Any philosophy that glorifies this,
Is going to lead to war.
Because that is exactly what a war needs to be able to happen.
The switching off of the independent thinking powers of the majority of the people.
If a religion is that philosophy that tells you to do as someone on top tells you, then the religion will cause war.
It is hence also possible for a movie star whom everyone loves exceedingly, to cause a war. Or a group of highly educated PhD’s who think they with their high quality brains can solve all the problems. Or a bunch of so-called scientifically driven process-oriented multinational corporations.
Such philosophies and groups and persons are there all over the place and any one of them can take over a community, a country and lead it to its doom.
So with this threat comes a ray of hope – the presence of a counter-philosophy that advocates for people to NOT give up their independent thinking ability, can act as a deterrent to war.
This counter-philosophy can also come from ANY source. The essential thing is that it must ask people to take back their powers of thinking and judgment and not blindly believe anybody.
It can be a religious institution, or a person, or any group of people, even just a theory. Or heck, even a bunch of kids. It can even be multiple sources independent of each other telling us the same thing, since here the core message is to NOT allow any limited entity to take over the collective mind.
But one thing is for sure : You cannot end war by replacing one authoritative philosophy with another. Repeating the same pattern that got us into a problem is not going to take us out of it.
So stop dreaming of that noble leader or leadership who will have all the answers, who will one day rise to power and put an end to all our problems. Ain’t gonna happen, buddy.
If we really want to solve the present mess, everyone is going to have to become their own leaders, their own thinkers, their own deciders.
~Peace out!~
5 comments:
Again having to divert some comments from facebook link to here. Things get lost over FB, if people have such big sizeable opinions to share, why don't they share it where the actual post is!!
Chinmay : Honestly speaking, you can never avert war or, to put it aptly, conflict. History is replete with examples for the same. Even the best of the pacifists led to war and destruction beyond imagination. It is an essential for the survival for any species of the animal kingdom that lives in a social group to have an alpha. Eventually this alpha will be challenged and will be replaced by another alpha. This social structure is ingrained in the very existence (and extinction) of animals.
Nikhil : so you're saying that just because things have been going on in one way, there is no alternnative? Then how come we have electricity and mobiles and computers and internet? How did the middle ages end? Please research a bit more, as even your assumption for group survival isnt up to date - it's already been discovered that co-operators and not alpha's are essential for survival of groups.
And animals do not go to war. Group conflicts maybe, but definitely not the way humans do. Their leaders don't pass orders and sit back and manipulate them for personal gain the way our leaders do. So using that as an excuse to justify the artificial horror of war isnt the right thing to do. Anyways I wanted to write about humans who have the opportunity of changing their response to events.
Chinmay : Certainly things have changed a lot with the advancement of technology. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depends on perspective) most of the research was done for military purposes or worked upon and perfected for warfare. Coming out of the dark ages was simply progression at a rapid speed than other animals which is a unique trait of human beings where gradually the alpha stopped leading from the frontlines (while animals still have the alpha in the lead). Show me an era in known history where there has been no wars/conflict/confrontation between two groups (regionalist, nationalist, totalitarian, religious anyone) There are some things that will not change, (human beings having two pairs of limbs for example) and the best thing to do is an engineers response, prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
As for your message about changing one's response to events, I fully agree with you that we should not be so gullible. Unfortunately, 'globalisation' has made things ever more complicated than they perhaps were in the dark ages with numerous real and imaginary boundaries drawn which are not to be overstepped. Frankly speaking, it is not as easy to avoid conflict now, as it perhaps may have been in the past.
Anusha :
But Steven Pinker thinks otherwise ,there's a decrease in conflict and violence compared to the previous generations .We have to build on that..See http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/03/14/steven-pinker-harvard-thinks-big-violence/
Nikhil: Thanks, Anusha for sharing that. Chinmay, just because you are not aware of positive solutions you do not have the right to claim that there are none and say pessimistic things like 'there is no choice', unfortunately this that etc. Of course the problems are not already solved, that's what makes them worth solving so stop cribbing. Whatever you wrote didn't even have any relation with my actual post which was about the philosophy of running society (centralized vs decentralized), plus it's a blog so you ought to have commented there where it would actually make some sense instead of putting negative defeatist comments here on facebook, which distracts people away from the main post. On top of being negative minded you've also been disrespectful but I guess you were too miserable to realize that. I'm going to paste your comments on my actual blog and delete them from here.
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