Making a Killing

I've been trying to reason out for a couple of weeks how one comes to judge another nation or culture as an enemy (makes no difference if they had been an ally in the recent past) and decide that they have to be killed. On the surface it goes against every law, religious and state, that says 'thou shalt not kill'. So how do you get there?

Maybe it's because my degrees are in psychology, I've had a lifelong interest in religion and spirituality, and in the last twenty years have been increasingly drawn to sociology, but the only conclusion I can reach is that one hasn't resolved the unacceptable negative parts of oneself, and by projection object to it when the same is seen in others. If one has attained a level of authority or power -- the motivation of which could be the same denial of personal negatives and subsequent attempt to control the world around rather than the world within -- and has at one's disposal some 'army', whether military, professional, or religious, one goes about trying to rid the world of the 'enemy' that is a reminder of the unaccetable inner traits or impulses.

What would the world look like if anyone who expressed any perception of an enemy were not allowed a position of authority? Capitalism would fall, of course, as would most governments. Yet when are we going to reach the point where we stop repeating history and allowing those who see demons to use society's resources to fight their own inner struggles (and in the company of those like them, who all band together), a struggle that can't be won because the focus is external when the fight is internal? At what point do we finally say that such people are not the highest examples to lead us?

Over many years I have increasingly been developing the idea that the greatest revolution in history will be when we stop trying to conquer nature and instead conquer ourselves. Fire, electricity, the wheel, the internal combustion engine, cyberspace...all these have made substantial and irreversible changes for humanity, but they are all external. When do we finally transcend what is within us and holds us back?

The writings that guide us in this direction go back at least four thousand years. There's a lot of resource. There's a lot of wisdom already in existence. Gandhi got closer to turning humankind in that direction than most, but things fell off after he died. What will it take to make it not the passion and mission of a single man (in truth, there are thousands of people at any one time trying to lead us there) but to make it the standard of humanity?

It's one of the reasons I write this blog. Doin' my part.