35 definitions
The book's index
Why War?
27 concepts · 35 definitions
Civilization (n.) does two things to the mind: it strengthens the intellect until it governs instinct, and it turns aggression inward, with all its advantages and perils.
Civilization (n.) gives us the best of what we have become and a good part of what we suffer from.
Civilization (n.) is a domestication of the human animal — one that may even be leading to our extinction.
Civilization (n.) and war pull against each other: whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.
War (n.) may paradoxically be a means to everlasting peace — it builds the large units in which central power makes further wars impossible; it fails only because those units fall apart.
War (n.) offends the civilized almost as much by its ugliness as by its cruelty.
War (n.) finds enthusiasm so easily because an instinct for hatred and destruction goes halfway to meet the warmongers.
Instinct (n.) never works pure: each is alloyed with a quota of its opposite — self-preservation needs aggression, and love needs mastery to possess its object.
Instinct (n.) comes in only two kinds: those that preserve and unite (Eros) and those that destroy and kill — Love and Hate given a theory.
Law (n.) is the might of a community — still violence, only no longer one man's.
Law (n.) is pulled two ways at once: rulers try to rise back above it into violence, the oppressed press from unequal justice toward equal justice.
A Community (n.) must be a union of the weak that outlasts the defeat of the strong man, or the next strong man starts the game again.
A Community (n.) is held together by two things: the force of violence and the emotional ties — identifications — between its members.
Communism (n.) hopes to abolish aggression by satisfying all needs, but that is an illusion — its own followers are held together by hatred of everyone beyond the frontier.
Idealism (n.) in atrocity is sometimes only an excuse for destructive appetites — and sometimes the conscious front for which destruction supplies the unconscious muscle.
Mercy (n.) began as economics: the enemy was spared because he could be put to work — and the victor bought the slave at the price of his own security.
Motive (n.) can be arranged like the thirty-two winds on a compass: "bread-bread-fame," or "fame-fame-bread."
Pacifism (n.) is not a conclusion but a constitution: we rebel against war because we cannot help it, and only then find the arguments.