War is ruthless. It brutally confronts our romantic assumptions and, in every sense, deconstructs the nature of our reality. War is an uncomfortable paradox and a systemic and enduring fact. If we are to move beyond the prejudice and naivete about our fond fantasies of who we are, there seems to be no other choice but to face the perpetual conditions which produce the state of war, before it achieves its irreversible and predictable conclusion — unnecessary suffering on a vast scale.

“War itself fosters an impossible collection of opposites: murder, soldierly comradeship, torture, religious conviction, the destruction of the earth, patriotism, annihilation and even hope for immortal glory. Wartime seems to propel life to its most vivid, most meaningful level. Engaged in the activity of destruction, its soldiers and its victims discover a profound sense of existing, of being human. The mind withdraws from this paradox; it staggers at the task of unlocking the baleful, intoxicating and necessary force that is war. Instead, the bare fact that war has dominated human history since the earliest records and seems always ready to break out is ignored, condemned or lamented.” [1]
~James Hillman – A terrible love of war, 2004

War seems to bring the individual’s latent capacity to commit evil and aggressive acts together with the predictable motivation of a political state to pursue its own interests. This then both co-opts and alienates the individual from his shared responsibility in the decision-making process. When an individual allows the state to take over as the ultimate authority in making this decision for him, then his going to war becomes the ultimate exercise in bad faith.

For us to carefully assess these recurrent conditions is of great importance. The gradual build-up to a state of war seems to proceed from our ignorance, dismissal and, finally, deliberate denial of causes that in most cases are self-evident. We need merely to look historically at the correlation between armed conflict and the procurement and control of resources. Whether Jerusalem or crude oil, whether the motivation is heavenly or earthly — all are complicit in the gains and losses that war produces. Legendary heroism awaits the victor, humiliating defeat the vanquished — a cruel illusion that, with rare exceptions, Hollywood is always quick to perpetuate.

For war to have a consistent rationale, the enemy must always be kept in the forefront of our minds. (2) Hillman adds: “The figure of the enemy nourishes the passion of fear, hatred, rage, revenge, destruction, and lust, providing the supercharged strength that makes the battlefield possible.” (3)

However, “soldiers are not killers.” In World War I, one of the most troublesome problems that infantrymen faced with incoming fire was that they wouldn’t return it. In World War II, this problem continued to present itself, and seemed to confirm that even well-trained soldiers have an “unrealized resistance towards killing” (4) which impedes the tactical fulfillment of military objectives.

Combat — or blood-war — is furthermore a contingency based not only on the psychological projection of otherness in the form of The Enemy, but also of the political state using this enmity to create unity. The United States, for example, came into existence partly because the many commonalities and freedoms shared and secured by the Constitution all presupposed a condition of utter disagreement and grievance with the British monarchy from which it was trying to separate.

As Clausewitz wrote: “Politics is the womb in which war develops.” (5) Hillman then later completed this idea, writing: “The enemy is the midwife of war.” (6)

Buddhist psychology adds a penetrating insight to this discussion with its analysis of the way in which Impermanence is at the root of how our sense of self is constituted. The truth of Impermanence is a key foundation of Buddhist Dharma. Impermanence is recognized as a core element of human experience— along with our deep and continuous desire to avoid it. This defense-against-change is, in its turn, an underlying element of the origin of our psychological distress.

Buddhist psychology — like Western phenomenology — states that the sense of self is a composite structure: i.e., it is not a discrete entity existing somewhere exactly locatable inside of us, but rather an ongoing process in a continuous state of flux. This relentless flux demolishes any fantasy that our sense of self is solid, stable, and unchanging. The reality of the self as a shifting, composite structure — in perpetual conflict with our endless effort to establish its permanence — is the engine for our existential anxiety. This is what the Buddha called The Truth of Suffering.

But the individual’s seemingly solid sense of self is not a single, internalized phenomenon independent of the external world in which he finds himself. It is a symbiotic phenomenon occuring in unison and mutual dependence with all the other selves with whom he interacts. We are all in this together, mutually creating this distortion — like it or not. So persistent is the desire to maintain an idealized image of ourselves, and so desperate is our effort to avoid change or any challenge to our internalized self-notions or survival strategies — that it becomes normative to cling to status quo habits of thought, rather than test them. Even if this means war. Indeed, the underlying conflict generated by our mutually distorted and mutually competing versions of self perpetuates an ongoing state of warfare even in peacetime.

Carl Jung concisely noted that:
Even today people are largely unconscious of the fact that every individual is a cell in the structure of various international organisms and is therefore causally implicated in their conflicts. He knows that as an individual being he is more or less meaningless and feels himself the victim of uncontrollable forces, but, on the other hand, he harbors within himself a dangerous shadow and adversary who is involved as an invisible helper in the dark machinations of the political monster. It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else. Nothing has a more divisive and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections.” (7)

War, then, is the ultimate penance paid for this denial, while also being the inevitable conclusion of our obliviousness to its unending presence in our everyday lives. (Or our pretending to be oblivious — bad faith again!) Its penance is “secretly” needed to shore up the relative illusion of security and comfort that our society enjoys, since the blind attempt to annihilate each outside threat also eliminates the necessity for any internal self-reflection or shift in consciousness. Hence civil society is propped up by the sacrifice of the fallen, and the shadow cast by this exchange ends up being carried entirely by those who wear the uniform — whether they are aware of this or not. And new young recruits, in particular, are not. The old can always compel or persuade the young to fight their wars for them. Thus the veteran must always bear the full burden for our abdication of our collective responsibility in the matter, altogether.

It would seem then, that our own internal proclivity to support and sustain an idealized image of ourselves is automatically linked to the larger “machinations of the political monster.” Since nothing is fixed, and since Impermanence is our true condition — which gives the lie to all our illusions of permanence — it therefore requires only a small leap of logic to ascertain that the root causes of our psychological unease are inexorably tied to the root causes of war. We are both individually and collectively liable for our disowned aggression and its corollary unconscious leakage.

The “withdrawal of projections” — as Jung advised — then becomes the ultimate act of defiance, courage, and self-reflection when we find ourselves confronted with the illusory seduction of material security and social status. The revolutionary gesture of being willing to engage with one’s own mind and emotions honestly and without repression — but rather integration — becomes the most radical expression of personal freedom. The end of inner warfare is the first step in bringing about the end of outer warfare.

[1] Hillman, James. A Terrible Love of War.( New York; The Penguin Press, 2004), 1

Thiago Leâo, author: 
Thiago has worked with veterans for the past 2 years. Originally from Brazil, Thiago has experience and exposure to the harsh realities of social inequalities and the correlated violent outcomes they produce. In Thiago’s view, working with veterans has attested to the conclusion that, as a society we generally have a tendency to offset responsibility for that which we don’t see. It stands then, that, that which we don’t see must nevertheless be dealt with. Nowhere does this become as clear, as in the case of war. In short, the brunt of the equation is that the soldier not only has to deal with the psychological and physical brunt of war – they also, whether wanting or not, liking it or not, become the storehouse of our collective ignorance insofar as our impact on the world goes. In essence, a burden no one person should ever carry.