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Salient: An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 12, No. 8, July 27th, 1949.

No Solution Yet

No Solution Yet

It does not appear that we and everybody else in the complexity of civilised life have found a lasting solution to aggression necessarily aroused by social living. We have, it is true, short-term substitute responses, but no general outlet which can reduce tension for the individual personality, and thus reduce the chance of war for the mass.

Some suggest that tension is whipped up by press and radio. To the contrary, the position seems to be that any propaganda expressed by these means is a symptom rather than a redisposing of the tension.

So we seem to be helplessly geared for aggression, and hence for war. The question then arises: what stand shall the individual take? I shall suggest that we shall probably derive more egotistic pleasure from going down fighting than by going down peacefully.

The idealist pacifist might suggest that we use non-violent resistance. However, the population of a small country like ours would soon be absorbed culturally. In other words, we would simply become a "host" (in the biological sense) for an aggressor.

Maybe this is just hastening the eventual extinction of our civilisation. I suggest that ultimately we shall go the way of all other civilisations and in the end, life as we know it, will probably become reduced (as Freud suggested) to start again. Why? I can't imagine. Maybe there is some primal inevitability of matter which endlessly causes its own restructure.