Insanity
There is a touch of insanity in every ninja. That insanity in Konoha is called the will of Fire by some.
Danzo would call it the insane ability to die for something.
The elder ninja-a rare, rare, title- had of course sought his whole life to distill this insanity. To purify it.
It was this insanity that permitted ninja to efface themselves, to delete their own will in service of the Hokage.
What use is a tool that shies at its use, whatever use that may be?
And if you find a person, no matter their abilities, who does not shy from any use, what is that but a tool? A ninja?
To find the cause of this insanity was to find what made ninjas. To understand this cause was to understand ninjas.
So every night, every morning, every chance he got, the young Danzo studied the ninjas of history, and of now. Trying to get to the cause of their insanity.
The core of this insanity, Danzo would have told you after this, the key characteristic of the insanity, is to value something over your own life. Life, the one thing we are hard coded to defend at all costs.
To die for something, the cost must be too high to pay for your own life.
The first, most obvious trigger to make a living thing die for something, he'd initially thought, was parenthood.
That was false.
There is no species on earth that does not abandon its young.
Fish will eat their young.
Rodents will eat their young.
Primates will eat their young.
There is no species on earth that does not evaluate the circumstances and take the best available option.
So simply giving birth to something is not enough to value something's life above your own.
The species that eat their young regularly are prey. It is beaten into them, or perhaps written into their genes, that they are powerless to defend anything from the myriad threats that face them, that they are barely alive themselves.
So they eat their young at the first sign of trouble.
But even the strong eat their young at times, and it is this that Danzo dug into.
A warthog with piglets, or a bear with cubs, even mountain lions. He sought the strongest animals the Konoha wilderness had to offer, animals that had long ago learned the supremacy of ninja, and hunted their young openly.
Without fail, all of the mothers impaled themselves on his blade rather than run.
But.
In years with lean winters, in droughts, those same mothers were not trailed by tiny shadows, instead sporting bloody streaks on their jaws where they'd otherwise have held their little ones gently.
To die for something, there must be a purpose.
The faintest hope that their death would save their young had been enough for the warthog to charge a mature ninja fuming killer intent, but there was no fighting starvation.
The young Danzo ruminated on his conclusions.
Hope + love = ninja?
The corners of his lips curled in distaste at the sentiment. He could practically hear Sarutobi saying the sticky sweet sentence without irony.
But power = hope, which made sense. And the love that he needed to extract from his ninjas wasn't the oozing sappy camaraderie Sarutobi championed.
For a ninja to die for Konoha, the love needed to exist outside of the confines of a personal relationship. This love had to be drawn on the singularly human concept of an Us, a theoretical and pure idea that would survive the ravages of time and bad rulers. An unshakeable belief in the goodness and righteousness of Us, and at least the illusion of power that creates the hope that you can contribute to it.
Power + Patriotism = Ninja
That felt more like it.
Now to create it.
A/N: Remember, ninja in Danzo's definition means mindless slave.
and I didn't write "unshakeable belief in the goodness and righteousness of Us" as a pointed thing at us americans or anything but guess the idea's in my head. Seems like there's a lot of unquestioning compliance with figures that have successfully gotten us to believe deeply in a created identity going around.
It's awe-inspiring almost, how one of the most beautiful, astonishing markers of humanity can be twisted into something truly awful.