Game Theory #22: Twilight of the Nation-State

There is a ceasefire now between Iran and the United States. But most analysts expect that this war will resume in a week, two weeks, a month. But it will resume because it is impossible for the United States and Iran to come to a mutually beneficial and satisfying arrangement. So today I want to look at how this war will evolve. And my argument to you today is that this US-Iran war, it's really the first war of the 21st century. And so I want to explain to you how warfare has evolved these past few hundred years.

So the simplest way to fight a war is you would destroy a state's capacity to fight by killing as many soldiers as possible, right? You would arrange to fight the enemy on a battlefield. Whoever wins this battle would win the war and that was how traditionally wars were fought for hundreds and hundreds of years. But in the 20th century something happened which is that the state and nation state have the capacity to have a lot of people, millions of people. And so the state could always replenish its forces on the battlefield.

And so now what you had to do was you had to destroy the state's capacity to produce, to manufacture. Okay? And this is really so the point is to kill as many civilians as possible before you wanted to kill as many soldiers as possible. But in the 20th century war, mainly World War II, you're trying to kill as many civilians as possible. But in the 21st century, it's different because we have nuclear weapons now and there are too many people. So it is impossible for you to kill everyone and if you use nuclear weapons then others will use nuclear weapons on you.

Okay. So now in the 21st century our goal is to use the population against the state, to turn the civilians against the government by sowing as much discord and dissent as possible within society, and you do that through economic sabotage, economic strangulation. Okay. So that's the argument I will make to you today.

The first thing I want to look at is why is it that we have 8 billion people living on this planet. And for most of us we think this is a tremendous achievement. But if you think about it, it's not that nice because there aren't that many resources to share.

There's not that much space. In fact, if it were not for fertilizers, we would only be able to support 1 to 2 billion people. So, how do we get to a stage where there are 8 billion people in this world and most of us are not very happy with the state of affairs? Okay. And scientists will tell you it's because of the revolution. It's because of this revolution in technology and understanding that's allowed us to progress. That's not true. Okay? The real reason is because of the nation and the nation state. It is a revolution in politics that came to us because of the French Revolution.

All right. So the main architect of the French Revolution, his name is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was not French. He was actually Swiss. But he's important because he developed a theory that underpinned the French Revolution called the social contract. Before we didn't really think about what the individual's relationship with the state was. Basically, you were born into a community and you just did what tradition and custom and family asked you to do. But Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first to say no, we are born free because God gave us freedom.

So why do we choose to surrender our freedom in order to join a community? Okay. And so his theory is that we join society to become more free. By ourselves we, together, okay, all of us together, we create something called a common will and think of this as democracy.

Democracy is basically the idea that to make a decision we just vote and then whichever is the majority wins. So for example, we might debate whether we go to McDonald's or Pizza Hut. Okay, there's three of us. If two of you say let's go to Pizza Hut, we go to Pizza Hut because that's democracy. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this is not a good system because we should strive to be higher than we are. We should strive for total freedom and that's the idea of the general will. Okay, the common will is who we are.

The general will is who we could be if we came together as a people. Okay. And the best way to understand the general will is through Kant's theory of the categorical imperative. Okay, which is for him the highest moral So as human beings, what makes us truly human? What allows us to achieve our ideal state are three principles. Okay. The first principle is a principle of So imagine that all your actions will be reflected throughout the universe. So if you smile, everyone smiles at once. If you get angry, everyone gets angry at once.

And you ask yourself, what sort of society do I want to live in? Do I want to live in a society where everyone is smiling or angry? Right? And then that's the way you should behave. Yeah, the law of universality. Second is the idea of free No one can compel you to smile. You must smile out of your own free choice. Even though smiling makes you feel happy, if I make you smile, that goes against the good of humanity. Okay. The third is the idea of human as an Okay.

So I can never sacrifice another human being in order to achieve a better society because we are the ultimate end. Okay. So these together, the categorical imperative, is what gives us the theory of the general will. So even though we all vote to eat ice cream, we shouldn't eat ice cream because that's not how we achieve enlightenment. That's not how we achieve the ideal state, right? We should think about Kant's categorical imperative. Now what happens is this, from the general will, this is a sovereign. Okay.

This is the highest law. This is God basically. And from the sovereign we achieve the state, the government. And the state makes us into citizens. And then we have laws, Okay. So for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this is the social contract. This is the ideal state. The French Revolution started because there were many intellectuals, revolutionaries who wanted to achieve the social contract. But as you can appreciate there were many who disagreed with this theory especially monarchs, right, because the idea here is that the general will, the people, are the sovereign but in a monarchy the monarch is what's So the sovereign must so it's a debate over who's sovereign and so at this time in history most nations, most countries in Europe were monarchies.

So they saw the French Revolution as a direct threat to them and that's why they invaded many, many times. But then something really weird happened. These professional armies who go into France and they're fighting against these citizens. Okay, people with no military experience who are not professional soldiers. What was happening was that they were losing to the citizen armies. And the question is why was this And the reason why is that this theory is so powerful that it makes people willing to fight, to die for this. Okay? Right? So what was happening during the French Revolution, these wars, was that you had the monarchies and these were professional armies.

And so these were basically mercenaries. And the thing about mercenaries is they didn't want to die, right? They're collecting a paycheck. Their point is to intimidate. The point is to scare. It's not to die. But then you have the French and they were citizens and they were willing to fight and die. Okay? And that's why France became the most powerful nation in Europe at this time because they could call on their citizens to fight and to die and it was almost an unlimited amount of soldiers. Whereas the other countries like Prussia, Russia, Austria had professional soldiers who were afraid to die.

All they wanted was their paycheck. So over time the French were overwhelming the Europeans and this created the French Empire. All right. But once these places were conquered, they developed their own theory as to how to defeat the French and they recognized that we also need a theory of nationalism. We also need a theory of the nation state. But they didn't like the social contract theory. Okay. So they came up with a new theory based on nation which was basically language, culture and race. And so this becomes Germany.

Okay. Or what we call iron and blood. So now you have these theories of nationalism come out into Europe and now they're invincible because they can call on their citizens to fight and to die. This is why Europe became the most powerful region of the world starting in the 19th century. Okay. But of course, the problem with nationalism, the problem with populations that want to fight and die is that they keep on fighting wars. But is that a real and so what happens is that to solve this problem, all these nations focus on trying to grow the population as fast as possible, as much as possible.

And this is what led to this massive population growth. But with more population, what was happening was that these wars were becoming deadlier and deadlier, culminating, of course, in World War II. And by World War II, Europe had exhausted itself. Too many people had died. Their civilization was destroyed. And so this allowed America to come into power. Okay, America. And America had a different theory of the nation state. So the French theory was the social contract. The Germans, their theory is iron and blood, okay? Race. The Americans had a different theory because America was a multicultural nation of immigrants who are trying to colonize the Western Hemisphere, North America, right?

So for them their theory is to create a game. The nation state becomes a game. The Constitution and government are the game masters. And what they will allow is for anyone to come to America and get rich as long as they work hard. And this will create the greatest nation in the world. Okay? So this becomes a game where anyone can play. In fact, the more players that you have, the wealthier America becomes, right?

And then after World War II, what happened was that America spread this game throughout the world as much as they could, right, to Europe and to Japan. But there are still communist countries like China and the Soviet Union which did not want to participate in this game. They had their own game. And so what happened was that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this game conquered the world, right? You had globalization.

Okay. The problem is this. Once this game keeps on going, eventually what happens is that only a few players achieve all the wealth, right? You have massive inequality and everyone else falls into debt. Okay? And that's the world that we live in today. America created this game. It was very successful in creating tremendous wealth and they're trying to have as many players as possible. That's why you have the population boom. But now only a few people have all the wealth and everyone else is in debt. In other words, these people are useless and therefore we need to reset the game.

And the way to reset the game, of course, is to destroy the game in the first place. Therefore, have World War II, burn everything down, and start the game over again. Okay? And that's why we are in the situation we are in today. Okay? So now what I'm going to do is go over some of the major ideas that allowed for this system to come into being. Okay. So first I want to look at the social contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So Ivory, could you do me a favor and read the first passage?

There can be no way of compensating someone who gives up everything. Such a renunciation is incompatible with a man's nature. To remove all freedom from his will is to remove all morality from his actions. Finally, an agreement to have absolute authority on one side and unlimited obedience on the other. What an empty and contradictory agreement that would have to be. Isn't it clear that if we are entitled to take anything and everything from a person, we can't be under any obligation to him? And isn't that fact alone, the fact that there is no equivalent, nothing to be exchanged between the two sides, enough to nullify the agreement?

What right can my slave have against me? Everything that he has is mine, his right is mine, and it doesn't make sense to speak of my right against myself." Okay. So the argument is this. Our freedom is given to us by God. Our freedom is what connects us to God. So our freedom cannot be surrendered. If we surrender our freedom, if someone takes our freedom away from us, that is surrendering our humanity. That is breaking our connection to God. Therefore, it is better to die than be a slave. And that was their thinking during the French Revolution.

Right? You have all these citizens. They have absolutely no experience with firearms. But they were running into cannon fire against professional soldiers because they were like, give me liberty or give me death, because without my liberty I am nothing. Okay, so this is a really important concept. And then you can read this below.

Over to you, calculators. Count, measure."

You can see how vast it is. Right? So this shows you the power of the nation state based on two ideas. The first idea is liberty is all that matters. Second idea is grow the population as fast as possible. Okay. So of course what happens as I mentioned is that the Germans who are being conquered by the French get upset and their intellectuals come up with a new theory of nationalism. This is Johann Fichte who is considered the father of German nationalism. His argument is that it is that binds us as humans.

Okay. So for Rousseau it's liberty that we should strive for. It's liberty that gives us value as human beings. But for Johann it's no, it's language. It's language that binds us to the past. It's language that binds us It's language that's worth fighting for. It's race, nation, blood. Okay? And this becomes the philosophy of the German state. At this time in history, Germany was divided into many hundreds of different kingdoms. It is Otto von Bismarck of Prussia who will unify the German people into one Germany. Okay? Often called the Second Reich.

And so can you read, Ivory, this is a speech, his famous iron and blood speech. Okay.

The usual help for the poor, however, leaves a lot to be desired, especially in large cities where it is very much worse than in the country." Right. So, Bismarck will turn Germany into the most powerful nation in the world by recognizing that it's not just soldiers who contribute to the war effort. It's also your people as well. It's your people who make the machines of war, the machine guns, the artillery, the ammunitions. And therefore, you have to make sure they are healthy. You don't want to send six soldiers to a battlefield, right?

Well, you don't want sick workers as well. That's why he passed a lot of progressive worker reforms including health insurance, accidental insurance, old age pension, workers protection, children protection. Okay. It is because he recognizes that a nation state is first and foremost about making warriors and if you want to win you have to make sure you have as many people as possible and everyone is contributing to the war effort. And to do that you need to make sure that everyone is taken care of including your soldiers including your workers.

Okay. And it was Mussolini who basically understood that the real purpose of a nation state is to fight wars. In fact, it is wars that give people meaning in their lives. If you have a war, if you create a nation state around war, you create a mythology around the beauty of war, then people will happily fight and die. Okay. Can you read a speech?

Does that make sense? So America, their factories were fine. Soviet Union, their factories were removed into Siberia far away from the Germans. The Germans and the Japanese could be firebombed. Okay. So look at this. So from 1940 to 1945 the British and Americans firebombed Germany. Okay, this is Dresden. You can see the entire city of Dresden was destroyed by the firebombing. So in World War II, what they recognized is there's no point in killing soldiers on the battlefield because they'll just send in more soldiers with more weapons.

So we need to destroy the civilian population. That's how you win the war. Okay. And that's how they defeated Germany. Japan was much worse. Look at this. At least half of Japan was destroyed by the American firebombing of Japan. That's why Japan lost the war. Otherwise, they would have kept on going. All right? And these are huge cities. So, Nagoya is a city the size of Los Angeles. 40% of it was destroyed. Okay. Tokyo is New York City. 40% of it was destroyed as well. Yokohama, 60% of it was destroyed.

Okay, this is Tokyo. You can see the extent of the damage. The nation idea was so powerful that in order to win a war, you need to destroy the civilian population.

As you can see because of the rise of the nation state we have to kill more and more people in order to fight wars. So this is war two and at least 20 to 30 more people were Okay. And depending on how you calculate probably a lot more than that died. But what's interesting is that even though World War II was a calamity, even though tens of millions have died, look at population. It never stopped. Okay? So for most of the history of human history, population growth was steady.

But then starting around the year 1600, it boomed. Okay? And again, scientists will tell you this coincided with the rise of science and technology. But we've always had science and technology. What made this different was the rise of the nation state and the recognition that to fight wars, you need more people who wanted to kill themselves for the And to get them to do that, you have to treat them well as well. Okay? And so the nation state wanted science, technology, grow the population. That's why we had medicine and sanitation.

Okay. These innovations happen because the nation state will these things to now as I mentioned, after World War II and after all the travesty and destruction of World War II, the world got together and said, "Okay, America, you're in charge now and let's build a world in which we don't have to fight and kill each other anymore." And so, America created this game, right, called capitalism, consumer capitalism in which we live in today. And this system is unique in human history. And for most of this history was extremely successful.

It grew the population from about 2 billion to about 8 billion today. It made a lot of people more wealthy. Think of the tremendous wealth that China has generated in the past 30, 40 years because of its participation in consumer capitalism. But unfortunately we've now reached a point where the system is off-balance. It's unstable. It's unsustainable. So now we're going back to war. But unfortunately because there's so many people this means that when we go back to war at least 50% of humanity will die off in World War II.

Okay. So this is the war in Ukraine and already millions of people are dying in this war. When you look at the war in Ukraine, it's essentially a 19th century war. Okay? It's almost like World War I. I know World War I happened in the 20th century, but it's really a 19th century war where you are trying to kill as many soldiers as possible. Okay? And that's what's happening in Ukraine.

What I will show you is that Iran will be the first 21st century war. So America in round one tried to use shock and awe. Shock and awe is basically you decapitate the leadership. Okay, you destroy the military.

Okay. And you destroy Right? That's the idea of shock and awe. I come in, I kill your leadership, I kill your military, I kill your war and you do it as soon as possible. But this is not working against Iran because they prepared for this. They prepared for this war for 20 years. So it's decentralized.

So you've killed the leaders, but they don't care because they have new leaders coming into place. The military is Okay, they're hidden in mountains and the factories also hidden in mountains as well. So even though the Americans have really destroyed much of Iran's war fighting capacity, Iran is still in this fight. So what's going to happen is that over the next few months America is going to shift its strategy into a 21st century war Okay, which will have three components. Okay, the first component is economic strangulation.

I will destroy your economy, your entire economy. Second is ethnic tension. I will try to create as much conflict as possible between the different peoples of Iran. Okay. And the third thing is civilian infrastructure.

Basically, I want to destroy people's capacity to access water, electricity, and food. The basic necessities of life. Why do I want to do that? Because if people cannot access these things, they get angry, right? Then if they get angry, I can channel anger against the government because it's easier for them to attack the government than it is to attack the US military, which is the one destroying all this So this is what a 21st century war strategy looks like. And this is what the Americans will deploy in Iran over the next few months.

Now, why haven't they done this before? Well, because these are war crimes. Okay? There are lots of treaties, the Geneva Convention, that prohibit you from fighting these wars. But as the Americans become much more desperate, as they continue to lose this war, they'll be like, "Screw this. I'm going to win this war no matter what it takes." Okay. So, let me show you how this war will be fought. So, right now, they're trying to target weapons. They're trying to target military bases. That doesn't get you anywhere. Okay?

You need to better use your weapon systems because you don't have enough munitions to destroy the entire Iranian military. Okay? So you have to be strategic now. And so you target things that have huge impact on the civilian population as well as the economy. Right? So the most basic thing is water. Okay? Look, guys, these are all dams and reservoirs around Iran. Okay? I don't destroy all of them, but I strategically destroy some of them. This is going to create a lot of pressure on the civilian population.

They'll be very angry. They might protest against the government. Okay. Also, transportation networks, right? These are roads and railways. This is important because Tehran is a city of 10 million people and they do not grow their own food. They require food to come from the countryside, from elsewhere. So if I attack the roads leading to Tehran, if I attack strategic hubs, then it's very hard for food to move from place to place. Okay, I don't have to destroy the entire food supply. I can't do that. I don't have weapons, but I'm being strategic about it.

I'm putting strain on Tehran's capacity to feed its own population. Power plants. Okay, these are all power plants around Iran and it's really easy to destroy these power plants, right? So, does that make sense? So, the idea is war, the rules of engagement require me to only attack soldiers and only attack but eventually I'm going to run out of munitions if I keep on doing that. And it's not going to destroy Iran's capacity to fight. They won't surrender. So now I need to be more strategic with how I use my ammunitions, how I use my bombs.

And so I want to create as much damage as possible. The best way to do that is by targeting key infrastructure, power plants, desalination plants, roads, railway networks. Okay, I can't destroy all of them, but I can create as much havoc as possible over time. So the civilian population gets very angry. So, my best weapon in this war is no longer my planes and my aircraft carriers. My best weapon is the Iranian people themselves. And that's what a 21st century war looks like. It's very slow. It's very methodical. It's pretty evil.

All right. The other thing is economic All right. So, what am I trying to do here? Okay. So Iran, there are two ways for them to generate income to finance this war. The first is to sell oil. Okay. And this is Kharg Island which is their main depot. Okay. Oil depot. And 90% of Iranian oil goes from Kharg Island elsewhere. Okay. Primarily to China. 90% of Iran's oil exports goes to China. Okay. So what Americans have done is they've imposed a blockade on oil exports. Okay, that's one way you can stop Iran's economy.

The other thing is that right now Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz and they collect tolls on that. Okay, so I basically need to destroy Iran's control over the Strait of Hormuz. The way I do that is I use ground forces. Okay. So, what I can do is seize Kam Island, seize Kharg Island, seize the coastline, and force the Iranians to respond to my attacks. Right. I can also position forces here and here. Why? Because these areas, okay, in the northwest of Iran are home to minorities as well as the southeast.

And when I put my soldiers here, this is going to encourage the local population to rise up against the Iranian state. And now what's going to happen is that Iran will now send forces to respond to all these ethnic insurgencies. Okay. So before, Iran could just focus its resources on controlling Hormuz, but now, screw that, I'm going to expand the battlefield so that Iran is forced to deal with multiple threats at the same time. I'm going to collapse their All right. Okay. So, this is what a 21st century war looks like.

It's slow. You focus on triangulation as opposed to a knockout punch. So, one way to understand what's happening is that the Americans have been doing this for a long time, but more subtly. All right. So in 2012 the Iranian president Ahmadinejad accused the Americans of weather warfare against Iran mainly by creating droughts in Iran. And how do you do that? Well, it's cloud seeding, right? It's cloud seeding. So, the idea of cloud seeding is that you shoot up a chemical called silver iodide into clouds, forcing it to rain.

Okay? When you do that, well, the clouds dissipate, the rain elsewhere and they don't go to Iran. Okay? So, in 2019, there's a real fear that Iran would suffer from long-term drought and regions like Dubai, which Iranians claim to be the source of this weather warfare, they experienced droughts, sorry, sorry, floods. Okay. All right. So again, I don't know how the science works and this is all rumors, but it does make sense where the Americans would use weather warfare against Iran, forcing rain to come down in Dubai to deny rain to the Iranians.

Okay. There's a conspiracy theory that these world governments are conducting weather warfare using something called HAARP. Okay. Now, HAARP was originally designed in order to study the atmosphere, but some conspiracy theorists claim that HAARP can be used to create extreme weather, including hurricanes, flooding, droughts. I don't know. Okay, I'm just pointing this out there.

What we do know is that in 1962, Lyndon Johnson, who became president of the United States, he had a very famous quote at a speech and he basically said, "He who controls the weather will control the world." Okay? The future of warfare is not about weapons. It's about weather. So, it's not about how many weapons you make, it's about how well you can control the weather. Because if you think about it, if you can create a drought in a country, that country will be destroyed. Okay? And they put a lot of resources into developing weather warfare and we know that from 1967 to 1972 the Americans created, called, Operation Popeye.

Okay. Okay, so this is during the Vietnam War and what the Americans did was they seeded the clouds so that the monsoon season would be a lot longer in Vietnam. Why do that? Because then it's harder for the to resupply themselves. Okay, it makes it harder for them to fight because the Vietnamese are living in tunnels, right? Whereas Americans are attacking from the air. All right. So, this is pretty well known. Operation Popeye is something that the Americans did do in Vietnam and they do have weather manipulation technology.

The question is, the debate is how effective the technology is and how powerful is it and how scalable is it. Okay. That's the debate. We're already seeing elements of 21st century warfare being implemented around the world. Okay. So, look at Cuba. There's now an oil embargo on Cuba and so there are blackouts. All right. So again, the intention is not to kill civilians. The intention is not to fight a war. The intention is to strangle a nation so that eventually the population wants to overthrow the government. And already what we're seeing is these past few months lots of accidents around the world that's destroying the world's oil Okay.

But there's one region in the world that doesn't really care about the loss of refineries, the loss of oil supply, and that's North America. Because North America is extremely wealthy.

And so if the rest of the world is facing energy scarcity and food scarcity, it's going to have to beg North America, United States, Canada, Mexico for resources. And this allows the Americans to better control the world. Okay. Again, this is what 21st century warfare looks like. All right. Another thing that I will point out is that the Americans are very good at overthrowing governments. Okay, there's something called the color revolution playbook. Color revolution And so what the Americans do is they basically invite young people from different nations to come to America to learn about democracy, to learn how to organize protest movements, how to overthrow the government in order to promote democracy.

The Americans will also finance NGOs in different countries in order to create young movements in the world. The Americans will also control social media in order to galvanize a population and foment unrest. Okay? And we saw this play out most recently in 20 sorry last year in Nepal when young people overthrew the government. Now guys, okay, here's the thing. In Nepal, most people don't speak English. They don't read English. So, why are these young people holding up signs? "Okay, boomer, times up." Okay, that's in English. Who's it for? Also, okay, boomer is an American Okay, it's an American phrase, not a Nepalese phrase.

So, in other words, they're doing this not to have impact in Nepal. They're doing this because someone's paying them to do this. Do you understand? It's being funded by Washington and Washington's like, "Okay, well, I'll pay you this amount of money if you give me a slogan. If you hold a slogan so I can show my boss that this protest is working." Also, guys, here's another sign. "We pay you flex enough." Okay. Another English sign. So, again, why are they doing this when the local population don't even speak English?

They're doing it for Washington. They're not doing it for their own country. They're doing it for their masters in Washington. All right. Does that make sense? All right. And this is very common in the world today where these protests are being orchestrated by Washington for Washington as opposed to being organic. In 2010, 2012 you have these Arab Spring protests happen all around the Middle East. Okay. Do they save lives in the Middle East? And we know that social media, basically Twitter and Facebook, were instrumental in organizing people and promoting unrest in these places.

All right. So these are all called color revolutions or the color revolution playbook. So not only does America have the capacity to strangle a nation's economy and force the population to beg for Washington, the Americans also have strategies on how to overthrow the government using the local population. Okay. Basically by controlling social media, by organizing young people, paying them to protest and bribing security services to not intervene. Okay. It's a very successful playbook. They've tried many times and it's worked many times before. All right.

America can use this playbook against every country that opposes it. Okay. So the main reason again is because America controls the world's choke points including Malacca, Panama Canal, Gibraltar. These are the major choke points. Even though the Iranians control the Strait of Hormuz, the Americans can have aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean and blockade the Iranians. Okay, this is important because a lot of people believe that what America really wants to do is just destroy China. And unfortunately, right now a lot of the Chinese economy depends on exports, meaning trade.

If you can't export, your economy can suffer a great deal. When your economy suffers a great deal, you lose GDP, your unemployment and it's possible that you have protest happening in China because of the collapse of the economy. Okay, so that is what a 21st century war looks like. Okay, you don't send troops, you don't destroy. What you do is you strangle a people to death and force the people to rise up against the nation state. Okay. And so the concluding message is this.

To fight 21st century warfare, it's really about population. What I mean by that is your enemy is trying to provoke your population into unrest to destroy you. So you have to respond by managing your population better. Okay? And that can often mean culling your population. Culling your population just means killing them. Okay? Killing them could mean you deny them food. You create famine. Okay? It could mean you spread It could mean you actually do go and shoot them. Okay? And this forces you to use artificial intelligence, an AI surveillance state, because the best way to control your population, the magic population, is with an AI surveillance state.

Right? So that's the future. We're looking at what a 21st century war looks like. And there's no way around it. It is just the inevitability of history. We have too many people. We want to fight wars and so a lot of people have to die in these wars. Does that make sense? All right. Any questions, guys?

Any questions?

According to game theory, there's only one response. Okay? There's only one proper response to this and this idea of eschatology. Okay? And the idea here is this, you need to create fanaticism among your people, right? Because your people are They don't have enough. They don't have enough to eat. They don't have any hope in the future. So what you say to them is this is all part of God's plan. We're meant to suffer because when we suffer, God will make us invincible. For our suffering, we'll find the courage to commit martyrdom.

Okay? When we do martyrdom, we go to All right.

We have an example of this, the sorry, the Iran-Iraq war which is what happened in the 1980s. Okay, an 8-year war between Iran and Iraq. All right. And guys, it was a crazy war. These Iraqis were supported by both the Americans and the Soviet Union. They had tanks. They had helicopters. They had a professional army. The Iranians in the 1980s didn't have an army. They didn't have tanks. They didn't have helicopters. So what they said to people is the greatest glory is to be a martyr.

The greatest glory is to die for your nation and for God. So all these young people went into the battle with just a rifle. Okay, guys, imagine this. Okay, you have this young guy 16 years old. He's running into battle against a tank and a helicopter and he's screaming at them. I will kill you.

And most of them got blown up, but some of them got through and they threw a grenade into the tank. Okay, now you think about this, you're like, "Oh my god, that's crazy." But first of all, it galvanized the Iranian population into resisting and eventually they turned the tide of the war so that they were actually winning the war. And it was only because the Americans started to use chemical weapons against them that the Iranians were forced back. Okay? But if left alone, the Iranians would have to feed the Iraqis.

So think about that. How it energized the population into resistance. The other thing is that it scared the hell out of the Iraqis. Okay, you have a tank, right? The guy's coming at you with a rifle and a grenade. He's not afraid of you. His fearlessness makes you afraid.

So even though yes in 21st century warfare, okay, it seems invincible but is the counter to this approach. And that's why we should see over the next few years a huge surge in eschatology and religious extremism throughout the world because it's really the only counter to this type of warfare. Does that make sense? Okay, great question. Any more questions, guys? Okay, great. So, there's no class on Thursday and next Tuesday, but we'll come back next Thursday and we'll continue this. Okay. All right. Thank you.