Winners and Peacemakers

I was listening to a story about the bloodshed in Syria, and one of the guests made the assertion that "all men want peace." I immediately thought that can't be true, at least that certainly can't be the first priority of all men. So what is it that puts peace on the back burner? The number one obstacle I could come up with was the desire to win - and that of course includes all the reasons behind a need to win such as pride, anger, vengeance, etc. But what an odd realization, that winning could be the natural enemy of peace. Lefer pointed out that this can't be true on the whole, because often times, after there is victory there is peace. You see decisive victories like ours over Japan in WWII and the peace and prosperity that followed, and surely winning and peace cannot really be opposites. But what we concluded was that in the course of battle, they are -- a sort of transient state. I've often thought nations act with human qualities, like giant fractals of the people therein, and between these nation people there are relationships. In most cases these relationships are largely adversarial, rather than loving, and when we go to war, that certainly shows. In a fight between people who love each other, how often do we hear the sentiment that it is better to be happy than right -- pick your battles and don't let things get out of control. But with an adversary, we'd rather die than let the other win, and that is the sentiment that we see on the global stage. We compete militarily and economically with our adversaries, and why would we ever have the compassion to back down? It seems there's much more wisdom in forming meaningful bonds with other nations, and stop treating each other like adversaries. I know there are efforts to do exactly that, but we generally do so from a very self-interested perspective, and what was is that to form a relationship? We didn't become the dominant species by playing the game of survival of the fittest, we did so through cooperation.

I was also surprised to see this article put out by the Brookings Institute praising the ARRA efforts. I always thought Brookings was more of a conservative think tank than a respectable economic research organization, but I could be mistaken.