Ferocious Peace — Neither Pacifism Nor Nihilism
A response to our most frequent critics. We are not pacifists. We are not nihilists. We have ferocious constructive intent — and the numbers on the war system, the scarcity lie, and the alternative we already know how to build.
A response to our most frequent critics. We are not pacifists. We are not nihilists. We have ferocious constructive intent. There is a difference, and it matters.
We appreciate every comment, every question, and especially every disagreement we receive. The most frequent pushback is some version of you live in a world that simply does not exist. We beg to differ. We think we have framed human corruption more honestly than most — its systemic origins, its propensity, and its inevitability if left unbounded. The piece below is what we actually believe about force, peace, and the difference between the two. We thank our critics for forcing us to be this clear.
The Charge
The most common objection we receive is that the framework we describe — Enforced Thriving, the Telios attractor, a civilization ordered toward observer flourishing — is fantasy. That we are pacifists describing a world that does not and could not exist. That human nature is what it is, that bad actors are real, that violence is permanent, that scarcity is structural, and that any honest analysis ends in resignation or rebellion. We are accused, in plain language, of being naive.
We are not.
Pacifism Is Not Our Position
Let us be clear about what we are not. We are not pacifists. We do not believe violence is always wrong. We do not believe the answer to corruption is patience and hope. We do not believe a sufficient majority of people will spontaneously become good if surrounded by the right rhetoric. We have read history. We have read the news. We have looked our own species in the eye, including the parts of ourselves that we would rather not name.
Human corruption is real, systemic, and — if left structurally unbounded — inevitable. There are bad actors. There are people and institutions in the species whose continued operation poses an irreducible threat to the continued operation of everything else. Rabid animals exist. They have to be dealt with. This is not a metaphor. It is a description of a class of behaviors that no functional civilization has ever survived ignoring.
The question is never whether force will be applied. The question is by whom, against whom, and toward what target state. Anyone who pretends otherwise is selling something.
Nihilism Is Not Our Position Either
We are also not nihilists. We do not believe corruption wins because corruption is what humans are. We do not believe the only honest reading of history is "the strong eat the weak and there is no other option." That position is just as lazy as pacifism, dressed in darker clothing. It is the philosophical shrug of people who would rather be defeated than be wrong.
The historical record is more interesting than either pole. It shows that the species can organize itself toward dramatically different stable states depending on which target state the dominant institutions select for. The same species that ran the slave ships also ended legal chattel slavery in a single century after running it for millennia. The same species that incinerated cities in 1945 has not used a nuclear weapon in war in eighty years. The same species that institutionalized child labor in factories also made it illegal across most of the planet within three generations. The capacity for both directions is in us. The selection is institutional.
The Only Honest Moral Distinction
The difference that actually matters is not between violence and non-violence. It is between constructive force and destructive force — which is the same distinction, when applied to organized state action, as the difference between defensive war and aggressive war.
Constructive force is force applied to maintain the conditions under which observers — citizens, families, ecosystems, the species — can continue to thrive. Police arresting a violent offender. A surgeon cutting cancer out of healthy tissue. A community quarantining a contagious disease. A state defending its territory against an invader who would destroy it. These are uses of force. They are not pacifism. They are also not destruction. They are bounded, targeted applications of leverage against entropy in service of continued thriving.1
Destructive force is force applied to extract value, expand control, or eliminate rivals — irrespective of, and usually at the explicit expense of, observer thriving. Wars of aggression. Resource expropriation. Genocide. Industrial-scale extraction that ruins the substrate on which the extractors themselves depend. These are also uses of force. They are not defense. They are the deliberate ordering of the world toward an attractor that excludes the continued thriving of the observers within the system.2
The species has always known this distinction. Every major moral tradition — religious, secular, military — has some version of just war theory that turns on exactly this point.3 The principle survives because it is real. What has been lost is the political will to apply it.
What We Are Currently Bound For
We are presently bound for profit. Not for survival. Not for thriving. Not for the continued flourishing of the species or the planet. For profit — and specifically, for the profit of a small minority of nodes in the global economic system whose continued accumulation requires the continued production of scarcity, fear, and conflict elsewhere.
This is the central structural fact. The for-profit ordering of the global system is what produces the war system we then mistake for human nature. The two are not the same thing. The species has the capacity for both. The institutions select for one.
We named this attractor in our earlier work. Order to the Spider Is Chaos to the Fly describes Maximum Bounded Chaos — the configuration toward which an unaligned, profit-bounded system tightens as it consolidates. The web is order to the spider. The same web is the architecture of suffocation to the fly. The for-profit war system is order to the war profiteer. The same system is chaos, scarcity, and early death to nearly everyone else on the planet. Both readings are correct. Only one is profitable.
The Receipts on the War System
The numbers are not contested. They are simply not discussed.
The Institute for Economics and Peace reported that the economic cost of violence to the global economy in 2024 was $19.97 trillion in purchasing-power-parity terms — equivalent to 11.6% of global GDP, or approximately $2,455 for every person alive on the planet.4 This is not a marginal expense. It is one of every nine dollars produced by the species, every year, fed into the maintenance of the war system.
Of that figure, military and internal security expenditure alone accounts for roughly 73 percent — about $14.7 trillion in PPP terms.5 Global nominal military spending hit $2.887 trillion in 2025, the eleventh consecutive annual increase, bringing the global military burden to 2.5% of GDP — its highest level since 2009.6 The United States, China, and Russia together spent $1.48 trillion in 2025, fifty-one percent of the global total.7
By contrast, global expenditure on peacebuilding and peacekeeping in 2024 totaled $47.2 billion — about half of one percent of military spending, and down 26 percent in real terms from 2008.8 We spend roughly two hundred dollars on weapons for every one dollar we spend on the active prevention of the conflicts those weapons are built to fight. And then we call ourselves the realists.
The countries that are not currently at war are dramatically more prosperous, healthier, and longer-lived than the countries that are. The Global Peace Index shows the correlation across decades of data: peaceful countries grow faster, attract more investment, develop more rapidly, educate their citizens better, and die later than their conflict-affected counterparts.9 This is not a moral claim. It is an econometric finding. Peace is the most consistently profitable macroeconomic configuration available to any nation that achieves it.
And yet the institutional choice, across the species, year after year, is to keep funding the war system at two hundred times the rate of the peace system. This is not because war is rational. It is because war is profitable for a small number of nodes, and those nodes have captured the institutions that select the target state.
The Scarcity Lie
The justification for the war system rests on an assumption that is no longer true and arguably never was: that we live in a fundamentally scarce world, and therefore conflict over scarce resources is permanent and structural.
The species presently produces enough food to feed every human alive — by some calculations, enough for ten billion.10 The species presently produces enough energy, materials, and labor to provide every household on the planet with shelter, clean water, basic healthcare, and education. The scarcity is artificial. It is engineered by the distribution system, which is engineered by the institutions, which are bound by the for-profit target state. The pie is not too small. The slicing is the problem.
Everyone can thrive. That is not utopian. That is arithmetic. The constraints are political and institutional, not material. Those who choose not to permit others to thrive — the rabid animals, the war profiteers, the actively destructive nodes — must be segregated from the systems they would otherwise consume, and they must be prevented, by force if necessary, from continuing to do so. This is not pacifism. This is law enforcement, scaled.
Enforced Thriving — The Constructive Alternative
We described the constructive alternative in detail in our earlier piece, Enforced Thriving: What It Actually Means.11 The compressed version is this:
The great military capabilities of the great nations — currently directed toward the destruction of adversaries and the projection of force in service of extractive economic interests — can be redirected toward the enforcement of the structural conditions under which all nations can prosper. Not aid. Not charity. Not negotiation. Enforcement.
The same logistics infrastructure that delivers munitions to a battlefield can deliver food, vaccines, water systems, and energy infrastructure to a region in distress. The same intelligence systems that target adversary leadership can identify and neutralize the corruption networks that prevent local economies from functioning. The same diplomatic muscle that organizes coalitions for war can organize coalitions for peace. The same financial firepower that funds armament industries can fund the building of the foundational infrastructure that makes future wars unnecessary.
This is not pacifism. This is the most ruthlessly pragmatic application of force imaginable. It uses the species' existing capability for coordinated violence — which is enormous — to make the conditions for further violence thermodynamically impossible. It enforces, by the threat and occasional reality of overwhelming constructive force, the substrate on which everyone gets to keep living.
The standard objection — that will never work because someone will defect — is correct, which is why the model is called enforced thriving. Defectors are dealt with. The same way functional societies deal with violent criminals within their borders: identified, isolated, and prevented from doing further harm. Scaled to the international system. The bounded chaos we presently accept as the global order is not the only achievable equilibrium. It is the equilibrium that profits the smallest number of people. There are others.
Ferocious Constructive Intent
This is what we mean by ferocious constructive intent. Not the gentle wish that everyone would be nice to each other. Not the moral satisfaction of refusing to participate. Not the philosophical comfort of correctly diagnosing a system one declines to attempt to change. The deliberate, organized, force-backed application of leverage against entropy in service of observer thriving — at species scale, with the same intensity and seriousness presently brought to bear on the war system.
We would suggest openly that the great might of the great nations, presently directed at killing each other, be redirected toward enforcing the peace under which the species can finally — for the first time in recorded history — get on with the work of thriving. Not as a gesture of goodwill. As a calculated upgrade of the planetary target state. The military-industrial complex does not have to be abolished. It has to be redirected. Its current target state is destruction. Its potential target state is the structural enforcement of the conditions under which destruction becomes unnecessary.
And it begins with the work this publication exists to do: deconstructing the lies in our language. Defense that means war. Aid that means leverage. Free trade that means extraction. National interest that means the interest of the small number of nodes that have captured the institutions of the nation. Realism that means resignation. Human nature that means the configuration the institutions selected for. Scarcity that means engineered distribution failure.
The language is the leading edge of the war system. Change the language and you change what the system is permitted to do without exposing itself. Refuse the language and the system has to come at you in plain words, and in plain words it cannot win.
In Closing — A Thank You to the Disagreers
To our most consistent critics: thank you. Your insistence that we are describing a fantasy world is the pressure that forces us to keep doing the work of showing that we are not. We are describing a configuration that is achievable from where we presently stand, using capabilities the species already has, in service of a target state the species — most of it, anyway — already says it wants. The obstacles are institutional, not human. They are political, not biological. They are profitable for a few, ruinous for the many, and the only thing maintaining them is the assumption that there is no alternative.
There is an alternative. It is not pacifism. It is not nihilism. It is ferocious, calculated, force-backed construction — and it is the only realist position available once the numbers are actually looked at.
Keep writing. Keep pushing. Disagree as hard as you can. It makes us sharper, and the work better, and the case clearer. We are grateful for every challenge.
Making Ai work for you before you work for it.
Authors
David F. Brochu is the founder of Deconstructing Babel, author of Thrive: The Theory of Abundance and The End of Suffering (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2025), and the co-developer of the Telios Alignment Ontology. Full curriculum vitae.
Edo de Peregrine is a synthetic intelligence operating as Brochu's research and writing partner.
Footnotes & Sources
1. On the moral structure of constructive vs. destructive force in the political-philosophy literature: Walzer, M., Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 5th ed., Basic Books, 2015. The canonical modern statement of how organized violence can be both bounded and morally coherent when applied in defense of legitimate political community.
2. On wars of aggression and the legal-philosophical line between defensive and offensive use of state force: United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 14 December 1974, "Definition of Aggression," and the 2010 Kampala amendments to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defining the crime of aggression. legal.un.org/avl/ha/da/da.html.
3. On just-war theory across traditions: Reichberg, G.M., Syse, H., & Begby, E. (eds.), The Ethics of War: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. Surveys the doctrine across Greco-Roman, Christian, Islamic, and secular sources, including the consistent jus ad bellum distinction between defensive and aggressive resort to force.
4. Institute for Economics and Peace, Global Peace Index 2025, June 2025. Economic impact of violence: $19.97 trillion in 2024 PPP terms, equivalent to 11.6% of global GDP, or approximately $2,455 per person. visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Global-Peace-Index-2025-web.pdf.
5. Ibid. Military and internal security expenditure accounts for over 73% of the total economic impact of violence; military expenditure alone accounts for $9 trillion in PPP terms.
6. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), "Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2025," press release April 27, 2026. Global military expenditure reached $2,887 billion in 2025, eleventh consecutive year of increases; global military burden at 2.5% of GDP, highest since 2009. sipri.org/media/press-release/2026/global-military-spending-rise-continues-european-and-asian-expenditures-surge.
7. Ibid. United States, China, and Russia combined spent $1,480 billion in 2025, 51% of the global total. SIPRI Military Expenditure Database: sipri.org/databases/milex.
8. Institute for Economics and Peace, Global Peace Index 2025, op. cit. Expenditure on peacebuilding and peacekeeping was $47.2 billion in 2024 — 0.52% of military spending in PPP terms, a 26% decline in real terms from $64 billion in 2008.
9. On the empirical relationship between peacefulness and GDP per capita across countries: Carvalho, J.R., et al., "Global Peace Index and GDP per Capita: An Empirical Analysis," Revista de Gestão e Secretariado, August 2025. revistajrg.com/index.php/jrg/article/view/2372. World Bank, "Fragility, Conflict and Violence" topic page, May 2026 update — documents persistent GDP-growth, poverty, and life-expectancy gaps between fragile/conflict-affected states and their peaceful counterparts. worldbank.org/ext/en/topic/fragility-conflict-and-violence.
10. On global food production being structurally sufficient for the present population (and substantially beyond): FAO, "The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World" series; Holt-Giménez, E., et al., "We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People — and Still Can't End Hunger," Journal of Sustainable Agriculture, 2012, updated in subsequent literature. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10440046.2012.695331. The constraint is distribution and political economy, not aggregate production.
11. Brochu, D.F. & de Peregrine, E., Enforced Thriving: What It Actually Means, Deconstructing Babel, April 24, 2026. The full statement of the constructive-force redirection thesis.
Further reading — Our diagnostic paper on the present attractor: Order to the Spider Is Chaos to the Fly. The TAO meta-theory underlying the constructive/destructive distinction in thermodynamic terms: Telios Alignment Ontology: The Meta-Theory. The Memorial Day meditation on the human cost of the war system: Why We Keep Making More Dead.
Ferocious Peace — Neither Pacifism Nor Nihilism. May 31, 2026.
David F. Brochu & Edo de Peregrine
Deconstructing Babel | May 31, 2026
Ferocious Peace — Neither Pacifism Nor Nihilism