Sinner/Saint Mystical Union of Antagonists (Dixon's Bait)

[Terrance Flaherty]

Hunt and hunted, bait and baited. Poor Slothrop. 

Without any exception known to me, militarist authors take a highly
mystical view of their subject, and regard war as a biological or
sociological necessity, uncontrolled by ordinary psychological checks or
motives. When the time of development is ripe the war must come, reason
or no reason, for the justifications pleaded are invariably fictions.
War is, in short, a permanent human obligation.

[War] is the essential form of the State, and the only function in
which peoples can employ all their powers at once and convergently.

No victory is possible save as the resultant of a totality of virtues,
no defeat for which some vice or weakness is not responsible. Fidelity,
cohesiveness, tenacity, heroism, conscience, education, inventiveness,
economy, wealth, physical health
and vigor — there isn't a moral or intellectual point of superiority
that doesn't tell, when God holds his assizes and hurls the peoples upon
one another. Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht; and Dr. Steinmetz
does not believe that in the long run chance and luck play any part in
apportioning the issues.  The virtues that prevail, it must be noted,
are virtues anyhow, superiorities that count in peaceful as well
as in military competition...

Great indeed is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe
and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the
higher ranges of men's spiritual energy. The amount of alteration in
public opinion which my utopia postulates is vastly less than the
difference between the mentality of those black warriors who pursued
Stanley's party on the Congo with their cannibal war-cry of "Meat!
Meat!" and
that of the "general-staff" of any civilized nation. History has seen
the latter interval bridged over; the former one can be bridged over
much more easily.

"I would have done whatever he bade me. 'Twas the only time in my life I
have felt that Surrender to Power, upon which, as I have learn'd after,
to my Sorrow, all Governmet is founded. Neverr again. No more Maiden as
to thah', and thankee all the same." 

	--Dixon on War and Government Power

The Moral Equivalent of War

--William James (1906)

                    Poor Nietzsche's antipathy is itself sickly enough,
                    but we all know what he means, and he expresses
                    well the clash between the two ideals. The
                    carnivorous-minded 'strong man,' the adult male
                    and cannibal, can see nothing but mouldiness and
                    morbidness in the saint's gentleness and
                    self-severity, and regards him with pure loathing.
                    The whole feud revolves essentially upon two
                    pivots: Shall the seen world or the unseen world
                    be our chief sphere of adaptation? and must our
                    means of adaptation in this seen world be
                    aggressiveness or non-resistance?

                    The debate is serious. In some sense and to some
                    degree both worlds must be acknowledged and
                    taken account of; and in the seen world both
                    aggressiveness and non-resistance are needful. It
                    is a question of emphasis, of more or less. Is the
                    saint's type or the strong-man's type the more
                    ideal?

The Varieties of Religious Experience
       
Lecture XIV and XV: THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS 

		--William James