Sharing a mind-bending concept in Simulacra and Simulation (by Jean Baudrillard). (This is the book that Neo grabs (which is hollowed out) in the movie The Matrix)
Quoted:
When at last the war had passed into the hands of regular troops in the North and escaped that of the resistance, the war could stop: it had attained its objective. The stake is thus that of a political relay. As soon as the Vietnamese had proved that they were no longer the carriers of an unpredictable subversion, one could let them take over. That theirs is a Communist order is not serious in the end: it had proved itself, it could be trusted. It is even more effective than capitalism in the liquidation of “savage” and archaic precapitalist structures. Same scenario in the Algerian war.
The other aspect of this war and of all wars today: behind the armed violence, the murderous antagonism of the adversaries - which seems a matter of life and death, which is played out as such (or else one could never send people to get themselves killed in this kind of thing), behind this simulacrum of fighting to the death and of ruthless global stakes, the two adversaries are fundamentally in solidarity against something else, unnamed, never spoken, but whose objective outcome in war, with the equal complicity of the two adversaries, is total liquidation. Tribal, communitarian, precapitalist structures, every form of exchange, of language, of symbolic organization, that is what must be abolished, that is the object of murder in war - and war itself, in its immense, spectacular death apparatus, is nothing but the medium of this process of the terrorist rationalization of the social - the murder on which sociality will be founded, whatever its allegiance, Communist or capitalist. Total complicity, or division of labor between two adversaries (who may even consent to enormous sacrifices for it) for the very end of reshaping and domesticating social relations.
(Emphasis mine)
Baudrillard is arguing that world powers engage in war to maintain their dominance over the ideas of other structures of communication and cooperation which could work across the globe. Structures that, if implemented on a wide scale, would crush the world powers’ control over the world itself. Leaders know this and seek to maintain these systems, and suddenly, war itself is maintained as an acceptable endeavor, since the public is gaslit into seeing only one system that could work to maintain organizational and cooperation structures (as opposed to the “tribal” / “communitarian” / “precapitalist” ones). War itself is an activity of self-fulfilling prophecy in this sense.