War in a dystopian setting

Question

In a world where there is ever-declining population due to a phenomenon that has no satisfactory explanation, what could cause war or large-scale armed confrontations between countries or sections of the society?

Assumptions:

• No births have happened for a while. No new pregnancies are happening.
• The cause for this population decline is unknown and there is no apparent cure/solution.
• The decline is unstoppable; humanity will soon be extinct.

Given that humans realize they will soon be gone for good, what could create a situation where human lives are intentionally harmed?

EDIT:

I noticed that I need to word my question better, so I'll add here what I posted in a comment.

Most of the answers so far assume the worst of humanity; stuff like "Might as well do anything I want, since I'll die one day". The thing is, that is true for all humans even now. Why would the possibility of there being zero humans a few decades from now foment conflict today?

For additional clarity, consider the following:

• The realization that there are more humans dying that those being born sinks in slowly. This isn't a T-virus/asteroid/alien invasion scenario, where humanity is given a few weeks till extinction.

• For most people, news about economic indicators like labor costs or population decline isn't worth a lot of attention. So it's conceivable they carry on with their lives (for what I assume will be quite a while) until this starts affecting them personally. By then, governments & society are likely to grasp the fact that every human life is "precious", much like tigers or pandas today.

So, I guess my question is, when governments are actively engaged in (however futile) efforts directed towards conservation of human life, what would cause war or any armed conflict between humans?

EDIT 2:

A lot of excellent answers. I'm going to have to pick out elements from each answer and cook up a cascading series of events that form the basis for some bitter resentment between the principal actors and a spark that starts the fire.

If only I could accept more than one answer...

Answer 1

A rumour that that other country(or whatever else) has fertile women or men and some government decides that they have the military power to acquire them for their own country.

If the rumour is not actually true, the war can last even longer because "they are hiding them from us".

I believe there have been several films with similar plots where there was one pregnant woman who had to be transported from one place to the other and everyone was trying to capture her.

Answer 2

If you ask me the causes of war are ususally:

Either:

• Philosophical disagreements (By which I mean ideas about the nature of god, proper governance of the nation, the right to oppress other people and/or the distribution of wealth)

or:

• Scarcity of resources. (example: Oil, Precious metals and/or space)

Philosophical differences is probably the easiest sell. A war could easily start over a sect of any major religion (or a new one) deciding that the human die off is God's will and either want to help out or hope to change the divine mind by appeasing it. ("We all must conform to these simple rules about food and clothes, then God will make us fertile again" ... basically the setting for Handmaids Tale thought... so I might end up feeling derivative.)

As other users have already pointed out general hopelessness might very well cause an outbreak of violence. Look at, for example, Children of Men which has a rather similar scenario as the one described. However, while most fiction deals with the worst of humanity surfacing in a crisis most studies of real disasters do show that on at least a local level people tend to cooperate. So it might not be the best motivator, it's a powerful trope which we all know. But it is a trope.

• Henry W Fischer: Response to Disaster: Fact Versus Fiction & Its Perpetuation : the Sociology of Disaster

• Sarita J. Robinson: Human Behaviour When Disaster Strikes: Human behaviour in emergency situations

As for scarcity I think as a motivator for war in your scenaroi it is trickier, with a decline in population most things naturally get less scarce as smaller amounts are needed to satisfy demand. And killing people who could be farming/mining/producing will essentially be highly counterproductive by make things more scarce, why send soldiers to the front when you could send them to the mines and factories?

Perhaps a related or unrelated event to the die off also makes livable land more scarce? Global warming and sea levels raising, deforestation and growing deserts would might remove viable real estate quicker than natural human die-off.

Answer 3

A War of Retaliation or Revenge

Say that one nation blamed it (I will just call it the decline) on another nation or a terrorist group took credit for it. Then it would boils down to, let’s make them pay for what they done to us. Even if it’s just a rumour or a religious hardliner saying this, conflict will arise. Much the same when London burned down the French were blamed and even killed for a crime they did not commit. It could even be used as a tool for control by governments, like this country/race/religion is holding the weapon that caused the decline if we take it we could find a cure...kill them all… we have nothing to lose.

Lack of Hope leads to Despair, Despair leads to Distrust, Distrust leads to Conflict

Answer 4

Decreasing population means less people available to produce resources and technologies.

Scarcity implies higher value, higher values attract greed. If group A has two cows and group B not, group B will attack group A to take the cows.

Better be killed trying to get food/water/shelter than reaching a slow death by simply waiting.

Answer 5

I don't think typically humans have an innate desire to protect other humans, other than their immediate family and friends.

The impending extinction of the human race will not automatically make people place any greater value on human life in general.

Conflicts will arise as they always do, due to competition for resources, or perceived moral superiority etc.

I would expect that rather than large scale conflicts, there would be more "tribal" conflicts, and society in general begins to break down.

If there is no clear scientific explanation for the calamity which has befallen the species, I would expect a lot of people will resort to religious and superstitious beliefs. This could easily lead to genocide against minority groups who are often blamed for the ills of any society.

Answer 6

Any war in human history has 3 motivations:

1. Money
2. Money
3. and Money

There's a lot of excuses for it because as said by Goering why a farmer can go to a war if the best possible outcome for him is getting back from it in one piece.

Excuses most used are: Religion, Ideology, Survival, Retallation, Freedom and any one you propaganda can get (those guys can be inventive).

But the bottom line is some (usually old) guys want's to grab some resource (land, oil, people, trade routes, market, political power, hunt fields, potatoes, etc) from another (usually old) guys and they send (usually young) guys to solve the resources owmership question.

They really don't care about unless they are good enough liars they can lie to themselves.

That beging said you can set the war for whatever you want because in reallity those old guys really don't care about the long term future (they are old).

Answer 7

It's been mentioned in several answers and comments already, but if you haven't seen it already, go see Children of Men. It deals with a very similar setting.

Inspired by (but not directly copying) that, one excellent way to introduce large scale conflict in a world such as this would be to have a cure pop up.

What's important to keep in mind, because a cure like this would be a big deal for your setting and potentially quite disruptive to your plot, that there doesn't actually have to be one.

People / countries just need to be convinced that there is a cure and that somebody is hoarding it.

Answer 8

Loss of hope and collapse of civilization.

If the world is going to end, why not do what you want and damn the consequences? You'll see suicide, crime and increasing apathy increase over the years. Then as the last generation becomes teenagers and young adults, they'll ask themselves why they should do jobs that ultimately don't matter? Why they should obey rules from a dying government? Why they should care about anything at all?

Revolutions will bring down governments. Hordes of like minded people will rove across the cities and land, taking what they want, destroying what they don't want, and fighting others for ever declining resources and to end their lives in a shower of blood and glory.

When you have no future, why not make sure no one else has one either?

Answer 9

Moral superiority / Fear

So if people are behaving like savages, and creating a civil war, still stable nations might fear that this behavior will lead to an earlier end of themselves and wage war against those nations in faster decline.

(Religious) fanatism

Think of the islamist idea of jihad or kamikaze attacks by the japanese. Humans will easily throw their life away if the apokalypse is coming and they do it for what they believe is a greater cause.

Answer 10

If all current forms of humanity are dying, then anyone with the technology to convert human consciousness into another form has the only hope. Such a technology is worth fighting for, as it is the only way to survive, even if in a different state. Post-humans will both be a goal worth gaining, or possibly in some circles worth destroying, or both (as many times what is forbidden for the populace is practiced by their masters).

Answer 11

Humans just went from being problematically numerous to being a scarce and rapidly diminishing resource, governments in countries with seriously aging populations, Japan comes to mind, could easily justify going to war in order to capture themselves an ongoing labour force. Once one country does it out of physical necessity others in less dire straits can start to justify similar course of action.

Answer 12

Consider that with a diminishing population, vital skillsets will be vanishing too.

A nation that was previously nuclear powered might shortly realise that they don't have anyone who can keep their reactors from melting down. but their neighbours do...

Extreme example, but I'd expect that head-hunting of this kind would quickly cross any borders, Upskilling would be a duty. If you can't do a dozen jobs then you become a burden fast on the people who can.

Maintaining a modern standard of living takes a LOT of people with a spectacular range of knowledge and skills, to keep it going, some nations may press-gang or even enslave the citizens of a neighbouring nation into doing all the grunt-work while their own citizens fill the expanding gaps as people begin dying off.

Of course, those other nations would take serious umbridge with this. They'd fight, and that would lead quickly to war, the losing side being taken into indentured servitude would give them serious motive not to surrender and thereby prolong the conflicts.

Stockpiled resources too would be targets, nations cannot afford the time to dig up fuel or metals when they can simply take it by force or scavenge it.

The more powerful nations would quickly resort to drone and remote warfare, their soldiers being far too valuable to risk in combat, but this would only last as long as the complex machines can be maintained and munitions and fuel provided.

Ultimately, the most advanced nations would be head-hunting anyone with a background in longevity, fertility and indeed anything at all that can prolong the inevitable, they'd gladly take those people by force from their own countries. It'd be a last desperate search for a cure or fix for the extinction of mankind. It's up to you the Author about whether you want this to succeed.

Answer 13

A religious movement might decide that the global infertility is the punishment of God for the evil ways of them, and accordingly decide that it must be God's will that they are destroyed.

Answer 14

War, by its Clausewitzian definition, is the use of force to compel our enemy to do our will. This definition, its limitations and faults aside, hints at two primitives: the means (of force), and our will. Of these two primitives, means are variable, not only through the ages (as seen with the development of weapon systems), but also during the course of the conflict (reflecting casualties), and thus represent the changing character of war (the way we prosecute war). Will, on the other hand, represents the unchanging nature of war, being as it is an expression of human nature.

The dystopian scenario of the question purely addresses means – the loss of fertility predicates a reduction in manpower, an issue for the character of war, provided that the existing paradigm of increasing battlefield automation is somehow abandoned and WMD are somehow discounted. This character of war will change correspondingly to reflect the means change, but the nature thereof will remain constant, as long as human nature remains unchanged. It is therefore not a question of whether war will be possible in such a scenario, but rather how such a war will be fought. The ‘why’ or ‘origin’ question is thus the same as for any war – a query addressed by a host of academics (Geoff Blainey, Michael Howard, Bertrand Russell, Anatol Rappoport, etc.), using a variety of models and tools (Game Theory, etc.). But please note :this is not to suggest that war in such a scenario is guaranteed – but rather to show that war is possible in any scenario, whenever certain conditions are met.

This leads to the question – what are those conditions (of human nature), specifically those required for a major war? A handy analogy to aid the conceptualisation is of a playful ‘dust devil’, building into a tornado when the correct meteorological conditions are present. The first prerequisite is almost self-explanatory: major conflicts require major belligerents, and the more belligerents there are, (in the form of alliance systems, or self-identifying camps), the greater the likelihood of the conflict outgrowing time and geographical realities of the origin. Even big wars start small, just as every tornado starts life as a ‘dust devil’.

The second prerequisite is a mental construct: a structure of fairness. Wars are either fought to maintain the status quo, or to change it. Given that fairness is subjective, those who feel that the status quo is fair, will fight to maintain it (or improve it to be more ‘fair’). Those who experience the status quo as unfair, will seek cause to change it.

For a war to occur in the scenario described, my suggestion would be to supplement the loss of manpower by automation (including drones and the likes in combat zones), thus addressing the implied reduction of means. To address the will (assuming that the dystopia is brought about purely by the loss of fertility, and not some additional external accelerant), there is nothing to suggest that existing conflicts will be concluded or abandoned, purely on the basis thereof – in short, [insert name of least-favourite world leader here] will not all of a sudden abandon [insert casus belli here], just because nobody is having babies.

However, should you feel that a brand new war is needed for a brand new threat to our existence, the will primitive is auto-diagnosed by a perception of fairness, (or the lack thereof). Scarce and in-demand resources (such as fertility) is fertile ground (pardon the pun), for perceptions on fairness to develop. By having major players coalesce into two opposing camps, the rest should be a walk in the park.

Sorry…

Answer 15

Nothing binds a people to their leader like a common enemy. Voters don't change governments during war. Harvey Fierstein

Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/harvey_fierstein

A sense of impending doom and hopelessness would make the citizenry unproductive at best and hard to govern / chaotic at worst. An outside enemy will unite the people in a cause, taking their minds off the existential threat of extinction.

Answer 16

In the face of extinction, I would imagine that many people would be in denial. People in denial might lash out against those who challenge their self-deceptions. That is, of course, not particularly rational. But, in this case the aggressors would be protecting their own wishful perceptions, as opposed to anything planted firmly in reality.

Sadly, I think that that sort of protectiveness over perceptions is quite common in people. In one extreme case, I remember reading an article about a school in (I think) Russia, where a teacher was accused of sexually molesting their students. The parents were furious... at the accuser, for suggesting that this particular community was as bad as outsiders made them out to be. I wish I could cite the article, but I don't remember the name off the top of my head, and the details aren't particularly important to my point anyway.

More generally, it is well known that people who are in distress, and especially who lack feelings of security/stability in their lives (which people in the situation that you described certainly would) have a tendency towards risk-taking behavior (which war certainly is). The distraction of war might be worth the trouble of going to war.

People come up with a lot of stories for why they lash out, but I think that those are mostly just things to tell other people. Or, even when they are legit, the reasons tend to fall back on this: when they feel insecure, people get more aggressive. For this reason, I cynically think that the situation that you describe would likely lead to conflict. The real challenge is deciding what excuses people come up with for becoming violent, how quickly do those ideas (excuses) spread, etcetera.

Answer 17

Disagreements in how far people are willing to go to create new humans could create conflict.

Otherwise, I don't see why the usual things wouldn't apply. People might be of the opinion that lives are precious, but not their lives, or not as precious as a cause. Much as today.

Some might be of the opinion that they are entitled to supress and control populations for the greater good.

Cloning might be an option to save humanity. Some might see this as bad. Maybe they are right to? Maybe clone soldiers are dispensable and "real" humans are not?