Passages from
How Peace

These are excerpts from the book — short excerpts about war, human nature, and the gap between our power and our maturity. They all circle the same question: what would it take for us to stop killing each other at scale, and why have we not yet done it?

Featured Passages

Consider This

"The thing that could have prevented World War II — and every war since — has been known for almost a hundred years. It was written down, plainly, in 1932, in two letters between a physicist and a psychoanalyst. Their solution would be common sense to a clear-eyed child. And yet we still have not done it."

Moloch

"Long before Einstein wrote to Freud, the ancient world had a name for what he was describing. A king-god who rules by appetite — a sovereign who demands his people feed him their own future to keep him strong. The warning never stops being necessary, because the pattern never stops returning."

Before You Had Words

"Before you had words, you already knew something about order and chaos. You knew it in your body. Something in you registered a truth that would repeat itself at every scale of your life thereafter: chaos is unbearable, and order is love."

If They Came

"Imagine that tomorrow, the whole species was visited. Not invaded. Visited — by a civilization older and wiser than we are, who had decided they could not stand by and watch a neighbor about to fall. Notice what your body does when you imagine that one fear lifted."

It Works the Same Way

"Naturally, the simple people don't want war. But it is always a simple matter to drag the people along. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism. It works the same way in any country." Hermann Göring, Nuremberg, 1946

Pandora

Anyone can be hopeful when the news is good. The problem is what to do on the days it isn't — when the pessimist is the one making sense, and he has the facts on his side.

The Greeks put that question in a story, and they left the answer at the bottom of a jar that held everything terrible.

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Passages from How Peace