Power being a zero-sum game, that means that the war of all against all will generate people whose needs to conquer and build their empires drives them into conflict with other people likewise driven by the same trauma-induced insistence on dominating.
A related effect of those historical forces that disregard human needs and treat people as of no account is the defensive self-inflation of grandiosity. When the world -- through the cruelties of war and domination (including the demands of power-shaped systems on the young) -- treats our deepest longings as insignificant, some will respond with the narcissistic insistence on asserting the opposite -- i.e. the compensatory image of themselves as superior.
A world where many feel compelled to be in the superior position is not a world where peace can readily be achieved.
History shows how, in these ways, the engines of war can be fueled by people's need to fight in order to deny feelings of weakness and worthlessness inflicted by the struggle for power and its social evolutionary consequences.
2. A second dimension of traumatic injury is the instilling of a desperate need for certainty.
As the traumas inflicted by the force of brokenness lead people to deny their true experience of vulnerability, so also do they drive people to deny their intolerable uncertainty and confusion.
In a safe world, uncertainties might be embraced as mystery. But the more those who peer out into the darkness have experienced the landscape as strewn with traps and land mines, the greater will be their need to feel certain that their maps are reliable. The sense of mystery that, in a more benign world, we might have apprehended with wonder and awe now creeps toward us with terror mounted upon its back.
The experiments of social psychologists show that the greater the stress, the less tolerance for ambiguity. Over thousands of years of civilization, the larger human experiment has demonstrated the same relationship. By condemning civilized peoples to inescapable insecurity, civilization has therefore greatly intensified the temptation to cling to false certainties.
The more one senses that a false step may mean disaster, the more impelled one feels to know with certainty that one is walking on the true path.
Dogma is the child of anxiety.
Differences of beliefs constitute a threat to those whose fears produce a need for certainty. People who see things differently raise the specter that one's own views may not be as completely valid and sufficient as one requires. And so those people, and their beliefs, are experienced as a threat. In a world where diversity of cultures and belief systems has naturally arisen out of history, the intolerance of difference is incompatible with a world at peace.
Thus do the traumatized (broken) fuel the war system by insisting that their truth is God's truth, and anyone who disagrees should be fought as enemies of God.
3. And the third way that the reign of power has inflicted injuries on humankind that, in turn, have fueled the strife in the world concerns the impulse to project onto some enemy those parts of oneself that their society condemns.
Societies shaped by the demands of power will require of people that (to a greater or lesser extent) they become something other than what they, by nature, would wish to become. Thus is the history of civilization marked by the imposition on the developing human young of "moralities" of greater or lesser severity-- moralities that condemn, or at least seek to overcome, people's inborn nature.
The more harshly our culture teaches us to regard our natural desires as evil, the less capable will we be, as growing human beings, to reconcile the warring parts within us. And the greater the need to turn away from that painful inner reality. The more irreconcilable the inner conflicts between inborn human needs and internalized moral demands, the more painful it will be for the members of that society to acknowledge those parts of themselves that society forbids.
To deliver ourselves from the pain of that internal war, to experience ourselves as more whole and harmonious within, we will be tempted to deny our "evil" parts and to identify with the power that has imposed its will upon us in the guise of "moral" authority. But since the sense of evil does not simply disappear, there will also be a need to locate that evil somewhere outside the boundaries of one's self.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
