DIY Peace

What’s the best method of creating world peace, well before you go near any practical methods you really need understand the root causes of war.  If we think of war as a crime (which it is) then we could proceed by breaking the causes into three steps:

Motive, Opportunity and Means.

Motive

The grass is always greener in your neighbours garden, is this a good enough to go to war?  Your neighbour’s garden has oil underneath it, simplified you are greedy.

Your neighbour believes in different things to you, is this a good enough to go to war?  What does it matter what your neighbour believes, oh wait a minute because your neighbour does not believe as you do therefore your neighbour must be evil, your neighbour threatens the status quo.  Is religion an excuse or a reason?

Your neighbour's Great-great-great-great grandfather killed your Great-great-great-great grandfather, therefore your neighbour is evil.  This can be down to how children at brought up, the people on the other side of the wall are bad.

Tradition can be a killer of good values, it does not let people have their own experiences to become less likely to kill someone they have never met based upon something happened five generations ago.

Your neighbour is bad person, head of the government, takes from the poor and gives to the rich – that would be revolution/civil war.  A coup-d'etat would be a less violent method than full blown war.

Opportunity:
Well that happens a lot due the fact we tend live next door to every other country, islands fair better than most although that normally gives way to civil wars instead.  Of course through alliances with other countries you get multiple countries invading one or worst two super powers using a small country as a battleground to fight between their opposing ideologies like Vietnam and Korea.  Also a perfect battleground to test new weapons and guess what we are back to greed.  Are opposing ideologies an excuse?

Means

The top 6 arms exporters in the world are:

USA, Russia, China, France, Germany and the UK.

They are effectively all the super powers on the planet, if they wanted peace to occur it would be a simple method converting their weapons factories over to something useful like alternative energy supplies and recycling all weapons.  Money however TALKS!

To quote one of my favourite authors Issac Asimov: “Violence is the last refuge of incompetent” 

Which would make mankind staggeringly incompetent for most of its history, we have failed to learn from our mistakes.  This is irony on so many levels.

Enlightenment by Resistance

Would the absence of war mean peace or just a population under control?  For any civilization to develop you must have change and for change to occur you need resistance to the status quo.  If everyone agrees with everyone else then all that happens is stagnation, civilizations like that are easily destroyed by simple culture shock or the degeneration into the worship of the past, loss of science etc.

Violence should never be used as a form of resistance it gives in to our most basic of instincts which is why there have been very few periods in history where there is an absence of war.  Man has failed to evolve in the last ten thousand years if we had war would be non-existent by now.  Perhaps ten thousand years is too short of time to expect that amount of change to achieve enlightenment?

Unfortunately for us change is violent.