A long time ago when talking about humanity’s endless round of wars a professor said ‘men love war and women love warriors’, and suggested it will alway be with us. Excavations of a lost city in central America have suggested not only is this the oldest city ever found, but that it was a major trading centre on an open plain and did not have a protective wall around it. The conclusion drawn by the archaeologists is that this city was not in fear of any attacks.
Which may be true but it doesn’t mean the people didn’t have warlike instincts. War is something that comes with population density, you can’t have an army until you have enough sons in the community to create it; until that time what you normally have are ‘gangs’, which work in similar ways, for armies depend upon the bonds of friendship between individual soldiers for their strength.
But the real kick comes with another facet of human society which baffles almost every thinker down the ages: the willingness of thousands, if not millions, to follow an order given by one person. Not a person they know or have met but obviously one they defer to.
For human beings to do this there has to be a certain amount of conditioning. It may come as something loathsome to think, but schools train people for society’s needs; and we are all on a leash of some description.