War & Peace Quote by Gregory Bateson

Fear is supposed to be a brake on catastrophe; Bateson treats it as an accelerant. The line works because it flips the moral logic of “preparedness” into a systems warning: when nations, institutions, or even families organize themselves around anticipating violence, they start behaving like violence is the most realistic future. That posture doesn’t just reflect the world; it edits the world.

Bateson, a scientist of patterns and feedback loops, is smuggling cybernetics into a sentence. “Every move” suggests mundane accumulation - budgets, alliances, doctrines, drills - each defensible on its own. “In fear of the next war” names the psychological driver, and “in fact hastens it” lands the paradox: fear creates the conditions it claims to prevent. Deterrence becomes escalation. Suspicion becomes intelligence-gathering becomes preemption. Each side reads the other’s “defensive” adjustments as proof of hostile intent, and the loop tightens.

The subtext is a critique of linear thinking in politics: we like to imagine a clean chain from threat to response to safety. Bateson insists the chain is circular. By acting as if war is inevitable, we normalize it, invest in it, and train our imagination to reach for it. The sentence also indicts a certain style of rationality: the kind that counts missiles and ignores meanings, that treats anxiety as prudence instead of contagion.

Contextually, this fits the Cold War’s security dilemma, but it scales beyond geopolitics. Any system that makes decisions primarily to manage its own fear ends up manufacturing the very evidence it’s afraid of.