Improvements in family interactions during the Freedom Phase become particularly powerful sources of fear to earlier, more reactionary psychoclasses. As men see their wives get new divorce and voting rights, as girls get more education and more access to jobs, the new freedoms blow the mind of the older generation of men, and reactionary attempts to turn back or limit women’s freedoms begin.

Looking at charts of economic growth reveals a clear picture of how closely major wars follow upon periods of prosperity.¹¹ The powerful economic advances of the last half of the 19th century of over 5 percent, year after year—after centuries of economic growth of under 1 percent per annum—were the real causes of the huge carnage of the two world wars of the first half of the 20th century. Prosperity and liberal reforms before WWI made the reactionary psychoclasses wonder if “no more rank, titles or race [meant] all is mixed, confused and blurred [and] the end of the world seem nigh…[with] a decline of religiosity, a disintegration of the patriarchal family, and the decline of respect for authority.”¹² Women at the end of the 19th century had new rights, and husbands began to fear their wives would soon become “oversexed wives who threatened her husband’s life with her insatiable erotic demands.”¹³ If women were to continue to get equal rights, men would soon become women. So wars are necessary, as Machiavelli claimed, to purge nations of “effeminato…the daily accretion of poisonous matter [caused by women’s] conspiracy to ‘poison’ manhood.”¹⁴ Only in war, men agreed, could males regain their endangered masculinity.

As early as the Freedom Phase, people began voicing their feeling that “materialism” (economic progress) should be opposed. A. J. P. Taylor notes “years before the war…men’s minds had become unconsciously weary of peace and security…they welcomed war as a relief from materialism.”¹⁵ Before WWI, “there was a feeling of approaching apocalypse…The world as it is now wants to die, wants to perish, and it will.” Only a sacrificial slaughter could cure Europe of the freedoms offered by cities: “infinite opportunities, but also rootlessness and loss of social ties…factory man is neurasthenic, bored, unable to endow any experience with value.”¹⁶ Being “bored” by change and challenges meant having your real-self feelings cut off by your dissociated punitive parent alter, whose authoritarian “culture” was opposed to innovation: “City life and Gesellschaft doom the common people to decay and death…the doom of culture itself,” i.e., individualism spells the doom of your parents’ authoritarian culture. All abused children assume it was their fault they were abused: “I must have deserved it; I must have been too selfish.” As Masterson puts it succinctly: “Self-activation leads to abandonment depression and death.”¹⁷

PHASE TWO: FEAR
The loss of approval by the internal dissociated parental alter means one is alone; as Masterson’s patient put it, “I’ve run up against a wall about Mother. When I was alone, I was afraid of death. Being alone was like being dead.”¹⁸ The inner attacking Mother is experienced as a voice inside: “The voice attacks me at every turn. Whenever I feel I’ve won, I’m attacked by the voice. It never stops.”¹⁹ Hanging on to the attacking voice inside is a way of holding on to the Mother, even if it means she is now a Killer Mother voice.²⁰ The result is a total loss of self-esteem: “If your mother doesn’t like you, how can anyone else like you?”²¹

Any rationalization for the fission makes sense to people entering into the fission trance. As one observer of the Serbian-Croatian civil war notes: “I’m trying to figure out why neighbors should start killing each other. So I say I can’t tell Serbs and Croats apart. ‘What makes you think you’re so different?’ The man I’m talking to takes a cigarette pack out of his khaki jacket. ‘See this. These are Serbian cigarettes. Over there they smoke Croatian cigarettes.’ “But they’re both cigarettes, right?’ ‘You foreigners don’t understand anything.’ He shrugs and begins cleaning his Zastovo machine pistol….The two planes of consciousness—the political and the personal—just can’t confront each other. So they float around in his head.”³³ They often occur more on opposite sides of the brain, the left one more rational, the right one containing the dissociated fears that split people into in-groups and out-groups, so-called “imagined communities.”³⁴ The in-group is a place—a tribe, state or nation—where you store the grandiose fantasies of childhood, a place where you can re-experience the traumas and dominations and defenses of your formative period. The out-group is imagined to contain projected fears that were embedded in childhood in violent perpetrator alters: out-groups are “beasts” who will “devour us,” they “encircle us,” they have a “need to dominate us,” and so on. Out-groups are usually called names that are the same as the names parents called their children when they were resented, when they were “bad.” Abused and neglected children have been found clinically to be especially liable to externalizing their problems.³⁵ Those who received constant love as children and were allowed to individuate do not need in-group and out-group splitting.

Since all the “Bad Mommy” traits are now contained in the polluted “enemy,” the in-group is felt to be “purified” by the fission process, and nations suddenly feel “cleansed.” I have previously described in detail how nations conduct “Purity Crusades” as they plan to go to war, closing down brothels, regulating dance halls, prohibiting obscene literature, opposing feminism, etc.³⁶ The persecutors are products of loveless families; those they choose to persecute are the more loving psychoclasses. Persecutors are usually reactionary politically and look for an authoritarian leader who can be a container for their cleansing group-fantasies, a delegate for their punitive inner alter, the Killer Mother, the dissociated perpetrator alter in the brain that Maccoby calls the “Sacred Executioner.”³⁷ Terror management theorists have shown experimentally that “reminders of death led to increased preference for charismatic political candidates.”³⁸ War leaders “revel in victory and gore [like] Theodore Roosevelt [who] never felt more alive than when killing something.”³⁹ Studies of the language used by hard-line political leaders show that those who scored highest in interpersonal dominance more often advocated the use of military force.⁴⁰ War leaders were almost always raised by dominating mothers who used shame regularly to control their children.⁴¹ The war leader is himself a narcissistic, authoritarian, grandiose personality without empathy, who while he tries to restore his failed masculinity allows the populace under him to enjoy what Masterson terms “closet narcissism,”⁴² so that the nation feels “ecstasy” as “chosen ones” who are so strong they cannot be defeated. Nations going to war usually delegate decisions to dictators; even democracies like Britain suspend elections during wars.⁴³ This authoritarianism soon leads to what Dominic Johnson calls “delusional overconfidence” in planning which nation to attack.⁴⁴ Most wars begin with a self-destructive manic overconfidence, like Germany stating that World War I would just be a “short, cleansing thunderstorm.”⁴⁵ As war experts show in great detail, “Excessive military optimism is frequently associated with the outbreak of war…undertaken with each side believing that it would win [since] God is on our side.”⁴⁶

Usually the “dirty enemy” who must be cleansed includes parts of their own Motherland—whether the Jews in Germany who were “poisoning our blood” or the foreigners “contaminating” Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge cleansing or the “traitors” within nations when “patriots” move toward violence. Both Hitler and Pol Pot were “obsessed with ridding corporate and individual bodies of impurities, contaminants, filth,”⁴⁷ reenacting their parents’ disgust with them as “dirty babies” that needed cleansing. Even though the nation knows the cleansing will be self-destructive, the fission process results in enormous relief, since it shows that the enemy is real and not just imagined. Designating “the enemy” always shows evidence of revenge toward the mother. Women are regularly tortured and killed in wars despite their innocence, from the Rape of Nanking to the torture, rape and twisting of women’s nipples with pliers by Ethiopian soldiers.⁴⁸ There is a surge of not only opiates but also of adrenaline, dopamine and serotonin, as the dangerous maternal alter is put “out there.” What Volkan calls chosen glories are mythologized as collective victories and chosen traumas are imagined to be former injustices and humiliations that need to be revenged.⁴⁹ The coming war is experienced as a “dreamlike, serene” manic high. As young Winston Churchill observed, war was always “exhilarating” to the nation and its warriors, felt to be “ecstatic” in the same sense as the original meaning of the term—namely, a state of being outside the self,”⁵⁰ absorbed in the greater whole, fused into the maternal body. Ehrenreich shows that warriors of all kinds overcome any empathy toward “enemies” by being “swept up into a kind of ‘altered state’… Almost any drug or intoxicant has served to facilitate the transformation of man into warrior”⁵¹ and transforming entire nations into warrior states.

The fission process produces violence whenever groups switch into their dominating and subservient alters, even when there is no rational justification for enmity. This is the finding of the famous experiment of Philip Zimbardo, who randomly assigned college-age men to roles as prisoners or guards in the basement of a university building. The guards quickly developed tyrannical and abusive strategies for controlling their prisoners, forgetting that it was an experiment. They obviously switched into their violent early alters, turned off their empathy mirror neurons in their insulas and anterior cingulates and acted out their childhood traumas, just as warriors and terrorists do.⁵² The same switching can be seen in the much-cited experiment of Stanley Milgram, where volunteers followed “university experimenters” who inflicted seemingly harmful damage upon victims when asked to do so. The only time the experimenters refused to obey was when the university arranged an acting out of a group rebellion, breaking the alter-switching fission process.⁵³ The experiment didn’t prove “obedience” as is usually claimed; if they had asked them to reach into their pockets and give others money rather than shocks, they would not have “obeyed.” Inner alters are always harmful, never beneficent.

PHASE FOUR: FUSION
It is the fusion with the power of the Killer Motherland that gives the war leader his charismatic “strength,” not any real strength he has. Hitler was a weak person physically and mentally, but was adored by Germans because he was fused with the Mutterland, with the Volk, a powerful mystical being utterly lacking in  empathy. Money-Kyrle describes a Hitler rally: “The people seemed gradually to lose their individuality and become fused into a not very intelligent but immensely powerful monster, which was not quite sane and therefore capable of anything.”⁵⁴ Wars begin in

this fused state, claiming “Motherland in danger!”⁵⁵ The nation fantasies it will lose its Motherland if it does not rescue her, even when there is no external enemy. Nations march off to war as heroes, “losing ourselves in ecstasy because we are conscious of a power outside us with which we can merge.”⁵⁶ Warriors are the “favorites” of their Motherland, her “heroes,” as they always wished they could have been with their real mothers. Those who die in wars are said to “die peacefully. He who has a Motherland dies in comfort…in her, like a baby falling asleep.”⁵⁷

War Leaders are exactly like tribal shamans who cure group despair by exorcising bad spirits through healing sacrifices. Leaders can be disobeyed whenever they do not interpret and carry out the group-fantasy of the internal fearful alter. They must make real the growing paranoia of the nation, saying “Let me help you by naming your persecutors…evil is out there, in the real world. And you thought it was all in your head!”⁵⁸ The war leader is an expert in switching into his abusive parental alter, his war trance. Mussolini once told a visitor that “he is subject to periods of trance at which time he is inspired by influences outside his ordinary self.”⁵⁹ The war trance has the same psychodynamics as the possession trance of tribal cultures; both are results of being taken over by dissociated inner perpetrator alters. Tribal warriors often eat the inner organs of their enemies; Cambodian fighters have been photographed smiling as they eat the livers of their enemies.⁶⁰ Both are fused with the cruel nightmares implanted as inner alters in childhood. Because they killed as dissociated alters, psychiatrists can describe them as “normal…They could be you.”⁶¹

Only those who are fused with their inner violent perpetrator alters, “obeying the inner voice of the purified community,” are able to join in the worship of flags, parades and other group-fantasies.⁶² Volkan terms this fusion group-fantasy “blind trust.”⁶³ Those fused with their Killer Motherlands are clinically paranoid, produce inner Terror campaigns in their in-group, and call all those who disagree with them “traitors.”⁶⁴ War leaders are regularly abandoned by their parents as children; one study of British prime ministers discovered that over two-thirds of them had been orphaned in childhood, compared to about two percent of the general population.⁶⁵ Fusion with the abandoning mother as a defense against the collapse of the self can be seen in the Hitchcock film “Psycho,” where Norman fuses with and dresses up like his Killer Mother and carries out terrorizing and killing people as if he were Her. Saying that Motherlands and war leaders are “loved” is quite inaccurate. People worship their Motherlands and war leaders, which reveals not love but unfulfilled infant needs. Fusion is needed as a defense against being abandoned (again). People “defend the honor of the Motherland” and “revenge insults to Her reputation” as defenses to avoid remembering their own rage against their rejecting, abandoning mothers.⁶⁶ Going to war because you are fused with your Motherland is the opposite from defending your group out of empathy; it is a defensive need, a need to relive the dominations of your childhood. Warrior cultures value martyrdom—self-sacrifice, not self interest. To say that domination and power are the secrets of success in international relations is a delusion that began in families by abused children needing to restore their hope that they still have a Powerful Mother who will take care of them.⁶⁷ And when Motherlands begin compulsive wars, war leaders regularly admit, like Churchill in 1914 (Churchill was regularly abandoned by his parents in infancy and later): “Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?” And, during the war, he admitted: “I love this war. I know it’s smashing & shattering lives of thousands every moment—& yet—I enjoy every second of it.”⁶⁸ Tocqueville puts the need for violence when fused with your in-group bluntly: “We have such a passionate taste for war that there is no enterprise so reckless or dangerous to the state but it is thought glorious to die for it with arms in one’s hands.”⁶⁹

Neurobiologically, the Fusion Phase involves the same attenuation of death anxieties as when religious people experience God’s presence, which is also preceded by the fear of being killed. Persinger shows that both are “temporal lobe transients,” similar to the seizures of temporal lobe epileptics, and they can be easily recognized by their brain patterns that include “a release of the brain’s own opiates causing a narcotic high…these opiates are found within the amygdala.”⁷⁰ Both patriotic highs and God highs represent fusion events, “revitalization movements…solutions to the anxiety generated by novelty, uncertainty and complexity.”⁷¹ The “voice of God” and the “voice of the Motherland” that are experienced in revitalization movements both come, says Persinger, from the release of “images and protosensations long locked within the old contexts of the temporal lobe [amygdala] of the infant self to which he or she has not had access for decades.”⁷² The most obvious of these revitalization movements is, of course, the millennialism that breaks before so many wars, a world-ending group-fantasy promising fusion with the Deity as a reward for the cleansing of sin.⁷³

PHASE FIVE: FRACTURE
In order for the good child self to be loved, the bad child must die. That is why there are so many early societies like Carthage where tens of thousands of jars have been found with charred bones of sacrificed children and inscriptions saying they had been killed by their parents to cleanse the world of their sinfulness.⁷⁴ Once the Bad Self is fractured off and projected into an “enemy”—located either inside or outside the society—empathy is entirely lost because the punitive parental alter in the amygdala cuts off all contact with the mirror neurons in the insula and anterior cingulate.

The poster above illustrates this projection of the Bad Self dramatically. It shows a Nazi view of “A crippled idiot. Bound forever to his bed,” which, in the 1930s, rather than eliciting sympathy from other Germans instead was intended to incite disgust at helpless German children who contributed nothing to the Volk and who were in fact murdered by the thousands with approval of their parents. As we will see in the next chapter, the gassing of “useless eaters”—a phrase often used by German parents for their own children—actually preceded the gassing of Jews and others in the Holocaust.

Epithets that enemies are called invariably repeat epithets that originally were used by parents for their children. Usually it is obvious, since it is the intent of the war leader to act out the violent parental alters of the people, as when Wilson called Latin Americans “naughty children who are exercising all the privileges and rights of grown-ups and require a stiff hand, an authoritative hand.”⁷⁵ Or enemies are shown to be just greedy babies, as when the Bush representative told Larry King “You can’t sit down and talk to North Koreans—they’ll want cookies, then more cookies, always more cookies.” Or when George W. Bush himself regularly repeats the injunction “You’ve got to hit them hard to teach them a lesson! They only respect force!”—a phrase that was used on him by his mother. Ehrenreich details admirably how nations regularly go to war against enemies who are children who must be “taught a lesson.”⁷⁶ Often enemies are even called “dirty” or “they stink,” as though they are babies left by mothers in their excrement. When an American soldier kills a North Vietnamese soldier and “balances a large piece of shit on his head,” he says he laughed⁷⁷—the real reason being because he had killed his shitty “Bad Baby Self.” Americans regularly refer to the need to “get the Bad Guys” as if enemies were playground bullies or “we’ll get those little bastards” as if they were illegitimate children. War itself is filled with references to children’s games, like “dominoes falling,” “the checkerboard of war” or “the iron dice about to be rolled.” The clinical term for all these returns to dissociated childhood alters is “flashbacks.” The enemy is always the helpless victim self, the “bad child,” and when Nazis or Tutsis smash babies’ heads against walls they are doing so fused with the Killer Mothers of their early nightmares. Killing babies is certainly not a contribution to the winning of wars, but it always occurs because it is your own “Bad Baby Self” who you blame for your losing your mother’s love, who she screamed at when furious with her life, “I wish I never had you!” Humiliation by the parent is always repeated toward the out-groups, so that humiliation and counter-humiliation become the central tasks of international affairs.⁷⁸

The creation of the “Bad Self enemy” is purely a group-fantasy, and often is created out of whole cloth. “In the Soviet Union, so-called kulaks were killed without guilt, despite the fact that before the revolution “we were just neighbors…Now we are bedniaki, seredniaki, kulaks and we are supposed to have class war…One against the other, you understand?” The same thing happened in Cambodia where “anyone with an education [became] subhuman ‘new people.’”⁷⁹ Finding an “enemy” to kill carries out the paranoid position begun when fusing with the Killer Motherland.

Unfortunately, the projection of the childhood Bad Self into an “enemy” who is either inside your own nation or is in a neighboring nation does not rid one of the problem. Since national growth and progress continue, the Motherland alter voice continues to hate the Bad Self alter, and even peaceful minorities and neighbors seem to be growing more and more threatening. Thus Germany started two World Wars with their more peaceful neighbors because they fantasized that Germany had to strike first, saying “the future belongs to Russia which grows and grows and becomes an even greater nightmare to us.”⁸⁰ This is the essence of paranoia in international affairs, Germans agreeing that “If Germany does not rule the world, it will disappear from the map.”⁸¹ All major wars since antiquity have been imagined to be “preventive”—“We must kill them before they overpower us.” As France said when they attacked Austria during the French Revolution, “time only improves their position and makes ours deteriorate [so we must] make the stormcloud burst instead of letting it grow.”⁸²

Because of the steady growth of the Bad Self projected into the enemy, it is a main task of a war leader to find a war-willing neighbor and invent a “Faked Provocation” for beginning the war in order to get their people to agree to eliminate them. Internal enemies are rather easy to find and invent threats from—even the most bizarre accusations are believed when the internal enemy is said to be an out-group, as when Jews were believed to be  “lice that are poisoning German bloodstream” or when Tutsis were believed to be “cockroaches” killing Hutus. But the idea that nations regularly use faked provocations of other nations as war pretext incidents—as cassus belli—is less often admitted by international affairs experts.

PHASE SIX: FAKED PROVOCATION
A summary of many of the faked provocations used by the United States during he past two centuries reveals a pattern of lying in order to make it appear that an unprovoked attack or threatening condition makes war inevitable. Since most of the nation is in a war trance by Phase Six, they do not question the lie.
The cartoon below shows Saddam Hussein as a killer of children, one of the central fantasies that led to the Gulf War. Although Iraq was one of the best Middle Eastern nations for child care and

education, the American media kept picturing him as a child abuser and baby killer, with U.S.-faked incidents like one where babies were supposedly being removed by Iraqis from their incubators and murdered.⁸³ Initially, President Bush told his representative to tell Saddam: “We have no opinion on…your border disagreement with Kuwait” in order to give him a “green light” to invade.84 The entire war was a set-up because the U.S. needed a war to feel masculine (Bush was being shown in cartoons as a “wimp” who wore women’s dresses), and when Saddam said he would pull his troops out of Kuwait himself, the U.S. ignored him, Bush saying to his diplomats simply: “We have to have a war.”⁸⁵

U.S. faked provocations have occurred in some form in every war it has entered,⁸⁶ so that—as one psychiatrist puts it—“our paranoia switch is tripped.”⁸⁷ The Mexican-American War was started by President Polk announcing he was about to declare war on Mexico even if they did not attack the U.S., then sending 3,500 American soldiers into Mexican territory so they could be accused of shedding American blood.⁸⁸ The American Civil War began after the south was tricked into firing on Ft. Sumter.⁸⁹ The Spanish-American War began when an interior explosion of the U.S.S. Maine caused by coal dust was claimed by U.S. authorities and a belligerent media as reason for war.⁹⁰ The U.S. got into World War I supposedly because the British ship the Lusitania was sunk with Americans on board when it purposely was sent “at a considerably reduced speed into an area where a German U-boat was known to be waiting and with her escorts withdrawn,”⁹¹ thus carrying out Theodore Roosevelt’s earlier wish that “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”⁹²

Even World War II was started, according to the very well documented book by Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, after President Franklin Roosevelt had set up a secret team assigned the task of getting Japan to attack the U.S. As Secretary of War Stimson wrote, “The question was: how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot.” The answer was by such provocations as sending U.S. submarines into Japanese waters, embargoing trade with Japan so they would run out of oil, putting the U.S. fleet into Pearl Harbor undefended, and not telling the Pearl Harbor commander that Japanese planes were on their way because FDR’s team had broken the Japanese secret code.⁹³

The Korean War came about because Truman needed a war with a communist nation, and encouraged the U.S.-backed South Koreans to conduct over 400 border battles and military incursions into the north. Then John Foster Dulles promised Korean President Syngman Rhee “if he was ready to attack the communist North, the U.S. would lend help, through the U.N. [if he] persuaded the world that the ROK was attacked first.”⁹⁴ This eventually provoked North Korean military into South Korean territory. The provocations continued when Truman permitted General MacArthur to “go north” toward the Chinese border despite Chinese warnings that they would respond militarily, producing a new war with China, resulting in an additional two million deaths.⁹⁵

The Cold War continued in the Cuban provocations of the Soviets by John F. Kennedy. After making all kinds of plans for faking an attack by Cuba on U.S. citizens, after arranging the Bay of Pigs invasion over the objections of his military advisers that it would fail, after authorizing various assassination attempts of Castro, JFK sent 40,000 American troops to the Bahamas to begin practicing invading Cuba, which led Khrushchev to say: “An attack on Cuba is being prepared. And the only way to save Cuba is to put missiles there.”⁹⁶ JFK concluded that “If Khrushchev wants to rub my nose in the dirt, it’s all over” and led a showdown with the Soviets that put American bombers armed with 1,300 nuclear bombs in the air ready to bomb Russia and start World War III.⁹⁷ Americans were deep into their war trance too; although 60 percent of them thought Kennedy’s actions might lead to a nuclear WWIII—only 4 percent of them opposed the nuclear showdown.⁹⁸

The Vietnam War was begun with a traditional faked provocation, when the U.S. send a destroyer into the Tonkin Gulf of Vietnam “primarily for provocation,”⁹⁹ and then President Johnson lied and said it was attacked “in neutral waters,” when actually U.S. overhead patrol plans reported to him that there were no Vietnamese PT boats anywhere near the ship. LBJ thereby easily got his authorization from Congress to begin the war.¹⁰⁰ And, of course, the Iraqi War was full of faked “evidence” on weapons of mass destruction and Saddam-Bin Laden contacts that were used to justify America’s attack on a sovereign nation. The invasion of Iraq will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter. Plus, there has recently been one extremely important provocation that the media has simply overlooked: Bush’s announcing in his National Security Strategy report that the U.S. would now for the first time allow themselves to make “first-strike” nuclear attacks against non-nuclear nations—a policy certain to cause many smaller nations to develop nuclear weapons in order to be able to show that they can strike back if attacked with a nuke.¹⁰¹ Nothing could be more provocative for future wars than announcing a “first-strike” nuclear policy. Bush has stated several times that this new pre-emptive nuclear war policy was needed “to rid the world of evil.”

PHASE SEVEN: FIGHT
With the switches into the war trance of the first six phases complete, the nation goes off to their sacrificial war ritual to kill and be killed. The nations involved now are controlled by their hyperactive “alarm centers” (area 25). Both trust and empathy are gone. The warriors on both sides are fully switched into their violent right hemisphere alters—their time bombs from early childhood—and are convinced that they are fully fused with their Killer Motherland and have Her power so they can kill and die as Her Heroes. In the drawing to the right, the Sumerian War Goddess, Innana, controls the death of Her heroes and enemies, even though the King may appear to be in charge of the battle.

In tribal wars, culture heroes are openly shown as “good children who do what their mothers want them to do: renew Her.¹⁰² In modern state wars, the aim is the same. As Paoli explained, “We have laid ourselves over the body of the motherland [Britannia] in order to revive her…I hope that she will soon recover entirely her vigour and her health.” Plutarch recounts a typical Greek mother as she was burying her son saying she had “good luck [for] I bore him that he might die for Sparta.”¹⁰³ And soldiers in every century write home to their mothers letters like this one: “Darling Mama, I had always prayed to show my love by doing something famous for you, to justify what you called me when I got back from France, ‘my hero son.’”¹⁰⁴ To show that they go to war fused with their mothers, warriors even wear symbols of her in wars—her feathers on their helmets, goddess pictures on their shields, swastikas (vaginal symbols) on their uniforms—and regularly display flags (maternal dresses, placental symbols)¹⁰⁵ in their battles. Heroes are never ones who reduce violence. Heroes kill—kill innocent others and kill themselves, setting off their inner time bombs embedded in childhood—and thereby become “a martyr beloved by God [Killer Mother].” Partridge observed the mood of war as “one of ecstasy…heroism, taking part in great events or of victory…the sense of self-loss…of merger into some greater whole.”¹⁰⁶ Dopamine is released; fantasies of grandiosity soar; nations dance in the streets. Bloody slaughter is often experienced as joyful: “As he watched pieces of men’s bodies fly up into the air…he wept with joy…like getting screwed the first time.”¹⁰⁷ Furthermore, as Chris Hedges’ book title puts it, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,¹⁰⁸ since those who did not receive love in childhood can develop no inner self that gives them meaning, and so as adults must fuse with their Killer Motherlands to achieve meaning.

Warriors are made by switching civilians into their early alters in basic training so they repeat the confrontations and fears between their fearsome mother and her helpless child. As one NCO explains: “I try to make soldiers of them. I give them hell from morning to sunset. They begin to curse me…Then they begin to curse together; and become a truly cohesive group—a fighting unit.”¹⁰⁹ Everything is done “to take down your pride, make you feel small,”¹¹⁰ and to re-experience the death fears of early childhood that are embedded in your alter. As one military academy put it: “This is the place where you will learn how to die.”¹¹¹ It is not easy to fully switch into these deadly early alters. Many soldiers do not succeed in switching into being killing warriors, since they received enough love in childhood to avoid having real killing alters. In the infantry in WWII, “only about one-seventh of the soldiers were willing to use their weapons” to kill, although “by the Vietnam War, with further modifications to the training, around 80 percent of American soldiers were shooting to kill.”¹¹² Warriors often recognize that they have switched into alternative personalities in wars. As one American soldier put it, “No man in battle is really sane. The mindset of a soldier on the battlefield is a highly disturbed mind and this is an epidemic of insanity which affects everybody.”¹¹³ Another one described how he killed in a dissociated state: “I enjoyed the killing of the Viet Cong [it was like] watching myself in a movie. One part of me was doing something while the other part watched from a distance, shocked by the things it saw, yet powerless to stop them from happening.”¹¹⁴ Soldiers in combat often switch out of their violent alters often in “lightning emotional changes [that cause them to] act like lions and then like scared hares within the passage of a few minutes.”¹¹⁵ Killing takes its toll physically: a study of U.S. soldiers found they report “a violent pounding of the heart, shaking or trembling all over…over a quarter said they had vomited, and 21 percent said they had lost control of their bowels.”¹¹⁶ Over a third of U.S. military returning from Iraq show evidence of clinical Post Traumatic Distress Syndrome. But war is deemed worth it. “It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble…gives us purpose, meaning, a reasons for living…gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness…”¹¹⁷ Literally, another self, an alternative “smallness” personality, fused with the Killer Motherland, loved at last.

The alternate self of the warrior draws upon the same neurobiological states of mind as pre-psychotic and autistic children access, both conditions resulting from early amygdalan, prefrontal cortex and insula damage.¹¹⁸ Both autistics and military groups demonstrate the failure of autonomy. This can be seen concretely in all the odd actions that the military demonstrates that are similar to autistics. Autistics walk about with arched backs and stiff legs and arms, and so do soldiers (called marching). Autistics flap their arms and hit their heads and so do soldiers (saluting).¹¹⁹ Autistics avoid eye contact and don’t recognize you as they pass you, and neither do marching soldiers.¹²⁰ Autistics don’t talk (troops in formation), love repetitive exercise (endless marching), retreat into their autistic shells to ward off expected attack (military armor), and are “fascinated by mechanical moving parts” (military vehicles).¹²¹ Autistics and troops march about to drums (like the shaman’s drum made of the Cosmic Tree of Heaven that induces trance) and wear costumes with metal ornaments (like shaman’s costume).¹²² All of these rituals explain why the military are called “infantry”—they feel infantile, like infants fearing death. They put themselves into their infantile war trance alters.

Why do nations go to war? Not because wars achieve any utilitarian return. The more than a trillion dollars a year the world now spends on their military is totally sacrificial, self-destructive. Nations say they go to war for emotional reasons, like “war is the greatest purifier to the race or nation” that can be achieved.¹²³ Self-destructive wars are “purifying” because they can drown out all those terrible inner alters embedded in childhood. Behind the defensive group-fantasy need for purification is the accusation of dirtiness and badness: Mommy calls me a “stinky baby,” leaves me in my feces and urine, hates me for “making a mess,” for “being a mess.” I am even now bad, filthy, but I can be purified by war. I can “die young, clean, pure, fresh.”¹²⁴ I can die as a “martyr to my Motherland,” and then I will be loved by Mommy instead of being hated. Becoming a warrior means not needing to live in despair; warriors control death, “choosing who lives and who dies because they pull the trigger.”¹²⁵ All my early nightmares of death that still are in my head can be faced in reality, “outside my head,” in war, and I can then be sent back to join Mommy—dead, in a casket wrapped in Her dress, Her “living flag”—and I will finally be loved by Her, buried in Her bosom, forever.