Why we all love war

Why we all love war.

It is human nature to constantly seek “fuel for one’s own aggrandizement and immunity”. Otto Rank says “The death fear of the ego is lessoned by the killing of the other; one buys one’s self free from the penalty of dying, of being killed”. Is there any surprise then to discover that human kind is constantly engaged in war?

The ego can consign others to death without a ‘second thought’, when such will provide a sense of personal security. This is why war comes so naturally for sapiens. Considering the fact that we now have the WMDs to destroy all citizens in one single cataclysm, is there any doubt regarding the necessity that humans begin quickly a process of self-learning in order to comprehend our nature so as to possibly prevent this logical fate?

The price of our natural animal narcissism is that we will, when pressured, willingly sacrifice another in our place; with one very remarkable exception; the exception to this rule is, of course, the hero. Heroism is an amazing reversal of the rule of routine values. Heroism is another thing that makes war so wonderful and uplifting. War has become modern wo/man’s ritual for the emergence of heroes. We launch our self into uncritical hero worship as a catharsis of own fears.

“The logic of Scapegoating, then, is based on animal narcissism and hidden fear. If luck, as Aristotle said, is when the arrow hits the fellow next to you, then Scapegoating is pushing the fellow into its path—with special alacrity if he is a stranger to you.

The logic contained in killing others in order to protect our own life makes clear anything that may puzzle us regarding the frequency of war in human history. When I kill an enemy and thereby affirm the power of my life, then, certainly the staging of massive life-and-death struggles affirms our whole society. The outsider ponders known incidents when the mob delighted in watching the prolonged death of someone; we need not ponder if we comprehend sapiens’ drive to survive. “They are weak and die; we are strong and live.” “My God is stronger than your God”.

The Nazis provide an example of this phenomenon. The dedicated themselves to the ‘final solution’, to large scale sacrifices of human life after 1941 when it was becoming evident that they were losing. The Jews were singled out as the scapegoat for the economic and political woes of Germany in the mid twentieth century.

Many of the quotes are from “Escape from Evil”—Ernest Becker

Hi Chuck. Read WAR and MOM and WAR and PEACE. Also in case you missed it I want you to know I responded to you plea for help in understanding Becker’s aesthetic experience.

War
Does not have a logical reason.

War is not reason.

But, the causition of “War” between one body and another, in a species, is a mix of genetic and social factors. Not many species kill their own kind, as it’s evolutionarilly-unsound. #-o

There has never been a single “Reason”, though.

Got sophistry?

It’s moreso a matter of raw chemical “imbalance” in the brain… It’s not like some kind of logical sequence, dude…

DEB

Sorry I missed that response. I have made a copy of your response and will study it and reply today a bit later.

Dan

The science of psychology and psychoanalysis does disagree with your assumption.

Ernest Becker has woven a great tapestry, which represents his answer to the question ‘what are we humans doing, why are we doing it, and how can we do it better?’

Becker has written four books “Beyond Alienation”, “Escape from Evil”, “Denial of Death”, and “The Birth and Death of Meaning”; all of which are essential components of his tapestry. Ernest Becker (1924-1974), a distinguished social theorist, popular teacher of anthropology and sociology psychology, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for the “Denial of Death”.

Many weeks ago a forum member suggested that I might be interested in the author Ernest Becker and I was given the following web site.
faculty.washington.edu/nelgee/hi … nsound.htm This is a great one hour audio about Becker’s ideas given by a very good lecturer.

Becker provides the reader with a broad and comprehensible synopsis of the accomplishments of the sciences of anthropology, psychology, sociology, and psychiatry. Knowledge of these accomplishments provides the modern reader with the means for the comprehension of why humans do as they do.

Becker declares that these sciences prove that humans are not genetically driven to be the evil creatures that the reader of history might conclude them to be. We humans are victims of the societies that we create in our effort to flee the anxiety of death. We have created artificial meanings that were designed to hide our anxieties from our self; in this effort we have managed to create an evil far surpassing any that our natural animal nature could cause.

Becker summarizes this synoptic journey of discovery with a suggested solution, which if we were to change the curriculums in our colleges and universities we could develop a citizenry with the necessary understanding to restructure our society in a manner less destructive and more in tune with our human nature.

The only disagreement I have with Becker’s tapestry is in this solution he offers. I am convinced that he has failed to elaborate on an important step that is implied in his work but not given sufficient emphasis. That step is one wherein the general adult population takes up the responsibility that citizens of a democracy must take on; adults must develop a hobby “get a life—get an intellectual life”. In other words, it will be necessary that a significant share of the general population first comprehend these matters sufficiently to recognize the need for the proposed changes to our colleges and universities.

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I dont know wether the premise of another dying in our place is entirely viable in to days world. I would suggest that in part it is true when taken to the extreme ie when all else fails then the last resort would be to take anothers life for example iraq. All other means to restrict the behaviour that was unacceptable (in the governments eyes) had failed and so the last resort to them was war and the death of the opposition. For the most part though it is far from the first resort and I would suggest that as a society we are trying to move away from that behaviour.