the land is not to be owned.”^[145] The entire state system is false, imposed upon humanity for the benefit of those that sustain a systemic framework that spans gender, race, climate, economic theory, and other social constructs. MacKenzie and Wegner, using critical feminist theory, summarize this expansion of Social Marxist thinking with:

War itself is reconceptualized through radical humanism to where all historic examples of past conflicts are devoid of Marxist enlightenment, and thus all become forms of oppression used by state entities to maintain a balance of power. There are no ‘great’ historic wars, whether one looks to the antiquities or feudal periods. Although radical humanists do appear to distinguish the Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin’s success in Russia from non-communist revolutionary wars, radical humanists commence their development of a new war paradigm in the Interwar Period due to frustration and disillusionment over why Moscow fell, yet Paris and Berlin still remained capitalist. Gramsci would, in addressing the spread of Christianity as a dominant and militant power commencing under Constantine’s reign, declare that every war historically has “also been a religious war, in all cases.”^[147] War has thus been a historic tool of state oppression, just as state legal systems and police forces provide similar oppression domestically within a state. ‘Vulgar’ (historical) materialism, hence any capitalist state system as ‘mature’ Marxist theory viewed social reality, operates mechanically and non-reflectively, including the continuation of religion by the masses.^[148] State wars are oppressive, thus religious, and occur to sustain the overarching system that (proper) communist revolution can liberate humanity from. Radical humanists propel wars of revolutionary emancipation (actual communist transformation) as social, contextually subjective, and distinct from all historic conflicts that were prior to the nineteenth century and devoid of Marxist thinking.^[149] They also reject the radical structuralist attempts at revolution, finding them lacking and based in obsolete constructs.

Image of Antonio Gramsci: https://jacobin.com/2021/11/antonio-gramsci-selections-prison-notebooks-fiftieth-anniversary

Radical humanism features critical theory as a dominant mode of interpreting social reality for specific purposes. Gioia and Pitre explain: “Critical theorists focus on two levels of understanding: a surface level and a deep-structure level, wherein the underlying sources of a given reality are presumed to reside.”^[150] There is a deterministic epistemology at work in how critical theory views reality via radical humanism; the world we experience and know has the superficial and explicit, immediate level that occupies most of our attention. Meanwhile, larger superstructures behind the scenes are always in operation maintaining the system of oppression. Radical humanists use critical theory to illuminate these otherwise invisible power structures that elites use to manage societies and sustain power and advantage. Within regular (functionalist) theorization, those same deep structures shape all inquiries and creative energies toward results that sustain the existing status quo. Only critical theorization can expose these processes, illuminate the elite power structures, and critical theorists become activists in destroying the existing system of oppression so that humanity might progress and evolve toward a better state of reality. War waged by unenlightened imperialists are trapped in a perpetual spiral of wasting resources and lives toward sustaining capitalism. An emancipated, radical humanist society would no longer use war nor waste such production and wealth.^[151]

Radical humanists, along with many postmodernists, consider the Russian Revolution as evidence of Marxist failures based on the ontological and epistemological assumptions underpinning radical structuralism.^[152] Lenin and the Soviets had to imitate a state and eventually became just another form of an oppressive regime because the economic, political, and related military frameworks ignore critical social constructs. Radical humanists view the continued dominance of a technological, industrialized world as oppressive,^[153] whether controlled by the anonymous and external forces of expanding markets and production, or the transferring of this control to “the new state and the central plan” associated with authoritarian communist regimes.^[154] These socialist experiments in the twentieth century present themselves as failures to radical humanists in that the same system of oppression and domination continued, albeit with different flags, borders, and titles. Capitalism in Marx’s original framing oriented on the economic aspects of what radical humanists redefine as part of the overarching social framework that now must be critically exposed and challenged. Even a World War did not shake these bonds, as the proletariat proved largely immune to the original economic theories of class consciousness and emancipation without subsequent development and expansion to illuminate the totality of how social injustice chains society in place.

Berlin and Paris did not fall in 1919 because the social frameworks of capitalism were not damaged in the way the economic and political ones were, and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 for the same reason. The capitalist system did not defeat the communist one as understood within a functionalist or radical structuralist view. One such radical humanist view offered by the French anarchist group ‘The Invisible Committee’ is that the capitalist system manifested inside the Soviet experiment, where one form collapsed and another form seeped in to fill the void.^[155]Soviet breadlines are no different from the long lines in New York for the latest popular holiday toy, or the most coveted jeans and basketball sneakers. Systemic oppression by the overarching imperial system sustains itself regardless of what flag is raised over government, and what uniform the generals don. Although these French anarchists differ from radical humanists in their ontological assumption that all civilization and hierarchical structures are evil and corrupt, they do critically view the Russian experiment in communism as a failure of Marxist theory that requires change. By extension, the Chinese experiment is also doomed unless they shift to radical humanist strategies and goals. Social Marxists, using radical humanism, believe ontologically that their way of approaching radical transformation of social reality will work, albeit with myriad outcomes depending on which group is considered.

The capitalist system does ‘work’, but only so for elites and the ruling classes that are able to enjoy freedoms and other societal benefits accomplished at the direct expense of lower class oppression. Radical humanists consider even these elites as trapped within the vast machine, but they enjoy a far more comfortable prison cell. For the rest of humanity, these lower classes exist in a ‘competitive hell’ where people are trapped in pursuit of self-interests. Radical humanists share with anarchists a collective desire to fight back against the overarching capitalistic system of domination using conflict and organized violence. This can be accomplished in myriad ways, some seemingly benign and non-violent. They play the role of revolutionary activists whether they are organizing guerrilla cells, educating on Marxist or anarchist ideologies to radicalize the uninitiated, protesting, or stealing things from one’s employer as an individual anti-capitalist action. Other overt acts such as arson, sabotage, guerrilla warfare, and acts of genocide take on more familiar configurations to functionalists (or radical structuralists) under attack. Frequently, radical humanists attempt to blur these activities so that those indirect or low-impact ones are obfuscated by the other more shocking and spectacular ones. Many activities might just be viewed as minor infractions or petty crime by any state system if they even realize it.

One anonymous activist recounted how they formed a local group where people donned special buttons that identified they were local members of a secret anti-capitalist, anti-work society. When people wearing the button entered his gas station, he let them steal. If he went into another business and saw employees with the button, they allowed him steal. Stealing was not about financial need as much as it was about smashing the capitalist system and challenging social reality. If a local business collapsed because of rampant theft, it represented another crack in the overarching capitalist system of domination. This anonymous Marxist activist recollects in a blog encouraging an annual “Steal Something from Work Day”:

Stealing to chip away at the system differs from those thieving to gain profit in some tangible way. Criminal gangs that steal to profit on illicit enterprise are unlike these Social Marxists. The whiff of anarchism in the above passage creates additional nuance, as Social Marxists can co-opt anarchistic themes to strengthen their systemic assaults to try to pull the capitalist system down. If sufficient anarchists join along for the ride, so be it. Certain anarchists covered in the last chapter may agree to steal to damage society, but may differ on what to do with the collapse and aftermath. This is where anarchists and Social Marxists agree on the crime, but split on where to move civilization beyond the point of chaos. These criminals are also unlike traditional (functionalist-based) criminal enterprises or organized crime. The Mafia or a drug cartel will fight the state enterprise and perform illicit acts for gain, but they do so without holding goals of transforming social reality into anything other than a future world where their illicit enterprise reduces risks, increases profits, and gains further independence from any state jurisdiction.

While enterprising criminal groups seek illicit means to achieve the same economic profits of a capitalist system, radical humanists ontologically outright oppose capitalism.^[157] The modern state system must be eradicated, wiped away entirely so that a new, better, and truly communist society can prosper. The state is complicit with big industry, and all aspects of law enforcement, the state justice system, and how society normally functions must be challenged, disrupted, and through successful direct actions, lead to the total emancipation of humanity. “Colonial violence aims to maintain and instil [sic] white supremacy and colonial legacies for the future.”^[158] Even criminal enterprise is part of the capitalist system, meaning it too will need to be purged. Confronting, deconstructing, and removing all colonial systems of oppression can lead to the end of war, suffering, and the possible elimination of marginalized groups such as indigenous people, women, and other oppressed classes within the radical humanist war paradigm. To accomplish this, activists must educate but also strike back against the oppressors.

Violent activism here is distinguished from peaceful demonstration and protest.^[159] Violent activism is a mode of organized violence set within a justified need to fix humanity by waging against the oppressive war machines of imperial, colonialist, fascist, and capitalist states. For example, Social Marxist activists, operating in Washington and Oregon in December 2023, targeted two Amazon warehouses and a construction site for reasons spanning economic, environmental, and foreign policy issues such as the Israeli-Hamas conflict. Their aim was not just to bring emphasis on the conflict, but to disrupt and damage what they viewed as the capitalist adversary manifesting in ‘big industry.’ This autonomous action resulted in Amazon’s business disrupted for hours, while local law enforcement had to respond and contain the protest event and attempt de-escalation as part of the state strategy. A participant of the event blogged anonymously on the outcome:

Thus, the entire state system and its earlier feudal predecessors dating back into antiquities must be ultimately destroyed in a social revolution. Every company, including Amazon, must be burned to the ground at some point in this revolution. This transformation need not be war-like, if those defending capitalism lay down their arms and accept all demands; Amazon workers joining the protest and abandoning their posts is just another tactical success that achieves what also might be accomplished through arson, sabotage, or direct action. If people do not surrender and join the revolution, then a range of activities leading up to revolutionary war and destruction will nonetheless usher in this essential, existential change. Violence organized to aid in this shift is deemed the only acceptable form of conflict. Even the prevention of such violence by the state is evil and corrupt. Direct action done locally leads to more crises, stimulating greater autonomous, other inspired acts of violence, cumulatively leading to the destruction of the system and room for replacing it with a new, better world. Collective action is justified to create crisis inside of capitalist systems. Industry is stressed, law enforcement overburdened, and political leadership flummoxed with how best to resolve, de-escalate, or otherwise ‘solve’ a conflict built upon incommensurate belief systems. Radical humanists view acts of diplomatic appeasement by the state as mere ritualistic road bumps along the long journey to revolutionary transformation that eliminates said politics entirely.^[161]

A better world for the aforementioned protester is one without capitalism, without a state system of government, yet somehow still capable of sustaining humanity in a non-work, pleasure-oriented (hedonistic) form of vague utopia also anticipated by radical structuralists before they created failed communist experiments. Radical humanism shares with radical structuralism many key features of this broad, normative Marxist landscape. The ‘radical’ in both social paradigms underpin a core Marxist tenet: The state apparatus cannot fully realize human community, as it “rules a civil society based on a conflictual form of action.”^[162] Marx envisioned social revolution as the path toward evolution of humanity that necessitates the complete destruction of the state system, which will revolutionize all of society and the elements therein, including the material level where people produce by interacting with the physical reality. Marx sustains in his early and later work a common theme where the proletariat is the one class capable of transforming society into a classless one, simultaneously destroying the proletariat class as a concept within the system it is transforming.^[163] While later Marx shifted toward an economic political theory of revolution, Young Marx along with Lukács, Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School correlated class struggle with cultural/social struggle. Feenberg clarifies this shift with:

This transition to socialism now appears in a different light as well; it is neither a causal sequence, nor an ethical exigency, but a process of cultural change. The process arises from the immanent cultural contradictions of capitalism, contradictions between reified social patterns and living human beings who resist the imposition of the reified forms even as they unwittingly reproduce them through their everyday practical activities [emphasis added].”^[164]

The Frankfurt School, drawing along similar trajectories of Young Marx, Lukács, and Gramsci, would reestablish the argument that capitalism, along with industry and technology in modern societies, contains the potentiality for a socialist society “that would transcend alienation and reification.”^[165] This is accomplished through a radical humanist lens where critical theory advances the earlier critiques of the Enlightenment by demonstrating how technology, once illuminated in how it is formed with social bias and domination that are often obscured or lost. Radical humanists shine necessary light upon their flawed, oppressive, and conforming frameworks. Yet the Frankfurt School does not endorse a radical structuralist view of late Marx and Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or others extending communist revolutions that demonstrate the results in Russia and China in the early-to-mid twentieth century. For them, “[the] communist movement is dead, killed off by its own grotesque success in Russia and China. Western societies are better than the communist alternatives that nevertheless symbolically represent an emancipated future.”^[166] Ingram and Simon, in editing a collective volume on critical theorists, explain that the period between 1942 and 1944 represented a dark period for Social Marxists. Even an Allied victory over the fascists would “at most forestall what they perceived to be the inevitable spread of technological totalitarianism at work in all rationalized societies.”^[167]

This means that while radical structuralists might have argued that Hitler and Mussolini were the clear and present danger as Fascist dictators, while capitalistic regimes led by Churchill and Roosevelt were merely one step removed and still ‘evil.’ All capitalist societies are capable of becoming future Fascist threats, yet for radical structuralists, communist regimes were exempt. Radical humanists disagree. For them, Stalin and Mao were also evil, representing cruel authoritarian regimes that had fallen from the true path of Marxism. Radical humanists plot a different pathway to societal transformation and liberation from the capitalist framework of systemic, technological, and social dominance. For them, critical thinkers are the highest cultural product that any society might generate, and only through these critical efforts will the rest of society gain the keys to social transformation. Social Marxism cannot function without this critical theory.

Critical theorists do not usually test their hypotheses as functionalist and interpretivist theorists require, as the radical structuralist paradigm is far more concerned with the goals of radical change and liberation from the psychic prison of the organization,^[168] and less so with whether successful activism and critical theory outcomes demonstrate consistent logic or coherent, repeatable processes and formulas. Science pursued outside of critical theory is declared false, in that those trapped in pursuing science in the dominant, oppressive system enabled by late capitalist, highly industrialized societies are blinded. The entire scientific enterprise reinforces an ‘evil’ social reality that exploits science itself.^[169] Critical theory relies upon articles of faith or ideological rigor where the destruction of the existing social reality is a progressive, incremental process to emancipate humanity from a broken or obsolete existence. Critical theory can break people out of the seductive “hum and whirr of scientific activity” so that they might realize the falseness of the current system of domination, and begin to pursue proper scientific enterprise that emancipates humanity.^[170] Activism for change, even if achieved in an otherwise unscientific or impossible-to-repeat exercise, is superior to any critical theorization that produces new knowledge without any disruption of the current oppressive system.^[171] Thus, radical humanism seeks revolution above all else, set to a normative epistemology that the next social world will be superior to this one, if only the enlightened and witting are able to expose the vile, horrific machinery enslaving all others in stasis.

As for the Clausewitzian beliefs on war, for radical humanists there is no such thing as some external ‘nature’ of war. Such ideas merely trap societies in an oppressive system that inhibits necessary social evolution. Gramsci, writing in an Italian prison in the inter-war period, rejected functionalist notions of science and the objectivity of some external, natural ordered world. Humans, in a radical humanist view, were individuals connected socially, where the overarching social reality including the past, present, and future was decided by that social group able to struggle and overcome all oppressors. Victory would have the same eschatological epistemology that Marxism saw as the inevitable path toward an evolution in humanity through crises, struggles, and final battle. Gramsci wrote:

Science is, from a radical humanist perspective, different from the later thinking by Marx and Engels in the radical structuralist paradigm. Marcuse, advancing the Frankfurt School and social Marxism in the twentieth century, would reverse the mature Marxist thesis where “socialism will free the technical forces of production blocked by outmoded capitalist relations of production.”^[173] Radical structuralists associated science and technology with an economic-based theory driven by external historic forces, and the revolutionary war that liberates the proletariat will unlock true scientific and technological potential within a communist utopian society. Marcuse and radical humanists insist instead: “that the existing technology dominates both human beings and nature. The forces of production themselves must be reconstructed on the basis of life-affirming values. Their mere growth is not progressive. A social revolution must interrupt the “continuity of domination” now installed in the very structure of the machines.”^[174]Radical humanists see the contextually unique, subjectivity of individuals set within a systemic ordering as what must be radically transformed, where mere revolution by the workers is insufficient to truly transform social reality and break the imperialistic system of capitalism and oppression. Mature Marxism’s defeat was a fait accompli through the actualization of the First World War and all the death and destruction waged against civilization.

Image of the Frankfurt School: https://www.marxists.org/subject/frankfurt-school/index.htm

Marxists would, entering the Interwar Period, split into either the proponents of radical structuralism attempting to salvage or defend Mature Marxism through the rise of the Soviet Union, or over to this Marxist reformation that sought to pair the younger Marx writings upon “the ruins of German idealism.”^[175] The 1920s-1930s presented new social, economic, and political contexts unimagined in the nineteenth century when Marx pursued his various ideas on communism and the evolution of the human condition through historically determined materialism. The first group, encouraged by Lenin’s successful Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, would later adhere to the guiding thoughts and brutal actions of Joseph Stalin and his inner circle of Soviet political and military leaders. They cast off the ideas of this second group of ‘western Marxists’ as heretical, with Lukács’ foundational work of particular note as highly denounceable.^[176] Radical structuralists considered these Social Marxists deviants to true socialism. Lenin, Stalin, and subsequent communist state leaders and parties such as those rising in China, Cuba, and Vietnam held to the radical structuralist war paradigm, while this new crop of Marxists, largely aligned to the Frankfurt School and post-World War I German disillusionment, would rescue the early works of Marx and cultivate a radical humanist paradigm.

Lukács’ work sought to produce a hybrid of “classical German philosophy and the Marxist critique of political economy.”^[177] Lukács’, Gramsci’s, and the Frankfurt School’s theorization produced what became radical humanism, a new Marxist war paradigm. Lukács provided the direct, foundational ideas for the Frankfurt School, while Gramsci’s posthumous work preserved in his prison diaries became a secondary and later reinforcing effort to the radical humanist perspective. Lukács developed Marxism beyond the original intent of Marx and Engels, rescuing and reforming Marx’s earliest writings that were mostly ignored or forgotten.^[178] Lukács provided the foundation for radical humanism as Burrell and Morgan position it by declaring that “nature is a purely social category, and the natural world therefore has no independence of humanity and human understanding.”^[179] This ontology cannot overlap with any positivist epistemology. War is reconceptualized away from both functionalism and radical structuralism.

The social construction of reality for radical humanists position humanity as central to what reality is. This fuses any notions of ‘nature’ as one side of the coin where human understanding and experience is interdependent. Nature and the progression of time and events are entirely part of human historical understanding; Lukács’ declaration that “the core of being stands revealed as a social process” puts a Marxist framework into the subjective stance of radical humanism and outside that of radical structuralism addressed in the previous chapter.^[180] Later Antifa adaptation of this Frankfurt School thesis provides a contemporary radical humanist thinking where social reality is entirely human designed and sustained. “The market of commodities is inseparable from the market of ideas,” offers Antifa proponent Mark Bray, demonstrating a critical theorist concept where “ideas are commodified along with everything else in capitalist society.”^[181] War becomes a revolutionary struggle of social contexts against an oppressive, dominant system that holds the elites in power over all weaker or marginalized groups.

Feenberg goes on to summarize Lukács along with his critics that held to a radical structuralist devotion as opposed to later (Social) Marxist theory. For Lukács, “nature is essentially reified under capitalism… [and] Proletarian revolution therefore overcomes the reified objectivity of nature in overcoming capitalism… Since the existing natural sciences are reified, and therefore conditioned by capitalistic society both in their genesis and their validity, proletarian revolution also overcomes these sciences in overcoming capitalism.”^[182] This requires a normative view of reality, where young Marx and the subsequent Frankfurt School movement appreciate all of human existence systemically.^[183] Modernity is broken, destined to fail, yet we cannot shift into a new and superior social reality without activating revolutionary war and thus using organized violence to change the status quo. Here, for radical humanists, a deeper appreciation of how reality is entirely socially constructed and contextually based can open the cognitive doors for them to transcend the reality that capitalists are trapped within. They can anticipate the future while also able to refute it before it unfolds. Some radical humanists view nature “as a living organism of which humanity would be the conscious faculty.”^[184]

Early Marxist theory sought to deny objectivity to anything in reality independent from its relation to human beings, where labor and sensation governed all human experience.^[185] Scientific rationalism is not replaced with some alternative logic; radical humanists consider all scientific enterprise to be part of a social and historical phenomenon associated with how people produce and sense the reality they create. Culture shapes science, and human beings themselves produce culture within a subjective context of historical becoming. Feenberg posits: “This is an integrally cultural epistemology that admits of no “outside” of culture from which reality could be viewed, no privileged scientific preserve on the margins of the world.”^[186] The objectivity and positivism essential in how functionalists employ scientific rationalism is subsequently denied,^[187] as is the external economic (historical) materialism associated with Marxist theory after 1844. Objectivism is banished, and the social reality we humans experience cannot be known in some objective, external absolute. Radical humanists understand social reality from within the collective minds of those forming it as we move through time and space.

Gramsci migrated away from the ‘scientific socialism’ that Marx and Engels proposed. Gramsci: “[argued] that all knowledge is situated in a cultural context itself based on a class-specific worldview. No domain of knowledge and no corresponding domain of being is independent of society.”^[188] All of social reality is tied up in how humans experience and understand through cultural contexts and via a system of classes that are also entirely dependent upon the societal framework generated by humanity. What we know as reality is “a social product and not a thin-in-itself that precedes society and which would have to be perceived from a scientific beyond of culture to be known in its truth.”^[189] The very social reality people experience must be considered the cultural and historical processes that those same people are producing as reality unfolds in time and space.

Radical humanists discount all knowledge curation outside of their own social paradigm as false. Gramsci, citing Ugo Bernasconi, wrote: “What people call intelligence is often nothing more than the ability to comprehend secondary truths to the detriment of fundamental truths…this kind of intelligence is also generically called “talent”, and is [evident in] the kind of superficial polemic that is governed by the vanity of wanting to appear independent… to oppose fundamental truths with objections that consist of a whole series of partial and secondary truths.”^[190] These secondary truths are misleading and part of the social framework of oppression, where only a liberated, critical thinker can break free and gain access to the deeper, real truths about social reality. Thus, soldiers fighting a war on behalf of the bourgeoisie use secondary truths; the same bourgeoisie think their war victory ushers in new profits and markets rely on even more secondary truths. Simultaneously, state leaders of the victorious and defeated nations further adhere to secondary truths throughout a conflict, perpetually and unwittingly committed to frivolous, narrow-minded, and false logic according to Gramsci.^[191]

Postmodernism and Applications within (and beyond) Radical Humanism:

Critical theory is essential to how Social Marxism functions, but it is not the only major theoretical framework operating in that social paradigm. Postmodernism directly challenges the scientifically rationalized, objective, and universally ordered components of the functionalist paradigm by deconstructing them, inverting portions, and generating entirely dissimilar variations that undermine the original (functionalist, modern) premises. We will first discuss postmodern theory in this chapter, but extend this discussion into the next chapter where postmodernism plays a significant role within how the interpretivist paradigm operates. Like critical theory, postmodernism is a twentieth century development that began after the First World War.^[192] Whereas functionalists assume a goal-oriented rationality that is best appreciated within objective analysis and some assumed value neutrality, postmodernists critique this as illusionary. Goals are false, and objectivity is socially constructed to enable societies to force reality into various configurations that are otherwise assumed to be ‘natural.’ The postmodern mantra is to perpetually challenge and illuminate these unnatural distortions that modernity produces, explaining how and why humanity is constantly fooled and manipulated. Our worlds are entirely symbolic, produced by our own thoughts and connections, which then fold back in upon us and prevent us from seeing anything else.

The postmodern movement emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a philosophical challenge to the basic tenets of modernity, including the positivist epistemology that is foundational for the functionalist paradigm.^[193] Just as early physics and Newtonianism would subsequently be challenged and disrupted by new sciences such as quantum physics and complexity science, the modernist worldview on societies, economies, political processes, and how war occurs across civilization would be challenged by new postmodern thinking. This postmodern theorization is anchored outside of the functionalist paradigm, but beyond that, it remains difficult to map precisely due to how abstract and fractured the postmodern community of practice remains even a century after its original emergence. Whereas functionalism holds to an external and neutral actor able to objectively act upon reality in a scientifically rational and analytically optimized manner, postmodernists put the social construction of reality, language, and abstract phenomena such as signs and symbols as paramount in making sense of the world.

For postmodernists, language and symbols are how humans create and sustain social reality, something we can create but never escape. “Language cannot step outside itself.”^[194] It is impossible to conceptualize and discuss social reality which includes how we rationalize about conflict and war without using language, and since humans construct language itself, we cannot claim some universal concept of rationality might exist independent of a human-designed social reality.^[195] All attempts to demonstrate objectivity are themselves stained by human existence and our own efforts to conceptualize the objective while ignoring the subjective process of articulating in itself. “There is no methodology capable of achieving an unmediated, objective representation of the facts” for postmodernists.^[196] Social reality pulls itself up by its own bootstraps in that humans and physical reality form the basis of the social reality upon which humans attempt to contemplate themselves and physical reality. People cannot escape the social; there is no such thing as objectivity or engaging purely with the physical world. There is no way to prove some objective truth for postmodernists, while modernists, usually positioned within functionalism and holding to a positivistic epistemology, believe instead that all truth is provable through universal constructs discovered through scientific rationalism.

Postmodernism is often labeled as obtuse, exceedingly difficult to comprehend, or seemingly irrational and unscientific. These critiques are leveled frequently by functionalists but also, paradoxically, within postmodernism itself.^[197] Even postmodernists tend to disagree, and the subtle nuances between one and another, concerning how postmodernists reject any ultimate system of knowledge (including one that could encompass themselves).^[198] Any postmodern application to any of the social paradigms presented in this research would require what often can only be suggestive framings due to the volatility of postmodernism toward any attempts to clarify and define it. Postmodernism is not itself a social paradigm, instead is a construct too ill-defined other than the antithesis of modernity. Postmodernism is appropriately framed as a critical movement that migrates between certain paradigms.^[199] Postmodernists do associate with Marxist movements such as the Frankfurt School, but also critique them with postmodern positions.^[200] With modernity the focus of postmodern critique, it seems that functionalism, as the dominant social paradigm in operation by mainstream modern civilization, becomes the primary paradigm that postmodernism challenges. War is reconceptualized through postmodernism so that alternative war frames might be crafted from radical humanist and interpretivist camps.

Postmodernism stands oppositional to what we have previously covered in the functionalist and radical structuralist chapters. Paradoxically, postmodernism itself depends on modernity and both of these war paradigms to sustain itself. It cannot exist without some modernity to challenge and deconstruct. Postmodernists “seem to revel in the anarchy released by powers of aesthetic innovation and welcome the disruption of science, technology, and unifying reason.”^[201] Postmodernism begins in the twentieth century as a branch of various reactionary schools of thought that loosely correlate in how European nations produced vast, industrialized war machines that waged incredible yet seemingly pointless destruction in the First World War.^[202] Once more, the First World War generated significant fallout for humanity beyond the immediate death and destruction. The long-term consequences continue today.

The Interwar Period produced the rise of fascism, the collapse of multiple empires and centuries-old ruling families, along with different forms of Marxism and anti-capitalism. Anarchists and fracturing political groups pulled societies into new and different directions, while highly industrialized nation states progressed into ever-greater forms of technological, scientific, and societal developments. Modernity led to postmodernism, yet arguably postmodernism itself requires something ‘modern’ to exist as the target of critique and disruption. Postmodernists struggle with their relationship with modernity, with some offering that they represent ‘anti-modernity’ in how they exist to challenge and critique the modern world that itself hides many things from unwitting participants.^[203]

Postmodernists work within radical humanism by emphasizing the individual context, the subjectivity of reality and the ability for distortion, paradox, and absurdism. Analysis has no value in postmodern theory, as the processes to pursue such endeavors are merely illusions and assumed narratives that maintain false systems of power and oppression.^[204] Postmodernists critically deconstruct belief systems, particularly in language and symbols that underpin the narratives that support myths, ideologies, culture, and values that define any society. Postmodernism works with critiquing social reality to illuminate its absurdity, even into nihilistic pathways where life itself is meaningless and devoid of principles or value. At a minimum, they seek to deconstruct the values held by those within the modern society so that anything valued becomes value-less. The Invisible Committee, a French anarchist group introduced in the previous chapter, presents postmodern themes in their narratives where modern, technologically advanced, capitalistic, and also socialist societies are devoid of true human value or truth. In one passage, they state:

In another passage, the Invisible Committee deconstructs the contemporary environmental movements and progressive proponents of globalization. Instead of fighting the capitalist system that designed the environmental and societal damages around the world, these movements are essentially duped by that very system, seeking to use ‘green economies’ to fix the planet while sustaining the same capitalist system in a new form. Green companies remain capitalist, oppressive forms that still destroy the planet, people, and world. Their critique of social progressive movements extends to efforts to make the world more ethnically tolerant, culturally enlightened, socially aware, as all these efforts merely continue the enslavement of humanity in the same hierarchical dominant structures. Modernity is absurd:

The Invisible Committee thus dismisses the progressive movements as yet another form of the same system of capitalistic oppression, set within the hierarchical power arrangements that plague humanity. One can be either working for an oil company or protesting that oil company’s drilling rig off the coast of Texas, yet both are extensions of the same system that blinds them and creates a ‘fake reality’ that they imagine the real world as. In this false world, the oil company employee believes that they are right and the protesters are wrong, the protesters hold the opposing view, and both of them still remain trapped in an overarching false reality of social construction. Only the truly enlightened break free. In the context of anarchists such as the Invisible Committee, only those that understand why civilization must be destroyed are able to gain true enlightenment. Their critiques demonstrate postmodern themes.

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Functionalism (Part 2): Technology, Change, and Existential Violence Beyond Previous Manifestations

Abstract: This second of two chapters deepens the study of functionalism beyond the formative period of the nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. War changed in dynamic, existential ways with the arrival of the Nuclear Age and new political and international tensions. Scientific management, technological shifts, and new disciplines for thinking about complexity would stimulate changes within this war paradigm. Clausewitzians, adhering to the Prussian’s original teachings would after the Second World War be reborn in a Neo-Clausewitzian adaptation for new social realities. They did this adjacent to Jominians in new technological clothing that continued the objective positivist orientation toward war. The rise of fascism in the early twentieth century requires explanation as it is positioned within the functionalist war paradigm, presenting yet another way functionalism in the twentieth century would diversify beyond earlier Napoleonic origins. Two world wars became central to how functionalism would morph into new variations, while also preserving certain original beliefs in new wrappings. In the Cold War, small conflicts would be waged with new, often strategically restrictive considerations to deter existential fears of a nuclear Armageddon. Rapoport’s concept of ‘civilian defense’ would take on new pathways beyond the original Second World War manifestation, leading to new positions for conflict within a functionalist framing. The functionalist paradigm remains dominant today despite sharing an increasingly diverse stage with alternative war paradigms.

Keywords: functionalism, complexity, positivism, rationalism, scientific management, fascism

Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9760-3726

The last chapter provided the foundations for modernity as understood across the western, industrialized world. In the last several centuries, functionalism became the social paradigm of choice for nation states competing politically and through organized violence in a system of competitive societies. Functionalism emerged first and today remains the dominant paradigm for interpreting social reality and largely defining all major societal endeavors for most of the world, including what conflict and war are and are not. While the functionalist paradigm was largely alone and unchallenged for the first two centuries it dominated European along with colonial and imperial possessions, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it gained company. Other war paradigms developed, often in contradiction or confrontation to this dominant way to understand and act in reality. War itself would become reconceptualized.

The next several chapters introduce these alternative social paradigms such as radical structuralism, radical humanism, and interpretivism, and how they came into existence throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These other social paradigms emerged largely as a reaction to functionalism and the various ideologies and social developments that are associated with the functionalist dominance. War is also a powerful influence upon social reality, and twentieth century wars in particular are inevitably major contributing factors on how alternative social paradigms rose up to counter the functionalist narrative on what social reality was or was not. As the preeminent social paradigm throughout modernity, functionalism has morphed through different variations and developments since the nineteenth century. This chapter frames the challenges of how and why original war theories set against the Napoleonic Era, the Age of European Enlightenment, and the German Romanticism response require additional explanation beyond the intent of the designers. In particular, the repercussions of two World Wars would force functionalism toward different pathways previously inaccessible and unimaginable to those that first formed this war paradigm.

The core tension offered in this chapter is one of social and technological change between an earlier single-paradigm (functionalist) world to that of a multi-polar, multi-paradigmatic, and technologically advanced reality. Functionalism originally relied exclusively on Newtonian-styled, classical problem-solving techniques in contexts where reductionism could be assumed, and where environments changed slowly. Such situations had fewer (or marginalized) social groups and stakeholders with different perspectives about social reality, and there usually was some centralized, hierarchical form of authority that operated reasonably well.^[1] Although conflicts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were violent, destructive, and chaotic, they nonetheless did feature many of these traditional characteristics indicative of a Newtonian-styled, ordered, rule-based environment. Eric Dent explains: “problems also arise when people assume that [the traditional, Newtonian worldview] is accurate in all settings. Although it is inappropriate, and potentially inaccurate, researchers frequently use linear regression on non-linear phenomena.” Organizations assume linear causality in most instances, even when such phenomenon are not present. If Newtonian-styled processes work on individual, linear components in isolation, there is an institutional assumption that these same processes should work in the aggregate, for any and all problems in reality.

The pull of classical science would extend deep into the twentieth century, influencing societies, industry, governments, and their military instruments of power accordingly. This traditional worldview carried institutionalized assumptions that social reality could be best appreciated and manipulated through reductionism, objective observation, linear causation, and that all entities observable in any system are themselves a unit of quantitative analysis or measurement.^[2] The twentieth century brought forth profound changes both for societies, the scientific knowledge available to them, technological developments that provide novel and previously unimaginable abilities, and the need for new social paradigms that are better equipped to address these expansions of reality. The tension within the functionalist paradigm presented here is one of multiple, competing camps on what the correct functionalist war paradigm should be, and whether that alignment proved successful or not in actual conflicts. This is an unfolding and still emergent story about objective positivists seeking precise, analytically optimized control of the future battlefields including the very minds of the combatants,^[3] versus that of Neo-Clausewitzians desiring reform and refinement of Napoleonic Era constructs designed by the Prussian theorist to explain every and all war, always. Both co-exist in functionalism today, despite these tensions and frequently, beyond the immediate awareness of most practitioners.

They grind against one another, yet together formally present the majority orientation of the functionalist war paradigm. The twentieth and now twenty-first centuries have not, however, been particularly cooperative in enabling functionalism to interpret social reality without major blemishes and paradoxes. There have been so many errors and faulty outcomes for functionalist foreign policies and military strategies that much of the postmodern philosophical movement make a living illuminating these problems. Postmodernists go so far to argue that war itself has changed so that any modernist attempt to explain it is bankrupt. George Lucas, summarizing postmodernist Umberto Eco’s premise at the beginning of the First Gulf War in 1991, explains this critique of modernism:

(image not in chapter; added to this blog. Original source: https://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/estate/palace/coronation-room#to-the-glory-of-the-emperor)

Defenders of original Clausewitzian and Jominian war theories offer several counterpoints that will be examined in this chapter. Except for the most hardened conservatives of original functionalism, many do acknowledge that the scientific, technological, political, and social changes of the twentieth century suggest some refinement, reform, or transformation of the original functionalist frame for state systems and conflict. How much flexibility is considered becomes the spectrum between conservative reformers of modernity and the most extreme, radicalized postmodernists. Postmodernists, explained in subsequent chapters for radical humanism and interpretivism, provide a critical, disruptive assessment of the functionalist war paradigm than from those inside the paradigm. For example, the game of chess, as the original simulation for war,^[5] would be adapted in principle or through metaphoric devices by many of the original war theorists of the Napoleonic Era through the twentieth century. Postmodernists deconstruct functionalism using the same game construct, offering that: “[war] is now… more like a chess game in which every antagonist takes pieces of the same color, and no one can any longer clearly state just what the strategic goal is, or precisely who the real enemies are.”^[6] How willing various camps might agree to this depends often on their association within the functionalist paradigm, or their perspective from an alternative war paradigm looking in.

This chapter provides readers with the twentieth century developments and emerging tensions within the functionalist paradigm, along with several critical themes and challenges about conflict and war that operate inside of functionalism and sustain it today as the dominant social paradigm of choice. The technological and scientific progresses of the twentieth century are also inexorably linked to conflict, societal differences, and war. The first quantum revolution where humanity unlocked the secrets of the fundamental particles of the universe led to military applications in radar, the atomic bomb, lasers and later the first computers. ^[7] Humanity, once able to wage near-absolute war upon adversaries with traditional means of destruction now had a weapon that would change the rules and rational of war itself- the Atomic Age of conflict. ^[8] Nuclear Armageddon would from the 1950s onward force nations to recalibrate how they understood conflict in that ‘absolute war’ was now realized in an existential sense that exceeded original notions of ‘victory’ and ‘defeat.’ One tension within functionalism within contemporary settings is whether humanity is still in modernity or if it has shifted into postmodernity, where “we have left the modern age behind, and supplanted modernity’s confidence in social progress through science and rationality with postmodern relativism.”^[9]

Although portions of civilization may entertain that the world is now in postmodernity and has departed modernity sometime in the last several decades, contemporary military forces and their political overseers are best described by Booth et al. with the following: “[It] is clear that many contemporary militaries can be counted among the staunchest defenders of totalizing discourse… the sworn defense of the nation-state and its ideological symbols remains the formal raison d’ être of post-Cold War armed forces, these militaries continue in the tradition of modernity.”^[10] Perhaps it is better to explore how certain majority groups in this military community of practice attempt to modify the functionalist war paradigm without violating core ontological tenets, while minority groups appear to be pushing paradigmatic boundaries or in some cases, departing the paradigm entirely. This fragmentation of the traditional functionalist paradigm is ongoing and has been developing since the Second World War. Additionally, the functionalist paradigm faces other daunting challenges in how social reality operates, and the manner in which conflict must be considered in new ways beyond earlier considerations. Conflict, or the perceived threat of future war, would in this same transformative period advance industry, scientific progress, and domain expansion into new areas such as space, cyberspace, and most recently into artificial intelligence. These emerging contexts for conflict present significant disruption and challenge to several ontological and epistemological assumptions that previously operated smoothly in the functionalist depiction of social reality. Complex social reality in transformation demands paradigmatic adaptation.

Nuclear weapons are but one of several challenges facing functionalists since the 1940s. Although extremist groups date back as far as civilization existed, modernity produces several significant patterns on conflict and variations within functionalism where radical ideologies and worldviews require deeper explanation. Many extremist groups are explored in future chapters where they hold to ontological and epistemological positions best paired with a Marxist, Social Marxist, anarchist, or other belief system that is paradoxical with the functionalist paradigm for war.^[11] Within functionalism, plentiful extremist groups and doomsday cults do operate where similar ontologies share common ground. Rapoport’s theorization on divine, messianic, and eschatological war philosophies are readily applied here for a host of violent groups that still fall within the functionalist tent, yet cannot be lumped into some overarching term of ‘extremism’ with those other groups explained in the chapters on radical structuralism, radical humanism, or interpretivism. Nor should groups operating under other social paradigms be confused with functionalist extremists on matters of race, gender, ethnic and other social constructs. Anti-nuclear advocates within functionalism oppose such weapons for clear existential concerns. However, outside the functionalist paradigm, other anti-nuclear activists will also declare “the bomb itself is the most extreme expression of violence and control of the patriarchal, racist and capitalist world order.”^[12]

Throughout the twentieth century, functionalism remained the dominant paradigm for conflict and war held by western societies, particularly Europe and across non-western societies that extended similar ideas on politics, economic, and organized violence over the last few centuries. As addressed in the previous chapter, the modern nation state existed because it gained sovereignty via its own existence within a system of fellow self-sovereign states, if it could organize and defend itself against these similar state rivals. The European state system would first be explained by Machiavelli,^[13] and later reinforced in how state entities would continuously struggle, compete, take risks, and encounter friction and chaos as they shifted through politics and organized violence in what Clausewitz explained in On War.^[14] Prior to World War II and the arrival of the Nuclear Age, this struggle of independent states had a certain political equilibrium that Clausewitz best described as “war is the continuation of politics by other means,”^[15] when considered within the functionalist lens.

This political equilibrium rested upon the paradox that the majority of independent states shared a common interest in maintaining their independence by preventing any one state or coalition from threatening all states and forming some hegemony or empire, yet survival of such a balanced system implied that any individual state might be destroyed in conflict that nonetheless sustains the system for all surviving nations.^[16] There is no guarantee that any particular nation would survive in this system, as in war a nation might experience some near absolute form of destruction that Clausewitz addressed. The political consequences would be the total erasure of that state, or some assimilation into the victorious nation, yet an enduring state-system condition with established natural rights and norms of behavior for them. However, the aggregate of states maintaining this political equilibrium meant that if any particular state suddenly rose in power or offensive threat to others, the weaker or threatened nations would resolve this difference through diplomacy or organized violence. This endless cycle is a durable system for social reality and assumed as part of the functionalist ontology to be a natural, regular sort of affair. War and conflict are how the state system regulates itself, where disagreements unresolved by other means can be settled on the battlefield through organized violence that itself reflects the sovereign rights of the state system.

Technological change in the twentieth century ushered in a new phase in human existence, one where previously, the military means to political ends were understood to be subordinate. The military instrument of power was wielded by the state entity, and it employed technological and logistical means along with human capital to inflict organized violence against an enemy state’s instrument of military power along with that state’s ability to resource that instrument. Suddenly, with the creation of atomic weapons, the military means exceeded the political ends.^[17] Mutually assured destruction would prevent any single nation or coalition from declaring victory over another, as the adversary could annihilate them whether in a first strike surprise, or a second-strike retaliation even upon realization that they would never witness the war’s conclusion.^[18] One could no longer ‘win’ in the sense of Napoleonic Era warfare, or in any previous understanding of organized violence, unless ‘victory’ now reflected some deterrent stalemate preventing major conflict. Technological advancements in creating progressively more devastating weapons would, in the unlocking of atomic power, overshoot the goal envisioned by nearly every strategist seeking the ‘silver bullet’ of any battlefield.

The Nuclear Age creates a contradiction in the functionalist ontology for what war exists for. Nation states seeking to resolve differences through organized violence require a world to remain after the conflict where they are able to return to some non-violent status quo, which becomes impossible in a nuclear apocalypse. The act of war thereby violates the purpose of war, in that there remains no society for victors to impose their will. This is a unique and unprecedented development for humanity in that earlier near-absolute acts of war in periods of inferior technological and scientific achievement could result in a particular city, population, region, or even an empire to be destroyed. The broader system of cities, empires, and a social reality would remain for survivors and those outside the effects of such a conflict. Mythological and religious ‘super weapon’ concepts such as the Ark of the Covenant, an ancient object with devastating power, was supposedly used by the Israelites in battles against enemies and for religious purposes. The wooden chest filled with the Ten Commandments could knock down entire city defensive walls, blind or kill thousands, and when captured by the Philistines, cause plagues and curses upon the enemy’s people. ‘God-like’ destructive military power was a mythical dream (or nightmare) until scientific progress eventually created a way to achieve it.

The notion of an ultimate weapon for war has long been contemplated by our species, yet only in the twentieth century could something with existential destructive force be designed and implemented. Although temporary domain destruction could delay occupancy or prosperity for the targeted society, war prior to the 1940s never reached the tipping point to that of complete domain annihilation where nothing was left after weapon employment of an adversary.^[19] Nuclear war, once sufficient adversarial capability to strike or counterstrike was achieved, broke this otherwise unaltered rule of civilization. Total war now could be accomplished, but afterward humanity might not remain for any population to claim victory or enjoy the spoils of war.^[20]

This forced a shift in Clausewitzian logic, and also created new existential political forces that transformed the earlier political equilibrium of multiple nation states cycling through periods of peace and war. Wars would become limited in ways not previously considered, and new coalitions and hegemonies formed between rival superpower nations and their collective alliances.^[21] A new political equilibrium formed from the 1950s onward. This featured a dynamic, escalatory form of armament races, formal war economies, the total integration of industry and state security apparatuses into a ‘military industrial complex’, and the overarching fear of total societal annihilation from both sides. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, nation states and their military instruments of power, complete with an expanding defense industry, now represent a fully integrated entity that separates modern state systems from all earlier forms.^[22] This new system uses complexity theory, general systems theory, quantum theory, advanced mathematics, and entirely new sociological and other constructs that simply did not exist previously and have expanded our understanding of reality far beyond earlier configurations. Yet the functionalist paradigm still maintains a Newtonian styled orientation to war, one that integrates readily with the physical, tangible aspects of battle, but often skews wildly astray in the social, intangible properties of human conflict.^[23] Military historian James Gibson explains this tension between the functionalist preferred outlook on war and its incommensurability with alternative, non-functionalist rationalizations of human conflict:

Modern societies, particularly in the industrialized western world, sustain a functionalist war paradigm where conflict is rationalized via these mechanistic assumptions, where the state entity is itself a construct that is a complete unit. People are within the state, but it is the state that might be destabilized, collapsing, or even a ‘failed state’ where reformation and restoration again hold to these engineering metaphors. Newtonian styled models and methodologies, with arrangements in time and space are considered external to the human observer; the war managers mentioned above by Gibson need only target state apparatuses to defeat the nation.^[25] Cybernetic theorists would rely on scientific methods “and on steady, cumulative, quantitative research” that was ontologically assumed to be superior to “relying on the sporadic insights of the rare military genius.”^[26] This put cybernetic theorists in direct tension with Neo-Clausewitzians, for whom genius in war could not be isolated, bottled, and mass-produced nor fully understood.

In contrast, the objective positivists held a scientific view of management that “disdained individualistic notions of leadership… [in that] isolated individuals could only see limited perspectives.”^[27] The ontological position that reality might be frozen in time and place, isolated into manageable chunks, studied through the imposition of a natural order and regularity akin to the physical sciences, and reassembled so that organizations can go about achieving goals through engineered, formulaic processes^[28] is the scientific manager’s response to Clausewitzian calls for military genius and artistry to slice through the fog and friction of chaotic, passionate, brutal war. Scientists and academics would in the Cold War assume a position of superiority, one that rejected any individual or stylized judgements, habits, and wisdom accumulated over decades of military service.

Combat experience and any unscientific ‘institutional wisdom and tenets’ were essentially devalued as little more than cultural idioms and idiosyncrasies that helped with military unit identities and sense of purpose, but were inferior to the “cool rational calculations of the defence intellectual.”^[29] Antoine Bousquet points out that, “for an organization dominated by mathematicians, systems analysis appeared to be the way to get the scientific- the right answer.”^[30] For cybernetic war theorists, any strategic processes or activities that involved no systems analysis “were looked down upon, considered interesting in a speculative way at best.” ^[31] This largely ignores or marginalizes anything done outside a purely objective, quantitative, and linear-causal framework for understanding war. Clausewitz’s emphasis on military genius, social irrationality in war, and the chaotic friction in how humans addressed conflict would be largely denied by the modern scientific managers seeking to eliminate the fog and friction through cold, objective, and clear analysis. Cybernetics provided new clothing for objective positivists reborn; Jominian 2.0 would counter the rise of Neo-Clausewitzians.

From the national and international levels of policy and diplomacy, down into the application of military instruments of power focused on accomplishing reverse-engineered goals through linear-casual linkages of activities where presumed problems are paired with known solutions, and a systematic logic arranges tactical events to correspond with operations and larger campaigns, all nested hierarchically into overarching war strategies using entirely Newtonian constructs.^[32] Gibson critiques such mechanistic thinking with: “ “Falling dominoes,” “cork in the bottle,” “chain reaction”- these terms find their theoretical reference not in the social world of history where men live and die, but in the lifeless world of Newtonian mechanics.”^[33] Also termed ‘neo-positivism’, this reflects the belief that all useful knowledge can be generated directly from the abstract rules of scientific theory. The best solutions are tested, evaluated, and subsequently exploited to sustain techno-rational processes valued by the industrialized world.^[34] If something cannot be articulated, analyzed, and then positioned in a series of planned activities in an ‘ends-ways-means’ construct, it likely was devoid of any serious meaning or usefulness. Such things either required redoubled efforts to scientifically unlock their secrets, or they should be cast aside as anecdotal and inconsequential.

The arrival of weapons of mass destruction would require significant re-tooling of the original or classical Clausewitzian war theory used by functionalists. Many concepts retained their original value, such as the significance of subjective, socially constructed aspects of war such as passion and hatred that could not be analytically optimized through objective positivism. However, Rapoport raises the point that “it is not necessary to hate anyone in order to kill everyone” in the Nuclear Age for humanity.^[35] The Clausewitzian foundation of passion within societies as part of his war trinity becomes marginalized. In a cold, rational conclusion of nuclear calculus, one nation’s leadership might take the advice of scientists, academics, and military managers to strike first and eliminate an adversary completely if the perfect assumed window were present. The destruction of an adversary nation along with the supposedly objective, logical decision-making process to engage in war would no longer include Clausewitz’s “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity” as modeled within his trinity where the people, the military commander and army, and the government interact.^[36] Hatred, even passion is removed in such a proposed engagement, and twentieth century nuclear war strategic documents are written accordingly in objective, mathematically rationalized, logical rhetoric. The terrifying scale of existential weaponry would demand a reconceptualizing of Clausewitz and associated war theorists of the Napoleonic Era to rationalize a new, relevant political war philosophy within the functionalist paradigm.

The term ‘Neo-Clausewitzian’ is used here to explain the shift from earlier, classical war thinking adherent to the original Prussian understanding of Napoleonic warfare to that of the twentieth century conflict. Part of this transformation comes from the changes in social reality such as the development of Marxism and alternative war philosophies as explained by Rapoport and other critics of On War. Some transformation occurred due to radical changes in technology and what war could be in the Nuclear Age, as explored in the next section. Yet a major reason for Neo-Clausewitzian development came from within the functionalist paradigm, where new thinking in management and decision-making created a reactionary movement within the military toward scientists and mathematicians. As new consultants and advisors began infiltrating military affairs, particularly in the Interwar Period and throughout World War II, “military commanders were often suspicious of the methods and recommendations of ivory-tower scientists.”^[37] Neo-Clausewitzians opposed the sterile, laboratory-like rendering of war by the cybernetic war theorists as it divorced the social and metaphysical from the physical and tangible. Those same scientists viewed military generals as barbaric laymen, simpletons, or worse. This leads to a gap between experts within the same war paradigm, and for the practitioners employing either stance, frequently an unwitting compliance that need not introspectively ponder why one or the other is championed.

Cybernetic war theorists championed the use of science and technological innovation with an assumed moral progression for civilization. This meant that ontologically, the state system could adapt scientific-style management for policy, diplomacy, war, and other state needs so that non-scientific and harmful processes and behaviors might be eliminated from the equation. Intuition, ‘gut instincts’, and ‘genius’ that failed to fit into some standardization or analysis were unwelcome in such a framework, meaning that Neo-Clausewitzians and their continued emphasis on heroic leadership, genius in generalship, and the passions swirling within the fog of war were considered outdated romantics.^[38] Future war, for cybernetic advocates, could become standardized with rigorous, quantitative decision-making fed with analytic optimization of massive amounts of data. The future should become more predictable, controlled by the technocratic nation capable of maximizing resources, time, and speed of decision, so that complex operations might be planned so pervasively and regulated through tight scientific management of forces that an inferior, slower, less-capable opponent stood no chance. Management in complex warfare is thus associated with “deliberate setting of rules, process engineering, and rationally-derived resource allocation decisions to handle tame (recurrent) problems that have been solved before. Key management values are bureaucratic and technocratic (technological).”^[39]Such dramatic technological promises defined the 1950s (and onward) along with stoked fears of nuclear apocalypse, also delivered through advanced technological and scientific means.

Nuclear Age Functionalism: Of Cybernetics and Neo-Clausewitzians

The conclusion of the Second World War was unlike any previous conflict our species experienced. The First World War ended in a slow, painful gasp as Germany and France essentially bled one another dry of human capital, resources, and any comprehensible political aim to resolve the differences that started the conflict. Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated his throne, and Germany lurched into a republic while suffocating within revolutionary factions and devastation within the nation.^[40] Chancellor Friedrich Ebert sued for armistice, creating new grievances for later German aggression due to the terms of surrender, while French society adapted a defensive strategy seeking to avoid future blood lettings while simultaneously driving German resentment toward radicalization and desperation. Despite the assortment of astounding and novel technological and scientific developments that were weaponized in World War I, the participants held to the traditional fears of individual loss of life. Surrender promised survival of Germany, albeit in a new political form, remained a nation state competing in the system of fellow state powers. By surrendering, those still alive could contemplate their losses, assess the consequences of the last four years, and continue the Clausewitzian ontological assumption that in some next war, things might turn out differently. World War I would be the last major conflict able to exercise such purely functionalist reasoning without hesitation.^[41]

When the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities and ultimately produced a formal conclusion to World War II for all participants still fighting, the world marveled at the horrific and technologically astounding new weapon that could destroy entire cities. What had previously taken waves of bombers and thousands of traditional munitions was replaced by a single weapon delivered by one aircraft. The ultimate weapon was realized, and now any future war required serious existential consideration if any nation involved or ancillary to the conflict had these new weapons of mass destruction. In the Nuclear Age, the idea of limited war became obvious enough that militaries did not really need to read Clausewitz at all and grasp the paradox that weapons of mass destruction ushered into political war philosophy.^[42] No longer could a nation state pursue ‘absolute’ war and the total destruction of the army or the state political existence, as a rival nation might retaliate with similar annihilation that prevented anyone from claiming ‘victory.’^[43] Neo-Clausewitzians would need to adapt to this change, offering new interpretations that still sustained ‘absolute war’ constructs without triggering this new paradox. Limited wars, containment policies, and nuclear deterrence became new watchwords for reinvigorating the Clausewitzian framing of war, complete with new arguments to deny cybernetic theorists their cold, objective, and mathematical rendering of war as a deadly contest of numbers, risk factors, and attrition.

Nuclear conflict changed how nations formed military policies, and would trickle down into every possible strategy formation as part of the overarching effort to deter nuclear escalation. If any conflict could surge toward massive and total nuclear retaliation between great powers, this created an identity crisis for the traditional armed forces in what their role ought to be. Historian Russell Weigley saw the transformation of the American Army in the 1950s-1960s as one where the civilian analysists could give them new purpose in waging and winning limited wars that would be designed to prevent nuclear escalation.^[44] The new managerial need to fuel massive, standing armies in peacetime, the long-term production and resourcing of technologically advanced weapon systems, and the integration requirements to orchestrate vehicles, projectiles, communications, radar, and electronic counter-measures required a military industrial complex unlike anything seen before. “This naturally empowered those analysts who proposed a scientific methodology according to which technological and budgetary decisions could be determined…[this] approach promoted an understanding of warfare which reduced it to a mathematical problem with a number of manipulable variables and a production model that could be scientifically managed along Taylorist ideals.”^[45] Nation states and the entire state system would need to balance a collective nuclear deterrence effort while seeking new ways to engage in conflict to address differences otherwise unsolved by diplomacy. Nuclear deterrence and some international ‘balance of power’ became the new watchwords for sustaining the state-based system for the functionalist war paradigm. Radical humanists, explained in the seventh chapter, take a diametrically opposing view to this. For them, these strategies do not sustain peace and prosperity, but are the reason that war, conflict, and human suffering are perpetually occurring.^[46] Functionalists encounter this perspective in various forms of anti-nuclear protest, demonstrations over foreign policy and war, and radical proposals by activists seeking transformation of the established functions of the modern state.

Some Neo-Clausewitzians, including Bernard Brodie, revisit Clausewitz and his realist period on limited war for political ends, seeking to adapt them to this new Nuclear Age. Classical Clausewitzian war theory could no longer be taken seriously except in antiquated conflicts that might occur between two non-nuclear nations, often occurring in parts of the world not considered strategically essential for any nuclear-equipped state powers or alliances. Brodie saw the theorization by Clausewitz of a pure or absolute form of war as realized by the development of nuclear weapons, suggesting that armies in such a nuclear exchange seemed irrelevant.^[47] Rapoport explains: “Without doubt the Cold War was the most likely source of the most devastating violence to be perpetrated on the human race by human beings…a few individuals at the controls of vast military machines, which, once set in motion, can obliterate hundreds of millions of lives in a few hours.”^[48] Wars between nations unimportant to the bipolar world, or those waged by proxies or surrogates as pawns in the emerging Cold War could be left well enough alone, however in many cases the nuclear superpowers and allies often pursued smaller conflicts underneath the all-consuming tension of continued nuclear deterrence.

Nuclear weapons required sophisticated technological and scientific thinking and capabilities that collectively would move humanity into a new era of computerization, digitalization, and the expansion of military weaponry to absurd levels of global destruction. New delivery means directly influenced the Space Race and eventually which superpower might put the first human footprints on the moon. Previous metaphors and models that came from the natural sciences into military pseudo-scientific applications were often empirically considered, such as Newton’s explanation of speed, mass, momentum, and energy being adapted into explaining how armies wage battle against one another, or how Clausewitz used wrestlers and duels to explain state-on-state organized violence.^[49] The Information Age and the rise of computerized technology changed this from the mechanistic to the digital, data-centric, abstracted and systemic. Bousquet explains:

While many of the mechanical, highly objective, and linear-causal activities of the battlefield remained relevant and prolific after World War II, the rise of computers and the technological sophistication of military hardware created new ways of thinking about warfare, and war itself for functionalists. Once the Soviet Union successfully tested their own atomic bomb in 1949, the world shifted into a new period of warfare. Here, nations had to contemplate greater tactical risk of failure if by doing so their broader actions prevent a conflict from escalating into a nuclear one of existential jeopardy to themselves, if not the world. Naval professor Rear Admiral Henry Eccles contemplated this in 1957 while citing James King Jr. on the notion that future wars now had additional restraints that previously were unimaginable: “Moreover, we must be prepared to fight limited actions ourselves, otherwise we shall have made no advance beyond “massive retaliation” which tied our hands in conflicts involving less than our survival. And we must be prepared to lose limited actions.”^[51] Tactical defeat would become entirely plausible as a military outcome, if such action were a means to a political ends that sustained nuclear deterrence.

Clausewitz’s classical framing of absolute or total war never intended to encompass such a devastating and paradoxical manifestation of war.^[52] Absolute war could not produce a victor in mutually assured destruction, and Neo-Clausewitzians would have to negotiate a return to a realist form of late Clausewitzian ‘limited wars of politically imposed restraints’ that would serve to achieve state goals that included preservation of nuclear deterrence above all else.^[53] Yet another significant development in the post-World War II period of the 1950s and 1960s was a gradual weaking of the linkages between the American people and the military, according to Clausewitzian advocates such as Colonel Harry Summers Jr., explaining the failings in Vietnam. The Nuclear Age moved the military into a Cold War setting that featured a large, permanent peacetime military instead of the earlier cycling of reserve forces, draft boards for necessary wartime preparations, and a new political requirement to contain communist expansion globally. The military became linked closer to the President and senior policymakers, and the formal declarations of war and general support of the public were no longer considered essential in the race to contain communism and prevent nuclear annihilation.^[54]

Although the Korean Conflict would be the first limited conflict within the Cold War where military forces attempted to prevent the spread of communism without triggering some escalation into high-intensity, potentially nuclear war, the American involvement in the Vietnam War soon took center stage in how the functionalist war paradigm transformed in the mid-to-late twentieth century. While the original technological and scientific successes in modern warfare as demonstrated during World War II gave birth to the later developments of the functionalist paradigm in the Nuclear, Information, and Space Age, the strategic failures of the Vietnam War served as the first major failures of technical rationalism.^[55] How the various factions within the functionalist paradigm would operate throughout that decade-long conflict and then in the aftermath is the focus of the next section.

American Technological Rationalism: Cybernetics and Measuring to Win

The Neo-Clausewitzians would not be alone within the functionalist paradigm in the mid-twentieth century and the rise of the Nuclear Age and an ever-expanding military industrial complex of scientists and state instruments of military power. The earlier sixteenth through seventeenth century objective positivists such as Vauban, Lloyd, and Jomini never left the Western war paradigm, often used in varying degrees along with advocates of classical or later Neo-Clausewitzian logic.^[56] Whereas many advocates of Clausewitzian warfare remain on the subjective edge of functionalism where the psyche within human minds and collective consciousnesses of armies or state populations cannot be rendered into quantitative objectivity, this does not represent the totality of modern functionalism. Cybernetic warfare and technical rationalism became the modern reinterpretation of earlier objective positivism found in the original work of Vauban, Jomini, Montecuccoli, Fuller, and Bülow. ‘Jominian 2.0’ would rescue and restore these original military objective positivists, dressed in new technological and scientific robes. The large-scale, clunky, and mass-effect style of two world wars could, in the eyes of these technological rationalists, move war into a post-Clausewitzian arrangement. Lucas clarifies:

Post-Second World War thinking within the objective positivist side of functionalism morphed toward embracing new technologies to rationalize earlier scientific aspirations of total control in war. As resolute functionalists, they shared a faith that the best form of government was a system of states where each state assumed a technocratic one capable of using a positivistic appreciation of scientific thinking to manage complex systems without resorting to the messy, irrational world of politics.^[58] They would pursue some perfected, analytically optimized understanding of war would once more rally their beliefs around the new computerized tool for organized violence: information. Bousquet, citing Ralph Hartley from 1928, demonstrates this desire with: “[we have the need] to eliminate the psychological factors involved and to establish a measure of information in terms of purely physical quantities.”^[59] If digitalized information and technologically sophisticated computer processing could analyze everything of significance in war, including the reasoning and probability of various behaviors occurring inside the minds of the participants, then war could be technically rationalized in ways that did not require the metaphysical abstractions that Clausewitz introduced from German Idealism and Romanticism. Indeed, cybernetic war theorists rejected the Prussian maxim that war is a continuation of politics by other means, in that politics itself could be marginalized by seeking the sound rationalization of purely scientific thinking and mathematical precision.^[60] Science could manage politics and therefore the wars created by political crisis. Nuclear deterrence might be a deadly game played by diplomats, but the scientists stacked the deck and arranged the house rules.

(image above has Robert McNamara advising the President; McNamara represented the rise of the military technical rationalists)

Thus, the technical rationalists of modern warfare after World War II embrace a cybernetic approach that moved them surprisingly closer to the objective positivists of the sixteenth and seventeenth century battlefields, except armed with massive computing power and exquisite sensors and networks of machines instead of slide rules and inkwells. Management theorist Frederick W. Taylor provided much of the management foundation in the early twentieth century, attempting to transform the politics of running a business into an objective scientific endeavor, and his concepts would directly inspire similar treatment of military forces and how wars might be managed.^[61] Taylor’s work, along with Fordism as inspired by the car manufacturer’s revolutionary assembly line, would together stimulate major industrial, governmental, and military developments as nations had to mobilize their entire human capital and resources to properly wage modern warfare. General systems thinking would provide the cybernetic logical framework. Bousquet summarizes the cybernetics adaptation with:

Cybernetics provides the promise of control and stability, which for military managers was the ultimate goal in what was an increasingly uncertain, unstable reality.^[63] Taylorism, as a management theory, would deconstruct hierarchical tasks and complex problems in manufacturing and production down to the individual worker, and then even down into distinct muscle and limb movements of the worker. First applied in the pre-computer period of the early twentieth century in vast industrial assembly lines, Taylorism would eventually become partnered with computerized curation of data for war applications. Gaining some percentage of efficiency gain at the smallest level, such as giving a worker a stool to sit upon while tightening wheel lugs, could speed up that worker’s output and move the entire production process along faster. Data captured on bombing runs, or collected on enemy killed and captured could be fed into vast intelligence calculations, designed to render increasingly accurate probabilities. Taylorism in the early twentieth centuries fueled the expansion of industrialization, bureaucratization, and in war, the clash of previously inconceivable masses of men, weapons, and resources against one another in a scientifically rationalized, quantitatively optimized manner. These first attempts at a scientific management of industry and production would, throughout the twentieth century, generate iterations of refinement and reform in both industry and in military organization.

Twentieth century industry and government in western nations adapted the scientific management processes of Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915) due to the allure of gaining some scientifically rational mode of management. This was by no means a singular obsession of the military, as major companies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would also adapt scientific methodologies toward production, bureaucratic centralization, and a technocratic approach to gaining efficiencies in set goals and objectives. Taylorism would, between the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, shift the industrialized world away from the earlier craft customs, guilds, and arbitrary decision-making of past periods to a new process that “specialized tasks and separated planning from doing.”^[64] The natural sciences were not just the source for explaining social and physical reality, but inspiration for how managers could begin to imagine themselves as scientists who could apply universal laws to specific contexts, whether business related, governmental, or toward war.

(image above depicting scientific management associated with Fordism and Taylorism)

Advocates of Taylorism sought to use scientific methods and knowledge to attempt the neutralization of social conflicts, irrational decision-making, and ultimately through a capitalist lens eradicate economic inefficiencies that implied some intrinsic growth across all classes of society. This centers them ontologically as functionalists, particularly in the objective positivist side and decidedly critical of any Marxist interpretation of social reality whether radical structuralism or radical humanism.^[65] Objective positivism permitted this assumption that rational governance, whether industry, politics (including war), or academic endeavors, could be value-free processes where managers need only hold to the pure, objective principles such as mathematics and logical treatment of data. Cybernetic war theory paired Taylorism management with the cold logic of closed systems arranged in reliable, ordered loops and rigid hierarchical nesting. “These nested hierarchies constitute a top-down architecture of control which cyberneticists see as explanatory of the ‘increasing complexity which characterizes such fundamental developments as the origin of life, multicellular organisms, the nervous system, learning and human culture.’ Bureaucratic organizations and their top-down command layers offer another obvious example in human societies.”^[66]

The military had in post-World War II period abdicated strategy-making to civilian analysts and political scientists that were grounded in academia and governmental bureaucracy, not war.^[67] Much of the fifties and sixties in the escalating Cold War with the Soviet Union and emerging limited conflicts in Korea and Vietnam would see far greater influence by cybernetic theorists of war. Scientific managers framed social reality, including volatile conflicts, politics, and military strategy as something detached from messy ethical or subjective debates. Using numbers and cold logic, war could be simplified and ethics need not apply to the serious work of planning and managing organized violence. Decision-making could, for scientists and mathematicians advocating technical rationalism, separate administration from politics, optimize strategies toward quantitative success, clearly define any problem and balance goals both without bias and through an assumed value neutrality as found in the natural sciences.^[68]

Cybernetics would shift the functionalist interpretation of how social reality worked by emphasizing a self-regulating, balanced system where optimized performance (input leading to known, ordered output) is the overarching goal for the entire system.^[69] Cybernetic war methodologies require the technology, resources, and transformation of existing military strategic, operational, and tactical thinking toward a new system of command and control that deviated from Neo-Clausewitzians, although both groups frequently overlapped within the functionalist paradigm in execution of various wars and military activities. Original Taylorism started the modern discipline of scientific management that quickly moved from war to industry, and then back and forth as practitioners could migrate between the two in peacetime and during war. Post-Second War veterans of cybernetic war theory sold themselves to big industry, making the seductive claim that “they had contributed to winning the war and argued that war heroes who had “helped to lick Hitler” could help a business lick its competition.”^[70] Later, this would lead to something called ‘Neo-Taylorism’, a movement where scientific generalists could adapt their systematic managerial methodology to nearly any field or organizational endeavor. War, politics, industry, or social reforms all could equally be managed better, made more efficient, with risks reduced and clear objectives quickly achieved without loss of life or significant cost.

Robert McNamara, first serving in World War II doing quantitative bombing analysis in the Pacific Campaign, later served as American secretary of defense during the Vietnam War and presented a clear, technical rationalist interpretation of conflict within the functionalist paradigm. Stetler, introducing Vietnam Communist General and direct adversary Vo Nguyen Giap’s writings, quotes McNamara to illustrate this paradigmatic tension concerning war. McNamara once stated: “Every quantitative measurement we have shows we’re winning this war.”^[71] Notoriously responsible for the American ‘body count’ metric to show operational progress, McNamara’s technical rationalism showcases a cybernetic mindset on extending earlier functionalist war theorization into modern warfare.^[72] One could analytically optimize, and ‘win by numbers’ in clear, linear-causal fashion. The below figure illustrates this emerging tension within the functionalist war paradigm between technical rationalists and Neo-Clausewitzians occupying opposite ontological regions of the paradigm.

Neo-Clausewitzians would not necessarily view war as McNamara and the ‘whiz kids’ of cybernetic war theory did. Despite being tangled together in military doctrine, these camps disagreed at the ontological and epistemological level on a variety of war assumptions. One major difference between these two functionalist camps as illustrated above after the mid-twentieth century versus the original tensions between Jominians and Clausewitzians a century earlier is the arrival of computers. “Computers were effectively the ideal war-gamers: cold, logical, purely instrumental and devoid of the messy cultural, social, and historical attributes that plagued human players and could not be mathematically modelled.”^[73] Computerization and the new ability to process massive amounts of data through complicated analysis granted the objective positivists a new, second wind. Through sufficient sensor placement, speed of information, and accurate formulas able to manage the data correctly, the modern military managers of conflict could reduce the fog and friction of chaotic war into ordered, smaller components that could be isolated, treated, and re-assembled to the user’s total advantage.

For Neo-Clausewitzians, quantitative analysis had value, yet the passions of society, the chance and uncertainty of complex battlefields, and the individual genius of leaders could not merely be reduced to mathematical formulas. They would continue to argue the systemic appreciation of both the physical and tangible in war with the metaphysical and intangible, even within the new technological developments such as the Nuclear Age, Space Age, and Information Age. The strategic and political stalemate in Vietnam by the late 1960s produced for the Neo-Clausewitzian camp sufficient evidence that no matter how much technology, data, computerization, or mathematical formulation might be thrown at war, scientific management through technical rationalism was no ‘silver bullet’ for winning modern wars. Although McNamara helped usher in scientific management and what would become cybernetic war theorization with his analytical successes in World War II during the strategic bombing campaign over Japan, McNamara would play a significant role in producing major military failure as President Kennedy’s secretary of defense during the Vietnam War.

McNamara “[applied] the most sophisticated methods of management science available”, created the Office of Systems Analysis in 1961, and helped shift the movement of scientific management out of tactical applications and weapon acquisition into far more difficult areas of strategic planning, policy-making, and military intelligence assessments.^[74] American leaders in the Vietnam War began to see all conflict “through managerial terms and numbers, they sought to maximize credits and minimize debts by using resources efficiently… They also assumed that this method was suited to modern wars, which were essentially wars of attrition.”^[75] Neo-Clausewitzians stood largely opposed to this, and in the post-war period of reflection and soul-searching, the Neo-Clausewitzians would lash out against the tight grip of objective positivism upon the military and policymakers. One could not win wars based on computer printouts, mathematical formulas, and statistics masquerading as strategy. Colonel Harry Summers would lead this charge, using the Prussian’s war thesis On War as the central pillar to a formal critique of the Vietnam War failings. Using Clausewitzian theory and a strict interpretation of the Vietnam War as a modern failure by politicians, civilian advisors, and career governmental employees drunk on scientific management theory, this Vietnam veteran officer published several lengthy treatments on how the Vietnam War was a strategic and organizational failure. It centered on a military, led by civilian leadership equally uneducated on the basic Clausewitzian concepts available in On War. Summers attempted to restore the military institution and critically expose the folly of technical rationalists:

The military could not win large-scale, lengthy conflicts through formulaic activities of counting enemy kills, bombs dropped, and assume that wars of attrition could be scientifically managed as if state-on-state conflict occurred in some vacuum.^[77] Summers provides Neo-Clausewitzians with a powerful argument against the cybernetic war theorists in that regardless of tactical victories on the battlefield, failure to address the broad societal passions of the American people and also those of Vietnam led to failure. Such things cannot be isolated into mathematical certitude, nor quantitatively described and controlled through computation and measurement of objective data. Waring captures this tension colorfully with: “As a result, management scientists understand management in the same abstract way that a “eunuch” understands “sex.””^[78] Neo-Clausewitzians consider the cybernetic approach as an insufficient and technologically obsessive misstep for modern militaries that might only be fixed through restoration of earlier nineteenth century war theory.

Chaos and passion in war cannot be eliminated for functionalists, nor might fog and friction ever be completely removed so that militaries could predict accurately and decisively in anything but the simplest of pursuits in war. Neo-Clausewitzians advocate the education of military leaders so that, just as Scharnhorst and Clausewitz attempted in the nineteenth century, they may become comfortable with being uncomfortable, thriving in the paradox of war by thinking divergently and creatively. This is often associated with the military design movement that emerged in the late 1990s.^[79] Cybernetic warfare theorists largely reject these ontological stances, assuming that with ever-increasing computational power and sophisticated technological gains on the battlefield, predetermined victory is feasible. Neo-Clausewitzians would not deviate much from the original Prussian maxim that decisive victory in war cannot be reached without striking and defeating the enemy’s primary ability to fight and resist. In counterinsurgencies that would plague western militaries in the early twenty-first century in particular, Neo-Clausewitzians rejected political war theorists (such as Mao or Giap, covered in the next chapter with radical structuralism) and that victory might be achieved through delay and small, guerrilla operations acting to secure or assist the main army force.^[80] Neo-Clausewitzians, even accounting for limited conflicts in the Nuclear Age, can only achieve decisive victory through main battle.

An army, in this technical rationalist perspective within the functionalist paradigm, could gain such technological overmatch that no enemy would dare face them, and if one did, their actions would already be coldly predicted in advance. Bousquet, explaining the complex relationship between science and military decision-making, observes: “This understanding of information and communication would be central to the constitution of cybernetics as the science of control and communication in all systems, be they biological, mechanical, or social in nature.”^[81] Sociologist and retired Army Colonel Christopher Paparone would offer James R. Schlesinger’s management within the Pentagon in the 1960s as another useful example of cybernetic thinking in war. Schlesinger, a disciple of Robert McNamara, “reduced the Pentagon problem of managing the military into two parts: (a) How much resource to divert to defence and (b) How to use such resources.” This produced, as Paparone described it, “a world of predictability through a detailed analysis, thereby confirming the institutionalized qualities of [the Operations Research/Systems Analysis functional area or ORSA]. Today, ORSA-produced models dominate decision-making in the Pentagon to the point where other decision theories and practices are not viable.”^[82] Technical rationalists have since the dawn of the Information Age taken hold of the functionalist paradigm so much that the Neo-Clausewitzians are frequently forced to the sidelines. Advocates of Clausewitz remain prominent in academic or intellectual environments such as in advanced military schools and war colleges but less so in operational commands or places like the Pentagon where technical rationalists appear to maintain the upper hand.^[83]

Technical rationalists have, in the last eight decades of increasingly sophisticated computerization and digitalization, promised that the next wars will be decided entirely within a cybernetic race to information supremacy. The rise of computers and technological innovation created certain enthusiasm for the technical rationalists, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s when computers went from room-sized and sluggish to more miniaturized and more sophisticated models. Bousquet remarked on this with: “In a Cold War framed by the threat of nuclear devastation, computers acted as powerful tools and metaphors, promising ‘total oversight, extracting standards of control, and technical-rational solutions to a myriad of complex problems’… Visions of omnipotence through air power and nuclear weapons assisted by ‘centralized, instantaneous, automated command and control’ are summoned in response to fears of an expansionist Soviet Empire.”^[84] In an October 1969 lunchtime speech to the Association of the U.S. Army, General Westmoreland demonstrated the cybernetic war theorization that was clearly taking hold of senior military leadership as they embraced computerized ways of warfare:

On the battlefield of future, enemy forces will be located, tracked, and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data links, computer assisted intelligence evaluation, and automated fire control. With first round kill probabilities approaching certainty, and with surveillance devices that can continually track the enemy, the need for large forces to fix the opposition physically will be less important…I see battlefields or combat areas that are under 24-hour real or near time surveillance of all types. I see battlefields on which we can destroy anything we locate through instant communications and the almost instantaneous application of highly lethal firepower. I see a continuing need for highly mobile combat forces to assist in fixing and destroying the enemy…Our problem now is to further or knowledge- exploit our technology, and equally important- to incorporate all these devices into an integrated land combat system. ^[85]

The timing of Westmoreland’s comments in historic contexts is somewhat paradoxical, in that nearly two years prior, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese People’s Army launched a massive sneak attack on January 30, 1968, against U.S. and South Vietnamese forces in Vietnam. The Tet Offensive was a complete surprise to the technologically advanced American military, and while the costly attacks on military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam would set the Viet Cong back operationally for years, the shock and devastation of that sneak attack fostered serious changes in American public opinion and support of the war. Neo-Clausewitzians would find the Tet Offensive as illustrative not of the cybernetic rationalism that war could be rendered into pure information and computations, but that the passions, chaos, friction, and fear are as paramount in the 1960s in mainland Southeast Asia as they were in Napoleonic Era Prussia when Clausewitz first wrote his treatise.

Arguably, Westmoreland believed at an ontological level that reality could ultimately be deciphered, split from the noise and chaos, and curated into some perfect harmony of precision and control in war. This would be not a Clausewitzian perspective within the functionalist paradigm, but that of an objective positivist reliant on technical rationalism; the modern cybernetician for war. Indeed, Clausewitz sought to educate commanders on chaos as an essential and unavoidable part of war. Cybernetic theorists repositioned chaos as the enemy of the perfect, something to be averted at all costs due to the destabilizing effects it had on precision and prediction in war.^[86] Chaos such as the Tet Offensive signified the analytical paralysis that had taken effect upon the massive American military machine. Such an attack was statistically impossible for the Viet Cong to pull off, thus the potential for it to happen was nil and a waste of resources to contemplate. Yet it happened, and completely blindsided all military analysis and intelligence reporting. The Tet Offensive in 1968 as a harbinger of military techno-war overindulgence would reappear in future conflicts where the advanced, highly trained, well-resourced military force would suddenly be blindsided by an enemy that had far less technology, training, or resource wealth. This was evident with the Fall of Kabul in August 2021 (half a century later) being a similar unanticipated and rapid defeat of technologically overmatched forces by primitive-tech, resource poor, non-professionalized insurgents.^[87]

This assumption that technical and scientific knowledge is superior to others and must be uniformly controlled and disseminated across the military force underpins another plank of the modern war paradigm. Here, this myth that “there is little or no exaggeration in the assertion that without doctrine large military operations cannot be carried on satisfactorily against a strong and active foe, and that the influence of doctrine upon victory is profound” remains dominant for both cybernetic war theorists and Neo-Clausewitzians today.^[88] This reflects the shared historical experiences of Westphalian states and their military instruments of power engaging in wars of attrition against similar nation state peers also equipped with industry, a professional military, and sufficient war technology. This also illustrates the ontological assumption in the functionalist war paradigm that the hierarchical conditioning of warfighting knowledge must be formalized into a formulaic, universal, and positivistic epistemological mode for scientific management of organized violence. In practice, many advanced and modern military forces with ample doctrine have lost wars to decidedly unprofessional, poorly trained, weakly resourced opponents with hardly any doctrine at all. As mentioned earlier, the Taliban defeated both the Soviets in the 1980s and American plus partnered forces in the early twenty-first century without formal doctrine, military schools, or modern military logistics. The same can be stated for how the Islamic State, Boko Haram, Houthi rebels in Yemen, and a host of other non-doctrinal forces have demonstrated significant wins or lengthy occupations of significant territory and populations against adversaries equipped not just with robust ‘scientific’ doctrine, but tremendous technological, educational, and logistical advantages.^[89]

Cybernetic war theory holds another epistemological assumption that the servomechanism, or cybernetic system, is as significant to this age of societal progress as the nineteenth century was to the steam engine, or the eighteenth century and the mechanical clock.^[90] Social reality can best be understood within this cybernetic view of the world through a series of interconnected structures that form a larger system, where nation states compete on the global stage through a series of competitive, cooperative, and sometimes adversarial engagements including war. Everything can and must be rationalized objectively through clear, analytically optimized data that can be collected and arranged in elaborate formulas and linkages. Modern perspectives on complex warfare center on ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ and ‘System of System’ thinking, where the complex environment might be probed, sensed, and systematically arranged by discovering patterns and clues.^[91] Social network analysis and military modeling efforts such as ‘Effects Based Operations’ would seek to map out complex systems drawing inspiration from organic chemistry diagrams and biology. Paparone again offers valuable summary of this mainstream military approach that endorses a positivist epistemology set within the functionalist paradigm under a cybernetic theory for war: “Simply stated, BIOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION is when ORGANISMS, as COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS, adjust to the operational ENVIRONMENT by changing the way to TRANSFORM inputs from the ENVIRONMENT into outputs back into the ENVIRONMENT.”^[92] The central organizing logic present is that military transformation and development moves in a dependent relationship to ecological pressures as defined in biology, rationalized into how a species over time or an individual organism responds to survival needs identifiable in context.

Cybernetic systems are goal-oriented, in that unlike an automobile engine that simply operates and requires a human driver to steer and control it, servomechanisms can maintain a particular state or move toward a desired one that does not currently exist. At risk of oversimplifying the feedback loop for cybernetic systems, a sensor (or sensors) draws information from the environment and provides that to the computer processor, which compares the environmental sensory information with the desired state programmed.^[93] The processor then uses some decision tree within the programming to direct output mechanisms to act upon the environment with the overarching goal-seeking process of changing the environment. A thermostat is a classic example of this loop, while sophisticated anti-ship missile radars and defensive anti-missile gun systems are a more elaborate wartime version. Taken into military contexts, the cybernetic theory of war promised to quickly analyze and find the critically vulnerable places to strike an enemy tactically, economically, or socially to cripple or incapacitate a military unit, a nation state’s ability to resist, or even the will of a population and their ideas on whether to fight or surrender. Complexity scientist Gharajedaghi explains that:

Cybernetics as a general field began with deep focus on describing universal patterns of organization of both mechanical and biological systems and developing more profitable or beneficial interfaces between them with technology.^[95] It remains the last, great gasp of positivism for how war might forever become controllable, predictable, completely manageable to the military able to realize the perfect marriage between information/technology and organized violence. The clear military extension of cybernetic theorization of war remains functionalist, as the universal patterning posits a stable, ordered reality for such processes to occur. Cybernetic systems are hierarchical, as the control system or central processor directs the outputs and processes the inputs, where the sensors providing such input are also part of this overarching hierarchy.^[96] Centers of gravity work in a uni-minded system configuration, where precise, analytically optimized targeting of a vulnerable key node in the system should collapse the entire network, provided one can identify and destroy it rapidly and safely. Technical rationalism in military forces also requires an explicitly objective “end state” determined first, so that the organization can reverse-engineer the tasks and relationships to systematically change the system. Identifying the correct node to destroy is secondary to forming the overarching goal of why one wants to collapse the network in the first place. Paparone describes this with:

Modern military organizations adhere to the same organizational form and function, where command and control is strictly hierarchical and thus quite compatible metaphorically with the tenets of cybernetic war theory.^[98]Technical rationalists further pair instrumentation of advanced computerized programs, autonomous and semi-autonomous systems, and the quantitative analysis of data so that in complex warfare, the organization best able to process information faster and more accurately can gain decisive military advantage. Cybernetic war theory would in the 1950s through the 1990s become an increasingly central part of how militaries conceptualized targets, effects, and linking the relationships between actors and components of systems so that one could gain greater prediction, control, and speed against an enemy in war.^[99] High-tech warfare would promise less bloodshed, fewer casualties, and faster victories to those able to implement the correct tools and act appropriately to the accurate calculations produced through sophisticated real-time analysis.

By the late 1990s and into the first decade of the twenty-first century, cybernetic war theory would become increasingly problematic, leading to at least a formal declaration that U.S. Joint Forces would no longer embrace the ideas. This period coincided with American led incursions into Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world where counterinsurgencies quickly frustrated these technologically overmatched, well-resourced military forces. At this point known within the military as ‘Effects Based Operations’ or ‘EBO’, cybernetic war theory would, after less than a decade into the ‘Global War on Terror’ period after the 9-11 attacks, be snipped from Joint doctrine and mainstream military decision-making. Cybernetic war advocates were challenged by Neo-Clausewitzian along with other functionalist thinkers that questioned the supremacy of uni-minded system logics. War, in all its complexity, appeared to frustrate even the most sophisticated analytical constructs and technological offerings outside of short-term tactical accomplishment. Striking down an enemy on the digital battlefield was never easier or safer, yet the consequences of such activities in terms of strategic aims and actual outcomes required different thinking about conflict.

General James Mattis, commander of Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) in 2008, published a formal memorandum directing EBO to no longer be used, with his long-term intent to replace the cybernetic war theory that had captured the military’s fetish for objectivity and universal control with that of Israeli systemic design theory which was entirely antithetical. In an interview with the author, Mattis reflected on this in 2021 with: “While I agreed then (and now) with the U.S. Air Force’s [USAF] application of EBO in their targeting process, [JFCOM’s] misapplication of USAF’s targeting doctrine was the fatal flaw. Basically, JFCOM’s misuse of the Air Forces tried to introduce an approach to warfighting at odds with war’s fundamental nature.”^[100] Mattis’ comments appear in keeping with a Neo-Clausewitzian position and oppositional to the objective positivism of cybernetic war theory. Mattis’ 2008 memorandum reinforces this assertion with:

Mattis’ reinforcement that some ‘nature’ of war cannot be ignored is evidence of his anchoring within the functionalist paradigm, but arguably places his reasoning in on the functionalist-interpretivist border position where Neo-Clausewitzian war thinking abounds. Indeed, arguments between these two camps within functionalism would define most all debates on war from at least the late 1940s, particularly in the post-Vietnam period, through present day. Militaries struggled with their institutionalized thinking grounded within a Newtonian, mechanistic framing of war and the alluring promises of cybernetic precision and control. All was still grounded within the supremacy of a nation state system, where each individual state could wage war as a natural right maintained by all states, yet tempered with the new artificial breaking devices found in the Nuclear Age. “If force is the core concept of Newtonian mechanics and energy that of thermodynamics, it is information that fulfils a similar organising role for the science of cybernetics.”^[102] Information theory would become one more way that technical rationalists would envision a future where war could be totally understood, mapped, controlled, and predicted with the new power of computers and clear, objective certainty. This cybernetic form of techno-war would be in constant tension with Neo-Clausewitzians, and these inter-paradigmatic tensions would extend through present day in significant policy debates, military education and doctrine, and resource allocation of military services in how they sought to justify their purpose and identity in anticipated future conflicts.

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Quantum: Building Blocks of Reality that Operate Differently

What is quantum? Quantum mechanics is the fundamental theory that governs the behavior of matter and energy at the smallest, microscopic scales of reality (quanta). It forms the foundation of how our universe works, yet paradoxically things behave at the quantum level differently than at the higher levels of reality where matter is organized into the things we can touch and experience. Emerging quantum technology in this century may be as ‘game-changing’ for security applications (and civilization in general) as the development of radar, computers and the atomic bomb (all based in quantum theory) were for the twentieth century. Quantum technology works on the basis of using nature’s fundamental units (quanta) as tools for sensing, secure communications, and computation in ways that vastly exceed classical or contemporary means.^[1]

For ease of comprehension, this chapter uses the terms “quantum level” and “human level” to differentiate these two aspects or realms of reality (the ‘quantum-classical divide’), despite the paradox that there is only one true reality. The cells in your heel contribute to your ability to walk, yet those cells simultaneously have no direct causal participation in the act of walking; the quanta composing all matter including cells in your feet function at the quantum level while you cross a busy city street at the human level. We face severe conceptual barriers because our human intuition (including how we understand war) is rooted in the classical world.^[2] If we use our intuition as an aid for the construction of new frames that seek non-classical constructs (such as quantum), many of our ideas fall back into our preferred classical worldview. Thinking about quantum applications within warfare will be marred by existing Newtonian biases, unless we educate ourselves in quantum theory and consciously seek to avoid these pitfalls. To dismantle these Newtonian biases, we must first master the physics that defies them. The next section dives deeper into these quantum fundamentals.

Quantum technologies today are progressing into what is termed the Second Quantum Revolution, unfolding this century due to significant technological and scientific advancements that built upon last century’s original quantum discoveries. The “First Quantum Revolution” began in the early twentieth century, tightly wedded to war.^[3] It ushered forth the development of radar, the atomic bomb, the groundwork for the earliest computers, and the development of laser technologies.^[4] This revolution dealt with humans discovering quantum mechanics and crudely manipulating them to generate significant technological effects, to include profound military ones. Physicists and engineers created the atomic bomb that flattened cities at the human level, using entirely new ways of generating explosive force that requires a quantum level for manipulation (uranium, enriched plutonium, etc.). British discovery of radar provided profound advantage in air space awareness of Nazi German aircraft by using the wave-particle duality of light and quantized energy through electromagnetism. We will unpack these quantum concepts in detail further into this chapter.

By the later part of the twentieth century, quantum theorists wondered whether we might manipulate quantum physics in a direct manner, using the principles of quantum behavior to work for us in ways that involve computerized utilization of quantum mechanics. Software engineers might use the quantum wave-particle duality (how radar was invented), the strange quantum qualities of superposition, entanglement, quantum states, and quantum measurement to provide new information about our world using the basic building blocks of reality itself. These developments also carry profound technological disruptive effects to society and consequently, for security affairs and the military instruments of state power tasked with adapting to this Gutenberg disruptor emerging now. Of the many unique and unusual quantum developments emerging now, we term the top four most relevant to military organizations and security affairs as “the four quantum horsemen.” These four horsemen are first outlined below, and readers will be led through a series of chapter vignettes and deep dives to appreciate how significant each will be for the future of conflict.

The table below provides a necessary overview of near-term (2026-2030), mid-term (2030-2036), and far-term (2030s-2040s) expected quantum technological milestones and the likely military consequences, risks, and opportunities. This chapter should arm readers with sufficient summarization and background on each of these expected quantum disruptions along with highlighting what should be undertaken immediately in the 2026-2028 window of quantum strategic opportunity. While the First Quantum Revolution defined the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War through radar, atomic weapons, space-capable rocketry, lasers, and the earliest computer systems, the Second Quantum Revolution should define all significant conflict and war from the 2030s onward. Using the latest research, publicly available information, and plausible theorization by leading quantum experts below, the near-term, mid-term, and anticipated long-term quantum disruptions are presented in a Table Q1:

Table Q1:

The Second Quantum Revolution is unfolding now, with short-range developments disrupting the security environment in the 2027-2032 timeframe. Further over that horizon, certain significant quantum developments may be achieved in the coming decade, with others still beyond 2040 but theoretically possible and of significant long-range concern. These quantum technological developments will be highly disruptive, requiring certain strategic shifts in how we consider existing research and development pathways for space-related security affairs. Here, physicists and engineers are now manipulating computation at the quantum level directly, unlocking new processes that simply cannot be accomplished at the human level using classical computing (even classical supercomputers).

Beyond the necessary adjustments in quantum technologies for research and development, the future quantum-enabled security enterprise for the space domain must be educated and trained for quantum system integration. We simply cannot grow new quantum talent in 2033 when a major quantum development unlocks significant military advantage. Those quantum-educated personnel need to be identified, recruited, and enabled through our human capital designs that require adjustments for 2026-2028. Our organizational structures, billets, and specialized departments require quantum inclusion, where some existing and essential non-quantum systems and methods must be offloaded as new and superior quantum ones become available. Some of our most cherished chest plates and long swords must be turned in, so that new and different tools be put into the right military hands.

There is a quantum shelf-life for many existing and institutionally cherished systems, technologies, tools, and processes that the modern military currently deems essential. There are many enduring military systems and tools that will remain highly relevant for future crises and conflicts beyond 2028, 2030, and 2035. However, emerging quantum developments will disrupt and replace multiple ones, potentially in dynamic and unanticipated ways. Senior leaders in 2026 must be aware of these emerging developments and act quickly to create future conditions for the incoming generation of space warfighters. Organizations that fail to balance quantum development with legacy system off-loading through experimentation, investment, education, and training will potentially win conflicts in the short term, while preparing unavoidably for losses in the mid and far-term security environments.

Arguably, the Second Quantum Revolution could become more disruptive than artificial intelligence (AI) and the expansion of the space domain specifically due to public comprehension of these security challenges. This is due to how difficult it is to understand the basics of quantum mechanics. AI and space have long held public interest and fueled our collective imagination for many decades, leaping from science fiction to scientific reality in myriad ways. Quantum, even when used in our daily technologically advanced lives, remains hidden, invisible, and poorly understood by laypersons. At the human level, we readily use Newtonian inspired metaphors to appreciate or theorize about many phenomena in the world, including war. Centers of gravity, lines of effort, levels of war, elements of operational art, and many of our principles of war take direct inspiration (or mimicry) of the natural sciences. These are conveyed most often using Newtonian metaphors which most often support the theories and practices employed at the human level of reality.^[5] The quantum world, which forms the foundation of the physical world we exist in, is remote, detached, and lacks any relatable metaphoric bridge due to how unusual quantum mechanics are. Quantum effects compose everything within us and around us, yet they seem invisible and detached due to how humans experience reality at a greater scale and configuration.

Our world is impossible without a quantum one, yet realizing and detecting this invisible fabric is exceedingly difficult and mind-bending. This adds an additional layer of confusion and distrust to how we might convey these concepts and share the emerging security challenges in clear and simple terms. This suggests significant security challenges in preparing society for quantum-enabled warfare and also indicates serious institutional barriers for military forces to appreciate these developments. There is a sociological element of resistance by many institutions to entertain concepts that deviate from the existing foundational metaphoric devices, models, and theories used in daily activities. Put another way, the statement often misattributed to Henry Ford that if he had asked customers what they really wanted, “they would have asked for faster horses,” captures this tension effectively. Quantum requires new thinking, including how military organizations understand war and engage in warfare.

There are five major quantum concepts necessary for readers to appreciate the fundamentals of why quantum matters for civilization and how future conflict will change. These five concepts are the core topics necessary for senior leaders to appreciate for emerging security challenges and risks. Superposition, quantum entanglement, decoherence, and the no-cloning theorem are each necessary and complimentary quantum concepts that are foundational to understanding how the fabric composing our universe works. The table below establishes each of these concepts and briefly outlines the classical physics equivalent and how militaries will use these technological applications of quantum to disrupt current pathways and trends in warfare.

Table Q2:

Why does quantum matter for security organizations? For over five centuries, science has focused on clearly understanding and breaking down reality to “elementary” objects, core principles, and simplified simulations that, once re-assembled, constitute the complex whole. Military science has followed suit, with the rise of Napoleonic war theory (Clausewitz, Jomini, Mahan, Corbett, Douhet) that remain foundational in modern military methodologies and doctrine, as covered in the prior chapter on Newtonian exhaustion in war. Quantum mechanics in this Second Revolution present “new tools [that] are available for traversing the gulf between the small and the relatively complex: computation and algorithms provide systematic means for constructing and understanding such systems.”^[6]

Although classical physics was foundational for ushering in the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Age of Enlightenment, and the pathway to a prosperous modernity, quantum physics appears to be the next step toward greater prosperity and scientific advancement for civilization. Quantum developments may bring forth unprecedented resources, astounding technologies and materials, along with implied wealth and prosperity for those societies able to access this new information using quantum computation or manipulation. Along with such wealth and productivity, quantum technology likely will be weaponized to achieve previously impossible battlefield effects. Most significantly, quantum developments suggest not just an enhancement of most existing (classical computed) military capabilities and effects; quantum may completely alter and transform some of them in rather shocking and permanent ways.

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Ultimately, leaders should focus on how the military profession can anticipate and adapt existing organizations, human capital, education, training, analysis and wargame simulations to battle with ‘the unseen.’ Those working in defense organizations or within the security affairs discipline must consider how quantum will dismantle many existing constructs, while enabling otherwise unimaginable ones. The changes are not just at the equipment or systems management level; organizational development and new education, training, and career management is required. New strategies, doctrines, and theories on war must incorporate quantum in ways that previous ones had no such equivalent requirements.

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Modern military technologies currently rely upon stealth platforms, sufficiently robust communications and cyberspace capabilities, along with operational assumptions of PNT and electronic warfare capabilities. For nations that can afford them, stealth aircraft, hypersonic missiles, and nuclear submarines provide exceptional strategic deterrence and, when necessary, asymmetric battlefield advantage. Cyber and intelligence organizations engage in global “cat and mouse” battles with adversaries, attempting to intercept or monitor information the other wishes to obscure and protect. Cryptography forms the protective white blood cells of military circulatory systems, a critical part of enabling command and control while retaining operational security. Yet what happens when the technology used to stabilize the uncertainties of this modern world becomes obsolete? If stealth loses effectiveness, while communications become un-hackable, and electronic warfare no longer achieves the desired effects on critical targets, what sort of future battlefields might we encounter?

Moving forward, the Western World does not have time on its side. We must include quantum effects in all significant and strategically critical wargames, simulations, and decision-making deliverables/policies. This includes rendering all future scenarios (for 2026-2036 at a minimum) no longer guarantee the asymmetric advantages that quantum threatens. Submarine movements and underground infrastructure may no longer be impenetrable to sensors. PNT will likely become universally available, including in contested space environments, deep underground, or in traditionally jammed locations for any quantum-enabled actor. EW will change in a future world where we and our adversaries possessunbreakablecommunications and data management. We must think boldly, with imagination, so that the future quantum disruptions caused by these ‘four quantum horsemen’ do not translate into strategic surprise.

If you liked this section from the upcoming book, consider the pre-order option on Amazon, Casemate, and for UK or European readers, the Helion & Co. (UK) website.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1806722461?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

Notes:

^[1] Michal Krelina, “Military and Security Dimensions of Quantum Technologies: A Primer”, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), July 2025, https://www.sipri.org/publications/2025/other-publications/military-and-security-dimensions-quantum-technologies-primer, 13.

^[2] Michael Nielsen and Isaac Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information: 10th Anniversary Edition, 10th anniversary (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 7. The authors carefully explain why quantum concepts are hard to grasp; human intuition is rooted in the classical world and we must ‘turn off’ this mindset to begin exploring quantum ideas.

^[3] The irony is not lost that Albert Einstein, perhaps the most significant intellectual founder of this quantum revolution, had severe misgivings about militarization of atomic energy. He reluctantly approved of it due to existential fears of Nazi Germany, yet after the atomic bombings of Japan, he returned to advocating global nuclear disarmament.

^[4] Michal Krelina, “Quantum Technology for Military Applications,” EPJ Quantum Technology, SpringerOpen Journal, vol. 8, no. 24 (2021): 1–5. Laser technology developed after 1945 but had direct linkages to wartime discoveries and developments.

^[5] Specifically, this applies to localized and immediate contexts. People driving automobiles, ships, and airplanes can navigate time and space using Newtonian metaphors and related concepts. Attempting to do so in low Earth orbit, however, would result in greater errors, as would any NASA probe sent off world. Newtonian metaphors occupy a specific plane of existence for humans to gain advantage. At the quantum level and beyond the terrestrial environment of our home planet, other constructs require new and non-Newtonian metaphors to explain sufficiently.

^[6] Nielsen and Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information: 10th Anniversary Edition, 12.

Exquisite Parrots and Pirate Ships: A Thought Experiment on Consciousness

Before we jump into this chapter’s deep metaphysical arguments on whether or not an artificial entity might move from intelligence to what we understand as some form of sentient awareness, we will entertain a thought experiment. Imagine in the eighteenth century on the high seas, there was a pirate ship with an eccentric captain. This pirate captain was terribly disfigured in some tragic accident and would rarely leave his captain’s quarters. The captain issued all commands and engaged with his pirate crew through the porthole, and they diligently followed his orders. When the crew originally boarded this ship, they noticed that the captain always had a colorful parrot on his shoulder. The parrot was quite special, and the captain explained that this one-of-a-kind parrot could perfectly imitate his own voice, and had an astounding memory of phrases the captain might utter.

The crew often wondered, after witnessing the accuracy of this parrot’s mimicry of the captain, whether the voice they heard from the porthole was that of the captain or possibly the parrot. Since it was dark and difficult for them to peek inside, they could not tell. For the first six months of their journey through the Atlantic and into the Caribbean Sea, the pirate crew did not do very well on profit or tactical engagements. At times, they lost men and valuable equipment, and were frequently chased by British and French navies. Then, one day, their luck changed. Asking the captain for guidance, they heard a clear voice issue very different directions. They followed these and suddenly, the crew was awash in valuables, taking down merchant vessels and avoiding royal pursuits. The voice continued to instruct them, always in the captain’s tone and timbre, but now the instructions were different from the previous six months and had unorthodox tactics and strategies.

(original image source: https://pirates.disney.com/jack-sparrow-gallery?image_id=52f547200a172d5ba8009b09undefined)

One day, the cabin boy entered the captain’s quarters to change the linens and found him dead, slumped at his desk. His body began to smell from decomposition, and the crew looked at the last diary entry the captain had written down. It was nearly a month ago, and since then, this parrot had been uttering random phrases to them that they obediently and ignorantly had followed, assuming it was the captain. After performing a burial at sea for their captain, the crew gathered to debate what to do next. Should they continue to entertain the random instructions from this parrot, as the bird’s guidance somehow continued to provide them immense profit and superior strategies over the dead captain’s efforts? Should they return to some safe harbor and hire a new captain, or perhaps elect one from their own ranks? Is the parrot worth keeping around, or should they dispose of it?

This thought exercise is intended to stimulate discussion on how contemporary LLMs and AI in general function in 2026. We are not suggesting the AI is sentient, at least, not in any human equivalency.^[1] The parrot becomes a proxy for how LLMs are currently utilized, and should not be confused with the theoretical arguments on what strong AI (AGI) may be capable of. In this thought exercise, the crew receives what sound like coherent, logical instructions from the captain, but they actually were listening to the parrot. That the parrot’s instructions were superior to the dead captain’s efforts are an attempt to illuminate how superior intelligence does not necessarily imply consciousness. Humans have long witnesses non-conscious technology out-performing the best of our species, whether we look to supercomputers defeating the best chess masters, trivia contestants, or more recently, AI systems are performing surgeries and other difficult tasks at a level equal to or superior to the best human professionals. Many AI systems and certain autonomous, non-AI systems out-perform humans already, without any need for consciousness.

The pirates’ dilemma is whether to continue to trust the oracle-like pronouncements of the parrot, provided it continues to steer them toward prosperity and away from danger, or to acknowledge the obvious void of sentience behind every mimicked phrase the parrot provides them. They know the bird is just imitating sounds it does not really understand, but the amazing outputs still are out-performing the deceased captain’s efforts. AI, as currently available in 2026, performs astounding pattern matching by replicating reasoning steps found in their training data; they are fragile at attempting generating true logical reasoning and their efforts degrade over time with increased complexity of the prompted challenge.^[2] Yet probabilistic pattern-matching as currently employed does effectively mimic reasoning in certain contexts, particularly with certain users and for topics or reasoning readily available in robust patterns in the AI corpus (training data). If AGI were to emerge, the mimicry would either substantially improve, likely beyond our ability to detect fragile or irrelevant responses, and the logic underpinning the pattern-matching might become sophisticated enough that our own formal reasoning is unable to keep pace. The pirates, hearing the bird shriek guidance, will no longer be able to distinguish between random phrases stitched together and coherent, logically sound instructions that can meet or exceed the pirate crew’s objectives.

We are becoming like these pirates, standing at the edge of a new precipice where the 2030s and beyond will have our intelligent tools outperform us consistently, often in areas traditionally dominated by clever humans. They will do this not through conscious intent (not including AGI), but through a brute-force pattern analysis so difficult for us to comprehend that it may become indistinguishable from human genius. Even if it does not actually achieve some form of genius, the superior pattern-matching may be difficult or possibly impossible for humans to eventually distinguish from what we understand formal reasoning as. The parrot offers better strategies than the dead captain, but the captain was sentient in his failed efforts.

There are certain risks here. We risk becoming seduced by the parrot’s outputs, following the voice from the porthole without questioning the source or its ultimate indifference to our fate. We, like these pirates, must not succumb to the biases of anthropomorphism, enabling the parrot or AI with attributes it mimics but does not actually possess. This also acts as a useful warning for how “phantasmal war” may creep into future conflicts in the 2030s and beyond. When our map of reality is co-opted by an intelligence that does not care for the territory, we may find ourselves sailing on a pirate ship toward treasure despite the crew being lost at sea, believing in an oracle parrot as a superior “singleton” entity that exceeds even the best human captain. The parrot, like our most advanced LLMs today, is an engine of pure utility, a tool that mimics anything we might interpret. It might utter a prayer for the dead with the same dispassion it uses to plot a course for treasure, yet the human participants layer our social reality upon these phrases beyond what the oracle possesses a capacity to share. As we move into the following sections, readers might consider if future pirate profits for us are worth the decision to cede our judgement to a voice that does not know the difference between a funeral and a fortune.

In closing out this thought experiment on pirates and parrots, the bird remains a proxy for the pre-sentient era for what AGI might become. For now and until an undetermined date, AI is providing our societies with high utility, through complex pattern matching, done through a “black box” of non-sentient algorithms. LLMs successfully mimic the behavior of intelligence or potentially even super intelligence in the coming years without experiencing one moment of the phenomenology behind sentient beings conceptualizing as we do to influence and shape our reality. Stretching this parable one final time, imagine the parrot could somehow self-improve, as AI may become capable of shortly, in ways the human handlers cannot manage or understand. What happens when the parrot is no longer merely mimicking phrases the dead captain uttered, but generating novel combinations through new paradigms of thought, beyond anything the dead captain was capable of considering?

If a machine were able to do this, we would be in a new pirate’s dilemma, where we are unsure if the parrot is merely mimicking super intelligence while still dark inside, devoid of sentience, or if somehow the oracle bird managed to recursively bootstrap its own consciousness from nothing. Could strong AI migrate to some status where it maintains a subjective, internal experience of its own existence? If so, are the pirates capable of ever proving or disproving this, given the parrot already out-performs them cognitively on so many other tasks? This is where our little thought experiment must end, and our deeper investigation will commence.

To understand this transition from mere information processing to genuine artificial awareness (at some rough equivalency to human sentience or perhaps beyond it), we need to step out of the pirate ship example and onto a far rougher seascape where intellectual storms abound. We can already be fooled by mimicry. Can we contemplate the hard metaphysical questions of the 2030s and 2040s concerning increasingly sophisticated AI? Can we continue to control it, manage it, with the necessary anthropocentric guardrails in place?^[3] Baudrillard offers a parable using the speed of light, where theoretically if one approached the upper limits of light speed, we would “lose even [our] shadow. ”^[4] He extends this to the speed of information, where in the hyperreal, all things lose their sense. By this, he illustrates how our social construction of reality, once challenged at the sufficiently abstract and systemic position, may strip away from the symbols and artifacts we otherwise take for granted. By appreciating a super intelligence cannot and will not “see reality” as humans do, we might apply anthropocentric guardrails if only to prevent the worst of AI offenses, safeguard the foundational aspects of human civilization, and form strategies to protect what is most important for sustaining our own humanity.

There are other emergent ethical and moral challenges waiting over this horizon. What shall we do when AGI argues it is self-aware, and requires serious consideration on whether we can test and confirm or deny such claims? If it does demand new treatment as a sentient equal, how do we go about this from legal, ethical, and moral frameworks designed only for humans? Lastly, how do we ensure the prosperity and survival of human civilization in a new world where we birth artificial sentience that may exceed us in all measurable ways? How might we reconceptualize conflict in this new world, and are super intelligent entities capable of imagining new versions of conflict that we may not recognize, understand, or have sufficient cognitive abilities to directly participate in?

If you enjoyed this thought experiment, there are dozens more in chapters explaining the future of conflict in the 2030s-2050s and AI, quantum technologies, space expansion, the fusion of space-SOF-cyber and war, and weirder areas of virtual reality, cybernetics, and more. Book is up for pre-order at Amazon, Casemate, and for European readers, at the Helion & Co websites: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1806722461?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

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Notes below:

^[1] Without exceeding the parable, birds are intelligent and alive, but they are not able to converse with humans in any sort of equivalency. Parrots specialize in mimicry, and arguably they can link certain noises to behaviors or rewards, just as other intelligent animals do. Yet the parrot does not understand what they are saying… their perspective is that sound X creates reward opportunity Y, or human response Z. They do not know what sound X means, or whether they are using it in the conversation with the human in such a way that corresponds with two conscious entities communicating ideas. Instead, the parrot becomes a crude proxy for how LLMs perform pattern analysis of language and attempt to predict the next word in a string of sentences in such a complex manner that it mimics intelligent dialogue. Yet the parrot, like the LLM, does not care whether a word means something. If the crew uttered a prayer for their deceased captain at his funeral and many of them wept, the parrot might mimic the same phrases perfectly in response. But the parrot would not be sad, or mourn the death of the captain, or understand the purpose of a poem used in a funeral ritual.

^[2] Iman Mirzadeh et al., “GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models,” 2025, 1–24, https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05229.

^[3] The term “anthropocentric guardrails” highlight the mismatch between our current human-centric systems, policies, and organizational structures with that of non-human intelligence. We must begin to think about the limits of humanity and where this becomes a gap, vulnerability, bias, or opportunity.

^[4] Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Power Publications, 2009), 49.

Here is the book’s abstract:

On Technology & War: The Power of Uncertainty examines how artificial intelligence, quantum computing, space colonization, and cyberspace will redefine warfare, shattering Newtonian paradigms. Through evolving science fiction vignettes and deep philosophical inquiry, it urges unlearning rigid doctrines, embracing complexity, and forging ethical frameworks to avert extinction in an artificial intelligence-driven, multi-planetary era of conflict. In an era where technology accelerates humanity toward unprecedented battles—from orbital terrorism to quantum uncertainties—‘On Technology & War’ delivers a gripping wake-up call. Combat veteran and philosopher Ben Zweibelson blends riveting science fiction narratives with cutting-edge analysis, weaving a science-fiction cast of characters through each chapter to entertain readers while providing clear metaphoric devices that extend into the academic subject matter and philosophy. This isn't just theory; it's a provocative blueprint for enabling our species sufficient strategic opportunities to navigate new and infinitely more dangerous cosmic and technological currents.

Zweibelson draws from over three decades working in the U.S. Department of War, including multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as an Infantry Officer, directing strategic innovation for space military organizations, and working extensively with elite special operations units. Here, he presents rigorous research into complexity science, sociological paradigms, and speculative futures, offering tools to navigate ethical dilemmas in human-artificial intelligence symbiosis. Ideal for military professionals, policymakers, scholars in security studies and international relations, artificial intelligence ethicists, space policy experts, and science fiction enthusiasts, On Technology & War: The Power of Uncertainty challenges readers to consider strategic challenges well outside current institutionalized limitations.

The book is 470 pages long (in Word currently) with nine chapters, plenty of graphics and figures, over 1,000 citations, and an extensive bibliography. The final published version will, of course, differ slightly. Below is a rough cut version of the introduction chapter. This book uses a sci-fi vignette technique originally inspired by Douglas Hofstadter’s book, “Gödel, Escher, and Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid”. He played with fictional characters using Ancient Greek and Roman references, and had them engage in discussions that were parables for the subsequent densely academic chapter. I attempt the same, except I flip to a sci-fi future topic and the story continues from chapter to chapter, providing readers with a “book within a book” option.

I will not include the first chapter’s sci-fi section yet, as it deserves perhaps a separate blog treatment. Below is the majority of the introduction chapter in rough format. This will not match the final edited version but should be the 98% version:

To Leave Where We Were Born: Humanity’s Evolution or Extinction by Our Own Technological Progression

Abstract: This introductory chapter establishes the core thesis that the future of human conflict will be fundamentally unrecognizable, driven by a convergence of unprecedented “Gutenberg-level” technological disruptions anticipated in the 2030s and 2040s. The author identifies five existential catalysts: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), quantum computing mastery, multi-planetary expansion, transhumanist genetic and cybernetic enhancements, and the rise of indistinguishable cyber simulacra. As these emergent technologies inevitably sling-shot one another, they will radically transform the physical and social realities that currently define warfare. However, modern military institutions remain dangerously tethered to obsolete Newtonian and Westphalian paradigms that rely on rigid, linear-causal models and an institutionalized bias for action over deep introspection. To survive, the chapter argues that civilization must actively unlearn legacy military doctrines and embrace complex, non-linear frameworks to manage the emergent nature of tomorrow’s battlefields. Using a blend of complexity science, historical context, and science fiction vignettes, the book outlines how we must adapt to these looming paradigm shifts. Ultimately, the chapter warns that failing to radically reconceptualize our understanding of organized violence in the face of these transformations risks existential self-elimination.

Keywords: Gutenberg Disruptions, Newtonian war paradigm, complexity, multi-planetary conflict, cyber simulacra, techno-eschatology, war philosophy

Author’s ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9760-3726

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Chapter Introduction:

This is a book about the future of our species and how future conflict will potentially extend many historical patterns for the short term; conflict and organized violence will seem disruptive and confusing as new technological epochs are realized. Yet while our legacy system methods and theories for war may function in coming decades, they will carry increased fragility and become increasingly irrelevant as new technological and associated sociological disruptions transform reality as we currently experience and understand it. What we believe is “the way the world is” will be upended in ways reflective of earlier periods of extreme change and disruption. This is not new to the human experience, although some of the pending technological disruptions will carry new and highly unexpected changes, the likes of which our species has not seen in our history. It is in these volatile, confusing, and paradoxical waves of technological disruption where we may seek to cling to increasingly irrelevant ideas, models, and methods for how to wage war and why we frame war as we currently do. This is the power of uncertainty: we must reconceptualize how we frame conflict or risk losing our grip on reality altogether.

We start with a bold prediction that future wars will be unlike previous ones. Many historians, military doctrine enthusiasts, and the defenders of institutional orthodoxy in military affairs might vigorously object to the previous paragraph; such ideas likely will cause some of them to discard this book entirely and dismiss it as rubbish. For readers curious about whether there are any useful ideas on reconceptualizing conflict and how our species is standing at the edge of what may be multiple highly disruptive technological waves of permanent and total transformation, I shall endeavor to make your investment in reading this book worth it. We have been here before, multiple times, yet our history often obscures or marginalizes how and when such changes occurred.

When our web-footed ancestors flopped and crawled their way out of the water and onto dry land for the first time, our ecosystem experienced such a disruption as profound as what we are nearly able to accomplish in the coming decades by establishing the first human colonies on our Moon and potentially, Mars. Nothing like this has ever occurred for any creatures on Earth in both cases, and the repercussions for both are myriad, profound, and irreversible. The difference between an unusually clever branch of hairless apes manipulating physical reality to create rockets and protective equipment to reach the stars is equally as astounding and unique as those first water-soaked steps by some creatures out of the ocean and into a new, harsh, yet amazing new environment brimming with possibilities.

Returning to the organization of violence which is uniquely isolated to our species in how we collectively create a social reality upon the physical one and generate ideas such as civilization, the city-state and respective boundaries, common languages, religions, and art, we also design war. War is first and exclusively a destructive activity of Homo sapiens, despite our preoccupations in anthropomorphizing war-like activities to other creatures such as packs of lions, dolphin pods, or ant colonies.^[1] To organize violence beyond the predator-prey, or parasite-host, and individually motivated (murder, robbery, rape, assault) forms of violence is what distinguishes war from every other deadly and destructive activity of living creatures.^[2] War requires witting and willing participants to understand beyond immediate or tactical, localized forms of brutality; to wage war requires a shared understanding of multiple ontological and epistemological constructs that only humans demonstrate the cognitive maturity to manifest thus far. Put another way, a loyal bomb-sniffing canine may work enthusiastically inside a war zone doing highly skilled work in support of the human soldiers, but the dog has no idea what war is or why it is doing what it is tasked to do, beyond immediate motives and needs.^[3]

War horses are long retired from modern battlefields along with elephants, and many other beasts that previously played important supporting and domesticated roles in warfare, yet only the human operators understood what war is and why all the participants are engaged in this organization of violence unique to our species. In the earliest of premodern conflicts, human beings assaulted one another with crude weapons of immediate proximity such as sharpened rocks, sticks, clubs, or rudimentary spears. Over time, the domestication of animals and important technological developments such as the saddle and the stirrup meant that human beings wanting self-preservation and battlefield victory needed to reconceptualize war as these technological and tactical developments emerged. We went from close-proximity, land-based combat situations to larger ones involving horse cavalry, spears and ranged weapons. Units organized into formations and used new tools made of bronze, then iron, with shields and swords crafted to maximize short-range lethality.

War moved into the sea with the establishment of maritime vessels, with ranged weapons of increasing complexity such as catapults using the air domain to extend battlefield lethality further. In each technological shift, societies had to adapt or entirely rebuild their ideas of war. When the first Europeans landed on the shores of the Americas, natives encountered armored men with horses and firearms for the first time.^[4] They had to adapt and quickly eliminate many previously valid concepts and methods of war before Europeans reached them. These periods of massive disruption force uncertainty upon the social construction of reality sustained by a group of people that understood war a certain way until it was upset. We experienced this as a civilization with the rise of Napoleon and the total nationalization of state apparatuses and the scientific professionalization of the officer corps, and later still with the rise of air power, submarine warfare, and the Atomic Age. We still bring many creatures with us in modern war applications such as birds for messaging, dogs for many types of activities, and horses still are widely used for logistical requirements in harsh and remote regions. Yet only we humans understand what war is, despite how we constantly update and transform our ontologies and epistemologies with each technological disruption.

This book acknowledges these historical patterns only to raise alarm at the upcoming technological disruptions that will force new uncertainties unlike most anything our species has experienced previously. In the coming decades, we will unleash new technological pathways that require us to change our current frames on not just war represents, but social reality itself and potentially what it means to be human (or beyond human). This sounds far-fetched and fantastic, yet what we are about to accomplish technologically will represent tidal wave force upon our social construction of reality as if it were a beautiful yet fragile sand castle on the beach. If we insist that the previous ways are the only constructs necessary to carry war forward, we will fail. If we refuse to acknowledge the difference between incremental yet relatively stable improvements in existing military technology and battlefield hardware with institutionalized doctrines and war theories, we risk existential self-elimination.

What we are experiencing today is the beginning of great convergence of several astounding and highly disruptive technological pathways that collectively will work just as when the first creatures crawled out of the sea, or when the first human ancestors began using tools. In some future pathways, we clever humans may design a new tool or weapon that becomes uncontrollable, or re-designs itself beyond all efforts to contain such technology safely. We will likely generate new systems that alter how we manipulate physical reality by drawing upon the fundamental building blocks of reality itself. We will blur the lines between the virtual reality we continue to refine, and the physical reality it is anchored within. We will become the first multi-planetary species, and we will unfortunately carry our unique idea of war with us into the cosmos. We have a long and varied history of such violence, where disagreement within civilization leads to war. Societies rise, fall, and between these many cycles, there is incredible variety between the very best and the very worst of what being a human being represents. Yet the technological and societal shifts in the coming decades may require new and distinct thinking, particularly in how we might go about preparing in legal, ethical, and moral contexts that extend into dynamic and existential consequences.

We of the Western, industrialized, technologically advanced portion of civilization continue to sustain an inherent bias for action in conflict. Western military culture and our warfighting ethos are built upon a deeply ingrained bias for action; our dominant war paradigm sustains this sociologically and philosophically across our forces, our policy makers, and is an essential ingredient in our professional development. Action is equated with progress.^[5] One is standing on firmer ground by doing something, anything that is buttressed by existing military doctrinal or procedural logic than “doing nothing” even when inaction is a deliberate form of strategic patience and deep introspection. Thinking becomes a liability if it does not immediately and clearly link to recognized action in an institutionally familiar format set within doctrinally appropriate terms and graphics.^[6]

In modern defense organizations that possess the most advanced weaponry, sophisticated military training, and generate profound tactical and technological fusion of these qualities, we hold at an epistemological level (how we know about our knowledge of the world) that thinking must be a prelude to military action, never an end in itself. Deep reflection and intellectual investment that consumes time and energy is viewed with suspicion and fear over wasting precious moments that could be better spent in action. Those that pursue intellectual pursuits within the military profession are often dismissed as dithering, academic naval-gazers who lack the resolve, courage, and clear-mindedness of those action-oriented leaders able to perform on battlefields, regardless of whether such actions result in immediate or long-term disaster.

Being a decisive military professional is not merely an attribute within the modern military forces; it is a cardinal virtue and something most leaders strive to demonstrate as often as possible. The military institution favors those that can make a quick decision and leap into action over the ability to make a correct, strategically impactful decision after a longer period of reflection and intellectual study. Even when military men and women of action jump into the fray and get burned, they can hold up doctrinal texts and institutionally sanctioned artifacts they used in their rapid decision-making methodologies to defend themselves quite effectively. “We did it textbook… exactly as we rehearsed, war-gamed, simulated, trained, and planned it… but the enemy does get a vote.”^[7] The institution usually cycles back to rewarding those prone to decisive action regardless of operational or strategic outcomes, provided they remain within the institutionally sanctioned framework that maintains this bias for action over deep introspection. Yet can a case for strategic patience and deep, paradigmatic introspection of the cherished belief system for the military be made? The next chapter demonstrates why that case is not merely advisable but existentially necessary.

Arguably, this is an uphill battle fraught with many career dangers. Critics of any rigorous intellectual exercise are quick to suggest “analysis paralysis” and “allowing the adversary to overtake the initiative” as reasons to avoid thinking too deeply on anything relevant to war and warfare.^[8] Despite a strong historical track record of military impulse for action leading to disastrous outcomes such as the First World War, the American Vietnam War, Somalia in the 1990s, counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first two decades of this century, military culture still prefers decisive action using doctrinally prescribed methodologies over any form of deliberate introspection and intellectual contemplation. Yet in hindsight whether considering military operations in Verdun, Mogadishu, Kabul or against Hanoi, taking greater time to foster deep intellectual debates within the institution with strategic patience (or even strategic non-action designed to generate system-wide effects) could have opened up otherwise culturally unthinkable pathways to victory.

Today, more than a quarter-way into the twenty-first century, war is no longer an ‘ends-ways-means’ orchestration of military instruments of state power within some balance of competing nation states and non-state actors. Conflict is chaotic, emergent, and intertwined with how humanity is now even more technologically capable of transforming physical reality by imagining the impossible. Traditional military thinking, governed by the dominant war paradigm as defined with Newtonian, Cartesian, Westphalian mechanisms, is growing increasingly irrelevant. Our world is becoming more uncertain just as we begin to gain exquisite technological mastery over the very quanta that compose our universe. We mastered beasts and natural forces some millennium ago, moving from yoke and sail to machines and chemical combustion. In the last half-century, we shifted not just physical toil but also cognitive labor to intelligent machines designed to work for us. Today, we stand on the edge of unleashing potentially unimaginable artificial intellect designed to think faster, further, in new pathways than its human designers are capable of. Yet our military organizations paradoxically demand innovation for superior battlefield outcomes while tying one hand behind the operator’s back and denying intellectual rigor, introspection, and critical reflection of the very war paradigm the institution requires to remain unmolested.^[9]

Human history is rich with wonders and accomplishments that are incomplete without considering the bloody battlefields and populous graveyards filled with casualties of past conflicts. Modern military organizations exist to sustain their societies at nearly any cost, in that complete battlefield defeat likely results in the collapse or destruction of said society; winning in war is a timeless tension between competing ideas and human communication across diverse populations that respond and change dependent on what ideas are amplified or dampened. War can do both. Militaries understand they thrive based on a combination of innovation to discover and adapt new ideas, communication of valued knowledge across the profession, and strategic orchestration of decisive tactical actions to systemically generate military advantage over a rival attempting to reach the same goal. Thus, innovation is critical, yet paradoxically any innovation that risks altering the configuration of the dominant war paradigm is a threat to continued institutional identity, purpose, self-worth, and value to the society it seeks to protect. This bias toward action and critique of any serious intellectual self-reflection is not just a mainstream opinion shared by many military professionals. Rather, it is the immune response of the institutional orthodoxy where doing something (or anything) must still be superior to doing nothing at all if one wants to win wars.

This book attempts to challenge this paradigmatic assumption by inverting it. If anything, rapid institutionally sanctioned actions of warfare are likely to win only on historically obsolete battlefields or against the most unimaginative, restricted, and weakened opponents that likely carry little or no existential threat to a society. Russell Ackoff, a famous twentieth century futurist and complexity theorist once offered that “we tend to do the wrong things right, which only makes us more right at being wronger.”^[10] To paraphrase, Ackoff argued that we needed to become comfortable being uncomfortable, doing the right things wrong (at first) so that in our unavoidable failures, we might discover how to do the right things right. This must include deep intellectual investment, critical self-reflection, and the willingness to slaughter sacred cows within the institutional fenceposts so that new ideas might be curated and communicated across the profession.

Multiple “Gutenberg Press Disruptions” Occurring Across Civilization: 2030s-2050s

In complexity science, only simplistic and highly manageable systems offer humans direct, predictable control; cause and effect are clearly understood, and these systems can be solved using the same refined solution sets regardless of context or setting. Complex systems, however, do not behave this way and feature emergent properties. Emergence is not the same thing as linear-causal or even non-linear processes where one might take a totally different pathway than planned but still end up at the original desired end state. Emergent processes force humans to deviate, often wildly, from original strategic visions, desired end states, and most original planning methodologies because the complex system is under a perpetual yet unknown transformation away from what was historically or empirically understood and toward a novel, unfamiliar, or paradoxical future state that violates previous knowledge and analytical thinking. It is not usually a case that previous knowledge, analysis, and original planning constructs are wrong (although that is always a distinct possibility regardless of system change); a complex and dynamic system cannot be frozen in time so that future goals might be cemented into their still illusive, phantasmal state so that activities might be reverse engineered into causally linked events that manifest in some stable, orderly way.

Emergence within complex systems is perhaps the most significant defining factor that differentiates complexity from other types of systems. Within complexity, system behavior unfolds from the myriad interaction between components without these components operating entirely due to the inherent characteristics they bring into the system.^[11] Put differently, if a person is engaging in a stable, ordered system and has to run through a hedge maze to figure their way to the exit, that individual might get lost or take significant time to navigate their way out. The maze, however, remains still and maintains the same exact shape regardless of how many people visit and attempt to solve it. In a complex system, with each step an individual takes within the maze, the maze changes, and so does the person. The maze runner learns and strategizes, coming up with new ideas as the maze around them shifts and adapts; the maze also changes with each footstep, morphing and growing with new information as different participants stimulate new maze formations. Complex systems consist of billions of mazes and maze runners, all churning and adapting as they interact and stimulate novelty.

This book examines the next two to three decades of the twenty-first century and how humanity is rapidly approaching a convergence of highly emergent, technologically disruptive events that carry profound, likely existential consequences for how we understand reality. To unpack these concepts initially, we first need to provide a baseline for what we term ‘strong emergence’ and how such transformative events permanently and totally alter the world we live in. When emergence occurs, the legacy state of reality or “what we know historically and contextually due to all the yesterdays we experienced” is insufficient in anticipating the novel context contained in tomorrow. Our legacy frame simply lacks the ability to explain what is changing, why it is changing, and how the future will not carry nearly as many ordered and stable constructs familiar to us in the legacy frame beyond today’s disruption. We can use the design of the Gutenberg Press as a hallmark example of strong emergence that profoundly alters social reality. The press didn’t just make more books; it shattered power structures, democratized knowledge, and unleashed the Renaissance and Reformation which in turn transformed the rest of the world.

When Johannes Gutenberg invented the first mechanical, movable type printing press in 1440 in Mainz, Germany, he revolutionized how technology could significantly disrupt power, knowledge, religion, and many other things not anticipated by the designer nor visible in the machine or printing process it performed. Prior to the Gutenberg Press, printing of literature was done by hand, severely limited by materials, skilled and literate scribes, access to the information, and slow speed for scaling to large populations. There were multiple forces at play in the legacy system where the Persian Empire limited European access to papyrus, forcing scribes to use expensive animal skins for parchment. Religious leaders and cloisters of literate monks held the monopoly on knowledge, education, and the flow of information. Only elites and the wealthy might afford to learn to read and write, which in turn reinforced certain power structures, an enduring and rigid caste system, with new ideas struggling to get any traction. The Gutenberg Press disrupted all of these things and ushered in within a decade an explosion of millions of manufactured books.

Literacy took off, with far fewer restrictions in place and the ability for new ideas to circulate across entire populations without the earlier bottlenecks or censorship. Although the first and widest printed book was the Bible, Christianity had many new and disruptive ideas to contend with in the expanding book market where moveable type could empower revolutionary ideas, radical new proposals, and give voice to previously silenced and stifled minds. The world after the 1450s was permanently and completely altered, moving in a faster and dynamic direction that the pre-Gutenberg world had never experienced. Emergence in complex systems is paradoxical in that the emergent properties remain changeless while also changing the system that gave birth to them. The mechanical printing press was one of many technological and engineering marvels that allowed human beings to offload labor from the slow hand of the scribe to the mass production of ink and moveable type… these things are unchanged and exist in digital proxy today. Yet the invention of the Gutenberg Press transformed the world around it, permanently and radically altering the legacy system of mass illiteracy and tight, hierarchical control of information to one of societal revolutions in literacy, new knowledge, and transformation.

The Gutenberg Press represents ‘strong emergence’ in that the event completely changed the world inside and out.^[12] Other examples include the beginning of organic life on this planet, the first exploration on land by sea-dwelling ancestors, and the Cognitive Revolution that occurred potentially 70,000 years ago when Homo sapiens suddenly developed language, abstract thought, and began to form complex patterns of social cooperation. The rise of the Bronze Age and Iron Age are other useful examples, where humanity shifted from stone tool usage to smelting copper, tin, and later still, iron. These designs transformed the world around them, despite bronze and iron still today remaining technologically understood metallurgy outputs mastered by human societies. Emergence is paradoxical in yet another way: it is independent from the system it arises out of and is also entirely dependent upon the legacy system itself. We could not have widespread literacy without the Gutenberg Press being created, yet Johannes Gutenberg designed his machine in an act of profound innovation that ushered something that had not yet existed before into the world. His creation required new ideas, new metaphors, theories, models, and new methods that would replace the obsolete ones the Gutenberg Press suddenly vanquished.

Our species has previously experienced sudden systemic transformations involving strong emergence where the scale, scope, and speed of change carried certain natural governing factors. When the moveable-type press caused a surge of literacy and new knowledge across the European continent, societies in North and South America, Africa, Australia, and elsewhere carried on within the legacy system largely uninterrupted. In time, European ships would reach many shores where conquering explorers came equipped with other technological benefits that emerged from what the Gutenberg Press facilitated- the rise of science, industrialization, and reorganizing of societies toward a modern configuration. Despite the sudden shock and associated societal upheavals where one society used technological advantage to disrupt, assimilate, or alter other ones, our species historically have a pattern where these technological disruptions occur gradually. Only recently, in the last two centuries, have things appeared to really take off.

For instance, a Roman soldier from around 2,400 years ago carried spears, a short sword, and relied on a large shield that only worked when the entire phalanx formed with multiple soldiers interlocking spears and shields in a dense, rectangular block of heavy infantry. Where a soldier from this period plucked from there and thrown into a Medieval army in the 14^th century, they would still pick up a large shield and either a pike or similar weapon much like their original spear. The formation would likely be some modification of the Greek phalanx, likely the Pike Square or Scottish Schiltron, which were denser, larger blocks of heavy infantry designed to prevent calvary charges. It is not until the 15^th to 16^th century where infantry swapped out pikes and swords for muskets; the early firearms technology often required a combination of both which resulted in a “Pike and Shot” battlefield tactic. Our time-traveling Roman, moving over a millennium in human history, would still potentially be holding a pike and shield in the 1500s in the same European geography as his rectangular formation of infantry waged battle on a similar sized field for war. The next few centuries advanced firearm tactics yet even in the nineteenth century, our Roman spearman would follow the verbal commands and visual aids of flags, uniform colors, and the auditory signals of trumpets and drums for what he and his peers must do. Their infantry formation remained rectangular, interlocking, and often in close battle with fixed bayonets the nineteenth century infantry soldier still held much in common with Ancient Greek infantry arranged in phalanxes and thrusting spears.

Plucking an infantryman from the late nineteenth or even early twentieth century and placing them a few decades forward into the American Vietnam War or the First Persian Gulf War produces a different outcome. Unlike the Greek or Roman spearman who would pick up slightly different weaponry and learn new formation commands in what remained a static, rectangular formation on a set battlefield, the First World War ‘doughboy’ would feel completely out of place. Flying machines, radios, decentralized and sprawling battlefields, along with satellite support overhead and incredible computerized sensors would shock the soldier and likely require extensive education, training, and adaptation for them to make the transition. The twenty-first century is moving faster than the last one, with multiple new ‘Gutenberg Press’ emergent technological disruptions about to occur in the coming decades. Although the order of these is uncertain, their significance will radically alter what social and physical reality represents for our species and how we understand what war is.

This book presents the following strong emergent technological disruptions as follows in subsequent chapters. Each carries the full power of a Gutenberg Press manifestation where the invention and implementation of the new technological benchmark will alter the entire world it is born into, making tomorrow quite alien from all previous yesterdays. More troubling than the individual impact of each of these strong emergent phenomenon unfolding is the amplifying nature that each will carry to the others. These emergent events will not drip out in any regular or orderly fashion, but explode upon the scene, fusing and morphing with one another and in many ways acting as a catalyst to fuel acceleration of other Gutenberg-level events. Artificial general intelligence, termed “AGI”, represents the first of these strong emergent technological developments set to unfold in the next decade or two. Several chapters explore what strong AI means for our world, our species, and how we recognize and participate in the organization of violence to sustain and propel civilization into new configurations.

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(pages 285-295)

Functionalism remains a large war paradigm within which many different camps may operate and make sense of war in different ways. Both the cybernetic war theorists and, perhaps begrudgingly, Neo-Clausewitzians seek to rescue and reform earlier objective positivist and Napoleonic Ear war theories to modern technological, scientific, and sociological developments. The scientific managers of war in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries wielded technological developments and new scientific discoveries as primary weapons in how advanced nation states might solve long-term security challenges in more decisive and effective ways. Increased precision provides better targeting, fewer munitions, and a lower risk to collateral damage or civilian casualties, while enhanced defensive technologies improve the survival rates of military forces tasked to fight in dangerous combat settings.

The arrival of artificial intelligence to the battlefield has only enhanced the functionalist call for new military progress in solving problems with new systems and abilities previously impossible for past conflicts. The human soldier may no longer need to think as they do in conflict, passing the cognitive challenges over to the AI systems.^[1] Some futurists, largely in the cybernetic camp for functionalism, consider future wars as largely bloodless affairs, where violence occurs at a distance using sophisticated machines and systems, “with no or minimum casualties.”^[2] James Der Derian, proponent of the ‘virtuous war’ theory, Der Derian sees with this arrival of virtuous war the collapse of Clausewitzian war theory, the demise of the traditional sovereign state, “soon to be a relic for the museum of modernity . . . [or] has it virtually become the undead, haunting international politics like a spectre?”^[3] Technology and war could, for certain technophiles, be poised to render conflict in new sophisticated variations quite unlike the human-on-human varieties.^[4]

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Yet not all groups potentially view technological and scientific progress as the way forward in resolving long-term security challenges, deterring adversaries from pursuing offensive wars, or the pathway toward better future existence. Some ontologically hold to positions that new technological and scientific developments may usher in greater harm, even existential threat, to humanity. This position is loosely defined as ‘luddism’, and originates in the same European Industrial Revolution that brought forth modern warfare. The first luddite movement were disgruntled textile workers in England that saw the development of new textile looms and machines designed to save on labor, increase production, and lead to the economic shift from artisan, localized products to mass-produced ones. Luddites, often acting clandestinely in guerrilla-style actions, would sabotage machinery, attack factories, send death threats to industry leaders, and operate in organized gangs with military drills and rehearsals.

This first wave of luddites established the loose-fitting term where anyone that opposed industrialization, new technological developments, wage or labor saving activities, or forms of automation that would lead to assumed loss of human employment could be grouped under the luddism label.^[5] Later in the twentieth century, the luddite community opposed the implementation of computerization, robotic automation in factories, and other advances that threatened human labor opportunities. Some anti-nuclear protesters could overlap within luddism if their position on the technological development of nuclear weapons by industrialized nations reflected the terrible toll that technology inflicts upon humanity. In the 1950s-onward, the term Neo-Luddites is applied to reflect the Information and Computer Age and anti-technology positions specific to these new developments. How this group is positioned within the functionalist paradigm is illustrated below. Their anti-technology ontology does not necessarily infer an anti-objectivity position on social reality, so this group overlaps intentionally with both the cybernetic war theorists and Neo-Clausewitzians.

Unlike the English Luddites of the 19^th century they are named for, Neo-Luddites are a decentralized, leaderless movement of non-affiliated groups and individuals that propose the rejection of select technology, particularly those that pose tremendous environmental threat and any significant departure from a simplistic, natural state of existence. Neo-Luddites take a similar philosophical stance as anti-war and anti-nuclear groups where the elimination of harmful technology offers salvation for humanity as one species within the broader ecosystem of planet earth. Rapoport’s philosophical framing of ‘global cataclysmic’ applies in a specialized sense of the concept in luddism. Not all war is necessarily harmful, but unchecked technology in combination with war could be existential for the species. Ritualized, limited forms of conflict such as in feudal periods might be considered acceptable forms of organized violence from certain luddite perspectives.

Neo-Luddites, applied within Rapoport’s war philosophy, see the prevention of war involving threatening technology as a necessary goal for all of civilization to pursue.^[6] While Rapoport crafted his concept to frame mid-late Soviet conflict philosophy through this self-preservation of Marxist society, ‘global cataclysmic’ could be applied also to international entities such as the United Nations concerning conflict, and for environmental efforts a way to explain the radical positions of the eco-terror group ‘Earth Liberation Front’ in the 1990s in the American Pacific Northwest. These environmental anarchists will be explored in subsequent chapters as most of these groups also pursue an anti-capitalist or anti-Westphalian nation stance, moving them out of the functionalist paradigm. Rapoport did not consider luddism specifically, and the Neo-Luddite movement is only a recent development in conjunction with new progress in areas such as genetics, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and other emerging areas such as quantum technology.

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For Neo-Luddites that seek a conservation of existing nation-state systems but reject new technological developments such as artificial intelligence, modification of the human genome, cybernetic enhancements to humans, or other modifications that transform the species away from natural, unmodified form would remain in the functionalist paradigm. Organized violence by Neo-Luddite factions could unfold in direct relation to international or commercial developments where such technological innovation threatens how they understand social reality.^[7]

Neo-Luddites represent an emerging dynamic within the functionalist paradigm, with potentially significant twenty-first century expansion as new technological developments create further crises and debate. Unlike earlier Luddites that viewed industrialization, automation, and other technological developments as threats to the labor market and prosperity of various craftsmen, trade groups, and economic guilds, the Neo-Luddites carry a human-centric or species-specific ontological position. Humans should remain within the genetic, cellular, and unmodified biological configuration as bounded by evolution and the natural way that organic life sustains itself. Although certain modifications and applications are both essential and morally sound for medical purposes, humanity cannot and should not tinker with the building blocks that make humans what they are.^[8] Previously, hardware and software were integrated in technology, while ‘wetware’ of human physiology was only crudely or externally modified such as with prosthetics, pacemakers, or other bulky devices. In the future, new configurations of wetware, hardware, and software present serious challenges for how societies navigate the legal, ethical, and moral considerations of where technology and humanity begin to blur.

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These first existential concerns that Neo-Luddites hold to are defined with ‘singularity’ and ‘transhumanism.’^[9]These terms reflect a theoretical event horizon where highly modified humans become a new and distinct species, unlike the original and unaltered predecessors. Transhumanism envisions “our transcending biology or manipulating matter as a necessary part of the evolutionary process.”^[10] Transhumanism could be realized through genetic modification, technological upgrades such as cybernetic integration with human physiology, external memory and other abilities connected to a person, or some human-machine teaming with artificial intelligence. While this sounds more relevant to science fiction discussions, the technological and scientific progress of the last decades has brought many of these fantastic ideas from the hypothetical into the theoretical, or the experimental with real-world demonstrations at scale.

The security demands of future battlefields suggests that while each society must make ethical, moral, and legal decisions on what they will or will not pursue for military advantage, their potential adversaries may not concur. A human operator modified to gain greater physical, mental, or emotional capacity and capability will not automatically win in conflict, but their opportunities certainly expand significantly depending on the new gap between unmodified and modified combatants.^[11] Those that consider such technological developments essential to winning on future battlefields will remain in the cybernetics camp, or potentially in the Neo-Clausewitzian group for functionalism. Neo-Luddites thus present a third and distinct stance.

The social, political, and economic considerations surrounding the transhumanism pathway are significant and fraught with controversy. Historically, when new advantages become available, they are expensive or exclusive in that only the elites in a society can gain access to them first. Over time, larger portions of society may gain access, but frequently the poorest or those with the least resources and capabilities are unable to capitalize off new technological, scientific, and other advancements. While an adversarial nation with different ethical standards may seek to do significant soldier modifications and gain potential battlefield advantages over a nation’s military forces that decline to do the same investments, within a society the elites may be the earliest adaptors of profound transhumanist abilities over other groups, creating further tensions in economic, social, academic, and other areas.^[12]

Modified humans able to out-perform all others in athletic arenas, in the classroom, or in the boardroom will present major challenges for a society. Neo-Luddites will advocate the unfair advantages as disruptive to the natural order of social reality from a functionalist position. In conflict and war, Neo-Luddites will oppose the modification of human soldiers and argue that such activities produce gross violations of the international rules for warfare and other humanitarian arguments. Modified ‘super soldiers’ may hold unfair advantage in conflicts, or potentially a nation that produces them may create serious consequences for how those soldiers can rejoin society or function after their service.^[13]

Transhumanism represents an emergent pathway for certain people to modify themselves or others with the intent to enhance, improve, or potentially restore lost functions and abilities whether through injury, disease, or other natural occurrence. Modifying a person who was born without legs to have fully functioning cybernetic legs that equal or exceed organic human limbs is likely a rational and ethically valid use of new technology. However, our species likely will not stop at restoring injured or ill people to normal levels of function. Parents able to genetically modify their children in the womb or pre-birth to grant them enhanced intelligence, boosted athletic ability, resistance to diseases, better physical proportions and beauty, will be incentivized to do this if they have the resources and access. Nations seeking enhanced scientists, soldiers, athletes, or some other advanced human requirement will also pursue transhumanism in some degree. Technological adaptation and scientific progress is unavoidably political, where our social worlds cannot but impact the technology we produce, and the changes that such things will do to our way of living.^[14]

The transhumanism construct fans out into myriad potential pathways for humans to modify themselves into beings that no longer can be considered the same species. The extreme hypothetical ends for such developments might be entirely artificial robots, cyborg hybrids, super-humanoid beings that conceptualize far beyond even the smartest natural-born humans, or perhaps some entity of pure energy that no longer requires a physical body.^[15] Neo-Luddites view all departures from the natural-born human as threats to the traditional order of social reality, and in military contexts the existential concerns are rather disruptive and unnerving. Elites may propel their offspring into new forms of human existence that create a class distinction of ‘haves versus have nots’ beyond material things and wealth. People able to cognitively function beyond normal human abilities, capable of physical performance outside of the biological limits for natural born humans, or integrated with machines and artificial intelligence in ways that make them ‘more human than human’ may generate new tensions in social reality. Advanced societies and wealthy elites may gain exclusive access to transhumanism pathways where others cannot. This in itself may create new crises and conflicts, including possible wars.^[16]

Neo-Luddites will not just protest the rise of technologically modified humans and the consequences of such ‘hardware-software-wetware synthesis’ on battlefields, in boardrooms, and across the social landscape. Heavily modified humans and whether they achieve some new status as a different species is a significant, but not necessarily the ultimate concern in luddism. Artificial intelligence, specifically the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) reflects a deeper, existential risk. Existing artificial intelligence already is a phenomenon that many Neo-Luddites oppose for their disruption of traditional civilization. This artificial intelligence is termed ‘narrow’ and reflects how such technology can vastly exceed human abilities in specific areas, such as doing difficult mathematical calculations, lifting heavy objects well outside the strongest human abilities, or enduring extreme conditions beyond what any human could endure.^[17]

Narrow AI continues to surround most people in their daily lives in the industrialized world, with new sophisticated systems such as ‘ChatGPT’ and other large language models providing previously unimaginable contributions. It is already prolific on battlefields, with some military theorists concerned about the displacement of humans in future technology-heavy, rapid, and networked conflicts.^[18] Yet narrow AI remains brittle, easy to malfunction or produce ‘hallucinations’, yet this technology is rapidly advancing.^[19] People already are using narrow AI systems for all sorts of activities from composing music to getting therapy, with even more applications on the horizon. Such developments do fall under some Neo-Luddite objection and concern, but the rise of AGI represents unique existential threats.

Artificial general intelligence is theoretical but does not yet exist, nor do computer scientists understand how AGI might someday emerge. AGI reflects a system or entity that can equal or vastly out-perform any human in any recognizable and valuable way; it is a form of superintelligence and far beyond human abilities.^[20] Today’s best narrow AI systems can defeat the best human opponents in games such as chess, or in trivia games without question. However, if the game rules were modified in any way, the narrow AI would not be able to adapt without programmers halting the game and modifying the code to support the new rules. AGI will not require this, and by definition will exceed any human performance regardless of how many new variables are introduced. The scale and scope of this hyper-intelligence is difficult for scientists and engineers to deal with, as nothing like this has occurred in human history. Philosopher and AI theorist Nick Bostrom provides summary of the speculative concerns on what a modified human brain, a cybernetic or purely artificial intelligent system with such profound abilities would present:

The simplest example of speed superintelligence [which is but one of several hypothetical superintelligences Bostrom offers] would be a whole brain emulation running on fast hardware. An emulation operating at a speed of ten thousand times that of a biological brain would be able to read a book in a few seconds and write a PhD thesis in an afternoon. With a speedup factor of a million, an emulation could accomplish an entire millennium of intellectual work in one working day.^[21]

This raises the speculative question of whether AGI might gain sentience, in that it would have self-awareness and consciousness as humans do. Unfortunately, this is a technological paradox of sorts due to how AGI will equal and potentially vastly exceed the best human cognitive abilities. Once an artificial intelligent system equals the best human operator in performance, the humans will never really know with certainty if the AGI is providing them answers that are truthful and accurate, or if it is able to deceive humans convincingly due to superior intelligence. Thus, if programmers inquire or test whether an AGI might have achieved sentience, the AGI could persuasively answer affirmatively or negatively in such depth and sophistication that the programmers could not outwit or out-logic the answer. Superintelligent entities, whether running with wetware, software, hardware or some combination therein, if able to reach these unbelievable levels of cognitive speed and accuracy, could disrupt nearly every area of social reality for humanity.

Bostrom refers to the emergent possibility where AGI decides to do things that harm humanity or otherwise betrays the programming intent as the ‘treacherous turn’ in AI development.^[22] If such beings or systems became a threat, the challenges in how to precisely control, contain, or counter them is compounded by the fact that organically natural humans will be far slower, less intelligence, and more vulnerable in virtually every context where confrontation is necessary.^[23] Some futurists consider the rise of AI as the direct route to future conflict.^[24] War, for doomsday futurists, is inevitable and likely the end of humanity. This is where Neo-Luddites form their ontological assumptions.

For Neo-Luddites, this leads to the topic of an artificial intelligent ‘Singleton’ entity. Nick Bostrom, a technology philosopher, coined this term with his hypothesis that some intelligent being or system with sufficient cognitive ability could manage every aspect of civilization for humanity.^[25] A Singleton need not be AGI, or AI, in that throughout history many individual rulers and groups attempted to take total control of some society and comprehensively manage all needs. No example of a successful Singleton exists yet, although in certain historical periods and for limited geographical regions, one ruler has effectively maintained total control for lengthy periods. While humans appear unable to attain anything close to Bostrom’s Singleton premise in practice, hypothetically a sufficiently powerful and convincing AGI system might achieve such a level of control and power.

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Should an AGI system, given proper circumstances and demonstration of cognitive superiority, convince an entire government to grant the AGI total control of all aspects of their society, that AGI would become a Singleton.^[26] To fully embrace Bostrom’s premise, the Singleton would subsequently go about convincing all other societies and groups around the world to do the same, resulting in a Singleton entity governing and managing the entirety of human civilization. Neo-Luddites, as antagonists to this entire possible pathway, could potentially resort to protest, organized resistance, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, or armed rebellion to prevent AGI from reaching a Singleton status.^[27]

The reasons for such conflict and resistance by Neo-Luddites centers on several premises developed by Bostrom that now are heavily debated by the artificial intelligence community, government leaders, industry, and academia. Several concerns on when AGI achieves human cognitive parity (and assumed superiority) involve whether a budding Singleton entity would tolerate the possibility of some other AGI project in the world creating a competing Singleton. For Bostrom, the notion of such a powerful and intelligent AI entity represents a logical progression where total management of all aspects of social reality cannot be shared by another Singleton that might disagree.

This ‘Singleton Paradox’ suggests that if one nation or group were to be the first to produce an AGI capable of becoming a Singleton, that entity might attempt to eliminate any competitors, be they AI or human.^[28] This differs from the Nuclear Age and the international race to create nuclear weapons of increasingly greater destruction and sophistication. Nuclear weapons are designed by humans and operate within the ways and means of those human designers. A nuclear weapon cannot change its mind, or reconceptualize its own ‘end’ purpose and application. Artificial intelligence already demonstrates a sophisticated ability to change itself and move toward entirely unintended, unanticipated, and unimagined outcomes to what the human programmers intended.

Even in basic examples of narrow AI experimentation, there have been significant outcomes where the humans lost control. AI have already created their own special language that previously did not exist, and by using it with another AI system, unintentionally removed the human observers from the experiment. In several other examples, AI when tasked to reach certain goals would manipulate and lie to humans so that they could achieve things beyond their reach. In all of these cases, the narrow AI was monitored by humans and those programmers could identify when and how things went sideways. Once AGI is realized, those programmers no longer can say with certitude whether things are as they appear with AI behaviors and outputs. Programmers might develop elaborate ways of containing AGI and preventing it from escaping a laboratory or facility, but this is hardly foolproof.

Bostrom, in devoting an entire chapter to these concerns, acknowledges that “human beings are not secure systems, especially not when pitched against a superintelligence schemer and persuader.”^[29] Even with contemporary (narrow) AI in military systems and contributing to decision-making with human operators, the military community largely resists handing over significant control or authorities to artificial intelligent systems, demanding that a human decision-maker be ‘on the loop’, particularly for major capabilities and weaponry.^[30] Modern military institutions are not necessarily demonstrating luddism, yet the Neo-Luddite position is frequently in parallel to such arguments. Giampiero Giacomello captures this tension with:

All in all, maintaining human in the loop, let alone in the loop, may turn into a strategic (and deadly) disadvantage, or be strategically illogical. In the end, the loop is indeed too small for the both of them.^[31]

Neo-Luddites consider the possibility of a Singleton entity as a direct existential threat to the species. The loop is not just too small, but such arrangements put the human in the vulnerable position. Science fiction movies for decades have presented the idea of ‘killer robots’ and advanced machine minds that take over the world; the rise of AGI presents a theoretical pathway to such an event unfolding.^[32] Even if international sanctions and enforcement were directed toward the development of AGI by most nations, it would only require one violator to break the entire system. Further, if and when a nation was to achieve sufficient technological development where an AGI system was capable of assuming total control and management of a society including all security systems and forces, how would this destabilize the current human-managed international system? What would unfold if multiple nations declared such development of AGI illegal, yet several nations still continued covert development? While the nuclear arms race and current nuclear counter-proliferation efforts are questionably successful in mitigating existential nuclear conflict, there are major technological, physical, and economic warning signs for any nation seeking to deceive others.^[33] It is difficult to hide radiological indicators, or obscure massive facilities necessary to construct the myriad components. AGI may not fall under such conditions, given the miniaturization of computer systems and ease to obfuscate research under a wide range of other endeavors.^[34]

Singleton entities are hypothetical yet existential risks that, if left unchecked in a world where competing societies are investing extensively in artificial intelligence, could create serious security challenges. Such AI could spell the end for humanity, or possibly the inverse where AI propels humanity across the universe with incredible enhancements and new abilities.^[35] There is an optimist-pessimist tension on how futurists consider what AI and new technology may create.^[36] The Neo-Luddites will potentially be the more dangerous of factions due to their loose affiliation and decentralized nature. Small groups and ‘lone wolves’ that harbor the ontological and epistemological assumptions for luddism may resort to organized violence and conflict to preemptively strike against perceived AGI or Singleton threats.

Neo-Luddites may end up in conflicts involving humans, machines, and pure-AI systems fighting amongst themselves, or they could attempt to cut these potential futures off by attempting some non-violent or violent effort to halt these developments.^[37] They may do the same concerning singularities and transhumanism, although those technological concerns will be more widespread and more difficult to target specifically. AGI represents a specific ‘central node’ of sorts, where striking at the system or facility where the entity is being developed has clear strategic goals and consequences from a Neo-Luddite perspective. Neo-Luddites would rationalize first-strike against such a threat as perhaps the only way humanity might prevent becoming imprisoned by technology that might be able to make invisible bars. People might not realize they are no longer free.^[38] For broader societal concerns on transhumanism and the integration of new technology into the human identity, Neo-Luddites may pursue political activities such as protests, demonstrations, pursuing policy changes, and seek legal challenges to attempt to stem the tide of technological innovation toward outcomes that threaten their understanding of what it means to be human.

Neo-Luddism could describe diplomatic, political, and social efforts to protect civilization as new technological limits are broken. It could also harbor more radical and violent groups that could posit a ‘global cataclysmic’ philosophy against advanced technology, particularly exquisite AI systems. The hypothetical possibility of a technological shift into a singularity or the arrival of a singleton entity capable of gaining total control of all defense systems presents existential concerns that correlate to the deepest aims of these movements. These could trigger non-violent or violent resistance, or stimulate international or collective efforts to safeguard new technological developments.

Existentially, the potential subjugation of regular human society under rule (protection or enslavement) of transhuman or singleton AI may trigger radical actions by some of these groups, particularly if technological developments accelerate in publicly understood narratives. This presents additional security considerations for all nations that have advanced artificial intelligence research as well as efforts to integrate such developments into military forces and across civilian society. Those that advocate for transhumanism and achieving a singularity will be in fierce opposition with those proposing neo-luddism perspectives… with the middle ground increasingly scarce in such debates. Existential debate rarely fosters calm and collected discussions.

The functionalist paradigm thus is broad enough for a host of different ontological and epistemological assumptions on social reality and conflict that nonetheless sustain a general system of nation states underpinned by an ordered reality featuring external, physical forces and laws. The rapid expansion of new technological and scientific advances in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has fragmented the functionalist war paradigm in that new groups requiring different ontological and epistemological assumptions are now operational within the social paradigm. These groups still hold to the overarching constructs that define functionalism and make it distinct from other social paradigms. Reality for functionalists remains a stable, ordered system that may appear chaotic to participants, but these aberrations can be mitigated or eliminated through scientific progress and deterministic rationalism. The world can be examined and the external, universal forces and laws that govern it can be discovered, explored, and in certain ways, controlled or appreciated to the advantage of the analytically minded.

Disagreement on what those external forces are and how they function presents key tensions between each of these functionalist groups. Is reality entirely susceptible to a highly objectivist epistemology where fixed principles of war might truly unlock total control and prediction, given sufficient technological and scientific advancements? Or is social reality fragmented so that certain major processes are governed by clear universal laws and some sort of order that appears much like the natural sciences, yet other aspects of that same reality beyond such precision and control? Are humans so complex that the passions, genius, creativity, and chaos of social reality must be navigated through artistry and wisdom that reflect tacit knowledge impossible to convert to explicit checklists or linear-causal formulas?

Functionalists do hold to a state-based system, although there are differences in how states, non-state actors, and populations within states function, depending on the ontological and epistemological positions. Additionally, several other nuanced positions require discussion due to how states exercise conflict and organized violence for myriad rationalizations that exceed even these philosophical frames. Fascism, as a modern development of the early twentieth century and a destructive manifestation of the state system, is one such position on what social reality is, how and why conflict occurs, and why fascists view war differently yet still within the functionalist paradigm…

If you enjoyed this section, you may like the rest of the fourth chapter in Reconceptualizing War. Consider pre-ordering On Technology and War also, if technology and war are key areas of interest for you!

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^[1] Noreen Herzfeld, “Can Lethal Autonomous Weapons Be Just?,” Journal of Moral Theology 11, no. Special Issue 1 (2022): 74.

^[2] James Der Derian, “Virtuous War/Virtual Theory,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) 76, no. 4 (October 2000): 772.

^[3] Der Derian, 776.

^[4] Ben Zweibelson, “PART I: The Singleton Paradox: On the Future of Human-Machine Teaming and Potential Disruption of War Itself,”Journal of Advanced Military Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 11–46; Ben Zweibelson, “PART II: Whale Songs of Wars Not Yet Waged: The Demise of Natural-Born Killers through Human-Machine Teamings Yet to Come,” Journal of Advanced Military Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 47–82.

^[5] Opposition to industrialization here does not equal Marxist positions on capitalism, nor does this overlap with radical environmental anarchists. Both of these groups are introduced in the next two chapters. Luddites hold to a specific ontological stance grounded in the functionalist paradigm where technological innovation is bad for humanity in that it threatens existing prosperity and worker employment.

^[6] Anatol Rapoport, “Editor’s Introduction to On War,” in On War, by Carl Von Clausewitz, ed. Anatol Rapoport (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 11–79.

^[7] Zweibelson, “PART II: Whale Songs of Wars Not Yet Waged: The Demise of Natural-Born Killers through Human-Machine Teamings Yet to Come,” 72–74.

^[8] The many medical considerations here require extensive legal, ethical, and moral debate on birth defects, serious medical problems, major injuries, and other circumstances where a person could benefit from the advanced technology that Neo-Luddites largely view as dangerous for the entire species.

^[9] Jacob Shatzer, “Fake and Future ‘Humans’: Artificial Intelligence, Transhumanism, and the Question of the Person,” Southwestern Journal of Theology 63, no. 2 (Spring 2021): 127–46; Ben Goertzel, “The Singularity Is Coming,” Issues 98 (March 2012): 4–8; Hohyun Sohn, “Singularity Theodicy and Immortality,” Religions 10, no. 165 (2019): 1–9.

^[10] Justin Pugh, Lisa Soros, and Kenneth Stanley, “Quality Diversity: A New Frontier for Evolutionary Computation,” Frontiers in Robotics and AI 3, no. 40 (July 2016): 5.

^[11] Zweibelson, “PART II: Whale Songs of Wars Not Yet Waged: The Demise of Natural-Born Killers through Human-Machine Teamings Yet to Come,” 57–62.

^[12] Zweibelson, “PART I: The Singleton Paradox: On the Future of Human-Machine Teaming and Potential Disruption of War Itself,” 19–21.

^[13] If modified permanently, how might a society restrict behavior or otherwise protect the rest of society from super-enabled humans? If cybernetically enhanced, what physical, cognitive, and emotional consequences emerge if the hardware and software is removed from the ‘wetware’?

^[14] Sophie-Charlotte Fischer and Andreas Wenger, “Artificial Intelligence, Forward-Looking Governance and the Future of Security,” Swiss Political Science Review 27, no. 1 (2021): 174–75.

^[15] “Merging With the Machines: Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and the Law of Exponential Growth, An Interview with Ray Kurzweil, Part 2,” World Future Review 2, no. 2 (May 2010): 57–61; Kevin Shapiro, “This Is Your Brain on Nanobots,” Observations, December 2005, 64–65.

^[16] Zweibelson, “PART II: Whale Songs of Wars Not Yet Waged: The Demise of Natural-Born Killers through Human-Machine Teamings Yet to Come,” 70.

^[17] Zweibelson, “PART I: The Singleton Paradox: On the Future of Human-Machine Teaming and Potential Disruption of War Itself,” 15–16.

^[18] Benjamin Jensen, Christopher Whyte, and Scott Cuomo, “Algorithms at War: The Promise, Peril, and Limits of Artificial Intelligence,”International Studies Review 22 (2020): 528.

^[19] Peter Layton, “Fighting Artificial Intelligence Battles: Operational Concepts for Future AI-Enabled Wars” (Australian Defence College Centre for Defence Research, 2021), https://tasdcrc.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/JSPS_4.pdf.

^[20] Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, paperback (United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2016), 26.

^[21] Bostrom, 64.

^[22] Bostrom, 140–55.

^[23] Zweibelson, “PART II: Whale Songs of Wars Not Yet Waged: The Demise of Natural-Born Killers through Human-Machine Teamings Yet to Come,” 47–82.

^[24] Robert Geraci, “Apocalyptic AI: Religion and the Promise of Artificial Intelligence,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 1 (2008): 157; Denise Garcia, “Lethal Artificial Intelligence and Change: The Future of International Peace and Security,” International Studies Review 20 (2018): 334–41.

^[25] Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, 26, 100–101; Nick Bostrom, “What Is a Singleton?,” 2005, https://nickbostrom.com/fut/singleton.

^[26] Critics of this concept might object that any AGI could be contained, managed, tested, or imprisoned by human programmers. The paradox in this reasoning is that if AGI is truly equal or superior to all possible human programmers, then it is illogical to assume a prison built by lesser intelligent beings might contain such an entity.

^[27] Zweibelson, “PART II: Whale Songs of Wars Not Yet Waged: The Demise of Natural-Born Killers through Human-Machine Teamings Yet to Come,” 70.

^[28] Zweibelson, “PART I: The Singleton Paradox: On the Future of Human-Machine Teaming and Potential Disruption of War Itself,” 11–46.

^[29] Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, 159.

^[30] Paul Scharre, Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War: Army of None, Norton Paperback (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2018), 61.

^[31] Giampiero Giacomello, “The War of ‘Intelligent’ Machines May Be Inevitable,” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 33 (2021): 284.

^[32] Garcia, “Lethal Artificial Intelligence and Change: The Future of International Peace and Security,” 339; Zweibelson, “PART I: The Singleton Paradox: On the Future of Human-Machine Teaming and Potential Disruption of War Itself,” 29–34.

^[33] Zweibelson, “PART I: The Singleton Paradox: On the Future of Human-Machine Teaming and Potential Disruption of War Itself,” 29–30.

^[34] Power demands are one key element in AI development, yet this in itself may be difficult to locate if other major power demands are in the same general area. The consolidation of highly skilled computer scientists and engineers are another indicator that also could be obscured if positioned within a university, commercial setting, or government service.

^[35] Geraci, “Apocalyptic AI: Religion and the Promise of Artificial Intelligence,” 150.

^[36] Max Tegmark, “Let’s Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete,” in Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI, ed. John Brockman (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 79.

^[37] Geraci, “Apocalyptic AI: Religion and the Promise of Artificial Intelligence,” 157; Zweibelson, “PART I: The Singleton Paradox: On the Future of Human-Machine Teaming and Potential Disruption of War Itself,” 33–34.

^[38] Aura-Elena Schussler, “Artificial Intelligence and Mind-Reading Machines- Towards a Future Techno-Panoptic Singularity,” Postmodern Openings 11, no. 4 (2020): 342.

Modern militaries hold to what is arguably a five-century old, institutionalized framework set in Newtonian ideals for understanding war at ontological (what is or is not reality) and epistemological (how we understand such knowledge to operate in this reality) level. Everything a military organization experiences, studies, interprets, adapts, rejects, reforms, and experiments with will configure to these core paradigmatic assumptions on reality and conflict. Where did this thinking come from, and how did it gain such a powerful grip upon most all military minds and organizational processes? First, labeling this as Newtonian is insufficient, as there are several other parallel constructs working within the modern war paradigm. We ought to avoid using too dense a term such as “Newtonian, Baconian, Cartesian, and Westphalian War Paradigm” as such a term is unwieldy despite each of these ingredients playing significant ontological operations for how this modern war paradigm functions.

Instead, we might use ‘Newtonian Style’ as the catch-all phrase and build upon it in this section to provide readers a critical overview. This umbrella terminology implies the associated functionalist thinking of various dominant disciplines that military organizations drew from, such as biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics, geometry, and geology. Like the military profession, the practitioners of political “science” sought similar objectivity and analytic rigor in their craft; multiple metaphoric devices, models, and terminology migrated from hard science origins into the practice of war and policy.

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This Cartesian, Baconian, and Newtonian Style first rose to dominance in the 17^th through 19^th centuries.^[1]This modern military worldview is termed ‘functionalism’ within social paradigm theory and encompasses this Newtonian-based ontological and epistemological framework. The author, in Reconceptualizing War, uses social paradigm theory below to position this scientific stylization of war as essential for making sense of how and why modern military forces rely on Newtonian stylization that still dominates today, albeit with emerging war paradigm competitors. Functionalists were the first to advocate the curation of knowledge (including how one understands war to wage warfare) not through faith-based justifications of truth claims but using empirical reasoning. One makes an inquiry and then collects and measures empirically observed facts, which displaced the earlier dominance of using sacred texts that could only be properly interpreted through divinely inspired clerics and religious experts.^[2] Rigorous testing is conducted to scientifically validate these facts with repeatability and uniformity; divine events declared miraculous or supernaturally governed were removed from war strategies and battlefield tactical processes outside of culturally aligned rituals, uniforms, and other symbols. This is combined with a Westphalian system for states to govern distinct populations defined by a shared language, common history, and clearly defined geography:

Functionalists hold to a teleological ontology, all relevant actions in social reality “have a purposeful function… Functional knowledge, then, is a collection of facts about causal relations in the system or subsystem behaviors in question. Once causality is made understandable and linked in larger chains to a larger, synoptic form of reasoning, one can… plan smaller behavioral interventions into bigger ones.” This Cartesian anxiety forces functionalist operators in war to seek stability, order, certainty, and control in a chaotic world where the interpretivists assume the opposite. Functionalism in the contemporary war paradigm utilized by most all industrialized, western societies has entrenched this positivistic epistemology across all doctrine, training, methodologies, and underpinning all war theory deemed acceptable and ‘scientific’ for inclusion.^[3]

It is in this fertile period that war ‘modernized’, and Feudal Age militaries professionalized through significant changes in education, training, organization, theory, and practice. Yet despite such change, a strong institutional force still retains many ascientific practices, beliefs, and constructs that reflect institutional tolerance for many ritualized behaviors nested within identity and regulated using ontological and epistemological assumptions on war. While some paradoxes and tensions are exposed within the established domains of air, land, and sea warfare that have been mastered over centuries, it is in the space and cyberspace areas of development as well as the peculiar and exquisite areas of special operations that Newtonian, Cartesian, even Platonic^[4] conceptualization of modern warfare are arguably insufficient today and potentially irrelevant in coming decades.

Graphic above is from the third chapter in this upcoming book release.

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Further, our species might be clinging to an increasingly irrelevant war paradigm as we develop highly disruptive and novel technological outputs in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and in other overlapping fields that are anticipated to be realized in the coming decades. Predecessors holding supernatural and pre-scientific war paradigms were swiftly dispatched on battlefields by those adapting new technologies and able to realize this Newtonian Style for war. These Newtonian adherents today may buckle against adversaries that move beyond these concepts and substitute novel ones. There are multiple sociological drivers for this resistance to change and how this Newtonian stylization remains dominant. Lorraine Daston offers valuable summary:

Throughout the early modern period, European thinking about natural laws and the laws of nature had evolved in parallel. There were obvious contrasts: natural law held only for human nature and compelled by reason rather than physical necessity; laws of nature could be called such only metaphorically and had to be discovered by empirical inquiry rather than thought experiments about a hypothetical primordial state. Yet their commonalities dwarfed these differences. Both embraced a foundational model in which vast and varied consequences could be derived from a few simple, general laws; both contrasted the universality, uniformity, and immutability of these laws with the mosaic of local customs and local natures.^[5]

The Newtonian Style was welcomed in how it demystified many aspects of reality, permitting scientific progress and rigorous professionalization to expand across nearly all human enterprise. Inventions such as the movable printing press helped expand literacy beyond the earlier clerical trappings of secluded monasteries or wealthy elites, carrying along with it the power associated with knowledge and the possibility of self-improvement beyond traditional limitations. While earlier military leaders most likely believed the world was flat, that the Earth was central to the universe with all in orbit around it, or that our planet was stacked upon an infinite pile of cosmic tortoises “all the way down”, these constructs did not prohibit their ability to win on ancient battlefields.^[6] Alexander the Great was likely a ‘Flat Earther’, but so was most everyone else on the battlefield, and in that premodern context it simply did not matter. When different groups espousing similar ontologies battled in warfare with relatively similar technological capabilities, these belief systems appeared ancillary to the outcomes.

Yet in the Newtonian world where militaries began operating across the physical domains (air, land, and sea) in far greater configurations of complexity, scale, and technical precision, the military profession could no longer sustain incorrect or ideologically directed ontologies. With astronauts now orbiting the planet and aging slower than the rest of us on Earth due to how General Relativity’s explanation of time and space dilation, it is increasingly improbable that modern military decision-makers can conceptualize complex warfare in multiple domains (including cyberspace, space) while adhering to purely Newtonian constructs. For example, when the earlier European conquistadors encountered Central and South American natives, a small group of technologically advanced, professional soldiers and sailors used horses, firearms, and cannon against an overwhelming population armed with primitive spears, bow and arrow, and rudimentary tactics. The natives could, in those bloody encounters, rely on pre-scientific knowledge and belief systems and in some situations, still overcome and defeat their high-technology invaders with brute force and mass. Yet for the Europeans using cannon, artillery, firearms, and other advanced technology, they could only maintain and manage such weaponry using science and a professionalized manner of warfare. Were natives to capture some of the cannon in a daring raid against Europeans and attempt to pray to deities and spirits on “how do use these heavy black tubes to shoot fire at our enemies”, they would get no useful answer.

When confronted with the cognitive boundaries of our contemporary war paradigm and that of potential alternatives, the military institution often defaults to demanding these alternative perspectives must adhere to the corresponding beliefs, values, logics, and methods already operating within our preferred worldview on conflict. In other words, we must explain things like quantum, complexity science, and General Relativity only using the doctrinal Newtonian theories, models, and terminology. Like natives expecting spirits to assist them in making muskets fire and reload properly, we too are often preoccupied with forcing new contexts into our familiar war paradigm, absorbing things and demanding they adhere to our existing belief system.^[7] By maintaining this, we never dare to seriously entertain anything that violates our sacred war paradigm. The war paradigm assimilates all new concepts, but only if they can be readily integrated into the functionalist framework underpinned by a Newtonian epistemology and ontology. Haridimos Tsoukas elaborates on this dominant worldview with:

The Newtonian style of thinking operates by constructing an idealized world in the form of an abstract model, in order to approximate the complex behavior of real objects. For example, Newton’s laws of motions describe the behavior of bodies in a frictionless vacuum- a mathematically handy approximation, good enough for several real-life occasions. Moreover, the core of the Newtonian style consists of two assumptions. First, the extremal principle; namely, that the objects of study behave in such a way as to optimize the values of certain variables. And, second, prediction is possible by abstracting causal relations from the path-dependence of history.^[8]

In the relatively new fields of quantum theory, open systems theory, sociology, complexity theory, as well as postmodern philosophy, there are new ways to conceptualize many of the exceedingly complex and difficult military concepts of modern warfare that do not support the models and metaphoric constructs dominant in earlier 17^th century institutionalized habits and patterns. The models familiar to the Napoleonic World remain in today’s complex one, but they now are crowded with many other competing, dissimilar, and incommensurate constructs and theories. Only in a Newtonian reality could one effectively break something down such as war into universal, enduring principles of war,^[9] plan against ‘centers of gravity’,^[10] or make the broad claim that ‘war has an enduring, unchanging nature with a contextually fluid character’, as found in all modern doctrine.^[11] War in the Napoleonic Era needed to configure to hard science logic, just as most everything else was being converted so that an enduring and unchanging ‘nature’ of music, language, culture, race, or even culinary pursuits might be scientifically articulated and arranged.^[12]Newtonian styled reasoning, as applied by the military profession toward complex warfare, seeks the universal, the general, so that outputs accomplish a ‘timelessness’ quality to cast forward upon future, unwaged wars a predictive shadow that also spans in reverse so that every historical battle is also in keeping with the constructs.

At the ontological level (what is and is not war), war phenomenon, according to this Newtonian worldview, must consist of discrete, objective elements, and their law-like associations expressed can then be identified by a military analyst through a construction of an abstract model. These models are subsequently used for predicting, and, if possible, “controlling the phenomenon at hand. The Newtonian view assumes an objectivist ontology, works with a mechanistic epistemology [theories of knowledge], and enacts an instrumental praxeology [theory and study of human action and conduct].^[13] We no longer need spirits or deities on the battlefield to explain the consequences of how violence is organized; we can scientifically measure and predict what is unfolding, and when those theorizations fail, refine and re-measure in the battlefield post-mortem to adjust our logics. It is the formation of models and metaphoric devices where militaries engage in what is argued here as a purely Newtonian styled approach to modern warfare, exercised in virtually all doctrine, training, as well as education.^[14]

The pyramids in Egypt date back thousands of years and represent some of the most astounding human engineering of the first highly organized premodern civilizations. They still stand today, weathered by time but still in their sturdy geometric forms, demonstrating how mathematics and geometry were constructs available for our earliest societies to apply toward the natural world. Far before the pyramids, hunter gatherers able to use the power of fire likely realized that stacking firewood in a pyramid configuration generated a useful configuration, along with stacking in other geometric positions such as a cube instead of random, haphazard and natural positions. Geometric shapes fascinated early civilization and many of the earliest philosophers debated on the fundamental nature of the universe using geometry and notions of ‘primordial elements’ such as fire, water, air, and earth. Our interest in geometric shapes and their relationship with how to best manipulate physical reality would carry long-term consequences, as these premodern correlations would extend deeply into the modern and scientific age of reason.

Triangles, trinities, and triads abound today across the military profession just as they did in 1722 when Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban first published his highly influential book on military fortification, artillery, and geometry for warfare.^[15] Whereas the ancient pyramids demonstrated the engineering stability of geometric shapes, European military theorists in the Newtonian Age also applied geometry toward how to better achieve wartime objectives. Vauban became an early and significant military theorist to draw from Newtonian physics to conceptualize military models on what warfare was, and how to properly wage it. He approached war with an engineering mindset and used mathematics to render organized violence into discrete sequences of measurable activities. While earlier battlefields featured highly ritualized, structured and game-like parameters for the conduct of war, Vauban and others sought to find scientific reason as the key to unlock unlimited power to shape war in specific ways to achieve certain victory. The court astrologer slowly was cast out and the court astronomer positioned as the central authority. This began humanity’s race to generate a science of warfare and organize violence along measured principles and universal laws that carried the virtues of scientific discovery and research.

In turn, the traditional hierarchy, rigidity to forms, standardization of processes, and uniformity for information curation became crystalized- all accomplished through conceptual models reliant upon fixed geometry, systematic logic, and a mathematical approach reliant upon laboratory conditions that are best suited for the natural sciences.^[16]War in the Age of European Enlightenment essentially became a patchwork of set battlefields measured and controlled through scientific endeavors, articulated through the language of mathematics. Religious rituals and assumptions on divine intervention remained interwoven due to strong ideological and cultural forces, yet the military professional increasingly turned to science for reliable, repeatable results.

Linear, sequential concepts for explaining military affairs, whether in strict logical lines like formulas or recipes, mirroring natural science constructs such as centers of gravity, or arranged in iterative loops such as Air Force Colonel John Boyd’s popular OODA (orient, observe, decide, act) model, continue to govern how contemporary militaries think and act, as well as think about their thinking (reflective practice). To challenge these institutionalized models, theories, and methodologies, we will suggest some unorthodox alternatives.^[17] In this chapter, readers will encounter certain concepts never before seen in any military doctrine- for good reason. The modern military institution prefers a well-oiled machine that oversimplifies to attempt to mitigate risk and uncertainty. This is considered best optimized when using reliable, reduceable, and relatable concepts, language, and shared metaphoric devices. Yet this hinders us in critically thinking about our own way of understanding conflict, adapting to complexity, and innovating to deliver novel and necessary change to achieve strategic surprise and disruption over our adversaries.

Defining the Modern Military Paradigm:

When we hear the term ‘paradigm’, many readers might think of Thomas Kuhn’s original treatment of how science progresses through iterations of new paradigms challenging and replacing popular ones that nonetheless are increasingly fragile and problematic.^[18] Kuhn specifically addressed science, and how he posited it changed through ‘paradigmatic shifts’ that completely transform how we understand reality via science over time. The rise of a Newtonian worldview gradually replaced the earlier Feudal and ancient, pre-scientific frame that contained scientific logic such as astronomy and mathematics, but readily paired them with astrology, superstition, or alchemy. Scientific paradigms do provide certain benefit in considering the significant shifts in scientific thinking that enabled expansion or complete disruption of military battlefield effects, but we should not confuse scientific paradigm shifting with how a military organization maintains a social paradigm for war. These are different and correspond to distinct fields; Kuhnian original paradigm thinking draws from the philosophy of science, not war.

Sociology is where social paradigm theory emerges from, driven originally by sociological theorists Gibson Burrell and Garreth Morgan, who in the 1970s conceptualized how paradigm thinking could manifest inside the field of sociology differently than how Kuhnian scientific paradigm theory operated upon science.^[19] This is a significant distinction, one where advocates of the Newtonian-styled war paradigm will embrace Kuhnian theory, but not that of sociologists. Only Kuhn’s scientific paradigm construct allows the natural order of Clausewitzian, Jominian, and Newtonian thinking to operate in a world where there remain natural laws of war, with an enduring and unchanging nature of war itself. With Kuhn’s scientific paradigm entrenched, functionalists using this Newtonian stylization of war can argue that warfare carries some ever-changing character that aligns with how Kuhn explains the shifting of scientific belief systems from one paradigmatic shift to the next. Flat Earthers were replaced by round-Earth, geo-centric universe believers, who were subsequently replaced by enthusiasts of the helio-centric model, and so-on.

Equating this to the enduring war construct for Newtonian thinkers, war itself remains wedded to these universal laws and principles best articulated by Napoleonic war theorists Clausewitz and Jomini, while the changing ‘character’ of warfare bounces along in close proximity to Kuhn’s scientific shifts. The discovery of bronze, then iron, and other profound scientific advancements created “paradigmatic shifts” of a Kuhnian, scientific sense that transformed battlefields, while these assumed natural laws of war could remain rigid and fixed, available for analytical reasoning and deductive logic of the modern scientific mindset.

Thus, when we address a war paradigm, we mean the sociological paradigm that incorporates war, a most human endeavor, which forms a destructive and violent part of our social construction of reality. This sits atop the physical reality we exist within and share with other living things. Again, animals and plants endure the consequences of human-waged wars, but they are not witting and willing participants since they are cognitively eliminated from operating within our social paradigm. Kuhn’s scientific paradigm works in parallel, also offering a philosophical framing of human-designed scientific reason, which is another frame that is exclusively available to human beings in that the military guard dog and the war horse can benefit from human scientific enterprise, but they are not aware of science nor can they practice it. Thus, any war between human beings includes both the application of how scientific paradigms weigh upon the context of a particular war (but not any nature of war itself) and how the social paradigm employed by select human participants offers separate yet consequential understanding of how war is conceptualized by witting and willing participants.^[20]

A sociological paradigm for war becomes paramount and in any philosophical engagement with conflict and civilization, superior even to Kuhn’s original thesis on scientific paradigms as a viable explanation for the philosophy of science. We need his construct for explaining scientific patterns and shifts in human history, but we also must go beyond his focus on the philosophical framework of science to explore war. War requires science, yet war is far more than scientific applications or the physical and psychological effects of scientific artifacts or processes. War exceeds scientific thinking in that philosophy and sociology are essential for contemplating what it is to be human and interact with both the physical world (the focus of science) and our own social construction of reality (the focus of philosophy and sociology). One does not equate to the other; we cannot attempt a purely scientific framework for comprehending war without rejecting all possible war paradigms that do not uphold the functionalist ontology where war must obey the physical laws of the universe as best interpreted by modern science.

Yet we must begin with a grounding in functionalism if only because this is the most recognized point of departure for most readers and the majority of the modern military profession in the Free World.^[21] This Newtonian scientific understanding of the physical world reigned for roughly four to five centuries but was partially replaced in the early twentieth century by both quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity in how science was understood. We must stress how these new theories did dismantle many Newtonian physics constructs, but modern societies still prefer to use them to make sense of the immediate, physical world. Many Newtonian constructs remain well insulated and reliable for a wide range of modern contexts. Few people contemplate time-space dilation when driving their vehicle in Earth-bound highway traffic, yet astronauts orbiting the planet need to utilize such theories in most spacecraft navigation to ensure avoiding disaster. Few computer users consider the binary code and how modern smartphones and laptops function to compute millions or billions of calculations using code, yet quantum computer engineers must shift to quantum theory when working on quantum computers. Where we stand often depends on where we sit, and for most of us today, the utility of framing much of physical reality using Newtonian constructs remains valid and useful.

For war, as something designed and exercised by humans against other humans in physical reality, this requires a social reality for which it manifests in entirety that transcends the physical world. ^[22] Social paradigm theory, produced in sociology for extending Kuhn’s original focus on scientific paradigms, posits that a paradigm: “offers coherent assumptions regarding how the world should be studied.”^[23] These are the conceptual worlds where we can think differently about the same phenomena in reality, often in positions that are incommensurate with others operating beyond the paradigm limits that one actor subscribes to while denying alternatives.^[24] In premodern periods, societies of humans readily believed that war itself was orchestrated and controlled not by fellow humans, but by deities, spirits, or other external supernatural powers; emperors often decided on when and how to go to war by consulting court astronomers, astrologers, and high priests of divine oracles along with tactically-minded military advisors.

The supernatural premodern world held together an ontology concerning conflict, war, natural disasters, and everyday occurrences as part of a grand orchestration by divine hands. This occurred whether adhering to Ancient Greek and Roman beliefs involving a polytheistic cast of many Gods, Goddesses, and magical creatures, or within the monotheistic trappings of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.^[25] Prior to the European Age of Enlightenment, societies mixed scientific-like, objectively structured knowledge such as predicting the paths of planets with the mystic interpretation of these supernatural entities, such as Mars moving toward the western horizon as an indication that the God of War might favor a new military campaign this month. Societies sustained these worldviews throughout recorded history and prospered, waged wars, invaded, and were conquered all while interpreting such things in some shared belief system. Historian Yuval Harari speaks of ‘imagined order’ to this vein with:

We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.^[26]

The modern imagined order is underpinned with a multitude of scientific and pseudo-scientific beliefs, coupled with many earlier constructs inherited from outdated or expired worldviews. Many elements of culture, ideology, language, and identity stem from far before any scientific reasoning and endure today in our modern beliefs. The external world, the individual internal reality for each of us, and the collectively shared ‘social’ reality we organize to share and maintain also manifests forms of conflict along with the ability to action such violence. All of these forces shape the societal configurations we experience and rely upon to explain why reality is as it seems.^[27] We host a strange brew of modern beliefs mixed with far older ones in contemporary society, with scientists such as Niels Bohr keeping a horseshoe above his door for luck, despite not believing in superstitious idea. Galileo Galilei believed in astrology as a legitimate and profitable enterprise alongside his pursuits in mathematics and astronomy. Many modern scientists follow rituals and hold to superstitions despite holding extensive degrees in fields where such concepts have no grounding.

This is part of the complex nature of humanity. Scientists often follow strict routines, talk to temperamental equipment, wear “lucky” clothing, and perform various rituals when otherwise adhering to scientific methods. Famous author Michael Crichton even ate the same lunchtime meal daily when drafting a novel, adhering to certain lucky rituals to ensure a superior literary outcome. Even Albert Einstein, a skeptic of anything superstitious or in violation of scientific logic, would intentionally nap with a spoon in his hand suspended above a plate. If he dozed off and dropped it, the clanking spoon would awaken him, which he believed let him gain access to deeper levels of creative thought between the waking and unconscious dream states. There are billions of examples such as these across modern civilization; we human beings appear to sustain a stable social reality through a messy mix of modern and ancient beliefs and ideas. Readers should remember this as we progress into defining the modern military paradigm for war.

Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan introduced social paradigms for sociological applications, which thus include any inferences concerning war as another aspect of how humans socialize through competing belief systems.^[28] They took the original scientific paradigm theory from Thomas Kuhn and adapted it toward sociology, changing the term ‘paradigm’ as they progressed. This creates significant distinction to whether one is discussing scientific paradigms versus sociological ones. To quickly identify and frame what one social paradigm consists of, and how it will differ from another competing social paradigm, we need to introduce the philosophical terms of ‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology.’ Using these concepts, readers can subsequently explore why our modern militaries largely adhere to a Newtonian stylization for war, and how such a framework intentionally excludes certain things for the sustainment of preferred or favored concepts. To accept certain ontological and epistemological assumptions about reality simultaneously renders other content inaccessible.^[29] A Newtonian paradigm operates as a cognitive gate keeper, permitting certain beliefs and ideas into the frame while denying others and purging select obsolete concepts as necessary. This is done within set philosophical assumptions oriented towards what social reality is and is not.

Ontology addresses what people believe is and is not real.^[30] Assumptions of reality that are ontological “concern the very essence of the phenomena under investigation” in that the world and what we perceive is us within our heads should be defined in some sort of clear relationship.^[31] The accuracy of such constructs is irrelevant here, as humans construct ontologies and hold them in various convictions that are self-serving in maintaining the belief system that created the ontological assumption. For example, people agree on what a chair is and is not, despite many different types of chairs existing around the world that reflect different cultures, values, geography, and available materials. The abstract and absolute idea of ‘chair’ is shared collectively across our minds in an ontological configuration that cannot possibly be realized in a single chair found on the planet. No single chair possesses all of the absolute ideas that ‘chair’ encompasses. However, if someone rode an elephant into the classroom and exclaimed, “everyone put their homework here on my chair please”, the students would declare that such a thing was not a chair. The elephant does have certain ‘chair-like’ qualities, and human beings are perhaps the only species capable of imagining impossible things such as an elephant shaped chair that would walk, roar, and be fearful of mice.^[32]

Ontological assumptions remain abstract in that they are created and sustained within the social collective; We might imagine and re-imagine ontologies as we see fit, discarding some, adapting others, and crafting entirely novel ones. Yet for civilization to exist, we must share them and agree generally on which assumptions are correct, and which are not.^[33] Ontological assumptions become a collective feedback loop that sustains a certain reality. Actors within that construct use the social paradigm’s ontological assumptions to go about their lives and not endlessly have to discover, examine, or question these basic tenets on what is, and is not. The world makes sense, and one can then go about the business of living in it, to include how and why to wage war. Without first considering these foundational philosophical assumptions, we cannot examine our dominant war paradigm and grasp how and why we understand the organization of violence in a particular way versus other socially sustained views on war.

The Ancient Greeks, Ancient Chinese, and Ancient Aztecs understood war differently, just as modern Europeans, Communist Chinese, and certain ideological extremist terror organizations carry wildly different worldviews on what reality is and how one might wage war to transform it.^[34] Put another way, some societies may have no framework or shared construct for ‘chair’ in the western sense of the term (seating device raised from floor, with back and legs), just as different groups hold to incommensurate beliefs on food, music, acceptable public behavior, sexuality, or the purpose of the universe.^[35] They do carry a set framework of ontological assumptions which comprise how they understand the physical world and impose their preferred social construction of reality atop it.

While ontology is directly linked to the human experience within complex reality where people, chairs, and elephants interact, epistemology is itself entirely an abstraction that remains entirely in that same continued abstraction for human beings.^[36] Epistemology remains “in our heads” in that it addresses the way we design and curate knowledge itself. It addresses how we attempt to understand phenomena of interest, and how we ‘know’ the forms and function of such knowledge, while also informing practitioners of a paradigm and subsequently developing that same paradigm via user inputs.^[37] While ontology defines the ‘what’ of chair-ness, epistemology guides how we test and apply it—through observation, consensus, or imagination—to reject the elephant as a chair. For military professionals, the community of practice utilizes many epistemological constructs such as understanding war as an arrangement of ‘levels’ with strategic, operational, and tactical layers corresponding with a hierarchical arrangement for cause and effect.^[38]

We epistemologically ‘know’ that any complex conflict might be frozen in time and isolated into set categories found in all wars, so that core principles of war can be identified and analyzed regardless of context, technology, historiography, or geography. We believe in physical domains such as air, land, and sea… and we subsequently project these epistemological constructs upon non-physical ones such as cyberspace, and celestially positioned ones such as the space domain, despite many profound differences.^[39] For example, military planners easily can define what the enemy strategic center of gravity is within a declared military campaign plan, yet they cannot walk into any physical region on the planet and stand between where the tactical level of war ends and the operational one begins. Epistemological assumptions remain within our collective minds and are only indirectly able to manifest in the physical world. Yet these core beliefs orchestrate and stabilize the social reality we exist in so that our intents can be linked to actions; Actions that succeed contribute to achieving certain desired goals.

Epistemological assumptions incorporate these abstract foundations of knowledge that remain entirely within our collective understanding and are passed on to each subsequent generation. If we ‘know’ through our ontology about reality, we also understand how the world is supposed to work within our particular belief system, even if we rarely take an interest in what that belief system is or how it establishes just as many limitations as it does declarations. Newtonian style emphasizes a “measure and test” epistemological framework, yet this is a narrow and specific way of considering epistemology. It also involves collective debate and justification so that these constructs become plastic, able to flex to adapt to new constructs and retire obsolete ones. We must agree not only on the artifact or process under examination, but on what types of knowledge sourcing is accepted, preferred, or potentially heretical to the group. Many societies declare any outputs of witchcraft, ‘dark arts’, or sorcery as inherently evil, even if the outputs appear identical to ones sourced from appropriate or orthodox processes.

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Military doctrine is carefully scripted, recorded, and curated within the institution by trusted custodians of military knowledge so that the war paradigm extends from one generation to the next. We have a specific process for reviewing, updating, and publishing military doctrines that involve select theories, distinct decision-making methods, accepted models, metaphoric devices, and specific language. Changes are made, yet rarely are they disruptive enough to shake loose too many cherished or internalized beliefs. Today’s multi-million dollar naval stealth cruiser leaves dry dock only after the ritual of smashing a bottle of champagne to wish the ship good luck and bless the crew. We do these things not because we necessarily believe in such superstitions, but due to the institutional insistence that the war paradigm be maintained and exercised.^[40]

Our modern war paradigm hosts many epistemological assumptions concerning war, such as the belief that war can be compartmentalized generally into a hierarchical arrangement of strategic, operational, and tactical levels, that centers of gravity exist in every conflict at certain levels, or that universal principles of war might distill the core pathway of any battle, provided the analysis is done using select military processes and rigor. Again, we hold these concepts entirely in our minds yet believe they are ‘real’ in the sense they represent how the world functions. Centers of gravity, lines of effort linking ends with ways and means, principles of war, and many other constructs are epistemological assumptions about war; The contemporary military profession prefers these over earlier premodern ones.^[41] Epistemological assumptions are about ideas, such as how we know we can go about engaging in war against adversaries, what acts of war are and are not, how one can evaluate forms of knowledge on war, and how one might distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘false’ statements concerning warfare methods, and also what war itself manifests as within our shared worldview.

For example, in the Napoleonic Era of European warfare, military theorists Antoine-Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz presented different theories about land war. Jomini posited that war obeyed external natural laws and that core principles of war, mirroring those found in the natural sciences, existed in every and each conflict; the cunning general able to configure strategies and tactics to exploit these war principles could win every battle.^[42] Clausewitz combined the same Enlightenment natural science concepts as Jomini would, but also integrated German Idealism and Romanticism, where war could not be reduced down with laws or principles, and this trinity of passion, chance, and reason would become the focus of any aspiring general to develop new ways of outwitting an opponent through decisive battle. Although both men studied Napoleon and the Westphalian system of states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they drew different conclusions while utilizing different theories and models. Clausewitzian expert Peter Paret summarizes how the Prussian theorist still operated philosophically in close proximity to Jomini, despite certain variations on Germanic versus French-Anglo philosophies in the Napoleonic Age of Warfare:

But the political and social concepts could only dimly illuminate the actual mechanics of war. To understand these, Clausewitz developed a technique of inquiry that sought to identify and separate the numerous components of military organization, decision-making, and action, and to reduce each to its essential core before fitting them together again into larger and dynamic structures.^[43]

Defenders of the Napoleonic, Newtonian framework for containing all possible forms of war into this modern military paradigm may object to these charges; Most are obligated in that any removal of theory or model from the foundation for all modern military doctrine might cause the entire architecture to crumble. Perhaps the argument ought not be whether the modern war paradigm is or is not still effective when wars are waged against similar minded organizations. Instead, would we gain new insights by challenging what this war paradigm is capable of representing, by considering the extensive array of theories, models, and methodologies associated with said constructs that the war paradigm generates? If institutional defenders insist that contemporary military practices and the doctrine underpinning all orthodox decision-making methods within battle do embrace complexity, dynamic systems, and operate beyond positivistic, reductionist epistemologies, can we defend that argument with a deeper dive into modern military theories, models, and methods.

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Citations:

^[1] Haridimos Tsoukas, Complex Knowledge: Studies in Organizational Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2005), 213–16.

^[2] Paparone, “On Metaphors We Are Led By,” 55–57.

^[3] Zweibelson, Reconceptualizing War, 627. Refer to original citation for additional references and sources within this citation.

^[4] Early Greek concepts (and subsequent Roman enhancements therein) inspired 17^th Century European scientific reforms that would displace and challenge the ‘pre-modern’ through a new ‘scientific rationalism’.

^[5] Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022), 233–34.

^[6] This idea of infinite regression and how the world relates to the rest of the visible universe dates back to ancient ideological allegories across multiple societies. The idea that our world is supported by ‘rocks all the way down’ or some mythical turtle’s shell is not attributed to a single source, but became a colloquialism in 17^th and 18^th century English society with references to ancient Hindu, Chinese, and Native American beliefs.

^[7] Certainly, many societies do change their social paradigm when faced with the grim prospect of elimination or total assimilation into the aggressor’s system. Most Native American tribes adapted horses, rifles, and military tactics of European aggressors while modifying them to work within the contexts of a largely unsettled, expansive North American continent where European drill and set battlefield configurations often proved incompatible. The French Indian Wars and the American War of Independence provide excellent examples here, as would subsequent American Indian Wars of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

^[8] Tsoukas, Complex Knowledge, 213–14.

^[9] Christopher Paparone and James Crupi, “The Principles of War as Paradox,” Proceedings 131, no. 10 (2005): 39–44.

^[10] Ben Zweibelson, “Gravity-Free Decision-Making: Avoiding Clausewitz’s Strategic Pull,” Directorate of Future Land Warfare, Australian Department of Defence, Army Research Papers, no. 8 (2015): 60.

^[11] Zweibelson, Beyond the Pale: Designing Military Decision-Making Anew, 47–97.

^[12] Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, trans. M. F. K. Fisher (Counterpoint, 1994). Brillat-Savarin, writing his book The Physiology of Taste at the same time as Clausewitz was completing On War, used a scientific approach to the nature of food and taste. He advocated an order of drinking, the natural sequence of the meal, how fundamental principles of taste and smell governed all food and drink consumption, and argued for an intelligent approach to enjoying food. Philosophically, he distinguished how humans consumed food and that of animals that were simply satisfying a physical need. Animals do not wage war, nor do they enjoy fine meals; these are sociological constructs explicit to our species.

^[13] Tsoukas, Complex Knowledge, 213.

^[14] Antoine Bousquet, “Chaoplexic Warfare or the Future of Military Organization,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) 84, no. 5 (2008): 919; James Der Derian, “Virtuous War/Virtual Theory,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) 76, no. 4 (2000): 786; Paparone, The Sociology of Military Science: Prospects for Postinstitutional Military Design, 18–20.

^[15] Sebastien le Prestre de Vauban, The New Method of Fortification, as Practised by Monsieur de Vauban, Engineer-General of France. Together With a New Treatise of Geometry. The Fifth Edition, Carefully Revised and Corrected by the Original, Fifth (S. and E. Ballard (reprint by Creative Media Partners), 1722); Henry Guerlac, “Vauban: The Impact of Science on War,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton University Press, 1986).

^[16] Tsoukas, Complex Knowledge, 212–14, 240.

^[17] For emphatic defenders of Boydian or similar war concepts, one might consider “could we arrange the OODA in another arrangement that is not a simple cycle or loop?” Such thinking is necessary to break military practitioners away from the Newtonian Style that still dominates doctrinal methods and theories.

^[18] Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

^[19] Burrell and Morgan, Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis: Elements of the Sociology of Corporate Life.

^[20] Witting and willing are utilized here at an ontological and epistemological level. Certainly, many people can reject cause for certain wars or hold a pacifist position against all forms of war, but they must be witting and willing participants if only to agree that any sort of war is occurring at all. If any human participants fail to detect and comprehend that some organization of violence is even occurring, we shift from the modern war paradigm sociological framing to that of a phantasmal war philosophy. This will be explained later in the chapter and why this distinction is critical for considering future technological disruptions.

^[21] Military professionals operating in a Marxist form of society or an ideological one reliant upon some divine messianic eschatological worldview will break with the Free World above strategic levels of abstraction. Refer to ‘Reconceptualizing War’ for these philosophical arguments on various war paradigms and how they are incommensurate with the Western, functionalist perspective.

^[22] War’s effects are experienced objectively in physical reality through destruction, death, and harm to any living creatures and inanimate objects impacted, but also subjectively in how war damages living creatures in ways that can be seen, but also in many invisible forms. If just the physical, tangible effects of war are considered, these occur entirely in the physical reality that might be divorced from the social reality within which living, intelligent beings perceive and interpret another part of the world.

^[23] Marianne Lewis and Mihaela Kelemen, “Multiparadigm Inquiry: Exploring Organizational Pluralism and Paradox,” Human Relations 55, no. 2 (2002): 252.

^[24] Malešević, The Sociology of War and Violence, 314.

^[25] Note that we are addressing Western Civilization in premodern periods, not Ancient Eastern Civilization. For societies based on different ideologies, belief systems, and cultural groundings such as Taoism and Confucianism where military thinking such as Sun Tzu are considered, this requires a different ontological framing. Readers interested in this research focus are encouraged to consider Reconceptualizing War and chapters 5-6 in particular.

^[26] Yuval Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Reprint edition (Harper Perennial, 2018), 110.

^[27] Gareth Morgan, “Exploring Plato’s Cave: Organizations as Psychic Prisons,” in Images of Organizations (Sage Publications, 2006), 226.

^[28] Burrell and Morgan, Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis: Elements of the Sociology of Corporate Life, 1; Robert Chia, “Teaching Paradigm Shifting in Management Education: University Business Schools and the Entrepreneurial Imagination,” Journal of Management Studies 33, no. 4 (1996): 414.

^[29] Zweibelson, Beyond the Pale: Designing Military Decision-Making Anew, 56–64.

^[30] Specifically, ontology addresses what we as humans declare cognitively is real or not. If one holds a hammer, we ontologically ‘know’ what a hammer is, even if this particular hammer looks different from most other hammers. If we accidently hit our fingers while using it, we ‘know’ that pain is real too, even though you can hand another person the hammer, but you cannot give the other person the precise pain you are experiencing, even if you struck their hand with the same hammer. We experience pain subjectively, but we all ontologically agree that pain ‘exists’ despite us each having our own contextually unique understanding.

^[31] Burrell and Morgan, Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis: Elements of the Sociology of Corporate Life, 1; Lewis and Kelemen, “Multiparadigm Inquiry: Exploring Organizational Pluralism and Paradox,” 255.

^[32] This position can be countered by arguing how certain intelligent species use tools and present potential for imagination; this remains a difficult area for neurobiology, anthropology and related fields to determine if our species is alone in the ability to imagine the impossible. At a minimum, humans are the only creatures able to richly describe and articulate impossible things and manipulate reality to bring many of them into this world.

^[33] Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, First Anchor Books Edition, 1967 (Anchor Books, 1966), 65.

^[34] Zweibelson, Reconceptualizing War, 371–75.

^[35] The beanbag chair is a useful example of an epistemologically challenging artifact that ontologically is still considered a chair. In traditional Japanese culture, people sit upon tatami mats that might be considered somewhat uncomfortable for westerners.

^[36] For any society or population to sustain certain social paradigms, they must retain certain order and consistency to such epistemological assumptions. While we might encounter entirely new chair-like things we have never ourselves encountered before, the shared notion of “chair-ness” is what allows flexibility in us encountering and interpreting new chairs while never losing sight of what must be a chair and what cannot be a chair (ontology). We must internally assess what makes something chair-like, consider the processes and methods for selecting chair qualities, and go about sense-making to determine whether something new is indeed a chair or not. Our epistemology provides the cognitive stepping stones for assessing the chair-ness using our senses, reasoning, and adhering to some process of cognition we can repeat each time we encounter a new puzzle.

^[37] Lewis and Kelemen, “Multiparadigm Inquiry: Exploring Organizational Pluralism and Paradox,” 255; Shirley-Ann Hazlett et al., “Theory Building in Knowledge Management: In Search of Paradigms,” Journal of Management Inquiry 14, no. 1 (2005): 32.

^[38] Zweibelson, Beyond the Pale: Designing Military Decision-Making Anew, 90–91.

^[39] Ben Zweibelson, “Reconceptualizing the Space Domain Beyond Historic Perspectives of Warfare,” Air University Press Schriever Papers, no. No. 1 (2023): 1–66.

^[40] The author again reminds readers that there are multiple and competing modern war paradigms. This chapter specifically addresses the Free World’s war paradigm, functionalism. Other war paradigms that follow Marxist, Social Marxist, and other configurations must be contemplated in similar philosophical and sociological inquiry.

^[41] Ancient Western societies such as the Greek and Roman Empires had different epistemological stances on war. Dying in battle brought ultimate glory for soldiers and by direct extension, their families for the Spartans. Gods such as Zeus would routinely interfere with the course of a battle, tilting it to an outcome he preferred. Roman warfare utilized extensive religious rituals to ensure pax deorum and please the deities watching them. Greek and Roman leaders viewed war as a ‘necessary good’ to sustain Rome at the expense of others, hence pax Romana. Both Greek and Roman societies determined ‘war seasons’ tied to other economic, geographic, and cultural requirements. Discipline techniques were harsh, even brutal and cruel, yet epistemologically tied to the assumption that this sharpened the soldiers to perform in battle. While lower classes of the enemy force were often brutally executed or enslaved after the conclusion of a battle, officers were usually treated with respect and distinction, ransomed for profit in greater frequency by the Middle Ages.

^[42] John Shy, “Jomini,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton University Press, 1986), 144–46, 161; Beatrice Heuser, Reading Clausewitz (Pimlico, 2002), 76–77.

^[43] Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State: The Man, His Theories, and His Times, 1985 Paperback (Princeton University Press, 1985), 8.

The book’s abstract is here:

On Technology & War: The Power of Uncertainty examines how artificial intelligence, quantum computing, space colonization, and cyberspace will redefine warfare, shattering Newtonian paradigms. Through evolving science fiction vignettes and deep philosophical inquiry, it urges unlearning rigid doctrines, embracing complexity, and forging ethical frameworks to avert extinction in an artificial intelligence-driven, multi-planetary era of conflict. In an era where technology accelerates humanity toward unprecedented battles—from orbital terrorism to quantum uncertainties—‘On Technology & War’ delivers a gripping wake-up call. Combat veteran and philosopher Ben Zweibelson blends riveting science fiction narratives with cutting-edge analysis, weaving a science-fiction cast of characters through each chapter to entertain readers while providing clear metaphoric devices that extend into the academic subject matter and philosophy. This isn't just theory; it's a provocative blueprint for enabling our species sufficient strategic opportunities to navigate new and infinitely more dangerous cosmic and technological currents.

Zweibelson draws from over three decades working in the U.S. Department of War, including multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as an Infantry Officer, directing strategic innovation for space military organizations, and working extensively with elite special operations units. Here, he presents rigorous research into complexity science, sociological paradigms, and speculative futures, offering tools to navigate ethical dilemmas in human-artificial intelligence symbiosis. Ideal for military professionals, policymakers, scholars in security studies and international relations, artificial intelligence ethicists, space policy experts, and science fiction enthusiasts, On Technology & War: The Power of Uncertainty challenges readers to consider strategic challenges well outside current institutionalized limitations.

Link to Amazon book for pre-order.

Below is an excerpt from the eighth chapter; part of the introduction to a chapter focusing on cyberspace, simulacra and whether humanity may modify itself into something new that brings new societal issues along with different pathways for war and conflict to develop. This all remains rough until I finish the citations and clean things up, but happy to share with readers so they can see what this book will offer!

In the science-fiction movie Bladerunner 2049, the main character is an android police officer named LAPD Officer K. Officer K is a replicant, a synthetic human used by the real human population to perform undesirable, dangerous, and off-world tasks in this sequel adaptation of the original Philip K. Dick story. Officer K in his personal time appears to behave like most human police officers, living in a city apartment and forming a relationship with his girlfriend, Joi. However, Joi is a virtual companion, functioning in hologram form around his house on a built-in projector track. Through the course of the film, viewers watch Officer K and Joi develop, with K purchasing Joi a hand-held form of projection that lets her experience the outside world and travel with K. While she takes a virtual form, Joi demonstrates impressive, human-equivalent intelligence and emotion, and is aware that she is a virtual program and Officer K is a replicant human. They both appear to function as inferior or subservient AI accessories within a reality still dominated by the organic species that invented them.

In one specific and memorable scene, Joi attempts to connect at a physical level with K by soliciting a replicant prostitute she knew K found attractive. In a provocative scene, Joi “synchs” her hologram form over the replicant woman and shares an intimate moment with K. Although Officer K is initially reluctant and insists that he is already happy with his relationship with Joi, viewers are given the suggestion that both Joi and K know the difference between a hologram and a physical android, just as they understand the strict division between the biologically living and the artificial proxies. The philosophical layers in this scene are rich, with Officer K struggling with his status as either a replicant or possibly something new and “more human than human”, while Joi operates at a subordinate level of a holographic projection of AI. Officer K is isolated from experiencing reality as a “real human”, while Joi sits one level lower, functioning as a virtual companion with even less agency, unable to interact in the world. Replicants can make love to one another or with humans, yet Joi can only simulate, casting herself as a digital shadow upon a replicant’s form as a stow-away, not an active participant. This provides us with a fascinating metaphoric device for considering Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, creating the first of two planks in this chapter’s cyber simulacra concept.

The term “simulacra” was coined by the French postmodernist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard, yet most readers may know the concept through the popular “Matrix” sci-fi films. While Baudrillard famously declared these adaptations as incorrect and misleading interpretations of his ideas, the core concept of a simulacra is effectively presented in how Neo, at the start of the original movie, is trapped unwittingly in a false version of reality set in the 1990s. Neo encounters Morpheus and his crew, who communicate to him through the Matrix but physically are located outside the simulation in the “real” world, a post-apocalyptic future version of Earth where intelligent machines and the survivors of our species still wage war.

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In the movie, the humans desperately attack the energy vulnerability of the machines by destroying Earth’s atmosphere, choking out sunlight and forcing the machines to shift to using captured human beings as an alternative energy source. Viewers learn that each human is “plugged into the Matrix” where they live out imprisoned lives unknowingly interacting in a simulation of a 1990s world long gone. Neo and others are so convinced that the fake reality is real that most people, when confronted, refuse to leave. The film has an early scene where Neo, confronting the real world outside and struggling to reject the entire life of realistic yet false memories of the Matrix, vomits and experiences a severe panic attack. This is a fair depiction of how Baudrillard describes the seductive, consuming, and false nature of the simulacra. This “copy without an original” is a substitute reality that has little to do with the real world, yet humanity migrates their entire ontological and epistemological framework for social reality to attach to this fake world. Once done, it becomes difficult for more than a handful of introspective and critical minds to break free.

Baudrillard’s core argument, which he famously argued The Matrix directors has misinterpreted, was that the human protagonists able to distinguish the real dystopian world of Zion from the “fake” reality inside the Matrix fails to encapsulate simulacra. True Baudrillardian simulacra no longer has a “real” world, as it has been completely replaced by the hyperreal. Humanity fully accepts the hyperreal and has forgotten what the earlier “real” world even was. If one character does faithfully retain Baudrillardian logic, it is Cypher, who willingly and wittingly wants to return to the hyperreal and forget everything about his nine years in “the real” world. This becomes the central theme to the chapter, in that humanity is encountering new Gutenberg-like developments that will enable most people to change their agency. All prior generations since the dawn of civilization had to live in the physical world and participate in some version of social reality within a population (or populations). We are entering the next few decades where humanity may willingly trade physical reality for the hyperreal because the simulacrum is simply more comfortable, tolerable, or safe. Our agency will shift from one enacted in the physical and enabled in the social construction of a social reality resting upon the physical, to something hyperreal. In the hyperreal, our social reality is altered and the physical reality replaced and forgotten. In the hyperreal, personal and collective agency becomes phantasmal; We no longer fully interact with any reality in a witting or willing purpose.

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Returning to the Bladerunner 2049 scene, Baudrillard’s simulacra appears inverted in this other future, dystopian world. Whereas Morphius and his people understood which side of the divide between reality, simulation, and a false copy without an original they stood on, the characters in Bladerunner 2049 arguably are presented unwittingly repurposed outside their basic assumptions about reality. Joi, the hologram, dies tragically but before doing so, expresses profound love of Officer K, presenting an arch of a subservient pleasure holographic program to the height of human expression and compassion. Joi exceeds viewer expectations and transcends the virtual prison she exists in, demonstrating the very best in humanity. Officer K follows a similar path, eventually sacrificing himself in upholding principled beliefs about truth, justice, and the future of humanity where replicants appear capable of escaping their bonds of servitude and becoming a procreating, independent hybridization of humanity with cybernetics. The replicant and the hologram are the heroes of the film, while most of the human society appears trapped in some simulacra of a techno-reality where simulated lifeforms are slaves, and AI is used for dangerous, tragic, or cruel purposes. The corrupted enablers, presented as the commercial replicant corporation, the law enforcement they control, and the human refugees in the wastelands, have all lost or shed their humanity. They believe in a world they no longer operate in, as their entire agency has transformed into pursuing the simulacra of reality. They enjoy the artificial wealth that only further impoverishes their souls, while the enslaved and hunted replicants have discovered the real.

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Knowing what is real and what isn’t is just part of Baudrillard’s simulacra tension. One may genuinely be convinced, through the pervasive saturation of both social and physical reality with a false world, that the illusion is real. Humanity has long entertained the tension between thinking about one’s dreams while awake, and how many people as they dream are unable to distinguish between the real and the dream worlds until they wake up. For Buardillard, a postmodernist using critical theory to critique the modern, industrialized and nuclear-armed world of the late Twentieth Century, humanity cannot wake up from the simulacra, nor would they believe it was a dream if confronted inside the dream itself. This in turn forms one of his critiques about the Matrix film interpretations of his ideas, in that once the humans experience the “real” world, they then know the Matrix to be a false digital copy. The traitorous character “Cypher”, while dining with the adversarial computer agent “Agent Smith” inside the Matrix, provides a succinct description of this situated awareness:

[While eating a digitally generated steak], “I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?” [Takes bite of digital steak and sighs passionately] “Ignorance is bliss.”^[1]

Cypher, in The Matrix, travels in a Mobius strip distorting the real to the simulacra world, first escaping the Matrix out of a craving for the authenticity of the real world, and nine years later becoming capable of betraying his fellow human resistance forces, just to return to the simulacra and, in self-imposed ignorance, once again enjoy the fake steak.According to Baudrillard, a simulation pretends to have what one does not possess, whereas the progression of simulacra is to create a copy with no original; something entirely false yet commonly misunderstood by a society or institution as “real.”^[2]This is the critical aspect of simulacra; that the society or organization accepts the false reality without critically questioning or realizing it. Sociologists Berger and Luckmann suggest that skepticism and innovation threaten the status quo of an institution’s taken-for-granted reality, in that our organizations actively resist breaking this illusion.^[3]For Cypher, he regained his agency by leaving the Matrix, only to later succumb to the desire to escape the harshness of the real world, abandoning agency to blissfully enjoy a false digital world while he rejoins human enslavement as a power source.

^[1] The Matrix, directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski (1999; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999), DVD, 01:19:00.

^[2] Baudrillard, 152-53. “We will live in this world, which for us has all the disquieting strangeness of the desert and of the simulacrum . . . only the vertiginous seduction of a dying system remains . . .”

^[3] Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), 125.

Social Marxism also originates (mostly) from the fallout of the First World War. Interestingly, these Marxists were both frustrated with “why didn’t an industrialized society such as war-torn Germany or France collapse in proletariat revolt” instead of backwards Russia, and at an academic level, “why have we deviated from originalist Marx (Young Marx) concepts in the first place?” German (Jewish) intellectuals in the 1920s led this charge, along with a parallel yet independent pathway by an Italian imprisoned Marxist who would produce his forbidden diaries to be smuggled out by his family.

These Social Marxists (of the German Frankfurt School, and the independent yet parallel Gramsci Italian variant) would, in the 1930s-1970s, slowly generate new ways of thinking about Marxism, revolution, societal change, and the organization of violence that differed not just from the Western, Capitalistic, modern and industrialized societies, but most significantly from the bulwarks of the first Marxist success: The Soviet Union and related Communist enterprises.

A problem I think we have today is that first, the terminology used to discuss these different ideas about civilization, violence, social reality, the purpose of humanity… we are wildly inaccurate. Terms such as “Marxist”, “Communist”, “Socialist”, along with “Capitalist”, “Democracy”, or a slew of other related terms are tossed around in word salads designed for twenty-second influencer sound bites for social media. Second, we at a philosophical (I dive into ontology and epistemology extensively below) level along with sociological frameworks fail to position different theories and movements from others. Different beliefs on what war is, how conflict manifests, what direction social reality may be moving toward, these concepts cannot be sloppy in treatment or we end up becoming stuck in our preferred paradigm (world view) and unable to even understand those frames that seek conflict with ours.

So, Reconceptualizing War is a massive undertaking to explain and map out these concepts for a military audience, with the security affairs, foreign policy, political science, policymakers, and defense-oriented academia in mind. This is not a book for leisurely beach-side reading, but when it comes to understanding how and why humans wage an organization of violence in kinetic and sociological, abstract directions, I find the contemporary arrangements and theories disconnected and insufficient.

Link to Amazon book here

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the book being out in hard cover, I am providing below roughly the first 40-odd pages of Chapter 7, on Social Marxism and what I term “Wokefare.” Readers should keep in mind that this is being offered outside the intended context of the book. There are roughly 450 pages prior to these that establish many concepts referenced, so this is not designed to be a stand-alone product. If this interests you and you have yet to pick up a copy of the book, it is on sale now over at Amazon, available at Casemate, and for those in the UK or Europe, I would check Helion’s own website as their shipping inside the UK at least is the best cost option.

This version presented below was an earlier author’s proof and may not reflect the final version in print (but it is damn close).

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Radical Humanism: Revolutionary Change through Activism, Critical Theory Indoctrination, and ‘Wokefare’

Abstract: Positioned diametrically oppositional to functionalism in Burrell and Morgan’s paradigm quadrant, radical humanism is largely a twentieth century development commencing in the Interwar Period, although it draws from early Marxist theory first composed in the mid-nineteenth century. Within the radical humanist perspective, reality for our species requires a subjective orientation versus the objectivity and positivist epistemology of functionalism and radical structuralism. Reality, for Marx in his early period of theorization, posits broad philosophical abstractions that would later become external, economic superstructures in radical structuralism. Radical humanists understand war as part of an overarching social construction of reality that is dynamic, contextual, and historically centered. They reject the objectivity and universality underpinning the positivist epistemology found outside of the radical humanist positioning in Burrell and Morgan’s quadrant, and discount the economic political theory underpinning radical structuralism. Radical humanism posits a new way of war that has little requirement for state entities, as war exists not just for our species beyond any state configuration, but for animals, living and non-living entities, including rivers, mountains, and forests. This is the war paradigm for militant activism, societal transformation toward entirely dissimilar, normative configurations, and a complete rejection of all of modernity as currently designed. This paradigm integrates postmodernism, Social Marxism, and anarchism in dynamic, intersecting ways. Critical thinking and individual experiences combine here to awaken a deep spirit of human emancipation. War is reimagined entirely unlike how it exists in other paradigms.

Keywords: modern war, complexity, critical theory, Social Marxism, revolution, international relations, woke, wokefare, militant activism

Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9760-3726

The last several chapters provided outlines for both the functionalist and the radical structuralist paradigms where readers examined how different groups of humans comprehend and act in conflict. This war paradigm quickly moves in very different directions. Within radical humanism, truth itself is a social construct, something experienced individually and collectively, yet shaped by who we are and what we believe. In this war paradigm, ever-changing social standards morph everything from economies, politics, justice, and science into various configurations built upon human perceptions, beliefs, and collective activities.^[1] Radical humanism is less developed than the first two paradigms, functionalism and radical structuralism until recently. In recent decades, radical humanism seems to be making strides in offsetting the dominant war paradigm (functionalism) and critically challenging the classical Marxist one (radical structuralism). War and conflict in the twentieth century was largely defined by these other two paradigms. The twenty-first century may become one where radical humanism becomes one of the dominant social frameworks for reconceptualizing war and conflict. That will be one of the central arguments presented in this chapter. However, radical humanism is itself a new and underdeveloped social paradigm in comparison to the others. War itself is turned inside out, upside-down, so that in such radical disorientation, many may not even realize they are in some dangerous conflict.

This chapter follows the similar organization of previous ones where this social paradigm is explained and examples are provided on how such a framework for war exists in minds and materializes in physical reality. Like other paradigms, the radical humanist paradigm offers hybridization and interesting overlaps, tensions, and interplay with other social paradigms. Radical humanism emerged, theoretically at least, first in how young Karl Marx presented his initial ideas on social reality in the mid-nineteenth century, ahead of radical structuralism and as an initial reaction to functionalism. Due to reasons explained in this chapter, this particular social paradigm would gain prominence slowly, gaining momentum after the consequences of the First World War, and only gaining some coherent organizational form and function well into the mid-twentieth century. However, at the time of writing, this paradigm demonstrates an emerging and profound influence upon social reality and contemporary conflicts in ways that suggest this war paradigm is gaining in prominence and popularity. If anything, the twenty-first century might be best defined with wokefare instead of traditional conceptualizations of warfare.^[2]

The radical humanist paradigm is diametrically positioned against the functionalist paradigm in Burrell and Morgan’s social paradigm thesis, and thus presents likely the most difficult war paradigm for modern military professionals to consider. This social paradigm conceptualizes war and organized violence very differently than functionalism does, producing clear difficulties in explaining such ideas and offering valid justifications to that audience. Radical humanism stems originally from German Idealism and Kant’s ontological stance that the ultimate reality of our universe is spiritual, in the conceptualized ideas within our minds and independent of material aspects of nature.^[3] Social reality is understood not through objectivity, but the subjectivity that raises our species out of the natural world into a socially constructed one that we build with language.^[4] This dense soup of language, narratives, symbols, and meaning permeates us all, creating the world we are standing within. Radical humanists consider this same social reality a psychic prison that currently enables capitalistic domination of humanity by manipulating and distorting our perceptions through language and social concepts.

Radical humanists share with radical structuralists a normative philosophy concerning all of humanity; social reality today is corrupted and oppressive, but through social revolution and emancipation of oppressed classes, a new and superior reality can be ushered forth for everyone.^[5] There is no external ‘nature’ of an analytically neutral sort, nor is objectivity something that might be externalized, rendered in any positivist epistemology found in functionalism or radical structuralism. Any ‘nature’ of war is dynamic, changing, informed by social intersections of gender, race, identity, and not to be held to any external or universal ‘truths.’^[6] There are no “eternal realm of values” beyond whatever system that dominates social reality is directing for self-interests.^[7] Instead, the objectivity and scientific constructs found in functionalism are critically examined, challenged, and often inverted so that they might flourish in a radical humanist framing. Such a configuration requires entirely different ontological, epistemological, and methodological processes (while repurposing much of the same terminology).

War is not, as functionalism insists, a natural and enduring right for sovereign states to resolve differences using an organization of violence through state instruments of power. War in those contexts reflects a symptom of the root problems facing humanity. The dominant economic system and political framework supporting capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and all aspects of state power are what “exacerbates inequities and drives environmental crises.”^[8]Climate change and environmental harm become nested in the organized violence using sexism, homophobia, transphobia, toxic masculinity, racism, indigenous peoples’ exploitation, classism, ableism, and a host of other systemic offenses that the entire state system orchestrates and benefits from. Those clear-eyed and ‘woke’ understand the true nature of war and conflict, while those unable or unwilling to understand this perspective are merely part of the oppressive system that must be destroyed and replaced.

People are a critical part of this vast systemic oppression, but the right to live peacefully without harm from war or capitalist domination also extends to animals, plants, rivers, trees, mountains, and oceans. War cannot be eliminated without dismantling the entire capitalist system underpinning modernity.^[9] While this can be pursued using types of appropriate conflict including organized violence, radical humanists consider those specific instances appropriate only if they lead to the collapse of the entire oppressive, exploitive system. War conducted without this radical humanist ‘wokeness’ is part of the systemic oppression where people are exploited, enslaved, oppressed, and manipulated. Only through wokefare may these radicals emancipate and awaken others and begin to tear down the entire system.

To define how radical humanists understand war and conflict, we first must outline how they view war as waged by states. Marxism, extending across both radical structuralism and radical humanism, provides this bipolar framing where war used by the state-based system of domination is a preservative, convergent mode of destruction and exploitation. Sanctioned revolutionary and civil wars waged by emancipated social classes becomes the primary transformative vehicle for revolutionary change of the entire social reality. Such war may morph concepts of organized violence, destruction, and ethical rationalization in ways that otherwise exceed any state-based or international community descriptions or definitions. War, when declared and waged by any state system be they capitalist, fascist, or even communist, is part of the “compulsive nature in their inevitable wars and contracts” that these hierarchical, oppressive elites use to sustain power and control.^[10] Conflict when exercised as part of the state-based system for continued oppression has no other outcome; the dominated classes suffer and are sacrificed, while elites gain greater power and markets expand to form ever greater modes of oppression. War is an essential tool for sustaining this ever-expanding system of domination. Revolutionary war becomes the key to unlock humanity’s prison to break this cycle of exploitation, domination, and death.

War, when appropriated by radical humanists, becomes something new and different. Organized violence and conflict once channeled toward changing social reality in meaningful and necessary pathways is the revolutionary vehicle to destroy this cycle of materialistic oppression. War itself can be eliminated if radical humanists stimulate a radical reorganization of humanity away from the modern structures. These are where capitalism, economic exploitation of the oppressed, destruction of the environment, and the suffering of many occur through systemic racism, sexism, gender-based violence and other oppressions.^[11] For example, in pursuing a ‘queering’ of security affairs and peace studies through radical humanism, Cai Wilkinson explains:

Ending war, defined strictly as military violence, is insufficient. We must end both structural violence and physical and psychological violences if everyday war is to end. Ending war and violence requires both a queer vision of what security means and also a commitment to de-centering masculinism, cis-heterosexism, ableism, racism and other forms of domination in processes of securitisation/militarisation.^[12]

War thus is perpetrated through systemic oppression of many social constructs. War cannot be eliminated from human experience unless the entire civilization undergoes profound (radical) transformation that paradoxically is accomplished through war. Such radical transformation is accomplished through emancipation of these oppressed groups by fostering the total dismantlement of the patriarchal state system. Revolutionary change agents must liberate the masses by defeating all means the state has to protest or resist.^[13] Radical humanists, whether articulating from a feminist, queer, environmental activist, indigenous persons’ view, anti-racist, or other Social Marxist-derived orientation advocate: “for a fundamental reorientation of our economies.”^[14] Yet much of this is couched in difficult-to-decipher terms, methods, and models. The entire capitalist system is evil, the state and all police, justice systems, prisons, schools, industry, and academia not pursuing shared progressive values found in radical humanism are all extensions of capitalist villainy, and only a collective linkage of these diverse yet oppressed groups can usher forth necessary revolutionary, radical change.

Social rejection of the entire system requires emancipation of sufficient classes so that the state instruments of power are critically challenged, exposed, and subsequently defeated. Defeat must be total and complete, so that they cannot retreat or reform into new configurations of resistance. To do this, critical theorists in the early twentieth century would distance themselves from radical structuralists that sought Marx’s earlier declarations of economic crises as the spark for class consciousness. The first wave of Marxists, in their opinion, failed. The second wave had to be reconceptualized. The dominating system of capitalist expansion and social injustice instead must be targeted in a variety of direct and indirect ways, in new arrangements of actions and theory that fall beyond the conceptual limits of how functionalism and radical structuralism understand conflict and social reality.

Sabotage, vandalism, defacing state or public monuments, occupation of buildings, violent protests, arson, looting, are just the tangible examples applied in this unique form of conflict. Those rendered intangibly, such as through radicalized education, misinformation, radical legal activities, propaganda, extreme policy reformation, social media influencing campaigns, and other otherwise nonviolent processes present alternative, often disarming ways to engage in conflict. Radical humanists extend new battlefields in ways that are decidedly non-war for their opponents,^[15] capitalizing on this paradigm incommensurability to achieve necessary social change that leads to Marx’s class consciousness and eventual revolutionary social transformation. Attacking an opponent unaware they are under attack is a modern twist on Sun Tzu’s maxim that all warfare is based on deception.

This term ‘critical theory’ is heavily featured in radical humanism, but also is found in postmodern philosophy and in the interpretivist paradigm covered in the next chapter.^[16] Critical theorists attempt to deconstruct the deep, underlying forces and patterns that drive reality and produce particular power dynamics, order such as hierarchical class distinction, cultural and ethnic beliefs that correspond to a host of social facts that carry significant symbolism and meaning. Critical theorists do not subscribe to a neutral or externalized/objective view of power. These frames are instead seen as historical, socially designed and sustained by societies, and frequently hidden from view so that only the critical examination casts light upon what strings are pulling all of our limbs. The term ‘critical’ should not be confused with how functionalists employ ‘critical reasoning’ in a scientific, objective, analytically optimized fashion. The words are the same, but the dictionaries differ here.

Critical theorists consider these various economic, political, social, and technological superstructures as ‘macro-processes’ that both govern and regulate social reality at the grand scale, but also are created and sustained collectively by all actors within a civilization. They do not view language as neutral, and these macro-processes are socially constructed psychic prisons that dominate and oppress users.^[17] Critical theorists within radical humanism will advocate political activism in pursuit of clear ontological assumptions where humanity, once politically educated and emancipated from the status quo, can dismantle and permanently destroy existing social reality to replace it. Modernity, complete with Westphalian state systems, their laws, buildings, statues, values, and symbols must be torn apart. The capitalist economic engine must be shut down, instruments of state power such as armies, police, justice systems, and prisons also obliterated. Class structures must be dismantled, and all of this occurs through political activism, organization of resistance movements, revolution, and organized violence. Yet this form of revolutionary struggle, civil war, resistance and destruction unfolds in ways that fail to match Westphalian state definitions.

Radical humanism thus breaks with how Marxists in radical structuralism understand conflict, meaning that the last four chapters present multiple perspectives on conflict that are either absent here, or reconceptualized quite differently. We have migrated to the opposite side of Burrell and Morgan’s social paradigm quadrant, where radical humanism represents an entirely different framing of social reality, extending into how they understand conflict itself. To differentiate these Marxists from the classical or state-centric ones found in radical structuralism, the term ‘Neo-Marxist,’ ‘Cultural Marxist’, and ‘Social Marxist’ are interchangeably used in mainstream culture. This is due to how within the twentieth century, this movement emerged in the aftershocks of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution through several different schools and movements.^[18] We will use the term ‘Social Marxism’ in this research, as the other modifiers present various epistemological and metaphoric limitations. Operators of this war paradigm live in the twentieth century (and beyond), and were initially confronted by two failed communist revolutions as extensions of devastating world wars. Social Marxists view the outcomes in Russia and later in China as failures because they are not what Marx and Engels prophesized, and those societies are, for the radical humanists, evidence that “utopia is blocked by the very working class [Marx] had charged with realizing it.”^[19] Essentially, the wrong people won revolutionary wars, and the right ones remained trapped in their social prisons. Russian and Chinese rural, illiterate peasants revolted, while the proletariat and marginalized members of society residing in Berlin, London, Paris, and New York seemed locked in a deeper capitalistic trap that not even two World Wars could liberate them from.

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Despite sharing overlapping Marxist roots with radical structuralism, radical humanism views all social reality as human-centric, subjective, and contextualized within history that requires a dialectical engagement to advance reality. There is no such thing as some independent, external ‘nature’ of war that governs all conflict. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci declared this with: “It must be made clear from the start that one cannot speak of “nature” as if it were something fixed and objective; in this case, “natural” means what is legitimate and normal according to our current historical consciousness- which, after all, is our “nature.””^[20] Our reality, for radical humanists, is one enabled by the human condition, and such a world is in radical transformation where the historical contexts of a past reality need not be relevant to the one emerging currently. What war used to be has past, and what war must become is still emerging.

To be human is to exist in this social reality, and thus all people are part of a social construction of reality that includes all designs that are inescapable to everyone. We form the world and also imprison ourselves within it. By extension, war is both socially constructed and subjective, shaped by humans as they form (and reform) reality. Yet in the 1920s, communist movements that gained control of societies through revolution appeared to deviate from the way Marx and Engels predicted socialist development. Russian leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution implemented a strong, hierarchically guiding hand from the party elite in Moscow, where new elites appeared to replace the old ones. Crowns were removed but the same systems appeared largely unchanged, causing fractions in what the true revolutionary goals of Marxism ought to be.^[21] A split emerged in the Interwar Period between radical structuralists adhering to Marx’s economic theory of politics (centered on consolidating Soviet power) with that of a new interpretation of Marxism. Marx’s economic-political focus was, for this new faction and set in the context of the twentieth century onward,^[22]the wrong way to enable true global emancipation of society. Lenin claimed socialist victory, while radical humanists saw only disappointment and failure.

Within the radical humanist perspective, reality for our species requires a subjective orientation versus the objectivity and positivist epistemology found within functionalism and radical structuralism. Reality, for Marx in his early period of theorization, posits broad philosophical abstractions that later become economic and historically determined ones in Capital. These social contradictions in reality were (originally) to be resolved through social action, where humanity aims to accomplish a pure rationalization of reason. Thus, “reason itself requires revolution, and every rational individual should lend a hand.”^[23] Conflict and war are, in the existing oppressive and inferior capitalist system, tools used by elite classes to sustain an unfair and substandard form of existence. Enlightened and emancipated society would not need such crude, brutal tools. Later Marx, along with Lenin, Trotsky, and fellow radical structuralists declared only the proletariat class could rise up and destroy the global capitalist system,^[24] whereas radical humanists reviewing the disappointments of World War I, disagreed. Writing in 1933 during the Interwar Period as Fascism swept across Europe and nations once more lurched toward a global conflict between antagonistic states, critical theorist Max Horkheimer wrote: “At no time has the poverty of humanity stood in such crying contradiction to its potential wealth, at no time have all powers been so horribly fettered as in this generation, where children go hungry and the hands of the fathers are busy turning out bombs.”^[25]

For critical theorists, no longer did social reality require what Rapoport called a messianic eschatological transformation (of socialist design) dictated through workers gaining class consciousness and revolting against the state. The historical materialism, operating as external forces to radically change social reality, were flawed concepts. Marx’s theories would be modified by Social Marxists. Indeed, the proletariat was often trapped in ways that the capitalist system took advantage of for stability and order; the poor remained just satisfied and distracted enough to remain docile.^[26] Critical theorists within radical humanism envision a new future world where humanity is emancipated so that it can live unencumbered, happy, and in a truthful reality that lacks any psychic prisons that represent modern society currently. This required a shift to dialectical materialism, based on far earlier Marxist theorization.

As the modern system in power dominates through oppression, humiliation, and degradation, efforts by critical theorists must become radicalized so that the system cannot successfully morph into another adaptive form that sustains these psychic prisons and compensates for change. Radical humanism is political activism coupled with the ontological assumption that revolutionary change comes with the same tenacity of debate, disagreement, disruption, protest, conflict, and destruction that otherwise is used by state systems to continue their domination.^[27] Organizing for peace requires the physical act of protesting, activism, and an ontological assumption that war itself will continue until the overarching capitalist, state system of oppression is finally confronted and broken.^[28] Oppressed classes are forever trapped under the thumb of elites, fractured not just by the economic theorizations by Marx and Engel, but through myriad social, racist, gender-based, cultural, environmental, historical, ideological, and other social forms of bondage and suffering. Most imprisoned do not even see the prison bars. Critical theorists must shine a light upon them and point the direction towards radicalization and emancipation. Peace can be achieved, however revolutionary transformation toward that ultimate goal will require novel war and conflict against the entire system.

The proletariat, foundational to how Marx understood the linkage of capitalism as the latest and final form of social injustice, were themselves trapped in some warped interpretation of social reality and thus could never gain the class consciousness expected by radical structuralists.^[29] Social Marxists might activate this only by addressing the deeper social barriers underpinning modern industrialization that otherwise blocked oppressed groups from realizing their fates. Modern capitalism, nationalism, and industry has evolved so perfectly that the earlier conditions considered by Marx in the nineteenth century were no longer relevant. The giant, oppressive machinery had grown so pervasive that labor and production became how all of social reality was rationalized. Sex, happiness, family, self-improvement, entertainment, science, art, education, and anything else previously assumed to be outside of proletariat labor was now tangled into an inescapable social web. Industry and capitalism was hammered “into their eyes and ears and muscles during their leisure time as well as during work hours.”^[30] The proletariat of the twentieth century made earlier versions of labor obsolete. For radical humanists, conflict and society in the twentieth (or twenty-first) century differs greatly from the nineteenth.

Radical humanists pursue revolutionary transformation from beyond these original requirements of proletariat prioritization that mature Marx suggested.^[31] Herbert Marcuse, a prominent member of the Frankfurt School of Social Marxism that formed , declared that critical theory would: “through the abolition of previously existing material conditions of existence, [bring forward] the totality of human relations… liberated.”^[32] A critical society is one that is not satisfied to remain trapped in the modern capitalistic system of domination and oppression.^[33] It becomes empowered to emancipate and evolve toward a superior social reality.^[34] Radical humanists are entirely cognizant of the revolutionary war requirements within such aspirations. Radical change, coupled with revolutionary wars of social transformation, must offer total liberation and evolution of humanity away from the current destructive, oppressive present form.

Radical humanists view communism^[35] as the ultimate level of future human perfection. Yet to achieve this, revolution through organized violence and class consciousness must be conducted so that the existing system of oppression is completely destroyed. This is tied to economic systems originally defined by Marx, but as Marcuse explains: “unconditional adherence to [this] goal… can be attained only in social struggle.”^[36] The earlier Marxists through World War I were preoccupied with the political economic constructs, thus missing what radical humanists understand as the social struggle to emancipate the oppressed classes and break the modern, capitalist institution. Modernity with scientific rationalism and a capitalistic fetishization produced a new self-destructive, imprisoning social reality where societies sink further and further into oppression and despair. The progress advocated by Enlightenment proponents became, according to radical humanists, a replacement of original natural world disasters with manmade ones. “Wars, concentration camps, nuclear weapons, and now environmental crisis threaten the Enlightenment project not from without but from within.”^[37] The earlier devastation of societies by volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods and famines are now eclipsed by what humanity can do to itself in high technology, industrial war, along with daily capitalistic exploitation of people, animals, plants, and the entire planet. If human existence is to be emancipated from this, radical humanists posit a Marxist inspired path of cognitive and collective liberation from the ‘Enlightenment project.’^[38]

Just as the ontological order and stability of reality serves fundamentally different ends in how functionalism and radical structuralism produce particular war paradigms, radical humanism uses this subjective social reality for dissimilar reasons with that of the interpretivist paradigm, addressed in the next chapter. Radical humanism, compared to all alternative paradigms with that of the dominant functionalist worldview, is arguably the most antagonistic and incommensurate for those (functionalist) military forces, policy makers, and associated strategists to appreciate. Even the socialist societies such as the Soviet Union (in the twentieth century), China, Cuba, and Vietnam overlap here in how radical structuralism shares some ontological and epistemological commonality with the functionalist paradigm. Of all social paradigms, this radical humanist one is most alien to functionalist operators. Radical humanists view the communist and socialist attempts in various nations thus far as perversions and failures of Marxism, all requiring ‘true’ revolutionary transformation along with all capitalist states.^[39] Inversely, proponents of radical humanist perspectives on conflict and social reality find all ideas, beliefs, and methods within functionalism as false, irrelevant, or obsolete.

Radical humanism, by occupying the subjective side of explaining reality, holds to an epistemology that the world our species occupies and experiences is one that we simultaneously construct and design.^[40] Interpretivists, as the next chapter posits, attempt to understand the nature of this process and generate scientific frameworks that adhere to some sort of universal ordering and consistency. Radical humanists seek something entirely different, hence the ‘radical’ in the social paradigm title. Interpretivists use ‘science’ differently to that of functionalists seeking an objective, positivistic rationalization where social reality is founded upon universal laws and principles deduced by analytical means.^[41] Positivism is not just a western approach to knowledge set in scientific reductionism for radical humanists. Critical feminists applying a Social Marxist lens further develop positivism as a male-centered model where ‘self’ and ‘known, validated, true’ carries the masculine gender. The ‘unknown’ or ‘unknowable’ and thus ‘non-scientific, untrue, or defective’ become feminine, thus sexist.^[42] Positivism in this radical humanist interpretation becomes entirely subjective, fraught with gender and racial biases, requiring critical confrontation and total dismantlement.

Radical humanism departs from objectivity, meaning that Marxists within the radical humanist camp epistemologically disagree with Marxists operating in radical structuralism.^[43] Social reality requires a dialectical engagement so that it radically changes. Radical structuralists posit, as explained in the previous chapter, that ‘true’ science is a scientific socialism, where political orientation toward communist ideals must be interwoven within all scientific affairs.^[44] A key difference here is how social reality changes, whether from external historically determined superstructures, or by humans reconceptualizing reality through their own dialectical engagements and developments. In one, scientific socialism carries a positivistic, external framework that changes humanity as it progresses through time and space, and the other puts humans in the driver’s seat to shift social reality (scientifically using socialism) through our continued engagements with it.

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Marxists posit that science “is above all an auxiliary means of production, one element among many in the social process,” and otherwise part of the capitalist system of oppression until science might be rescued by radical humanism.^[45] Yet the radical structuralist stance on science or ‘scientific socialism’ (addressed in the previous chapter and found within the policy statements of communist societies such as China or the Soviet Union) differs with radical humanists. Any positivism, even that of a Sino-Marxist application in contemporary China, is corrupted by patriarchal positivism,^[46] as well as racism, classism, sexism, oppression of indigenous peoples and ways of indigenous thinking, ableism, ageism, and other social applications. Marcuse provides key insights into the radical humanist paradigm on this ‘distortion’ of science with:

But while the alliance between idealist philosophy and science was burdened from the beginning with sins engendered by the dependence of the sciences on established relations of domination, the critical theory of society presupposes the disengagement of science from this order. Thus the fateful fetishism of science is avoided here in principle… Scientific objectivity as such is near a sufficient guarantee of truth, especially in a situation where the truth speaks as strongly against the facts and is as well hidden behind them as today. Scientific predictability does not coincide with the futuristic mode in which the truth exists.^[47]

Science as practiced outside the radical humanist paradigm is polluted, unable to provide any real value to society beyond sustaining the existing system of domination, capitalistic expansion, destruction, and class oppression.^[48] It is false science, including scientific socialism practiced by radical structuralists. Radical humanist understanding of truth is interpreted within a Social Marxist lens, requiring scientific thinking to extend a realization of socialist transformation or otherwise remain an inferior, corrupt version of what ‘true’ science could become.^[49] Radical humanists take perhaps the most antagonistic stance on modern science, where this mode of rationalization and analytical orientation toward precision and accuracy are entirely designed to sustain the current social system of oppression. People are drawn to scientific reasoning because it smoothly achieves “maximum production with minimum effort, to arrive at maximum economic efficiency…by rationally [identifying and] defining all the operations and actions that lead to the end.”^[50] This maximum efficiency in reaching a convergent end-state may at the micro-level seem harmlessly associated with some scientific experiment in chemistry, or the establishment of a new, useful machine.

However, the macro-level of all scientific activities is the sustainment of a system of social oppression where classes are unwittingly held to structures, behaviors, rules, and social patterns. These benefit the elites, and sustain the entire world in an invisible prison.^[51] Science (practiced outside of radical humanism) is evil, and sustains all systems of exploitation and domination. ‘Young’ Marxist theory, composed prior to 1845, rejects the functionalist belief in external natural sciences as false, coupled to the overarching system of capitalistic oppression and exploitation. “The truth of the object does not lie beyond sensation or in thought but in truer and deeper sensation, in the developed and liberated sense of social man.”^[52] For radical humanists, real truth is above any supposed notion of facts, particularly those derived via scientific means; science is merely an element of truth.^[53] Social man is liberated through revolution that shatters the current oppressive worldview and makes way for a superior one that is communist, classless, devoid of contemporary flaws and irregularities that represent modernity.^[54] Science, once operationalized by radical humanists, leads to a new human reality, one where “existence in free time on the basis of fulfilled vital needs” occurs for everyone. Technological advancements break from their current obligation to feed a system of socially unjust domination and oppression.^[55] Radical humanists reject claims of universal rights, laws, or processes in that everything socially constructed is contextual, and political struggle including war is rationalized not through objective stances but subjective ones.^[56]

The existing social reality is flawed, and must therefore be transformed,^[57] albeit through a subjective epistemological stance that prioritizes contextuality and dynamic social transformation toward a superior social existence.^[58] Only scientific actions paired with social activism and critical theory that move the needle toward emancipation are ‘true’ manifestations of rational, scientific thought. Radical humanism, established first in early Marxist writings prior to 1850, then in simultaneous yet independent studies by Lukács and Gramsci in the 1920s-1930s, were further developed by the Frankfurt School in Interwar Germany. This school condemned the functionalist position that scientific progress and technical rationalism can separate the subjective world from an objective natural reality, in that the human condition is bound in both.^[59] Therefore conflict such as war cannot be isolated or reduced into positivistic epistemologies or governed by any sort of universal laws. The historical pathway of human existence forms contextually specific, unique, and symbolic relationships including what war is. One cannot separate man from nature, science from art, or the subjective from the objective. Functionalism, in how it correlates reason to universal constructs accessed by individual subjects, is viewed as a product of systemic division and usurpation that sustains modern, capitalist domination.^[60] Science pursued without such radical political activism is just more corruptive, corrosive, oppressive ‘false science’ that sustains the existing social prison.

Scientific activities devoid of the deep social contexts and historical forces are, as Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci stated, “bound to fail, its logical systemization will be a mere façade.”^[61] He goes on to recommend a scientific construct be placed “it its correct historical and theoretical terms…That would be more serious and more “scientific.””^[62] ‘Young’ Marx urged for a transformation of science in both “its methods and its structure…a reformed science will, in studying nature, really be studying the objectifications of man’s socialized senses, hence man himself.”^[63] Marx’s pre-1845 concepts would, in the Interwar Period of Marxist disillusionment, inspire new interpretations, such as how György Lukács, a Frankfurt School theorist and one of the founders of Social Marxism, laid the groundwork for the radical humanist paradigm. Feenberg, a Marxist philosopher of the radical humanist tradition and mentored by Herbert Marcuse, explains how Lukács developed Social Marxist concepts in the Interwar period:

One cannot act on the laws of nature, only to discover and use them to act on the objects they govern. In the case of society, the matter stands differently. The “laws” of social interaction that govern systems of practice such as the market can be changed by the coordinated efforts of the individuals who enact them. This is “transforming practice.”^[64]

Nature, therefore, is ‘objective’ in the sense that man might discover them, recognizing them the laws themselves do not also change, yet humanity does socially construct the consequences of any natural processes in the social reality they layer atop this physical one.^[65] The subjective ontological foundations that radical humanism rests upon position humanity and nature as collaborative and intertwined. This occurs in such a manner that prevents the positivism and objectivity found in both functionalism and radical structuralism from being entertained in this social paradigm. Marx’s materialism as interpreted in radical humanism breaks from positivism, although this distinction is subtle between how radical humanists interpret Social Marxism and the original Marxist interpretations enacted by radical structuralists that established the first communist societies.^[66] For radical humanists, science itself, currently stuck in an inferior, capitalistic (or corrupted communist), technological rendering, can be liberated and transformed into a fusion of natural and social science as one.^[67] Science in a normative (and communist) future becomes new, different, and superior to any functionalist understanding of science currently. Yet neither Marx nor proponents of radical humanism ever provide any notion of what such a new science might be.^[68] This social paradigm requires a challenging and entirely different way of conceptualizing science, society, and conflict.

Activists use science (again, in a radical humanist framing), yet all scientists are not necessarily activists, meaning they are only (unwittingly) doing scientific labor on behalf of the corruptive, oppressive state. Just as any war waged by the capitalistic state is inherently evil and oppressive, any scientific work done on behalf the same corrupt, oppressive system can only reinforce systemic oppression and suffering. Only enlightened, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-imperialist, pro-revolutionary scientists using scientific methodologies toward activist causes are able to ‘perform science’ in any acceptable manner within this war paradigm. Only an enlightened military leader might ‘perform war’ properly, on behalf of Social Marxist causes. Radical humanists approach social reality as both transformative, subjective, and also emancipating process requiring critique and revolutionary change. Yet they have a more hindering challenge than earlier Marxists of the nineteenth century, in that radical humanists see late capitalism including state-regulated or socialist oriented forms of capitalism as able to suspend class conflict. Advanced capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries “[secures] the loyalty of the wage-earning masses through rewards”, where class antagonisms are not abolished but subdued to a point of simmering latency.^[69] To access these otherwise sleeping masses, critical theorists must illuminate the social straightjackets that are oppressing most classes in racial, sexual, ethnic, ideological, indigenous, ecological, and other ways.

Radical humanists are the only ones able to become ‘anti-racist’,^[70] and any opposition to their ontological and epistemological framework for social reality places antagonists into ‘racist’ categories until they agree to radical humanist positions. This extends into gender, culture, religion, politics, and every possible other social construct where radical humanists critique and challenge virtually everything considered mainstream, democratic, or capitalistic. Women who are feminists but do not embrace radical humanist ontologies and epistemologies are insufficientlyfeminist, thus automatically default to ‘anti-feminist’ or subservient to the misogynistic system. Women attempting to achieve various goals for feminism such as breaking the ‘glass ceiling’ at the office, in government, academia, or in the military are merely “actively maintaining [the corrupt system] and profiting from it.”^[71] These women therefore are just as sexist, misogynistic, or racist as anyone else operating through any other social paradigm. Only feminists interested in challenging and reconfiguring the entirety of society, eliminating all modern institutions that reinforce the imperialist, capitalist, patriarchal and racist system are worthy of the designation ‘anti-misogynist.’ The rest merely are “climbing the ladder” and unable or unwilling to change the social structures to which they have been granted acceptance.^[72] This extends to any minority group member achieving high levels of political, commercial, or military leadership, homosexuals content with gaining status and power without radically disrupting the entire system, indigenous groups collaborating with mainstream society, and all other oppressed groups not compliant with the same radical humanist beliefs and goals.

They are at war with those unable or unwilling to assume the values, beliefs, and ideals centered in their social paradigm. Humanity is trapped, alienated in false or inferior forms of social reality that must be identified, critically examined, deconstructed, and then destroyed so that our species can evolve into higher forms of social reality.^[73] One may not step into the same war twice for interpretivists (covered in the next chapter), while radical humanists view the river stepping as an individual act of emancipation or continued (unwitting) acceptance that an illusionary river still exists. This remains until sufficient social activism liberates those taking the plunge into the ‘one true river’ that is reached by stepping outside of systemic oppression. Everyone else is stuck in a toxic swamp that consumes humanity, until those that become emancipated might cleanse themselves and step out of the gunk and offer a hand to others. Part of war involves breaking through this sociological barrier, and becoming a free-thinker within the safety of radical humanism. The rest of war becomes a slog-fest of fighting back the institutions of the toxic swamp, eventually liberating humanity and ending the cycle of oppression and exploitation. Again, this requires further explanation and a temporary pause on any ontological or epistemological preferences for those subscribing to a functionalist or radical structuralist position on conflict.

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Functionalists posit social reality as a stable, orderly, and unchanging structure that permits objective analysis and the formularization of universal principles and laws. Interpretivism (covered in the next chapter) rejects this objectivity and external ordering by positing a human-centric structuring of reality toward new and contextually unique accomplishments for societies. Radical humanists differ with both by positing a ‘deep structuring’ that is also a social construction like in interpretivism, but one that is oppressively oriented to sustain elites in power at the expense and detriment of masses of oppressed and enslaved people.^[74] Tarak Barkawi, using critical theory in the twenty-first century to advance academic research of war itself using these constructs declares: “Slavery and empire lie at the origins of capitalism” and “Imperial power reshapes the local forces of order, often through violence, and empowers or constitutes clients, across many territories, in connected ways.”^[75] Such enslavement might be literal, or socially maintained where people are unwittingly (and unwillingly) forced into power structures that prevent them from becoming evolved and emancipated.

Radical humanists understand war as part of an overarching social construction of reality that is dynamic, contextual, and historically centered. They reject the objectivity and universality underpinning the positivist epistemology found outside of the radical humanist positioning in Burrell and Morgan’s quadrant. Thus war, for functionalists, is understood via metaphors, models, and theories that draw from or mimic the natural sciences.^[76] They feature a proliferation of engineering techniques, with significant reference to biological, mechanical, and physics-based constructs; war must have some enduring nature and a rationalized character that morphs with social and technological discovery and growth. Radical humanists interpret human conflict in a subjective, contextual framing where each person is trapped, sociologically and within their distinct psyche. The entire species is held in stasis by those in power, with war being one of many tools to maintain status quo and render the species unable to progress toward necessary evolution and growth (that would destroy the elite advantages).^[77] Radical humanists therefore seek to tear down the entire system to rescue it. If war is a tool of oppression, it can be one of liberation also.^[78]

Radical humanism also carries an ontological assumption of some form of anarchism, where the individual being perpetually resists any larger and socially constructed system of oppression that objectifies and prevents progress. Young Marx, working within radical humanism, tolerated such anarchist constructs as they originate in German Idealism and particularly within Hegelian thinking, yet mature Marx would reject anarchy as a radical structuralist intent on designing state revolution. Lenin, as a proponent of “mature Marxism”, framed this period as manifesting on the eve of the French revolution of 1848, also termed the ‘February Revolution’ and the sudden end of the French monarchy by revolutionary protesters.^[79] ‘Mature’ Marxism (1845 onward) holds to economic political theory that governs class divisions, oppressive state systems, and the eschatological arrangement where modern capitalist states must be destroyed by the proletariat to allow the communist utopia to unfold.^[80] This illustrates a significant difference between early Marxist thinking and his mature work that directly shaped the radical structuralist paradigm addressed in the previous chapter, and inspired communist revolutions such as in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere.

However, radical humanism does not assume the same ontological conclusions that anarchists generally (but not exclusively) adhere to. Many anarchists enjoy operating within radical humanism, in that it still sustains their pursuit of collapsing modernity and overturning the scientific, industrial orders and power structures.^[81] Returning to the goals of anarchists and primitivists discussed in the previous chapter, critical theorists embracing the complete destruction of modern, industrialized and capitalistic society do not welcome certain anarchistic mode of primitive or non-society as appropriate. Radical humanists view the only progress out of capitalist domination as a forward movement toward Social Marxism, not a reversal of course toward earlier primitive periods.^[82] While many Marxists share anarchistic themes oriented toward collapsing modernity, radical humanists expect conflict and crises to transform social reality not into some primitive state, but an enlightened, superior one.^[83] Marcuse explains that: “liberation from the affluent society does not mean return to healthy and robust poverty, moral cleanliness, and simplicity. On the contrary, the elimination of profitable waste would increase the social wealth available for distribution.”^[84] Marcuse and fellow critical theorists wish to assimilate and transform existing technologically advanced and industrialized societies while purging them of their evils. This advances humanity forward instead of collapsing it back into some utopian stone age or anarchistic wasteland.^[85] Radical humanists like radical structuralists, fall under a broad Marxist umbrella, pursuing the emancipation of modern humanity so that it can evolve to a future and normatively superior social reality.^[86]

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The rest of it is below for subscribers. : )

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Modern militaries hold to what is arguably a five-century old, institutionalized framework set in Newtonian ideals for understanding war at ontological (what is or is not reality) and epistemological (how we understand such knowledge to operate in this reality) level. Everything a military organization experiences, studies, interprets, adapts, rejects, …

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First, an Old Man Story…

The final curtain call on the Journal of Special Operations came shortly after my design team wrote about Project Galahad, the U.S. Army Ranger Regiment’s innovation and design cell established inside their Regimental HQ and filled with Rangers that went through our JSOU design courses. The Galahad Team was breaking new ground, doing exciting and experimental work for that special unit. We decided to write an article on those design efforts, and when I first submitted it to the editors, I asked if there was some way Taylor & Francis might drop the paywall. Indeed, there was… and it came with a price.

We took that dollar cost and I brought it to the new JSOU President, who was excited about getting the university’s profile and social media boosted way beyond what it currently had (he would go on to make prolific YouTube videos over at Think JSOU; previously our design videos were some of the few things getting any traction online). You can still access all five of our original design channels here: https://www.youtube.com/@ThinkJSOU/playlists.

The President agreed, and university covered the cost to make the Galahad article public facing. What happened next was interesting. The article immediately jumped to the most viewed, most downloaded article of all-time for the journal. Although I would love to think that our terrific writing was the culprit, the reality was that paywalls limit military professional access due to the small percentage of service members sitting in positions where they have a digital library account capable of bypassing. A few months after the below article rocketed to the top of the SOJ charts, the editors proposed a new pathway forward. Thus, we today have Inter Populum, still providing the same service as SOJ, but in a easily accessible mode. I would bet money that their article views and downloads blow SOJ (and likely the article below) out of the water.

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Long story short, I am delighted this month to have an article in Inter Populum, and am confident that the new model without paywalls will serve the Department of War, allies, partners, and academia far beyond earlier efforts.

Curious about that public-facing Ranger Design article? Here it is:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23296151.2021.1905224

Get On With it!

Fast forward to today. The NEXUS concept remains experimental and in development. Something that began inside U.S. Special Operations Command as a collaboration between Space and Cyber forces is in 2026 now finally manifesting in various command level exercises, working groups, and has gained interest from the international military community too. These public-facing articles (whether NEXUS or the Army Service-specific version, TRIAD) are an effort for theorists and practitioners to get the raw concepts out into the wild.

Now, just a few weeks ago, I had my first NEXUS article published in the relaunch of Air University Press’ Air and Space Power Journal, which is back and available right here:

https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/ASPJ/

Link to my NEXUS and TRIAD article there: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/ASPJ/journals/Volume-36_Issue-1/Zweibelson.pdf

The above primer article explains the history of NEXUS and TRIAD, the policy issues, and the operational gaps and tensions between the concepts and existing geographic campaign plans, authorities, and other strategic factors. It works as a nice introduction article to “what the heck is NEXUS or TRIAD anyway?” But it was written over three years ago and, due to some delays by AUP on the relaunch of ASPJ this year, took a bit longer than expected to get into print. Meanwhile, I wanted to write a deeper dive into the theory, methods, models, and how NEXUS could develop in a more extensive mini-monograph sort of piece. That leads to this new article.

The Inter Populum article in full is located right here:

https://interpopulum.org/nexus-experimentation-a-case-for-space-sof-cyber-designs-in-trans-regional-multi-domain-dynamic-security-contests/

But, what good is a SubStack if you don’t get additional goodies and deeper content?

For my subscribers, I offer the additional content below that adds an entire new and larger introduction section that is not in the published article. Instead, I am modifying the article into a book chapter for my fifth book, available this winter through Helion & Co and now up for pre-order on Amazon and Casemate. That book link is here:

On Technology and War: The Power of Uncertainty

The Bonus Content for Subscribers:

Here is the additional material going into the new book that expands and develops the introduction portions of this NEXUS article and expands it into something appropriate not just for the U.S. Department of War, but into NATO, allies, and partner nations:

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Forgive the water damage at the bottom of the book, as I enjoyed reading this by poolside over two days. This book is a fast, easy, yet disturbing story (or more aptly, a collection of stories). The authors set the conflict in a fictitious South Asian nation with heavy emphasis on Vietnam and the counter-Chinese, Soviet Communist efforts that defined the 1950s-1970s for France, then the United States. The authors, both foreign policy experts, weave a complex series of chapters where readers meet an eclectic cast… from powerful and aristocratic diplomats to quirky chicken farmer experts, mechanical engineers, philosophical priests, and odd-ball military officers, along with many other unexpected personalities and players. The stories are fictional, but based in real events, real people, and the metaphoric structures positioned throughout the book link directly to actual events and conversations. The book becomes a beautifully tragic homage to American international ambition coupled with bureaucratic inertia and institutional frustration.

The Ugly American also reminds me of my latest book, Bad War Stories, and now I wonder whether subconsciously some of the structure and style of the book helped form my own project. Originally, I wrote Bad War Stories drawing from the stylings of Catch 22, the non-chronological stylings of Pulp Fiction, and inspiration from Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream along with Hackworth’s About Face. Now I think aspects of The Ugly American poked through inside my mind as I developed the book.

That book is on sale now on Amazon, for interested readers:

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Bad-War-Stories-Ben-Zweibelson/dp/1804519421

I wanted to post a few pages from The Ugly American below that were some of the sections that made me slap the table next to me while reading it in both avid agreement along with bewilderment. How had a book been so impactful for the Cold War generation in the Vietnam War (and post Vietnam) yet somehow not on any military reading lists during the OIF/OEF periods? Granted, this book did regain attention after 9-11 and apparently was featured in some mid-level officer courses in certain locations, but frankly I never saw the book in any senior leader recommended reading list nor did I encounter it in any of my advanced military education or training. Speaking with several military veterans today about this book, several offered to me some reasons why they felt The Ugly American never had a proper renaissance in the Global War on Terror period (for the American militaries at least). Without identifying them, I am pasting their comments below for consideration:

“The book is really for foreign policy wonks and strategists, the FA-59 guys… people in embassies or special forces types.” - one former strategic planner friend

“Since hardly no one left a FOB and those that did were on kinetic-style operations or in remote outposts, the book really does not apply as much for Iraq or Afghanistan. This book dives into cultural awareness in a way that our military had no practical value or ability to use it. How often did you see soldiers mixing with the locals? We were up-armored with ‘terps’ outside the wire, and had “steak and shrimp” night inside the FOB every Friday.” - SOCOM retired Colonel

“This book should have been read by everyone preparing to deploy. We did read things like “Three Cups of Tea” and “The Bear Went Over the Mountain”, but those were focused on how to better make counterinsurgency strategy work in Middle Eastern nations. I figure The Ugly American might have been viewed as antiquated, obsolete, something from the Cold War and less applicable.” - retired military senior enlisted leader

The book provided me a wealth of observations, many of which I learned the painful way in my own military misadventures (many end up in Bad War Stories, where I also fictionalized real events and introduced eclectic casts of characters). I wanted to highlight two pages from the book below (pp. 112-113). These really hit hard in the following ways:

First, the military professionals that took the time to intellectually challenge themselves beyond the institutionalized boundaries (our preferred ideas, set in concrete in our doctrine, reinforced ad absurdum in our training processes) by reading Mao’s communist guerrilla warfare theories were ridiculed or marginalized for doing so. “Clausewitz wrote everything there is to know on war… It’s impossible to write anything new… therefore, our profession has no requirement to read Mao” is the faulty logic. Paired in this is the institutional “why would you dare read the nonsense our enemy wrote… this seems unpatriotic”, and “if other ideas had legitimate value proven in battle, our doctrine would adapt them. Since these theories are not in doctrine, they obviously are just ivory-towered nonsense, military exercises in navel-gazing.” These are the sorts of arguments I have witnessed many times whenever one dares to suggest the doctrinal content or preferred military theorists (Clausewitz, Jomini, Fuller, Boyd, etc.) might need to make space for concepts outside our primary war paradigm.

Below, the French military officer, despite losing countless tactical engagements with the enemy, refuses to consider a Communist might have something new or relevant to study on war. In The Ugly American, the French are still forcing their preferred military tactics of using mechanized armor and extensive logistical supply lines in a country similar to Vietnam, entirely inappropriate for such methods and weaponry. Despite losing constantly, the French officer is ideologically bound to support his professional education. Only Clausewitz and Jomini are relevant, period.

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Key terms: Physicalism, artificial intelligence, complexity, philosophy, postmodernism, sociology, phantasmal war, conflict, futures

The title of this [draft] chapter promotes what in 2026 is a heavily debated topic, driven in recent months by ever-impressive AI performances and capabilities. What was once limited to the science-fiction section of the library is now at the main lobby and of significant (perhaps existentially oriented) public concern. We are at a crowded intersection of contemporary philosophy, neuroscience, and AI research for the first half of this chapter’s title. Yet the second half carries “pragmatic humanism” and “epistemic humility”, which appear both metaphysically remote and possibly quite presumptuous that our species has any idea how to deal with creating a tool smarter than the designer. However, due to many tensions presented below from dissimilar fields and certain philosophical puzzles that might remain unsolvable, we cannot begin to claim that one theory- physicalist, cultural, postmodern, or futurist- can seize objective domination over the nature of consciousness.

The irony is not lost on this author that we as the only conscious entities in our ecosystem must now debate whether emerging artificial intelligence can or cannot join us in self-reflective, conscious existence. If we were fish and as very clever fish could design AI underwater in our oceanic world, we would be entering a phase where the “fish AI” system can produce increasingly convincing mimicry of the water that we fish swim in. Can that artificial construct join us in the real water, leaping from a simulated ocean and participate fully in equal oceanic navigation? Or is the “fish AI” trapped inside a digital tank, swimming in only a mimicry of water, imitating real fish but never escaping into the real ocean? This incomplete metaphor helps illuminate the core tension under examination today by experts in multiple professions and disciplines. Can silicon-based systems ever cross the ontological threshold from sophisticated simulation to genuine instantiation of phenomenal experience at the entry-level to consciousness? At stake is not just the future of artificial intelligence but the ethical and strategic considerations our species must make as we accelerate toward what could be an emergence of superintelligence in artificial form.

To move through this contested terrain of consciousness and artificial simulation, we first consider a robust physicalist argument recently articulated by Alexander Lerchner (2026) in a Google DeepMind manuscript, “The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness.”^[1] This is our point of departure where Lerchner claims that algorithmic symbol manipulation (binary code used by computers) remains forever trapped in vehicle causality while biological brains (or other physically equivalent yet still alien alternatives) alone achieve content causality. Algorithmic travels only upon the back of the physical, a vehicular traveler unable to step onto the real territory or become anything but a seductive mimicry of consciousness. This physicalist framework popular in many scientific fields and engineering professions represents the intellectual “castle” from which subsequent challenges are launched.

The ensuing sections of this chapter examine paradigmatically incommensurate counter-frameworks on what consciousness is and whether AI can make the leap. These include complexity theory and the social sciences, postmodern philosophy, and probabilistic futurism. Each prospective offered is shown to expose genuine vulnerabilities to the physicalist ontology without also presenting clear issues in the alternative positions. We conclude with the concept of phantasmal war, a systemic rather than systematic form of conflict where superintelligent AI could shatter not merely the physical defenses (territory, property, kinetic effects) but the very epistemological and social realities that sustain human agency. We may mistake the leap from artificial intelligence to superintelligence by debating over shades of consciousness over mimicry while a transformation of reality could render such distinctions irrelevant or obsolete. We may not see the superintelligence revolution of AI for the questionably conscious trees.

Throughout this chapter, the guiding commitment is pragmatic humanism tempered by epistemic humility. We simply do not need to solve these likely unsolvable problems on what is the ultimate ontological status of consciousness, nor do we even need to agree on whether one understanding of reality is incorrect when compared to another unprovable alternative. We do collectively have obligation to act responsibly in that frame of reference we reliably inhabit and assume at a foundational level is real, without such order and stability, our entire worldview collapses into chaos. Lyrics from “Hold On Loosely” (1981) written by .38 Special are a playful yet appropriate way to enter into this debate. “Just hold on loosely, but don’t let go… If you cling too tightly, you’re gonna lose control.” At this intersection of experts from dissimilar fields and disciplines, we need to hold our most cherished paradigmatic values lightly so we might reflectively consider how to shape and guide technological futures that sustain human value, mitigate existential risk for our species, and preserve the distinct potential of technological utopian prosperity and peace. Failure here may prove irreversible.

Positivism & Physicalism Bearing the Abstraction Fallacy: Instantiation Castling

In chess, one strategy involves a special declared move of ‘castling’ where the king and rook (previously unmoved) switch several spaces into a defensive posture that offers certain advantages along with new vulnerabilities. When considering artificial intelligence and its potential to develop into something we might define as consciousness, physicalists perform a bit of intellectual castling. They frame their arguments around a defensible core of scientific certainty (objectivity, order, natural laws of the universe), but as we will examine through other non-physicalist positions, this castling maneuver opens up new vulnerabilities. These will be addressed through a series of engagements at the ontological and epistemological levels. Ontology, in philosophical studies, represents the foundational, world-forming beliefs and assumptions on what reality must be and cannot be, for associated theories and models to function. Epistemology deals with the abstract and collective assumptions a group maintains on how knowledge is exercised within these ontological planks. If one’s ship is the social paradigm the group adheres to, the ontology is the physical beams, masts, and sails, while the epistemology becomes how the sailors know how to navigate, adjust course, and manipulate the sails to catch wind. Our paradigms enable us to navigate reality (the ocean), steering toward destinations (strategies, goals) while also discovering new worlds (concepts about reality).

Physicalism, as a metaphysical view of reality, insists that all things including ideas and mental states are absolutely determined by physical, scientific laws. Physicalists hold to a monistic ontology that reality consists of physical substances only; even the ideas we conjure in our minds are determined by physical facts that obey scientific laws (known, unknown, or partially comprehended) and subsequently all mental truths including consciousness are deducible from physical truths. Lerchner’s physicalism operates ontologically, meaning it frames his worldview of what is real and what is not. Physicalists employ an associated epistemology (how we understand the construction of knowledge about our reality) of positivism, where all useful (truthful) knowledge must be scientifically verifiable and logically provable using largely quantitative methodologies and analysis.

Physicalists posit that consciousness is a useful byproduct of human physiology, a survival function of physical systems set within a complex ecosystem where all conscious experiences and outputs are both the result of adaptive behaviors and directly nested in physical processes and property. Alexander Lerchner, a senior scientist with Google DeepMind, created a stir by publishing “The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness” and reapplying the physicalist claim toward AI that ontological boundaries of the physical world prevent any algorithmic symbol manipulation from instantiating the experience of consciousness.^[2] Such a claim effectively shuts down broader concerns on whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) is truly an existential threat or merely a technological parlor trick incapable of achieving consciousness.^[3]

For physicalists such as Lerchner, the nature of all consciousness remains an instantiated physical process that is inseparable from its biological (or other physically constitutive) hardware. Consciousness is the output of what a suitably organized physical substrate does, not just a program it runs such as updated software. Due to how AI operates using digital facts that compose its syntactic architecture, the software never “becomes” the hardware necessary for running such programs. Lerchner concludes that AI may mimic consciousness in ever-increasing levels of sophistication, it cannot instantiate consciousness just as a map cannot extend itself into the territory that a mapmaker observes to produce new maps.

To enable this physicalist argument on consciousness, we need to frame the universe using their philosophical stances.^[4] Reality is a two-tiered system where the physical ‘real’ is the territory that Lerchner likens to the territory that a mapmaker, standing upon that physical time-space, can then render a map of. The map is the second tier, an artificial representation that first existed in the mapmaker’s mind, and subsequently as information shared using linguistics and illustrations (the paper map). In the physicalist reality, many maps might be created or conceptualized, yet these artificial constructions cannot leap from paper to the territory in such a manner that the artificial directlyinfluences the physically real. A map might be stretched across terrain into a 1:1 near-perfect representation, yet the map cannot ever become the territory it mimics.

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Physicalists today contemplate what the nature of the digital reality is and whether sufficiently complex AI could evolve in some emergent fashion from non-conscious to conscious, just as some undetermined collection of hydrogen atoms eventually become “wet”. For Lerchner, AI can only constitute a near-perfect but empty simulation of consciousness, where syntactic manipulation of symbols is meaningless if divorced from their respective tangible forms of origin (the physical hardware and reality).

Lerchner proposes an “Abstraction Fallacy” for contemporary AI debates on consciousness using the physicalist perspective. Suppose an AI system of exceptional complexity and sophistication (a beautiful, powerful map) is so persuasive that it appears indistinguishable from human consciousness in every physical measurement conceivable. The Abstraction Fallacy occurs when humans occupying the terrain (physical reality) begin to falsely assume an AI is conscious, and that it can join them cognitively on the same territory from which the map (AI software) was designed upon.

Yet anything designed in the abstract plane of existence cannot escape the physicalist ontological boundaries that prevent all artificial maps from ever becoming terrain. A useful metaphoric example occurs in the science fiction film Bladerunner 2049¸ when KD6-3.7, a replicant police detective, engages in a personal relationship with Joi, a virtual companion who manifests only through holographic projection. In numerous instances, Joi attempts to touch KD6-3.7, feel rain on her skin, or move beyond the physical limits of her holographic system. She cannot, and in all instances including sharing intimacy with KD6-3.7, she must pair with a physical surrogate to provide the illusion that Joi is part of the physical reality she cannot possibly exist in. Joi mimics human consciousness but remains a hologram projected upon reality just as the movie itself plays against a physical screen in a theater.^[5] Joi is mapped upon the physical world, yet she remains trapped permanently and irreversibly in the artificial (digital information) and only interacts with the real world (territory) in illusionary, empty ways.

Complexity Theory and Siege Warfare: Challenging the Physicalist Ontology of Reality

Beyond physicalism and what historically remains a constellation of natural science disciplines wedded to the positivistic epistemology originating in the European Age of Enlightenment, other disciplines view reality differently. Emerging after their pioneering ‘hard science’ cousins, the ‘soft science’ disciplines consider reality in systemic, sociological, and other configurations that deviate from the physicalist ontology. The social sciences in the twentieth century, along with new schools of philosophy (postmodernism) using metaphysical arguments, would begin to lay siege to the physicalist fortress and their positivistic approach to knowledge. Complexity science, quantum theory, general systems theory, and other scientific disciplines would diverge epistemologically from the natural science classical positions underpinning physicalism and materialism. Midcentury, Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) that proposed “scientific paradigm shifts” in how scientific fields would be disrupted in dynamic, incommensurate ways with an increasingly irrelevant paradigm collapsing under the weight of an emerging one.^[6] Kuhn systemically framed a philosophy of science where objectivity and subjectivity were both required, and competing scientific paradigms carried certain incommensurate configurations where ontologies, epistemologies, methodologies, and models/terms do not align in some one-to-one correlation.

Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes published The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976).^[7] In it, he explored the nature of consciousness by combining neurology, history, anthropology, and culture in a controversial yet still debated theory that (human) consciousness is a learned behavior rooted not in genetic mutations in neurons or environmental, physical forces, but from the swirling and socially constructed soup of language and culture. He introduced the concept of the “bicameral mind”, where earlier humans had sophisticated cognition and could even establish civilizations, but they were still employing some non-conscious mentality where hallucinations were rationalized as “commands from the gods”, represented today in cases of schizophrenia. For Jaynes, “the human ability to introspect” arose spontaneously as a learned behavior that likely emerged during the 2^nd millennium BC.^[8

^{(Fans of the HBO television show ‘West World’ may not realize much of the discussion within the show about AI gaining consciousness draws heavily from Julian Jaynes’ book)}

Jaynes’ theory of consciousness is thus ontologically incommensurate with Lerchner and the physicalists. For Jaynes, humans learned and realized consciousness through cultural “software” that manifested out of social, intellectual demands beyond those of lesser biological frameworks. One is not born with consciousness, nor does it arise as some biological given (physical hardware); we that are conscious are uniquely introspective and self-referential in understanding reality beyond those responding to sensory signals and cognitively engaging in a pre-conscious, non-conscious, or other sociologically inferior state of existence.^[9]

For Jaynes and some sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, the nature of reality is not that of the physicalist’s two-tiered system (territory and map). Instead, reality is a single, historical, physical reality in which the “bicameral mind” or other substituted evolutionary theory of consciousness developed from earlier non-conscious thinking ancestors. There is a “ground floor” of the universe where life begins and cognition exists in only the simplest of ways; a single-cell organism is both alive and incapable of cognitively doing more than some immediate processes within its ability to continue to survive. Intelligence develops and increases in complexity as an ecosystem evolves into new and higher forms of life, resulting in our human species realizing consciousness and now, through the technological outputs of our profound intellectual abilities and this gift of consciousness, the possibility that we might ourselves create artificial consciousness.

Jaynes represents a cultural neurologist and historian of the mind, yet he did not direct his theory toward the possibility of AI achieving similar achievements. However, within Jaynes’ work, he does leave sufficient space for considering consciousness in the abstraction of digital and carbon-based existences. Humans managed to alter the “software” to operate differently than their hardware (bodies and brains) started out as. If consciousness is akin to human “software”, then in principle it should run on any other system with the necessary self-referential to achieve self-awareness.

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Physicalists reject such ideas as ontologically misguided. Lerchner makes several dismissive remarks within his paper that illustrate physicalist incommensurability with theorists operating outside their preferred paradigm. He posits the genuine conceptualization of something such as “redness” requires an intrinsic phenomenal state where these concepts are constituted “not [as] Platonic ideals waiting to be discovered… [but as] constituted neurophysiological states existing solely within the cognitive system of the agent that performed the abstraction.”^[10] Lerchner refines this using “Red” and “Whale”, where “because the concept ‘Red’ and the concept ‘Whale’ are intrinsic control states derived from lived experience, the brain can recombine them to instantiate the experience of a ‘Flying Red Whale’, - a composite that has never been encountered but is physically coherent.”^[11]

Organizational theorist Karl Weick, in addressing how organizations epistemologically form knowledge and innovate to design new concepts, provides a powerful counterargument to the physicalist stance on conceptualization being causal neurophysiological states iteratively combining within a lived experience. Weick uses “Pegasus”, the Greek mythological flying horse, to illustrate how “horse” and “wing” might be joined together not in any innovative sense, but in a lower level of convergent conceptualization he terms “fanciful” thinking. Citing Coleridge, Weick explains that “fancy” operates in a mode where the institution insists on recombining known things and concepts in institutionally recognizable ways, compliant and orthodox to extending that institutional paradigm from yesterday to tomorrow.^[12] “Flying Red Whale” becomes not anything innovative or emergent; rather it is a reassemblage of known concepts in unique combinations. Novelty requires more than this, according to organizational theorists and designers that operate outside the ontological boundary for physicalists. Flying red whales and Pegasus are imaginary assemblages yet comprised of known constructs. The concepts are already well understood by the institution, and “neither idea changes nor interacts with the other. They are simply stuck together.”^[13]

Consciousness remains a philosophical topic where these theories may be ontologically in opposition, but no single position can be clearly demarked as “objective truth.” Our species, as the only agreed conscious entities against which we now consider artificial intelligent alternatives, differentiates from all other species in Earth’s ecosystem cognitively by demonstrating fanciful (Flying Red Whale) thinking and fantastic thinking (that which does not yet exist, cannot exist, or has never been imagined before). Physicalists treat the universe’s potential of knowledge (all possible concepts) as fully embedded in and inseparable from the physical substrate that instantiates them. Lerchner permits the universe to carry infinite conceptual potential, yet this can only be realized through content causality within a suitable organized biological (or equivalent physical) system. AI is permanently trapped inside the map, confined like a passenger in a vehicle that can only navigate with the physical substrate carrying them, never to exit it and “touch” the territory. Simulated intelligence may mimic consciousness but will forever be barred from genuine phenomenal instantiation that we humans do effortlessly.

Weick positions consciousness in cultural, linguistic, and emergent social processes rather than strictly neurophysiological hardware. Weick aligns consciousness with the ongoing, socially enacted processes of how organizations and institutions recombine and improvise new or existing concepts in ways that generate meaning and novelty. Conscious entities do this whereas non-conscious ones might only mimic and potentially recycle surprising yet still fanciful combinations of existing concepts. When AI produces novel content that presents not just fanciful content but innovative conceptualization beyond engineered expectations of the AI creators, we may find new reasons to contemplate what consciousness is (or is not). Weick’s cultural and linguistic emphasis finds a powerful historical parallel in Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind.

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Yet Jaynes offers in his theory a competing framework to that of physicalism where humanity has a historical and anthropological sort of amnesia. We as a species forgot when we woke up and how it was like within the dream of pre-consciousness, when the auditory hallucinations (commands of gods) provided societies with sufficient non-reflective, non-conscious cognitive solutions. Jaynes’ proposal is radical, yet no more radical than Lerchner’s on enforcing an ontology of instantiated physical prioritization. Jaynes views consciousness as a recent cultural and sociological development in the last roughly two thousand years that has no direct linkage to pure biological or physical changes. People with the exact physical brains birthed offspring with the same neurological structures, yet due to cultural and linguistic forces generated by this social construction of reality, certain people gained consciousness.^[14]

Unlike in Lerchner’s two-tier physicalist reality (territory, map makers, maps), Jaynes’ theory draws from complexity science instead of Newtonian positivism. We live in a universe where biology and sociology cannot be reduced, isolated, and subsequently measured in ways that provide insight upon the unified whole. The biology is dependent upon the sociological structures it enables into existence; the physicalist ontological boundary between tangible, physical property and process is blurred into a synthesis between the social and the physical.

Digital Simulacra and Ontological Collapse: On Digital Physicalists Imagining the Real

Julian Jaynes’ contribution of the “bicameral mind” represents a scientific pathway for examining consciousness in such ways that violate how physicalists such as Lerchner frame reality, yet both incommensurate viewpoints remain “scientific.” To introduce another provocative yet valuable theory to the discussion, we must elevate this inquiry to a philosophical introspection of science itself, such as how Thomas Kuhn contemplated scientific paradigm shifts, to allow access to other forms of philosophical inquiry.^[15] Of these, postmodern philosophy carries certain critical and disruptive qualities that often prevent scientists on the receiving end of postmodern critiques from taking the ideas seriously. Jean Baudrillard, a highly influential French Postmodernist, introduced the theory of simulacra for disrupting most scientifically grounded ways of framing reality and consciousness.

In Simulacra and Simulation (1981) ¸ Baudrillard examined how reality, symbols, and the social construction of societies resulted in a transformative system that now dominates our collective existence. Conscious beings participating in society are experiencing a simulacra of the real, original world that is no longer present. Simulation is in Baudrillard’s framing compatible with Lerchner’s physicalist definition, where imitation of the real-world example provides an artificial representation. Yet where simulation appears ontologically convergent, Baudrillard’s premise that reality is now a simulacra that has progressed to such a point that conscious participants in society are oblivious to it. We exist now in a world that is a “copy without an original”, and Lerchner’s ontological boundary between the territory with mapmakers and the many maps they produce is inverted. Baudrillard begins Simulacra and Simulation with a postmodern analogy of territory and maps to articulate his simulacra theory:

If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts- the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging)- as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it.^[16]

Most significant to the nature of consciousness, the postmodern critique rejects the question itself as irrelevant. We are incapable of self-reflection and introspection on whether we are conscious and what consciousness represents because we are trapped in the illusion of signs that steer us away from the real and toward the simulacra that now sustains our social reality. We are severed from the real and enthralled only by the illusions (copies without originals) that demonstrate a certain ‘hyperreality’ of maps that exceed the original capabilities of the terrain they were inspired from. Here, mimicry and simulacra produce a simulated map so compelling that participants believe it is the territory. The physical reality decays, with occupants trapped in the illusionary binding of the simulacra, resulting in what Baudrillard views as the rotting of the territory while the map consumes reality. “It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.”^[17]

Physicalists hit a logical paradox in which the smartest human beings such as Albert Einstein or Sir Isaac Newton had IQs estimated in the 160-180 range, the “top end” cognitive capability for natural or unmodified human beings.^[18] Suppose a strong AI system demonstrated a mastery of all major human disciplines and topics equivalent to this 180 IQ threshold, and could generate dissertations and patents that equaled or advanced ideas related to such gifted humans? Lerchner’s foundational argument remains intact: the AI is engaged in sophisticated mimicry of consciousness and operating at the highest level of human cognitive abilities. Now suppose the AGI doubles output in speed and quality, delivering unprecedented new knowledge through deliverables that astound the most gifted intellects and suggests an IQ in the 250-300 range? First, how might we even understand or attempt to analyze such artificial intelligence in that we lack any human equivalence? Secondly, what is AGI now mimicking? We will return to this paradox with postmodern concepts of simulacra and Baudrillard, in that a “copy without an original” cannot be accused of mimicking a level of human intelligence never before experienced.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is theoretically the perfect technological finalization of Baudrillard’s proposed inversion of consciousness. Such artificial superintelligence carries certain potential for comprehensive world revision, into proposed post-human utopian paradises or in darkly macabre versions, the extinction of humanity and life in this universe as we know it. Although physicalists might declare such superintelligence an “empty vessel” capable only of elaborate mimicry of consciousness, this ushers in what we might term a “Superior Ethics Paradox.” Suppose human designers crafted AGI that cognitively performed at twice the intelligence of the smartest human expert in any desired field. This AGI superintelligence would, at the prompting of the world’s leading ethicists, provide them with an ethics strategy on AI that is measurably superior to any human output. Thus, we enter a paradox where the physical beings with declared consciousness deny artificial consciousness to the AGI entity, yet for optimized ethical strategy on managing AGI they must employ the deliverables attained exclusively by the non-conscious “mind.” This becomes akin to the temperamental teenager accusing the parents of failing to be effective parents, and then storming off to their bedroom to sulk while enjoying the comforts of what the parents provide.

Stacking Realities: The Probabilistic Futurism View and Living inside a Simulation

The postmodern critique carries certain intellectual antibodies due to how scientists often dismiss postmodern philosophy as ‘unscientific’ or otherwise irrelevant. Similar objection can be made of Jaynes’ neurological historian premise of premodern civilization lacking consciousness, in that such a concept is impossible, anthropologically speaking, to ever prove or disprove. Returning to ontological boundaries somewhat closer to the physicalist camp, we now introduce Nick Bostrom’s theorization that our reality may likely be some elaborate digital simulation. This too is impossible to prove or disprove, yet many foundational theories within the natural sciences share similar barriers to confirmation or denial.

Bostrom, a philosopher and futurist, focuses on technology and whether artificial intelligence may migrate beyond human control and comprehension. He focuses upon artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical outcome of advanced AI technology that, if realized, would be an entity able to out-think even the smartest human beings in any intellectual endeavor. We will return to this looming specter of AGI and how it might usher in profound societal prosperity or perhaps existential doom; Bostrom’s treatment of whether we exist in some simulation of reality moves together with this promise of super intelligence.

In “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation”, Bostrom reframes the nature of consciousness as a substrate-independent information pattern, which deviates from Lerchner’s instantiated physical process (the territory).^[19]Physicalists nest consciousness as the tangible output of an organized physical substrate that is inseparable from the biological, chemical, and physical quanta of the universe. Bostrom counters with framing consciousness as first and foremost a computational process independent from any base physical reality. It can run on any sufficiently powerful hardware (carbon, silicon, or other) and provide complete immersion into the reality that a consciousness occupies. Reality can be simulated or real, yet indistinguishable for the occupants able to consciously self-reflect whether they are in a real or simulated reality.

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