"And you all know security/ Is mortals' chiefest enemy."
(Macbeth III, v, ca. l. 32-33). Sometimes argued to be apocryphal; but it fits with the rest of the play and Shakespeare’s work. Can be interpreted in more than one way, all with grains of truth; but one way that fits well with the play is that the quest for security, at least if it’s overly single-minded, can be mortals’ chiefest enemy.
{NOTE: This post was written for sharing with readers from more than one end of he political spectrum.}
Macbeth’s downfall comes because of his failure to trust that his own merit will continue to be seen and rewarded by the good King Duncan, who’d just promoted him to Thane of Cawdor; instead, Macbeth’s “If chance will have me king, then chance may crown me without my stir” is overcome by Lady M.’s insistence that he must seize control over their fates by murdering Duncan at the earliest opportunity: “When you durst do it, then you were a man;/ And, to be more than what you were, you would/ Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place/ Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:/ They have made themselves, and that, their fitness now/ Does unmake you!”
The deed done, Macbeth spends the rest of the play seeking to make himself more secure by assassinating his best friend and any potential rivals to the throne, keeping spies in all his nobles’ houses, and returning to the witches for further prognostications; but any security he gains by such means is delusional. His tyrannical acts are so destructive and destabilizing that the good King Duncan’s horses literally “eat each other” and Nature herself seems to turn against Macbeth as Birnam wood marches against his castle.
People who are prone to trying to advance themselves by doing harm to others do not trust that their own merit will be rewarded, or they fear they lack the merit that would earn the rewards they want, or perhaps they’re just impatient, too eager, like the Macbeths, to “jump the life to come.”
They assume that others have the same inclinations; they therefore experience others’ freedom as a threat to their own security, and can’t feel secure unless, by any means necessary, they control everyone and everything. They fail to realize that such means yield a barren existence and that the “security” achieved thereby at best requires a life of continual, anxious vigilance, effort, and destroyed relationships, rendering their lives “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
This is the world of the war hawks. They cannot bear a multipolar world or even one in which their own citizens are not surveilled, censored, and manipulated, afraid to speak out for fear of their own government. For the hawks, the only means to safety is total control, over all weapons, wealth, resources, food, communications, sciences, arts, etc.; all bases for power. G.W. Bush’s “they hate us for our freedoms” was sheer projection; it’s people like him and his war hawks who fear and hate others’ freedom.
For decades or longer, neocon and neoliberal hawks have told us that we must invade or otherwise meddle in one country after another in order to protect our own security, not shrinking even from replacing democratically-elected presidents with vicious but more compliant dictators. We’ve helped overthrow governments in Chile, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Libya, Nicaragua, Panama, Syria, and many more. We were told both that we needed to protect ourselves from these countries and also that, by overthrowing their governments, we would be helping their citizens.
But none of the governments overthrown were ever proven actually to have posed a meaningful threat to our security – indeed, our interference has often inspired blowback, degrading our security instead of improving it – and we left those countries in shambles, devastated and in chaos. Our oligarchs do now control those countries' oil or other resources – but at tremendous cost in blood and treasure to US citizens as well as to the hapless residents of the countries suffering our “help.” (And what might we have accomplished with all that blood and treasure had we devoted them to more constructive pursuits?)
Recently, the same people who misled us into these exploits pushed us into Ukraine (whose democratically-elected president we helped oust in 2014, leading to years of internal conflict and helping to trigger the Russian invasion) and have urged us toward war with Iran (whose democratically-elected Prime Minister we helped replace in 1953 with the dreaded Shah).
Why are all the historians and journalists who warned us of the folly of our past exploits completely shut out of the MSM, while those who led the ideological charge into these wars continue to dominate our public conversation? Why do we keep falling for the exact same script that fooled us into Iraq? Why do we still hear from Jeff Goldberg and Bill Kristol and even John Bolton and Condoleezza Rice, who’ve proved wrong time and again, and never from Seymour Hersch, Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, or Ray McGovern, who’ve time and again proved right? Why do we keep electing hawks?
(All of that said… Macbeth also had a lesson for the good King Duncan: just because you treat others well doesn’t mean they’ll always reciprocate; it’s possible to swing too far in the direction of trust. As Reagan put it, "Trust, but verify." If you leave a kid alone in a room with the cookie jar long enough, you’ll find yourself short on cookies, and you might be argued to have yourself partly to blame for the shortage.)
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