| Subject: I like this essay so I'm posting it....bitch |
Author:
xander
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Date Posted: 17:57:39 11/02/03 Sun
This is a part of a homework assingment about "Why War?" by Sigmund Freud, so it may not make complete sense, but I think its one of my better essays.
I agree with Freud in the instinctual nature of war, the unavoidability of it, and the dynamics of the Love-Hate instincts in the human psyche. Like him, I believe that war is inevitable. “It seems to be quite a natural thing, to have a good biological basis and in practice to be scarcely avoidable”. I also agree that it can be combated by creating bonds of love between men (“I willingness to engage in war is an effect of the destructive instinct, the most obvious plan will be to bring Eros, its antagonist, into play against it”). War is inevitable so long as people are unequal and hostile, which is to say, always. The only situation in which war could be avoided would be in a perfect communist state in which the populace was drugged, which is not only impossible but also undesirable. War is better than the alternative. However, through education, travel, and improved communications, it is possible to strengthen unity under humanity. A strong, international campaign of love towards one another would reduce violence and war. This, however, is also very unlikely, and would come at a hefty price on everyone’s side. It would also not totally prevent war, because there would still be inequality and hostility.
I believe that there is such a thing as “good”, but then again I’m an idealist and young, and only just developing my cynicism in order to deal with the truths of life. I believe that “good”, like almost everything else that holds importance (that is to say, the intangible concepts that plague existence), is self-assigned. To one man, it is “good” to eat your dead family members because it is less wasteful. To most of us, the concept is repulsive despite its logic. “Good” to an individual, which is the only way it exists, is precisely how their latent scruples deal with the pressures of society and nurture. What is “good” will never be uniform, and so it is useless as a political concept, other than to harness a majority opinion to make a law or wage a war. “Good” is only a personal affair and one of the reasons that world is so confusing is that everyone is acting on their own invisible moral structure.
When people unite to form society, the aggressive instinct is altered, along with everything else human. Aggressiveness is usual transformed into xenophobia or hatred of certain groups or actions. Society cannot destroy the Death Instinct, so it harnesses it to form armies, lynching mobs, or rallies out of the instinct that was originally designed to kill a single individual who opposes you. Society’s distortion of Hate, as well as its distortion of every other emotion, partially failed with disastrous results. Society is not powerful enough to fully pervert our small-scale desire to kill into a healthy appetite for genocide, nor is it efficient enough to convince its populace not to kill eachother. The results include civil wars, idealism, murder, and tank rampages down the streets of LA. In Lord of the Flies, Golding shows the way society harnesses hate. The boys go from a bunch of confused schoolchildren to a lynching mob screaming for blood.
This is who we are, despite whatever misconceptions we may hold. Wonderful, huh?
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