It won’t be long before we are celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace. There’ll be talk about “peace on Earth, goodwill toward men” and we’ll sing about it, too.

Devoutly to be wished.

January will come and peace won’t.

I used to be an optimist about peace. I wrote about how war was obsolete and that war had become so overwhelmingly destructive that it must die of its own weight.

No more. It is much more complicated than that.

War and preparedness for future wars are vital to the economy. The U.S. has personnel stationed all over the world and installations that cost trillions of dollars to build and maintain.

I have often thought about what would happen if Jesus returned to Earth and, in a single act, outlawed war and weapons. All members of the armed services would come home; all military bases would close; all weapons manufacturers would close up shop. Taken together, millions of people everywhere would be thrown out of work. The ensuing depression would make the Great Depression look like a walk in the park. The rest of the industrialized world would soon follow our fall.

For the foreseeable future, the war industry is vital to the world economy. Peace has become unaffordable.

There is more. There is a war-prone psychological dimension.

The industrialized world is caught in a culture of war that is stuffed with beliefs that justify the practice of war.

Here’s an example of how beliefs grease the skids toward war. Masses of people believe that war is hard-wired into the human psyche. War has been with us since we began to walk upright and always will be. Believing that, who would take working for peace seriously?

But it is not true that we are hard-wired for war. Strong medical evidence exists for a different view of the role of testosterone (the hard-wiring factor) in the human body. Strong anthropological evidence exists indicating that before the onset of agriculture and “civilization,” humans were mostly peaceful. In fact there are some 80 peaceful societies around the world today where people shun aggression and where murder, rape and domestic abuse are unknown.

If truth be recognized, even in the United States, the vast majority of people are non-violent

The presence of testosterone is related to aggression, but not the way most people think. Testosterone does not cause aggressive behavior directly. Rather, aggressive behavior stimulates the production of testosterone, increasing the likelihood and degree of aggression.

When watching a war movie or a football game, males, and to a lesser extent, females, experience an increase in testosterone accompanied by an increase in aggressive feelings. Stimulated by a jingoistic press, readers experience an increase in aggressive feelings. Those feelings make the idea of going to war more acceptable.

Mennonites have the usual amount of testosterone in their bodies. Quakers and people in other peaceful societies have normal amounts of hormones. They are not aggressive and they don’t go to war.

All humans have the potential for cruelty and aggression. All humans have the potential for kindness and peaceful resolution of conflicts. It is what they believe to be true that determines how they are likely to behave.

Again, the apparently self-evident belief that war is inevitable is part of a belief system that prevents people from taking seriously the possibility of permanent peace.

Peaceful societies believe that aggression is wrong, that competition is to be avoided and that the society needs rules to control anger, hostility and other aggression stimulating emotions.

These beliefs work to control aggression in societies that hold and approve of them strongly

On the other hand, war-prone Americans believe that boys will be boys; an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; running away from a fight is cowardly; war is a last resort but it’s on the table. Americans believe that rules that help shape behavior restrict their fundamental freedom. These beliefs tilt the field toward aggressive behavior, thus increasing levels of testosterone, making war seem right and necessary.

The irony is that the United States, at war for so many years and saddled with fears of terrorists, has seen significant loss of freedom stemming from the need for more and more protection.

There is another impediment to peace that worries me greatly. Massive numbers of Americans have lost faith in the possibility of a better life for themselves and for their children. The greed, duplicity and self-aggrandizement of the captains of industry have been on display in the daily lives of common people for years. The anger of the people has not been effective. The rich and powerful see few barriers to their continued dominance. The poor, sharing in the aggressive-prone beliefs of their society, pin their hopes on the emergence of a leader who will mobilize them to fight. The beliefs of Ghandi and King seem to have vanished from the national landscape.

People know that the good life for the middle class is vanishing. While the country was in a vicious recession, $6 billion were spent on a seemingly interminable election season. Ending the war in Afghanistan has not been a priority. The fossil fuel industry and the war materiel industry are thriving without effective protest. The environmental degradation caused by human activity increases daily and was barely mentioned in election-centered political speech.

That’s only a sample of how the lives and values of the people have been degraded. The people know it and it alienates them. Given an opportunity to vote, they do so but they have little hope that things will change.

My pessimism is about the prospects for peace, the return of an economy that benefits all and, most poignantly, it is about the devastation of the Earth in pursuit of profits.

To the warmongers, to the leaders of the global economy and to those who gain from pollution, I have a somber observation. Their greed and selfishness is raping the Earth. They may conquer the people but climate change will get them in the end. They will get their comeuppance.

The trouble is, it will get me, too.

Hubert Kauffman, Ph.D., is a retired clinical psychologist with an interest in brain physiology. He lives in Oxford.