War is hugely profitable. It creates so much money because it's so easy to spend money very fast. There are huge fortunes to be made. So there is always an encouragement to promote war and keep it going, to make sure that we identify people who are 'others' whom we can legitimately make war upon.

Destruction Spends Faster Than Building

There's something almost mechanical about how war functions as a money machine, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. Unlike building a school or writing software—where profit comes slowly as value accumulates—war destroys things fast, which means replacing them even faster. That velocity of spending is intoxicating to certain industries and the politicians who depend on their donations. It's not a conspiracy so much as a system that rewards itself: the faster things burn, the more contracts get issued, the more jobs appear in districts that vote for reelection.

The trickier part is how this economic incentive shapes what we think about other groups. When there's genuine money to be made from conflict, there's enormous pressure to find or emphasize reasons why certain people are fundamentally different from us, incompatible with us, threatening to us. History shows this happens again and again: an opponent gets dehumanized not because of ideology alone, but because a dehumanized enemy is much easier to sell to the public. You're not choosing between a complicated negotiation and a profitable war—you're choosing between a complicated negotiation and a story where the other side is simply evil.

The uncomfortable part is recognizing this isn't ancient history. It's the system we're still living inside, still benefiting from in invisible ways, still being subtly pushed toward.