War is Hell. Hell is well understood. Peacetime sucks.
For the same reason that the noose focuses the mind, liberty allows for discovery of novelty in every sphere. I am reflecting for a moment on my discovery several years ago of the benefit of war. To reiterarte, the great value of war is that it becomes the excuse for everything, and it simplifies and accentuates the meaning of life. War is in every sense, reductive.
Peacetime sucks because in peacetime, flirtations with the truth are sufficient. Nobody quite cares if you miscalculate because in general, nobody is going to lose an arm or a leg about it. Consequently, every mistruth becomes pretty much equal to every other mistruth, and the slippery slope ends up going down certainly. But not down to Hell. Because we are at peace with ourselves, our misdeeds, our mistruths and well isn't there delightful discovery in all that novelty? Yes there is. Peacetime breeds the corruptions of injustice, especially a peacetime with no death penalty.
Make no mistake. Peace is always preferable to war. Only during peacetime, with its attendent modes of discovery can we find value in the myriad permutations of human character and endeavor. Nobody loves humanity and all the diversions of society so much as during peacetime. In war, all we want is for war to end, by any means necessary - which generally means more war. In wartime, anything and everything goes to win, and blood debts give rise to greater commitments until the very end of human ability is tried. It exhausts the very soul. War makes zombies of humans, we become single-minded rabbits, astounding in our abject terror. Every face of every child reminds us that we are not our true selves in war, that we are reduced to following the orders of survival. And so we crave peace.
Peace is where a man can be a man, and a woman can be a woman, and a man can be a woman and so on. War does not allow us that luxury. So it is amusing as we contemplate our peacetime selves that women are wanting to be men and vice versa. The corruption is so vexing that it makes me entertain the clarity of Hell and the reduction of desire to survival.
In between these extremes is Justice. I am sufficiently certain of this and don't feel compelled to backup this idea with my previous levels of investigation. I won't be looking up Adam Smith's version to compare it to somebody else's. I will simply rest on that certainty. More on Justice later.
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