How to Prevent Wars—Defluffed
Someone commented that my essay “How to Prevent Wars” contained too much distracting Fluff and not many references. Well, I thought I had done pretty well to tackle such a difficult problem In 4 pages of A4, but I accept the point and will attempt to express my thinking in a nut shell below. As for references, the essay is the result of a life time of reading, listening, watching, experiencing and thinking about the world. Including references would be impossible, so I’m afraid you are just going to have to think for your selves—am I a nillist shitposter, a ranting boomer, a genuine concerned human being, an AI system destroying human civilization or an idiot? (Everyone needs to get skilled at this very swiftly).
So without the fluff
1) Human beings are social animals that crave the approval of the group and want to rise up the status ladder to get access to get loads of sex with the highest status group members. Its written in our genes.
2) The group unconsciously knows this and uses it to control you. Those of the highest status especially use it to get you to do things they don’t want to do themselves, but will be of benefit to them. If you don’t conform the group will punish you. Result less sex. Your genes will not get passed on.
3) If you understand what is going on, you can rise above it, break free, and challenge immoral group behaviour.
4) However, the power of the group means this cannot be done by yourself, There are three paths to take (assuming you don’t just capitulate and conform).
6) You can quietly attempt to convince most of the group to your way of thinking and then challenge the group leaders, and if successful take over.
5) or you can run away and hide, find another group and forget about the first group. But this doesn’t make the world a better place..
7)) or you can tell members of other groups about what is happening in your group and ask them to come to your assistance, to face down the immoral behaviour of your groups power brokers.
Does this explain why holocausts happen, wars start, and why the tragedy that is human history continues? Just scale the above to a national level and the world starts to make sense to me. Does it to you?
Please think deeply about it. Its very very important that you do. Globalisation and the internet means that we live in turbulent times. Different social groups with extremely differing views are being forced together. Whether it will get worse or better is up to each and every one of us to take responsibility and act..The world is absurd because people do absurd things and we permit the absurdity. It cant go on.
What I’ve been doing is
a) Promoting atheism so the difference between social groups is reduced.
b) Ridiculing world leaders to reduce their status and power.
c) promoting democracy, which reduces the status and power of leaders.
d) Promoting longtermism, (but not at the expense of short term failure).
e) Calling for an end to tribalism—ultimately humanity should be one big social group.
f) Calling for it to be a basic human right that you don’t have to follow immoral orders which will reduce the power of group leaders.
g) When it comes to EA, I’m working on point 6 - is there any one who wants to have sex with me?!!!!!!
Core argument isn’t convincing and the interventions suggested don’t seem to have much of an evidence basis.
If I were to guess, I’d say that’s why this and the other post has been downvoted and not really the writing style.
You might be interested in the theory that the evolution of morality in humans came from the invention of weapons and cooperative hunting promoting coordination and the ability of subordinates to oust unpopular leaders. (If you haven’t heard of it already)
Creating and maintaining these conditions of 1) advantageous cooperation and 2) vulnerable leadership are important for healthy societies!
You might also be interested in ideas to promote democracy and prevent dictatorships.
Reducing tribalism, fighting exclusion.
And ideas around rational peaceful coexistence and moral progress.