Given the news these days, it seems like a swell time to quote from an essay (feedbacks) that Sam Keen wrote for Meeting the Shadow some years ago.

"The problem seems to lie not in our reason or our technology, but in the hardness of our hearts. Generation after generation, we find excuses to hate and dehumanize each other, and we always justify ourselves with the most mature-sounding political rhetoric. And we refuse to admit the obvious. We human beings are Homo hostilis, the hostile species, the enemy-making animal. We are driven to fabricate an enemy as a scapegoat to bear the burden of our denied enmity. From the unconscious resudue of our hostility, we create a target; from our private demons, we conjure a public enemy. And perhaps, more than anything else, the wars we engage in are compulsive rituals, shadow dramas in which we continually try to kill those parts of ourselves we deny and despise." Meeting the Shadow, The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, Tarcher, edited by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, 1991, p. 198.