In this modern age, with so much knowledge available and communicated, we tend to think we know our own minds. We focus on the rational, that is, goals to be accomplished and ways to reach them. We use moral and legal rules to control the unconscious wherein reside primeval instincts, drives and desires. We think we have skirted the unconscious, but we have not, even after bringing much to our conscious attention.
We still have largely unconscious desires for power, sex, domination, cruelty and destruction. These include self-destruction and self-sacrifice. We still have strong unconscious desires for security and fears of insecurity. The State’s monopoly of legalized violence intentionally concentrates some of these desires as a means to protection and security of the group or nation. The State represents in group form certain unconscious desires that each of us possesses.
Leaders rise up or are elected or seize power with the conscious goal of providing security. Power is purposely focused in their hands. Limiting this power is very difficult. The extension of the State’s power comes naturally because domination and destruction are both ends and means to achieve what the unconscious demands. The more aggressive among us tend to gain the most influence because they appeal to the unconscious desires of all of us and because the State is designed to fulfill those desires and make them come true. The peacemakers and advocates of non-aggression are always on the defensive. Only when wars break out and the high costs of the security are felt broadly may peace become a more viable option. The world’s pattern is intermittent war and peace. We have found no way yet to control the unconscious or to live without a State that veers between war and peace.
When war breaks out, there is frequently wild enthusiasm of the public. Men sign up to go to war. Heroes are lauded. What is this but an expression of the unconscious?
To quite a large extent, the moral and the legal suppress the unconscious, but they are never enough, either within a given nation or among nations. The idea of non-aggression is highly worthy and has been embodied in international treaty and law at times. Yet aggression persists. The State itself is taking what each of us has inside us and amplifying it. The State has long periods where it acts hand and glove with the worst of our unconscious drives and desires, not against them. Civil wars are wars of domination, as bloody as wars to conquer foreign nations.
10:16 am on March 29, 2018
