“War is the most horrible of barbarous customs.”Voltaire · Dicționar filozofic · 1764 · articolul „Guerre
A habit practiced out of inertia is not automatically justified — war is barbarity, not necessity.
Voltaire attacks the idea that war is noble or inevitable. He places it in the same category as cannibalism or human sacrifice: practices societies abandoned once they became more rational. The mechanism is simple: doing something out of inertia and tradition does not automatically make it justified. His example is concrete — European monarchs sent hundreds of thousands of peasants to die over territorial disputes that never touched their own lives.
Voltaire does not merely say war is barbaric. He shows how a primitive habit disguises itself as necessity. When something repeats for generations, we start inventing rational justifications, as if it had ever been chosen. The age of a practice does not make it good. Think of duelling: it once looked like a matter of honor, then everyone saw it was simply accepted killing. The same test applies to arguments for military spending or for a conflict: are they real reasons, or tradition dressed up as reasoning? The question for the next steps: who benefits from the habit going unexamined?
Why it matters Useful in debates about military spending or war propaganda: it helps you see through seemingly rational arguments used to justify a fundamentally barbaric habit.