Why do the nations rage? Psalm 2:1
It seems as if the nations have a problem with anger. Who are the nations? Who stirs them up? Why do we respond the way that we do?
It’s a question that has been in the air for thousands of years. A group of people can be stirred to action by a leader who shouts convincingly, “We were robbed!” In Eric Berne’s Games People Play, he provides the rules of “Lets Him and You Fight!” Hannah Arendt goes back to the Trojan Horse to illustrate the March of Folly in a book by the same name. I remember the refrain my parents, and some relatives would say, “They’re still fighting the civil war.”
After a military career with a little bit of education through the distant learning program of the Naval War College, my parents’ comment only needs a minor edit. “They’re still fighting the Peloponnesian War.” Nations keep preparing for and fighting the last war.
A member of the second congregation that I served remarked after one of our hymn picking meetings, “No one likes someone coming into their house and telling them what to do, yet that is what we do whenever we fight a war.” He was a World War II veteran.
I remember fighting with my cousin in the backseat of our car one fine day. There were six of us in the car (remember bench seats and no seatbelts?) “Stop fighting World War III!” I do remember getting in the last punch and feeling rather good about it.
Decades later, I remember the sense of accomplishment we had returning from Afghanistan in 2002. We hadn’t found bin Laden, but we had gotten there and back and had received a hero’s welcome in Australia, both in Perth and Sydney. Drinks for everybody!
Returning to Camp Pendleton, it was strange hearing officers worrying if they would get their chance at combat. They did.
Why do the nations rage? My impression from that first heroes’ welcome is that the chance for glory is alluring. But like most lures, it is a trap. It would be great fun if it weren’t for the dying. I close with this link to a civilian survivor of the combat in Ukraine.
https://medium.com/@myukrainness/what-living-through-war-taught-me-about-trauma-bf8ba3e43a5d
Be well, dear readers. We have the rest of our lives to work on this question. Why does rage arise in our hearts so easily?
James, individuals can be courageous, sometimes in unimaginable ways. Individual anger is probably hard-wired into the defense mechanisms of the "beast. Rage, however, would seem to be part of the "herd complex/behavior." When individuals become a collective, their actions acquire different dynamics. Only a few individuals may be able to stay a mob. Because the mob expresses and involves powerful emotions that carry people with them.
Human tragedies do not occur as the actions of an individual, even if driven by one. They may begin with the anger of one and transform into the rage of many. Often, they are directed at something or someone because rage without a target is a tantrum. Rage-directed becomes a massacre, an act of destruction, and eventually even a crime against humanity or genocide.
Social norms built over centuries to restrain rage and leave the anger to the resolution of cultural norms are failing as cultural norms, especially those that involve ethical, normative, and foundational ones that are built of the faint in the human imperative to a right to live, are replaced by the drive for supremacy and exclusivity: a zero-sum game of my world or extinction is being replaced by the freeing of individuals to their base drives for survival. This is, of course, driven by the anger of individuals capable of harnessing self-loathing and alienation, exclusion, and the death of faith in the Other into the attractiveness of the "Banality of Evil." And yet, survival is not of the fittest but of the faithful in fellow humanity.