What are your ideas, that if you could implement would likely stop our species from warring so much?
I’m asking for a reasonable ones, but if not - at least make them funny :P
Restructure society to value cooperatation over competition.
Break down unjustifiable hierarchies where possible and reasonable. The flatter the power structure is without sacrificing much in the way of efficiency, the better.
I feel like this is the way. It’s more or less the idea with the EU, and I would say it’s working great. I just hope this level of cooperation reaches the whole world
Agreed. This won’t work 100% but it’s probably the closest we can get.
That’s my type if I had to answer that.
The complete extinction of the human race
Through evolution or genetic engineering
I agree with genetics engineering as the answer.
Our DNA has greed, power tripping, paranoia etc. hard coded somewhere. The correct combinations might stop all wars.
But all in all, wouldn’t it make humanity dull and unsatisfied? I wonder.What if we genetically engineered ourselves to make beans taste like lasagna and kindness feel as satisfying as getting a promotion?
I’d argue that humanity is humanity and we wouldn’t remove its complex emotions, philosophical wonders and existential dread.
Desire for more out of life, search of meaning, etc.
Unless we go all the way and engineer ever flowing euphoria from birth to death, for everyone. But then, what’s even the point?
at what point is that just eugenics tho
Yeah, I’m with this guy
I think if we had someone with charisma start a suicide cult, things would generally improve… I’m Trevor to make a Joe gRogan joke, but I’m actually at least half-serious
Rename to “armed conflict” or “special military operations”
You are now a moderator of [email protected]
Kill everyone. No people, no wars! Win/win in my book
It certainly is a way… although I don’t feel like we would greatly benefit from it!
That’s moving the goal posts. Though killing everyone might fall under the “unreasonable” part of the question.
When there’s no war, people like Hitler won’t have any opposition to their rise to power. Haiti never gains independence. We’d never have escaped feudalism.
Most wars are stupid bullshit and suck ass. The military, especially the US military, is the biggest waste of money ever. That doesn’t mean that war isn’t directly tied to lots of positive things like innovation. There’s so much medical, industrial, and geographical knowledge we wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for some war, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. People’s ideas will always conflict because different groups of people are going to have goals unique to them that clash with others
Now if you were to ask how to stop unnecessary wars, better more efficient rulers. Most of the people in power today are complete hacks. It’s crazy
But I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of war and I don’t know if that’s necessarily that crazy? Ultimately it’s apart of how we grow as societies
Make everyone bulletproof and bombproof. If it is no longer possible to kill people using weapons of war, then there will no longer be a point to fighting the wars. Either that, or things will escalate to a point where it is no longer sustainable to fight wars that way, also solving it. Mind control, or gelatinising everyone into a singular hivemind is also an option.
Somewhat more realistically, I think that exchanges and the internet are the ways to go when it comes to ending wars. It’s a lot harder to fight wars when you can empathise with the other side, and see them as your peers. It’s one of the reasons why soldiers who took part in the Christmas Armistice were shuffled around, since they became friendly during the ceasefire, and would be less wanting to fire weapons on the friends that they made.
A lot of wars tend to centre around dehumnaising the other side, and treating them as the “enemy”. Allowing people to co-operate and communicate mutually makes it a lot harder for that to take place, since you have experience with the “enemy”, they’re not that bad. You’ve even got friends there, and training a gun on them with the expectation and desire to turn them into a corpse is just not on.
I love that comment.
Allowing people to co-operate and communicate mutually makes it a lot harder for that to take place, since you have experience with the “enemy”, they’re not that bad.
That’s why I believe Esperanto, while evidently not enough by itself, is a necessary tool in the fight for world peace.
There is this dystopia anime series called From the New World. The premise is a portion of humanity gained psychic power and led to the collapse of society because it’s so powerful that order could not be enforced. Far into the future there’s a cluster of communities that’s able to exist, and the way they went about it was to genetically engineered humans so when they harm another human it triggers body functions that make it harder for them to breath and other things. Killing another human also kills the aggressor. It kind of works on the interpretative level so it’s possible that using drones could still have an effect, probably.
Even in the story they explored ways to circumvent it though, but that’s kind of a tangent.
This one was great, highly recommend it.
Off topic but on a side note, I spent the last 7 years trying to find back this anime. Thanks!
This is something my old history teacher once mentioned: we have games like COD and other esports titles. Just have all conflicts resolved via virtual combat instead of in real world violence
But that would require the loser to accept the loss.
The equivalent to someone losing and breaking their controller in this scenario is them invading the other country.
Make those who declare war to actually fight the war. Put the two countries president on each side of an arena with some swords to fight to death, the one who lives wins the war. I’d record and pay pee view or something and the money raised would pay for homes for the poor in each country
A single world spanning country.
If we don’t kill ourselves off first it will probably happen eventually. Country sized used to be limited by things like communication latency, and the time it took to move forces around. Technology has shrunk the world so that those things no longer matter. The natural size limit on a country is almost certainly as large as the earth now.
It won’t happen soon, cultures will take time to become similar enough to merge. Leadership structures take time to be absorbed into a greater one (EU style) or have to forcefully taken over (Chechnya style, thankfully very rare these days). But with no real impediment to countries growing larger, it will happen eventually. With no-one able to fund or support rebellion and modern technology making police actions extremely effective it may well last effectively forever.
Whether it’s a democratic utopia, a dictatorial nightmare, or something in between for the common citizen is not yet defined. Either way, war, as in peer to peer conflict between sovereigns, will be over.
Well, you can still get civil war in that scenario right, or just mass strife and protests which can grow into warlike movements.
With the capability of modern surveillance technology (making it extremely hard to organize a rebellion), and the sophistication of modern weaponry (making it extremely hard to arm an army without state support) it strikes me as unlikely that you would ever get civil war in a single country world.
Civil war is already incredibly rare with plenty of outside actors happy to support trouble.
I certainly don’t rule out mass strife and protests, but the question was about war, not suffering.
Democracies rarely go to war with each other. Add mutual economical dependency to that and you have a strong base to avoid armed conflict. The EU is a good example for that.
A global ‘EU’ is the most likely way to end all wars, yes.
Britain has left the chat
And don’t we know it!
Mass extinction event. Breed out aggression from our species we seem to be doing that but slowly. Space mining could potentially stop us from having war in Earth at least. AI takeover have everyone live on their own virtual reality paradise. For the most reasonable I think the best way to end wars is education and uplifting poverty nations not exploit them.
Edit: Or we can just be like Switzerland be a direct democracy, with how slow they decide things it will be highly unlikely to go to war at all.
Education for everyone globally. War is, like all kinds of violence, an act or reaction of impotence (psychological term/not sexual).
It basically means nobody actually chooses to act violently or start wars. They do it because they believe consciously or subconsciously that they have no other options, because they can’t think of any options.
This is always a wrong assumption, because there is always a better option. The difficult part is to getting people to understand their actual options. Education solves this.
Did the last year in Europe fly by you unnoticed?
No. I think Putin started the war because he was already threatened by the economy and domestic rivalry. It’s not like he woke up one morning and thought it was a good idea to kill a lot of people. In his head it was the right thing to do for some reason, probably something involving saving his own ass.
He was able to gather some support for this horrible idea because there are many uneducated Russian voters who actually believe that the war has a purpose.
If they had been educated, he would not have had support.
Since you stipulated our species, to me, the answer is an external threat to the whole. Aliens, higher or lower dimensional creatures, cryptids, flame unicorns sharting lava, even angels or demons if we want to get real wild.
Even just the threat of an existential terror such as these and probably a lot I missed, (feel free to add to the list! Feed me your existential threats!) has the potential to bring the species together to fight on a larger scale.
However this doesn’t eliminate war just moves the focus. So I’m not sure if I’ve answered your question or not but I had fun doing it!
I feel like the cultural/political responses to both global warming and COVID-19 have shaken my faith in this sort-of Watchmen scenario working out. No matter how universal the threat, seems like some groups will always find an angle to work that cuts against the “greater good.”
Eradicate fear.
Fear of losing power. Fear of “them”. Fear of going to hell because you didn’t convert someone. Fear of lost resources.
It all boils down to fear. The problem is that fear is contagious. It’s easier to convince someone to back your side if you make them afraid vs hopeful.
How do you eradicate fear?
You face it, permit it to pass over you and through you. And when it has gone past you turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only you will remain.
/S, I’m just hype about the new dune trailer.
I wish I had an answer to that. For me, it’s knowledge and recognition. Having an open mind to hear both sides of an argument and trying to focus on facts, not “what ifs”. Then paying attention to not just what’s being said, but how it’s being said. It’s pretty easy to see when someone is trying to get you emotional rather than logical,but you have to be looking for it.
When I hear a politician say “they’re trying to take away…” or “they want you to…”. That’s them trying to make you fear the other side. I don’t give a shit if you’re left, right, capitalist, communist, or a dictator, if you’re goal is to make me fear what the other side will do with power then you’ve already lost me. Because I know, that really you’re afraid to lose power and so you make other people afraid too. Unfortunately, it works for way too many people.
