A society, however nobly purposed, that is built on violence and pure aggression, cannot easily break free from the crushing grip of its own brutal addiction to endless punishment and death.

However much they trumpet their exceptional allegiance to the “turn-the-other-cheek“ guy, American society actually cleaves far, far more miserably to the lex talionis dad – – “an eye for an eye” — who Carl Jung described (quite rightly) as a psychopath in Answer to Job.

Recent social indicators reveal that this malignant mass-psychosis is only becoming more unfixable. I had felt America’s addiction to retributive violence decades ago, and it is the reason why — when it was time to finish training in Asia —deciding to live in Europe was truly a no-brainer. Strict, common-sense gun control laws mean there are vanishingly few guns on the street, and there is no capital punishment throughout the European Union, and a far, far more humane approach to mental health treatment.

For these reasons, and so many more, I have chosen to live in a Europe which is an incomparably far more enlightened human civilization than the one into which I was born. When I organize some tax reporting matters owed to the land of my birth, I hope to begin soon the process of letting go of a US citizenship that serves no purpose but to cause me to send tax money to a system which, while begun steeped deeply in genocidal death, is still not yet sufficiently drunk on it to realize the pointlessness and cynicism of this addiction to arrogance and brutality.

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