I say this time and time again, but I can always say it more. The reason for no world peace is just about the same thing that Constantine said. The Human Element. Unless the element is obliterated Than there will never be room for peace. We're fallible and Man has never stopped persecuting his brother, and he never will.

Perhaps turning the other cheek is what we all need.
To stop caring, to become indifferent, to ignore those who seem irrelevent to us. Maybe that's all we really need, it's not the sympathy that we must show to the humans in the globe but the exact opposite.
This is a sad, sad world and all your replies makes complete sense but GRRRRR... I wish there was somehow to change that.

Let's all promote indifference and see if that helps..

As long as we are each our own individual there will never be world peace..

I think this has far less to do with human nature than it does the squalor of the third world. You'll notice that prosperous nations that don't need additional wealth and have some kind of representative government rarely go to war. Impovershed countries tend to have issues with war and civil war: places like Nigeria, where the sole avenue out of poverty is oil, and thus it is fought over.

Granted there is also an ethnic component, as we have seen in Georgia and the Balkans. But I think even in the absence of ethnic conflict war is inevitable because billions of people are poor, desperate, and led by tyrants who don't have to answer to anyone for their actions.

Yet rather prosperous nations have gone to war in the past: The WW1 and WW2 powers were not impoverished, but among the richest of their time. During Cold War, the East Bloc maybe wasn't as powerful as the West, but still not "impoverished", and much wealthier than most of the third world.

Poverty alone cannot explain war.

I think one compound in any collective conflict like war is an "in-group/out-group" thinking of at least two groups of people. Considering the own side as "in-group" and the others as "out-group" may have various reasons -- being the "havenots" compared to others who are "haves" may be one reason, but most of the time, there are other compounds, such as ethnicity, religion, ideology, worldview, language, culture, etc. Once a friction along these lines is there, a difference in wealth serves as a catalyst, it's like oil into a fire.


There are also psychological studies on the field of authoritarianism research, which focus on the "authoritarian character" from a psychological level, basing on the works of philosophers such as Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Alice Miller, Jessica Benjamin, Theodor Adorno. The more authoritarian an individual is raised by the parents, the more likely is he or she going to think in "in-group/out-group" terms, projecting the things they hate about themselves on the out group, glorifying the own "in-group" and incoherently applying moral standards (they use a different yardstick when judging the "own" kind and "the others").

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorit%C3%A4rer_Charakter

(sorry, the link is in German -- I did not find an English source on that field of political psycho-social research.)

There are two ways to achieve world piece. The first being to kill off everybody who disagrees with you, the second being agree to disagree. Unfortunately humans are too stubborn to accept the latter so the first will have to do. Then again humans are too nice to allow that so they would go to war to prevent that from happening. And now we are back right where we started. No, world peace cannot be attained.

*sigh* The stupidity of humans..

I think world peace is something that will never be attained, no matter how badly people may want it.

For starters, fighting is nature's way of helping species survive. Animals fight each other so that the strongest genes are passed on. Plants do it to. In the beginning, that was why humans fought, merely to survive. Now, we fight because we want control or power. I don't care who claims to be fighting war for peace, the winner merely gains power and eventually someone will come along feeling that they need to liberate those oppressed. It's endless waltz of war, peace and revolution.

Frankly, I think the world would be doomed without fighting. In order for good to exist, it needs something bad to fight against. Think about it. Could you have a coyote without the road runner? What good would the fox be without the hound? Think of all the DEA agents who would need to find jobs without drug dealers to go after.

As nice as world peace sounds, it would be unrealistic and inherently dangerous.

I must note that it really iritates me when these pageant winners and celebrities say they want to promote world peace. I wish they would aim for something more realistic. If you want to promote peace, then pick a section of the world and go there.

This thread got me thinking about something hypothetical
http://www.generalforum.com/philosop...tml#post457392

Or, alternatively, wipe out enough to keep a group of socially like-minded Human's with which to start a new race/order, hence erasing social differences. One of many such examples; sadly (for Human's), most involve some scale of death.

The problem is that no-one wants to conform to others, as such an act could be seen as sign of weakness on their part.

Agreed - peace requires similar social, religious (or non-religious), and economic views.

But could it not also be said that people, or in this case, countries, who have power only want more of it? Perhaps they have the thought, "Well, we've got this far, why not take it further?"

Besides, there is no proof either way that powerful countries don't want war while poorer countries do.

Perhaps with a central power figure, and some degree of violence, the world could be made to accept peace as the norm. However, that begs the question: Does using violence in the aim of acquiring peace mean that violence is acceptable if the outcome is desirable?

Perhaps Peace requires War.