How To Create Peace and Reduce Conflict

How do we create peace in a world that sometimes focuses on conflict, which is the source of pain? If conflict is the source of pain, why do we continue to cause pain and grief towards another? People want to be happy and not angry or sad, so why haven’t we stopped creating conflict and start creating peace and happiness? These are the questions that we’ll begin to ponder in this article.

To answer this question, lets think back to when you are a kid and you couldn’t speak. At that moment, every thought that comes into your head is correct. Whenever you have a thought, you choose what you want and you go with it. If things didn’t go the way you wanted, you started to cry and complain. Now the reason why you cried and complained was because you wanted something but someone else tried to stop you from getting what you wanted. You don’t know why they did that, but you just know that they won’t let you have it.

When language enters the equation, you finally are told why things are happening. You are told you can’t hit little Timmy because it is bad. You are told that you can’t just take things from people because it was theirs. Whatever these reasons are, you are told from a position of authority that these are the reasons why life is and you do not question them.

The problem is this though. Once that child gets older and begins to accept more of what people are saying, they begin to live their lives based on what other people are telling them without judging that thought, as this is how they were taught. By the time they are much older, they get introduced to different ideas and they resist them because these new ideas don’t agree with what they were already told life should already be like. It is this resistance to new ideas that spreads conflict. The reason why someone objectifies someone else is because they were taught to be that way AND they choose to resist being told that what they are doing is wrong because they think their idea is right and nobody can question it. Resistance to new thought is the only conflict in this world.

So the way to end conflict is to have everyone be more flexible on their beliefs. The more flexible people are, the less conflict will spread because they will have less resistance to new ideas. Note that this doesn’t mean that they have to agree with you, but it does mean that they should at least be willing to drop their ideas on life to accept another if it makes sense to do so. That being said, when was the last time you changed your mind? When have you been convinced that something that you didn’t believe was in fact true?

Therefore, in order to end conflict, you must drop your current judgments about how people should live and begin to live a life that is ever changing. The more open you are to new ideas, the more you will stop conflict.