The Why of War
My reality is all I have and everything there is for me. I don’t have anything else. My reality is and remains my reality. Always. It is its content that changes. And what I call I, is this content. I am the content of my reality. Everyone’s content is different. I am different from everyone else. You are different from everyone else. I am unique and you are unique.
And the objective reality, the truth? It is not the world that we consider ourselves to be a part of and to live in. Objective reality is actually the content of the reality we share, the part of me that is also a part of you.
To agree on what’s objective and true, we most of the time, just agree. We agree that some things are objective since they are obviously there and we accept it. Other times, a way to agree is to find explanations, as they do in religion for example, or to find or create environments in which we can test explanations, like in science. The concept of objectivity is simply the content of reality which we share, a part of both of us. Its where we agree.
The reason we are able to agree at all, is because we are able to express our reality to each other. Through speaking or writing, but also in all kinds of other ways, painting, music, movement, essentially anything that we do. These expressions are representations of our reality, of us. They aren’t us and the aren’t our reality. And therefore, to understand these expressions we have to put them back into context, meaning into our own reality, into the context of who we are. That’s what we call interpretation. The degree to which we are able to do that, defines our depth of understanding of someone, of someone else’s reality.
Understanding starts with expression through representation and results from interpretation. And so, understanding is the foundation for agreement on literally anything and everything.
We can also describe understanding and therefore the process of expression, representation and interpretation as as a degree of similarity between two people or two realities. This goes as follows: All kinds of doing give away something about your reality but whether I can grasp and understand your reality, you, depends on how similar my reality is, on how similar I am to you.
Similarity allows us to understand each other. And without expression and interpretation there is no understanding. And if there is no understanding there won’t be any agreement. Without agreement there is no truth or objective reality. And if there is no truth or objectivity there is no possibility for a shared reality, a place where we can all be, where different realities can be. And when we come to this conclusion we can finally see why we are killing each other. This is the reason for all war and violence.