What's So Great About War?

Think about your two selves - give peace a chance.

"It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we would grow too fond of it."

--Robert E. Lee

We might want to ask ourselves: what is so great about war? The answer might scare us.

In a long life of observing one war after another, endlessly occurring, there is one disturbing thing I've noticed.

People love it. 

They love the thrill of watching it on TV, of hearing it discussed on the radio, and of talking about it with their friends.

They love war.

I loathe it, but I don't think I'm wrong about this: most people love it. It's the shame of the human race.

Erasmus said that war is exciting for people who have never experienced it, so maybe that's a qualifier that needs to be added here. If your family and friends are killed or mauled, if your home is burned to a cinder, if your wife or sister or daughter is raped, then you might change your tune.

What is going on inside our heads that we constantly engage in war? One generation after another engages in it. We make dishonest movies and books and TV shows about the glory of it, and suppress art and information that excoriates it.

There's a conclusion that can be drawn from that: war takes place inside our heads.

The human mind is a wondrous thing with hidden horrors. When it's excited, when we hear a gorgeous piece of music or see a great painting or fall in love, our bodies react with excitement. An excited mind makes the body feel pleasant things.

So to make the mind and body react positively to war, we turn it into a beautiful thing.

It's heroic, it brings out the best in mankind, it saves us from the evil other, it teaches us courage and honor and self-sacrifice.

The ancient Greeks said that all good things come of war.

Nonsense.

As Erasmus said, it's exciting until we experience it.

It's the job of propaganda to make us believe war is a good thing. All the excitement the human mind can experience is called up by the propagandists of Madison Avenue or the politicians in various world capitals, and naïve friends who are stimulated by the prospect of war.

It's created stupidity made by the unscrupulous who understand how to make people believe in ridiculous things.

Voltaire said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

But don't we have the common sense and intelligence to see this when a despot wants you to kill for him? All that's in it for you and yours is pain and suffering, while he profits in power.

In all my long life, I've seen people disregard what war is time and again in their excitement.

The young fall for it all the time, simply because they're blank slates filling up with information while their fully functioning intelligences are led astray. It is the habit of sophisticated and unscrupulous humans to take advantage of the young for their own ends.

But even that doesn't fully explain it. It doesn't fully explain why people are so fond of war.

A year before Adolph Hitler killed himself, the great psychologist Carl Jung predicted that he would commit suicide. Jung believed we have two sides to us, all of us. Simply put, there is the real self and the shadow self. One or the other can predominate. The shadow self is something we create in our minds after suffering trauma or disaster and it allows us to live after such things have happened to us. With the shadow self, we believe ourselves better than we are, that we a noble creatures always trying to do the right thing, despite the failures of our lives. Then someone comes along while we are vulnerable and tells us we are wonderful if we destroy what he tells us is bad. The enemy is bad and we are good.

How big of an idiot are you?

Philosophers, priests, politicians and psychologists have long understood that human beings have several sides and that one side or the other can be watered with false or true information to create the kind of plant they wish that person to be.

Sometimes it just happens naturally.

Jung thought the shadow self had completely taken over Hitler's mind and personality. He was far more a shadow self than a real self. Perhaps he had experienced the horrors of World War I too deeply, having seen his beloved nation fall, having been wounded and having suffered hysterical blindness from all his trials. Trauma had destroyed his real self because the real self was nothing but pain.

His shadow self was that great and good savior of his country, so he killed everything in his path to make sure his horrible shadow self triumphed, because that was the ultimate good, to avoid trauma was the ultimate goal. Everyone else was a sub-human preventing the triumph of his shadow self. They were shadows that didn't matter.

His real self had shrunk to the size of an atom. It no longer held any sway over him. When the impossible happened and his great and good shadow self lost the war, he had to murder his real self to prove his shadow self was correct in killing millions and destroying much of Europe. He couldn't tolerate his shadow self being wrong, he couldn't tolerate the pain of reality, despite the obvious.

It's the same way today. Our shadow selves play off against each other in politics, religion and war.

Our real selves are reduced to atoms.

Why else would Putin invade Ukraine?

So the next time you get excited about war, think of a bullet flying directly toward your forehead.

Who is that bullet going to kill, your shadow self or your real self?