einstein

set up to resolve any disputes. “The two great Semitic peoples,” he said, “have a great common future.” If the Jews did not assure that both sides
lived in harmony, he warned friends in the Zionist movement, the struggle would haunt them in decades to come. 78 Once again, he was labeled
naïve.
The Einstein-Freud Exchange
When a group known as the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation invited him in 1932 to exchange letters with a thinker of his choice on issues
relating to war and politics, Einstein picked as his correspondent Sigmund Freud, the era’s other great intellectual and pacifist icon. Einstein began
by proposing an idea that he had been refining over the years. The elimination of war, he said, required nations to surrender some of their
sovereignty to a “supranational organization competent to render verdicts of incontestable authority and enforce absolute submission to the
execution of its verdicts.” In other words, some international authority more powerful than the League of Nations must be created.
Ever since he was a teenager rankling at German militarism, Einstein had been repulsed by nationalism. One of the fundamental postulates of
his political view, which would remain invariant even after Hitler’s rise made him waver on the principles of pacifism, was his support for an
international or “supranational” entity that would transcend the chaos of national sovereignty by imposing the resolution of disputes.
“The quest of international security,” he wrote Freud, “involves the unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of
action—its sovereignty that is to say—and it is clear that no other road can lead to such security.” Years later, Einstein would become even more
committed to this approach as a way to transcend the military dangers of the atomic age that he helped to spawn.
Einstein ended by posing a question to “the expert in the lore of human instincts.” Because humans have within them a “lust for hatred and
destruction,” leaders can manipulate it to stir up militaristic passions. “Is it possible,” Einstein asked, “to control man’s mental evolution so as to
make him secure against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness?” 79
In a complex and convoluted response, Freud was bleak. “You surmise that man has in him an active instinct for hatred and destruction,” he
wrote. “I entirely agree.” Psychoanalysts had come to the conclusion that two types of human instincts were woven together: “those that conserve
and unify, which we call ‘erotic’... and, secondly, the instincts to destroy and kill, which we assimilate as the aggressive or destructive instincts.”
Freud cautioned against labeling the first good and the second evil. “Each of these instincts is every whit as indispensable as its opposite, and all
the phenomena of life derive from their activity, whether they work in concert or in opposition.”
Freud thus came to a pessimistic conclusion:
The upshot of these observations is that there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies. In some happy
corners of the earth, they say, where nature brings forth abundantly whatever man desires, there flourish races whose lives go gently by;
unknowing of aggression or constraint. This I can hardly credit; I would like further details about these happy folk. The Bolshevists, too, aspire
to do away with human aggressiveness by insuring the satisfaction of material needs and enforcing equality between man and man. To me this
hope seems vain. Meanwhile they busily perfect their armaments. 80
Freud was not pleased with the exchange, and he joked that he doubted it would win either of them the Nobel Peace Prize. In any event, by the
time it was ready for publication in 1933, Hitler had come to power. Thus the topic was suddenly moot, and only a few thousand copies were
printed. Einstein, like a good scientist, was by then revising his theories based on new facts.