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CHAPTER 1
WAR AND PEACE
Politics is history in the making. History itself is the presentation of the course of a Folk's struggle for existence.
I deliberately use the phrase struggle for existence here because, in truth, that struggle for daily bread, equally in
peace and war, is an eternal battle against thousands upon thousands of resistances, just as life itself is an eternal
struggle against death. For men know as little why they live as does any other creature of the world. Only life is
filled with the longing to preserve itself. The most primitive creature knows only the instinct of the self
preservation of its own, in creatures standing higher in the scale it is transferred to wife and child, and in those
standing still higher to the entire species. While, apparently, man often surrenders his own instinct of self
preservation for the sake of the species, in truth he nevertheless serves it to the highest degree. For not seldom
the preservation of the life of a whole Folk, and with this of the individual, lies only in this renunciation by the
individual. Hence the sudden courage of a mother in the defence of her young and the heroism of a man in the
defence of his Folk. The two powerful life instincts, hunger and love, correspond to the greatness of the instinct
for self preservation. While the appeasement of eternal hunger guarantees self preservation, the satisfaction of
love assures the continuance of the race. In truth these two drives are the rulers of life. And even though the
fleshless aesthete may lodge a thousand protests against such an assertion, the fact of his own existence is
already a refutation of his protest. Nothing that is made of flesh and blood can escape the laws which
determined its coming into being. As soon as the human mind believes itself to be superior to them, it destroys
that real substance which is the bearer of the mind.
