In the last couple of decades, there has been an increasing incidence of armed robberies in Ghana’s major cities. Over that same period, the country’s public safety system has progressively weakened. Average citizens have been forced to seek private solutions to protect themselves and their families.

Most people provide that protection by building fortified walls around their homes. Every new house built anywhere in Ghana’s major cities and towns these days is surrounded by walls. I grew up in a Ghanaian village where everything was open and people moved about freely all the time so Accra, Ghana’s capital, has looked quite strange to me whenever I have traveled there in recent years. All of the new houses look like fortresses. It probably takes as much money to build the walls as it does for the houses themselves. Those who can afford it even add an extra layer of security by hiring watchmen to stand guard at night.

During one of my vacations in Ghana a few years ago, I went to visit my friend Adinkra (a pseudonym to protect his privacy). He is an old schoolmate. He is the kind of middle-class Ghanaian who would normally have a decent house with a wall around it. I was quite surprised to find that his stood out in the open with no barricade.

I asked him whether he had any worries about safety. He laughed and said that other people had asked him the same question numerous times. He thought it was unnecessary for him to spend a lot of money building a wall because there wasn’t much in the house to make it worth someone’s time to rob it. I countered that a would-be robber would make that determination only when they were already inside the house, and that he would still be in danger. He said he wasn’t bothered by that either.

Quite a bit of time has passed since my visit to Adinkra’s house. He and his family are alive and well. The bad actors have perhaps concluded themselves that someone leaving their house that unprotected could only mean one thing: They have little to lose. Why bother with such a seemingly low-reward target when there are so many juicy ones all around.

Strengthening the state and the public safety system is the obvious and most efficient way to relieve the siege mentality that has taken hold in Accra and elsewhere in Ghana. But few seem to care. Because government officials and civil servants live in impenetrable fortresses themselves and travel around in heavily fortified vehicles, there isn’t much incentive for them to do much about the general security situation. Hence the enormous waste of resources and time to seek those private solutions.

As I observe the world’s rapid descent into chaos, I’ve been thinking a lot about Adinkra and his way of life. Nations everywhere are having to spend vast sums of money and precious resources to build increasingly sophisticated weapons to defend themselves against bad actors—real and imaginary. In the process, many basic needs of average citizens, like healthcare, are going unfulfilled.

America’s national debt is likely to reach $40 trillion next year. It’s been reported that the Trump administration was preparing to ask Congress to appropriate $200 billion for the war in Iran. I look at the sheer scale of the munitions that the U.S. and Israel are firing at Iran, and what Iran is shooting back not only directly at its two opponents but at the entire region, and just what question comes to mind: What the heck are we doing?

In President Trump’s budget proposal for the 2027 fiscal year, a summary of which was released last week, he is seeking $1.5 trillion in defense spending. The Wall Street Journal says it is by far the largest dollar amount in modern history. The budget plan calls for a $73 billion decrease in nondefense spending, including cuts to education and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The threats to global security are growing at an alarming rate so it is prudent for countries to take protective measures. That necessarily requires increased defense spending. But $1.5 trillion, for just one year, is such an eye-popping number that it should force us to take a pause and ask whether there aren’t alternative and less expensive ways to keep ourselves safe.

In her column in the Wall Street Journal last week, Peggy Noonan said, “having grown up with World War II movies and TV shows and histories, I came to see war as pretty much the normal state of man, because there’s something wrong with us.”

Something is definitely wrong with us. Because I haven’t studied zoology, my understanding of how the animal kingdom works is limited. But I have this constant feeling that it probably functions quite a bit better than our human world.

The thing I am also curious about is what the animals see, and what they think of some of the things we do. Many of our self-destructive actions unfortunately affect them. We have a habit of destroying their habitats in our quest for the resources that we use to satisfy our endless wants and to build our killing machines. We are not apex predators, but the common animals we interact with must be wondering how we got to sit atop them in the food chain.

Since our resources are not infinite, our current trajectory is not sustainable. One of these days, we will realize that adopting Adinkra’s way of thinking is the only way to save ourselves from extinction. The bad actors in the world, like the armed robbers in Ghana, always constitute just a tiny fraction of the population. But somehow we allow them to dictate how we live.