FROM WELL before a time when we were born, there have been those who have proclaimed the necessity for peace in the world. Yet decade after decade, war engulfs us. Year after year, wartime casualties mount. There are 30 wars, entailing armed action, currently going on; ranging from the well-known and publicised war in Iraq, to those less well known. The conflict in Peru has so far tolled over 70,000 casualties, but how many people actually know about Peru, other than the fact it is an exotic place to travel to?
The sad reality is that many tens of thousands of people die every year as a direct result of war or collateral infrastructural damage caused by the effects of war. The death toll is often so large that individuals cannot even be counted. Instead we end up with rounded estimates. Throw in a little tilde sign and suddenly, the human life, which we value more than anything else, is rendered into a statistic rounded by the thousand.
Bodies like the UN have existed for years. We’ve had institutions like Amnesty International and AntiWar for decades upon decades. But every year, more and more people die. Why is it that humanity has such a hard problem understanding one another?
For starters, peace by itself is a notion contrary to human instinct. The same applies to morals. The strongest instinct a human being is born with is the will to endure and survive, and if not brought up in a proper way, that will to survive will mould itself into whatever natural tendencies that person has. Would it be illegal if a child stole from a rich baker just so he wouldn’t starve to death? This is something that varies from region to region; tradition and culture, for example, play a stronger role in the morals of some regions of the world than others.
To that end, education is vital. Education is what creates an intellectual awareness of other principles, and it is only through this way that some of the baser instincts of man can be combated. The concept itself seemed absurd to me once, but the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. Take the simple indoctrinated extremist. He is taught and has ingrained upon him a single belief, and because his fundamental understanding of what he has been taught is that it is correct, he will follow it blindly. It is this power to manipulate the masses that makes upstart ideas and movements so possible in third world countries. It is also this reason that preventative actions taken against extremists are often so unsuccessful. How do you kill an idea? Certainly not with a gun or a hunter-killer missile.
Proclamations of equality will always be a blissful unreality. For everyone to be equal, there must be no greater amongst others, similar to the perfect Marxist definition of what a community is. This cannot be the case because, for such a utopian society to exist, there must be a body of impartial enforcement, to enforce the conformed views of the society. But that very concept denies communal equality because there would again be someone in power. And as these things go, someone else would decide that they aren’t happy and that a revolution was in order. And then the killing begins afresh.
The Robin Hood syndrome is becoming ever more popular, with people hitting out at the big corporations to stop the little people from suffering. Yet it is that recognition of people less fortunate than you that is the first rung on both the ladder to understanding, yet at the same time lies on the dangerous slope of adopting indifference and assuming superiority. I guess the only way you can do anything about that would be to look into yourself and see what kind of person you actually are. And only when you solve the problems within can you begin to stop the problems in the world, because to understand someone else you need to first understand yourself. Most of you have been gifted with ample opportunities and every last one of you has intellectual awareness and intelligence; use them wisely because in my opinion, we stand on a very thin high wire, with a circus of carnage below. So, from this article, can you deduce what the balance pole should be?
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