There are people who think, or actually don't think but believe, that wars are inevitable. In fact, if those dear people did think, they would come to the inevitable conclusion that wars are not only avoidable, they are also harmful and unnecessary for the progress of humanity. I say that they believe because it is actually a belief without a logical basis, despite all the efforts that are made to justify it with apparently logical arguments. And these arguments have gone so far as to propose that the best way to resolve conflicts between young people is to give each of them boxing gloves and have them fight until one of them survives all the blows. In other words, the unfortunate natural law of domination by force or also called “Law of survival of the fittest” - more on this, in the future…

This has been done without the expected results, and instead of being resolved, the conflict worsens. The "winner" has to keep his win, and the naturally humiliated "loser" will seek revenge in one way or another until he becomes a "winner" and the cycle repeats itself with the roles reversed but with the same consequences for both.

In 1929 Erich Maria Remarque, a young German, wrote an extraordinary novel about his experience in the so-called "Great War" in Europe. The novel was made into a film in 1930 that was later banned by Hitler because of its anti-war tone that did not fit with his plan to conquer all of Europe. The novel, entitled All Quiet on the Front, is a faithful account of what happened on the front between Germany and France. In 2022 another film was made based on the original, with the same name and the same theme. I am not a film critic nor am I interested in that aspect. The most significant thing for me is that in the place where one battle after another was fought in the effort to conquer the terrain separating the two countries, more than three million German, Prussian and French soldiers died in an incredible carnage that never gained or lost more than a few meters.

The absurdity of this fact is so remarkable that despite all that has been publicized about it, it is difficult to imagine it. More than three million human beings is already too much and we are not even counting those who survived with all kinds of mental and physical traumas. Numbers always have this amazing power to leave us speechless, but then we forget about it and move on to something else.

Tragedies accumulate but they are not inevitable...

Around the year 2169 something quite unusual happened on this planet. In the middle of the street, in a South American city, one character pushed another character and the observers of this anecdote, including young people and children, all had the same response. A greenish, acidic and fetid liquid poured out of all their mouths. Uncontrollable vomiting seized the youngsters who observed the mishap and there was no stopping that kind of response provoked by a simple but significant and obviously violent incident.

Someone sarcastically commented that luckily it was just a push...

In that decade of the 50s (but already in the 22nd century), when many changes took place in a humanity that had managed to overcome the idiocies and difficulties of past centuries, one of the great achievements was the conquest of violence. It wasn't easy, nor was it delicate, let alone decent, but that's how things are in our species. For many reasons that are irrelevant due to the brevity of this writing, the generations born in that decade "came into the world," as they say, with a biological mechanism that had never existed before, a genetically modified visceral reaction to any act of physical violence. In anyone confronted with any situation of physical violence, an uncontrollable vomiting like that described above was produced, and the sarcastic comment actually had its reason for being.

Perhaps most importantly, the matter did not end there. This physical rejection of violence created the best conditions for a repudiation of all forms of violence that had existed and were still in existence in those years. A true and complete understanding that all violence (economic, sexual, religious, etc.) was rooted in the mechanism of desire was also part of the internal circuitry with which the new generations were born and grew up.

For the naive or those who immediately protest when hearing things of this nature, it is good to clarify that the discovery of the roots of violence did not mean that such violence magically disappeared and that we suddenly found ourselves in a social paradise. Those were very hard times and the human being advanced painfully, step by step, meter by meter until they achieved a change that was not only psychological but physical. Those few steps and meters were as difficult as those in the great war, but were approached with a totally different intention. The typical nausea that occurs in response to being confronted with some element dangerous to the body was rejected in this way. As nausea. Curiously, in previous centuries, especially before the 20th, nausea was considered a weakness and in certain places "feminine" weakness. That's how bad things were on our planet.

However, as we said before, it was only with difficulty that we came to an understanding of many things, and to the transformation of the human being into a "truly Human" being, where the most important characteristic was the absolute recognition of being a single species. Again, to appease the protests of this dehumanized present, it is necessary to understand that this process took time and energy, and did not move forward linearly but with many ups and downs, with many "falls" and "rises,” and with a lot of effort, especially in the realm of truly understanding who we are and the place we occupy in this universe.

That uncontrollable vomiting was the product of many years of accumulation of certain forms of behavior that we might call "unitive." This unitive behavior transformed the internal energy of those who devoted themselves to such tasks, and as a consequence of physical laws and other less well-known laws, there was an energetic change and redistribution of that energy in a body more suitable for handling such energy, with an internal lucidity that was a novelty for our species.

Only then did the great projects that had seemed unattainable a century before really make sense. It was only then that we were able to explore the universe not only because we had achieved the appropriate technology and had inexhaustible sources of energy within reach, but also because we had managed to transform ourselves as a species, as a group, and as individuals.

When we stopped believing in death, life manifested itself in all its splendor, and we realized that it was impossible to "kill" and to live at the same time. Then we had to choose, and we chose "to live." That conscious choice, motivated by understanding and not by fear, created the conditions for change in our species. 

But it all started when we stopped justifying every act of violence and put great effort into eradicating violence from within. Then laws, controls, repression, and everything we had known as mechanisms for keeping violence "at bay" became unnecessary. This was a human effort, one of great caring and of recognition that "all individual existence is possible because of the existence of others." That was when our upward path began, with the rejection of all forms of violence - a rejection that later became a biological protective mechanism for that new body with that new consciousness that began to emerge on our planet.

To be continued…

EDITED & TRANSLATED BY TRUDI RICHARDS

PHOTO BY RAFAEL EDWARDS