Let’s appreciate the holy conflict
It is not easy to recognize conflict as a basic system-engineering element of our civilization. Some may guess that the second signal system — language lies at the heart of all people’s interactions. The others consider an ability to think as a foundation of everything we do. Both concepts seem reasonable but they both are looped over human beings while all other phenomena of the reality are left untouched. If we involve the whole nature into our consideration, the best reflection of what is going on around is the ancient Chinese yin-yang symbol where dialectic of unity and diversity is available. It shows how things happen in this world. But why everything happens as it happens?
The entire reality unfolding before our eyes can be perceived as either evolution (paradigms of both modernity and postmodernity) or circulation (a paradigm of pre-modernity) — choose the model you like the most. Disregarding the chosen model, only one fundamental process generates interactions between everything and anything else — a conflict. Namely opposition in contrast to unity makes any movement possible in this universe. Dark and light, plus and minus, male and female as well as all the other polar extremes are in a state of permanent conflict. Just the divine conflict creates powers and forces that allow anything to develop.
If we apply this to a biosphere, we can find universal conflict as a reflection of a cruel but fair modus operandi — “eat up or be eaten”. The endless war of all against all is what creates food chains. Our motivation to survive by all possible means would be meaningless without the necessity to struggle against opposing powers. A never-ending conflict teaches the fittest how to win the battle. We humans fairly call it “progress” once we all are learning how to collectively resist our ultimate enemy — death.
Despite all military conflicts available in human history, the global population keeps growing. The plague in medieval times killed ¾ of the European population, but in a very short period (in terms of history) the European civilization made a leap to another evolutionary stage — Renaissance. All revolutions that erupted over the last 500 years were shifting humanity into unprecedented social formations enabling technical progress to move forward.
Any warfare, pandemic, or revolution is nothing but a conflict that inevitably triggers progress. Any conflict is a broken status quo due to a lack of balance between what currently exists and what can come instead. Any social development is impossible if all opposing forces in society are well-balanced. No social progress is possible if no confronting strata are available.
The so-fancy “sustainable development” propagated today by many eggheads through media is merely an oxymoron, if not a myth. Any development as a movement needs conflict in its background to succeed. The more contradictory interests clash, the more reasons for desirable improvements appear. A stable position implies a lack of movement. If sustainability implies any movement, it would be rather a circular mobility than progress.
Think of the Cold War in the last half of the 20th century: namely the then arms race indirectly made reading these lines on your gadgets possible today. The ideological conflict between two opposing political systems was pushing technologies to make progress. But the fastest progress was observed during the WW2 when the leap-frogging development of industries emerged day after day. We bet the then creators of various “wunderwaffe” had no idea about any sustainable development.
Conflicts happen every day due to the great social and biological diversities on this planet. The struggle against what is inherent in our very nature is as meaningless as a protest against the day and night sequence. The more we try to mitigate conflicts through the artificially created “social harmony”, the more our nature rebels against our biological organisms. Cancer is nothing but a conflict between the cells repressed by idiotic social conventions and biases in our minds.
We can never win the battle against our own nature. The increasing mortality due to cardiovascular disorders and cancer is a clear message from mother nature that our attempts to shift conflicts into the outer space of our societies will inevitably get conflicts inside the inner space of our bodies. We should accept and appreciate what is the essence of existence and movement — the life-giving conflict.
Our social organisms are no exception. Even such a simulacrum of conflict as the current “Trade War” between the US and China is better for both superpowers than a morbid degradation to which many “peaceful” European countries are sliding today. The ongoing civil war in Syria motivates the local population to migrate over the world so furiously that the only option for apathetic Germany is to watch how Syrian refugees are gradually occupying German cities. This is how ethnogenesis occurs, by the way, making the human genotype shining bright in its diversity.
The thing is that prosperous but spineless Germans do not want to come into conflict with their government which is incapable of resisting the liberal public opinion that, in many cases, can be recognized as extrajudicial coercion. The latter mesmerizes German leaders to meekly accept the quiet Muslim invasion since an ethnic conflict in Western Europe wouldn’t look like a civilized European solution. This is how social conventions in our mind let cancer cells eat up the host’s native cells. Eat up or be eaten, indeed. There are no negative connotations in such a comparison. Cancer is just another form of life. Cancer cells fight for survival in the same manner as the host cells do. And only the life-greediest will survive.
What is the current migration crisis if not social racism reflected by the so-called “clash of cultures”. Both the local population and migrants divide all people into two groups: mates and foreigners. What makes them do so? Nothing but the social conventions of different societies where they are brought up create numerous reasons for frictions and conflicts. People always establish an association of mates against an association of foreigners. The difference is only in the level of activity of each association. Some perceive an opposition with foreigners as a call to action. The others prefer to take the invasion as fate. None of them is right, none of them is wrong. They all are socially conditioned crowds in which only a few individuals are capable of getting above herd behavior to look at the situation from the post-social perspective.
