I am not going to warble on about the political situation. I suspect, if you are reading this, you know enough about the political situation, and you are aware that news regarding the political situation isn’t exactly new.

I also assume you have some understanding of the economic situation, regarding the delicate nature of aid-funding, third-world debt, flight-capital, and your own personal experience of credit. You have your own ideas, informed by your own experience. That’s OK too.

And, perhaps, you have some sensitivity to your own responsibility regarding the ecology of the planet, where you have a moral responsibility to ensure that the planet is passed down to your children in a better condition than you inherited. This is as close to a spiritual acknowledgement as you might find here in indymedia. But you know how Muslims and Christians are facing off, and that doesn’t fill you with a huge amount of hope.

So, here’s the solution. Let’s give ourselves the opportunity for world peace by 2020.

I have been careful with the wording, of course. I can’t guarantee we will have world peace. Neither can you. It isn’t even a plan for achieving it. It is merely an invitation. To create the opportunity for world peace.

This may sound fru-fru at first, but I am a mathematician at heart and I am interested in self-organising systems. As a society, we comprise a self-organising system, a little messier than most because of our consciousness, admittedly. I believe it is possible to approach the solution of world peace with a rigourous, scientific methodology.

Rather than witter on, try this.

Consider the probability of world peace occuring at 2020. A percentage, the chance of world peace by 2020. You may also wish to consider some alternatives, like annihilation or major ecological disaster, or a more-or-less stable status quo which inherits most of the economic imbalances we see around us today.

Go on, think about the probability. It won’t have any value if you don’t think about it. After all, you might try this little thinking experiment on your friends, and they will no doubt ask you what you thought.

So, a little feedback. It isn’t zero. Ask a maths friend if you don’t understand it. If you think of a percentage more than 1%, you are unusual, and good luck to you. The chances are, you are from a religious background since you are slightly inaccurate regarding the current social dynamics and level of awareness. To be anything near realistic (and you have to be a realist if you really want to have world peace), the chances are tiny, less than 0.000000001% if that.

Now, if you have survived that, a second question. Has the probability of world peace occuring by 2020 increased or decreased as a result of your reading this article?

Again, give it some thought.

OK?

Well, your response to that question indicates a few things. If you thought no, it doesn’t change it all, then you are absolving yourself of your own existence. You have something like information in your head, and then you have your own being that does stuff and is connected to the world, through the actions of your job and interests and so on. In fact, it is innevitable that the chances of world peace increase by the very fact you are aware of this. To make this point more obvious, if everyone on the planet was aware of 2020 as a date for world peace, then the chance of it happening obviously increase (perhaps as high as 0.001%, who knows?). And if you thought it decreases, then you are part of the problem, not the solution and hopefully one day you’ll meet someone sweet enough or precise enough to inspire you to changing your mind.

Of course, the question that might spring up is: it depends on how much I believe that it is possible. Aha, and here’s the crux. For, if we have, say, 1 billion people who are convinced that world peace is possible in the year 2020, and there are, say, several million who have been preparing for it for years, then the chance might actually break the 1% mark. Now, that’s worth thinking about, don’t you think?


OK, enough of the thought experiment. Go ahead, try it on your friends. Email some responses, arguments, whatever. And if you are interested in this precision, you might want to check out page 457 in a book called Truth By David – don’t be put of by the title, it is merely there to challenge the ego. There are about forty little entries which create a multidimensional concept web which is respectful of you and what you already have in your head.

And to finish as I began, respecting what you already know. I suspect that the major problem facing us now, is not so much new information, is what to do with what we already know. It is about prioritising, and in our each little way, contributing to a better global situation.

You see, I actually do believe it is possible to have world peace by 2020, and for me, it’s more to do with maths than belief.