MENTALITY

The young child knows that life is wonderful, fascinating and no struggle at all. If society did not think it duty to set every child straight about struggle, there would be no war. Still we know in our bones if we don't warn our children of every danger they might face, we have not prepared them for survival or life. It is a very vicious cycle indeed.The war mentality springs from the core belief that life is a struggle. That core belief is successfully passed from each generation to the next.

War damages the fabric of civilization not by the destruction it causes (the net effect of a war may even be to increase the productive capacity of the world as a whole), nor even by the slaughter of human beings, but by stimulating hatred and dishonesty.

By shooting at your enemy you are not in the deepest sense wronging him. But by hating him, by inventing lies about him and bringing children up to believe them, by clamouring for unjust peace terms which make further wars inevitable, you are striking not at one perishable generation, but at humanity itself.

People naturally move toward pleasure and away from pain. We learn both pain and pleasure at a very early age. We are taught that pleasure can easily lead to pain, such as when we disobey authority in our pursuit of pleasure and receive punishment. Pleasure and pain become tools to shape our behaviors and our core beliefs.

Without the exchange of thoughts or ideas, and without a clearly articulated analysis of narrative self-image, all individual and collective identity constructs will be forced towards their worst possible historical variants. In retrospect, this compensatory mechanism of politics has been disastrous. In the public sphere, one experiences the lack of clear concepts of democracy or constitutional patriotism. "Literate" systems of culture traditionally provide the models for the construction of collective identity

The truly evil thing is to act in such a way that peaceful life becomes impossible.
why are people so easily persuaded that war, or any type of violence for that matter, is the answer to their problems?

The bottom line is, I am NOT in favor of war under any circumstance.