You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
'Fighting … is a means to an end, not an end in itself… When men fight, either singly or in groups, this fighting is directed to some goal.' The motives for fighting vary; the most common among adults seem to be security, power, profit, and love objects.
Frustration is one of the most important sources of aggressive behavior and originates in social barriers limiting the freedom of action of the individual. Repressed hostility may become displaced or projected onto secondary goals.
To understand modern war, Brown investigates the nature of social groupings and finds that, in the modern world, those of nations have become dominant. All of us are participating in a race, a nation, a social class, and usually in a religious group. The respective importance of these groups is changing. In the present world, the national differentiation is more decisive than the religious one. In conflicts between nations, there is a tendency to minimize conflicts between various groups within the nation, and to displace the in-group-hostility onto outside groups. A purely psychological tension between organized groups, however, never suffices to create real conflicts. 'Such mechanisms only lead to conflict, however, when the group is organized in terms of some primary interest.'