The Reason For Wars

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Belindi
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Re: The Reason For Wars

Post by Belindi »

Thank you, Lucky R . I'll absorb that.
Gordon975
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Re: The Reason For Wars

Post by Gordon975 »

LuckyR your observations on traditions of suppression of the individual, based on country traditions and culture, etc is a nicely written and beautifully crafted account of what I think is perhaps the commonly perceived reasons for the reduction of violence among human males, and is a very well observed politically oriented account of the problem. My personal belief is that people are just very much the same wherever you journey in the world, with the same aims and aspirations, and it is usually the fanciful beliefs of their controlling leaders and perhaps their perceived culture that stamp them with specific traits different one from another, people everywhere mostly just want the basic human right of a quite family life, and to achieve this they will generally put up with much discomfort and follow the norms of their society if that is what it takes to allow them to achieve it.

Something that is very new in the intellectually driven part of the human species, is the Internet, which strangely may be one of the reasons for the reduction of male on male violence, based on the premise that this may in part happen due to male competition for females, please watch the YouTube TED Lecture which I think relates to this idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiU
Belindi
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Re: The Reason For Wars

Post by Belindi »

Lucky R wrote:
This set of circumstances has made the USA with it's tradition of individuality, into being more vulnerable to group-think than at any other time, though to be fair, it isn't one group-think, rather one opinion and it's opposite. Sort of double group-think.

Perhaps they'll cancel each other out...
Do you think that perhaps instead of sort of passively cancelling each other out, Americans could rediscover that each and everyone is an individual and not part of some superimposed category such as 'African American', 'woman', 'disabled', 'Hispanic', 'old person', 'homosexual', 'white' etc. ?

Gordon writes that what most people want is to bring up their families in peace. This may indeed be what most people want. However this as Gordon describes possibly may not be what everyone wants. It's not possible to know for sure what one really wants as an individual until the superimposed categories have been thrown off. For instance it may be the case that those people who love to go lonely into some American natural wilderness do so to be what they really feel themselves to be.
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Ormond
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Re: The Reason For Wars

Post by Ormond »

Gordon975 wrote:Our hope may be that an attack of one society on another will be impeded by the realization that the application of total war, would mean the destruction of everything that could be gained by pursuing it, such as cultural supremacy over the other society and its wealth, and as I have suggested before war relies on people to execute the orders to enable it, with the proper education people would not exist prepared to carry out the tasks needed.
No society in history has succeeded in preventing wars by the manner you describe. Your theory depends on ignoring this huge inconvenient fact. Thus, you aren't doing philosophy, but idealistic dreaming.

The German people were among the most educated and highly cultured people in the world, and they still turned to Hitler for solutions when their economy hit the wall. The scientists who built the A-bomb and those who hired them to do so all had excellent educations, and they had the best of intentions too. None of that mattered.

The forces at play here 1) the knowledge explosion and 2) the pervasive persistent existence of violent men in human populations, are simply too large to be controlled with the politically correct 19th century progressive moralism you are attempting to apply to the problem. Like the rest of our society you are attempting to apply incremental remedies to a revolutionary situation.
Violence within our societies from men is generally under control, and I think rare...
Are you old enough to know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was? Do you have a TV? Do you pay any attention at all to what is going on in the world beyond your personal life? Sigh...

Even if your theory that violence is rare were true, it still wouldn't matter. The knowledge explosion renders it irrelevant. It's rare for any nation to use nuclear weapons. That is a true fact, right? It doesn't matter. The scale of nuclear weapons means we only need one nuclear war to end everything. One bad day, that's all it takes. One bad decision by one person one time. And what the recent election should prove to you is, in America literally anybody could be that one person.

Even if some in the missile silos have what you consider to be "proper education" and they refuse to comply with an order to launch, that won't matter a bit. They'll simply be relieved of their position and/or shot, and then somebody else will hit the button. Again, your theory is stuck in the 19th century, when it took thousands to millions of willing participants to launch a war. That's over with, please get it out of your head.
If the things we want to hear could take us where we want to go, we'd already be there.
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Cosmogenes
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Re: The Reason For Wars

Post by Cosmogenes »

Typically, wars are started by a tyrannical ruler - a king, dictator, or elected politician. The Athenians had a way of preemptively getting rid of such individuals by the process of ostracism for ten years. It was a kind of negative election designed to curb the power of any potential tyrant.
If we had a way of keeping individuals from gaining the power to control others, perhaps we could have a more peaceful world.
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Atreyu
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Re: The Reason For Wars

Post by Atreyu »

The real reasons for war have nothing to do with Mankind himself. The actual reason for wars is because it serves the interests of "higher powers". Men don't start wars, wars happen by themselves due to the collective influence on Mankind from the Earth, the Moon, the other Planets, and the Sun....
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LuckyR
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Re: The Reason For Wars

Post by LuckyR »

Belindi wrote:Lucky R wrote:
This set of circumstances has made the USA with it's tradition of individuality, into being more vulnerable to group-think than at any other time, though to be fair, it isn't one group-think, rather one opinion and it's opposite. Sort of double group-think.

Perhaps they'll cancel each other out...
Do you think that perhaps instead of sort of passively cancelling each other out, Americans could rediscover that each and everyone is an individual and not part of some superimposed category such as 'African American', 'woman', 'disabled', 'Hispanic', 'old person', 'homosexual', 'white' etc. ?

Gordon writes that what most people want is to bring up their families in peace. This may indeed be what most people want. However this as Gordon describes possibly may not be what everyone wants. It's not possible to know for sure what one really wants as an individual until the superimposed categories have been thrown off. For instance it may be the case that those people who love to go lonely into some American natural wilderness do so to be what they really feel themselves to be.
It can and ultimately will happen. Though as I phased it at your request, not right now. Right now the pendulum is at the opposite apex. Why? Because we are in a lull or hiccup in the transition to a more pluralistic society. When those in power have to relinquish even a small amount of their influence or even have the (incorrect) perception that they have to give up some power, there is tremendous resentment or backlash. We are in such a time of backlash. Historically this has been temporary but these are not historic times, so it is not a given that the pendulum won't get stuck here... though it never has in the past. We'll see.
"As usual... it depends."
Belindi
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Re: The Reason For Wars

Post by Belindi »

Lucky_R wrote:

It can and ultimately will happen. Though as I phased it at your request, not right now. Right now the pendulum is at the opposite apex. Why? Because we are in a lull or hiccup in the transition to a more pluralistic society. When those in power have to relinquish even a small amount of their influence or even have the (incorrect) perception that they have to give up some power, there is tremendous resentment or backlash. We are in such a time of backlash. Historically this has been temporary but these are not historic times, so it is not a given that the pendulum won't get stuck here... though it never has in the past. We'll see.[quote][/quote]

Or we won't see if Mr Trump presses the button in which case there won't be any history any more.
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Re: The Reason For Wars

Post by Gordon975 »

Ormand Wrote
No society in history has succeeded in preventing wars by the manner you describe. Your theory depends on ignoring this huge inconvenient fact. Thus, you aren't doing philosophy, but idealistic dreaming.

The German people were among the most educated and highly cultured people in the world, and they still turned to Hitler for solutions when their economy hit the wall. The scientists who built the A-bomb and those who hired them to do so all had excellent educations, and they had the best of intentions too. None of that mattered.

The forces at play here 1) the knowledge explosion and 2) the pervasive persistent existence of violent men in human populations, are simply too large to be controlled with the politically correct 19th century progressive moralism you are attempting to apply to the problem. Like the rest of our society you are attempting to apply incremental remedies to a revolutionary situation.
You are of course completely right, no one throughout history has ever managed to avert a war in the way I have described, and probably never will, I wrote with hope rather than expectation, although no other solution seems possible. It is perhaps the reasons for war that need to be explored before we can begin to eradicate it. I agree with you, regarding the pervasive persistent existence of violent men in human populations, however the violent men that you describe that are of danger, are perhaps not the ones that comprise the armies, but the ones that create them.
Within our societies the members of a population exist with various disabilities and talents some directly visible some not so, some used and some never used. Within a society there are those born without all or part of their controlling conscience, the part of us that influences our educated intellect, we can perhaps see this when someone breaks a law, however unless this happens such people go undetected. My assertion is that the individual male with a normal conscience will fight kill and die for a cause only based on the leadership of a leader without one.
Although the human intellect can override most of what we think of as conscience, and the instincts that we were born with, it is hard for it to override the forces within us, that dictate the rules for reproductive natural selection within the male of our species. Education must always come from understanding, and the debate and agreement resulting from that, and this may give hope, although I would agree with you that history is against my assertion here.
The European wars of the 20th century, sort of backs up my assertion that men of conscience are led by those without one, they engage in warfare, kill and are killed in a way that no intellectual reasoning properly explains, and for reasons they themselves do not properly understand, their justifications are perhaps based on an inbuilt conscience and instinct which in the end overrides intellect.
Ormand Wrote
Again, your theory is stuck in the 19th century, when it took thousands to millions of willing participants to launch a war. That's over with, please get it out of your head.
In this exploration of the reasons for war what you describe is what I am interested in exploring, why would an entire population bother dieing or make others die for a "cause". The scenario that you describe with regard to going nuclear is similar to dealing with a person prepared to commit suicide for a cause, and perhaps a slightly different scenario to that which I am trying to immediately explore here, perhaps we need to look towards psychiatric reasons to explain what you are rightly pointing out.
Cosmogenes Wrote
Typically, wars are started by a tyrannical ruler - a king, dictator, or elected politician. The Athenians had a way of pre-emptively getting rid of such individuals by the process of ostracism for ten years. It was a kind of negative election designed to curb the power of any potential tyrant.
If we had a way of keeping individuals from gaining the power to control others, perhaps we could have a more peaceful world.
Democracy when well organised with free speech and a well-educated and informed electorate should solve the problems, we should look after it.
Atreyu Wrote
The real reasons for war have nothing to do with Mankind himself. The actual reason for wars is because it serves the interests of "higher powers". Men don't start wars, wars happen by themselves due to the collective influence on Mankind from the Earth, the Moon, the other Planets, and the Sun....
I would agree that war, indeed violence of any kind towards any member of your own species of creature does not make any intellectual commonsense, the concept of "higher powers" though is perhaps beyond me, however for species survival, based on conscience and instinct, resulting from competition within a hostile environment, it may do.
LuckyR Wrote:
It can and ultimately will happen. Though as I phased it at your request, not right now. Right now the pendulum is at the opposite apex. Why? Because we are in a lull or hiccup in the transition to a more pluralistic society. When those in power have to relinquish even a small amount of their influence or even have the (incorrect) perception that they have to give up some power, there is tremendous resentment or backlash. We are in such a time of backlash.
Historically this has been temporary but these are not historic times, so it is not a given that the pendulum won't get stuck here... though it never has in the past. We'll see.
The problem with the atomic version of a total war, is that it destroys what is perhaps the basic reason for war in the first place, which is that it is to acquire access to the female population of another culture and society, a very basic instinctive requirement of the individual males of the aggressor in a conflict between societies. If the female population is destroyed in a conflict, then the reason for war disappears, and the conflict although it may be made justifiable on some sort of intellectually based level, can never be justified to the individual male expected to serve in an army, this based on the fact that there is no reason to compete with the rival males of the opposing society. Our intellect in constructing nuclear weapons has in reality taken us beyond the constraints of our conscience, and it is the justifying needed by the conscience for war, which perhaps should never allow their use.

-- Updated February 10th, 2017, 12:53 pm to add the following --
Belindi Wrote:
Or we won't see if Mr Trump presses the button in which case there won't be any history any more.
In The Donald we witness a situation where democracy, has allowed a person without a proper conscience to have access to power, turning on its head what most people would regard as the
common decencies that we should extend to all members of the human family.
We just have to hope that Mr Trump has a strong sense of self preservation, and as a result has no wish to press "The Button".
History will however continue whatever he does, however it may not be that of human history but just that of bacteria evolving to repopulate the planet.
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LuckyR
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Re: The Reason For Wars

Post by LuckyR »

Gordon975 wrote:
LuckyR Wrote:
It can and ultimately will happen. Though as I phased it at your request, not right now. Right now the pendulum is at the opposite apex. Why? Because we are in a lull or hiccup in the transition to a more pluralistic society. When those in power have to relinquish even a small amount of their influence or even have the (incorrect) perception that they have to give up some power, there is tremendous resentment or backlash. We are in such a time of backlash.
Historically this has been temporary but these are not historic times, so it is not a given that the pendulum won't get stuck here... though it never has in the past. We'll see.
The problem with the atomic version of a total war, is that it destroys what is perhaps the basic reason for war in the first place, which is that it is to acquire access to the female population of another culture and society, a very basic instinctive requirement of the individual males of the aggressor in a conflict between societies. If the female population is destroyed in a conflict, then the reason for war disappears, and the conflict although it may be made justifiable on some sort of intellectually based level, can never be justified to the individual male expected to serve in an army, this based on the fact that there is no reason to compete with the rival males of the opposing society. Our intellect in constructing nuclear weapons has in reality taken us beyond the constraints of our conscience, and it is the justifying needed by the conscience for war, which perhaps should never allow their use.
Well, there are a lot of problems with nuclear war. I would suggest that the reason for current conventional wars is so that the Military Industrial complex can make lots of profits for their shareholders. Obviously your theory would also apply here as there are no profits to be had in a post-apocalyptic world.
"As usual... it depends."
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Atreyu
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Re: The Reason For Wars

Post by Atreyu »

If it were up to Mankind, there would be no wars. They are so nonsensical and counterproductive to all parties that Man would agree not to fight wars, and, in fact, men often do agree not to resort to wars, but, of course, it's futile. Men cannot help but fight and battle each other, and this is so because big cosmic forces are acting on man in the mass, and those forces have an interest in men occasionally slaughtering each other. Hence, we have wars...
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Sy Borg
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Re: The Reason For Wars

Post by Sy Borg »

Atreyu wrote:If it were up to Mankind, there would be no wars. They are so nonsensical and counterproductive to all parties that Man would agree not to fight wars, and, in fact, men often do agree not to resort to wars, but, of course, it's futile. Men cannot help but fight and battle each other, and this is so because big cosmic forces are acting on man in the mass, and those forces have an interest in men occasionally slaughtering each other. Hence, we have wars...
For the same reason as volcanoes erupt - the explosive release of built up pressure. One of the achievements of humans is releasing societal pressures in a controlled way without the pointless destruction of violence. The diplomatic and economic barriers that stand between us and warfare are impressive, but they must at some point be worn down by conflicts of interest as natural resources whittle.
Grunth
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Re: The Reason For Wars

Post by Grunth »

This could be valid information (I don't know) of an impending US civil war. Maybe worth a listen and then see if it actually plays out for real.

http://www.davejanda.com/guests/robert- ... ry-12-2017
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LuckyR
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Re: The Reason For Wars

Post by LuckyR »

Greta wrote:
Atreyu wrote:If it were up to Mankind, there would be no wars. They are so nonsensical and counterproductive to all parties that Man would agree not to fight wars, and, in fact, men often do agree not to resort to wars, but, of course, it's futile. Men cannot help but fight and battle each other, and this is so because big cosmic forces are acting on man in the mass, and those forces have an interest in men occasionally slaughtering each other. Hence, we have wars...
For the same reason as volcanoes erupt - the explosive release of built up pressure. One of the achievements of humans is releasing societal pressures in a controlled way without the pointless destruction of violence. The diplomatic and economic barriers that stand between us and warfare are impressive, but they must at some point be worn down by conflicts of interest as natural resources whittle.
What a great reasoning for the Olympics and the World Cup
"As usual... it depends."
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Ranvier
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Re: The Reason For Wars

Post by Ranvier »

Profit had always been the only reason for war. The underlining justification to mobilize the willingness of the population may vary (religion, patriotism, or spreading the democracy and freedom, lol) The only reason we hadn't descended into a Global nuclear war yet... there is no profit in that. That doesn't mean it can't happen if some country decides that they have nothing left to loose or some group of people decides that there is no more profit to be made unless we start a new.
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