The oldest motion picture I remember is a black and white projection of a row of refugees, bearing heavy loads down a narrow road. A military transport progressed in the opposite direction, pushing the refugees against the border. This military colon consisted, it seemed to me, of vehicles with neither windows nor doors. I remember this as a constantly moving image, not as a motion picture with a beginning and an ending, but as a continuing stream. As every Sunday afternoon, the projection took place in a back room of the only café in our little town. The session always started with a news programme, followed by a movie, and since this was before television the whole town was gathered. I was deeply shocked because the people on the screen looked exactly like the people in the audience – the only real people I knew.

Today I realise that my view as a five-year-old was surprisingly accurate. The stream of refugees never stopped; it continued in colour, on a wide screen, on television - and they are indeed neighbours from any street or village.

I was drafted for the military service at the very moment a law was voted allowing conscientious objectors to serve double time as a Civil Protection agent. The main reason for me to apply was that I could not accept ever to kill someone unknown to me, simply at the command of some other unknown: at the time, this blind submission disgusted me more than aggression as such. Only as the years passed, my opinion shifted to plain rejection of the very insanity of violence.

The first months I lived in the company of three Jehovah witnesses, who had already spent part of their time in prison. The last two months four pacifists came in - it was the time when many people were protesting against the Vietnam War. For more than a year however I was alone to benefit from facilities built to house and feed two hundred men. I had become a fly on the wall of my country, not important enough to be discussed, a nil in the governments’ statistics. This gave me an unexpected sense of independence from any party, state or nation. Free to think any thought, I had to answer to nobody but myself. I decided to use this freedom to start a systematic search for the answer to the most fascinating question on earth: why do people cause their own suffering as an insane matter of course? At first sight, such a plan seems too pretentious. I was however twenty-four years old and had a whole life ahead of me. Many people claim to know the truth about the origin, purpose and ending of the universe, about a cosmic conflict between good and evil, and about life after death. Many even claim to have received privileged information on those subjects. Compared to all this it seems a rather humble task to examine the causes of our own shortcomings. And as time passed, I became aware that to search for a better existence is the most natural occupation among living beings, and not overly ambitious at all. While digging deeper and deeper as answers seemed to near and fled once again, I managed to make a good living in the development of computer networks, and kept my independence from professional scholars who, in my view, had not even found the question.

Thirty years later I was struck by a serious illness. Hit by the bumper of life I realized that an end might come to the freedom I won as a young man, and decided to conclude my enquiry. This essay is the result. And thanks to modern medicine, I can deliver it in perfect health.

Despite all shortcomings in this essay, I am convinced that its subject – both the question and the answer - is the most important issue of this century. If we do not deal with the issues presented here, the twenty first century will become the ugliest and most atrocious monster humans ever created - if we survive it, it will only be to lament our fate.

I started my enquiry in a world very different from the present, up to the point that many of my sources have only been written when I was already under way. I considered the concept of child submission seemingly without sufficient justification, but then stumbled upon the work of Lloyd DeMause, and found so many arguments It made me sick. I was racking my brain to present the need to destroy borders in a more convincing manner and one day, unexpectedly, saw a crowd hammering down by hand the concrete wall of Berlin.1

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that he wanted his books to be ruminated, and I must admit that the books I value the most are those that made me stop reading each page, and sit back and contemplate. But even if evoked by a gripping author, I never felt my thoughts obliged by his or her opinion. I hope some people will feel the same about this essay.

Rafael Leyre

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