People often talk about “Wishing for world peace”. Is it possible for us to have world peace, and if so, what would need to be done for it to happen?
Well, in a nutshell: we are actually doing better in the peace front.
(check the sources in the Show More button under the video)
As the German educational video shows we have to stand up and speak for peace and support more efforts to democratise nations, increase fair world trade, discourage more acts of aggression, and to prefer negotiations instead of relying on warfare.
it is, but we all have to stop acting like we’re superior just because of the particular patch of land we were on when we slid out.
He plays for an Italian League team. I suppose he’d play for your team if you paid enough.
Moderator Action
I think this calls for too much speculation at this point for a factual answer to be possible. Let’s try IMHO for now. Depending on how the thread progresses it may end up in GD.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
I think it would only be possible if the whole world had the same interests, which would probably mean a global culture.
No.
It could work so long as we had the same meta-interests, one of which would be peace.
i.e., it doesn’t matter if China is communist and atheist, and Saudi Arabia is anti-communist and strongly religious – so long as both of them (and everyone else) agrees that the differences aren’t worth fighting a war over.
ETA: California and Alabama have very different interests…but we can exist together in a functioning union.
Is world peace something we actually want? Have we considered the unintended consequences of world peace?
Vast amounts of money that could be spent on education, research, social needs, highways, water projects…
Sounds bloody great! What’s the down side?
I’ve given this some thought before. I admit, they’re all just thoughts I’ve had rolling around in my head, so it’s not something I feel strongly enough to debate at length about.
I wonder what would happen to advancements in technology? What about medical advancements? How well could we handle worldly disasters like tsunami wiping out coastal cities? How much worse would the New Orleans disaster been had we not had a military in place?
And then, you have to think: Even if we did achieve “world peace” it would not last in perpetuity. What happens then when the old war machine gets cranking again? A couple of generations of NOT knowing war; how are they going to fight? How are they going to defend themselves? It would be like giving two monkeys a loaded pistol and hoping for the best.
And then there are consequences we don’t even know about.
Humans are tribal creatures. Killing each other is an inherit part of that. Take that away and what happens? Good? Bad? I don’t know. What I do THINK I know: World Peace wouldn’t be all sunshine and lollipops like some people think it would be.
Yes. I have them for dinner once a week.
No, the planet is too overpopulated for that to occur.
By this sort of reasoning we should be hoping for the Cold War to restart or better yet World War 3 to happen as that would be cranking up technological advance.
I don’t see why we wouldn’t have a civil defense agency to deal with this sort of thing.
Why do you think war will start up again after not having it a for a few generations-if anything it’ll create a “virtuous cycle” further discouraging war.
We didn’t know what the consequences of abolishing slavery would be either
Why would this take away that instinct?
It certainly would be an improvement upon the present.
As for the question itself, I think its something that is not entirely inconceivable. As experts like Pinker have pointed out war has been declining over the generations so I think its not entirely impossible for an order of things to be established where there is no significant interstate warfare . Reducing intrastate warfare of course is a much more difficult thing.
Actually, the statistics shows that we are indeed increasing in population, but at the same time there is less warfare (and less people getting killed in wars) going on nowadays.
Of course, this does not mean that we should relax, we need to make an effort to do even better yet.
As noted already, civilian efforts can suffice to respond to major disasters. The military is optimized to destroy other militaries. It is partially optimized to deliver cargo, secure regions, and build encampments. But a civilian emergency agency can be fully optimized to those purposes.
Simply by not carrying around weapons and ammunitions, the civilian agency is going to be better at transportation of materiel.
Shrug. There’s a chance I’ll be delighted to take. Yeah, maybe we’ll forget the lessons of the past and re-arm. Maybe the new militaries will be brutal, cruel, and vicious. Dude, we’ve already got that today, with ISIS, Boku Haram, the children warriors in Africa, etc. You can’t come up with worse than what already exists.
Even if the peace is nothing more than a pause between wars…that’s great. It could allow for an immense social renaissance such as western civilization enjoyed between WWI and WWII. Flappers and jazz and cubism and Hemingway. Deal!
But I can say the same thing! There might very well be benefits to lasting peace that no one has foreseen. An argument from ignorance is not an argument.
As for human nature, we already do change it all the time. Ever stood patiently in line at the supermarket, waiting to pay for your food? That isn’t natural! Waiting in line and paying someone for food are huge violations of “natural” human behaviors. Yet we’ve taught ourselves how to do these things, because they make our lives vastly better. A small sacrifice in our instinctive impulses leads to a huge increase in our contentment, comfort, and enjoyment.
It doesn’t have to be “all sunshine and lollipops.” It just can be a few fewer massacres, burned cities, refugee camps, and disabled veterans.
I’ll take a small improvement if a large one isn’t available. Let’s have fewer wars, and smaller wars. Which, in fact, is what the world is doing right now.
Define “world peace.”
No battles involving more than 50 people on each side, no bombardments of areas causing more than 50 civilian deaths, and no sieges causing more then 50 deaths (civilian or military) from starvation and denial of medical care.
You and 25 other guys want to rumble, that’s just “disorder.” You and 100 guys start something, that’s a threat to peace.