Misplaced Pages

World peace

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Slicky (talk | contribs) at 08:35, 18 September 2004. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 08:35, 18 September 2004 by Slicky (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)


Definition and History

World peace is a future ideal of freedom, peace and happiness among and within all nations.

The realization of world peace may also make the idea of individual nations obsolete. Some historians identify a long-term trend where nation-states stop fighting and become united. For example, old Europe with wars culminating in World War I and World War II, compared with the European Union; warring Chinese states compared with the modern Chinese nation. Some historians theorize that the world will eventually follow this pattern as well.

Dr. Frank Laubach, an American Missionary to the Phllipines in 1935 saw poverty, injustice and illiteracy as impediments to world peace. He developed the "Each One Teach One" literacy program which taught about 60 million people to read in their own language.

World peace is often claimed to be the inevitable result of some political ideology. Thus, communist thinkers such as Leon Trotsky assumed that the world revolution would lead to a communist world peace, and neoliberal thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama assumed that the rise of Western democracy will inevitably lead to the "end of history".


Rational Assessment

From a rational, that is a scientific attitude world peace is a fiction which describes the scenario of unity with peace and harmony amongst the human species, whilst some even extend the meaning of the term to a interspecies background, namely that all higher developed lifeforms coexist in harmony.

It can be shown however with a simple thinking experiment that world peace is impossible to archieve for the human race at its current state. In order to enable something like world peace, the least requirement would have to be a coherent striving or natural drive of the human beeing that stretches throughout the whole species, meaning that all humans would have to be affected by such a drive. Now one would instantly think of the natural survival 'instinct' (humans basically have no instincts, thus the more exact expression would have to be 'drive'), as it is known to be one of the strongest, but as we all know humans are well capable of sacrificing themselves for a purpose which seemingly has no other resort in order to be achieved and is deemed important enough to actually be fulfilled. Because of the structure of the human species each human beeing develops into a completely individual entity (psyche), although at the price that anything that would require some kind of total unity throughout the species is impossible. Sigmund Freud did some psychological research on that topic. The real questions that has to be asked is what the human species would have become if there would actually be some kind of unity (on a mental level) withhin them, and if they would have even made it so far as they are now, or perhaps even further.

See also:

External links