Assignment 16 - Hunter Cole

If you found a genie in a bottle, what would you wish for? Most people would wish for world peace, thinking that it will be wholly beneficial to society. Everyone in the world would be better off without any conflict to destroy themselves. But they are wrong. Although conflict only seems to hold us back, it also pushes us forward. We take one step back and two steps forward. We can only improve by making mistakes and improving on them.
Conflict is to come into collision or disagreement because of incompatible ideas. Differing ideas is at the root of conflict. And differing ideas will forever be present. Whether it is because of race, gender, intelligence, or background, everyone is different. World peace is unattainable because no one is the same as the other. This is the beauty of life, diversity. Our imperfections are what make us alive. They create mutations which make us all unique. We can’t be perfect by any standard. Everyone has different standards because not everyone was created the same. We are not all the same. So no one can see things the same way someone else can.
We also were made to conflict with other people. We have to fight for mates, food, and opportunity. We have always had to fight for life. Not everyone can have the same thing as everyone else because everyone was created differently. If there were complete peace, everyone would be satisfied with what they have. And
someone always wants more. They want what someone else has and they want more power than everyone else.
Conflict is the beauty of society. It shows our inborn selfishness, to take our ideas as fact and not let anyone else inside. Binary thinking is classifying something into one group or another. By doing so it classifies things into the in group and the out group. The us and the them. Only people in your group are right and everyone else is wrong. It is instinctual in human society and is a big cause of conflict. When someone has groups already created, they dismiss everything in a group that is opposed to theirs. Ryan E. Long from Stanford says “Take negotiations between Democrats and Republicans. Labeling an idea "Republican" or "Democrat" can change an otherwise great idea in a split second into a horrible idea, depending on the listener's prejudice”. Binary thinking creates comfort, but can also blind us with our own bias. An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore is an example of a conflict that show binary thinking.

It is all about perspective. What you and I may think is evil may seem perfectly good to another person. Take for instance ISIS, they do things that seem absolutely terrible to most of the world, but to them it seems perfectly legitimate because they are acting in the name of their god, Allah.
In “Blink” Malcolm Gladwell claims that prejudice can operate at an intuitive unconscious level, even in individuals whose conscious attitudes are not prejudiced. So we are always affected by our nature of prejudice.
The fact that world peace is usually number one on someone’s genie wish list shows that it is impossible. When you suddenly get the power to do anything, you do the hardest things first. World peace is the first thing people wish because it is the largest obstacle facing human society. The number one thing that is hindering the human race is itself.
When one thinks of a utopian society, world peace is certainly included in their image. A utopian society was never meant to be achieved, it always pushes us to become better. But since a utopian society is never meant to be achieved, peace isn’t either. A utopian society is constantly evolving, just like everything else in the world. If we eventually evolve out of our instinct for conflict, nothing will ever get done.
Without conflict, nothing would get done. If there was complete peace then no one would challenge anyone’s ideas and nothing would progress. If there was peace it would make our society even more vulnerable to conflict because it would magnify the smaller problems which could become big problems.
We should realize that though conflict is harmful to the human race, it also progresses the human race. We should not deliberately try to engage in conflict, but when it is necessary we should.