On winning and losing
Recently, an eight-year-old acquaintance of mine offered the following prediction for the new year: she posited that Russia would win the war.
Putting aside all thoughts about an eight-year-old child even being aware of a war, to the extent of making a prediction about it, I want to talk about my immediate reaction to the statement, which was: nobody wins a war.
This idea of winning and losing is in fact a human construct, a necessary component of games, which are another artificial human construct. Someone wins the gold medal, the ribbon, the cup, and the others don't. There are protocols to try to ensure that all competitors start from the same initial condition: the cards are shuffled, the darts players toe the same line, the sprinters start together at the sound of a gun. There is a complex etiquette of shaking hands and congratulating the winner and thanking the loser for a good game.
And then there is professional wrestling, a form of theatre which introduces another artificial construct: good guys and bad guys. Of course the good guys always win. Everyone is familiar with the concept because it is a staple of fiction, another construct.
Needless to say, there are no victims in games. No innocent bystanders, no civilians.
The problems start when we try to interpret real events in the world using these artificial concepts, which are part of the artificial world that, let's face it, we inhabit most of the time.
Events like wars in remote places that we learn about through the same devices with which we watch the football game and the movie where the good guy wins and the bad guy gets his well-deserved comeuppance.
The military themselves reinforce this gamification of war. They divide up into red and blue armies, and literally play war games. They also have a keen interest in the world of video games, which they regard as a useful recruitment tool as well as an inexpensive training tool.
I'm sure I don't need to describe the inconceivably awful reality of war to you. In war there are no rules, no inhibitions, no moral scruples. No protocols to ensure fairness, no etiquette. No good guys, no bad guys. As for victims, well, that's the whole point of war. Anything goes, the more cruel the better. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 are today not worth the paper they're written on.
There is no moral way to conduct war.
We need to de-gamify war. For this we need to stop thinking in terms of winning and losing when it comes to war. The concept simply does not apply.