Desire breeds conflict.

Desire creates scarcity. Scarcity creates conflict. Conflict creates misery.

Freedom from misery implies freedom from desire. To eliminate desire, we would have to eliminate organic life. Life is desire. Or at least consciousness: the awareness of pain.

We don’t want to eradicate life. And most of us cannot imagine a life free of desire. So we must endure suffering.

In fact, most of us are only concerned with our own suffering, or the suffering of those like us. We are not concerned about the suffering of others: strangers and outsiders. Them.

We could have less suffering, if we had less desire. But we have embraced beliefs that encourage unlimited desire. There is more desire than the Earth—or any number of Earths—can sate. So we must either endure the frustration of dissatisfaction, or the pain of fighting that comes with competition. Or both.

Almost no one likes to talk about this: to admit the absurdity of this situation, to acknowledge that we have designed a society that primarily produces pain, misery, and suffering. We say, “life is pain,” or make other excuses and rationalizations. We blame nature, or God, or the Devil, or evil spirits, or aliens, or—inevitably—one another.

Is frustration, competition, and violent struggle an inevitability? Do most people prefer to endure the pain of insatiable desire, and the consequences of its pursuit, rather than find a reasonable means of reducing it? It seems so.

It might be, however, that we are simply stuck in our cultural inertia.

Most people are not inherently consumed with insatiable desire. Most of them may not even desire more than they have. But some do. And they have inflicted upon the rest the belief that desire is inevitable, necessary, and good.

Desire mongers. They have persuaded us to consume, and that consumption and desire are essential to our individual and collective self-esteem, to the honour and respect of our peers, and even our righteousness in the eyes of God. We have made desire and competition noble and necessary.

Advertising. Economics. Politics. Pop culture. Religion. Every system of belief tells us that we can and should want unlimited material confirmation of our meaning and significance to ourselves, to society, and to the spirits in eternity. We have doomed ourselves to the impossible. By choice, partly, but also by allowing ourselves to be seduced, misled, brainwashed.

Every living being will always experience longing, and frustration. But most of us, left to ourselves, would find such desires manageable: annoying, but not overwhelming or crisis-inducing.

Unfortunately, a few people are utterly consumed with the need to have and become everything, to be infinite, to be gods. And they have confused everyone else, persuaded everyone else that a life of madness is in fact completely reasonable, no matter how miserable it makes us.

I don’t know the solution. It requires a long process of deprogramming. It requires understanding and resistance, a rejection of the lies and absurdity that we currently take for granted, that we have endorsed, embraced, and asserted as absolute, ultimate, unassailable truth. It will take a long time, or a great and destructive severing, or a miracle.