einstein
einstein
einstein
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set up to resolve any disputes. “The two great Semitic peoples,” he said, “have a great common future.” If the Jews did not assure that both sides<br />
lived in harmony, he warned friends in the Zionist movement, the struggle would haunt them in decades to come. 78 Once again, he was labeled<br />
naïve.<br />
The Einstein-Freud Exchange<br />
When a group known as the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation invited him in 1932 to exchange letters with a thinker of his choice on issues<br />
relating to war and politics, Einstein picked as his correspondent Sigmund Freud, the era’s other great intellectual and pacifist icon. Einstein began<br />
by proposing an idea that he had been refining over the years. The elimination of war, he said, required nations to surrender some of their<br />
sovereignty to a “supranational organization competent to render verdicts of incontestable authority and enforce absolute submission to the<br />
execution of its verdicts.” In other words, some international authority more powerful than the League of Nations must be created.<br />
Ever since he was a teenager rankling at German militarism, Einstein had been repulsed by nationalism. One of the fundamental postulates of<br />
his political view, which would remain invariant even after Hitler’s rise made him waver on the principles of pacifism, was his support for an<br />
international or “supranational” entity that would transcend the chaos of national sovereignty by imposing the resolution of disputes.<br />
“The quest of international security,” he wrote Freud, “involves the unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of<br />
action—its sovereignty that is to say—and it is clear that no other road can lead to such security.” Years later, Einstein would become even more<br />
committed to this approach as a way to transcend the military dangers of the atomic age that he helped to spawn.<br />
Einstein ended by posing a question to “the expert in the lore of human instincts.” Because humans have within them a “lust for hatred and<br />
destruction,” leaders can manipulate it to stir up militaristic passions. “Is it possible,” Einstein asked, “to control man’s mental evolution so as to<br />
make him secure against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness?” 79<br />
In a complex and convoluted response, Freud was bleak. “You surmise that man has in him an active instinct for hatred and destruction,” he<br />
wrote. “I entirely agree.” Psychoanalysts had come to the conclusion that two types of human instincts were woven together: “those that conserve<br />
and unify, which we call ‘erotic’... and, secondly, the instincts to destroy and kill, which we assimilate as the aggressive or destructive instincts.”<br />
Freud cautioned against labeling the first good and the second evil. “Each of these instincts is every whit as indispensable as its opposite, and all<br />
the phenomena of life derive from their activity, whether they work in concert or in opposition.”<br />
Freud thus came to a pessimistic conclusion:<br />
The upshot of these observations is that there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies. In some happy<br />
corners of the earth, they say, where nature brings forth abundantly whatever man desires, there flourish races whose lives go gently by;<br />
unknowing of aggression or constraint. This I can hardly credit; I would like further details about these happy folk. The Bolshevists, too, aspire<br />
to do away with human aggressiveness by insuring the satisfaction of material needs and enforcing equality between man and man. To me this<br />
hope seems vain. Meanwhile they busily perfect their armaments. 80<br />
Freud was not pleased with the exchange, and he joked that he doubted it would win either of them the Nobel Peace Prize. In any event, by the<br />
time it was ready for publication in 1933, Hitler had come to power. Thus the topic was suddenly moot, and only a few thousand copies were<br />
printed. Einstein, like a good scientist, was by then revising his theories based on new facts.