How would life change if there was no war or suffering?

[Reach]

Originally Posted by iironiic

I understand that life is a balance between good times and bad times but let's avoid reality for a bit and venture into an idealistic world. What if life was filled with trusted people whose purpose is of no harm and no greed? How would people spend their days in this given lifestyle. What would life be without crime, rape, and war? Discuss.

No crime, rape and war? It sounds like life would be wonderful. My life would remain relatively unchanged, since I don't experience these types of things very often, and our population as a whole would be better off being in a similar situation.


I find the fact that some of you seem to think that this would make life 'boring' a bit laughable. I mean.....seriously?

How many times do you wake up and experience crime, rape or war? Hopefully never. These are global issues that cause harm and destruction on a large scale that filters down into a smaller scale, but it thankfully doesn't end up affecting most of us.

Do you even know anyone that has experienced war? If so, do they have anything positive to say about it? Probably not. It isn't fun. It's terrifying. It's not something to glorify or think highly of. It's an abomination that causes widespread suffering; it should be avoided at all costs.

Crime too. How would the lack of crime do anything but improve your current life? Things would go on normally save for the fact that you would never have to worry about things like having your items stolen from you or being held at gunpoint. Can you seriously not amuse yourself in the absence of this? You get off in knowing that there are people out there that might rape your future daughter? It really wouldn't make your life better knowing that this never happens?



As for an absence of 'suffering'; this is significantly more ambiguous, so I won't even bother addressing it. If we're going to define it as something like torture, my answer is the same. If we're talking about experiencing pain or distress though, things are very different (I would like to point out that in order to remove these things, we would have to completely alter the human brain. Even in a 'perfect' world with no war, no crime or hatred, there will still be many challenges to face and there will certainly be pain and distress).

Forget about land and food supply, what is your 10billion+ population going to do once all the fossil fuels, metals, rare earth metals and so on are exhausted?

We're going to exhaust them either way, unless you plan on killing off everyone.


War and crime aren't limiting factors in our modern population anyway. People that experience more of these problems have more children. Advances in modern healthcare and technology are mostly responsible for our recent population growth. We know this because we have seen this boom in countries for some time now that begin to adopt modernized medicine and technology. Their populations eventually plateau though because as they rid themselves from systemic problems, their birthrates go down (see most of Europe for countries with no population growth). War is entirely unnecessary in this respect (at least currently. maybe it was in the past).