02-06-2010 – Menu Hipster « //LucasHutmacherDotCom

02-06-2010 – Menu Hipster

In 1932, Albert Einstein, already world famous for his work in physics and mathematics, wrote a letter to another distinguished thinker, Sigmund Freud. Einstein was deeply troubled by the memory of World War I, which had ended only fourteen years before. Ten million men had died on the battlefields of Europe, for reasons that no one could logically explain. Like many others who had lived through that war, Einstein was horrified by the thought that human life could be destroyed on such a massive scale and worried that there might be another war. He considered that Freud, the world’s leading psychologist, might throw light on the question ‘Why do men make war?’

“Dear Professor Freud,” he wrote. “Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?” Einstein spoke of “that small but determined group, active in every nation, composed of individuals who … regard warfare, the manufacture and sale of arms, simply as an occasion to advance their personal interests and enlarge their personal authority.” And then he asked, “How is it possible for this small clique to bend the will of the majority, who stand to lose and suffer by a state of war, to the service of their ambitions?”

Einstein volunteered an answer, “Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction.” And then he put his final question to Freud, “Is it possible to control a man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness?”

Freud responded, “You surmise that man has in him an active instinct for hatred and destruction, amenable to such stimulations. I entirely agree with you …. The most casual glance at world-history will show an unending series of conflicts between one community and another.” Freud pointed to two fundamental instincts in human beings: the erotic, or love, instinct and its opposite, the destructive instinct. But the only hope he could hold for the erotic triumphing over the destructive was in the cultural development of the human race, including “a strengthening of the intellect, which tends to master our instinctive life.”

But what is Freud’s evidence for the existence of such an instinct? There is something curious in his argument. He offers no proof from the field of his expertise, psychology. His evidence is in “the most casual glance at world-history.”

- Howard Zinn – Declarations of Independence

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