Porn or Peace?

I'd probably choose the former, not because I actually watch porn, but mainly because the latter isn't possible without devastating consequences.

For me, peace is like poverty; you can't eliminate it, at least not without comprising something vital. World peace simply isn't possible. It's like striving for perfection: a goal to be attained, but not something we actuall grasp.

I mean human beings aren't demons, but they're not angels either. Part of us wants to inflict violence on other people, or to show others that we're better than them. I mean who was never tempted to hit someone? (But of course, we're similarly born with other qualities, such as compassion, pity, and even love.) Sure, humans have free will, and while the will of individual's is stronger than another individual's, as a group, as long as there will be differences between one type of group or another, there will always be conflict. And as much as I want that all future conflicts be resolved peacefully, some will eventually retaliate with force.

I'm not saying short-term peace is impossible. In fact, that's all we can really strive for. Short-term may be as short as one day, to as long as five decades. But over the long course of human history, war will eventually erupt; people will lose lives, and destruction would be unleashed upon the Earth. Do we have a choice? Of course we have a choice! That's why striving for peace is so important -- it's not an unconscious act but a conscious one. If all of humanity can be united in their will and desire for peace, it will be so. But we must recognize that while this is possible, it is also possible that humanity will eventually stop wanting peace (whether they are seduced by power, wealth, fame, or simply deluded) and a new war will erupt.

So is long-term peace impossible? Yes, it's possible, if we all live under one dictator, and everyone else has been lobotomized and programmed to follow the commands of the one dictator. Would there be peace then? Yes. Would we have free will? No. Conflict is part of being an invidual. At one level, we're one race. But on another level, we're unique individuals as well. We don't have a hive-mind, but we do have individual personalities and wills. And as long as that is the case, war and turmoil will eventually erupt. We can only hope to delay the inevitable, and sometimes, fighting for what you believe in is the only option left to us.

Human life wouldn't be so precious if it wasn't so fragile.

Poverty?

As I mentioned earlier, poverty can't be eliminated without drastic consequences. I mean as long as we live in this kind of society, there will always be heirarchies. And as long as there will be heirarchies, someone will always be at the bottom, and those people will eventually experience poverty.

One way poverty was attempetd to be resolved was by implementing an equality system. That's basically what communism is. But as proven by history, it has its own flaws too. When everyone is equal, why strive for being much much more when the results will be the same either way? We currently live in a semi-meritocratic system (because let's face it; our current political system is a hybrid of sorts; as much as I want it to be a pure meritocracy, other factors influence our decisions, such as favoring our friends and family, giving in to bribery, etc.) and it is a system where poverty is a given reality. No matter how you look at it, it can never be solved with the existing framework (unless we suddenly develop robot slaves and everyone suddenly becomes rich because the robots do all the work...).

Of course having said that, while we may not remove poverty entirely, we are capable or raising the bar. What I mean by that is that we can change the state of what it is to be in "poverty". A good example is to simply look at Canada and the Philippines. The poor people of the former is still better off than the poor people of the Philippines. The former still has health care, and sometimes even unemployment checks. Poor Filipinos already have problems finding the funds to pay for food for the day.

So perhaps one day, if we strive hard enough, poverty would mean basic clothing, basic shelter, and probably one cup of rice for the day. We can't eliminate the heirarchy, but we can make it a better place than it is now.