There is war and death happening everywhere,
but all 'sides' claim not to want it. Are they all lying, or are half of them lying, or is
there something stranger going on? Take the North of Ireland. No one wants the killing to
go on, they all say. Everyone wants peace. But the situation is sliding with a horrible,
slow inevitability back to the point of no return. So if everyone involved wants peace,
why doesn't peace happen? Maybe it's because, even though everyone does want peace, there
are things they want more than peace, and one of those things is to be right. I've never
heard anyone say "We were wrong." Everyone says "We were right to act as we
acted, because we were forced to by the other side." Like Laurel and Hardy, "Now
look what you made me do." So the cycle just keeps on going because no one wants to
be wrong. They'd rather risk death and horror than admit that they have done wrong, or
that they are doing wrong.
Somehow the world has gotten into a state where it seems
perfectly reasonable for the leaders of a nation to announce their intention to kill an
unspecified number of people for some 'cause' that a child could see is not genuine.
Somehow we have got to the point where, even though we know that a politician or military
leader is lying when they say why they are doing something, e.g. "We are continuing
to bomb Iraq to prevent Iraq from becoming aggressive towards its neighbours again",
we pretend that they are speaking the truth, and grapple with the words they have said,
debate them as if they are serious or truthful, instead of admitting that we know what
they REALLY mean - "We are continuing to bomb Iraq because if we stop it looks like
an admission that we were wrong to keep doing it all this time."
Why are we so concerned with being right? Why can't a nation admit that it made a wrong
decision? Even individual people have difficulty doing this, but the larger the group
gets, the less likely it is that it will admit it was, or is, in the wrong, no matter how
dreadfully obvious it is. The American government has never said that it was wrong to
invade Vietnam, even though the vast majority of people in the world know that it was. And
no one calls them to account over it. I guess it's far enough in the past that people just want to forget about it, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, if we could guarantee that it wouldn't happen again, but we can't.
It's easier to reach a higher level of growth, where you can admit you were wrong and not
feel that that destroys you, as an individual person. You can't change group psychology without
changing the psychology of the individuals composing that group. But one of the problems
seems to be that it is not the best and the highest-evolved individuals who come to lead
most groups, but the worst, the most degraded and false, the most power-driven and ruthless.
That's understandable in non-democratic power systems, but in a democracy, even a
corrupted form of democracy like the US and UK party political systems, the only reason
that this kind of person rises to lead the nation is that they represent a majority of the
voters.
Or maybe I'm thinking too simplistically. Maybe they don't represent the voters so much as
hoodwink them. Maybe power and celebrity are really the worst places, karmically, that you
can end up in your life. I've lost track of my thoughts. I don't understand why the human
world is such an awful, hellish realm of lies and unnecessary death, when every person in
it feels the same love and can see the same truth. I don't get it.