"I don't know, madam," I said, "but I can make a rapid guess . . . I
very probably would use the toe of my boot on him, thereby showing that
my own interest in cruelty was still alive. But five minutes later I
should try to discover what was at the back of the boy's mind."
Not long ago I studied a small boy whose chief pleasure was in pulling
bees' wings off. I never mentioned bees to him, but I got him to talk
about himself. He was suffering from a deep hatred of his teacher, and
he had a bad inferiority complex. He feared to play games like
football and hockey because of his sense of inferiority. All that was
wrong with him was that he was regressing. Life was too difficult for
him, and he took refuge in his infantile past; his pulling off wings
was the destructiveness of the infant. But the important thing to
remember is that destructiveness is simply constructiveness gone wrong.
The child is born good, and all his instincts are to do good. Bad
behaviour is the result of thwarted desire to do good. This is shown
in the case of Tommy on page 115.
* * * * *
At one time I was absolutely certain that the Great War was caused by
economic factors; British and German capital were competing, and the
losing party took up the sword. I am not so certain now. It may be
that the cataclysm was a natural ebullition of human nature, and as a
cause the economic rivalry may have been just as insignificant as the
murder of the Archduke.
During the last few decades education has been almost wholly
intellectual and material; intellectual education gave us the don, and
material education gave us the cotton-spinner. The emotional and the
spiritual in mankind had no outlet. In the unconscious of man there is
a God and a Devil, and intellectual activities afford no means of
expression to either. And when any godlike or devilish libido can find
no outlet it regresses to infantile primitive forms; thus, while the
brain of man was concerned with mathematics and logic, the heart of man
was seeking primitive things--cruelty, hate, and blood.
It may be then that the war was the direct result of the world's bad
system of education. No boy will destroy property if he is free to
create property, and no nation will take to killing if it is free to be
creative. Intellectual education allows no freedom for the creative
impulse; it not only starves the creative impulse but it drives it into
rebellion. An outlet is always a door to purification. The old men
who sat at home hated the Hun because their libido was being bottled
up, but the young men who were using up their libido in fighting talked
cheerfully of "Old Fritz." The chained dog soon becomes savage, and
the chained libido reverts to savagery also.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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