War is a convenient way to manage a growing distrust of government. A distrust that could potentially lead citizens to question the legitimacy of an established political order. A conflict is an expedient way to distract any resentment away from the ruling elite and re-direct it against an enemy abroad. The process enables the imposition of stricter control on the population, reinforcing the power of rulers at home. Typically, the bigger the conflict the greater the political disintegration and readjustment for the defeated party.
Self-righteous politicians who promote tough gun control laws see any problem spending gazillion dollars of taxpayers’ money on destructive weapons for war. For conflicts that benefit mostly corporations and their shareholders who in turn finance the political campaigns of warmonger. Candidates who don’t have a problem with destructive weapons that kill an obscene number of people. And who don’t send their children to the front but sends other people’s children to die in battle while they enjoy a cushy political career at home.
Based on my lifelong study and research on religion I realized that the Economy (with a big E) is humanity’s universal religion. Every human being on the planet accepts and believes in a system that will enhance his or her economic benefit and security. Conversely, the worship money, defined as greed, is the source of all evil. This is the intractable mysterious spectrum of good and evil that defines the human condition.
I read Lionel Rubinoff’s The Pornography of Power in the 1970s. I recently bought another copy of the book as I got rid of most of my books over the years. I was unaware the book is available for free on archive.org. I also found out that Robert Sheer wrote a book with the same title, also available on archive.org.
Lionel Rubinoff; The Pornography of Power
“The artist is not simply a reporter who takes evil for granted and uses his talent to profit from man’s inherent fascination for it. If a man as to be called an artist, it is because he has used his art not to exploit but to transcend evil. The way back to salvation is not to go mad and surrender oneself to evil, but to create. The creative act is the apotheosis of man; the destruction of creativity is therefore the greatest of all crimes. This is how the death of God comes about. It begins with man’s destruction of his own creativity.
But this is precisely what is happening today. The life of creativity is slowly being infected by the propaganda of irrationalism, and the imagination, no longer informed by the elan vital, has lost its capacity to transcend despair and has become instead an imagination of disaster. The success of the propaganda of irrationalism in stifling the imagination is due partly to our own fears. We are afraid to be creative today because we are afraid to be individuals, afraid to be active in a conformist society that encourages total passivity. To be an individual on a collective society is to suffer a kind of madness. But to be part of it, which is normal, is to live without purpose, to worship platitudes and empty truths, to be mediocre, and to exist without love, which hell. Hell is the suffering of being unable to love, and hell is the anomie and the powerlessness and living under the shadow of the apocalyptic vision…”
