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War is a good thing. Sorry, Edwin Starr.
Good God, ya'll!
Okay. Okay. I have to clarify that. War is a horrible thing. War means that lots of people are going to die. And that’s terrible. People that, in the long view, were going to die anyway. Except now they died because of a war. See, wars are, without a question, the single greatest driving force for technological development in human history. And, while you may be putting all your faith in a manifestation of the Merkaba, I am going to assume that technological development is crucial to the species. So, like it or not, war is a good thing.
But hey, have fun with that Merkaba stuff.
What does this mean? Does it mean war is always going to be with us? Probably. The universe is a harsh and dangerous place, and we’ll always have to be ready to fight. Unfortunately, this currently manifests in the form of ridiculous squabbles and disputes over lines on a map or words in a holy book. These squabbles do have an unfortunate tendency to lead to a high body count.
No, not THAT Body Count...
And before that angry synapse has finished firing towards your primitive brain-stem, let me clarify further. I realize it is horribly callous and glib to imply that it is okay that people die in wars simply because they were going to die anyway. It glosses over the fact that the future and the past don’t exist; that all we have is the present moment and for those people their present moment ended in pain and destruction. And besides, in the long run, we’re all dead, as John Maynard Keynes famously said.
In the long run we're all dead... but a goofy mustache lasts forever.
Or, in the long run, we are all post-human gods that roam an infinite universe creating at whim. Either way. The point is, war is a terrible thing, and also a necessary thing. Therefore the solution is to make it less terrible or to render it unnecessary. In that vein, consider the legendary Jay-Z / Nas battle of 2001. At the end of it both Jay and Nas emerged victorious, having utterly defeated each other. It shows the signs towards future ways of making wars more metaphorical and not as literally destructive. Compare and contrast with the OTHER big attack of 2001:
NEVER FORGET
Here the attackers fought by killing themselves in a terrible suicide attack. Who won? In retrospect 2001 was the year that humanity was shown that we must find a new way to engage in conflict; and that the only alternative was futile self-annihilation.
Sorry, Arthur C. Clarke.
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