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Mikey Lee

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World peace is unattainable - and to think otherwise is naive

Is it just me, or does anyone else cringe whenever someone talks about "world peace"?

It always reminds me of a beauty pageant where the contestants naively wish for "world peace", without much thought into how, or even why?

What exactly does "world peace" mean? No wars, no fighting, no conflict at all, whatsoever? Everybody loves each other, and accepts each other?

As long as personal conflict exists, there will never be world peace. Wars are built from the ground up. Fighting over scarce resources, territory, food, mate (husband/wife) is inevitable.

Discuss.

Topics: World Peace conflict nirvana war
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    Ken Gettys

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    Jul 10 2012: The use of the 13 colonies uniting was to show that tribes, colonies, states, nations etc can get together to make rules (laws) that will allow us (all humans) to live together in harmory (of course not 100% just possible without wars).

    Yes, Mark, I will agree that you do not think anything can be done to improve the human condition so unless you can propose something else and I will leave it at that.

    • Mark Meijer 100+

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      Jul 10 2012: I'm not saying nothing can be done to improve the human condition, I'm saying nothing will be done if we don't change the way we look at things. And that's not likely to happen, or at best marginally so. People aren't really that interested, claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Just look at your own reaction.

      People want to dwell in their sense of rightness and do anything to avoid considering the possibility that they couldn't be more wrong. The very notion seems absurd and unbearable, and therefore not even worth investigating. That's what status quo means. We'd need to actually grow up, but that looks unappealing to a child.

      I have no answers, because there are none. So I don't make proposals. There are only questions, and nobody has the balls to even ask them, much less look at them honestly. We're always just looking for solutions outside of ourselves, to problems we don't even know how to articulate, let alone know what they are founded on.

      I say they are founded on the way we look at things, i.e. on ourselves, which in the larger picture has never changed much and isn't bound to change much any time soon. Why would it? And which incidentally also means that they are problems of our own devising. We are creating and maintaining our own problems with tremendous zeal. They will go away when we stop doing that, but to stop doing that we first need to acknowledge that's what we've been doing all along.

      Fat chance.

      But what it really means is that there are no problems. If there is any problem, it is our constant effort to improve the world, as a result of our seeing fault with it which isn't actually there. And we will insist on finding fault with whatever world we'll ever find ourselves in. If one day we were to wake up in paradise, we would find fault with paradise. And guess what, that's exactly the situation we've always been in.

      So you say the solution is even more of the same rules? For even larger groups of different people? Good luck with that.

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