The fundamental problem part 2

The other conversation stopper is of course, war.

Watch Marie Avgeropoulos (as Octavia Blake in The 100) calmly announce from high on her horse: "I'm here for the war." Or Clint Eastwood (as William Munny in Unforgiven): "Now I'm here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you done to my friend." Imagine Sherman's adjutant, as the general quietly stated his simple solution to the recalcitrance of young Confederates: "Kill them. Kill them all."

My mother hated the song, "Eve of Destruction", or she hated the way I loved it in 1965. The lyrics which she couldn't stand seemed to contradict her Episcopalian faith, her optimism that the world was in fact saved two thousand years ago by Christ's death and resurrection. The songwriter P. F. Sloan seemed to argue with the view that everything was fine and the world was getting better, with his lyrics:

You may leave here for four days in space, 

but when you return it's the same old place, 

the pounding of the drums, the pride and disgrace,  

you can bury your dead but don't leave a trace, 

hate your next door neighbor, but don't forget to say grace!

Most of my intelligent suburban neighbors tend to protest that war never makes sense. They can't understand how any reasonable human being can ever allow it, or participate in it or fail to stop it. They implicitly claim immunity from the dark, earliest human ecstacy; and they surely neglect an obvious fact that there is an utterly unreasonable aspect to each and every human being. Of course war makes no sense and cannot be understood. As the movies and song lyrics document, that is precisely its appeal! It's the transcendent assertion of social will, into which, as Nathan Kline wrote, we can "escape from our sweaty selves by dissolving our sense of individual being."

One of my best friends says he could never kill another human being, no matter what. He recognizes that there are people (e.g., child murderers) who do not deserve to live and need killing, but he wants someone else, or some machine, to punish them. He could not pull the switch himself.

My father-in-law was the kindest, most noble man I ever knew. He drove a Higgins boat to the beaches in thirteen Pacific landings against the Japanese, and walked in the dust of Nagasaki. Like many others, he never spoke about the war afterwards, but I know that was not because he didn't remember.

The purveyors of psychedelic solutions expect to be coddled in integrative therapy sessions against the horrors of their own subconscious. The pushers of psychiatric drugs want to pretend their brutal control is really medical help. 

These efforts will all fail, because the world is what it is. Believing you can duck is a dangerous way to live, and drugs are even a bad way to duck.

The only viable strategy is communication: cause, distance, effect, with intention and attention, and a duplication at effect of what emanates from cause. Learning to really communicate is spiritual, and directly opposite to manipulating brains and other machines.

Without learning to really communicate, we might as well just hump on down to the Perfume River with Private Joker singing, "Hey there, hi there, ho there, we're as happy as can be!"