Why Do Nations Fight?
Questioner: Namaste Acharya Ji. I live in the US and I've been listening to you for a very long time. You've answered a lot of my questions in the past. It's massively improved my life.
My question today was about a global conflict that's going on currently. A few days ago, the US attacked Iran and they killed one of their top political and religious authorities, Ayatollah Ali, and this guy was a prominent leader in Iran. So now Iran has retaliated and they're attacking Israel and US military bases in the Gulf regions.
All of this has come at a time when there's also so much tension right now between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan attacked Afghanistan last month. There's already tension between Ukraine and Russia.
So my question was about what nations are getting out of this, and is this a fight for resources or territory or security or power?
Acharya Prashant: It's not about any of these. There is nothing called a nation as a conscious entity. A nation is a principle. It could be a conscious principle. It could be an unconscious principle. Nations were supposed to be very conscious principles that bring conscious people together, right? Nations were not meant to be divisive principles.
Remember, the principle is generated by the ego. The principle has no agency on its own. If the ego wants to remain in the dark, it will generate a principle that helps it remain in the dark.
If, let's say, there are 100 people sitting here, and these 100 people decide they want to live in the dark because that's what pleases the ego, they will come up with some concept of a nation that is aggressive, divisive, belligerent, and exclusive.
On the other hand, if these 100 people are conscious, then they will come up with a conscious concept of a nation. And that kind of nation can be auspicious for the entire world. So nations don't fight, egos do. It's not the US and Venezuela, or the US and Iran, or Pakistan and Afghanistan, or Israel and Palestine, or that one Russia, Ukraine. No, no, no, we are looking at the wrong labels. Egos are fighting. And there is a danger in thinking that Russia and Ukraine are fighting. The real belligerent is absolved of his guilt. It appears some abstraction called the nation is at war.
Not the nation at war, as simple as that, human being. Humans are fighting for very primitive reasons. There is nothing sophisticated about all this. The reasons belong to the cave and the stone and the jungle. The reasons have not evolved. Civilizations have evolved. The ego has not evolved. Right?
Does the ego evolve? Science does, technologies do, civilizations do, systems do; but the ego does not evolve, at least not in a period as limited as, let's say, 2,000 or 5,000 years. That's too small a period for even the biological ego to evolve. So we fight for the same reasons as early man did. You said resources, no, no. Resources are an alibi. No, they are not fighting for resources. They are fighting for identity. Identity.
How is it a fight for identity?
The ego says, you have to understand this, the ego says, "I am incomplete. So, what do I need for my completion?" Loads of objects, loads of energy, because energy will help me get more objects. Therefore, I have to fight for oil, be it Iraq or Iran or Kuwait or Venezuela. When you look at this fight for energy, what is energy related to? The ego's quest for objects. Because the ego takes itself as fundamentally incomplete. The subject says, "I'm incomplete. I need more and more objects to fill myself up." So it will appear as if they are fighting for oil, but they're not really fighting for oil. They are fighting for identity.
Do you get this?
Otherwise, when it comes to energy, actually the US is bigger than Saudi Arabia. They need not attack anybody for energy. Iran is unlikely to have any weapon that ever reaches the US, and probably some kind of deal was in the making where it was being said, with the mediation of Oman, that Iran would maybe produce fissile material but not stockpile it. And if it can't stockpile it, it can never be weaponized.
Are you getting it?
What's at stake? Consumption. I need as much money as possible so that I can consume as many objects as possible. Let me have more and more energy, energy and energy. And Iran does have energy. Therefore, a favorable government is needed in Iran so that even Iran's energy can be appropriated.
Otherwise, why does one need energy? Please tell me. In any case, the per capita consumption of energy in the US is among the highest in the world. Why do you need more energy? And even if you need more energy, you already have energy reserves in your own country. But that won't suffice.
Even the energy reserves of the entire planet won't suffice because the incompletion called the ego can never be truly addressed. You feed the entire universe into it, it would still remain hollow. And that's why diplomacy, etc., won't work. You don't need diplomacy. You need wisdom. That's why deals won't solve the problem. That's why these foreign ministers and bureaucrats and mediators and ambassadors and embassies, they are mere entertainment. They cannot stop wars.
What you need is wisdom. What we need is the ego looking at itself. But we love to entertain ourselves, right?
So we say, "No, you see, the problem is geopolitical." No, sir, the problem is here (pointing towards the heart), internal, the heart of man.
You want to give it fancy labels, that doesn't help. You have been doing it for so long. All that remains is a full-blown nuclear war. And after that, nobody will remain to deceive himself. The ego's proposition is: keep deceiving yourself till you are blown up in a nuclear catastrophe. That will ensure that you never have to face the Truth. As long as you are alive, you keep lying to yourself, and you lie to yourself to such an extent that ultimately there was a nuclear blow-up and you got annihilated. And hence, you survive the dreadful prospect of facing the mirror. "I lied to myself all my life, and then I just got blown up." That's nice, because even in my death I didn't have to look at myself.
These world leaders, you are glorifying them with fancy names and titles. They are kids. They are not even proper representatives when it comes to level of consciousness. Most of them are below the average level of their own electorate. I do not believe the average American is as dumb, or the average citizen of any other country.
It's not as if the leaders represent even the average. They represent the worst of a people's tendencies. Ego. Ego; the fundamental error. The fundamental lack of understanding of who the human being is. The internal war being played out on a massive external scale, that's all. There's nothing more to this.
"I am somebody. I belong to a particular nation, and I have a particular ideology, and I have a particular religion. I am American. You are Iranian. I am Christian. You are Muslim. Or I am a Jew, or I am a Hindu." Something.
How do I sustain myself if there is no other? So others are needed. The ego can operate only in duality. Remove duality, the ego is gone. And that's why separations and boundary lines are needed. Nothing can exist for the ego if there are no boundaries. A boundary means duality, something on this side and the opposite on that side. And both this side and that side then celebrate. The egos on both sides revel in the separation, whereas the separation itself is unnatural.
I look at the coverage of all these global wars, and I could have laughed at it, actually. It's amusing. But the thing is, lives are being lost, and that tragic aspect prevents me from laughing at it. But it's also childish. Getting it?
Don't be taken in by the grand narratives. "Then China did this, then Germany did that, then the great empire did this." What do you mean by the great empire? Show me the great empire. Where is the great empire? You're talking of a person, a human being. Why don't you put it straight? You're talking of the human ego here. Why are you hiding behind abstractions? Geopolitics, diplomacy, don't pin your hopes on these. These will not succeed.
You say you want to disarm Iran. The fact is, with what is happening to Iran, every country of the world will say it wants an ICBM capable of reaching the US, because that's the only way to prevent the US from killing its president. Every single country of the world is thinking that way. Because what's being displayed is the rule of might. "You don't have a missile that can hit my city. Therefore, I'll come and destroy all your cities." Your guilt is that you don't have a nuclear-tipped ICBM. That's your offense.
So you can imagine, that's the thinking going on in the strategic think tanks in most capitals of the world today. "How do we also procure a nuclear-tipped ICBM? Because otherwise, we are also unsafe." That's how the ego on the other side would think now. You're trying to disarm Iran. No. All countries will now want to arm themselves to the teeth.
The real disarmament is: disarm the ego, defang the ego, detoxify the ego. Apart from that, there is nothing called disarmament.
All right, you can stop somebody from building a missile and a bomb. You can stop them from building a missile and a bomb. How do you stop them from purchasing one? How do you stop them from hiring one? Let's say. Pakistan used to call its nuclear bomb the "Islamic bomb." At some point, the intent was, you know, "We don't have money, we are failing, but then there is something that we have and no other Islamic country has." What is that?
Listener: Nuclear bomb.
Acharya Prashant: So you give me money, I'll give you security. And that was the reason it was called the "Islamic bomb." You have money. The Islamic world has petrodollars, energy, money, job opportunities. You give me all this, and in return I'll put you under the nuclear umbrella. That didn't quite materialize. That's fine. But that was the thinking at some point in the '90s and the early years of this century, the Pakistani nuclear umbrella for the entire Islamic world.
So you can stop a country from manufacturing a bomb. You cannot stop a country from trading it or leasing it or something. The ego will try to find a way to get around the obstacle, right? So all these coercive methods are not going to succeed.
We are pushing ourselves closer to the apocalypse. Think of North Korea. How did they get the bomb? Did they really have homegrown technology? Somebody supplied it to them. And the thing is that the US won't attack them so readily. They have the bomb and the missile, both. And that serves as an example for the entire world.
The ego trades in power, and no amount of power will ever secure it. Therefore, it will be a blind quest for supremacy through power, leading to inevitable conflict. The only way out is challenging the ego itself. But this would sound absurd, utopian, impractical to most people. Maybe this is utopian or impractical. A nuclear Armageddon is very practical. You are prepared to embrace that dystopia, right? The nuclear war, you are prepared to embrace that. But when I talk of addressing the ego, you call that a utopian fantasy.
And if this won't work, tell me what else would, do you have an alternative? The answer is so simple, the world needs education. These chaps are not educated enough. Not just the leaders; I'm talking of the masses. Inner education. Education of the self.
Questioner: Sorry to interrupt, because you just said this. It occurred to me when we hear about civilian deaths, large numbers of people dying, Gaza strikes, especially here where I live, closer to where I live in the South, you were talking about detoxifying the ego. I actually see the exact opposite. People feel a sense of pride in what the US is doing, and they feel like everything that is happening is like, "We are powerful." This is happening outside of the US. They remain unaffected by the events that are happening.
Acharya Prashant: No, again the same egoic blindness about itself. The ego loves to deal in objects and won't look at itself. So the average American would think that the disturbance is in the object states, US, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Syria; stuff is happening there. The thing is that the same disturbance is happening within every American who has sanctioned the war.
The objects cannot be disturbed without first the subject being equally disturbed. But it appears to be happening out there, so one tends to feel relaxed and secure. But you're not secure. The fire you see there and the smoke were first lit in your own inner cave. It reached there from here (pointing towards the heart). You can't remain secure. It will show up in various ways in your daily life. The others will die from the bomb. You will die of your own egoic deeds.
Does one always need an external tormentor? Does one always need an external enemy?
So the people out there will die because the external enemy bombed them. And you will live assaulted and suffering because you are bombing yourself from the inside. See, duality doesn't exist. You cannot burn your neighbor's home and rest in peace. As simple as that.
Questioner: That makes sense, because the rates of depression and anxiety.
Acharya Prashant: Obviously, and it is not commonsensical to link it with American misdeeds the world over. If you have an epidemic of mental disorders in the US, it doesn't seem intuitive to link it with what America has been doing all over the world over the last several decades, right?
And it's not as if I'm putting America in the dock and exonerating the rest of the world. We are all one. In fact, the entire world nurtures the American dream. The entire world dreams to be like America. And in that, I'm not denying America's contributions to education, to medicine, to technology. But when it comes to the ego, Americans are as blind as anybody else. And power has the tendency to turn the semi-blind into totally blind. Ego with power becomes its own worst enemy.
