He writes:. For just as states which are chastened by border warfare and continual campaigning become well content with good order and a sound government, so persons who have been compelled on account of enmities to practice soberness of living, to guard against indolence and contemptuousness.
This mechanism is unlikely to lead every state to become more virtuous—by, for instance, becoming more respectful of human life or gaining a greater appreciation for liberty. The particular political leadership of a state for example, a Putin or an Assad may be immune to the reproaching posture of other states. This is not to affirm that no objective standards exist and we should accept moral equivalency, but only that the attainment of moral superiority may be a very small incentive for states.
Nonetheless, in the first part of the paragraph cited above, Plutarch suggests a direct relation between international rivalries and internal order. An enemy on the frontier makes the citizens of the threatened state more appreciative of political order and good governance. The most basic aspiration of people is security and, when reminded of the risks to it, they seek to improve their chances of survival.
One way to do that is to alter their own behavior: less infighting among themselves, more appreciation for unity. The second benefit of having enemies is that people who are engaged in a competition with others seek more effective political leaders, more efficient political regimes, and in general try to improve their capabilities and skills. The enemy provides an organizing principle for our strategy.
Without enemies, one lets oneself go, so to speak. The state leadership and institutions become careless in their behavior because there is limited risk for mismanagement, for a mistaken decision or even for a poorly thought out strategy. The danger of having no enemy is that it becomes more difficult to think strategically.
Policies become agendas, rather than strategies. The absence of an enemy—or the perception that there is no enemy—results in political leaders thinking that the achievement of a particular objective depends merely on a plan and a proper utilization of the necessary resources. With no competition from another actor, no shooting back so to speak, policies are thought to be molding a passive material, akin to chiseling a human form out of a block of marble.
What is required then are not strategists, individuals capable of understanding the enemy and endowed with great intuition and skills of adaptation, but managers, individuals calculating the resources needed to implement a scripted agenda.
This is not a hypothetical temptation. The opponents, whether in Kiev or in Moscow, were not enemies or rivals; they simply did not comprehend yet the inevitability of this larger trend away from nation states, territorial control, and brute force.
The outcome is well known. An additional danger of having no enemies is a splintering of the various institutions and individuals within a state. Lacking the organizing principle that the clear presence of an enemy supplies, it becomes more difficult to harness the many actors inside a state toward a common purpose. It is difficult to have a grand strategy for a state in any conditions, but perhaps more so in the absence of an enemy when institutional strategies pursued for their narrowly defined benefit and survival become predominant.
The preferred bureaucratic option overshadows a larger strategic purpose of the various state institutions and branches. As institutional selfishness takes over, each organization within the state becomes less capable of coordination and of working together toward the common objective of providing security. The orchestra becomes a cacophonous group of glory seeking players. Finally, the third broad benefit of having an enemy is, according to Plutarch, the ability to vent emotions.
The enemy serves as a punching bag to release pent up passions that otherwise may create discord among friends. As with the previous arguments, this one can also be extended to the political life of a state. Plutarch mentions an example of how the achievement of accord in domestic politics is illusory at best and conducive to even greater strife at worst. This logic applies also to foreign enemies. The absence of external enemies—or, worse, the naive belief that there are no enemies—is dangerous because it elevates the naturally discordant interests and agendas of the various leaders and political groupings inside the state.
The primary concern of the state is then fractured into the pursuit of the narrow interests of factions and individual leaders. Please donate today to support our mission to build a united American society by eliminating toxic polarization. Who is the Enemy? Written by: Andrew Hanauer. From the Desk of. April 21, In the US, the battle between good and evil is weaponized, pitting Americans against each other.
We agree. The truth is that the world is messy and full of contradictions. The truth is that Toxic Polarization feeds on our behaviors, thoughts, beliefs, and actions. We could end it tomorrow if we chose to. But we can do better.
The function of such an attitude and such activities is to prepare the population to fight the enemy as and when it is deemed necessary. While this is the basic format of what takes place, it applies most easily to societies and nations whose members have little contact with each other. Under those circumstances, all the negative images of the enemy flower and grow.
Enemy images mirror each other - that is, each side attributes the same virtues to itself and the same vices to the enemy. This tendency exists in many people in latent form. For Israelis, it was particularly striking to see the intense curiosity of the population to come to know Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank.
It was most strongly psychologically motivated. While there was also a marked wish to see areas of a country that had been prohibited up to this point, Israelis who came back from such more and more frequent trips, were full of stories of having met people, human beings from what had been the enemy camp. They cared about how they were received, and, in the first few months, after some initial fear and suspicion, they were very well received indeed.
I do not have enough information about the manner this was perceived on the Palestinian side at this time. The visits of Israelis en masse to Egypt after the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty bore characteristics similar to those Israeli visits to the West Bank in , and Egyptians were warm, friendly and hospitable. Exceptions were rare. Obviously then, there are two ways of reacting to the enemy: to demonize, to scapegoat and to use, as most of us do, as a foil to make us feel better by comparison.
That is the more common, the easier way. Psychologically, we have both sides of the coin in us. Perhaps we psychologists should work more on understanding under what circumstances and how the second facet becomes more dominant or can be helped to be more dominant than the first. Bibliography Abu-Samra, Y. International Schulbuchforschung Frankfurt: Diesterweg,
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