World Peace

I have been thinking about world peace for the past few days since I have been reading up on the current happenings in Iraq and Afghanistan plus the posturing of Iran and the USA. At first I was thinking that world peace will never happen as long as people insist on believing in invisible men and doing the bidding of those invisible men. But the more I thought about that the less it seemed to be the ultimate solution to world peace.

So while I would love to rail about how religion was the sole cause of us not getting along (and it is a major one) it is not the root cause. The root cause is limited resources and the need for the preservation of self and family. It is a very basic instinct that we observe in the wild and it still applies to us humans. So as far as we have advanced as a race we still have not risen above the need for physiological survival (ref: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs). Until such time as we, as a race, have risen to the point that we can all focus on self-actualisation conflict is inevitable as we all scramble for the limited resources to satisfy our needs.

So what is the ultimate solution? Either we reach Buddha's nirvana and eschew all wants and desires or we kill everyone else.

So conflict is here to stay for the foreseeable and imaginable future of mankind. In one respect that sucks as it means that we will continue to exploit and use each other, but that also means that people will be pushed to greater heights of inspiration to get the most out of the limited resources the world has to offer.