Journey to Peace

Could this have all been prevented? In a perfect world, violence, war, and child-manipulation wouldn’t exist, but the world is far from perfect. However, the Sierra Leone Civil War was bad...but it very well could’ve been better, and here’s how. Steven Pinker refers to these concepts as the “better angels” of our nature: empathy, self-control, recent biological evolution, morality and taboo, and reason (Pinker, chapter 9). When imagining a peaceful Sierra Leone, empathy plays a major role. Perhaps if the power-struggling forces had possessed more empathy towards one another, they wouldn’t have mutilated and destroyed each other. These were people of their own communities, some even blood-related family members, yet for rampage to happen, it requires the removal of empathy. If that empathy was there, perhaps there wouldn’t be a rehabilitation center for amputees. Self-control, too, if given the opportunity to be exercised, could’ve very well turned things around for Sierra Leone. The problem is that because of how young and vulnerable these children were at the time of the conflict, their exercisement of self-control was limited, and then completely obliterated once initiated into the armed forces. If they had the opportunity to exercise their self-control, again, perhaps they wouldn’t have committed such intense and gruesome atrocities. When it comes down to it, the case of Sierra Leone is one that shouldn’t have happened, but did because the people didn’t know how to reconcile without the use of violence. The state of the nation prior to the outbreak had its flaws, and given everything that had taken place, it’s very hard to say whether this could’ve been prevented. Personally, I don’t believe that the war itself could’ve been prevented, but I do believe that such gruesome atrocities wouldn’t have been committed, had the militants involved the resources, knowledge, and opportunity to develop more empathy and self-control under such given circumstances.