I wonder why the interviewee is so confident that the world will always be a place of conflict. I can think of no rational, or no necessary, reason why multiple conflicting powers should exist based on the lines on a map.
Perhaps it's for the same reason he is religious (i.e. he's just wrong sometimes, like every human).
If you tried to prevent conflict by making people afraid to start it, then you would really just end up holding yourself in perpetual conflict with everyone.
Most don't have maps though.
Humans primarily distinguish themselves by their creative abstractions and rationalizations to justify fighting/killing other tribes...also imaginary friends in the sky who demand it, nonexistent differences in DNA, etc., etc. Territorial disputes are the least imaginary of the lot.
(Desmond Morris's 'The Naked Ape' is an interesting look at how human behavior relates to apes - spoiler alert, a lot of similarities https://www.amazon.com/Naked-Ape-Zoologists-Study-Animal/dp/... ... I've heard good things about 'Sapiens' as well https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/d... )
It always has been.
> I can think of no rational, or no necessary, reason why multiple conflicting powers should exist based on the lines on a map.
You mean other than the fact that it's always been that way? These are just tribes on a larger scale, humans are tribal, we fight, it's in our nature.
Do we perform any action that is not "in our nature"? Do you feel the same way about slavery which, until relatively recently, was the natural order of things?
That misses the point, but I can pin the example down if that helps: ... publicly supporting slavery, until relatively recently, was the natural order of things. The point is that saying "something is in our nature" doesn't justify it or explain it - because everything everybody has ever done or will do is something in our nature.
> As long as resources are scarce, man will fight...
This is better than the nature angle, but not by much - as pretty much anything (including adherents to a religion) can be called "resources". We just need to crack the whole post-scarcity thing... kind of a silver lining.
It doesn't justify it, never claimed it did, but it most certainly does explain it.
> Do we perform any action that is not "in our nature"?
Of course we do, much of culture isn't in our nature, but is learned. Advanced mathmatics isn't in our nature, it is learned. "in our nature" essentially means because it's human, and that isn't tautological imho. The OP could think of no reason humans would have conflict over land, human nature is a reason, this is not tautological.
Free market in supply crunch is great for the people that have the money or the supply. The ones that only have demand can either go to war or get destroyed as a nation.
The arab spring was not caused by the sudden love for democracy. It was caused because of the massive spike in commodities and staples' prices across north of Africa and parts of the middle east.