Can we give peace a chance?

Question from the Internet:

“Should we give peace a chance, or is that naive?”

Of course we should give peace a chance, we just need to know how.

Asking, demanding peace, especially from others will not help — as we can see from historic and contemporary experience.

The conflicts, riots, wars we see around us are simply the external, superficial symptoms of the real conflict, war that unfolds within us.

We are all born with an inherently “warmongering”, ruthlessly competitive ego, that defines itself, proves itself by overcoming others, proving and fulfilling itself at the expense of others.

And even if we honestly do not know this behavioral trait about ourselves this is so. When we examine our lives from childhood and see all the environmental influence, upbringing and education we have received, we find that everything we ever done and do is some kind of a competition, exclusive fight with others for necessities, for resources, for positions, for control and rewards.

There is no aspect of life from the simplest boardgames we play with family to the ruthless competition we observe in sports — both the athletes and their supporters — in businesses, schools or workplaces, where we would not be forces to survive and succeed at the expense of others. This is simply how we are programmed, this is simply how human society is set up.

The major conflicts and wars are simply the highest, most severe expressions of this.

If we want to give true peace a chance then we will need to learn how to neutralize, correct and harness our destructively competitive urges, our blind desire to defeat and overcome others to prove ourselves above others, by manipulating and controlling others.

We cannot suppress or delate our instincts and our insatiable, irrepressible drive for more, but we can learn how to channel, harness those instinctive urges towards positive, constructive, mutually responsible and mutually complementing goals and purpose. We can learn how to become a single, thriving and surviving living Human “superorganism” instead of scattered cancer cells that are blindly, instinctively existing only to exploit and consume everything for their own sake, for their own total control until everything is destroyed.