Why I don’t believe in “world piece”...

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Ace Rimmer

Spaceman
World peace would inevitably lead to lethargy of the human race and it’s eventual extinction. It’s adversity that fuels change, chaos is what moves things forward. It is not religion that fuels war, but opinion and individuality that drive people into conflict.

As long as humans are free to think and disagree there will be conflict and war. The individuality and uniqueness of free thought, that form the mote of the soul, are the causes of war, to end war you must destroy the human soul, you must cease to be human.

If there is nothing left to fight for, there is nothing left to live for. World peace is suicide.
 
If I had handed something like that in to my Feminazi teacher, back when I was in school, I would have been sent to the principle’s office. In fact, I got sent to the principle’s office all the time for stuff like that.
 
Why I don’t believe in “world piece”...
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I don't think you quite know what it means to have free will, or how to spell "peace" consistently. Don't people have the right to choose to be peaceful? Where do my rights end and yours begin? I can choose to kill you but that isn't what is important when it comes to the right to choose your own path. Your definition of peace ignores the entirety of the human condition for the sake of a stupid semantic argument that equates strife with freedom? If that were the case then why the hell fight any war if being opressed is so synonimous with free will. You're right to choose is only guaranteed by removing the rights of others? How clever.

Freedom and peace, while under present world conditions may be impossible, means being able to learn forever without fear of others or death. It means having the ability to accomplish all you desire without the injustice and opression of the greedy (whether for power or money).

World peace is such a vague concept in peoples mind that gets boiled down to a joke as in Miss Congeniality. It's the safe answer for people to say when asked what they would fix in the world because most people have no idea what it would take to fix it so you can say the answer and nobody will laugh at you for not being able to explain it.

To suggest peace on earth removes what makes people individuals is idiotic. Conflict prevents people from fully realizing who they are on an individual level .
The solutions just aren't simple, and I don't see how saying someone has the right to rob me of my money or life, or living conditions makes the world a better place.

As an aside, those things do make reading history books a lot more interesting. But unless people are willing to choose to learn from it, what was the point of writting it all down?
 
Ace, why don't you try the "Culture" cycle by Iain M. Banks ("Consider Phlebas", "The Player of Games"...)
good prose, and deals with that very issue, most of the way.
 
In a way all of you are right. World Piece for the most part will never happen unless we all have a common enemy to face as in the kilrathi. There needs to be something that everybody can agree if we are to be totally at peace. Other wise the bullies of this world will still find a way to opress the weak. Because of love for our fellow human, war is created. Without love Napolean would have conquered the world or Hitler. War is not the worst thing in the world. Its letting people take away peace and then people not fighting to keep it.
 
Delance said:
Free will is not the cause of war. Bad choices are.
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Wars are caused by people believing other people must believe the same things they do, live the same way they do, etc., and believing to such a degree that they feel obligated to force everyone to do so. Boiled down, wars are caused by intolerance.
 
It's even more simple than that when you think about it. It always has, and always will be human nature to want what the other guy has and try to take it - being the pathetic descendants of monkeys that we are. It really boils down to greed more than intolerance.
 
Whisper said:
Wars are caused by people believing other people must believe the same things they do, live the same way they do, etc., and believing to such a degree that they feel obligated to force everyone to do so. Boiled down, wars are caused by intolerance.
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"Intolerance" is mostly a loaded, meaningless term. Tolerance preaches intolerance towards people and ideas that they perceive as intolerant. "Oh no, that guy is intolerant! We must silence him!"

Tolerance can be a bad thing, intolerance can be a good thing. It depends on the situation, it's not fixed.

The original posters suggests that individuality leads to war. I disagree. Collectivism, the opposite of individuality, lead to a whole bunch of messy wars in the past. The very idea of a peaceful united world can, and often is, used to justify a number of bad things.

McGruff said:
It's even more simple than that when you think about it. It always has, and always will be human nature to want what the other guy has and try to take it - being the pathetic descendants of monkeys that we are. It really boils down to greed more than intolerance.
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I don't think mankind is inherently good or bad. As I said before, it's a matter of the choices that are made.
 
As long as somebody is willing to kill in order to impose their will upon others, there will be war. Perhaps one day we will be able to reduce the scale of such conflicts, so that "armies" will consist only of the hard-core war hawks and those who directly oppose them, and not hundreds of thousands of conscripted people who want no part in the whole business but are told by their government to fight or be declared criminals in their own hometowns, but conflicts will always exist.

Let us look at one of the simpler examples. Let's say that group A and group B both claim ownership of a piece of land. (they don't have to be nation-states, or even corporations--they merely need to have the will to kill each other--weapons will be found if they want them, since even kitchen knives can be used to kill people)

Now, neither A nor B are willing to cede control of the piece of land to the other. Each of the two parties wants exclusive and permanant control of the land, and will accept nothing less. As long as neither side is willing to compromise or back down, the only options are either continued stalemate, or the two fighting until one emerges dominant. In order to have true world peace, we (the rest of the world) would have to be able to force A and B not to fight, AND do so without creating enough anger among those who aren't getting their way that they want to go out killing people.
 
Ijuin said:
As long as somebody is willing to kill in order to impose their will upon others, there will be war.
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Oh, really?

Ijuin said:
In order to have true world peace, we (the rest of the world) would have to be able to force A and B not to fight
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That's some pretty flawed reasoning. Your solution is to do the same thing you said the problem was to begin with.
 
The idea that war defines change in some fundamental way is a common misconception. Conflict is a catalyst, something which speeds up an existing process for a moment and nothing more. This applies both ideologically and technologically. We like to look back at the last century and claim that war eliminated fascism as a system of government or that war split the atom and created a new age of technology. Neither of these things are true: in both cases, the war simply moved forward a process which had already started. The dictatorships that didn't end up on the wrong side of World War 2 died inevitably in the 1950s and the research that lead to nuclear power had been set in its course well before the war. The idea that these realizations came about in five years of war instead of a generation of peace means very, very little to history.

This thread is full of silly rhetoric. War isn't any one thing that we can classify so easily -- else we would be done with it. Our generation isn't somehow special... we're the latest in a long line of people who would like very much to decide exactly why war is wrong and how to do without it. It just isn't that smiple. If anything, our parents came the closest to actually doing this. I know we would all like to act indignant about whatever modern conflicts our countries happen to be involved with (for we are nothing if not angst-ridden, post-modern characters)... but the last generation actually made it to the edge of a world-destroying war, saw what was at stake and backed down.

If war is something that can be removed from our character, then it's something that is already on its way out.... and we didn't get to make the call. Look at any "war" today... small, isolated conflicts full of forced equality. There won't be another war between actual equals or even another proxy battle between superpowers... it's all been done away with to an extent that we don't even really appreciate yet.
 
Ace Rimmer said:
If I had handed something like that in to my Feminazi teacher, back when I was in school, I would have been sent to the principle’s office.
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If it's something that would have gotten you in trouble at school, you should've considered if it'd run afoul of the rules here.
 
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