Its all about the ‘Haves’ versus the ‘Have Nots’ rule. Let me explain by a simple analogy. Human interaction on a global scale can be likened to a weather system. Just as varying temperatures create the wind and rain, varying levels of need and poverty drive the world economy to fluctuate. Profits, success, and even life then grow by this constant imbalance. This ‘imbalance of life’ creates a desire to get an upper hand at everything. Those who are driven by their impulses then resort to violence for acquisitions. Thus, ‘want’ become the root cause of most violence. Violence is derived from an individual or collective perception of need. Whether someone needs it or not, they’ve decided they’re willing to sacrifice, kill, die or do whatever it takes to achieve something they don’t have. If I put it in a more crude language, its righteous enough to say that nobody really fights for a country or a religion. They fight because they WANT or NEED something like fame, land, a better future, or wealth.
Is World Peace Possible?
How many times have we asked ourselves this question? How much have we heard rational people rant sermons about it endlessly? How many times have we pondered upon this truly? I bet most of the people often get discouraged and eventually shake away such thoughts because they may think its just not possible to attain true world peace. As a matter of fact, keeping in view the current situation of the world, they are not entirely wrong in behaving so. Doubtlessly, it is a difficult task to establish peace, if not overtly impossible. But solutions do exist, if only people would calmly listen and more so, apply.
Now, it seems logical to say that you could remove the violence by removing desire. The easiest way to do that would be to make sure everyone in the world has what they want. And the simplest way to do this is to give! By ‘give’ I am addressing the so called elite class of the society who are busy making profits, day in and day out. So much much so that they forget that hundreds and thousands of people in the world die everyday owing to the lack of basic amenities; be it food, clothing or shelter. Therefore, most religions in the world propagate giving to the needy because they propagate world peace indirectly. Take for example Islam, which says that it is MANDATORY for every well to do Muslim to give to the poor and needy 2.5% of their annual wealth. But I guess this fact won’t go down so well with the so called ‘elite class’ people because if everyone in the world has what they want, there will be nothing to drive the world economy. If the system gives everyone what they wanted, it may stall out and die from a lack of funding. Regardless of peace achievement, I would rather call this as real ‘Barbarism’, that people now-a-days consider few paper notes superior to even the lives of their own kind!
Nonetheless, it’s in our genes to seek out superior qualities. Even insects do this, especially at times of mating. So it’s fair to say that violence would still occur amongst humans even if all humans had every need taken care of. Just like battle for the right to acquire a better mate, humans would seek to promote or exaggerate their differences for various
reasons. We would still need to fight to earn the “right” to superiority in everything. This tendency is regarded evolutionary. So, it can almost never be conditioned out of humanity. Thus, there will almost always be something or the other to drive a person to violence, no matter how petty.
In summary, if you said YES to the question above, people would still kill each other and fight for superiority. A clear example for which is for right to procreate with whom we decided to. A Worldwide Human Reproductive Agency
(WHRA) that governed the reproduction of a passive race would greatly lower the amount of violence associated with mating rituals, but the enforcement of the Agency’s laws would require massive levels of incarceration. And even if hypothetically everything goes on the right track, we can never rule out the damages which can be caused by ‘black sheeps’ of each community who just live to watch the world burn for no reason at all! Thus, World Peace in totality is only a far-fetched dream, just as one worldwide air temperature isn’t possible. Remaining hopeful, though, is a personal choice.
Dr Aafreen Kotadiya
MGM University
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