Why Provide Essential Resources
Many organizations and individuals work to provide people with life's basic resources: decent food, adequate shelter, clean water, basic health care, fundamental education for adults and especially for their children. AIDS and malaria are such devastating scourges that many recent efforts focus on these two ills in an effort to bring stability to afflicted parts of the world.
People laboring for these causes do this simply to relieve suffering. They want to provide what their moral values tell them are basic necessities. They don't want to live in a world where some people enjoy fabulous plenty while others live and die in squalor, pain, and the absence of hope.
This alone is sufficient motivation for their labors. But their work also contributes to the quest to end war since the most frequent proximal causes of wars are resources or the means to acquire them—money or other sources of wealth such as land, oil, natural gas, fishing rights, water, etc.. (Religious wars inspired by religious fanaticism are in a different class and are often, though not always, driven by power-seeking leaders rather than to accumulate wealth or resources.)
It is critical for our campaign to end war to recognize and take advantage of our understanding of the sources of human happiness (What Makes People Happy and Foster Connectedness). Happy people are reluctant to go to war themselves or to send loved ones into battle. In a democracy, where citizens are free, leaders must virtually always rattle some dire threat, real or concocted, posed by an enemy to shake happy citizens from their profound reluctance to go to war.
Critics sometimes woefully bemoan that there is no way to make all the people in the world happy because the globe simply cannot sustain worldwide consumption at the level the developed countries enjoy. It is indisputably true that the world's resources are limited. But to eliminate the dissatisfactions that lead to violent conflicts, it isn't necessary or even desirable to raise all societies to American or European levels of affluence. Great wealth isn't necessary for a man or woman to be happy.1 (What Makes People Happy). In fact, great wealth has the potential to be a burden. Suggesting that we need to do the impossible—that we need to raise the whole world to American or European levels of affluence—in order to foster the happiness that leads to social stability is simply to offer an excuse to do nothing.
Our good fortune is that a human spirit in possession of life's essential resources and living within the context of family and community will find happiness if it is within the capacity of that person's personality.1
When people everywhere are asked if they are happy, a remarkable, almost counterintuitive, conclusion emerges. There is no correlation between "happiness" or "life satisfaction" and absolute level of affluence. If they have access to basic resources, even people from poor villages in India may say they are happy and their lives are fulfilling, often even more so than the happiness reports of CEO's of major corporations sitting comfortably on their one-hundred-foot luxury yachts. Financial resources are an ingredient of happiness, but by no means are they the most important (What Makes People Happy).
Democracy, Middle Classes, and Happiness
Another way to look at the issue of essential resources is a less altruistic, more economically oriented view with respect to global stability. Democracy is important to constrain hyper-alpha males (see Spread Democracy for definition of hyper-alpha male), but also because it produces a middle class.
Studies of what causes people to feel happy have shown that we compare ourselves to the people around us.1
- We tend to feel happy about ourselves and our circumstances if we are at the norm (in money or goods) or above.
- We tend to feel happy about ourselves and our circumstances if we feel we have a chance to rise in status, or our children do.
- We tend to feel bad if everyone around us seems to be better off or our status is sinking1 (What Makes People Happy).
In a democracy, with a large middle class, people can always feel good when they look around and see others who are not quite as well off as they are. In a democracy, the great numbers of people in the lower and middle class also feel that they or their children have a future in which their status may rise.
Convincing comfortable, middle class citizens to go to war is a tough sell, although it can be done. Pearl Harbor made middle class Americans willing to enter WW II. The hunt for weapons of mass destruction was the rationale for the second Iraq war. In both instances, only the fear of encroaching subjugation or death itself was sufficient to rally the support of the majority of United States citizens.
By setting the goal of creating a global middle class—in other words, by creating the means for people to feel their basic needs are well met—we not only create buyers of the goods we need to sell, we also create people less inclined to make war with us.
We can create a global middle class by giving people assistance to help themselves—not by giving one-time or permanent handouts. To end war, we must insure that essential resources reach all of the world's citizens and do so in ways that foster the dignity and self-reliance that is characteristic of a middle class.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
Dwight D. Eisenhower
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