this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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No Stupid Questions

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What are your ideas, that if you could implement would likely stop our species from warring so much?

I'm asking for a reasonable ones, but if not - at least make them funny :P

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[–] NewDark 35 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Restructure society to value cooperatation over competition.

Break down unjustifiable hierarchies where possible and reasonable. The flatter the power structure is without sacrificing much in the way of efficiency, the better.

[–] torres 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I feel like this is the way. It's more or less the idea with the EU, and I would say it's working great. I just hope this level of cooperation reaches the whole world

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[–] redballooon 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Rename to “armed conflict” or “special military operations”

[–] RIotingPacifist 4 points 1 year ago

You are now a moderator of [email protected]

[–] Colt420 15 points 1 year ago

How about massive free psychedelic doses?

[–] kluevo 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is something my old history teacher once mentioned: we have games like COD and other esports titles. Just have all conflicts resolved via virtual combat instead of in real world violence

[–] Tagger 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But that would require the loser to accept the loss.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (7 children)

The complete extinction of the human race

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[–] Barns 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Kill everyone. No people, no wars! Win/win in my book

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[–] T156 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Make everyone bulletproof and bombproof. If it is no longer possible to kill people using weapons of war, then there will no longer be a point to fighting the wars. Either that, or things will escalate to a point where it is no longer sustainable to fight wars that way, also solving it. Mind control, or gelatinising everyone into a singular hivemind is also an option.


Somewhat more realistically, I think that exchanges and the internet are the ways to go when it comes to ending wars. It's a lot harder to fight wars when you can empathise with the other side, and see them as your peers. It's one of the reasons why soldiers who took part in the Christmas Armistice were shuffled around, since they became friendly during the ceasefire, and would be less wanting to fire weapons on the friends that they made.

A lot of wars tend to centre around dehumnaising the other side, and treating them as the "enemy". Allowing people to co-operate and communicate mutually makes it a lot harder for that to take place, since you have experience with the "enemy", they're not that bad. You've even got friends there, and training a gun on them with the expectation and desire to turn them into a corpse is just not on.

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[–] wabafee 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Mass extinction event. Breed out aggression from our species we seem to be doing that but slowly. Space mining could potentially stop us from having war in Earth at least. AI takeover have everyone live on their own virtual reality paradise. For the most reasonable I think the best way to end wars is education and uplifting poverty nations not exploit them.

Edit: Or we can just be like Switzerland be a direct democracy, with how slow they decide things it will be highly unlikely to go to war at all.

[–] onionbaggage 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Very easy. Global thermonuclear war. That should make sure that the remaining humans (if any) don't need to fight over resources for at least a few generations.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I bet I could convince you that there are no winners in global thermonuclear war with just 1000 games of tic tac toe.

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[–] Reliant1087 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Universal basic income, universal food and shelter and education.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Implantation of the post-scarcity society and the end of capitalism ez gg

[–] Hazdaz 10 points 1 year ago

There is no solution to that. It is a cold, hard reality of living on a planet with limited resources. We all might hate war (and for good reason, obviously), but it isn't like animals don't fight for territory either. Just happens that humans found a way to make it a few orders of magnitude more extreme.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Abolish Money and increase global distribution of goods aka socialism.

[–] buycurious 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah yes, the Star Trek approach.

[–] T156 5 points 1 year ago

Although it did take them at least one apocalypse, alien intervention, and 200 - 300 years before they actually got around to it.

[–] alokir 7 points 1 year ago

That would probably create more reasons for people/groups to go to war with each other than it eliminates.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

And who decides who has to produce those goods for everyone? Also who decides who gets how much? ... Probably some kind of war. :)

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Make those who declare war to actually fight the war. Put the two countries president on each side of an arena with some swords to fight to death, the one who lives wins the war. I'd record and pay pee view or something and the money raised would pay for homes for the poor in each country

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Education for everyone globally. War is, like all kinds of violence, an act or reaction of impotence (psychological term/not sexual).

It basically means nobody actually chooses to act violently or start wars. They do it because they believe consciously or subconsciously that they have no other options, because they can't think of any options.

This is always a wrong assumption, because there is always a better option. The difficult part is to getting people to understand their actual options. Education solves this.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

When there's no war, people like Hitler won't have any opposition to their rise to power. Haiti never gains independence. We'd never have escaped feudalism.

Most wars are stupid bullshit and suck ass. The military, especially the US military, is the biggest waste of money ever. That doesn't mean that war isn't directly tied to lots of positive things like innovation. There's so much medical, industrial, and geographical knowledge we wouldn't have if it wasn't for some war, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. People's ideas will always conflict because different groups of people are going to have goals unique to them that clash with others

Now if you were to ask how to stop unnecessary wars, better more efficient rulers. Most of the people in power today are complete hacks. It's crazy

But I don't think we'll ever get rid of war and I don't know if that's necessarily that crazy? Ultimately it's apart of how we grow as societies

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

There is this dystopia anime series called From the New World. The premise is a portion of humanity gained psychic power and led to the collapse of society because it's so powerful that order could not be enforced. Far into the future there's a cluster of communities that's able to exist, and the way they went about it was to genetically engineered humans so when they harm another human it triggers body functions that make it harder for them to breath and other things. Killing another human also kills the aggressor. It kind of works on the interpretative level so it's possible that using drones could still have an effect, probably.

Even in the story they explored ways to circumvent it though, but that's kind of a tangent.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Democracies rarely go to war with each other. Add mutual economical dependency to that and you have a strong base to avoid armed conflict. The EU is a good example for that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

A global 'EU' is the most likely way to end all wars, yes.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Eradicate fear.

Fear of losing power. Fear of "them". Fear of going to hell because you didn't convert someone. Fear of lost resources.

It all boils down to fear. The problem is that fear is contagious. It's easier to convince someone to back your side if you make them afraid vs hopeful.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How do you eradicate fear?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

A single world spanning country.

If we don't kill ourselves off first it will probably happen eventually. Country sized used to be limited by things like communication latency, and the time it took to move forces around. Technology has shrunk the world so that those things no longer matter. The natural size limit on a country is almost certainly as large as the earth now.

It won't happen soon, cultures will take time to become similar enough to merge. Leadership structures take time to be absorbed into a greater one (EU style) or have to forcefully taken over (Chechnya style, thankfully very rare these days). But with no real impediment to countries growing larger, it will happen eventually. With no-one able to fund or support rebellion and modern technology making police actions extremely effective it may well last effectively forever.

Whether it's a democratic utopia, a dictatorial nightmare, or something in between for the common citizen is not yet defined. Either way, war, as in peer to peer conflict between sovereigns, will be over.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, you can still get civil war in that scenario right, or just mass strife and protests which can grow into warlike movements.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Let's first address all the "nature" and "biological" not-really-true claims.

The Batek people of Malaysia are so averse of killing other humans that refuse to do it even when threatened with slavery https://peacefulsocieties.uncg.edu/societies/batek/

So, war is cultural, not biological.

Second, why do we do war?

At first glance, is for scarce resources, for survival.

But look at the modern wars. Are they for survival? Are they for resources that we need to survive?
No they are not.
They are for power.

But whose power?
The power of those who actually have to fight and die?
Certainly not.

The power of the rulers, who are greedy for more power.

Most people need to be scared into going to war, need to be convinced that they are defending their families and their "people".

This is why rulers work very hard to build national identities, the good "us" vs the evil "them".

Here we need three things:

  1. We need a culture that knows how to recognize those greedy for power, those with a desire to dominate, and see them as the threat to freedom that they are, ie some sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_mechanism
    There are several cultures that do that, but it has to be a deliberate and conscious thing.

  2. We need to rethink our identities, national and not, because those identities are used to define the "other" that is ok to harm and kill.
    A way to do this is to make sure that people who want to travel and visit other groups can do so easily: this will help the various groups understand and humanize each other.

  3. We need a culture that stresses the importance of non-violent conflict resolution.
    Because if all you know is violence, then that's what you will use.

I mean, easier said than done of course, but I think that knowing the direction makes it easier to reach it.

For further reading on the subject, I would recommend Bob Altemeyer's "The Authoritarians" and Graeber & Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything" from the top of my head.

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[–] Today 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Did you watch Shiny Happy People? Apparently Christian fundamentalists believe the world population can fit into Jacksonville, FL. There's the answer. Anyone who wants to start a war has to go live in Jacksonville. Build that wall!

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[–] shandrakor 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Since you stipulated our species, to me, the answer is an external threat to the whole. Aliens, higher or lower dimensional creatures, cryptids, flame unicorns sharting lava, even angels or demons if we want to get real wild.

Even just the threat of an existential terror such as these and probably a lot I missed, (feel free to add to the list! Feed me your existential threats!) has the potential to bring the species together to fight on a larger scale.

However this doesn't eliminate war just moves the focus. So I'm not sure if I've answered your question or not but I had fun doing it!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

The question is ill-posed.

War is just a tool, a collective act of violence that a group of people do against another in order to obtain a result. It's always sad and it's always bring sufference, but one could say sometimes it's necessary. If you cancel war from the world witouth changin anything else, you will ends up probably damagin more the one with actually less power, since violence is usually the last resort in order to confront someone that hold political, economical and soft power upon you.

If you wanted to ask how we go to a situation when wars are not necessary and they are actually the less convenient and effective way to obtain collective or personal results, so that we ends up with no actual war are started, here's my answer. We need to build a system that minimize close to zero the difference in power (every kind of power) between people, and we need to build an efficient an relieble system to intermediate and resolve the inevitable conflict between people and groups.

[–] Sir_Simon_Spamalot 5 points 1 year ago

Kill every human being. No people no war.

[–] RIotingPacifist 5 points 1 year ago

End capitalism (& the nation state/state in general)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Benevolent global AI dictator. These never go wrong in sci-fi after all.

(has to be true AI like Daneel Olivaw, not this fake LLM crap though)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The Culture has entered the chat.

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[–] Anitabath097 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Economic democracy; if money and resources cause wars then why not let everyone have control? I will probably hear the human nature stuff but being social is just as if not more important than hurting your species/society.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Put all leaders together in a hall with good music and cozy interior and give everyone MDMA.

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[–] encync2 4 points 1 year ago

Put everyone in a time-out until they can play nicely with the other children (because let's face it, a lot of them are acting like children)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Easy enough, we just build a jail so big that we can fit the entire world inside of it, boom no more crime.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nuclear deterrent. If that fails, nuclear annihilation. Either way, there will be no more wars.

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