Book Share: The Politics of Heaven by Earl Shorris.

Excerpted from The Politics of Heaven: American In Fearful Times by Earl Shorris

I’ve never been a huge Sigmund Freud fan. In fact, I think he’s a bit of a loon. But he actually sounds rather succint here.

The individual in any given nation has in this war a terrible opportunity to convince himself of what should occassionally strike him in peacetime – that the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrongdoing, not because it desired to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco. The warring state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual man. It practices not only the accepted stratagems, but also deliberate lying and deception against the enemy; and this, too, in a measure which appears to surpass the usage of former wars. The state exacts the utmost degree of obedience and sacrifice from its citizens, but at the same time treats them as children by maintaining an excess of secrecy, and a censorship of news and expressions of opinion that renders the spirits of those thus intellectually oppressed defenseless against every unfathomable turn of events and every sinister rumor. It absolves itself from the guarantees and contracts it had formed with other states, and makes unabashed confession of it’s rapacity and lust for power, which the private individual is then called upon to sanction in the name of patriotism.

- Sigmund Freud quoted from “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915)