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Old 03-8-2007, 03:27 PM   #1
coberst
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Default Why we all love war

Why we all love war.

It is human nature to constantly seek “fuel for one’s own aggrandizement and immunity”. Otto Rank says “The death fear of the ego is lessoned by the killing of the other; one buys one’s self free from the penalty of dying, of being killed”. Is there any surprise then to discover that human kind is constantly engaged in war?

The ego can consign others to death without a ‘second thought’, when such will provide a sense of personal security. This is why war comes so naturally for sapiens. Considering the fact that we now have the WMDs to destroy all citizens in one single cataclysm, is there any doubt regarding the necessity that humans begin quickly a process of self-learning in order to comprehend our nature so as to possibly prevent this logical fate?

The price of our natural animal narcissism is that we will, when pressured, willingly sacrifice another in our place; with one very remarkable exception; the exception to this rule is, of course, the hero. Heroism is an amazing reversal of the rule of routine values. Heroism is another thing that makes war so wonderful and uplifting. War has become modern wo/man’s ritual for the emergence of heroes. We launch our self into uncritical hero worship as a catharsis of own fears.

“The logic of Scapegoating, then, is based on animal narcissism and hidden fear. If luck, as Aristotle said, is when the arrow hits the fellow next to you, then Scapegoating is pushing the fellow into its path—with special alacrity if he is a stranger to you.

The logic contained in killing others in order to protect our own life makes clear anything that may puzzle us regarding the frequency of war in human history. When I kill an enemy and thereby affirm the power of my life, then, certainly the staging of massive life-and-death struggles affirms our whole society. The outsider ponders known incidents when the mob delighted in watching the prolonged death of someone; we need not ponder if we comprehend sapiens’ drive to survive. “They are weak and die; we are strong and live.” “My God is stronger than your God”.

The Nazis provide an example of this phenomenon. The dedicated themselves to the ‘final solution’, to large scale sacrifices of human life after 1941 when it was becoming evident that they were losing. The Jews were singled out as the scapegoat for the economic and political woes of Germany in the mid twentieth century.

Many of the quotes are from “Escape from Evil”—Ernest Becker
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Old 03-8-2007, 03:36 PM   #2
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Default Re: Why we all love war

Wait; So hero worship is the outsourcing of our fear of death to another in a positive manner, and scapegoating the the outsourcing of our fear of death to another in a negative manner?

Psychology can be retarded.

Not having killed anyone, I can't confirm the validity of this line of reasoning, but it belongs to a series of perspectives which are certainly quite intriguing even if a bit outdated.
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Old 03-8-2007, 04:41 PM   #3
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Default Re: Why we all love war

what chapter are we on now? how many more are there to go?
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Old 03-8-2007, 05:23 PM   #4
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Default Re: Why we all love war

sherbtail

Ernest Becker has woven a great tapestry, which represents his answer to the question ‘what are we humans doing, why are we doing it, and how can we do it better?’

Becker has written four books “Beyond Alienation”, “Escape from Evil”, “Denial of Death”, and “The Birth and Death of Meaning”; all of which are essential components of his tapestry. Ernest Becker (1924-1974), a distinguished social theorist, popular teacher of anthropology and sociology psychology, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for the “Denial of Death”.

Many weeks ago a forum member suggested that I might be interested in the author Ernest Becker and I was given the following web site.
http://faculty.washington.edu/nelgee...lomonsound.htm This is a great one hour audio about Becker’s ideas given by a very good lecturer.

Becker provides the reader with a broad and comprehensible synopsis of the accomplishments of the sciences of anthropology, psychology, sociology, and psychiatry. Knowledge of these accomplishments provides the modern reader with the means for the comprehension of why humans do as they do.

Becker declares that these sciences prove that humans are not genetically driven to be the evil creatures that the reader of history might conclude them to be. We humans are victims of the societies that we create in our effort to flee the anxiety of death. We have created artificial meanings that were designed to hide our anxieties from our self; in this effort we have managed to create an evil far surpassing any that our natural animal nature could cause.

Becker summarizes this synoptic journey of discovery with a suggested solution, which if we were to change the curriculums in our colleges and universities we could develop a citizenry with the necessary understanding to restructure our society in a manner less destructive and more in tune with our human nature.

The only disagreement I have with Becker’s tapestry is in this solution he offers. I am convinced that he has failed to elaborate on an important step that is implied in his work but not given sufficient emphasis. That step is one wherein the general adult population takes up the responsibility that citizens of a democracy must take on; adults must develop a hobby “get a life—get an intellectual life”. In other words, it will be necessary that a significant share of the general population first comprehend these matters sufficiently to recognize the need for the proposed changes to our colleges and universities.
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Old 03-8-2007, 05:25 PM   #5
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Default Re: Why we all love war

You've posted that exact same thing before, and it isn't exactly relevent here.

Hey coberst, what is a turing test?
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Old 03-8-2007, 05:46 PM   #6
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Default Re: Why we all love war

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kilroy_x View Post
You've posted that exact same thing before, and it isn't exactly relevent here.

Hey coberst, what is a turing test?
Wow, now I get why some of his responses have so many pronouns,
they are pre-typed also.
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Old 03-9-2007, 03:27 AM   #7
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Default Re: Why we all love war

The question is why do we behave in the manner that we do? We have the sciences of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and psychiatry to study such things and to acquire a comprehension of such matters. We do not ‘see’ what is going on all around us because we have lived in the middle of such behavior all of our lives. We can ‘see’ only what we are prepared to ‘see’.

Some wise person said “know thyself”. We have no way of knowing our self until we begin to study what these sciences have learned and can tell us. If we wish to follow the wise admonition “know thyself” we will begin the process of learning about the findings of these sciences.

I think that one of the steps in the process of self-actualization is to read what the best thinkers have to say about their comprehension of human nature.
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Old 03-9-2007, 03:40 AM   #8
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Default Re: Why we all love war

Quote:
Originally Posted by RandomPscho View Post
Wow, now I get why some of his responses have so many pronouns,
they are pre-typed also.
I sent him a PM a long time ago asking him why all of his posts are copy pastes, and I got no response.

Notice: the quotation marks and apostrophes he uses are dead give aways that they were written in another location in which the those marks are curved.
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Old 03-9-2007, 05:29 AM   #9
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Default Re: Why we all love war

*cough*
http://foolmoon.com/showflat.php?Cat...rue#Post371514
http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=63917
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...ue#Post9489590

And I'm sure he posted the same thread on more than 20 forums.

He post each of his thread on all the "critical thinking" and "philosophy" forum he knows, and he always answer the same thing when someone post a message on his thread.

I'm SURE it's a bot.

(http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search)
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Old 03-9-2007, 07:01 AM   #10
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Default Re: Why we all love war

Kiro

I think that you are a double bot. You are a bot squared.
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Old 03-9-2007, 12:44 PM   #11
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Default Re: Why we all love war

Quote:
Originally Posted by coberst View Post
Kiro

I think that you are a double bot. You are a bot squared.
lol.
Can't you just say "Nope I'm not a bot" instead of saying that? Oh and... 1˛ isn't 1x2.
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Old 03-9-2007, 01:31 PM   #12
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Default Re: Why we all love war

Quote:
Originally Posted by coberst View Post
The question is why do we behave in the manner that we do? We have the sciences of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and psychiatry to study such things and to acquire a comprehension of such matters. We do not ‘see’ what is going on all around us because we have lived in the middle of such behavior all of our lives. We can ‘see’ only what we are prepared to ‘see’.

Some wise person said “know thyself”. We have no way of knowing our self until we begin to study what these sciences have learned and can tell us. If we wish to follow the wise admonition “know thyself” we will begin the process of learning about the findings of these sciences.

I think that one of the steps in the process of self-actualization is to read what the best thinkers have to say about their comprehension of human nature.
You don't 'see' what's going around you because you scarf down all these soft science articles without understanding what it is behind them. What you're doing is grappling for permanence in a completely impermanent, meaningless world. ..

"The price of our natural animal narcissism is that we will, when pressured, willingly sacrifice another in our place; with one very remarkable exception; the exception to this rule is, of course, the hero. Heroism is an amazing reversal of the rule of routine values. Heroism is another thing that makes war so wonderful and uplifting. War has become modern wo/man’s ritual for the emergence of heroes. We launch our self into uncritical hero worship as a catharsis of own fears."

Oh, we will sacrifice others in our own place when pressured? I'm glad Becker can now extrapolate a subset of western philosophy and universalize it to being fundamental to the human condition. Becker isn't uncovering anything about humanity; he's locked down in irrelevant minutia while telescopically trying to address the entire system of human existence. If you want to look for meaning behind the human condition; the place you will ultimately end up is that meaning is meaningless.

Humans have been trying to trace and justify their existence ever since they became self aware. If you want evidence of where we've wound up, just play the why game with someone: The next time someone makes a claim, keep asking "why?" until you/they see what's going on: You can make a claim, then each claim is filled with subclaims that are each defined by subclaims and so forth. Ultimately, you get in this infinite crawl where you try to trace your reasoning back to some kind of axiom that is just inherently true. The problem is that you never get there. This is what set theory is doing in mathematics; This is what cognitive sciences are converging upon with neural nets; this is what Buddhism is talking about with emptiness; this is what postmodernism is talking about with epistemology: Any kind of analysis of meaning ends up in an infinite crawl where you either try to break things down forever or build them up forever.

Humans have a hard time coping with the infinite. Because our computational power is limited, it is easy for us to imagine things as being independent or inherent. When we generate a random number on our computer, we conventionally accept that it is random. We don't stop to think that the number is based on a series of deterministic events such as grabbing the clock timer and seeding a chaotic equation with it. Because we can only see the infinite climb/crawl structure so far in our heads, we designate everything at the lowest/highest level (depending on which way we're moving) to be axiomatic and thus inherently true. This is what Becker has done in your post; he's made claims about the human condition while the axioms set in his system draw back only to earlier western philosophy. He is trying to uncover humanness by examining a tiny subset of human history with very lofty assumptions about what is innate to humans; he's allowed himself too much infrastructure to give meaning to very meaningless things.

You are examining sciences that rely upon all this infrastructure. If you are truly interested in the philosophies of epistemology I think you need to look at places which examine the structure of meaning itself, not ones that try to climb or crawl inside the system. Quit looking at places like sociology and psychology for your answers; they are very muddled inside this structure. Look at places like Buddhism, formal logic, postmodernism, and metamathematics; these are places that are concerned with the nature of the structure as a whole, and these are the places where you will make much more resounding epiphanies.
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Old 03-14-2007, 12:36 AM   #13
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Default Re: Why we all love war

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kiro51 View Post
lol.
Can't you just say "Nope I'm not a bot" instead of saying that? Oh and... 1˛ isn't 1x2.
or 2 bots...
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Old 04-1-2007, 12:04 AM   #14
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Default Re: Why we all love war

we need war because of this

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