Here's an essay I wrote for a class a while back. Thought it was interesting enough to post, but I don't necessarily agree with everything I wrote. Nevertheless, it felt right at the time. Agree with it or disagree, if you'd like.
Time and again many great thinkers have proclaimed mankind a peaceful animal, albeit one driven to violence by iniquity. Were man granted an equal share of territory and equal access to resources, these thinkers argued, his soul would be fulfilled, obviating the need to perpetrate crimes or, for that matter, make war. And sadly, time and again, man, through his actions, has proved this notion wrong. History has shown us that even when a man seemed content—i.e., had a surfeit of land, a full belly and a heavy coin purse—he still wanted more. Suffice to say, then, that war, crime or enmity doesn’t stem from a dearth of land or resources but instead from an intrinsic flaw in mankind’s nature.
What happened in Nazi Germany underpins this theory. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he instituted radical economic polices, many of which were incredibly successful, over a Germany that had, through the Weimar era, been destitute. By the time war WWII began, Hitler didn’t need any more land or resources for his people. The Reichsmark had recovered nicely, and Germans were again eating well. Germany’s problems, in fact, had never really centered on lack of land.
However, one of many impetuses for Hitler’s war was land acquisition. But the Führer didn’t want to harvest crops: he wanted more land with which he could better nourish German children, his cannon fodder. What is more, Hitler wanted to expand the Reich, so it could be harder to defeat—thanks to more resources and manpower—on the battlefield. Here is the perfect case of a man, who did not need more land, a man whose human condition was relatively agreeable, but started one of the deadliest wars to win more any way.
Though Hitler serves as an extreme example, he wasn’t the only man who exhibited such intrinsic flaws, when considering history and literature.
Similar to Hitler, Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s main character in the book Crime and Punishment, acts out of a twisted impulse when committing a nasty deed, a deed born not out of necessity. Raskolnikov was responsible for the death of two people, who, much like all those millions killed in WWII, could have easily been spared.
Raskolnikov had a decent life—he was going to university and receiving money from his mother back home. However, Raskolnikov, in Dostoevsky’s classic (a classic in which many a characters' ruminations most definitely reflected Dostoevsky’s personal musings), isn’t happy with his mundane existence. Acting from this frustration, he decides one day he wants to “challenge himself”: he wants to be unique; he wants to be a “superman,” or an “übermensch.” The only way to do this, Raskolnikov believes, is by committing a spectacular act, which will set him above common man: murder. Perhaps most shocking, Roskolnikov commits these crimes just to see if he can. Thus, Raskolnikov, like so many before in history and literature, wanted to test the limits of human capacity, irrespective of who had to pay the price.
Disheartening as it is to think that true peace is almost never possible, thanks to a flaw in man’s soul, the case for it is strong. Both Hitler and Raskolnikov speak for the fact that, even when man is sated or comfortable, he still wants more. Therefore, idealists can—and will—perpetually bemoan the state of the world. They can preach about how one should give peace a chance, or one should share with one another and live cordially. Truth told: any man, given the right opportunity, would steer into the wrong due to some intrinsic flaw.
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