Freud again expressed both his pessimism and hope in “Why War?� (1932), an exchange of letters with Albert Einstein (1879-1955) for publication. In answering Einstein on “Right and Might,� Freud pointed out “that right is the might of the community. It is still violence, ready to be directed against any individual who resists it; it works by the same methods and follows the same purposes.� Is there no difference then? One difference, Freud held: “What prevails is no longer the violence of an individual but that of a community.� This transition is psychologically effected when “the union of the majority� is “a stable and lasting one,� thereby assuring the identification of might, right, or law. This community of the majority must be permanent, well-organized, capable of anticipating and suppressing rebellion and executing “legal acts of violence.� It is violence within a community that produces peace. Moreover, wars between nations are “a far from inappropriate means of establishing the eagerly desired reign of ‘everlasting’ peace, since it is in a position to create the larger units within which a powerful central government makes further wars impossible.� The weakness of this method is the lack of cohesiveness between the constituent parts. The answer is some kind of world order stronger than the League of Nations. “Wars will only be prevented with certainty if mankind unites in setting up a central authority to which the right of giving judgment upon all conflicts of interest shall be handed over. There are clearly two separate requirements involved in this: the creation of a supreme authority and its endowment with the necessary power.� Nationalism is hostile to such an order, while Communism is held by many to be congenial to it. In any case, force cannot be replaced by “the force of ideas,� for “law was originally brute violence and that even to-day it cannot do without the support of violence.� For Freud there was no higher law and no right to which power must be subservient. There are only human instincts, and these are of two kinds, Eros, or the sexual in its broadest sense on the one hand, and “the aggressive or destructive instinct� on the other. We have here a polarity, but not a moral one. “We must not be too hasty in introducing ethical judgments of good and evil. Neither of these instincts is any less essential than the other; the phenomena of life arise from the operation of both together, whether acting in concert or in opposition.� Thus, Freud reduced his own preference for a one-world socialist order to a purely non-moral matter of personal taste. The death instinct and the life instinct are equally valid, if value can be used as a criterion. “There is no use in trying to get rid of men’s aggressive inclinations.� Communists are guilty of illusion if such is their hope.

But how can Freud’s own one-world hopes be achieved? “Our mythological theory of instincts makes it easy for us to find a formula for in-direct methods of combating war.� Eros must be encouraged to stand more strongly against Thanatos. Two kinds of ties between men can be encouraged: first, a love of neighbor, and, second, “identification� through a community of interests. This will correct imbalance. The encroachments of Church and State “upon freedom of thought� need to be removed. “The ideal condition of things would of course be a community of men who had subordinated their instinctual life to the dictatorship of reason.� And for Freud this “dictatorship of reason� meant a total power like that of Plato’s philosopher-kings, enlightened rulers of absolute power. “Nothing else could unite men so completely and so tenaciously even if there were no emotional ties between them. But in all probability that is a Utopian expectation.� This last sentence is typical of Freud; his hope is real, but his denial of that hope is equally real. He was ready to make a case for war and yet call himself a pacifist “for organic reasons� and hope that “the rest of mankind become pacifists too.� Thus he hoped, but even in hoping called his pacifism “an idiosyncracy.� The one-world order he hoped for was an order built on violence, and reason itself was no more than a biological aspect of man, a thin veneer over a vast unconscious. Freud had written at length on the nature of dreams as an infallible index to the unconscious forces in man. Could not the dream of reason, including Freud’s own, be dismissed also as a significance only in terms of the unconscious in man, rather than a valid ground for action? Freud could not say.

~ R. J. Rushdoony, Freud, p.49f