Peace is the aggregate of struggle

Human ecosystems back in the Hobbesian octagon, more at 11

You have of course walked in a meadow.

Tranquil, serene, harmonious. But zoom in, and it’s nature red in tooth and claw, a billion bugs and flowers struggling for survival and reproduction, often at violent odds with each other.

It is a jungle in miniature, in which you just happen to be sovereign, for the most part.

Things are only ever peaceful and harmonious apparently, at scale, as an equilibrium and aggregate of struggling forces.

This is as true of your serene meadow, as of the entire universe - the apparent calm and peace of a starry night is Σ of incredibly violent forces: timespace-ripping black holes, gamma ray bursts, quasars, pulsars, pwnsars, supernovae, enormous thermonuclear furnaces, volcanic processes and unimaginable energies at work. Zoom in on the starry sky and…

A beautiful human being, well dressed, polite and sipping a fappuccino in a tranquil leafy neighborhood, is the total of millions of years of merciless evolutionary pressures, conquest, genocide, the ultra ruthless micro-eugenics of mate selection, and their every feature shaped by and for it. Beauty itself is a weapon. A beautiful woman is a superweapon designed by her genes to propagate themselves. You even have the meat supercomputer brain you do because of competitive social games for status, survival and reproduction played for fathomless ages by generations of your ancestors. The losers aren’t around to complain to life’s manager any more, and you only see the attractive, “high biocapital” product.

The abundance and leisure afforded to you by capitalism is the outcome of ruthless competitive struggle. Countless firms are at each others’ throats to serve you a cheaper, more succulent avocado for breakfast. Smoothly working organizations are aggregates and aligners of, and lids on, individual ambitions, rivalries and solipsistic self-interest. The aggregate is great, the details are often deeply unpleasant. Many such cases. All such cases.

The losers and costs of apparently harmonious systems are often hidden away to not offend sensibilities. Best not think about where your sneakers, or chicken, comes from.

Civilization is the struggle to obtain the nice outcomes with a minimum of the unpleasantness typically necessary.

Perception of peace and harmony in complex systems is a function of privilege(d position within it). If you don’t see the struggle, it’s because you’re sitting on top of it as a (temporary, provisional) victor.

That’s not a bad thing, but it’s good to keep in mind.

It is like that both intra-and-internationally. It was like that with our liberal Pax Americana of 1990-2010. What happened then was the lid was taken off and an ideology propagated - as violent upstarts do in peaceful systems - which directly surfaces conflict and drags everyone back into the fray. Wokeness is the arrival of violent hunter gatherers into a peaceful ecosystem of oblivious herbivores - both in principle and in the most immediate, material practice.

To forget that being at peace and safe is a privilege and a provisional contingent is to be oblivious, or worse, a pansy, a quokka - an animal that’s fearless not because it’s invincible, but because it had no natural predators for a very long time, and walks into untold danger (typically the company of not-all-but-enough-to-be-a-problem humans) by simply being oblivious to it.

Maybe Elue and The Culture - niceness, civilization and empathy - always wins in the long run, as a matter of cosmic necessity, in aggregate. But you may still get pwned in particular. If it wins, it will be by force, in one form or another, and against the will, intent and dogged, ruthless struggle of its numerous enemies. The world is not the place you once knew. You are now just another struggling bug in the meadow. Best keep that in mind.

I urge you to be good and grow teeth.