What separates man from animal is that man has got an intellect.
It could also be the way that man choose to use his or her intellect against themselves.
How do you create war? You set some criteria for what matters, and then you decide that everyone who thinks differently is on the other side, and so must be killed. It doesn't really matter if it's about sharing the water of a river or having different perspectives on what happens when you die. (When it comes to having different takes on afterlife, killing others in war because of different opinions can be considered a particularly paradoxical activity, since nobody will be around to tell who won.) In this case, though, the men who make the decisions rarely fight in the war, and so their decisions do not inflict any personal damage.
On a more personal level, we have something called anxiety, angst. It comes in many forms, but is always carried out by the individual. It wasn't until having lived with severe angst through many years, that I suddenly realized the problem is not angst itself, but the capability of creating chains of thought long enough to make one feel insufficient. Some people would boil this down to having too much time to think. In that case, getting a hair cut and a job might solve the problem. But I would like to explore this further than that. What is it that drives us towards hurting ourselves with our intellect?
