[lit-ideas] Re: War, no sort of about it

  • From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 08:45:10 -0400

This is a variation on my sheep hypothesis.  Rational thought is
subordinate to emotion and mob tendencies, as good a definition of stupid,
or of evil, as I've seen.  Apes with talent having a little intellectual
fun in between killing each other.  Philosophy is pointless except in a
crossword puzzle distraction sort of way.  I've said all along that people
are inherently evil, but I tempered my beliefs by agreeing with Richard K
that humans have an added dimension, one of unconscious motivation.  Now
you're telling me that there is only evil.  Even if history bears you out,
I like the denial better.  Brother Philbert, are you listening?  Are you as
depressed as I am?  Religion is vindicated.  Crabs and sheep can't stop
themselves from being bad without the thought that Father is going to come
home and beat the living daylights out of them.  And they're bad anyway,
that's how evil they are.  Oh, I am so depressed.


Andy Amago




> [Original Message]
> From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 8/12/2005 4:27:03 PM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: War, sort of
>
> Andy: The more advance we get, the more advanced our killing 
> machines get.  Are we, Kimo Sabe, that stupid?  How do you explain it?
>
> Eric: There have been many attempts to explain it--Norman O. Brown's 
> book previously cited, Erich Fromm's _Anatomy of Human 
> Destructiveness_, even Arthur Koestler's _Ghost in the Machine_.
>
> Koestler's argument is interesting. Ever experience the "rush" of 
> being in a football, baseball, or soccer stadium? Koestler compares 
> this to war, in that our "horse brains" dominate our neocortex, the 
> social/emotional dominates the rational. It's part of our dual 
> natures, according to Koestler. We are simultaneously individuals 
> and part of a group--just as words are individual entities and also 
> part of a sentence. It's how our nervous system evolved, layer upon 
> layer rather than de novo.
>
> Personally I find all these psychoanalytic explanations interesting 
> but ultimately useless. We are more like crabs in a shallow bucket. 
> When one crab tries to climb over and escape the bucket, the other 
> crabs will pull it back in. The primitive restrains the more 
> sophisticated. The trapped restrains the free.
>
> In other words, all it takes is one aggressor army to force all 
> nations to have armies. If you see the smokestacks of an 
> extermination camp over the border, you see a need to defend your 
> side of the border at least, and perhaps even go over the border to 
> make those smokestacks cease.
>
> One thing you can say for the dictatorship of global capitalism--by 
> attempting to create a purely mercantile world with a uniform global 
> business culture, it is working to create nations that all see war 
> as being bad for business. Whether that leads to a new kind of 
> oppression remains to be seen.
>
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