War & Peace Quote by Robert Anton Wilson

Wilson writes like a man watching the same movie on endless reruns and finally shouting at the screen. The line is engineered to puncture the official storyline of war: the noble mission, the clean moral ledger, the flag-waving clarity. He replaces it with an uglier two-step that feels depressingly familiar: material incentives at the top, myth-making for everyone else.

The first clause is bluntly Marx-ish but also very American in its cynicism: “markets and spheres of influence” reduces grand speeches to supply chains, oil routes, and prestige maps. It’s not a neutral diagnosis; it’s an accusation that the real motives are boring, transactional, and therefore must be dressed up.

Then comes the sharpest blade: the sales pitch. “Professional liars” implies a class of trained narrators - propagandists, press secretaries, compliant pundits - whose job is not persuasion but laundering. The “totally sincere religious maniacs” are the more unsettling half, because sincerity is usually treated as virtue. Wilson flips it: sincerity becomes fuel, a ready-made moral certainty that can be harnessed by the less sincere. The pairing suggests a coalition between cynics who know it’s spin and believers who can’t imagine it is.

Calling it a “Holy Crusade” isn’t just a historical reference; it’s a warning about narrative mechanics. Wars become stories with heroes and demons because complexity doesn’t mobilize masses. Written in the long shadow of Vietnam and the Cold War, the quote anticipates the modern media ecosystem where “saving goodness” is a reusable script - and where the real battleground is often the public’s imagination.