MJ asked:
If most people on this planet do not want to
inflict pain or suffering on other people, and they mostly hate wars, why is
there so much war? Is it because governments want war, but not the people who
elect them?
That’s a fascinating question — and one that political philosophers, anarchists, and democratic theorists have debated for centuries. In short: yes, in theory, a society could function through annually elected committees rather than a centralized government, but in practice, it would depend heavily on scale, culture, and complexity. Let’s unpack how that could work — and where the challenges lie.
Instead of a hierarchical state (president, parliament, bureaucracy, etc.), imagine:
Local assemblies or councils handle decisions directly affecting their community.
Committees are elected annually to coordinate specific functions — e.g., food distribution, public health, infrastructure, defense, education.
These committees are recallable, rotating, and accountable to the people, not above them.
This resembles some real-world experiments in decentralized, participatory democracy — like:
Rojava (northern Syria): local councils and rotating committees manage society collectively.
Zapatista communities (Chiapas, Mexico): autonomous municipalities governed by rotating councils.
Medieval guild systems or ancient Athenian democracy, where many officials were chosen by lot or short-term election.
✅
Accountability & Anti-Corruption
Short terms and direct recallability discourage power accumulation.
✅
Citizen Participation
People
directly engage in decision-making, which can increase civic awareness and
responsibility.
✅
Adaptability
Small, flexible
committees can respond faster than large bureaucracies.
✅
Equality of Power
No entrenched
political class — leadership constantly rotates among citizens.
❗Scale and Complexity
This model works best in small or
medium communities. Running a large industrialized society — managing
healthcare, defense, currency, or foreign policy — requires coordination that’s
difficult to achieve purely by rotating committees.
❗Expertise and Continuity
Annual turnover can mean loss of institutional knowledge.
Without a stable civil service or long-term experts, complex systems might
degrade.
❗Decision Fatigue & Participation Limits
In large populations, not everyone can be
involved in every decision. Participation can decline, leading to apathy — and
eventually, informal elites who “handle things.”
❗Coordination Between Committees
Without a central authority, conflicts between committees
(e.g., transport vs. housing priorities) can stall progress unless there’s a
clear mechanism for resolution.
Some thinkers suggest a federated model — combining the committee idea with coordination networks:
Local committees manage community affairs.
Regional federations coordinate larger projects.
Delegates (not rulers) represent local committees at higher levels and can be recalled at any time.
This is essentially confederal democracy or anarchist federalism — associated with thinkers like Murray Bookchin, Proudhon, and Kropotkin. It aims to replace the state with a network of self-managed communities.
In small, cohesive, and educated societies, yes — it could function effectively.
In large, diverse, and complex modern nations, it would likely need:
Strong local autonomy,
Technological tools for coordination (digital voting, transparent records),
Cultural commitment to civic participation.
Otherwise, the system might drift toward chaos or recreate hierarchies informally — what sociologists call the “iron law of oligarchy.”
| Factor | Committee-Based System | Centralized Government |
|---|---|---|
| Accountability | High (short terms, direct recall) | Variable |
| Efficiency | Moderate, depends on coordination | High in large systems |
| Corruption Risk | Lower | Higher |
| Scalability | Limited | Strong |
| Citizen Engagement | High (ideally) | Often low |
| Expertise Retention | Weak | Strong |
If you want, I can sketch a model constitution or governance structure based on annually elected committees — showing how justice, defense, and economy might be handled without a formal government.
Would you like that?
That’s a profound and very important question — and you’ve put your finger on one of the deepest paradoxes of human society.
If most ordinary people dislike violence and
suffering, why does war keep
happening?
The short answer is:
wars rarely emerge from what most people
want. They tend to come from how power is organized — how decisions are made, how fear is
cultivated, and how complex systems magnify small conflicts into large ones.
Let’s break that down carefully:
You’re right — across cultures, surveys consistently show that:
Most people prefer peace.
Most people dislike killing or destruction.
Most people want safety, dignity, and prosperity.
Yet the people who actually make war decisions are almost never
“the people.”
They’re small groups:
political leaders, military elites, corporate interests, or ideological
movements.
Even in democracies, the gap between public will and state action can be wide. Governments can:
Manufacture consent (through propaganda or selective information).
Frame wars as “defensive,” “inevitable,” or “for freedom.”
Exploit fear, revenge, or nationalism to rally people behind violence.
So yes — governments, not populations, usually initiate wars, though they rely on popular support or silence to sustain them.
War thrives on fear. Leaders and elites often find it easier to maintain control when people feel threatened:
External enemies justify internal unity (“We must stand together!”).
Fear allows governments to expand surveillance, restrict rights, or consolidate power.
War can distract from domestic failures — economic crises, corruption, inequality.
In that sense, war isn’t just about territory — it’s a tool of social
management.
Even people who hate
war can be swept up in it once fear and patriotism are triggered.
There’s also a hard material factor: some institutions profit from war.
Arms manufacturers, defense contractors, and industries tied to the military benefit from perpetual conflict.
War spending stimulates economies in the short term, creating jobs and political leverage.
Empires and major powers gain influence, access to resources, or strategic advantage.
This doesn’t mean “everything is a conspiracy,” but it does mean that war can become self-perpetuating once powerful actors profit from it.
Even if individuals are peaceful, systems can be violent.
States exist partly to enforce borders and defend interests — those logics easily escalate.
Nationalism, religion, and ideology create “us vs. them” thinking, which leaders exploit.
Once weapons exist, mistrust between states drives arms races (“If we disarm and they don’t…”).
In short: war is baked into the current global structure of power, even though most individuals within it do not want it.
Imagine if:
Foreign policy were decided by citizen assemblies,
Military budgets were subject to popular vote,
The internet enabled global referenda on conflicts.
It’s likely wars would plummet overnight.
But as long as decisions about war are centralized in small groups — presidents, generals, corporate boards — and the rest of humanity is merely “consulted” afterward, wars will reflect elite incentives, not popular morality.
In many cases, yes — governments (or powerful factions within them) see war as
useful, even when people don’t.
But “government” here really means the
structure that accumulates and protects power. It’s not always deliberate
evil; it’s often inertia, competition, and fear repeating themselves through
history.
War declines when:
Decision-making becomes more democratic and transparent.
Economic systems stop rewarding militarism.
Media and education foster empathy across borders.
Citizens demand accountability for every act of aggression.
Peace isn’t just “no war.” It’s a different way of organizing society, one that prevents the few from weaponizing the many.
In essence:
Most people don’t want war — but
they live in systems that don’t yet trust
ordinary people to run the world. Until that changes, the will of the many
will remain hostage to the ambitions and fears of the few.
Would you like me to show how a society could be structured so that wars literally can’t start without broad public consent — for example, through distributed governance or peace-by-design mechanisms?
I’m really glad you asked that — because what
you’re touching on is the central question of the 21st century:
How do we redesign
society so that peace is the default, not the exception?
Below is a roadmap for how a peaceful society could be structured — not as a utopia, but as a realistic framework that builds peace into its very operating system.
Instead of seeing peace as something we negotiate after conflict, this model treats peace as an architectural feature of society.
A peaceful society doesn’t depend on everyone being morally perfect — it’s about designing systems where violence, secrecy, and domination can’t easily take root.
Every community governs itself through open assemblies.
These assemblies elect temporary committees (as you mentioned earlier) for administration — education, environment, mediation, etc.
Committees rotate annually; all decisions and finances are transparent.
Local assemblies send delegates (not permanent representatives) to regional councils.
Delegates are mandated and recallable — they can’t vote their conscience; they must vote as instructed by their assemblies.
This preserves coordination without giving rise to an unaccountable elite.
A federation of federations — a global council focused only on coordination (disaster response, ecology, health, conflict prevention).
It has no army or coercive power — only collective intelligence and mediation capacity.
This is a bottom-up system, not top-down — the inverse of current state structures.
When no single body can command armies or
control the economy unilaterally, war becomes logistically
difficult.
Decentralization acts as a
structural “immune system” against authoritarianism.
Replace profit-driven, scarcity-based economics with cooperative ownership models (worker co-ops, community banks, open-source technology).
Tie economic growth to wellbeing indicators — health, education, happiness, sustainability — rather than GDP or military dominance.
Radical transparency: all budgets, negotiations, and policy drafts are public.
Media cooperatives (owned by readers or citizens) replace corporate and state propaganda outlets.
AI and blockchain tools could verify information and prevent disinformation campaigns.
From early schooling, children learn mediation, empathy, nonviolent communication, and critical thinking.
History is taught through multiple perspectives, reducing nationalistic bias.
Conflict resolution becomes a core civic skill, not a last resort.
Conflict is inevitable — but war isn’t.
In this system:
Each region maintains a Council of Mediators — ordinary citizens trained to resolve disputes, both locally and internationally.
Justice focuses on repairing harm and restoring relationships rather than punishment or revenge.
Volunteers trained in negotiation, cultural understanding, and de-escalation act as first responders to rising tensions — before governments or militaries intervene.
A peaceful society still needs protection — but from disasters, not enemies.
Focus on disaster response, cybersecurity, and peacekeeping.
Everyone serves a short civic term learning first aid, mediation, and ecological resilience — not weapons training.
When neighboring societies are economically and culturally interwoven (shared water systems, digital infrastructure, student exchange), war becomes self-defeating.
An international network flags misinformation, hate campaigns, or military buildup before they spiral — like a “Peace Weather Forecast.”
A peaceful system relies on psychological health as much as politics.
Universal access to mental healthcare and community spaces reduces alienation.
Art, ritual, and culture are valued as social glue.
Instead of patriotism (love of one’s state), people cultivate planetism — loyalty to life itself.
Modern technology can help distribute power instead of centralizing it:
Digital Assemblies: secure online platforms for global citizen participation.
Liquid Democracy: people can delegate votes to trusted experts but reclaim them anytime.
Civic AI Systems: trained for transparency, policy modeling, and consensus-building — never for surveillance or manipulation.
We can’t scrap everything overnight, but we can prototype this system locally:
Start with municipal participatory budgeting (citizens allocate parts of the budget).
Form community mediation circles and co-ops.
Build regional federations of local initiatives — scaling up gradually.
Network cities and communities internationally — a confederation of peace laboratories.
This way, the peaceful society grows organically inside the old one, until it quietly replaces it.
| Dimension | War-Based Society | Peace-Based Society |
|---|---|---|
| Power | Centralized, hierarchical | Decentralized, federated |
| Economy | Competitive, extractive | Cooperative, regenerative |
| Education | Nationalistic, test-oriented | Empathic, civic, dialogical |
| Information | Controlled, propagandistic | Open, verifiable, participatory |
| Defense | Armies, deterrence | Civil resilience, mediation |
| Identity | Nation-centered | Planet-centered |