The moment we’re born we intellectually absorb the world around us. We have no choice but to.
We learn our nation’s languages, we’re indoctrinated into our parents’ religions, we dress like our friends, think like our teachers, and go about our day like the people around us. Everything we do is derivative.
Thus the question arises, where on Earth can originality be found?
The answer’s simple – originality can be found in environments uninfluenced by ordinary thinking. And originality can be found in people who’ve been raised on ideas different from everyone else’s. Originality hinges not on what it is, but on what it’s not – it’s not like everything else. Thus once world peace is attained we have a problem.
“World peace,” on its surface, simply means that the people of the world have agreed to live together peacefully. Scratch the surface and it also means that the people of the world have a means of global communication.
By being completely globally connected, and peacefully at that, we will actually be too well connected to each other to come up with any original ideas, ever. All connected, everything will be affected by everything else. Every idea will be derivative of another, echoic of the whole, and plagiarized. It won’t have a choice but to be. Just look at the disappearance of specific genres in music.
Once we attain world peace original thinking will die out. World peace might be better though.