restricted antagonism quantitatively,
facilitating an understanding about everything personal, producing a
recognition of being impelled on both sides by historical necessities,
this common basis did not reduce but rather increased, the intensity,
the irreconcilability, and the obstinate consistency of the struggle.

B. WAR, INSTINCTS, AND IDEALS

1. War and Human Nature[209]

What can be said of the causes of war--not its political and economic
causes, nor yet the causes that are put forth by the nations engaged in
the conflict, but its psychological causes?

The fact that war to no small extent removes cultural repressions and
allows the instincts to come to expression in full force is undoubtedly
a considerable factor. In his unconscious man really takes pleasure in
throwing aside restraints and permitting himself the luxury of the
untrammeled expression of his primitive animal tendencies. The social
conventions, the customs, the forms, and institutions which he has built
up in the path of his cultural progress represent so much energy in the
service of repression. Repression represents continuous effort, while a
state of war permits a relaxation of this effort and therefore relief.

We are familiar, in other fields, with the phenomena of the unconscious,
instinctive tendencies breaking through the bounds imposed upon them by
repression. The phenomena of crime and of so-called "insanity" represent
such examples, while drunkenness is one instance familiar to all. _In
vino veritas_ expresses the state of the drunken man when his real, that
is, his primitive, self frees itself from restraint and runs riot. The
psychology of the crowd shows this mechanism at work, particularly in
such sinister instances as lynching, while every crowd of college
students marching yelling and howling down the main street of the town
after a successful cane rush exhibits the joy of unbottling the emotions
in ways that no individual would for a moment think of availing himself.

In addition to these active demonstrations of the unconscious there are
those of a more passive sort. Not a few men are only too glad to step
aside from the burden of responsibilities which they are forced to carry
and seek refuge in a situation in which they no longer have to take the
initiative but must only do as they are directed by a superior
authority. The government in some of its agencies takes over certain of
their obligations, such as the support o