“The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose–especially their lives. They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.”

- Eugene Debs, 1913

A passage about the neuroscience of decision making:

'These innate emotions are so powerful that they keep people moral even in the most amoral situations. Consider the behavior of soldiers during war. On the battlefield, men are explicitly encouraged to kill one another; the crime of murder is turned into an act of heroism. And yet, even in such violent situations, soldiers often struggle to get past their moral instincts. During World War II, for example, U.S. Army Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall undertook a survey of thousands of American troops right after they'd been in combat. His shocking conclusion was that less than 20 percent actually shot at the enemy, even when under attack. "It is fear of killing," Marshall wrote, "rather than fear of being killed, that is the most common cause of battle failure in the individual." When soldiers were forced to confront the possibility of directly harming other human beings-this is a personal moral decision-they were literally incapacitated by their emotions. "At the most vital point of battle," Marshall wrote, "the soldier becomes a conscientious objector."

After these findings were published, in 1947, the U.S. Army realized it had a serious problem. It immediately began revamping its training regimen in order to increase the "ratio of fire." New recruits began endlessly rehearsing the kill, firing at anatomically correct targets that dropped backward after being hit. As Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman noted, "What is being taught in this environment is the ability to shoot reflexively and instantly ... Soldiers are de-sensitized to the act of killing, until it becomes an automatic response." The army also began emphasizing battlefield tactics, such as high-altitude bombing and long-range artillery, that managed to obscure the personal cost of war. When bombs are dropped from forty thousand feet, the decision to fire is like turning a trolley wheel: people are detached from the resulting deaths. These new training techniques and tactics had dramatic results. Several years after he published his study, Marshall was sent to fight in the Korean War, and he discovered that 55 percent of infantrymen were now firing their weapons. In Vietnam, the ratio of fire was nearly 90 percent. The army had managed to turn the most personal of moral situations into an impersonal reflex. Soldiers no longer felt a surge of negative emotions when they fired their weapons. They had been turned, wrote Grossman, into "killing machines." '