World Peace Is Possible - Part 1

Imagine 90%+ of the violence in the world gone. Imagine trillions of dollars of new money available for life affirming projects. Imagine world peace.

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One of the more intriguing aspects of an intellectual life can be to take on the challenge of making what at first seems like an impossible case. Imagine that you’re a defense attorney, and the community takes it to be an obvious given that your client is guilty. Your job as the defense attorney is to prove the group consensus wrong. This is that kind of post.

Is World Peace Impossible?

In this article series, world peace is not defined as a perfect utopia, which we can agree is impossible for we humans.

DEFINITION: For the purposes of this discussion, world peace is defined as a radical reduction in human violence at every level of society.

Such a radical reduction of violence around the world is typically thought of as a vague impossible fantasy cooked up by dreamy hippies who have probably smoked too much weed. The commonly held notion that world peace is impossible is an understandable assumption given that violence has always been a pervasive reality of the human experience as long as anyone can remember.

But is it true? Is it true that world peace is impossible? Difficult, yes. But impossible? Those who are serious about peace should at least be asking this question. Is world peace possible? Let’s explore that together on this and following pages.

Understanding Violence

This post won’t attempt to understand human violence in some deep fundamental manner. Let’s save that kind of philosophy for another day. Instead, this post will focus on a direct practical question.

QUESTION: Who is it that’s committing all the violence all around the world every day at every level of society? What’s remarkable is how incredibly simple and obvious the answer to this question is. A clear eyed objective observation reveals one very simple fact about human violence.

ANSWER: Almost all of the violence humanity experiences is committed by men. Male humans.

This is not just a fact for our modern times, but rather a consistent pattern that goes back many thousands of years in every time and place.

The Problem

1. Of course, the first obvious problem is that individual innocent men, women and children (animals too) all over the world are being subjected to unjust unspeakable horrors, and we find this to be unacceptable. (Or do we?)

2. Sadly, there is an even bigger problem arising from male violence. The marriage between violent men and an accelerating knowledge explosion is unsustainable. As evidence, right now, today, a single violent man named Vladimir Putin has the power to destroy our entire civilization within minutes. And, the knowledge explosion will be continually handing such violent men ever more power. There’s no credible reason to believe that our culture can survive further empowering violent men forever.

Thinking Outside The Box

Because of the vast scale of human suffering caused by male violence, and the fact that civilization itself is at stake, we should at least consider solutions beyond what we’re used to, what’s been done before, what’s comfortable and familiar, what the experts suggest, and what we would like the solution to be. If we’re serious, we should be trying to think outside of the box of conventional ideas.

Here’s why…

If “realistic”, commonly accepted, normal, status quo, “reasonable” ideas could solve the problem of male violence, after thousands of years they likely already would have. What we see instead is that in all of human history, no religion, philosophy, ideology or political system has succeeded in keeping the peaceful men while removing the violent men.

Some might vaguely dream that science will maybe someday somehow solve this problem. But if they thought that through they would realize that were science to invent a “peace pill”, violent men would immediately try to use this invention to neuter their enemies. And so the same old game would continue.

What we’re doing isn’t working. Do we care enough about innocent victims and protecting the miracle of modern civilization to try something new?

A Solution

The establishment of world peace requires certain necessary pre-conditions in our attitude towards that goal.

If we are:

• Willing to be honest about who is doing most of the violence…

• Willing to be clear that to have peaceful men is to also have violent men…

• Willing to be serious about world peace, then….

It should become clear what the path to world peace is.

We create a world without men.

Let’s take a look at that together.

A Vision Of World Peace

In a world without men, 90%+ of the violence we see in our news feeds and on TV would vanish. In a world without men, vast suffering would be lifted from the backs of many millions of innocent people all over the world. Not a perfect utopia. Just a radical improvement upon our current violence soaked situation.

In a world without men, many trillions of dollars now needed to manage and recover from all the carnage being generated by violent men could be reinvested in life affirming projects like education and health care etc.

Just think of the vast sums we currently spend on armies, weapons, jails, prisons, criminal courts, victim services, and rebuilding broken lives and broken nations. In a world without men most of these expenses would become unnecessary, and we could spend most of this money on building peace and prosperity, instead of on responding to violence.

1. If most violence was ended, and…

2. Vast new resources became available for constructive purposes…

3. We would arrive at a revolutionary new era in human history that might reasonably be called world peace.

World peace is not impossible as is so often assumed. Very challenging for sure, but not impossible. There is no law of physics preventing world peace. Only we are preventing world peace.

And this is good news, because it means we have agency, and can have hope. The bad news is, if we don’t achieve world peace, we are to blame for that failure.

It is the contention of this article series that world peace is possible. But, uh oh, the dirty little secret is that we don’t want to pay the price for it. We’d rather have the carnage continue so that we don’t have to change. Because after all, violence always happens to somebody other than us, right? And so we tell ourselves that world peace is impossible.

It’s the purpose of this article to try to pull the rug out from under this lie we’ve grown comfortable telling ourselves.

The Question

To wrap up the first page of this article series on world peace, let’s explore a few quick questions. Perhaps you’d like to discuss such questions in the comment section. I hope you will.

1. What is it about the male gender that is so incredibly important as to justify the vast scale of suffering which violent men inflict upon the world? Are men really worth it? Really?

2. If we were real men, wouldn’t we be doing something decisive to prevent this unnecessary suffering?

3. If we were real women, wouldn’t we prioritize the safety of our children above all else?

This page hopes to introduce the idea of a world without men for your consideration. This is obviously a very big topic with a great many angles which require further exploration. Additional articles in this series will make a good faith attempt to at least start that process.

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