I am Right, You are Wrong

 

Human conflict is utterly inevitable. 

·        We each live in our personal world of imagined values. 

·        Our individual imaginations are sufficiently independent and creative to conjure beliefs and opinions that conflict with the other guy’s beliefs and opinions. 

·        We are too self-absorbed to compromise and incorporate aspects of the other guy's opinion.

So, the Bolsheviks create a civil war amongst themselves, the Christians schism, Muslims wage war among competing caliphates, political parties splinter, Masons concoct different orders, spouses divorce, empires divide, and congregations split.  

In the newly minted age of digitally spawned social media, our natural proclivity for conflict over arbitrary differences of belief and opinion has accelerated overnight from the equivalent of tossing sticks and stones to launching thermonuclear weapons.  This is an unforeseen and existential shock to civilization and society.  

Such shocks used to transpire over centuries or at least decades.  Empires in east and west and their associated belief systems would eventually grow large enough that their borders would begin to irritate each other.    

Sooner or later, at the behest of our overactive imaginations combined with our stubborn rejection of anything differing from the product of those imaginations, conflict will inevitably arise.  Shia and Sunni proclaimed their analysis of inheritance was worth dying for. Calvinists and Popes proclaimed their version of God was worth killing for.  

But never have arbitrary differences of opinion over contrived topics had the power to spread worldwide in milliseconds.  Never have individuals been so utterly isolated and malleable  as their fears and ignorance are deftly manipulated by rants and screeds delivered through their screens.  

Civilization will soon face the unprecedented stressor of three billion of its kind fleeing as refugees from coastal and arid locales rendered uninhabitable in the coming decades.  This hammer-blow will strike a human society already fractured down to the local level by digital amplification of our tendency to elevate disagreements over imagined beliefs, elevate them to life and death causes.  

The contrived political and religious conflicts that have always been so, are now more so. 

This century will likely see exponentially growing physical hunger.  Will it suffice to ameliorate our perennial hunger to prove ourselves right?