What prevents us from peace?

Question from the Internet:

“What is stopping humans from achieving world peace?”

We are stopping ourselves.

We might be speaking about and for peace; we might even protest and demand peace. But in truth, we are all for war; we are all for ruthless competition and success at each other’s expense because we are all born with the same inherently self-serving, self-justifying and exploitative nature.

This is why human history is an endless chain of conflicts and wars; this is why the largest part of the GDP of almost any country goes to “defence”, this is why human society is built on exclusive competition since we need to prove who we are and how good we are above and against others.

All human activity from early childhood to the grave is about competing against and defeating others. And it is not a friendly or constructive competition, but it is always destructive. Just look at the language we use when describing the victory of athletes or sports teams over others; we use words like “destroyed”, “trashed”, “hammered”, “humiliated”, etc. We urge our children to be better than other children and are happy when others do not do so well and fail. Everything is always about overcoming and defeating others, from board games to computer games, not to the corporate world.

And when it comes to violent conflicts and wars, it takes skilful and shrewd politicians a very short time to recruit the masses for the threat and destruction of others.

Until we all recognize our inherent nature behind each conflict and war and develop a desire and a true need to change and further develop ourselves so we can act and exist above and against our inherent nature and instinctive tendencies — we will have no peace.