| Fornari (citing Gaston Bouthoul) says that war may appear to be a "voluntary destruction of previously accumulated reserves of human capital," an act performed with the implicit intention to "sacrifice a certain number of lives."
Proceeding from the empirical fact that every war causes the deaths of young men, Bouthoul arrives at the conception of war as deferred infanticide, a voluntary destructive institution, the aim of which is the elimination of young men.
War appears to be a recurrent social function, characterized by the accumulation of human capital, a part of which, at a given moment, is brutally ejected. Thus, war is a form of potlatch, an act of ostentatious destruction, the aim of which is to intimidate the rival and, ultimately, to give prestige to the donor or destroyer. |