Of Fear, the Psychology of Nations and of Love

I think it's worth looking at nations as we look at people. If you anthropomorphise nations it will give you an interesting outlook on their behavior and on the world story. Imagine the world as a high school and look at who likes to hang out with who. You'll quickly be able to identify the archetypal characters that embody each country. If you're well versed in history and think of every one or two hundred years as being a grade then you can get an idea of the way each nation is growing up. It's also worth bearing in mind that certain Nations have been around longer than others and are in different grades.

Now that you've done that you'll see that most nations are still in high school (some may be in kindergarden) and if you look further back you'll see the family tree and who's parents are who's. You don't have to look to far back to see that we're all related.

Now here's the big difference between People and nations; there are no nuclear armed toddlers on the level of individuals. There are no nuclear armed nihilistic teens for that matter either.

The worlds a difficult place. Having children means inflicting on a living, breathing, soon to be self aware creature all the horrors of reality. While life brings a vibrance and joy that for most of us makes it preferable to the alternative it is, none the less, a scary endeavor.

Fear is a powerful motivating force in the world. At the moment, when we look at the nation people of the world, I think it is probably the dominant motivating force. There is another though.

Love.

There are a lot of people in the world who's hearts are in the right place. A place where they can reach out from and affect the world in a positive way. Unfortunately most of these hears are unable to see past the fear that thy believe threatens their existence. Rather than acting out of love we act against and out of fear. You can't fight fear in a loving manner. You can't fight a compassionate war on terror.

You can't fight a compassionate war.

To try to fight fear is to fight an illusion and in so doing perpetuate it's existence. Instead of this we must act out of love. We spend to much of our valuable time fighting against what we know is wrong in the world but by doing so we only make those who are deluded into thinking that their path is righteous fight back all the harder. By fighting against intolerance you validate intolerance and give it something to push back against. What's worse is that in our fight against what we perceive to be wrong in the world we ourselves, us who would do right, only act out of fear. By doing so we are no better than those we would fight against.

Remember that when you are in a fight, when someone throws a punch, all you are defending is empty space. You are defending nothing.

Far better to surrender that space. In so doing we free ourselves to act constructively. When we do this all actions are once again available to us.

Then we can then act out of love.