Seth on war

 "In its natural state, hatred has a powerful rousing characteristic that initiates change and action. Regardless of what you have been told, hatred does not initiate strong violence. As covered earlier in this book, the outbreak of violence is often the result of a built-in sense of powerlessness. Period.

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On their return home the code of behavior changed back to one suited to civilian life, and they clamped down upon themselves again as hard as they could. Many would appear as superconventional. The "luxury" of expressing emotion even in exaggerated form was suddenly denied them, and the sense of powerlessness grew by contrast.



(Pause at 9:59.) Give us a moment... This is not to be a chapter devoted to war. However, there are a few points that I do want to make. It is a sense of powerlessness that also causes nations to initiate wars. This has little to do with their "actual" world situation or with the power that others might assign to them, but to an overall sense of powerlessness — even, sometimes, regardless of world dominance.



In a way I am sorry that this is not the place to discuss the Second World War (1939–45), for it was also the result of a sense of powerlessness which then erupted into a mass blood bath on a grand scale. The same course was followed privately in the cases of such individuals as just mentioned.



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In an odd way this made it even more difficult for those who did go into the next two, less extensive wars, for the country was not behind either one. Any sense of powerlessness on the part of individual fighting men was given expression as before, this time in a more local blood bath, but the code itself had become shaky. This release was not as accepted as it had been before, even within the ranks. By the last war (in Vietnam), the country was as much against it as for it, and the men's feelings of powerlessness were reinforced after it was over. This is the reason for the incidents of violence on the part of returning servicemen."



—Seth, NoPR, Chapter 21, Session 673, June 27, 1973