The Words that Predict the Outbreak of Wars

Abstract

McClelland has shown how passionate reformist zeal for social justice is often the link between an “imperial motivation pattern” (i.e., high need for power and low need for affiliation) and subsequent wars. If we could predict the outbreak of past conflicts from observing the gap between affiliation and power in stories and documents of the past, we could also analyze documents of the present and point at the gap as a signal of alert of future conflicts. With the help of the new computer-readable MOTIVE DICTIONARY, I content analyzed literary stories and real-life documents concerned with war and conflict. The dictionary rests on three axes, which are: the need for achievement, the need for affiliation, and the need for power. Examples of such narratives and documents are William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, Tolstoy's War and Peace, a 373-page document produced in Washington in 1944 under the title of Events Leading Up to World War II. Chronological History Of Certain Major International Events Leading Up To and During World War II with the Ostensible Reasons Advanced For Their Occurrence. 1931-1944, and Robert F. Kennedy's Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. With close to impeccable precision, the gap between affiliation and power widens as the conflicts develop, with power higher than affiliation, and narrows if and when serenity resumes.