Summary
Everyone must understand that war is a primitive, backward, base activity that is carried out by people who are unintelligent, people who cannot solve their problems by negotiation, compromise, and respect. They can only achieve their goals by conning others by use of threats, violence and lies, which only spreads destruction, pain and misery. We all have a selfless duty, not to hide from the horrors of ourselves, but to stand together against such fools. We should all unite to consign war to the history books and keep war out of our present and out of humanity’s future.
How to prevent wars - defluffed
Someone commented that my essay “How to Prevent Wars” contained too much distracting Fluff and not many references. Well, I thought I had done pretty well to tackle such a difficult problem In 4 pages of A4, but I accept the point and will attempt to express my thinking in a nut shell below. As for references, the essay is the result of a life time of reading, listening, watching, experiencing and thinking about the world. Including references would be impossible, so I’m afraid you are just going to have to think for your selves. So, if you don't like a bit of fluff -
1) Human beings are social animals that crave the approval of the group and want to rise up the status ladder to get access to get loads of sex with the best quality and highest status group members. Its written in our genes.
2) The group unconsciously knows this and uses it to control you. Those of the highest status especially use it to get you to do things they don’t want to do themselves, but will be of benefit to them. If you don’t conform the group will punish you. Result less sex with desirable people. Your genes will not get mixed with high quality genes or may be not passed on at all.
3) If you understand what is going on, you can rise above it, break free, and challenge immoral group behaviour such as the use of violence as a short cut to increasing or maintaining status within a group or between groups.
4) However, the power of the group means this cannot be done by yourself, There are three paths to take (assuming you don’t just capitulate and conform, which is the short term, personally risk free, selfish, usual human response - it takes courage and sacrifice to stand up to your own group).
6) You can quietly attempt to convince most of the group to your way of thinking and then challenge the group leaders, and if successful take over.
5) or you can run away and hide, find another group and forget about the first group. But this doesn’t make the world a better place.
7)) or you can tell members of other outside groups about what is happening in your group and ask them to come to your assistance, to face down the immoral behaviour of your groups power brokers.
Does this explain why holocausts happen, wars start, and why the tragedy that is human history continues? Just scale the above to a national level, with leaders punishing those that criticise them and the world starts to make sense to me. Does it to you?
Please think deeply about it. Its very very important that you do. Globalisation and the internet means that we live in turbulent times. Different social groups with extremely differing views are being forced together. Whether it will get worse or better is up to each and every one of us to take responsibility and act..The world is absurd because people do absurd things and we permit the absurdity. It can't go on.
What Ive been doing is
a) Promoting the view that status, wealth and power gained by violent immoral means is not sexually attractive. It is a short cut, or cheat, used by low status individuals to jump up or maintain a high position in the group hierarchy. (How many dictators were nobodies in their early lives?)
b) Promoting atheism, so the difference between social groups is reduced.
c) Ridiculing world leaders to reduce their status and power.
d) promoting democracy, feminism and human rights, all of which reduce the status and power of leaders and so lessen their ability to boss others about.
e) Promoting longtermism, (but not at the expense of short term failure).
f) Calling for an end to tribalism - ultimately humanity should be one big social group (but respecting differing cultures - the world would be very boring indeed with out cultural diversity).
g) Calling for it to be a basic human right that you don’t have to follow immoral orders, which will reduce the power of group leaders.
h) Promoting the sharing of resources, which will reduce wars over scarcity.
Even if you don't agree with the above, the question needs an answer, why are humans always fighting, and how do you prevent it?
Methodology
The style of the essay "How to prevent wars" may be unusual to many. My approach is as follows.
a) Examine my own behaviour and what motivates it. ie know myself.
b) Assuming that I'm just a normal typical human, I assume that my behaviour and motivations apply to others. Therefore find and present evidence that confirms this assumption. ie Seek first to understand.
c)
Scale up this behaviour and the motivations behind it to examine if
they apply to nations and globally in differing cultures . The
assumption is that people are behind world events and all people are
basically the same. From my travels and reading, I think this is so.
d) Assuming a) to c) are true, use this knowledge and understanding, for a practical purpose ie change the world, stop wars.
Upon
reading d) you may think I'm a romantic fool, and I would agree it sounds crazy on
the face of it. However, the rewards are so high ie a world without war,
and my life so insignificant, that I'm 100% committed. What's to lose? I'm old and I've
had a great life. If I'm right someone of higher status may nick my ideas and take the credit. If I'm wrong, I will be ignored, perhaps laughed at,
and that doesn't matter either. I've risen above group approval.
It's absolutely fantastic to be so free of group approval!
