The Business Of Death

Two point four trillion dollars. That is what the world spent on military and weapons in 2024. Not defense against alien invasion. Not preparation for a global asteroid. Just each other. Just people preparing to kill other people, or paying other people to prepare to kill other people, or paying corporations to build the tools with which people will be killed.

I have spent most of my adult life trying to understand how this is normal. How a species that can put satellites in orbit and cure childhood cancers and grow food in the desert has decided, collectively, apparently, that this is the correct allocation of its shared wealth.

What I have found is that we have not decided this at all. It has been decided for us.

The Arithmetic

Let me show you the numbers as I have come to see them, sitting at this desk in Nairobi, looking out at a country that has never invaded anywhere and is regularly told it is too poor to educate its children.

Ten CEOs. That is how many people you need to gather in one room to represent the leadership of the world's largest weapons manufacturers. Between them, in the last quarter alone, they took home over two billion dollars in personal compensation and stock appreciation.

That is not two billion for their companies. That is two billion for ten men.

Meanwhile, a single Tomahawk missile costs two million dollars to build and one flight to destroy. The people who die when it lands did not authorize its production. The people who paid for it, through taxation on their wages, were not asked whether they wanted to. The people who profit from it are the ten men in that room.

Every ten seconds, somewhere on this planet, a child dies from hunger. This is not a metaphor. This is a data point. We could fix this for less than one percent of what we spend on military. We do not.

What The People Actually Want

Here is the fact that governments do not want you to sit with for too long. When you ask ordinary people, across every country surveyed, whether they would rather their tax money went to weapons or to healthcare, education, and housing, the answer is not close.

Sixty-eight percent, worldwide, say the same thing: we would rather spend on life than death. This is not a fringe view. This is not radical. This is not idealistic. This is what most human beings believe when asked plainly.

Their governments do the opposite. Every year. Without their permission.

The Lies We Are Told

Every war has a story. Almost none of them are true.

What It Takes From You

Your annual contribution to war, if you are a taxpayer in a wealthy country, is roughly three thousand four hundred dollars. That is what the average person contributes, involuntarily, to this machine.

Three thousand four hundred dollars would fully cover a year of healthcare for a family of four in most of the world. It would put a rural child through primary school for six years. It would purchase enough solar power to remove a family from the grid.

You did not choose this trade. You were not asked. Your taxes were taken and applied. Your voice was not consulted between elections. Between elections, in most systems, you have essentially no voice at all.

What Could Be

I do not write these things to add to the noise of complaint. I write them because I refuse to describe a problem without describing what could replace it. I have spent years working on what could replace it. Some of what I have found is ready to move.

There are ways to build self-sustaining communities that resolve displacement, food insecurity, and dignity in one integrated model. There are ways to develop community-owned energy sources that make certain resource wars unnecessary. There are ways to build infrastructure that does not require the extractive dependencies that fuel conflicts to begin with.

These are not theories. They are designs. Held under protection because the world has a long history of taking such things from their originators and building them without the values that made them worth building in the first place.