Journal Article — Conspicuous Conflict — by L. M. Damian

For millennia, the human race has had the ability to manipulate its environment for its own benefit. This ability gives members of the species a feeling of power to which many of them become fixated. The more easily or effectively they can do the manipulating, the greater the euphoria and prestige they gain.

Power is a means to achieve happiness for some, but it does not equal happiness. There has been an underlying dogma in many ideas about life, society, and politics that glorifies power and prestige, urges everybody to acquire them, and promotes inequality. People seek political influence over others, more property than they need, popularity for the sake of being seen as an important figure by others, and to further the ends of their particular interest group(s). The ideology that power and prestige bring superiority, a presumably desirable end, brings about constant conflict among humans.

It is this conflict driving our species that poses a problem for me; I shall have no part in it. Regardless, conflicting groups need my peers and I to pass on their ideology to the younger generation in order to continue the vicious cycle. People are being socialized into this mode of thought from their earliest days. Escape from conflict is not an exact science, but I intend to relate to the reader my experience in doing it and my philosophies behind it.