Gurdjieff on War

Near the end of Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Hassein asks his grandfather a question that could belong to any of us, in any century:

"How will it all end? Is there really no way out at all?" (Beelzebub's Tales, p. 1117).

He asks it after listening to Beelzebub survey humanity's extraordinarily long history of periodically destroying itself, and what troubles him is not simply the horror of war but the apparent impossibility of understanding why beings capable of reason continue to do something they themselves recognise as monstrous.

His question follows one of the most extraordinary passages in the entire book. Hassein has already asked why human beings, despite possessing the capacity to think and reason, continue their "need of periodically occupying themselves with the destruction of each other's existence" (p. 1055). Beelzebub's answer is devastating: "This particularity and all the results ensuing from it are chiefly the cause of all their abnormalities and so to say 'muddled logic'" (Beelzebub's Tales, p. 1056).

War, in other words, is not simply one abnormality among many. It is one of the things that reveals what is wrong with the human being. And this is where Gurdjieff's analysis becomes considerably more interesting than a conventional discussion about war, because he is not primarily asking how governments can prevent wars. He is asking something much more uncomfortable: what is it about the human being that makes war possible in the first place?

Knowledge without being

One of Beelzebub's first observations is that human beings actually do recognise the horror of war — they are not completely ignorant. Hassein asks whether human beings "ever ponder on this matter, so that they might become aware of this horror and find a means of eradicating it?" (p. 1056), and Beelzebub's answer is almost surprisingly simple: "Of course they ponder, of course they see…" Then comes the problem: "Yet, unfortunately, from this pondering of these three-brained beings there, no sense at all is ever obtained" (Beelzebub's Tales, p. 1057).

That sentence is worth reflecting on. They see. They think. They understand. And yet nothing changes. Why? Because the thinking does not penetrate deeply enough into the being of the person doing the thinking. Beelzebub says that when individuals reach a sincere perception of the horror of war, their insight remains isolated — it "fails to penetrate into the consciousness of other beings" (p. 1057).

This is one of the fundamental distinctions running through Gurdjieff's teaching: knowledge is not being. A person can know something without being capable of living according to what he knows. We see this everywhere. A man can know that vanity destroys him and continue to pursue recognition. He can know that hatred destroys relationships and continue to hate. He can know that fear makes him irrational and continue to allow fear to govern him.

And a civilisation can know that war is catastrophic while continuing to produce the psychological conditions from which the next war emerges. Gurdjieff's point is not that human beings lack moral information. It is that information does not transform the human being. The problem is therefore not merely intellectual. It is ontological. The human being himself has to change.

The machine that manufactures the next war

This becomes particularly clear when Beelzebub turns to the people who actually possess the power to influence human affairs, and his analysis is brutal. He says that the people who could potentially do something about war are themselves products of an abnormal education, an education through which qualities such as "egoism," "partiality," "vanity," and "self-love" become crystallised in them and are transmitted from one generation to another (pp. 1058–1059).

This is important, because Gurdjieff is not merely blaming individual politicians. He is describing a mechanism of civilisational reproduction. The problem is reproduced through education, through culture, through what one generation teaches the next to admire. And this is why his proposed solution to war is so unusual: he does not tell humanity simply to make better treaties. He tells it to change what it teaches its children.

When Beelzebub discusses the League of Nations (what is now called the "United Nations"), he says that the psychological disposition toward reciprocal destruction had become fixed in humanity's psyche "during hundreds of centuries" and therefore could not simply be removed within a few decades (p. 1071). This changes the entire time horizon of the problem. If war is embedded in the inherited psychology of a civilisation, the question becomes not merely how do we stop the next war? but what are we teaching the next generation that will make the next war possible?

Beelzebub gives two particularly striking examples. The first is the glorification of warriors — he calls for "the abolition of the practice of exalting certain of the participants in these processes to what are called 'heroes' and rewarding them with honors and what are called 'orders'" (Beelzebub's Tales, p. 1071). The second is the intellectual justification of war, one of humanity's "Hasnamussian sciences," which argues that periodic reciprocal destruction is necessary because otherwise population and economic problems would become intolerable (p. 1071).

The argument is extraordinary. Gurdjieff is saying that war survives not merely because people fight. It survives because civilisation teaches people to admire killing and to rationalise destruction. The warrior becomes a hero. The destruction becomes necessary. The necessity becomes respectable. And the child grows up inside an imagination in which killing can become noble, rational, patriotic, inevitable or even sacred. War, in this reading, is not merely fought. It is culturally reproduced.

Why the League of Nations fails

This is why Beelzebub is so dismissive of the League of Nations. He predicts that it will accomplish little through "all kinds of regulations and various agreements" because the problem has already entered human beings "into their 'flesh and blood'" (p. 1070). The criticism is not that agreements are worthless. It is that agreements cannot accomplish what they are being asked to accomplish. A treaty can regulate behaviour; it cannot, by itself, transform the person who signs it. A law can prohibit violence; it cannot remove hatred from the human heart. An institution can create procedures; it cannot manufacture conscience.

Gurdjieff makes the point explicitly: "such an inherency which had become fixed in their psyche during hundreds of centuries can never be decrystallized in the course of a few decades" (Beelzebub's Tales, p. 1071). This is why he says that humanity should stop concentrating exclusively on its contemporaries and instead direct its attention toward "the beings of future generations" (p. 1071) — a profoundly different conception of social transformation. The task is not simply to stop war. The task is to stop producing the kind of human being who needs war.

The tragedy of who governs

There is an even deeper problem.

Beelzebub observes that beings with what he calls Objective Reason are almost completely absent from the societies established to improve human existence, and the reason is simple: to become socially "important" one generally needs either money or fame (p. 1069). And here Beelzebub makes a remarkable observation — "those three-brained beings with Objective Reason always have conscience as well," and consequently, "such a being with conscience, will never be 'important' among the other beings" (Beelzebub's Tales, p. 1069).

There is the tragedy. The people who possess the faculty most necessary for the transformation of humanity are precisely the people least likely to occupy the structures through which humanity governs itself, while those who possess power are often driven by the very psychological characteristics that perpetuate the problem.

Beelzebub describes what happens when people with a genuine "resurrected conscience" attempt to establish societies for the common good. At first, something real can happen. They have suffered. Their conscience has been awakened. They begin to "see and feel reality almost in its true light" (p. 1067).

But then other powerful people enter the organisation — not because conscience has awakened in them, but because their social position requires them to belong to every "important" society — and their "personal egoistic and vainglorious aims" eventually destroy the work of those who actually possess conscience (p. 1068).

Again, the problem is not primarily institutional. It is the human being.

The deeper mystery: what if war serves a function?

And then Gurdjieff takes us somewhere much stranger.

Atarnakh, a philosopher within Beelzebub's account, proposes that Nature requires a certain quantity of death. The society studying his theory eventually reaches the conclusion that "according to the laws of Nature, there must periodically always proceed on the Earth, independently of the will of men, 'wars' and 'civil wars'" because "during certain periods there is required for Nature a greater quantity of deaths" (Beelzebub's Tales, p. 1098).

If that were the whole theory, the conclusion would be horrifying — war would simply be inevitable. But Atarnakh proposes another possibility: if Nature requires a certain quantity of death, perhaps the death of animals could substitute for human death. The society therefore revives animal sacrifice on a massive scale (pp. 1100–1102), and something remarkable happens — human wars become less frequent and smaller.

But the experiment ultimately fails, because Atarnakh has understood something correctly, but only quantitatively. Beelzebub explains that "the vibrations required by Nature … have no significance quantitatively, but only qualitatively" (Beelzebub's Tales, p. 1104).

That distinction is crucial. The issue is not simply how much suffering occurs. It is what kind of suffering occurs. And here the chapter suddenly opens into Gurdjieff's deeper anthropology.

What is a human being for?

Beelzebub explains that human beings have a cosmic function. Their destiny is to elaborate, through their existence, particular vibrations required by Nature for the maintenance of the cosmic order (p. 1105) — not metaphorical language within the cosmology of Beelzebub's Tales, but part of the book's literal metaphysical framework.

Human beings are not simply organisms attempting to survive. They have a purpose within the larger economy of the cosmos, and the mechanism by which this purpose is fulfilled is extraordinarily significant: Beelzebub explains that the sacred substances from which the higher being-bodies are formed and perfected are transmuted through "conscious labors and intentional sufferings" (Beelzebub's Tales, p. 1106).

There it is.

This is one of the most important sentences in the chapter. The human being is supposed to work consciously. The human being is supposed to suffer intentionally. And through that conscious labour and intentional suffering, something within the human being is transformed. The suffering itself is not the point. The consciousness with which suffering is received and worked upon is the point.

This is very close to the distinction that Christianity makes between suffering simply endured and suffering voluntarily assumed for the sake of transformation. The resemblance should not be overstated — Gurdjieff is not here giving a Christian theological exposition, and his cosmology is expressed in its own highly particular language — but the resonance is difficult to ignore. The human being becomes something other than he presently is through conscious participation in his own transformation.

What happens when man refuses his Work?

Now the argument becomes truly disturbing.

Beelzebub says that the instinctive need for "conscious labor and intentional suffering" had gradually disappeared from the psyche of humanity, and as a result, "Great Nature Herself was constrained to adapt Herself to extract this sacred substance by other means, one of which is precisely that periodic terrifying process there of reciprocal destruction" (Beelzebub's Tales, p. 1107).

Read that sentence slowly.

Gurdjieff is not saying that war is good. He is not saying that war is spiritually desirable. He is not saying that human beings should seek suffering through violence. Quite the opposite: war is the catastrophic consequence of failing to perform consciously what human beings were created to perform consciously. The voluntary has become involuntary. The conscious has become unconscious. The Work has become war.

That is an extraordinary proposition, and it changes the way we understand the chapter. War is not itself the transformation. It is the mechanical extraction of something humanity should have transformed voluntarily. The suffering of war is therefore not equivalent to the suffering of the Work — it is almost its negation.

A person who consciously accepts hardship in order to overcome himself is doing something radically different from a person who is swept into collective violence by fear, hatred, propaganda, identification and circumstance. Both may suffer enormously. But suffering alone does not transform a human being. It is conscious suffering that matters.

An older memory of the Work

Gurdjieff then gives us a strange glimpse of what he presents as an older civilisation. The beings of Atlantis, he says, understood this cosmic responsibility as a sacred being-duty called Amarloos, meaning "Help-to-the-Moon" (p. 1108). More importantly, they united two duties which modern humanity has separated: "the duty of the perfecting of their higher bodies and the duty of serving the Most Great cosmic-Trogoautoegocrat" (Beelzebub's Tales, p. 1108). They performed both simultaneously.

This is perhaps one of the most important ideas in the entire chapter. Self-perfection and service were not two different activities. To perfect oneself was to serve the whole. To serve the whole consciously was to perfect oneself. And Gurdjieff says that these practices were performed in a state of "self-remembering" (Beelzebub's Tales, p. 1109) — a word that should immediately catch the attention of anyone interested in the Fourth Way. The answer to war, then, is not merely political. It begins with the recovery of the human being's capacity for conscious participation in his own existence.

The Christian reader should pause here

For a Christian reader, this is where the chapter becomes particularly provocative.

The language is not Christian doctrine, but the underlying problem is familiar. Christianity has never taught that suffering is automatically transformative simply because it hurts. Christ does not tell His disciples merely to suffer. He tells them to take up the Cross. There is a difference.

There is suffering that happens to us, and there is suffering that we consciously accept because we are pursuing something greater than the preservation of our own comfort. There is unconscious suffering, and there is ascetic suffering. There is suffering imposed by the world, and there is the voluntary death of the false self. This is one reason the Christian tradition's language of askesis, repentance, self-denial, watchfulness and theosis is so important.

The point is not suffering for its own sake. The point is transformation. And this is remarkably close to what Gurdjieff is describing when he speaks of "conscious labors and intentional sufferings." The difference between these two approaches should not simply be erased. But neither should the correspondence be ignored.

The overproduction of death

Gurdjieff then applies this extraordinary cosmology to the First World War. He describes poison gas and rapid-fire machine guns as producing an excess of deaths beyond what Nature required — his word is "overproduction" (p. 1115) — and then describes Nature as having to adapt again to this imbalance, pointing to the proliferation of wolves, rats and mice in post-war Russia as examples of this compensatory process (pp. 1115–1116).

Taken literally, this is an extraordinary cosmological claim, and whether one accepts the literal cosmology is another question. But the philosophical point remains striking: human beings do not act in isolation. Our actions participate in systems much larger than our intentions.

And when a civilisation becomes sufficiently mechanical, the consequences of its actions can become increasingly catastrophic and increasingly difficult for the civilisation itself to comprehend. The machine produces consequences that nobody consciously intended. That is precisely what makes it a machine.

Time alone can do it

And so we return to Hassein. He has heard all of this and is overwhelmed: "How will it all end? Is there really no way out at all?" (Beelzebub's Tales, p. 1117). It is one of the most human moments in the chapter — after all this explanation, there is still the question of hope.

Beelzebub's answer is not comforting. He reminds Hassein of the conclusion reached earlier by the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash: "If it is still possible to save the beings of the Earth, then Time alone can do it" (Beelzebub's Tales, p. 1118). And then he applies the same principle directly to war: "if this property of terrestrial beings is to disappear from that unfortunate planet, then it will be with Time alone," either through "the guidance of a certain Being with very high Reason" or through "certain exceptional cosmic events" (Beelzebub's Tales, p. 1118).

This is not a programme. It is not political optimism. It is certainly not the promise that humanity is about to wake up. But neither is it nihilism. Humanity is not declared irredeemable. Rather, its transformation is placed within a much larger temporal and cosmic process.

The war beneath the war

By the end of Chapter 43, the meaning of the word war has quietly changed. We began with armies. We end with anthropology. We began with nations destroying one another. We end with the question of what a human being actually is.

The external war is the visible manifestation of something deeper.

Human beings who are internally divided create divided societies. Human beings ruled by competing impulses create competing political interests. Human beings dominated by fear, vanity, identification and self-love can be persuaded to call destruction virtuous. And human beings who refuse the conscious labour required for their own transformation eventually become subject to suffering that is no longer voluntary, conscious or transformative.

This is why I think Gurdjieff's analysis is considerably more radical than either pacifism or militarism. He is not asking us simply to choose peace over war. He is asking us to become the kind of beings for whom war is no longer psychologically, spiritually and cosmically necessary. And that is a much harder proposition.

What kind of human being would no longer need war?

Gurdjieff does not finish Chapter 43 by giving us a political manifesto. He leaves us with Hassein's question. And beneath Hassein's question lies another one: what kind of human being would no longer need war? Not what kind of government, not what kind of treaty, not what international institution, not even what economic system — but what kind of human being?

Because if Gurdjieff is right, the deepest problem is not that human beings do not know that war is terrible. They already know. The problem is that knowledge has not become being. We know and remain mechanical. We condemn violence and remain violent in our own relationships. We denounce tribalism while identifying ourselves with tribes. We criticise propaganda while allowing ourselves to be manipulated by whatever emotional shock happens to reach us next. We demand peace from the world while remaining internally divided.

And perhaps this is why the question of war eventually becomes a question about the Work.

The real abolition of war cannot begin merely with the signing of another document. It begins with the transformation of the human being who signs it. Gurdjieff's proposal is therefore considerably more demanding than "peace." It is that the human being must learn to work consciously, to suffer intentionally rather than mechanically, to remember himself, to develop conscience, to acquire Objective Reason, to become capable of fulfilling the purpose for which he exists.

And perhaps this is why Hassein's final question remains so powerful. How will it all end? Beelzebub does not know. He says that "Time alone" can answer it. But perhaps there is another question that lies beneath it — one directed not at civilisation but at each of us: what kind of human being am I becoming?

Because if Gurdjieff is right, the future of humanity will not ultimately be determined by what humanity says it believes. It will be determined by what human beings actually become.

And the deepest question concerning war may therefore not be how do we stop making war? It may be: how do we become beings who no longer need to?