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War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

Book by Chris Hedges · 3 quotes · War, Meaning, Battle

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War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning Quotes

“Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours, is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver. It reduces and at times erases the anxiety of individual consciousness. We abandon individual responsibility for a shared, unquestioned communal enterprise, however morally dubious.”

“We believe in the nobility of self-sacrifice demanded by war, especially when we are blinded by the narcotic of war. We discover in the communal struggle, the shared sense of meaning and purpose, a cause. War fills our spiritual void. I do not miss war, but I miss what it brought. I can never say that I was happy in the midst of the fighting in El Salvador, or in Bosnia, or Kosova, but I had a sense of purpose, of calling. And this is a quality war shares with love, for we are, in love, also able to choose fealty and self-sacrifice over security.”