The psychic roots of war

In the critical observation about the world and its conflicts, one can easily find himself lost in the immense complexity of social situations. Personally I have experienced this problem several times, in my activity as a documentary filmmaker and social researcher.

It is true that it's very easy for many people to disregard the difficulty of this task —to understand clearly the situations of the world— because they hold an ideological lens that allows them to remove any doubt and thus obtain some kind of certainty. However, this certainty in knowledge, which simplifies —and falsifies— what is perceived, is a tool denied to any man who values to some degree the principle of intellectual honesty.

For us, social researchers, this frustrating maze of information can become a very discouraging element, not only in terms of our work, but also with regard to those terrible world situations that we investigate on a daily basis. However, I have observed that even people who are far from this research activity often feel this uneasiness, when the contradictions of social conflicts appear in front of them, and then they do not know how to approach these issues with lucidity.

There is no doubt that the lack of certainty can be the origin of a great discomfort for any type of person, all the more so if this confusion arises about important and dangerous problems in which we are involved, and which completely surpass our individual capacities.

I sincerely believe that this is one of the most important psychic forces behind the ideologization demonstrated by so many scholars, who are supposed to strive for objectivity at all times, but fall into the repulsive simplistic tendency of ideologies. It is easier to prejudge the realities we face with unjustified certainty, than to remain questioning them forever.

Nevertheless, my strong interest in philosophy and psychology led me to a sort of deep discovery, which nullified this anxiety in me and gave me great emotional peace. That discovery was simply the fact that our inability to understand reality is caused by our everlasting wandering into a maze of consequences.

Western society is characterized by its constant invitation to focus our attention always on the field of effects, and to strive to find answers for the whole of our lives there. But that road is a blind street because there we could find only the consequences of the human motivations. Beneath that field stands the profound realm of human causes, which very few individuals are willing to explore.

Despite the endless discourse of collectivist ideologies, the fundamental facts that make up every social phenomenon are exclusively individual. As Terence McKenna put it:

Every historical change you can think of, in fact, any change you can think of —forget about human beings—, any change in any system that you can think of is always ultimately traceable to one unit in the system, undergoing a phase state change of some sort. There are no group decisions. Those things come later. The genius of creativity and the initiation of activity always lies with the individual.

For this reason, if we truly wish to understand the human situation, we must turn our attention to individual phenomena, to the psychic layers from which arise all our wars, social transformations and conflicts in our relationships.

Jiddu Krishnamurti clearly understood this fact, when he assured that the human crisis is, in reality, an inner psychological crisis, but that people are not willing to face this fact.