beware the war mind virus
American culture has spent the last three years learning to love war again, and that filmmaker seems to notice.
I was listening to Pivot1 while doing the dishes a couple of weeks ago when Scott Galloway dropped one of his usual gems: "Some wars are good wars." Scott was, obviously, defending Israel's strikes on Iran with the enthusiasm of a man who's never held anything more dangerous than a laser pointer.
Galloway, for those lucky enough to avoid his LinkedIn thought leadership, is a NYU marketing professor and a self-proclaimed Zionist who has found his war. In fact, he now wants his audience of affluent professionals to know that this one—unlike those messy conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan—is actually worth cheering for. He's built an empire explaining why young men are lonely while simultaneously cheerleading every military intervention that crosses his feed.
I stopped mid-scrub on a particularly stubborn pan. Not because I was shocked by Scott's position on Israel-Palestine (the man's been consistent about that), but because of how he was selling it. War as brand strategy for the U.S. Conflict as portfolio management. Human carnage as acceptable overhead in the grand spreadsheet of geopolitical supremacy.
And that's when it hit me: War isn’t being sold to us through propaganda posters or jingoistic rallies. It is being marketed through the same calm, analytical voices we trust for investment advice and career guidance.
I needed a name for this phenomenon.
So I’ve started calling it the war mind virus.
The numbers alone tell a story that should make anyone queasy. Global military spending has hit a record $2.718 trillion in 2024—a 9.4% annual increase that represents the steepest jump since the Cold War ended. Defense contractors aren't even pretending to hide their excitement anymore. Lockheed Martin's Tim Cahill stated it like this: "Each day munitions are being fired reinforces the need for substantive stockpiles, and I don't see that going down." RTX CEO Greg Hayes is practically salivating when he references the Israel-Hamas war's potential for "investments in weapons systems," while Northrop Grumman's Kathy Warden describes global tensions as business opportunities. Meanwhile, General Dynamics is scaling artillery shell production from 14,000 to 100,000 monthly rounds.
War, unsurprisingly, is a fantastic money maker.
Still, raw profit motives need intellectual cover, and that's where America's think tank industrial complex is earning its keep. The Council on Foreign Relations, American Enterprise Institute, and Brookings Institution have spent decades perfecting what critics call "manufacturing consent"—providing prestigious intellectual frameworks that make military intervention appear reasonable, necessary, and morally justified. "Humanitarian intervention" rhetoric has evolved from a limited exception to the primary justification for military action, with every adversary becoming "the next Hitler" and diplomatic solutions dismissed as "appeasement."
These institutions operate through what Robert Vitalis describes as "a mix of millionaire lawyers, bankers, and professors" protecting "the interests of the U.S. imperial project." The foreign policy establishment has learned to avoid accountability by shifting between justifications when original rationales prove false—from WMD threats to terrorism connections to humanitarian concerns to democratic transformation—while never honestly assessing previous failures or questioning the underlying assumption that military force solves complex political problems.
Right now, all of this is converging in real time with the Israel-Iran escalations. European military spending surged 17% to $693 billion in 2024. The Middle East saw a 15% increase to $243 billion, led by Israel's dramatic 65% jump to $46.5 billion—the highest since the 1967 Six-Day War. Netanyahu has been running this same play for three decades, moving from his 1992 prediction that Iran would have nuclear weapons "within three to five years" to arguing in 2025 that Iran can produce weapons "in weeks." The defense industry employs 2.211 million workers at an average salary of $112,000—well above national averages—creating entire communities economically dependent on military spending.
What we're witnessing isn't just another Middle Eastern proxy war. It's the entire war machine—economic, intellectual, and cultural—operating at peak efficiency to transform public opinion from "war is tragic" to "this war is good."
And it's working.
The war mind virus is my term for how societies become psychologically prepared for conflict through cultural conditioning rather than overt propaganda.
This isn't your grandpa's "Uncle Sam Wants YOU" propaganda poster. It doesn't care if you support this war or that war. Instead, it builds an entire mental ecosystem where war goes from unthinkable to "well, actually, if you consider the strategic implications..." to "necessary evil" to "moral imperative". The infection spreads through three main vectors:
Think tank respectability (those PDF reports with navy blue covers and Garamond font)
Economic dependency (your cousin's solid middle-class job at Raytheon)
Cultural brain-marinating (every badass slow-motion explosion scene you've ever pumped your fist at)
Once infected, a culture stops asking whether war is necessary and starts asking which wars are worth having. Most importantly, the whole process runs below your conscious radar. You genuinely believe you're being a Rational Adult Having Nuanced Thoughts when actually you're just showcasing symptoms like someone insisting they're not drunk while trying to microwave their phone.
Which makes what Alex Garland's been cooking up lately so fascinating.
Like most of us, I've been following Garland's work since Ex Machina, but 28 Years Later cemented something I'd been sensing around his worldview. Danny Boyle may have directed the film, but the screenplay belongs to Garland as his latest exploration of how we pass violence around like a family heirloom. The movie's gut punch comes from watching children who've grown up in this post-apocalyptic hellscape treat brutal survival as routine. These kids are absorbing violence the way I absorbed my dad's passive-aggressive communication style—completely, unconsciously, and with zero chance of ever unlearning it.
Garland flips the entire zombie genre on its head here. Most undead flicks obsess over the monsters, but Garland's screenplay fixates on what survivors become—which (plot twist!) turns out to be the actual horror show. The children represent what happens when an entire culture militarizes: people who literally cannot imagine peace because they've never experienced an economic system that doesn't profit from death. Reminds you of these kids raised in doomsday cults who get confused by grocery stores.
I also think of the military compound, initially appearing as a bastion of order, swiftly devolving into a microcosm of depravity under the leadership of Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston), who sees women as commodities. That transformation isn't accidental—it's Garland showing us how thin our veneer of civilization actually is. One crisis and suddenly women are property again. Cool cool cool. The “rage virus” operates exactly like the war mind virus—right brain activated, quietly rewiring your moral circuitry until an entire generation thinks brutality is just Tuesday.
Last year's film Civil War followed war photographers through an American apocalypse without ever explaining the why. Then Warfare dropped earlier this year, co-directed with an actual Navy SEAL whose friend lost body parts in Ramadi.
Alex Garland has been creating the most sophisticated counter-programming to the war mind virus, and he's doing it right when our cultural immune system is at its absolute weakest.
So let’s talk about it.
civil war: meaning's obliteration
The war mind virus lives on justification the way vampires need blood. It's ravenous for clean narratives, heroic profiles, and moral certainty—anything to transform industrialized slaughter into something you can discuss over brunch without ruining your appetite. This is the intellectual money laundering that keeps the whole operation running, turning atrocity into policy discussion through the magical alchemy of expert opinion. And then Alex Garland's Civil War walks in and dropkicks the entire buffet table.
The film hurls us face-first into America's collapse with zero narrative safety harnesses. You want exposition? Go watch Prime Originals. You need a historical timeline crawl explaining the Western Forces' grievances? Tough shit. Garland serves raw, chaotic violence without the usual additives that make slaughter palatable. California and Texas fighting as allies exists as deliberate sabotage of our desperate need for ideological sorting.
Some critics attacked this as political cowardice, missing Garland's key insight: The moment you start debating which fictional faction deserves your support, you've caught the infection. The desire to sort Civil War's combatants into recognizable ideological camps exemplifies exactly what Garland aims to disrupt. The film's focus on photojournalists—detached observers cataloging atrocities—hammers home this commitment to bearing witness rather than taking sides. Violence itself becomes the subject, divorced from any justification framework.
Kirsten Dunst embodies Lee Smith, a war correspondent whose career rests on what people now find both touching and delusional—the faith that documentation prevents repetition. For twenty years, she shipped home images of Iraqi children killed by American bombs, Afghan villages flattened by American drones, Syrian refugees fleeing American-backed proxy wars. Every shutter click was a desperate prayer: look at this. Feel something. Do something.
Garland understands this moral bankruptcy firsthand. Growing up with newspaper cartoonist Nick Garland for a dad, baby Alex's house swarmed with foreign correspondents treating documentation like religious practice. Little Garland even played war photographer himself—running through conflict zones with fake press credentials until a veteran correspondent finally pulled him aside. "You need to cut that out," the man warned, seeing something unsettling in the boy's fascination with violence. That intervention haunts Civil War, ghosting through every frame of Lee's relationship with Jessie, the young photographer she desperately wants to save from her own path.
From a sociological standpoint, its documentary-style realism challenges traditional war cinema not with grand speeches, but with the visceral, ground-level perspective. One of the most chilling scenes unfolds at a rural gas station where Lee and her team encounter a militia checkpoint. Jesse Plemons plays the leader—a soft-spoken man in sunglasses who asks each traveler: "What kind of American are you?" He's not asking about political affiliation, of course. He's asking about genetic purity. Behind him, fresh mass graves reveal what happens to people who give the wrong answer.
At the same time, we see Lee adjusting her camera settings while this interrogation unfolds. F-stop calculations, composition choices, exposure adjustments—the technical demands of professional photography create emotional distance from the human cost unfolding in front of her. She checks white balance and frames perfect compositions while systematic murder happens in broad daylight.
The war mind virus depends on audiences who experience violence as information rather than reality. But Garland shows us a culture so thoroughly infected it requires no coherent ideology to justify killing. The mere permission for brutality provides sufficient fuel.
warfare: sensory assault
The 2025 film Warfare—Garland's alliance with ex-Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza—unleashes a full-spectrum neurological ambush on militarism's aesthetic seductions. The film honors Elliott Miller, whose traumatic brain injury claimed both his leg and speech through this 90 minutes of combat footage that are viscerally repulsive.
Warfare catapults viewers mid-mission into a Ramadi labyrinth where Marines hunt phantoms through alabaster dust clouds. The doorways frame potential extinction. The shadows harbor oblivion. Garland and Mendoza captured this nightmare in merciless real-time, matching the 2006 operation's actual duration—a Tarkovskian commitment to temporal authenticity. Combat in reality bears zero resemblance to its sanitized mythology—snap judgments carry permanent repercussions, survival hinges on cosmic randomness rather than heroic prowess, and participants absorb psychological shrapnel their brains never evolved to metabolize. This durational approach transcends aesthetic choice into philosophical manifesto: truth demands unfiltered temporality.
"If the movie's presentation makes you want to go to war, there's something wrong with you," Mendoza said in a Screen Rant interview. The war mind virus propagates by cloaking violence in purpose, glory, and necessity. Typical war cinema amplifies this infection—musical swells manipulate emotions, character arcs manufacture investment, narrative structures impose resolutions where none exist. But the film amputates every device that typically makes combat palatable.
François Truffaut argued "there's no such thing as an anti-war film" because cinema inevitably glamorizes whatever it depicts. Garland and Mendoza responded by crafting an experience that functions as cinematic ipecac—a deliberate purging agent for military fetishism. The resulting nightmare exists as pure endurance test, daring viewers to stomach unvarnished reality.
The sound design assaults eardrums as instruments of disorientation—ambient noise accumulates without cathartic release. Traditional war films deploy audio as emotional shorthand—trumpets herald triumph, drums telegraph tension, silence signals sacrifice. Here, sound exists as texture without punctuation. Boots scrape concrete. Radios stutter static poetry. Men hyperventilate. Weapons sound exactly like what they are—mechanical extinction devices tearing through flesh.
Visually, cinematographer David Thompson maintains what he dubbed "urgently subjective camera" throughout—trapping viewers in claustrophobic perspectives with severely limited information. The camera refuses reassuring wide shots or tactical overviews. This visual constraint mimics perceptual limitations under combat stress, demanding visceral empathy rather than analytical distance.
The film’s radical anti-spectacle methodology directly confronts the economic engine of warfare. Warfare seizes the product—combat itself—and renders it utterly, primally repellent, so disgustingly unmarketable that it shatters the illusion of strategic value or financial gain.
Makes you wonder—if this is what war actually feels like to those living it, why the hell do we keep packaging death as entertainment and calling it patriotism?
Our attraction to "good wars" narratives stems from the Greek concept of kalos thanatos—a beautiful death that gives meaning to an otherwise meaningless end. Most Americans like Scott Galloway want to believe in righteous military action because viewing themselves as moral actors feels better than acknowledging their imperial impulses. The "defending democracy" argument transforms their college-aged youth into heroes rather than pawns on geopolitical chessboards. Nations build enormous psychological infrastructures around this bargain. You die, but in service to something transcendent. Your parents receive a folded flag, a letter from a president, the knowledge that their child's life purchased something valuable. Politicians need rhetoric that obscures lobbying dollars. The military-industrial machine needs your buy-in for its next quarterly earnings call.
Everyone gets something from the myth except those who fight and lose a leg.
I often wonder what keeps New York Times liberals nodding along to military interventions despite self-identifying as peace advocates? I see them absorbing a selective reading of WWII where military action definitively ended Nazi atrocities rather than arriving tragically late. I see them imagining that today's Pentagon operates with surgical efficiency, smart bombs hitting only guilty targets. Most crucially, I see them craving moral clarity amid information overload. Supporting "defensive" wars lets the comfortable privileged feel engaged without questioning systems that benefit them. They export violence while importing resources, maintaining plausible deniability about who suffers for our comfort.
Religious frameworks also bolster secular justifications for war and genocidal violence. Augustine gave Christians permission to kill despite "thou shalt not murder" by distinguishing between sinful and sanctified bloodshed. Jewish theologians debate whether preemptive strikes constitute legitimate self-defense under pikuach nefesh principles. Muslim scholars argue over defensive jihad versus offensive expansion. Every faith tradition contains textual ammunition for hawks and doves alike.
If God sanctions killing, who am I to question it?
Religious narratives have a way of offering us psychological armor against combat trauma, promising that death in service to higher power grants meaning beyond mere nationalism. Military chaplains walk this tightrope daily.
Yet military veterans themselves often become war's fiercest critics after experiencing its reality (again see: Warfare). Daniel Ellsberg transitioned from RAND Corporation nuclear strategist to Pentagon Papers whistleblower after witnessing Vietnam firsthand. Winter Soldier testimonies revealed how noble missions degraded into civilian massacres. Smedley Butler, America's most decorated Marine general, eventually condemned his career as "racketeer for capitalism."
This tension between the spread of the war mind virus and warfare's reality extends directly into how audiences engage with anti-war cinema. While critics largely embraced Civil War's unvarnished messaging (81% fresh), everyday viewers hovered at a more ambivalent 69%. So why the disconnect?
I remember my brother Chris (who’s 27, raised on Call of Duty's night-vision heroics and is thoroughly unconcerned with ‘just war’ theory), came back home from seeing Civil War looking pale. "That film made me feel sick, I really didn’t like it," he told me, rubbing his stomach. When I asked why, he struggled to articulate it. "The journalists just watched people get executed. They just stood there filming. Who does that? That’s unrealistic." He kept returning to this point—the passive witnessing—as though it violated some solacing expectation of how stories should work. He expected heroes to intervene. He wanted moral clarity.
The gap between filmmaker intention and audience interpretation reveals how deeply militaristic narratives have colonized our imagination. Online discussions about Civil War devolved into partisan debates about which real-world factions the film's combatants represented, despite Garland's deliberate political ambiguity. Reddit threads obsessively dissected whether Texas-California alliances made sense rather than confronting why viewers needed logical coherence from societal collapse. These interpretive gymnastics expose our desperate need to impose familiar patterns onto uncomfortable truths. Even when explicitly denied moral frameworks, we frantically construct our own rather than sitting with warfare's inherent emptiness.
My conclusion from all this is that we've become frighteningly adept at convincing ourselves we're immune to the war mind virus while displaying every symptom. We know it spreads through cultural vectors, but some people seem naturally resistant. What inoculates them? My grandfather fought in two wars and never once romanticized combat. "Anyone who glorifies this shit never lived through it," he told me once, his hands steadier than his voice. Maybe trauma serves as vaccine. Maybe certain people possess genetic resistance to military mythmaking. Or maybe—and this feels closer to truth—conscious exposure to alternative narratives creates antibodies against the infection.
Recognizing symptoms becomes our second line of defense. When military experts on MSNBC panels make your heart race with urgency, that's the virus hijacking your adrenal system. When complex geopolitical situations suddenly appear morally straightforward, that's the virus simplifying neural pathways. When you find yourself thinking "this situation requires immediate action" rather than deliberation, that's the fever spiking. The virus doesn't make you love violence—it just convinces you that violence represents the mature, responsible choice under these specific circumstances.
Always these circumstances. Only this time. Except it's always this time.
I draw attention to Garland's cinematic vaccines not because they trigger intellectual agreement but immune response. My brother's nausea watching Civil War wasn't failure but success—his body rejecting the virus before his mind could rationalize it. This physical revulsion represents hope. The war mind virus thrives in abstraction and dies in embodied experience. It can rewire thought but struggles against physical reaction. The virus will continue mutating, again and again and again and again and again and again, finding new hosts, spreading through new vectors.
Unless.
Unless we start maintaining skepticism toward anyone offering violence as solution rather than tragic necessity. I'm not saying Alex Garland singlehandedly saves us from militarism. I'm saying his work reminds us immunity remains possible.
A final note for people with taste 🫦
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- Sophie x
By listening, I mean skipping to the bits where Kara Swisher talks about how much of a shit Elon Musk is - I enjoy these monologues thoroughly. I have a soft spot for her, what can I say!
I was so shocked when I saw the online discourse about the Civil War. I found it very obvious that it doesn't matter why Texas and California are aligned. I think you nailed it on why. It's not just about media literacy, it's the obsession with wars and good guys vs bad guys stories. I would add that the superhero movies contribute to the glorification of the military.
Thanks for writing this. I recently read War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges. He really delves in to all of the ways war infects people and societies based largely on his own experience as a war journalist. If you’re going to pursue this further and more outside the film realm, I highly recommend.