WHY ARE PEOPLE TERRIFIED OF THEIR OWN NATION? WHY DO MOTHERS EVOKE DESPERATE ANXIETY?

The main reason that warfare persists is it because it is undertaken in the name of a beloved entity, one's nation. Since violence is undertaken in the name of a beloved object, therefore violence cannot be perceived as "evil."

So the fundamental question is: WHAT ARE "NATIONS" AND WHY DO PEOPLE LOVE THEM SO MUCH THAT THEY ARE WILL TO DIE AND KILL FOR THEM?

OR: WHY ARE PEOPLE FORBIDDEN NOT TO LOVE THEIR NATIONS. Ah, there's the rub. If you do not love your nation, you are some kind of awful person.

It's equivalent to not loving your mother, a primal sin. At the root of all this is the TERROR of the mother--she might kill you if you criticize (or desire to separate from) her, which means one needs to placate her by pretending to love her intensely.  
________________________________________________________

AND BY "NATION," LET ME MAKE IT CLEAR, I'M REFERRING TO AN ABSTRACT, MYSTICAL, SYMBOLIC ENTITY, not the concrete practices and experiences of everyday life. I love baseball and milk-shakes and macaroni and cheese, I love rock 'n' roll and Smokey Robinson, I loved Norman Mailer and Leslie Fiedler, I love Robert  De Niro's movies, I love Manhattan, its subways, and the "night on Broadway." I could go on and on.

In fact, my analyst (who is Canadian) once made a pointed criticism of me, "You are SO American."

The "America" I write about in my papers and essays is not the concrete experience of everyday life, but this MYSTICAL, ABSTRACT ENTITY IN THE NAME OF WHICH PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO DIE AND KILL.

What is the nature of this entity in the name of which people are willing to die and kill? This is the fundamental question. And most academics don't ask this question because they assume nations are real things. This is the starting point of the "history books" they write. For all their profession of "deconstructionism," they are radically naive.