War: The Dementedness of the Sapiens Species

After the horrors of World War II and yet again in humanity’s history, law was seen as a rational means for containing such rampant, insane violence. And it has proven, yet again in humanity’s history, to be a frail straw to clutch at as world leaders and the societies they head seem to be madder and madder by the day, to the extent of ignoring national and international law and covenants and striking at fundamental aspects that supposedly define humanity, the sapiens species, and even at the very life of the planet that humans inhabit together with all the other species on which their existence depends.

In its very first article, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights spells out the essential condition for human rights. Human beings are “… born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience”. The current deplorable state of human rights shows that humans are far from making good use of this natural endowment. In today’s wars, humans who start and prolong them are vicious in their violation of moral values, and of the ethics of war itself. Hate dictates action. Sustained by false justifications, the will to exterminate triumphs. Human behaviour becomes demented.

Before war and faced with war, we’re frightened for this is a time of anxiety, of uncertain waiting, of real, already-started wars that threaten to become global, of attacks against international law and organisations that work for peaceful coexistence. People are scared about war and, as psychoanalysts, we are also worried about the human madness (non-reason, and non-conscience) that leads to war. In “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946), Melanie Klein described madness as an internal war from birth, in which fear of death linked with rage and hatred (that the mother tries to soothe as best she can) is projected onto others. Trying to be free of suffering, the Ego is dominated by illusory beliefs, and anything opposing these deceptive fantasies and desires are seen as malign. Hate commands action, and the will to exterminate takes over.

On the national scale, this attack on “reason and conscience” takes the form of “straight power concepts” increasingly managed by dishonest, corrupt—but elected—leaders whose violent, supremacist, hate-laden discourse spurs on wars of plunder and dispossession, and also genocide and ecocide. Ten months before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed, George Kennan, architect of the Marshall Plan, brutally described a future dominated by the great powers, first states and then, more stealthily, corporations.

We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population.[…] Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.[…] We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. […] The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

Even in gestation, the Declaration of 1948 was condemned to languish among “unreal objectives”, because disparity of wealth and its inevitable cruelty had to be maintained.

It is generally believed that, unlike the Hominidae or great apes, whose “cognition is structured by stable cognitive abilities that respond to different developmental conditions”, humans have come to rule the Earth as a species that is able to observe reality and think, have self-awareness, value freedom, and be creative. Widespread notions of human superiority or exceptionalism tend to project a civilised species capable of periods of peace. But human wars are characterised by bestiality and inhumanity, which are also part of human nature.

In his 1955 inquiry into the psychotic part of the personality, the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion showed how fragile the human thinking mechanism is in being affected by the emotions of the social animal that humans are. He describes the attempt to think—“reason and conscience”—as a “a central part of the total process of repair of the ego”. In 1974, from the social standpoint, the French sociologist Edgar Morin criticised the designation of Homo sapiens sapiens and observed that Homo is sapiens-demens. He describes the human as “a reasonable and unreasonable being who can be subdued and excessive. Subject to intense unstable affectivity, he smiles, laughs, and cries but is also able to understand objectively. He is serious and calculating but also nervous, anguished, playful, excitable, ecstatic; he is a being of violence and tenderness, love and hate; a being invaded by the imaginary who can recognize the real”. This species, its members, and its civilisation has a large part of demens—the stubborn insanity of attempts to shun reality in the ways people interrelate and function in society, and the madness of individuals faced with, or fearing threats and danger—which Freud anticipated, in his way, by turning to the mythology of Eros and Thanatos and their fusion in the human being.

One extreme case of murder, widely reported in the Italian press in September 2024, reveals the connection between individual and social pathology. Riccardo, a “serious, studious, easy-going” seventeen-year-old, stabbed his parents and younger brother to death after a family meal and then called the police. Asked why, he said he didn’t know, except that he felt oppressed and thought he could free himself by killing them, that he always had the sensation that he was alone, a stranger with them and with his classmates. He’d been thinking about killing his family and he “exploded” at midnight. He thought that one thrust of the knife would kill them. But he didn’t want them to suffer so he stabbed them again to be sure they were dead. Then he coldly realised that he was mistaken. Killing his personal version of the family as a social institution hadn’t freed him from being a member of the wider society.

It seems that Riccardo had managed to repress his inner conflicts and feelings of oppression for some time previously, which is why his teachers and friends believed he was a stable boy. He’d projected the suffocation (of his inner world) onto his family (external world). He thought he’d be free if he killed these suffocating people. He was unable to think about his subjective experience of being suffocated and alone, of being a stranger everywhere, so he killed the people who loved and cohabited with him. His solution was demens, with a dose of sapiens (he didn’t want them to suffer). There are many socially enraged Riccardos in this world, as school-shootings/ in the United States alone show. Since the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, more than 390,000 students in the U.S. have experienced gun violence at school. That’s about 1,300 children per month.

Demens appears in the perverse parts of the human personality, which are well described in crime novels, amongst other literary genres. In brief, its versions could be:

+ Wanting to harm, revenge, total power, but seeing this as good;

+ Distorting the reality of things;

+ Corrupting individuals and social institutions;

+ Selfishly, erotically, and cruelly enjoying attacks on truth and people, and seeing it as a victory.

Demens doesn’t think properly, or uses thinking to do harm. Like Riccardo, it attacks and parasitically abuses its carers and the world that sustains life, turning them into enemies and oppressors. It assaults the Ego itself, and all its affective connections in the course of its thanatological and demented expression. The anxieties described by Riccardo are typical of psychotic crises, unbearable archaic feelings which, in our training of observing infants, we psychoanalysts have seen as going back to early feelings of suffocation, hunger, rage, and acute fear of death. To be free of such pain, babies use projective evacuation to get rid of what is gnawing inside and suffocating them, and then they see it as being outside themselves.

Experiences that tend to be explosive and full of rage must be contained, which is what the mother does for her baby, making them utterable and representable, while satisfying essential needs such as feeding the infant and providing human contact and love. As psychoanalysts we do our best to help the patient understand this quality of “containment”, which must be learned.

Sapiens loves and fights for life, for peaceful coexistence, accepting that, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”. It strives to solve problems and to be more sapiens. In the elected political leaders of many countries (which signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in favour of “reason and consciousness”), demensaspects submit healthy Ego functioning of “reason and conscience” to cruel, despotic control. Individual clinical cases of madness (psychosis) and its social demens dimension are aspects of the same reality: Homo sapiens demens.

The baby’s fear of dying is similar to the terror of society of being annihilated in a war. This dread of a threatenedwar can actually lead to real war, as the example of Israel suggests. The trauma of the Holocaust was brought to Palestinian lands when the state of Israel was established and, with it, the fear of being annihilated all over again. Inexpungible anguish shaped the country’s mentality, with two main reactions. The dominant one (demens) favours war, in an endless vicious circle, and the minority one (more or less sapiens) understands that the only hope is hope itself.

For Moshe Dayan, commander of the Jerusalem front in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, “Israel must be seen as a mad dog; too dangerous to bother”. With this principle as a guide, racism and cruelty won the day. For a while, military superiority sustained the illusion of invulnerability, but Hamas changed that on 7 October 2023. Israel was warned of the attack three days before it happened. Netanyahu declined to act, maybe because of fantasies of invincibility, or perhaps a massacre provided the “self-defence” justification for genocide. This denial of reality, this waiting in fear or omnipotence for the Hamas attack to happen, has had enormously devastating and destabilising consequences, not least among them the present flagrant display of the politics of hate, lying, political blackmail, and despicable interests.

The other view, about the need for hope, comes from Ami Ayalon, former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s secret service and commander-in-chief of the Navy, when he sums up what he learned when combatting terrorism. A soldier in training only sees enemies as “objectives” to be shot, tortured, stabbed, or killed by missiles but, when you fight terrorists, you must know everything about them and their daily lives, and you discover they are human beings. Then you no longer fear them, so your way of understanding the war changes. The “equation” Ami Ayalon learned is that, “We Israelis will have security only when they, Palestinians, will have hope.” Knowledge, he says, can save us. For us, as psychoanalysts, understanding who we are cohabiting with is what characterises sapiens life. It also applies to the smallest cell in its setting through to nations with their neighbours in the international realm.

Such understanding isn’t easy. What is seen, and what is believed must be questioned. This is a crisis of identity and loyalty which means either clinging to the illusion of having total control like the omnipotent fantasy of the newborn child who must learn how to be sapiens, or courageously acknowledging a feared, unknown reality on which, in fact, we depend. Sapiens must learn to recognise everything angry and undesirable that humans unconsciously project onto and identify in others, and which is inseparable from the harm and barbarism they cause. For demens, depression and guilt become persecutory. Any criticism is demonised and past persecution justifies present persecuting. Only the voice of power speaks the truth. Trump’s recent “explosive” attack on Zelenskyy in the White House is a demonstration of this at the highest levels of power, and also of Bion’s insight that a corroded mental apparatus corroded by lies is incapable of good judgement. The wars in Ukraine and Palestine—not to mention mostly untold accounts of genocide against Indigenous peoples in many parts of the world, which could end up being ecocide for all of us—are blatantly demonstrating the predominance of demens in action in ways that are so brutal that written and filmed testimony are making fictional stories of war look like nursery tales.

If this brutality is to be prevented, there must be a change of mentality. We need concepts that are able to “contain” (like the mother of the distressed baby) the barbaric actions of demens, offering instead a model of respect for and commitment to essential human needs. From the earliest societies there has been a constant quest to contain the excesses of demens, for example from Hammurabi (1755 – 1750 BCE) through to today’s laws and conventions. Related ideas like universal basic income which would guarantee the most basic right of all, that of material existence, have not yet consolidated. We must demand observance of the laws and conventions—promises of a future of peaceful coexistence—we already have, and new ideas if we are to impede the drive to exterminate, and if we are to evolve towards solidarity with the members of our own and other species, and maybe become a better one if Homo sapiens demens hasn’t already self-destructed.

To conclude, we believe that the designation Homo sapiens sapiens should be changed to Homo sapiens demensas a pedagogical principle so that we can have a new, more realistic awareness of our true human condition and, on that basis, proceed to improve it. This won’t be easy in the present hubristic milieu.

Josep Oriol Esteve and Lluís Isern are members of the Spanish Psychoanalytical Society.