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

[FFR4EVA_00]

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

see, i thought that the thread was asking about what if there was NO suffering, not just a lack of crime, rape, and war
if you want to start another thread about how many people the earth could sustain and all your related conspiracy theories go right ahead, i'm not getting into that here

at any rate, if there was no crime, rape, or war, there would not be a need for law or ownership. presumably you could trust people enough to use a pure socialist system

[~kitty~]

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

I don't like how everyone's saying that the world would be boring without war, because war is not involved in our everyday lives and definitely isn't what makes life interesting. There are much more different forms of "chaos" you can go by if you want entertainment, such like in nature.

Suffering is necessary, though. On an extreme level, maybe we can see about that, but I don't know what my answer would be.

[cixOclock]

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

if you want to start another thread about how many people the earth could sustain and all your related conspiracy theories go right ahead, i'm not getting into that here

Its not a conspiracy theory anymore than a fish can swim. The Earth has more than enough land including Africa, which has by far some of the most nutritious land for growing crops if a proper irrigation system could get implanted without corrupt dictators taking over.

And yes that has happened.

Seriously it doesn't take much research to find this crap out. Try looking up stuff in something besides Google.

[ScylaX]

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

Back in the ancient Greece, Africa was a very fertile land. Granted. But that's not the debate right there and corruption has nothing to do with the philosophical question of this thread.

[Patashu]

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

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?

[Reach]

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

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).

[cixOclock]

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

population going to do once all the fossil fuels, metals, rare earth metals and so on are exhausted?

So are you implying that humans are dependent on fossil fuels? When there are hundreds of viable different resources that can also create power?

For instance you can use the gas that is emitted from animal feces, garbage and other material's along with hydro for those that have human made dams, to create power.
As for metals, and rare metals there is always the grand idea of recycling, even though it is not nearly as effective as most of it turns into unusable waste, but also your old laptops and computers along with cellphones aswell as the metal from old unused buildings.

There are thousands of ideas out there all with possibilities, and if it really came down to it, man has survived for ages without electricity, gunpowder, and processed food.

Where there is a will there is a way, and if you think that the only possible good future is one that still has internet or one that still tries to run on fossil fuels, try and do some studying on how the Earth is able to keep producing these minerials and materials.
Its a little bit on the amazing side.

Man just needs to control his greed and we would already have a world without war and suffering.
A greed for sex turns into a rape, the greed for oil turns into a war in some country that just happens to have some under its soil.
However, that is all I desire to write about. Just figure it out.

[Patashu]

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

So are you implying that humans are dependent on fossil fuels? When there are hundreds of viable different resources that can also create power?

Well, what do you think would happen if everyone woke up tomorrow to discover all the oil in the world had vanished? It wouldn't be pretty.

Recycling is a possibility, but it's never going to be more efficient than mining was without some kind of super advanced robot system sorting things.

Where there is a will there is a way, and if you think that the only possible good future is one that still has internet or one that still tries to run on fossil fuels, try and do some studying on how the Earth is able to keep producing these minerials and materials.

Can it produce them faster than on a geological scale?

[cixOclock]

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

Alright name how many people that would all of a sudden die just because fossil fuels gave out?

OMG!! People would have to walk?! :O
Trust me humans adapt and are made to adapt, it wouldn't be nearly as bad as Mad Max makes it out to be...

[ledwix]

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

No suffering implies no pain. Pain has already evolved as a mechanism to tell us when we are doing something that could potentially eliminate our existence, so to eliminate pain would seem almost magical. You would have to either reprogram our nervous systems or....just hypothetical conjure up a bunch of magical situations. It would be a world with no car accidents....no terrible accidents at all...and no one would be suicidal or jump off cliffs or anything. It would be impossible for anyone to make any huge mistakes, because we would all be too perfect for that.

Obviously a lot of occupations would have to shift. The existence of war and pain have created a lot of jobs. We would all be civilians doing jobs that exclusively support other civilians.

But overall, the world would be awesome, because awesomeness is pretty much the elimination of perceived bad things. It would be heaven. It seems almost robotic, but if our emotions were still intact, we would all be happy.

But what about death? How could you have a world without suffering if people still died, leaving behind their loved ones? The elimination of suffering would either mean that people didn't care too much about the death of their loved ones, or that people didn't die at all. Eternal life would make life pointless, so lack of suffering would imply that people didn't care when their loved ones died. And that seems like a robotic, emotionless world to me.

Overall, life is a competition totally driven by risk management and the attempted elimination of suffering. There is no plan for what we would do if there was no suffering. Suffering is a property of life, so taking it away seems like trying to make an apple pie without apples.

[Writhz]

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

I believe that if greed, harm, and rape were gone, it would have to be because the emotions which cause such acts would be nullified. We'd be without our natural instincts nor have a drive to succeed (after all that's what prompts rape and greed, right?). In other words, unless an outside force prompted us to get anything done, such as reproduction or the bettering of society, we as a race would wither away.

And our everyday life wouldn't necessarily be better. Without our core instincts, nobody would care whether we were living hand to mouth or in a life of luxury. And because of that, we'd probably all resort back to a nomadic lifestyle. We'd lose all our infrastructure, and the whole population can't survive as nomads. What I'm getting at is that, even though we wouldn't be killing each other nor mean harm to each other with the purpose of betterment, we would cause harm to each other in our apathy.

[Silver Sky]

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

I believe that if greed, harm, and rape were gone, it would have to be because the emotions which cause such acts would be nullified. We'd be without our natural instincts nor have a drive to succeed (after all that's what prompts rape and greed, right?). In other words, unless an outside force prompted us to get anything done, such as reproduction or the bettering of society, we as a race would wither away.

And our everyday life wouldn't necessarily be better. Without our core instincts, nobody would care whether we were living hand to mouth or in a life of luxury. And because of that, we'd probably all resort back to a nomadic lifestyle. We'd lose all our infrastructure, and the whole population can't survive as nomads. What I'm getting at is that, even though we wouldn't be killing each other nor mean harm to each other with the purpose of betterment, we would cause harm to each other in our apathy.

Try this world would be a lot better without war and suffering. Peace on earth. No suffering as sickness and all? I guess you would be referring to. Life would be grand. We would actually have an economy. Not wasting billions of dollars on war efforts spiraling into debt. Everything would be better. People who are driven to war and suffering should check into a mental institute. They need help. lol

[Emithith]

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

There really wouldn't be much.
Almost all of our inventions are from war, and some form of suffering. If there wasn't any of that we wouldn't have stairs, we wouldn't have the wheel, we probably wouldn't even have jumped out of the tree thinking "I'm sick of lice and fleas!"

edit: half of zero looks like this (

edit2: you guys seem to be looking at this in a way of if YOU didn't have to. But what about on a larger scale: If it never existed in the first place. There is probably a chance alot of us wouldn't even have been born, due to things being so radically different.

[Writhz]

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

you guys seem to be looking at this in a way of if YOU didn't have to. But what about on a larger scale: If it never existed in the first place. There is probably a chance alot of us wouldn't even have been born, due to things being so radically different.

Assuming you believe in all aspects of evolution, not only would none of us exist, but I don't think animals would have developed as they did. I mean, you can't have carnivores if eating another creature causes it harm.

Try this world would be a lot better without war and suffering. Peace on earth. No suffering as sickness and all? I guess you would be referring to. Life would be grand. We would actually have an economy. Not wasting billions of dollars on war efforts spiraling into debt. Everything would be better. People who are driven to war and suffering should check into a mental institute. They need help. lol

I don't really know how this is a response to my post, but it's not as simple as there is no human-caused suffering thus there is world peace. The original question didn't mention sickness, so I assume it's still plausible as well as famine and societal decay. Also, if there was no greed, then there would be no "economy." Most likely we would only gather enough resources to provide for our survival. But, if I took a step back and thought, "Well what if there was an economy," I'd say it would be pretty lacking since war and greed are what drive the economy to get the most done.

[ffraxis]

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

Life without suffering or war would be just like Eden, paradise.

of course you would have to give up "knowledge" and all sorts of things.