27
Aug
2010
Rambo on War; Wisdom on Peace
Rambo and Stallone on War
Wisdom on Peace
“Old men start wars. Young men fight them. And everyone in the middle gets killed. War is natural. Peace is accidental. We’re animals.” This piece plays Stallone’s Rambo off the quite different view of war held by Chris Hedges and Jonathan Schell, two authors who believe that that “wisdom is better than weapons of war.”
Read the article here
I believe Stallone is correct in his assessment that humans, collectively, are inherently violent. Humans have always, and forever will, in my opinion, organize into defined social groups and absorb or attack rival groups, primarily over access to resources. Behaviorally, we are much more like wolves than we are like mountain gorillas. Psychologists have long written about “herd instinct” in human beings but the term is silly. Substitute the words “pack instinct” or “pack consciousness,” since humans are predators, and history actually makes sense.
At the same time, succumbing to the violence inside all of us is self destructive. I believe god gave man the ability to transcend this “wolfish” natural state . . . to be “better” than the role evolution would have us play. But only individuals can do this, not groups of individuals, which is a lesson that screams from the pages of “Moral Man and Immoral Society.”