Monomachia: Why We Should Settle Wars With Sports, Not Soldiers

I want to start with something that gets me called a cynic at dinner tables: I don't think you can take the competitiveness out of us, and I don't think you should want to. Every utopian project I have ever read assumes that if we could just cool the blood a few degrees, we would finally be at peace. I think that gets the biology backwards. The drive that makes you want to win is the same drive that got your ancestors through winters that killed the people who did not want to win badly enough. You do not get to keep the resilience and delete the appetite.

So this post is not an argument for peace in the sense you are used to hearing it. It is an argument about where to point the appetite.

We Are Not Going to Evolve Into Little Green Men

You know the image. The big-headed, thin-limbed, serene alien who has transcended violence and now floats around dispensing wisdom. That fantasy is really a fantasy about docility, and I don't buy it as a destination for us. To become that placid, a species would have to live somewhere that stopped testing it, and no such place exists.

The universe is not gentle. Even if we stopped fighting each other tomorrow, we would still be fighting the thing that has been trying to kill us since the first cell: entropy, weather, pathogens, scarcity, radiation, time. Ask an evolutionary biologist about the Red Queen hypothesis, the idea Leigh Van Valen put forward in 1973, and you will get the shape of it. You run as hard as you can just to stay in the same place, because everything you compete with is also running.

There is a wrinkle here that I think most people miss, and it makes the point sharper rather than softer. Anthropologists like Richard Wrangham argue that humans have already partially self-domesticated. Compared to chimpanzees we are dramatically less reactively aggressive, meaning we can sit in a crowded stadium shoulder to shoulder with strangers and not tear each other apart, which no chimp troop could manage.

But here is the paradox in Wrangham's work that ought to keep you up at night. That drop in hot-blooded aggression came bundled with a rise in the cold-blooded kind, the planned, coalitional, organized killing of out-groups. We did not become gentle. We became calm enough to organize, which is precisely what made us capable of war as an institution.

So the docility fantasy is not just unrealistic. It may be backwards. Getting tamer did not make us less lethal, it made us more coordinated, and coordination is what turns a brawl into a campaign. If you want less killing, you cannot get it by asking humans to want less. You have to change what the wanting is aimed at.

A Short History of War in Three Moves

Strip away the flags and the ideology and the arc is embarrassingly simple.

Move one: two people fight. Fists, teeth, rocks, whatever is at hand. The stakes are personal, the outcome is immediate, and the loser is usually the only casualty.

Move two: someone adds a weapon. The spear extends reach, the sling and bow add distance, and suddenly you can win without ever being touched. This is the single most important change in the history of conflict, because it decouples winning from personal risk. Every escalation since is a variation on that theme.

Move three: someone adds more people, and then figures out how to make them move as one thing. The Sumerian and Egyptian formations, the Greek phalanx, the Roman legion, the drilled musket line. Once war becomes a coordination problem rather than a courage problem, the winner is whoever can organize and supply more bodies.

Then the industrial era simply ran that logic without a brake. Gunpowder, rifled barrels, the machine gun, the artillery barrage, the strategic bombing campaign, the atomic bomb. The Second World War killed somewhere in the range of seventy to eighty-five million people, most of them civilians, which is a number no phalanx could have produced in a thousand years of trying.

I want to be honest about one point here, because you deserve accuracy over rhetoric. Some scholars, Steven Pinker most prominently, argue that per-capita rates of violent death have actually fallen over the long run, and others, including Bear Braumoeller and Nassim Taleb, argue the statistics are far shakier than that and that the recent calm may be a lull rather than a trend. I am not going to pretend that debate is settled. What is not in dispute is the ceiling: our capacity to kill per unit of effort has risen without limit, and it is still rising.

Look at where it sits now. SIPRI's 2026 yearbook puts the global inventory at roughly 12,187 nuclear warheads, with about 4,012 deployed and somewhere between 2,100 and 2,200 on high alert, meaning launchable in minutes. Global military spending hit a record 2.9 trillion dollars. Meanwhile the frontier has moved to drones and AI-assisted targeting, which push us back toward the move-two problem in its purest form: killing with zero personal risk, at scale, at machine speed.

Monomachia: When One Man Fought So an Army Would Not Have To

Now think about the opening of Troy. Two armies are drawn up, and instead of a bloodbath, Achilles walks out alone to face the Thessalian champion Boagrius while the kings agree that this fight settles it. That specific matchup is Hollywood's invention, Boagrius is not a character in Homer, but the convention it dramatizes is entirely real.

The Greek word is monomachia (μονομαχία), which literally means single combat. The fighter who steps out in front of the line is a promachos, one who fights in front. And in the Iliad, Homer gives us the full version of the idea. In Book 3, Paris and Menelaus agree to duel for Helen with the explicit understanding that the winner takes her, the war ends, and everyone sails home.

That is the concept in its purest form, and I love it. The stakes are named out loud. The cost is one life instead of ten thousand. The two men with the actual grievance are the two men in the dirt. Compare that to any war you have watched on the news in your lifetime and tell me which one is more rational.

The idea shows up all over the ancient world, too, which tells you it was not just a Greek literary tic. David and Goliath is a champion duel, proposed by the Philistines as a winner-take-all substitute for battle. Roman legend gives us the Horatii and the Curiatii, three brothers from Rome against three from Alba Longa, fighting to decide which city ruled the other.

What Actually Happened When They Tried It

Here is where I have to argue against my own enthusiasm, because the historical record is brutal on this point.

In the Iliad, Menelaus wins the duel. The war does not end. Aphrodite yanks Paris off the field, the truce collapses, and the killing goes on for years. In the David story, the Philistines lose their champion and then, rather than honoring the deal, they break and get chased down and slaughtered anyway. The Horatii duel worked for a while, and then Rome destroyed Alba Longa regardless.

The real historical attempt is even more instructive. Around 546 BC, Sparta and Argos were fighting over the plain of Thyrea, and Herodotus tells us they agreed to settle it with 300 chosen champions from each city, with both main armies marching away so nobody could interfere. They fought until dark. Three men were left alive, two Argives and one Spartan.

The two Argives looked around, saw nobody standing, and went home to announce victory. The Spartan, Othryades, had been left for dead, got up, stripped the enemy corpses of their arms to claim the field, and stayed. The next day both cities showed up and both claimed the win, Argos because it had more survivors and Sparta because its man held the ground.

According to Plutarch, they even brought in neutral mediators, who ruled for Sparta. Argos rejected the ruling. Both armies then charged each other and fought the exact full-scale battle the whole arrangement was designed to prevent. Sparta won and took Thyrea, and a hundred and twenty-six years later Argos asked for a rematch and Sparta declined.

Then there is the Combat of the Thirty in March of 1351, thirty men from the French-aligned garrison at Josselin against thirty from the English-held Ploërmel, fighting at an oak tree midway between the two castles with an agreement that no one would interfere. Beaumanoir's side won. The War of the Breton Succession then continued for another fourteen years.

So the honest scorecard is this: the champion-duel convention was real, it was widespread, and it almost never actually decided anything. Not because the idea was stupid, but because nothing forced the loser to accept the result.

Why I Still Think We Should Go Back

I know how that reads. I just spent four paragraphs demolishing my own proposal. I still think we should go back, and here is why.

Every one of those failures failed at the same joint: enforcement and legitimacy. Nobody could make the loser honor the outcome, and in every case at least one side had a story about why the result did not really count. That is not an argument that the format is broken. It is a specification for what the format needs.

Which is why I think sports is the modern answer. Sports is the new monomachia, and the team is the promachos. We already have the infrastructure: standardized rules, trained officials, instrumented measurement, global broadcast, and a shared public understanding of what winning looks like. We have already built the arena. We just refuse to bet anything real in it.

The Referee Would Be the Most Sacred Job on Earth

This is the part I would build first, because everything else hangs off it.

Any system like this has to be run by a genuinely neutral third party, and those positions would have to be treated as the most sacred offices humanity has. Not respected. Sacred. Because the moment people believe the rules are rigged or the score is bought, the result does not hold, and when the result does not hold we go straight back to real fighting, which means we descend into chaos again.

You already know why I am worried about this, because we have the receipts. The 2002 Olympic figure skating judging scandal. The state-sponsored doping program that got Russia banned from multiple Games. Match-fixing rings in soccer, cricket, tennis, and sumo. Every one of those is a small-scale demonstration of exactly how the Battle of Thyrea failed, just with cameras on it.

So the referee institution would need things no sporting body currently has: real independence from any competing state, funding that no participant controls, transparent instrumentation, and consequences for corruption severe enough to make bribery unthinkable. That is a hard institutional problem. It is not remotely as hard as the problem we currently solve with 12,187 nuclear warheads.

Look, America, I Honestly Don't Know What You Want From Me

I say that with love, and with genuine confusion, because you already do every single piece of this separately.

You gamify everything. Fitness has leaderboards, work has quotas and dashboards, elections are covered like playoff brackets, and school is a scoreboard with a GPA on it. You have taken the most mundane parts of human life and turned them into contests because you like contests. So why not the one activity where the contest is already the whole point?

And you love a high-stakes bet. Sports betting is legal in most of this country now and pulls in tens of billions of dollars a year, and the entire appeal is that the wager is real and the outcome is honest. So my question is simple: if you are willing to bet money you actually need on a game you cannot control, why won't you bet something that matters on a game where you get to send your best?

Because here is the thing about deciding it with a game. You would know the stakes. You would know exactly what you wagered, exactly when you wagered it, and exactly what losing costs. That is more than you can say for any war this country has entered in my lifetime.

Political scientists have a formal version of this argument. James Fearon's 1995 work on rationalist explanations for war points out that a huge share of wars happen because each side has private information about its own strength and resolve and therefore miscalculates, since if both sides knew the outcome in advance they would just negotiate that outcome and skip the killing. A contest is an information machine. It converts private guesses about who is stronger into a public fact that everyone watched happen.

Compare the accounting. War costs you lives, treasure, infrastructure, veterans who come home destroyed, civilians who never had a vote, and national security that is usually worse afterward than before. And you frequently pay all of that not because the cause demanded it but because somebody upstairs was incompetent, or lying, or both. Deciding it with a game is objectively more human, because it keeps the competition and drops the corpses.

The Hole In My Own Argument, Stated Plainly

I will not sell you this without the caveat, because you read this blog for the reasoning and not the applause.

The theoretical objection is real. War is a credible signal precisely because it is ruinously expensive, so a nation that goes to war proves it means it. A game is cheap by comparison, so it proves much less, and the losing side always has the option of saying the game did not count. That is the commitment problem, and no clever bracket dissolves it.

The empirical objection is worse. In 1969, El Salvador and Honduras played three World Cup qualifiers while tensions over land reform and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Salvadoran migrants were already boiling. The matches did not absorb the conflict, they detonated it, and the resulting hundred-hour war killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands more. Sport did not substitute for war there. It became the flashpoint.

Sports diplomacy has also produced the opposite result, which is why I am not ready to give up on it. Ping-pong diplomacy in 1971 genuinely helped open relations between the United States and China. The ancient Olympic truce, the ekecheiria, guaranteed safe passage to the games, though I should tell you honestly that it was violated more than once and never actually stopped a war.

So my claim is not that games would work. My claim is that games could work, and war reliably does not. Right now we have one option, and it always ends in bodies. If we build a second option, we get the possibility that both sides honor it, which is a possibility we currently do not have at all. A chance at honoring the result beats a certainty of burying people.

Keep the Competition. Change the Enemy.

Here is where I land, and it is the part I actually care about.

The problem was never that we compete. The problem is that we have aimed our competition at the one target where winning makes us weaker. Every dollar and every genius-hour spent on a better missile is a dollar and an hour not spent on the actual adversary, which is the environment that is entirely indifferent to whether we survive.

Point the same instinct at nature and watch what happens, because we have already run this experiment. The Cold War space race, driven by pure nationalist competitiveness, put people on the moon and gave us satellite networks and the research culture that produced the internet's ancestor. The public-versus-private race to sequence the human genome finished years ahead of schedule. The competitive scramble to build COVID vaccines compressed a decade of development into months.

That is competition doing what evolution built it to do. The smartest, most cunning, most adaptable win, and the whole species gets more resilient to its actual environment as a byproduct. That is selection pressure pointed outward instead of inward.

And it protects against the thing I actually fear, which is not that we get too violent but that we get too comfortable. Bone loses density without load. Muscle atrophies without resistance. A species that stops being tested becomes dependent, and a dependent species has no answer ready when the environment finally asks a hard question. Climate, pandemics, energy, food systems, whatever comes next.

So keep the fire. Keep the trash talk, keep the rankings, keep the desperate need to win. Just aim it at entropy instead of at each other, and when we absolutely have to settle something between nations, send our best out in front of the line the way the Greeks did, with a scoreboard instead of a spear.

Achilles walked out alone so an army would not have to. That instinct was right. We just need better referees than the Greeks had.

Can and Will Do

If this argument landed with you, it is because you already suspect that most of the things we call inevitable are actually just badly aimed. That is the whole thesis of my book, Can and Will Do. It is a practical philosophy for assessing any problem and overcoming it: separating the real constraints from the manufactured ones, figuring out what is actually blocking you, and pairing your will with calculated action instead of wishful thinking.

War is that problem at civilizational scale. Whatever you are facing is that problem at yours. Same method, different size. You can pick it up at CanAndWillDo.com.

Thanks for reading! Please comment!

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