“victories and defeats cancel one another”
You may not be interested in war, but it is interested in you.
Leon Trotsky
What is it about war that holds our attention and makes heroes of our soldiers?
“Whether the resurgence of China [2017] will mean tragedy in the form of armed conflict will depend on how China, China’s neighbors and the United States understand and manage the deeper motivations and structural forces in play.”[i] The structural forces in play are worldview, identity, and whether our behavior is a response or a reaction. Alas, we doubt if any of these are on the radar of the U.S. State Department or Defense Department.
Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine (2017) is about his experience working at the highest levels of nuclear planning at the Rand Corporation. He tried to get his book published since 1975 but no one was interested despite the fact that it revealed an accidental or intentional nuclear holocaust could happen killing nearly every human alive. In an interview he was asked: “You’re warning people that human civilization itself is at risk, and so many people don’t seem to be concerned. Does it ever make you feel as if you’re the crazy one? [He replied] ‘No, it makes me feel that I’m living in a country in a very intense state of denial.’”[ii]
Seth sees violence and war differently than most: “Violence is not aggressive. It is instead a passive surrender to emotion which is not understood or evaluated, only feared, and at the same time sought. Violence is basically an overwhelming surrender, and in all violence there is a great degree of suicidal emotion, the antithesis of creativity. Both killer and victim in a war, for instance, are caught up in the same kind of passion, but the passion is not aggressive. It is the opposite—the desire for destruction.”[iii]
Heidi Julavits is concerned for her children who face challenges in their future. “Nuclear war was avoidable (or so I optimistically chose to believe), but what they will encounter as adults is not. Their interior landscapes, thus, are the only landscapes that may not end in ruin. Those are the only landscapes over which they may have any control.”[iv]
Simple Reality is all about our “interior landscape” with a focus on compassion, awareness, response vs reaction, Self-reliance and so much more.
Insight # 92 comes to us from Will Durant (1885-1981) an American historian and philosopher best known for his work The Story of Civilization, co-written with his wife Ariel Durant (1913-1981).
“Though there is drama in the details of strife, there is a dreary eternity in its causes and results; such history becomes a menial attendance upon the vicissitudes of power, in which victories and defeats cancel one another into a resounding zero.”[v]
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Additional Reading:
- War, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
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[i] Shapiro, Judith. “China’s World.” The New York Times Book Review. June 18, 2017, p. 20.
[ii] Amira, Dan. “Daniel Ellsberg Thinks We’re In Denial about Nuclear War.” The New York Times Magazine. February 11, 2018, p. 54.
[iii] Roberts, Jane. The Nature of Personal Reality. New York: Bantam, 1974, p. 210.
[iv] Julavits, Heidi. “The Art at the End of the World.” The New York Times Magazine. July 9, 2017, p. 48.
[v] Durant, Will. The Life of Greece. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939, p. 587.
