Fighting against terror

I read one story long back. It was written by, I guess, Isaac Asimov. Here is what I remember of the story, in short:

"There were two worlds, always at the tug of war. Each wanted to prove itself to be a super-power. They spent high sums of money on their defense budgets and innovation in military technology. There was a constant war going on between them.

One day the two worlds encountered an alien species which wanted to inhabit these worlds as their world was not worth living anymore. They tried to overpower our two worlds, little knowing that these worlds had a technology far more superior to their own.

Our two worlds won the battle only because they had the defense capabilities which was because they were always fighting."

In today's scenario, does terror keep us on our toes? Does it help us strengthen our defenses? Will it ultimately HELP us survive? Actually, I can hardly agree with that line of thought. (Somehow, I could not stop myself from narrating the story.)

I cannot understand the ultimate aim of creating terror. What is achieved by it? WHY to create terror? Just for the heck of it? It is beyond my rational mind to answer those questions because I haven't seen anything being gained out of it by anybody. It is only loss that both the parties have to suffer. Loss of wealth and more importantly, loss of precious lives, loss of consciousness. Ultimately, a world, a society has come into being where nobody, the victims or the terrorists, can live in peace.

We say that man is a social animal. However, humans have not matured as a society. As a society we are still a baby, or rather a teenager: difficult to manage, moody, thinking that we can make the world dance to our moods.

An ideal society would be one where everybody realizes that they are all the same species, that they share the same world. Such understanding would automatically result into a sense of responsibility. There would be a sense of unity and equality. Our present societal structures have miserably failed to achieve this. I know that I myself am a part of that immature society and I accept it. However, at least I admit that something is not correct and that we need to correct it. That too fast.

That something can be the way we have created borders (countries), the way we have created customs, the way we perceive so many social variables like honour, success, wealth etc., the way we have created our monetary system... It can be anything and everything. I feel that the root cause is the basic tendency of proving oneself superior to others, of greed. We as a society need to understand that such superiority, in the end, does not count. Ultimately, however superior or inferior we are, we all have only one end. Death. There, there is no inequality about it. So there should not be any during life.

How can we achieve such a society? No idea!!!