Sometimes I remember a thought experiment we did in 11th grade Civics class. A handful of students were given roles to play, and the scenario was that they were all trapped on a sinking boat and the rest of us had to vote on who to throw off to save the rest, one at a time, until only one was left, who would be the one to survive. I think each one of them also got a bit of time to give their schpeal about why we should vote to let thhem stay on the boat. Their roles were mostly things like a pregnant woman, a teacher, an ordinary salaryman; but there were two that were very obviously supposed to end up as the last two on the boat: a scientist who had discovered the cure for cancer, and a diplomat who had discovered the secret to world peace.
So, when it came down to those two, the students overwelmingly voted to keep the guy with the cure for cancer, including me. And then the "correct" answer was revealed, that we were supposed to keep the guy with the secret for world peace. The logic being, that more people die in war than die of cancer, but that most of us had voted the "wrong" way because more people in the first world are affected by cancer deaths than war deaths.
I wanted to tell her, that that wasn't my motivation at all. I've never known anyone in my life who died of cancer. It wasn't that I wanted to get rid of cancer, it was that I didn't want to get rid of war. I couldn't think of how to put it into words then, but war is really the purging cataclysm that's needed in society every few generations. A very real incarnation of the belief in quite a few relgions who believe that when the world is at its most corrupt and foul and wicked, their god of choice will destroy it and make it anew. Or to put it in a more nihilistic way, just being a human life doesn't give it any intrinsic meaning, what gives human life meaning is struggling against other human lives. Societies advance through conflict with other societies.
Humans are inherently conflict-seeking. We didn't evolve to be happy and content with 2.5 children and a mortgage and a mid-sized car, we evolved to always want more, to search for new enemies to beat and new problems to overcome only to move on to the newest enemy and the newest problem once the old ones are taken care of. When there's no "real" problems left to take care of, people start inventing them, and the ones they invent are usually stupid ones. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if all the people going on their moral crusades about other people being mean on the internet or men spreading their legs too wide on the train had "real" problems to worry about like where their next meal is coming from, or artillery falling on their houses. Sometimes I think ISIS or the Nazis had the right idea, that there's no such thing as a futile conflict because conflict is what's true and meaningful.
I don't know, is that "edgy"?