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0 pointsspoonfeeder0061y ago0 comments

Sorry, I don't mean anything against legitimate self defense, I'm talking rather about "self-perceived need to engage in warfare for childish reasons"

Examples of that would include ego, greed, petty revenge, etc...

But I guess the way I said it did come across that way, so yeah, my bad

I'm just saying that if we could evolve past such petty ego-based sentiments in the world, then wouldn't such pressure to develop weaponry in such massive amounts, and hence we could focus on actually making a functioning society

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shiroiushi1y ago

>I'm just saying that if we could evolve past such petty ego-based sentiments in the world

That would be nice, but it seems that would make people no longer human. Happily following a petty ego-based Dear Leader's orders into warfare seems to be the norm for much of the human population, looking at history, so this tendency appears to be deeply-rooted into the human psyche.

em-bee1y ago

why? the majority of humans are peaceful and friendly. the problem is that we have been raised to follow leaders instead of thinking for ourselves. that is what needs to change. when people learn to think for themselves then we won't have that problem anymore.

as the quote above says:

thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor

it all comes down to better education, specifically moral education, and learning to critically evaluate any information we get.

if people blindly follow a leader, then this is exactly what they are missing.

CamperBob21y ago

So, the problem with that is that not everybody is equally good at "thinking for themselves." A sufficiently-large group of people will always divide itself, as inevitably as if Maxwell's Demon himself were prodding them, into subsets of people who can be easily herded and people who can't be. By the same token there will always be a small minority, drawn from both subsets, who are unusually good at doing the herding.

Everything that goes wrong later can be traced to that inequality. Things that go right can usually be traced back to it as well. Any faith or philosophy that doesn't begin with an understanding of that aspect of human nature is a waste of time at best. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

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lloeki1y ago

Not just humans, apes at large.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

Cue the opening scene of 2001 A Space Odyssey.

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