Political life seems to sublimate many homosexual trends. Politicians characteristically work together in little cliques and clubs, and many of them show marked difficulties in reaching a stable heterosexual adjustment. In military life, when men are thrown together under intimate conditions, the sublimations often break down and the homosexual drives find direct expression. A German general has gone so far as to declare that one reason why Germany lost the war was that the command was shot through with jealousies growing out of homosexual rivalry. Dr. K. G. Heimsoth has prepared a manuscript describing the rôle of homosexuality in the volunteer forces which continued to operate against the Poles and the communists after the war. In the case of certain leaders, at least, the reputation for overt homosexuality was no handicap; indeed, the reverse seemed to be true. Franz Alexander has suggested that one reason why homosexuality is viewed with contempt in modern life is the vague sense that complex cultural achievement depends on an inhibited sexuality, and that direct gratification tends to dissolve society into self-satisfied pairs and cliques. The observations of Heimsoth throw some doubt on the wisdom of this “vague sense.”[48] The prominence of alcoholism and promiscuity among like-sex groups has often been observed, and both indulgences appear to be closely connected with homosexual impulses.[49] Political crises are complicated by the concurrent reactivation of specific primitive impulses. War is the classical situation in which the elementary psychological structures are no longer held in subordination to complex reactions. The acts of cruelty and lust which are inseparably connected with war have disclosed vividly to all who care to see the narrow margin which separates the social from the asocial nature of man. The excesses of heroism and abnegation are alike primitive in their manifestations, and show that all the primitive psychological structures are not antisocial, but asocial, and may often function on behalf of human solidarity.[50]