Solitude and Hope: Y'all Come Visit!

The thoughts involved my last the few postings have somehow led my thinking to this question: Why War? This reminded me of the letters between Freud and Einstein investigating the nature of war, thus hoping (although not optimistically) that we might find the means to prevent.

The letters were published as a very limited edition monograph (2,000 copies), entitled Why War? Careful readers of the Freud letters contained within that monograph will especially note that Freud conceptualized his professional identity here as a psychologist, rather than as a psychoanalyst.

I find the conclusion of the correspondences to be extremely striking. Specifically, the conclusion of their investigation into the causes of war was that its root lay in psychosis, and that war is a clear example of collective psychosis:

Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction. In normal times this passion exists in a latent state, it emerges only in unusual circumstances; but it is a comparatively easy task to call it into play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis. Here lies, perhaps, the crux of all the complex factors we are considering, an enigma that only the expert in the lore of human instincts can resolve.

And so we come to our last question. Is it possible to control man's mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness?