Collective Psychological Trauma and Its Implications on World Peace
Violence may be a demonstration of one's psychological trauma, a process which allows belligerents to vent their stress. Psychological trauma may come from various sources around the person, whether they be his/her parents, siblings, friends, tv shows, music, teachers, colleagues, and so on.ย
One interesting feature about this trauma-based violence is that the aggressor, or the person who is inflicting violence on someone out of psychological trauma, seems to act in a way that is similar to actions which conferred on him/her the very psychological trauma in the first place, upon which he/she is compelled to inflict violence toward external objects.ย
Take Israel for example. Here, what I have seen is not Palestine or Israel. Rather, I have observed that a certain psychological trauma may be compelling Israel to use indiscriminate and excessive force on Palestinians in Gaza. What is this certain psychological trauma? Well, it is the memory of ย the Holocaust.ย
It is well known that when someone suffers a severe psychological trauma due to violence, he/she dramatically loses the sense of personal security, due to which he/she shows frequent symptoms of resorting to excessively violent actions meant for self-protection. This case, however, does not fully explain Israel's current behavior, because it mainly elaborates upon an individual, not 8 million collection of him/her.ย
Then, how can this case be supplemented to better explain the actions taken by Israel? This is where the theory of immoral society intervenes. Reinhold Niebuhr, a prominent Christian priest and an International Relations scholar, has argued in his book, theย Moral Man and Immoral Society, that morality found in an individual is lost in a society. In other words, morality is gradually replaced by the immoral sense of survival that a society can resort to radical actions that may be seen as shockingly immoral to an individual. This theory is coherent with other prominent studies on collective psychology as represented by Sigmund Freud.ย
So, if one combines the case of an individual with a severe psychological trauma due to violence with the theory of immoral society, he/she will be able to see that the Israel's behavior is far more worrying than one may expect. Driven by the psychological trauma based on the memory of the Holocaust, as well as deprived of morality on a collective and societal level, Israel is determined to achieve its security as a nation by resorting to indiscriminate and excessive use of force, regardless of whether the victims may include women and children.
As I've written above, aggressive actions driven by a certain psychological trauma breed similar form of psychological trauma within the victim, whether it be an individual or a society. This is why I agree to the term that is frequently used by many politicians and journalists in describing this tragedy in Gaza: the "New Holocaust". Israel, an immoral society driven by the memory of the Holocaust, is breeding another group of victims who will also be traumatized by the sense of their own "Holocaust".ย
This may imply something very serious for further generations. Future generations of Palestinians will collectively suffer from this psychological trauma, and may therefore be exposed to high chance of resorting to radical action, whether it be violence, isolation, taking flight, and so on. Also, all societies are generally argued to be in the state of immorality, and Palestinian society is not an exception. So, this sense of societal immorality will further exacerbate the extremeness of Palestine's traumatic reaction.
In the end, however, this article is not only about Israel and Palestine. I note with a thick underscore that this world of globalization in which contacts between individuals, societies, states, and supra-state entities are becoming more and more frequent, transfer of psychological trauma from one party to another is also becoming more and more rapid and widespread. Another epidemic called collective (and therefore immoral) psychological trauma is on its way, and not even the Ebola virus will be able to beat it.ย
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