The reason for war

In secondary school on one afternoon, I dropped my pen on the table next to me and turned for a split second, on returning to my pen I had a classmate of mine claiming this was his pen. He claimed he had just dropped his pen as well on the same spot and wanted it back, as it turned out there were a lot of people in our class who thought it was fun to steal other people’s pens and this skyrocketed the theft of pens in our classroom. Looking back at it now, I can say it was another person who profited of the moment to snatch one of our pens.

At that specific instance, realizing that I had no other pen left and the next teacher won’t take it lightly the fact that I didn’t have a pen to take down notes, combined with my certainty that this was my pen, I refused to relinquish it. We were both certain to be 100% right, and all it took for the thief was 1 second of distraction from both of us. We found ourselves in a deadlock situation with none of us willing to give up on that pen.

Tensions grew by the second, and no matter what each of us said, the other party wasn’t going to be convinced. How could we determine who was right? Was it going to be through communication? That failed already, was it going to be a third party? Nobody saw what happened, was it going to be through respect for the oldest? We were the same age. The only way of determining who was right was going to be through the oldest method in history, the law of the strongest, so we entered into a fight.

A lot was destroyed that day, our clothes, our relationship, the pen, our reputation all just for a simple pen.

Conflict of Ideas

Wars start as a result of conflicts of ideas. I just illustrated to you how a fight could start over something as simple as a pen, but it wasn’t the pen which caused the fight and very often times wars aren’t started because of a fight over resources or even divergence in opinions, but they are rather a result of a conflict of ideas. How else would you determine who is right or wrong, and who should have their way? Dialogue didn’t work, diplomacy failed, logic isn’t accepted, and every other peaceful avenue failed, how else will so strong ideas resolve themselves especially when they are incompatible?

There is only one method we can all agree on which appeals to our natural instincts and can bring a resolution which will be accepted by every party, and that method is violence.

Drunk on the idea of being right

What makes such ideas become so potent is the fact that we get drunk on the idea of being right. In that story It's difficult to tell who was right, me or my friend and to this day there is no way of telling whose pen it was, but that situation got us both drunk on being right. There is no way of telling who was wrong and who was right, in a lot of instances that's the case as well because you have a situation which is very nuanced and complex making it impossible of telling who is right.

It might be easy based on the information you have to make an uninformed judgement of who is right and who is wrong, but you can never really have the full picture of everything. Some people might base their judgement on whom the strongest is and automatically assume the weakest to be the right one, while others consider the death toll as being a fair judge, but in a war there is no winner or loser, there are just victims and nobody is innocent in the end.

Peace is never the default

It's easy to think that peace is the default option, but history has taught us different countless amounts of times. War doesn’t always result as the consequence of evil intentions, there are many other reasons why conflicts might arise, some reasons are; self interests, miscommunication, self-preservation, strong ideologies, cultural differences, injustices and many more reasons. You don’t need to be evil, nor the other party for it to result in war and even this is a subjective statement. Who decides what right and wrong are? We have different perceptions and definitions for these things, what you consider right might be wrong for someone else, and just this difference might cause a war.

How to avoid war

Looking back at that situation with my classmate, it might be easy to say the solution would have been for me to back down, for me to relinquish the pen to him and all of that could have been avoided. Sure that could have been a solution but what if that wasn’t a pen, what if it was something I couldn’t relinquish? There is a difference between relinquishing something and losing that thing, losing a battle is different from surrendering. Peace isn’t easy, maintaining peace is even more difficult because humans have always had to grow in a very harsh environment where they had to fight, so violence has always been our natural recourse.

When you figure out a way of determining who is right and who is wrong without resorting to violence then you would have figured out how to avoid wars, till then, violence is the only way of determining who is right and who is wrong.

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