I don’t believe in a worldwide empire. The problem is that wars and occupation only fuel resentment and revenge.
There are two problems today IMO : inequalities and imperialism.
Inequalities is basically the western countries living on the exploitation of developing countries labour. The tendency is quite good I think though with the economies going back a bit to local production, it should balance things a bit if developing countries can catch up and stabilise.
Imperialism is very concerning though. The war for power between US and China can be very bad for everyone. Smaller countries or old powers refusing the evolution is the other problem.
IMO there is a paradox to see: bigger wars means that bigger nations are fighting, but they’re going to stabilise ultimately. Europe saw wars for about all of history, culminating with the world wars, but ultimately the EU was born. I some way, the biggest the war, the biggest the place that get stabilised after that. Unfortunately it means some unfortunately big war may come in the future. But maybe the government will be reasonable at one point in front of the possible destruction of today’s weapons.
To answer the question, I see a peaceful world as a big version of Europe : cooperation and no frontiers to build respect, friendship and human links, and a place for each country to be reasonably itself. There is a very long way to go though.
Free information on peace was available clearly by 2006. Most countries are corruptly (monopolies, $500 billion/year drugs black market) driven by lust, greed, and evil fundamentalist motives that are getting worse such as today’s Manipur genocide internet censorship. 1 language yes, but more new countries and separating the worst states such as florida from the better ones.
While world peace is obviously desirable, I think it’s important to recognize that the absence of conflict does not imply the presence of justice. World peace should not be pursued until we first achieve universal justice, because pursuing universal justice will require war.
Stopping wars while we live in an unjust international order does nothing but solidify that order and demonize opposition to it as “warmongering”. Some wars are just. The Allies could have avoided a lot of bloodshed had they invaded Germany to immediately depose Hitler, rather than allowing him to solidify his power, grow Germany’s military, and invade Poland and Czechoslovakia.
The end of war will naturally follow the end of inequality and injustice.
There are many forms of governing and often that form is result of local environment and culture. Flow of wealth through the society being an important part.
Its not really about warfare, but abbout divisions, and mostly class divisions, be it political or economical. And goverment always becomes corrupt and at least in the case of the main 3 superpowers, starts getting into shit that doesnt really concern them, be it cold war shit like the contras or the mujahadin or be it espionage and the taking down of sovering states to install their own pupet governments for banana companies among other stuff and whatever the hell the soviets where doing. Thats why i propose that we should create an A.I. overlord so that it replaces human leadership and distributes resources as needed (by persons) and exploits them in a sostainable way. But not A.I. like the language models that we have, no, im talking singularity type shit, but there has been good progres with what we have right now. And i believe the fate itself of humankind rest on the fact that we build such A.I. since we as humans have proven uncapable of governing ourselves without mass murder, starvation, fear and inequality.
Believe it or not, we’re living in the most peaceful period of human history thus far. I’d recommend the book The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker which talks about how far we’ve come. That said, I see the threat of global warming, lack of fresh water, famine, and energy scarcity becoming threats to the current status quo, though. If we don’t figure some things out as a species, we’re likely in for some turbulent times in the next hundred years.
I was thinking about how we (USA) are always in continuous (ghost) wars and never try to negotiate for peace, to my knowledge.
The US has supported or started many pointless wars, but that we have never negotiated for peace or avoided war is not accurate. One example is that the US, as part of the UN, participates in peacekeeping efforts across the world.
One country and one languague or would a world power have to forcibly join everyone together?
So, you know that 'one world government' is a thing that terrifies a lot of religious conservatives because they think it means the antichrist and the end of the world, right? The language thing is difficult too. From what i recall the most common language worldwide is Spanish, with 2.5-3 billion people speaking it, which means 5 billion or so people would have to learn Spanish, or we'd have to pick some other language and even more people would have to learn that. (EDIT: oops, English is #1 followed by Mandarin. I somehow confused Spanish with Catholicism)
I agree that nationalism is harmful, but overall it would be very, very difficult to persuade every country in the world to give up their language and national identity. Also, as central planning doesn't work very well, any world government would have to be segmented to provide effective governance for regions, which would mean basically... like now... each region has it's own government.
Most likely the reasonable thing to do would be to try to encourage countries to work together peacefully, rather than try to abolish nations.
I think the scariest thing about a world government isn’t some daft prophecy about the antichrist but that if it turned tyrannical there’d be very little anyone could do about it. Power inevitably corrupts and to say otherwise is wishful thinking; we’d have created the ultimate power and therefore the ultimate source of corruption, imagine the world government underwent a palace coup and we ended up with a regime like Stalin’s or Mussolini’s but you couldn’t even flee it as a refugee or hope for foreign intervention.
Balances of power rather than monopolies on it are probably best in my opinion.
No and I’d say diversity is worth over a homogenized society even if it comes at an increased chance of conflict. And it’s not like people who live in the same country and speak the same language don’t fight each other. People argue over mundane stuff like tv shows after all, and get into online wars and exoduses over social media platforms.
The peace you seek is probably only possible through massive brainwashing or an absolute privacy infringing totalitarian state that monitors everyone and is rapid in exterminating dissidents that are flagged for abnormal behavior.
A lot of people will blame conflicts on power hungry individuals, on war profiteering, or on relatively simple characterizations of cultural prejudice (“Americans hate brown people!”). There’s truth in these viewpoints, but they’re limited by being framed in current sociocultural issues.
It’s very important to understand that there are ancient cultural feuds that people who were born and raised in the US are mostly ignorant of. For instance, India and China.
The reason that Afghanistan is such a mess internally today is that it was never a cohesive national culture in its history. The people who live there are comprised of many different cultural groups, many of whom are the descendants of various groups of invaders throughout the region’s history - and as such, many of the groups hate each other due to past territorial conflicts.
Every place you might look at in the entire world, the history is like this - an endless fractal of groups trying to conquer each other, or running away from some other conquerors and getting into conflict with the locals whose land they ran away to. It goes all the way back to the time that the first hominid picked up a rock and hit another one over the head. The conflicts are so old that no one remembers how, why or when they started, but the fear and the hatred remain.
These conflicts aren’t the product of modern international economic competition or ideological differences (capitalism v socialism, etc) or nationalist political division. Rather, the modern competition, differences and division exist today as an expression of the old conflicts.
To get to the world of peace that you have in mind, it would be necessary to wipe the slate of history clean.
“Progress over profection” That’s a saying in the 12 step program, but it applies to everything related to humans. We will never be perfect, but we can always be better.
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