Is violence part of human nature? Can we ever prevent wars? These were the questions Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud discussed in 1932 and 1933. I learnt about this communication between these intellectual giants of the 20th century in an article on the effects of violence and wars on children. The source is https://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/273/documents/FreudEinstein.pdf.
We need to re-read this dialogue, think about them and most important act on them – to do what each of us can do to reduce violence (elimination is impossible) and protect our children from the trauma inflicted on them throughout their lives.
The most important point for me from this dialogue was in Freud’s letter. He suggests that one way to bring peace is to develop the “tend-befriend” system, which is already part of our nervous system, through love and identifying with other lives. This is what Buddha and Jesus taught long ago.
The other point is what Vedic religion and Buddhism taught. It is to reflect on oneself, “purify” the mind so thoughts, words and deeds align towards peace and harmony.
Here are some profound observations from those communications between one scientist who studied the mind and another who studied the universe.
Einstein’s comments: “Political
leaders or governments owe their power either to the use of force or to their
election by the masses. They cannot be regarded as representative of the
superior moral or intellectual elements in a nation.”
“Is there any way of delivering
mankind from the menace of war? It is common knowledge that, with the advance
of modern science, this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death for
Civilization as we know it…”
In this conversation, Einstein requests
Freud to come up with some ideas to educate the people outside of politics to
remove obstacles to bring about peace based on his research on the instincts of
human beings. He proposes establishing an international legislative judicial
body to settle conflicts between nations with an authority to impose them. He
recognizes immediately that this is unlikely to happen. People in power will
never agree to limitation of the sovereignty of their nation. “But at present
we are far from possessing any supranational organization competent to render
verdicts of incontestable authority and enforce absolute submission to the
execution of its verdicts.” He goes on
to say: “The quest of international security involves the unconditional
surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of action--its
sovereignty that is to say--and it is clear beyond all doubt that no other road
can lead to such security.”
Einstein wonders why people get so
aroused that they sacrifice their own lives and kill innocent people. “Does
humans have such lust for hatred and destruction?” He asks: “Is it possible to
control man's mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychosis of
hate and destructiveness?”
Freud answered Einstein as follows.
He acknowledges that this subject must be the province of politicians and
political scientists and not of a physicist and a psychologist. Freud realizes
that Einstein is asking for help and support to answer this question as a
“lover of fellow men” and that he is not asking Freud to “formulate a practical
proposal but, rather, to explain how this question of preventing wars strikes a
psychologist.”
Freud starts by saying that war
defines the relationship between “right and might” and quickly replaces the
word violence for might. Generally, conflicts of interests are resolved by
resorting to violence in animal kingdom and in human societies. In animals it
is for territory and food. In humans, an added factor is conflicts in opinion. In
small communities, group force help decide disputes on ownership and whose
right prevailed. Soon disputes were settled with physical force; initially with
crude instruments and then with more powerful ones. The defeated was totally
crushed or humiliated. Sometimes, life was spared, and the victim was used for
labor. If the vanquished were allowed to live, there was always the danger of them
coming back for vengeance.
It started with brute force,
violence backed by arms. It changed over the course of time from violence to
law because people realized that “the superiority of one strong man can
be overborne by an alliance of many
weaklings”; “the allied might of scattered units makes good its right against
the isolated giant.” In other words, the majority lacking (losing) individual
might, establishes its rights in the form of laws of the community. “Thus we
may define law as the might of a community.” However, when anything was on its
way, it too used the same method – violence. It was now communal violence, not
individual violence.
But for the law to survive there
has to be union of the majority, which is permanent, stable and well-organized.
The law has to be enforced for the interest of the community. Such a state is
difficult to maintain just by the nature of “elements of unequal power, men and
women, elders and children, and, very soon, as a result of war and conquest,
victors and the vanquished--i.e., masters and slaves--as well. From this time
on, the common law takes notice of these inequalities of power, laws are made
by and for the rulers, giving the servile classes fewer rights.” (To be continued)
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