[extropy-chat] 'History' and the fulcrum of 1945

[Amara Graps]

Keith Henson,

Hi! (and thanks for your nice words)

>And *why* hasn't there been another major war in Europe in 
>the last 60 years?
>I think I know why.
>What are your suggestions?

I don't have a theory to test, only some thoughts after many
conversations with my family and the people arouund me and living
in Europe now ~7  years. Hubert Mania filled in for me some of
the holes of German perspectives (since WWII) that I didn't
understand yet, as well. (Extropes, consider for a moment _why_
he is so sensitive regarding facism; his salvos, then, might be
easier to understand, moreover, might actually be _useful_.)

I think that the horrors of WWII (events leading to, during, and
after) reached so deep into the consciousness of those people who
experienced it (directly, indirectly), that one psychologically,
unconsciously, needed to perform a kind of cauterization to stop
oneself from going mad. 

At first glimpse, the psychological effect looks like when you
burn yourself on the stovetop, it is enough to teach you to jerk
your hand away when you are close to the flame again. In this
situation of what humans faced in WWII, I think it is much more.

You are familiar with some ideas of Jung of the shadow-self? We
are most upset by those aspects that we recognize in ourselves
and our impulse is to reject it, sometimes violently. I think
that it was numbing to see the 'beast-within' expressed to the
magntitude that was expressed in WWII. Probably it rendered
psychologically mute a layer of people closest to the ground zero
of the horror, the next layer closest could maybe express a bit
more, and so on. In any case, if faced with something approaching
that kind of horror, you did whatever it took to not be there
again, war-avoidance, to the extreme.

Now you, being the meme-guy, probably have a meme-explanation,
yes? Maybe those people carrying the meme-of-great-beastliness
usually died, and left those carrying memes-of-less-beastliness
survived and reproduced?

Amara