Weapons and Pornography. Is it just Good Business?

Have you ever wondered why we constantly talk about how the world is in turmoil, how humans kill everything, including each other, yet no one seems to mention the weapons manufacturers and dealers? I believe the world is filled with much more good than bad, but the media loves to cater to our primitive brains, and we willingly consume it.

It’s fascinating that there’s rarely any coverage on where the weapons responsible for millions of deaths are actually coming from. All these weapons must be coming from somewhere, right?

Imagine if I owned a weapons manufacturing company, which, according to Google, is a five hundred billion-dollar industry. How invested would I be in world peace? What’s my marketing strategy to move everything from bullets to tanks and fighter jets? What motivates me as a weapons manufacturer? I’d be thrilled for wars and instability. Peace, after all, is bad for business. Love is bad for business. But instability and chaos? That keeps the money flowing.

Now, let’s think about pornography. While it’s not as massive as the weapons industry, it’s still a multi-billion-dollar industry. They produce, and we consume.

If we take ethics out of the conversation for a moment, are the pharmaceutical, oil, insurance, and education industries any different? The products and services may vary, but the systems keeping them afloat are nearly identical. They sell, and we buy. We actively contribute to these systems.

So, what do we do? Do we raise the white flag and say, "I’m just one person; what can I possibly do? I’ll never break the system. It’s too big." Or do we fight? Do we protest, picket, and expose their crimes to the world?

Both are fair positions, but they share one common outcome: neither leads to lasting change.

What if we approached this differently? Let’s move from a macro to a micro level. Let’s look at you and me and our habits. Habits are pathways wired in our brains. I learned in Positive Psychology that existing pathways can’t be destroyed, but we can create new ones parallel to the old. The more we walk the new path, the weaker the old one becomes.

Here’s where I’m going with this. I like to use smoking as an example because I smoked for almost twenty-five years. Fifteen of those years, I struggled with quitting and restarting. I had many pathways and triggers that led me to light up. One was driving. Every time I drove, especially in traffic, I would smoke. To change that habit, I didn’t try to break the pathway (well, at first I did). Instead, I replaced it. I drank coffee, water, or tea while driving instead of smoking. Eventually, the new pathway became stronger, and I succeeded in quitting.

As bad as these systems—war, pornography, or any other—are, our feelings alone won’t change them. These pathways are too strong and deeply ingrained.

What is possible, however, is countering them by creating new systems. Trying to break the old pathways from the top down results in zero long-term change.

It’s time to create new pathways and systems from the ground up, understanding that we may never witness the results. But we must trust that it’s worth the effort.