As I got this thought while reading Foucault, this thread properly
belongs in the “in reading Foucault” thread but because of its importance,
I have decided to break it out…
War vs Peace… simple enough, which one is easier and which one is harder
and which one has much more value for us?
now recall, I once posted the numbers for America and the number of years
in her history that America has been engaged in war…I believe that as of
2017 and you can add a couple of years here, that our of her 239 year history,
America has been at war for 222 of those years…or 94% of American history
has America been at war, with somebody…be it the British, or the Germans
or the American Indians, or the Japanese, somebody…
but let us think about this… why not peace instead of war?
because of the nature of peace and the nature of war…
let us look at war first…war really isn’t that hard and is easily within
our biology, our instincts… to make war all one has to do is hit the other
guy over the head with a stick… that is it… nothing too complicated
about war… all it takes is to hit the other guy with a stick…
that’s it…
but what does peace take? the reason we prefer war to peace is that
peace takes time, effort, energy… you have to work at peace whereas
at war, you just have to hit the other guy with a stick… simple…
but peace, ahhh, but peace you must work at, you need to compromise
and negotiate and be patient with… war is an activity, whereas peace is
a lifestyle and very time consuming…in slightly different language,
to engage in peace requires us to treat the other, as human beings, with
feeling and rights and possibilities…peace is nuance and war is blunt like…
anybody can engage in war… all it takes is a stick… but to engage in peace,
that means one has to become aware and alert to the possibilities that exists…
in peace…
peace is an engagement with our higher self and war is an engagement with
our lower self… to engage in peace requires us to hold to the higher possibilities
of existence, to love and hope and peace and honor and loyalty… it
takes dedication and time…
to engage in war is to engage in our lower selves, anger, hate, greet, violence,
the primal instincts of evolution… the ones that animals have…
that the peaceful ones will inherit the earth is important to note
because in war, there are no winners, in creating violence,
we are left only with violence and hate and anger…
you want to see what I mean, look at the results of World War One…
that the failure of wars and violence… all that happens is more violence…
that is the only result of wars and violence…
but peace, peace is something different…
how as the world progressed in the last 50 years?
has it progress because of War? or has it progress because of
the relative peace over the last 50 years?
so the question is raised, how are we to make it a better world for us
and for our children and grandchildren? is it to engage in peace or is it
to engage in war and violence?
if we had engaged in peace as hard as we engage in war, this world would
be in a far, far better place…think of all the resources that is lost
to war what could be used on people to help in building better lives…
for that is the result of peace, we can build better lives whereas in war,
we just hit the other guy over the head with a stick…and how does that
better our lives?
those who are in love with war and violence, are in love with the lower
animal instincts of hate and violence and anger and greed and lust…
and it is easy to do those things because they, the instincts are breed
into us, part of evolution… but to seek peace means we must overcome
our instincts, we must become more then just animals, or be more
then animal/human… we must become human, rising above our instincts
and evolution to seek peace rather then to seek war/violence…
and one might ask, how do we seek peace? by seeking the
eternal goal of philosophy, one… to know thyself
and two, the unexamined life isn’t worth living…
to examine why one cares for war and violence over peace and love?
and then to overcome the instincts of war and violence?
once again, we become human by our seeking to overcome
what our instincts have decided for us… to make free choices
that we engage with peace and love … instead of war and violence…
Kropotkin