War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges. Pub: Public Affairs, 2014.

For me, this book sheds light on a subject that many people I know, prefer left alone - the division between them and us. Many in the wider community believe that we are engaged with the right side of history. Are we? This book goes some way to challenging that notion.

Cheap oil? Endless plastic? Inconvenience? Convenience? Right? Wrong? The others perspective? My truth? Your truth? Our truth? Their truth? 

I genuinely recommend this as an important part of piecing together the jigsaw of what it is to be human. A jigsaw piece towards understanding our motivation and drives - however terrifying this has to be.

While not an antidote, it follows, at the conclusion of this disturbing and frank appraisal of people, that love also gives life meaning. You know … there is no light without darkness. Love here, is a bittersweet, heroic acceptance, but it cannot be allowed to excuse the horrific excesses of the desire to dominate and extinguish another person. 

From chapter 1, The Myth of War, Chris quotes Simone Weil: 

"Those who believe that god himself, once he became man, could not face the harshness of destiny without a long tremor of anguish, should have understood that the only people who can give the impression of having risen to a higher plane, who seem superior to ordinary human misery, are the people who resort to the aids of illusion, exaltation, fanaticism, to conceal the harshness of destiny from their own eyes. The man who does not wear the armour of the lie cannot experience force without being touched by it to the very soul". Simone Weil, The Iliad or "The Poem of Force".