Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality

I just watched this documentary: Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality:

Apparently, many things boil down to people defending their symbolic story of denial of death... read it again: our denial of death belief system, defines our tolerance, and when we see our immortality system threatened, we tend to become anxious and aggressive.

Here's a paper published in 1989, http://people.uncw.edu/ogler/Experimental/TM%201.pdf, which says that once subjects are reminded of their death, they sympathizer more toward people of their own beliefs, and become hurtful of people who either disrespect that immortality system or just believe in something different. THIS, of course is when we push this anxiety to our subconscious. If we keep reminding ourselves about our death, we will not allow this anxiety to affect our actions without us realizing it.

There's so much that comes to mind after this. I realized that when a war starts, specially if it is between different culture/religions, it will be a reinforcing cycle: see more death, feel more threatened, get more anxious, hurt the other more, kill more... Now I am thinking that the Iran-Iraq war might have permanently changed the views of those generation that took part in it. (i.e. my parent's generation). They might not realize the effect, but the war has indeed made them more and more intolerant. Some time has passed, some people have again forgotten the fearful times, so they are again getting tolerant people, but I hope.. I just hope... that nothing like that reminds them again and pushes them unto the stressful, intolerance, fear of mortality.

On the flip side, peace is a positive reinforcement cycle too..
oh well..