What Can Be Done
Leon J. Saul
...Hostility can be attacked at its roots: in the rearing of the child and in the re-education of the adult. It can be banished as smallpox and typhoid have been banished in this country, or at least reduced as tuberculosis has been. Then we will realize the dream of producing mature, constructive men and women so that there may be many of them among us. The ancient war of good against evil, of love against hate, of God against Devil, of democracy against tyranny, is the war of mature and loving people against infantile and hostile people. In this struggle lies humanity's most thrilling challenge; in the outcome lies the hope of a desperate world.
Psychodynamically, man's inhumanity to man springs almost entirely from irrational sources. Today the individual cannot meet difficulties by physical attack, and neither can nations. War and tyranny are basically and ultimately irrational. Our survival on this planet is possible only through co-operation, responsibility, productivity, and interdependence. The fight-flight reaction, however indispensable it was in the wild, is now, as a method for solving the complex problems of modern social adjustment among individuals or nations, like trying to repair a fine watch with a hammer...
...The problem should be tackled by all the related sciences. It should be pursued at least as widely and energetically as cancer and heart disease. Our best brains should be mobilized and given adequate funds to attack this problem on a national scale. What is already known should be disseminated systematically and as widely as possible to improve the upbringing of our children and thereby the lives of our adults. In the long run our security will not rest with sophisticated computer-controlled weaponry but with a population that is strong, realistic, and resourceful, through its achievement of emotional maturity. The best available information should be made readily accessible through libraries, mass media, schools, churches, and all those who deal with people and particularly with children...
...Ideally the greatest single effort of the nation and of the world should be devoted to seeing that its children mature emotionally from the moment of conception. This is the basic answer to man's tendency to torture and destroy himself. The practical difficulties are overwhelmingly immense, but they are not insuperable. They can be overcome in the long range if we persevere in our attack on the problem. When they are, peace and brotherhood will be, not sentimental dreams, but practical reality...
Excerpted from The Childhood Emotional Pattern by Leon J. Saul M.D.
Copyright © Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1980. Reprinted with permission.