War & Peace Quote by Alfred Adler

Adler lands a clinician's punchline on geopolitics: the state behaves like an anxious patient, stockpiling defenses against a threat it can't name. The bite is in the quiet absurdity of "without even knowing" - a phrase that makes militarization sound less like strategy than compulsion. War preparation, in his framing, isn't a rational response to a clear opponent; it's a symptom, a chronic habit of mind.

The specific intent reads as diagnostic and admonitory. Adler, steeped in ideas about inferiority, compensation, and "safeguarding" behaviors, is pointing to nations that convert insecurity into armaments the way individuals convert fear into controlling routines. The subtext is that the enemy is partly internal: leaders and institutions need an adversary to justify hierarchy, discipline, and sacrifice. When the future enemy is unknown, the apparatus of war becomes its own rationale. Read psychologically, this is the politics of projection: vague dread gets outsourced onto whatever face history provides next.

Context matters. Adler lived through the First World War, the collapse of empires, and the jittery interwar period when Europe oscillated between disarmament rhetoric and rearmament realities. His "modern states" are mass bureaucracies with conscription, propaganda, and industrial capacity - machines that can be kept humming even when peace is the official story. The line works because it exposes an uncomfortable continuity: preparing for war can be a default mode of governance, not a response to a specific crisis, and the unknown enemy is the tell.