That’ll teach thepillar to stop coming around here with his hippie-dippie, kumbaya, pass-the-bong ideas.
{{group hug}}
I’m not saying things can’t be improved. I’m just saying that the human race can’t be reasoned into peace. At best it has to be tricked, a la Watchmen.
Basically rational: we reliably act in our own best interests (children, the insane, and so on excepted). Of course, what we perceive to be in our best interest is often not. There’s nothing enlightened about it, but a stable, peaceful society can be built from everyone acting in their own best interest: that’s what we have now.
Teach??? What the hell are you talking about? If this has anything to do with the ‘sarcastic philosopher’, understand that I’m just letting him wallow in his own ignorance:
“Philosophy has been defined [as]: The science of things divine and human, and of the causes in which they are contained…”
–Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, Sir William Hamilton
Furthermore, let’s not forget that the purpose of Philosophy, according to Socrates, is to contemplate God and abstract the soul from corporeal sense.
Now, could you please pass my bong back 
The way to achieve total unity on the planet is to kill everyone except one person.
No matter what, there will always be disputes. As mentioned above, the best way to avoid armed conflict seems to be democracy and international trade. Is it true, as I’ve heard say, that there has been no war between modern democracies that are significant trading partners (or something like that)? I hope that’s not just a “no true scotsman” statement.
You can keep your bong, for all the good it is doing you.
American Heritage Dictionary:
edited to add: anyone promoting mysticism, theosophy, freemasonry and the movie Zeigeist should take a good long look in the mirror before accusing others of ignorance.
Given that we are here, exchanging ideas over the internet; that magic medium that allows everyone to come together to experience the epiphany of brotherhood, and yet we still cannot come to agreement, leads me to conclude that the answer to your question of when, is: Longer than you think.
We are not one. We are not anything like one. We’re more like, 7.2 billion. Other important differences have been pointed out to you up-thread.
Unless that person has Multiple Personality Disorder. Oops.
This is absolutely something that we should strive for, but it is not something we can achieve in the foreseeable future, short of a sudden and dramatic shift including possibly more than one of the following: free/cheap energy, discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, a massively successful global philosophy, or some sort of global near-extinction event.
I think globally, we’ve made huge strides as a species in recent decades, and ultimately the internet will be one of the major tools because its a way of uniting us and sharing ideas. But we still have a long way to go.
One of the biggest problems I see is that we have to overcome human nature. Just based on how we’ve evolved, we’re naturally competitive and have a desire to horde resources. This means, even if most people are starting to be able to overcome those base urges and pool their resources to the common good, there’s still plenty of people who are stuck in a mindset of having as much as they can. Ultimately, sure, if absolutely everyone can truly work together, it would be awesome, but it only takes a small handful of people to create enough disruption that it starts a cascading effect.
This is where those other things come in place. If we had nearly free energy and resources, there would be virtually no benefit to hording, and there would be less impact on others as it happened. We’d have more incentive to work together because then I’d hope we’d have greater desire to maximize what we can accomplish instead. I think aliens could make a difference too, because we tend to be tribal and be helpful to “us” and often hostile to “them”; but with aliens around, we may be more inclined to see all of humanity as “us” and be more inclined to work together. Similarly if we have some kind of global disaster with only a few of us left, maybe we’ll be forced to work together. Even if it was only briefly, look at how quickly people work together after major disasters, like 9/11, Tsunamis, Earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, etc.
Hell, look at the future in Star Trek, it took a global nuclear war, essentially free energy and other massive improvements in technology, and first contact to make that generally fairly optimistic future for the cooperation of humanity. Frankly, I think we’re looking at stuff at least on that level and quite a bit more time before I think we’d have that degree of unity. Regardless, I think we’ll make progress toward that as time goes on, but short of waiting for some massive events and/or the singularity, I doubt it’s something that has any real chance for a few hundred years.
I’m not sure anyone wishing to have people treat them like brothers and sisters have ever had real brothers and sisters.
We are all one big happy family - but you other people stay away from my stuff!