A Perfect World

 

By request, I'm writing a little post on my thoughts on a perfect world.  Imagine this: world peace.  No violence, killing, or hurting.   We wouldn't need Marines because there'd be no bad guys to go after.  We wouldn't need locks on our doors because we wouldn't have to fear anyone breaking into our homes or stealing things.  We wouldn't need firearms because there'd be no one else out there to use a weapon against us.  There'd be no ill-wills, negative thoughts, or selfish acts.  There'd be no suffering, poverty, or sickness.  Oh, boy, does that sound fantastic.

The world would be, in essence, perfect, right?  A lot of us desire this.  "WORLD PEACE!" right?  You'd be shunned if you opposed it.  But you see, as weird as this would sound, I oppose it.

For starters, I am a firm believer that humans are imperfect.  For this world to be perfect, we'd have to be wiped from existence.

Secondly, I believe in this theory that the strongest survive and capitalism.  No, I'm not saying that because I'm a ninja and I'm also terrifyingly strong that I'll take on everyone and I'll be king of the world.  I'm just saying that naturally, humans, like everything else in nature, will use their abilities and gifts to excel.  Because of this, there will ALWAYS be someone with the shorter end of the stick.  There will always be a loser.  Someone will more than likely be better.  And in the future, someone will better that person as well.  As long as humans have freedom, there will always be someone on top, and because of this, there will also be someone being pooped on at the very bottom.

By believing in capitalism, I believe that when success is allowed and even encouraged, there WILL be some who do better than most, and those who just simply fail.  I believe that there will be millionaires who figure out the system or are smart enough to profit off their ideas, and there will be homeless, lower income individuals, and poor.  I'm not saying I want to be in poverty, nor am I wishing that upon anyone else.  But if we want people to have a life of luxury or even a decent, stable financial environment, someone else is going to to lack that.

My third reason: in a perfect world, there'd be no room for success.  This is the total anti-socialism argument: if we decide to not allow people to do better than others, where will the progress be?  For example, if every employee at Radioshack is making the same amount of money no matter what kind of performance they have or how good their sales stats are, do you honestly believe there will be any employees who want to do their absolute best all the time?  I doubt it.  Imagine being in a class that says you all get A's no matter what you learn or how well you do in the class.  Yes, that'd be awesome, but would you gain anything from that besides a letter that says you did as good as everyone else?  We have a grading system to encourage learning more, doing better, and being smarter than other people.  Top ranking employees are there because they earned it.  Success is wonderful, but it's usually based on doing better than someone else, or besting someone else at something.

And here's my fourth reason for opposing this idea of a perfect world.  It's this idea of equilibrium.  How can we define peace?  It's lack of violence, right?  Without violence, peace exists.  But if we remove violence from ever existing, can we really understand or have a perspective of peace?  Frankly, I know and appreciate a lot of the good things in life because of my witnessing or experiencing of the bad in life.  And that's it.

My friend asked me what my opinion was on this idea of there being only good in life.  My answer is that the existence of only good and nothing bad is paradox.  Light is nothing without darkness.  My interpretation of good is nothing without perspective on bad.

I'll end with this quote from the Joker in Batman.  There was a point in the Dark Knight when Batman asked the Joker, "Why do you want to kill me?"  The Joker replied, "I don't, I don't want to kill you! What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off mob dealers? No, no, NO! No. You... you... complete me."

It's crazy when you think about it.  The Joker, while seemingly insane and all that, understood one thing; without Batman, he'd be obsolete as a super-villain.  And the movie would have sucked.

So, a perfect world... yes, it's a great idea.  But I would never really want that.  I suppose we could see the bad in this world as a necessary evil, so that we could then see the true good in everything.