Our Love Affair With War
Why we so often choose the path of violence
We will get to the new world either through violence or through reflection.
There is a bloodthirst in us. We try to hide it from ourselves, but we can’t deny that stories are not as exciting as those were a lot of people die. Of course, we want to be the heroes, and so we need a villain, but the shadow side to this need to be a hero masks an anger and a thirst for vengeance. We’ve been hurt, and so we want others to hurt as well. We want revenge on this world for all that it has done to us, and because we cannot forgive ourselves, we cannot forgive anyone else. No one else gets to get out of here without going through the same pain we went through. We call it ‘justice’ as a way conceal this twisted spirit of judgment that lives in us, that condemns us. We cannot bear its weight, and so we project it onto others, we find those that we can label ‘evil’ so we don’t have to recognize the evil in ourselves. And we find in this a kind of moral intoxication. We can draw a line between us and them, and we are the good guys. How good it feels to be right. And so we don't want to let judgment go, but we don’t realize that holding on to it is what condemns us.
But there is something else at play here. Something soft and human. Such creatures as we are, we bond in times of crisis. We become alive, the trivialities of life get blown away, in the tortured face of death. This desire to ‘return to terror’ is because, man, from the depths of his unconscious, seeks an ontological confrontation, to confront the real. War is the harbinger of enlightenment, for in that moment of historical timelessness, man transcends himself. Much like a child pulls apart a toy to see what makes it work; our destructive effort is but an unconscious attempt to force life to reveal her secret. But there are other ways to become authentic, other ways to encounter the real. We are not only purified by blood.
