Why We Love War
(Page 6 of 7)
January / February 2003
By Lawrence LeShan, Adapted from The Psychology of War: Comprehending its Mystique and Madness
This process can’t begin until we acknowledge how easily we shift from sensory reality to mythic reality, especially when international tensions escalate. The point is not to prevent such shifts; all the scientific evidence indicates that they are essential to psychological health. If we encourage the use of alternate realities—as often achieved during meditation, play, listening to or playing music, and so forth—we increase the ability of human beings to reach new potentials. We’re also more likely to become familiar with alternate modes of perceiving reality and know what they portend.
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The ultimate goal is to be able to consciously choose between war and peace, uncontaminated by mythic thinking. The ambitions of a Hitler, a Pol Pot, or a Saddam Hussein may be so bad for the rest of us that declaring war against them is a reasonable and logical decision. But no war will accomplish mythical goals. It will not make the world safe for democracy, nor establish a thousand-year Reich, nor organize a new world order, nor establish the perfect society, nor end war, nor do anything else except solve a particular problem, at a high cost and with unexpected results. And there will be unexpected results.
War has been so common in history that many have assumed it to be part of “human nature” or “inevitable to the socialization process.” All such theories are comforting in that they lessen our guilt by assuming there is nothing we can do. But in fact other social patterns just as widespread as war, and deemed just as intractable, have been abandoned. We’ve only given up slavery in the last 150 years. Under the threat of extinction, and using our new knowledge of the social sciences, we must get rid of war.
The time is now. Every war we fight since 1945 increases the chance that someone will again use the atomic bomb, destroying our civilization and perhaps the species. The day the first bomb was dropped was, in Buckminster Fuller’s words, “The day that humanity started taking its final exam.” We had better pass.
Lawrence LeShan is a research psychologist, educator, and author of more than a dozen books, including The Dilemma of Psychology and How to Meditate. Adapted from The Psychology of War: Comprehending Its Mystique and Its Madness (Helios Press, 2002).
IN DUBIOUS BATTLE
There are startling differences in the ways we perceive reality during wartime compared to peacetime.
PEACETIME | WARTIME |
1. Good and Evil have many shades of gray. Many groups with different ideas and opinions are legitimate. | 1. Good and Evil are reduced to Us and Them. There are no innocent bystanders; there are only those for or those against us. Crucial issues are divided into black and white, and opinions about them are either right or wrong. |
2. Now is pretty much like other times. | 2. Now is different from all other times. Everything hangs in the balance; whoever wins now wins forever. It is the time of the final battle between good and evil. |
3. The great forces of nature, such as God or human evolution, are not often evoked in our disputes. | 3. “God is on Our Side,” “History will absolve us,” and other such slogans indicate our belief that the great cosmic forces are with us. |
4. When this present period is over, things will go on much as they have in the past. | 4. Everything will be vastly different after the war. Things will be better if we win and terribly worse if we lose. Winning or losing will change the meaning of the past and the shape of the future. |
5. There are many problems to be solved and their relative importance varies from day to day. Life is complex. | 5. There is only one major problem to be solved. All others are secondary. Life has one major focus. |
6. All people act from pretty much the same motives. | 6. They act from a wish for power. We act from self-defense, benevolence, and reasons of common decency and morality. |
7. Problems start on different levels—economic, political, or personal—and must be dealt with on these levels. | 7. The real problem started with an act of will by the enemy and can only be solved by breaking his will or by making him helpless to act on it. |
8. We are concerned with what causes the problems we’re trying to solve. | 8. We are not concerned with causes, only with outcomes. |
9. We can talk to those who disagree with us. | 9. Since the enemy is evil, he naturally lies. Communication is not possible. Only force can settle the issue. We tell the truth (news, education). They lie (propaganda). |
10. All people are fundamentally the same. | 10. The same actions are “good” when we do them and “evil” when the enemy does them. There is doubt that “we” and “they” really belong to the same species. |
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