It would be great if we could all share that sentiment. But ask the Ukrainians how unilateral disarmament worked out for them. Unfortunately, it seems that this particular waste of resources and intellect is still necessary.
> Be united, O kings of the earth, for thereby will the tempest of discord be stilled amongst you, and your peoples find rest, if ye be of them that comprehend. Should any one among you take up arms against another, rise ye all against him, for this is naught but manifest justice.
> (“Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh”, pp. 253-254)
Examples of that would include ego, greed, petty revenge, etc...
But I guess the way I said it did come across that way, so yeah, my bad
I'm just saying that if we could evolve past such petty ego-based sentiments in the world, then wouldn't such pressure to develop weaponry in such massive amounts, and hence we could focus on actually making a functioning society
That would be nice, but it seems that would make people no longer human. Happily following a petty ego-based Dear Leader's orders into warfare seems to be the norm for much of the human population, looking at history, so this tendency appears to be deeply-rooted into the human psyche.
as the quote above says:
thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor
it all comes down to better education, specifically moral education, and learning to critically evaluate any information we get.
if people blindly follow a leader, then this is exactly what they are missing.
Everything that goes wrong later can be traced to that inequality. Things that go right can usually be traced back to it as well. Any faith or philosophy that doesn't begin with an understanding of that aspect of human nature is a waste of time at best. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
true, but perhaps we do have capacity to learn to think well enough to pick leaders who are better people than the most of us overall, e.g. learning to not mistake charisma for pure intention or intellectual insight
with some self awareness, it takes less effort overall to know who is better than us or our friends in terms of ethics and intellect, than it is to be right on every issue
and thats probably more important than the specifics of each issue, especially since the lay person doesn't have time to delve into the finer details of everything
now if we can get in a cycle of electing leaders like that then that would set us on a trajectory of constant societal growth, but to get to that our system probably also needs to change so as to actually present people with realistic options
that is probably a lot harder, and the two are certainly locked into a feedback loop
and I don't have answers on that one, but I believe if its possible to get to where we are from pond scum, then perhaps we can get to that point in the future as well
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
Cue the opening scene of 2001 A Space Odyssey.