Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Watts

Watts is skewering the special kind of moral vanity that turns violence into a sacred duty. A war of conquest has a grubby, practical limit: you want the ports, the oil fields, the tax base, the surrender. That creates a perverse restraint. As Watts puts it, the attacker "will not destroy that which he is after" - because acquisition implies preservation. But when a war is waged "based on principle", the objective isn’t land or leverage; it’s purification. The target becomes not just an enemy, but an offense against order itself. Once you’re fighting sin, heresy, barbarism, terrorism, communism - pick your era’s mascot - you’ve quietly licensed total war.

The subtext is classic Watts: a Zen-tinged suspicion of righteousness as a psychological drug. Principle feels clean. It lets a society experience its own aggression as altruism, even compassion. That’s why these wars metastasize: compromise starts to look like treason, and limits look like weakness. If the goal is to eliminate an idea, you can’t sign a treaty with it; you can only keep escalating until the world conforms or burns.

Context matters. Watts was writing and lecturing in the long shadow of World War II and in the thick of the Cold War, when ideology dressed up nuclear brinkmanship as a moral crusade. His line lands because it punctures the comforting story modern states tell about themselves: that violence is regrettable but principled. Watts implies the opposite - that principle is often the accelerant, not the brake.