Neithan Tol Turambar

'Such questions cannot be answered,' said Gandalf. 'You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess: not for power or wisdom at any rate. But you have been chosen, and you therefore must use such stength and heart and wits as you have.'
'But I have so little of these things! You are wise and powerful. Will you not take the Ring?'
'No!' cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. 'With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.' His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire within. 'Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity. Pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me.'

I wonder sometimes exactly how the wisdom and will of Gandalf to do good would have been twisted to evil. To my mind, I cannot help but to see parallels in our own modern societies.
If Gondor and Harad went to war over conflicts between farmers, tradesmen and their caravans along the southern border, and let's say for arguments sake that a citizen of Gondor had planted rows of wheat along and over the border, in the years following the Great War when Harad had been driven back, and then a Haradian's retaliation began a series of events which brought both kingdoms head to head once more.
Would Gandalf with his farseeing and deep vision see that judging each individual case on it's merits would ultimately lead to more cause for even more and more unceasing struggle? Perhaps, I think, Gandalf would see that the Border itself was to blame, no border, no source of contention. Once realizing that, he would see that the idenities themselves of the people within the two geographic areas had brought the border into being, and that that was even more deeply the fundamental source of the border, over which the contentions had been given birth, to grow into wars between the two peoples. So, in pursuit of peace and the happiness therin, Gandalf erases all sense of idenity from the minds of both Haradians and Gondorians and they cease even having a conception in their minds as being anything other than people, and . . . .
In todays world I have seen a mentally retarded man love the Catholic Priest who beats him unmercifully for his sins. I have seen drought in primative agrarian cultures lead to a million deaths by starvation and read the treatise of economist who calculate the advantages of this vacumn created within labor, out of which will pour surpluses from industry, the resulting loss in production in each, will then drive values up, and benefit the economy.
In The Lord of the Rings, I think of two occasions, the 'deaths' of Saruman and Sauron. In both occasions their physical forms became like clouds, like a basic lesson in chemistry: Solids to Gasses. And then, the gasses were blown by another gas, more dense and greater volumn, more turbulant; the Wind: Manwe.
And the converted gasses of both Saruman and Sauron became vapor. Complete molecular disintegration. They, in effect, lost their self awareness, life, or, Idenity if you will. The molecules were scattered all over the world. And eventually inhaled, inbibed, eaten, or shallowed, and each one of us to this day has a little particle of Sauron and Saruman integrated into our own atomic structure.