Sunday December 12, 2021

 "In war there are no winners, only widows."

I've been reading on the history of the Vietnam War, both from the US and Vietnamese perspective. US History textbooks taught us to love our American ideology. It's almost feels as if they're preparing for a justification for our country's massacres. Screw ideology -- it's not theoretically perfect; it's not practically adapted, and it's a belief paid with a blood-tax on behalf of the world. I'm not rejecting capitalism (far from it), I'm merely rejecting the ideological defense of capitalism through war and nationalism. The same goes for religion too. Yes, and as bad as that sounds, parts of religious ideology deeply disgust me. Because just like capitalism or communism or any other ideology , people may believe in it too much and it never ever ever works. Practicality > ideology... as a shining example, just look at the rise of Botswana amidst an ideologically divided Africa.

The US conventionally lost. The US withdrew from Vietnam, lost ~825 billion, and lost so much more. You can frame it that Vietnam won, but it was at a terrible price.

What is lost (death, money, time, generational advancement, and all else) can have little relevancy in declaring victory; depending how you frame the definition, everyone can be made to feel like a "winner."

But here's my outlook, which I feel can be taken analogously. I heard it at the Broadway Comedy Club.

You can go to the Casino and win $30: cool, it's a meal. Or you can lose $30 and darn freaking shit, that's a whole ass meal. Based on the theories surrounding loss aversion, I'm under the impression that as humans, we prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains. With human life, it's hard to even begin to quantify any form of gain when compared to the weight of losing a life.

In war, people always die. There are never winners. Only widows. 

This is the type of stuff that draws me towards aspects of public policy.