“Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives.” – Fight Club
The ultimate participation award.
As humans, we’re wired wrong. Or right, depending on how you look at it.
We chase peace like it’s the ultimate prize at the carnival of life. We say that we want a world without war, without struggle, where everyone has a comfy couch, unlimited Wi-Fi, more liver capacity, and steak that cooks and delivers itself.
Sounds like Heaven, right?
Wrong. When I was a wee Wilder, Grandma McWilder would talk about how I should do nice things in life rather than bathing the cat in a paste made from DDT® and Lysol™ so I could go to Heaven. Obviously, I asked, “What is Heaven like?”
Grandma told me it was nice and peaceful and that nothing bad ever happened up there. I believe I said something like, “That sounds boring.” Grandma did not look pleased, but I don’t know if it was about my statement or the cat.
Let’s just say I was a technicolor handful as a kid. Oh, the stories I could tell.
But I wasn’t wrong.
But wait, there’s more!
Tranquility isn’t the goal. Tranquility is the trap.
Peace isn’t just boring; it is deadly to the human spirit. We need the fight, the blood, the steel. Without it, we rot from the inside out. And that’s not me, John Wilder making crap up again. We have actual studies where the government tortured mice to verify that I’m right.
Take John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiments, please. I’ve written about them a couple times before, you can use the search thingy in the upper right hand of the screen to find them. I would have done that for you but you’re not my supervisor and I could type this sentence way faster. Short summary:
In the 1960s, Calhoun built paradise for mice: unlimited food, water, space, unlimited beef jerky, no predators, SNAP benefits.
What happened? At first, boom, the population soared. But then, the weirdness set in. The mice stopped breeding normally. Males became either passive or hyper-aggressive or “beautiful ones,” preening themselves instead of fighting or mating.
Females abandoned pups. Society collapsed into violence, isolation, and extinction. All of this happened in a “utopia”.
No threats, no struggles: just free cheese forever. And they died out. Stop me if you’ve seen this recently in other mammals.
I’m not going sugarcoat my jokes about diabetes.
Humans aren’t mice, but we’re close enough if you ask my parole officer. Look at the downward spiral of the United States after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The Cold War ended. We “won.” Yay! No more Soviet boogeyman lurking with nukes and unibrows.
Instead? Peace! Prosperity!
What did we do? Got fat, lazy, bored and divided: music went from “I’m gonna kick your ass” in the 1980s to “Oh, man, I need lithium because I’m sad”. The ‘90s brought endless economic booms, but also the seeds of today’s mess: identity politics, endless entertainment, and a generation starting to get hooked on screens instead of life.
Without a real enemy, we turned inward, fighting over pronouns and safe spaces. Tranquility bred complacency, and complacency bred decay.
Same story with the Moon landing. July 20, 1969: Armstrong steps on the lunar surface. Humanity’s greatest leap. We beat gravity, the Soviets, and the odds. Then? Crickets as the ratings dropped.
We went back a few times, planted flags, played golf (shoutout to Alan Shepard), and then just . . .stopped.
And then she refused to talk to them for six hours.
NASA shifted to the gay space trucks shuttles and looking for non-binary muslims and lesbians to shoot into orbit. No more bold frontiers. Why? We won. The Sea of Tranquility turned space exploration into a budget line item.
Need another example: a Syrian teen in London.
Picture this: an eighteen-year-old from war-torn Syria, resettled in a taxpayer-funded flat in London. Free food. Free education. Free X-Box®.
Utopia, right?
Wrong. He drops the controller and goes to Syria andjoins ISIS or stays in London and joins a gang and becomes a rapefugee with a machete.
Why?
Blood calls to blood. Iron to Iron. That flat was Mouse Utopia 2.0: safe, soft, soulless and, let’s face it, that kid was inbred and not very bright to start with. He craved the jihad, the struggle, the validation of existence through fire and fight. Comfort didn’t kill his spirit, comfort starved it. In part, this is why allowing refugees from incompatible countries is immoral.
I played hide and seek and ended up in the hospital. ICU!
Why do we have wars?
We want wars. If they weren’t popular, we’d have stopped having them a very long time ago.
Why do we want them? Not because we’re monsters, but because we’re human. Struggle validates us. High stakes forge character. Leaders like Alexander or Churchill didn’t thrive in peace; they rose in the crises they created.
Without enemies, we manufacture them, internal or imaginary. Look at modern “wars”: culture wars, gender wars, class wars, cola wars. We can’t help it. Tranquility isn’t our default; it’s a rare condition that, when it lasts long enough we pop our collective corks.
Think about it: our history has wired us for survival, not spa days. Hunter-gatherers fought for food, territory, mates and because it was Tuesday. Civilizations brought people together and made a professional league and channeled that into empires, exploration, and innovations. Remove the fight?
We devolve.
Mouse Utopia showed it: no threats equates to no purpose. Humans need the arena, the sweat, the sand, and the blood. We were built for the Colosseum, not the couch.
But here’s the rub: the struggle creates a spot for growth, it’s literally the engine of history. Without high stakes, we fail to thrive.
We back ourselves into existential corners: depression epidemics, fertility crashes, societies crumbling under their own weight and people who need drugs to stop that nagging feeling that they should be doing something that matters. Oddly enough, our very humanity appears to be built upon the fight.
If you meet a dolphin and feel a connection, can you say that you just clicked?
So, what now?
We can’t “prosperity” the struggle out of us. We need leaders who rally us to real frontiers and put real goals out in front of us, not fake fights over tweets®. Stakes high enough to matter: colonize Mars, cure aging, harness fusion. And something for the masses to do, like watching re-runs of Ow, My Balls.
Something. If we don’t have something, we’ll make something. Give us blood (metaphorical or not), steel, the feel of it all. In the end, tranquility was never the goal.
The struggle is the point. It’s what makes us scream, fight, and conquer. As I’ve seen in memes: “I want to go out of this world the same way I came into it: screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.”
And Heaven?
I think it isn’t at all as Grandma Wilder described. I think it’s more like:
Player 1: Ready Level 2.
