War & Peace Quote by John Boyd Orr

Orr borrows an old Greek maxim like a scalpel: if a society is about to be ruined, it won’t begin with bombs, it will begin with a mind going wrong. “Mad” here isn’t a slur or a diagnosis. It’s political psychology - the point at which public feeling becomes unmoored from reality, and people start craving simple enemies and purifying violence. By framing that slide as something “the gods” do, Orr smuggles in a double accusation: leaders will deny responsibility (“history made us do it”), but the destruction still follows a recognizable script.

The phrase “war neurosis” is doing heavy work. In Orr’s era, “shell shock” had entered the vocabulary after World War I, and Europe was living with the aftereffects: mass trauma, propaganda, and the ease with which fear could be weaponized. Calling propaganda a neurosis suggests something contagious and self-reinforcing - a social illness where panic becomes proof of danger, hatred becomes evidence of virtue, and the public can’t tell the difference between vigilance and obsession.

The subtext is a warning about modernity’s most efficient technology: not the tank, but the story. Orr implies that propaganda doesn’t just justify war; it prepares people to accept their own moral deformation as patriotism. Destruction, in this view, is less a sudden catastrophe than a rehearsed breakdown: first the mind is captured, then the nation follows.