> "If you are not capable of violence, you are not peaceful. You are harmless"
this is exactly the value that caused so much war and death all over the world, for decades and thousands of years. still, even in 2025, it's being followed. are we doomed, chat?
There are peaceful strategies that are temporarily stable in the face of actors who capitalise on peaceful actors to take their resources, but they usually (always?) take the form of quickly moving on when an aggressor arrives.
Eg. birds abandoning rather than defending a perch when another approaches.
We're typically not happy to do that, though you can see it happening in some parts of the world right now.
Some kind of enlightened state where violent competition for resources (incl. status & power) no longer makes sense is imaginable, but seems a long way off.
No one in particular. Russia would be one current example, Israel (and others in the region at various times) another, the US and Germany historically, the Romans, the Ottomans, China, Japan, Britain, Spain, warlords in the western sahara, the kid at school who wanted the other kids' lunch money.
The idea though is that if everyone suddenly disarmed overnight it would be so highly advantageous to a deviant aggressor that one would assuredly emerge.
The emphasis is the word capable here. I think there's a difference between a country using their capability of violence to actually be violent and a one with the tangible capability using it for peace.
this is exactly the value that caused so much war and death all over the world, for decades and thousands of years. still, even in 2025, it's being followed. are we doomed, chat?