The Lenaia festival in 422 BC featured Aristophanes’ comedy The Wasps, an ancient Greek work. This comedy focuses on a juror who never acquitted anyone in his career and how his son comes into conflict with him in order to make him change his behavior and start to judge people in accordance with his moral pledges. The play ends, as most comedies do, with father and son reconciling and the father agreeing to train himself in the rules or standards legitimized.

This imagery that Aristophanes asserted in The Wasps has accompanied mankind since 422 BC. As new individuals reach adulthood, they express their dedication to enhancing civil liberties and human rights. However, once they experience power, they often deviate from this path, using politics and wealth to further their own self-interest rather than the common good they promised to uphold during their rise to power. Thus, prompting their successors to come into conflict with them just as the son of the juror in Aristophanes’ play The Wasps did.

In fact, Greek mythology suggests that the gods punished kings or figures who failed to align their actions with their pledges by imposing eternal punishment on them. For example, Sisyphus was “condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again just as it nears the top.” Danaïdes was “condemned to spend eternity carrying water in a sieve or perforated device.” Tantalus “was made to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, with the fruit ever eluding his grasp, and the water always receding before he could take a drink.”

This eternal punishment that our ancestors appear to have lived with should have ended in 1945. This is because in 1945, the victors of WW2 (the old powers) dismantled their empires, united all the people of the world, and counselled their heirs (their children) to constantly strive to observe the work program suggested in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) to prevent new people from putting into question the values of love and duty that they project and depend on to ensure the long-term stability of their monarchs or republics. In this way, stop extending the eternal punishment of the gods beyond this 1945 date.

The constant wars, conflicts, and acts of disloyalty that have swept the world since 1945 support that the heirs of the old powers are largely unaware of their fathers’ reasons for dismantling their empires in the aftermath of WW2. Most importantly, what were their fathers trying to avoid happening in the world if their children stayed preserving their security post-1945 exactly as per the way they were doing it before 1945? This was through letting their critical thinkers and servants (governments and international intergovernmental institutions) stay arguing over laws instead of observing the laws that are already legitimized so people have no reason to rely on their self-help to increase their happiness.

The heirs of the old powers chose not to balance change and tradition in the aftermath of WW2, despite their fathers’ suggestions to lift all boats. This change of plans indicates that the heirs of the old powers are unable to foster stable connections globally, as the ongoing wars that have affected the world since 1945 suggest. The heirs of the old powers are creating confusion in the world, leaving people unsure whether they are truly united with these heirs to improve values and unity, or if they are just playing a game. Most importantly, the heirs of the old powers’ defiance of their fathers’ counsel indicates that they believe they can restore their power without facing the eternal punishment that Greek mythology states was imposed on kings or figures who failed to align their actions with their pledges. That is, of course, unless the erratic or hypocritical behavior demonstrated by the heirs of the old powers is due to a diminished importance placed on their power, wealth, and status.

It would be naive to suppose that the old powers, meaning the victors of WW2, dismantled their empire and then invited both the societies they vanquished during the war and those they dominated and freed in its aftermath to help rejuvenate their power by pitting people against one another. This situation is because the victors of WW2 preserve their power based on the number of personal connections they tie and not based on the number of people who would start to play their own games. Increasing the number of people who build complex relationships does not uphold the promises made by their fathers (the old powers) to persuade others to remain loyal and allow them to maintain greater power, but instead damages their prestige and accelerates their decline.

The book Wisdom of the Victors of WW2 reflects on the absurdism that the heirs of the WW2 victors (the western European monarchs and republics) have relied upon to rejuvenate their power since 1945, as well as the conflicts arising from their egoistic and irrational conduct while trying to navigate the complexities of blending contemporary practices with age-old customs. Most importantly, convince people that they are still serving a purpose or have a role to play.

The work tries to look into how the loose morals and mere concern for material pleasure and prestige that the heirs of the old powers (i.e., the victors of WW2) and their global policemen, the United States, have been prioritizing since 1945 are subverting their capacity to fulfill obligations, meet standards, and maintain a public image that would make people continue to find meanings or relevance in their behavior, especially after rationalization made people question traditional structures and learn how to choose from among the alternatives the option that can increase their happiness better.

In particular, the work looks into how the decision of the victors of WW2 (the western European monarchs and republics) to let their critical thinkers and servants (governments and international institutions) prioritize a politics of wealth, materialism, and pleasure instead of rationality, reason, and objective worth has failed to forge strong cultural relationships that could enable people to connect the past with the future, which is a requirement to preserve the continuity of the victors of WW2.

This means that the more people come into conflict in the future with the dull way the victors of WW2 are understanding and interpreting reality, the more the inability of the victors of WW2 and their critical thinkers and servants to grapple with force, diplomacy, cultural sensitivity, and global competency will grow until the confusion that their deeds are creating makes them lose equilibrium and new families/dynasties start to play their roles.

The work argues that the victors of WW2’s bleak attitudes prevent them from balancing the world’s nature with political skills, leading to their eventual resizing. It emphasizes that their belief that reality changes like ocean waves (i.e., the water goes back to the same shape and form), not desert sand (i.e., the sand forms a new landscape), may hinder them from seeing what’s right in front of them and what is hidden from them. Accordingly, the unpreparedness of the victors of WW2 to recognize that all the people of the world are created in their image and, therefore, their wealth and their military superiority mean nothing when trying to rule over the new landscape that is constantly taking a new shape, because man does not have control over the way the mind (soul) interprets the senses, makes the victors of WW2 perceive that if they convert truth (freedom, justice, etc.) into a game of poison musical chairs whereby people are repeatedly and pointlessly shuffled among various locations or positions, such an approach could make them balance traditional customs with modern values.

Throughout history, all the rulers and kings that adopted straightforward policies that exemplified empathy and generosity managed to make others trust them, want to stay with them, and let them have more power than others. All the rulers and kings who encouraged citizens to pursue aspirations that foster competitiveness, stress, and a sense of victory at the expense of others did not gain any benefits when this game ended, except for sorrow. The manipulation employed by rulers and kings who used division and confusion was like a mirage in a desert; it appeared to a thirsty person as water from a distance, but upon closer inspection, it turned out to be nothing.

The book Wisdom of the Victors of WW2 highlights a perspective on how the arrogant and irrational demeanor of the heirs of the old powers prevents their successors from staying relevant in the future and creates irreparable damage. The work will try to show that the decision of the heirs of the old powers to deviate away from the work program that their fathers counselled them to stay faithful to its principle to keep on transforming the conditions and outcomes that matter to them and to let their critical thinkers and servants (governments and international institutions) establish political and trade networks of their own in UN member states could have entangled them in complex relations so that their outcomes may not end up in their favor as happened during the 17th and 18th centuries when they dominated much of the world trade and its oceans and became the world’s foremost global power. The work will try to show that the decision of the heirs of the old powers to let their critical thinkers and servants be devoted to regarding themselves exempt from observing the appeal suggested in the UDHR while working on creating ordered relations that would preserve their dominating role over the economies of nations and their trade routes would put them in conflict with the self-interests of those same critical thinkers and servants, just as happened when the people of their two most valuable possessions, America and India, decided to split from them and to rival them for their wealth, power, and status.

The book aims to show that only one project can help the heirs of the victors of WW2 maintain their dominance before more people worldwide start to rely on the same business that they are in to increase their happiness instead of observing standards and norms and push their relevance to endure the same fate that the families/dynasties that controlled the Soviet Union endured in the 1990s. This project involves revisiting and implementing the work program proposed in the UN Charter or the UDHR. The heirs of the victors of WW2 can try to start a new global war in hopes of replicating their fathers’ WW1 and WW2 victories. But first, they must make sure that those who would die for them don’t defend them like the Soviets did their leaders.