merely one form of confidence (or lack of confidence) among many. Pride, honour, greed, self-sacrifice are equally valid.
All professional discipline is spiritual, and the only attraction of Military thinking above that of other professions is that it is more fundamental, and therefore more useful than other disciplines in practice. Perhaps this is because if soldiers indulge in mistaken theory, which does not work, they may find they have to run for their lives. That is a discipline which must concentrate the mind wonderfully.
But however necessary conflict may be at times, and however necessary it is to understand conflict, my heart is set on reconciliation. The whole purpose of two people trying to create a sense of communion between themselves, and to overcome the evil that separates them, is to bring light into the darkness of the lives that surround them. The light of imagination, courtesy, kindness, and good humour. Men exist for the sake of each other. That is not a new idea; one finds it in Marcus Aurelius. It is a pagan idea. So at the end of the book I suggest that the proper goal for an evolving society is a perfectly relaxed consciousness, freed that is from the spasms of covetousness and greed. Not a description of salvation, but perhaps of the type of mind which will enjoy salvation, if it ever gets there. The epilogue ends with the reconciliation between God and man after a disastrous adventure.
But if two people did overcome the evil that separated them, they would create between themselves a communion far deeper than anything normally found nowadays. Human relations would be transformed, and the gates opened onto a new world, at least for them.