All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Introduction
In the course of their development, young people are confronted with a variety of challenges which they usually cope with well. In order to be able to tackle life’s tasks courageously, the adolescent is dependent on being embedded in a supportive environment as a living world and in an integrating culture.
They experience support and orientation when values and virtues are established in the family, which are reinforced and consistently enforced in social institutions such as kindergarten and school. Among others, these include: Compassion, justice, truth, peaceableness, tolerance, sense of community, ability to deal with conflict and willingness to compromise. In order for these social values and virtues to be consolidated in the adolescent, practical participation in social activities is essential.
I believe in youth, in their ability to learn, their creativity, their empathy, their sense of responsibility, their insightfulness and their willingness to change attitudes and behaviour. Most of the time, all young people lack is some prudence and perseverance so that they can develop their skills in small steps.
Peace and freedom correspond to human nature
Since we have knowledge about human beings, we know that they want to live in peace and freedom, without war and violence. Living in peace is a matter of nature. They want to have a roof over their heads with their children. They also don’t like to kill themselves and they don’t like to be killed. They prefer to stay alive. But the state forces them to do so and chases them to the “field of honour”.
People also want to live in freedom, where each person decides how he wants to live and with whom he wants to associate. He wants to have his peace and security and not have to beg for church soup.
Every working person, whether labourer or employee, wants to know if he will have the same opportunity to live in old age or if he falls ill and can no longer work. He wants to keep his home and his wife should be provided for when he is no longer alive. At the moment, people are preached to save diligently. But then the “sharks” come and eat away his hard-earned savings. The money is devalued and the “poor devil” is plundered.
Some mature people who had a laid table, like Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) or Michael Bakunin (1814-1876) and other rich people who had the opportunity to educate themselves and do research, have guessed that this system, as it is, is not right. The people would be won over; people like to show solidarity with their contemporaries and help each other if they are not conquered, do not instil fear of harmless fellow human beings and let them live.
Adolescents also want to live in peace and friendship with their parents, teachers, friends and schoolmates. In peace and in freedom. They like to settle their personal issues, their school problems, their relationships with friends and with the opposite sex themselves and do not like to hand them over to mum, dad or teachers.
State and church conquer the people
But it is still the case that the state and the church, which work together very well, impose their view of the world and their religion on the people. They have all the institutions in their hands – especially the schools. There they educate the young people to become good soldiers. The young man is educated to march when the authorities call.
He is then supposed to defend his fatherland in Ukraine or Asia. The priest is along for the ride and blesses the weapons that slay the faithful on the other side of the borders. The young person is made to believe – and he believes everything he is told. He is kept in this frame of mind.
Historical knowledge and historical thinking are not imparted to him. That is why he does not have a clear picture. And the parents and teachers let themselves be harnessed by the church and the state for this kind of education and carry their views to the adolescents on a daily basis. The entire culture is shaped by this.
A life of peace and freedom in Russian Mir
Talking about historical knowledge: Do you know that a life of peace and freedom existed for a certain time in the past? But this dream of humanity, this hope of the proletarians of the whole world has failed for lack of psychological knowledge of human nature. The principle of violence, of oppressing and conquering people has led to disaster in the former Russia.
The Russian peasant lived in the Mir, a Russian village community. Each household could claim one or more strips of land according to the number of its adult members. Until the revolution, peasants worked their fields together out of solidarity.
What little life they had, they spent in peace and quiet and without war. Where did the peasant Russian population ever see judges, gendarmes or informers? There weren’t any. And the doors had no locks, because they were not locked.
But then the state came – the red state – and took it away from the peasants and demanded taxes. Commissioners from the city, who didn’t understand anything, were sent to the countryside to tell the peasants what to grow. They maintained the state and eventually chased the peasants and workers into the “field of honour”.
In the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia the principle was more humane than in the former Russia. If a person had work, he could not be dismissed. The principle of self-management, of workers’ councils, was realised there. Because Yugoslavia did not go the Russian way, Russia was against Yugoslavia.
Can’t this humanist idea of peace and freedom, equality, justice and solidarity be revived? Wouldn’t that be a way to prevent the Third World War?
What to do?
I keep thinking about the war. The next war will come. Why should it not come? It has still come until now. And we have still kept silent and participated. There are not many voices against it.
We are not far from the Third World War. This is the situation we live in. There’s no point in fooling ourselves. We humans are not ready yet. There are only a few people who think about it, very few.
How do we protect ourselves from a world war? What can the youth do?
For example, don’t march when the authorities, when the state calls to arms! Say “NO” loudly and clearly! Wars are above all good business. People are capable of living together without weapons and wars. Every war is fought in the interest of a small upper class. Only the greed for power of those who act as authorities within the peoples leads again and again to warlike conflicts in which the peoples bleed to death for the benefit of their masters and exploiters.
But it is not only the wars that are good business. Everything is profit wherever we look. Why is the youth involved with drugs? How does it get them into it? If it wasn’t good business, there would be no drugs, the market would be empty. But no consideration is given to that. Young people can no longer think and act rationally with drugs. They perish from them, literally go to their death.
Furthermore, young people – like all people – should adopt the results of psychological research. If we recognise ourselves and our fellow human beings, our view of state conditions, of the entire social order, changes. Young people would be in a position to do this, as humanity is very slowly detaching itself from the world of thoughts and feelings of the Middle Ages.
Since history is a work of the people, the change of the world must come from within them. People must come to know their own nature, their mental condition, their conscious and semi-conscious prejudices, as well as their own ways of reacting and those of their fellow human beings.
If we look around the world, we see that all people without exception are not healthy but psychologically irritated by traditional education. They are not sick, they are just not properly enlightened. They must be helped to recognise themselves.
If we succeed in grasping the human problem in all its depth, we will learn to see what is wrong with us human beings. But a lot of time and patience is needed to explore this. All relevant questions must be thoroughly thought through. However, this is of immense importance for the life and mental health of each of us. The results of psychological research point the way. We then have a compass.
Also, the youth – like all of us – should not hand over power to anyone else. According to the Russian writer Count Tolstoy (1828-1910), those in power are “often the worst, most insignificant, cruelest, most immoral and especially the most mendacious people” (1).
Not to hand over power to another human being, but also not to a supernatural being who, as a deity, is supposed to guide and protect us from earliest childhood to the end of days. We are, after all, embedded in the community of fellow species, of whom we need not be afraid and on whose solidarity we can build (2).
Last but not least, we should all try to abandon the individual and collective prejudices that are the ideological background of many human disasters. A peaceful, free and just world is created solely by human resolutions, by thinking and acting in accordance with the ideal of justice and humanistic values.
Today, it is prejudice against Russia and China that can bring about the next world war – tomorrow, it may be prejudice against one’s own homeland.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share button above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Dr Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a school rector, educational scientist and graduate psychologist. After his university studies, he became an academic teacher in adult education. As a retiree he worked as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and professional articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral education in values as well as an education for public spirit and peace. For his services to Serbia, he was awarded the Republic Prize “Captain Misa Anastasijevic” by the Universities of Belgrade and Novi Sad in 2021.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Notes
(1) Tolstoy, L. N. (1983). Speech against war. Political pamphlets, p. 5
(2) Hänsel, Rudolf (2020). Handing over power to no one! A psychological manifesto of common sense, Gornji Milanovac.
Featured image is from flickr/cc
