It's Christmas. My son has given me a copy of Chris Hedges' book. A book whose premise is that, as a species, we don't sincerely desire peace on earth. That's boring.
In fact, Hedges cites a calculation by the historian Will Durant ". . . that there have only been twenty-nine years in all of human history during which a war was not underway somewhere." While I cannot cite an academic to verify it, I would wager that almost every human who has lived and not experienced war is thankful to have been spared.
Though, as Hedges contends, most of us are susceptible to the allure of the concept of war as a unifying mission. What I don't see explicitly identified in the opening Introduction is the idea that our susceptibility arises from the basic desire to belong in order to defend ourselves. We are vulnerable individual beings who find our odds of survival enhanced through banding together. Once bound together, we view other groups as threats to our group . . . and they are.
However, it's usually a very few people within any group that instigate fear and action (e.g. war) in response to that threat. These individuals have a myriad of reasons for doing so, from ego satisfaction, economic gratification, or simply garden variety sociopathic lunacy. Hedges identifies this fact in his opening chapter, when he observes that our era's wars " . . . are manufactured . . . (and) run by gangsters, who rise up from the bottom of their own societies and terrorize all, including those they purport to protect."
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