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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