Paint it again, Sam!

I have just finished reading a two‐volume tome: The Correlates of War which is a complex application of philosophy, metaphysics and mathematics, put together in an effort to define the causes of man's greatest sin. It has been like trying to hold gin in a bottomless bucket—a futile exercise of hundreds of graphs, statistical tabulations, mathematical formulae with touches of moral philosophy, trotted out in an effort to explain why we love to throw at one another. Futile, because in the end the author admits man has an instinct for such conduct.