Are human beings capable of peaceful coexistence?

Post Reply New Topic

Over our history, many things have changed, but there has always been one constant: War.

I'm starting to believe that humans are just incapable of meaningful peace. Is it one of our flaws as a species? Can we change?

I think we're doomed by our arrogance and selfishness, but I'm curious as to what other's thoughts are.

Throughout history the upper classes have made the lower classes fight each other. The lower classes had no desire for war and not much to gain from it.

There will always be conflict because at the end of the day we are just animals.

Life has gotten easier the longer we've been on this planet. We could end up killing ourselves in the end, but we generally make progress collectively.

I think our only hope is technologically find ourselves in a place where we don't have to struggle and even fight each other to pay our way, to get food, etc.. That sort of abundance, combined with advanced ways of recycling, might also help decrease the slavery of economies to rare resources and accordingly war on groups or nations who can't defend those rare resources.

Other than that much abundance, no, I think this is hardwired behavior. Maybe CRISPR Cas9 could help but we're then opening a whole other sort of Orwellian Eloi vs Morlock split that's likely to come of what's rotten in our understructure.

Our best bet, IMHO, is using technology to render our survival-of-the-fittest settings as dormant as possible and only having adventures in changing our own biology once we've set our apishness just about dormant for several generations to where the perverse social incentives toward dominance are reduced to a minimum.

No.

But it is not a flaw of our species. It is merely a way of our species. Perhaps we will evolve away from that someday but consider a scenario.

A human like species that never wages war. Species 1001. Suppose this species consisted of two groups, group A and group B, within an hours walk of each other. Each group manages to grow just enough food to make it through the year. There is climate change that results in crop failure. Group A has just enough for their population to survive until the next year if it rains. But all of group B's crop has failed.

Now what species on Earth is going to voluntarily sit back and starve to death? None. Every single species on this planet that is active in It's pursuit of food is going to fight for it if they are starving.

For group B to sit there and perish voluntarily on a large scale, species 1001 would have to be an unusual species indeed, because it would have to lack the instinct of both self preservation and preservation of it's children.

Maybe group A and B are not seperate groups. Maybe they are the same group. Maybe they all live in the same city but there is still only enough food for half of them. How will they handle this?

No. I present the whole of human history as evidence.

In a microcosmic sense, yes.

In a macrocosmic sense, probably no.

Are we ever satisfied?

That seems to be root our "evil".

The root of all evil is mankind itself. Most humans are born psychopaths.

That's the cause of wars and other plagues.

Remember: At the beginning of WW1, most people were cheering and generally happy because of the outbreak of the war.

Only really REALLY evil psychopaths would find it a good thing that war breaks out and that people should be drafted in that war. It turns out 90 % or more of the european population are really, really evil psychopaths!

This also explains the rise of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin and their popularity!

Humans love war and hate peace. Whenever there is peace, people get bored and that's the cause of all wars!

I tend to view things more abstractly. Humans are a life form, all life forms compete for limited resources, in terms of society this conflict can lead to war over said resources.

We’re at a point as a species that we’re pulling out more resources than the Earth can reproduce (I’m mobile atm so I can’t easily look up stats, but google ‘fishing estuary decline’, ‘global river flow rate decline’, and ‘global deforestation’ for relevant stats on the phenomenon). At the same time our population is increasing, creating even more competition for even less resources (look up world population growth for relevant stats). It’s a powder keg that will burst within the next century on it’s current course, creating a lot of famine and a lot of war as a result.

I honestly don’t see that course changing either. Any efficiencies made by science and tech over the last 60 years have been overwritten by humans desire for consumption. More fuel efficiency to dump less caustic byproducts in the air, hell no, that just means I can get a bigger vehicle or drive more at the same cost. More efficient agriculture that produces more food to either safeguard from a famine or help alleviate populations going through a famine, hell no, it means I get to eat more. Etc. That’s human ‘nature’ (quotes because it’s really not nature, but the way society has nurtured it’s citizens to think and operate), and human nature isn’t conducive to long term survival of the species.

When future intelligent life evolves and they dig up our bones and recreate our conditions through thier version of paleontology they’ll initially be impressed by our intelligence, but they’ll soon come to realize as far as apex species are concerned we were the shortest lived thus least effective in the game of life.

We're currently the most destructive one though.

Morality can only exist within the context of one species because it is evolved to benefit the survival of only one specific species, so it is completely impossible to apply morality to an interspecies context.

Depends if you mean that in terms of social rules (like don't eat shellfish) or at a more boiler-plate level.

People who torture or deliberately injure animals go to jail if they're caught and I think this is something of a nod to Sam Harris's point that to a relevant degree you can draw a moral sense of good and bad from questions of whether gainless suffering is involved in a situation.

I mean on all levels. Morality was evolved to help each species survive, and it cannot be applied outside of one species. For example, some animals eat their children because it somehow benefits their survival. Humans do not eat their children because it does not benefit the survival of humanity. If humans labeled animals that eat their children as evil then they would miss the point that morality can only exist within one species, and in a context beyond species, it is meaningless. The same is true for humans who label humanity evil (or good) on an interspecies level. It’s meaningless because evil and good do not exist outside of the morality of any specific species or even culture.

It clearly can be applied to how we treat other species, which from your clarification it now sounds like you weren't meaning to suggest otherwise.

As for other animals I don't think we have a species close enough to our own style of cognition for that to be in practical proximity as a concern. If we did, especially if they came from a line other than hominids, even if they had cognition and cultural complexity on par with our own we'd almost have to handle them the way we'd handle the first alien species - ie. there would be some moral overlap in the social sense, a lot of leeway in how that race dealt with its own matters, but we'd probably have the most focus on areas of their culture that directly impacted our own for better or worse.

I don’t think it can happen while people always have to be “right.” People often think that the have the only “right” religion, government, or political leader. Until we can respect each other’s differences and evolve a higher sense of morality (that’s not from some archaic religion), it’s not going to happen.