Why Peace Is Impossible—Even in Heaven
You can never eliminate your opposition completely, because opposition is woven into the fabric of reality itself. Once you understand this fundamental truth, every fantasy of a human utopia on earth—whether established by people or by a worshipped religious entity—becomes impossible.
I reject the supernatural entirely, but the internal logic of religious narratives is worth examining because even on their own terms they fail.
Take the story of the Bible: Lucifer rebels against God and is cast down from heaven. He is not eliminated from existence—he is cast away. Why? Why didn’t God simply remove him from existence? God cannot eliminate evil because without evil, God is not defined as good. Without evil, those with free will—which I also don’t believe in—cannot choose to be good. Without evil, good itself cannot be defined.
And to make this conclusion even worse for the religious: if God couldn’t have peace in heaven, what makes you think he could establish it on earth? For God to create heaven on earth, he would have to eliminate free will completely, making evil impossible. But why didn’t he make everything perfect from day one? No being forced him to make it otherwise. If he could not, what kind of omnipotent being is he? Why create beings you already know you will condemn? This is like a company deliberately manufacturing robots it knows will be defective.
It gets worse. For God to achieve perfection in the world to come, everyone would have to be equal—there could not be various personalities even among the so-called saved souls. Why? Because if evil were fully eliminated but people were not identical, some would inevitably be less good than others, and those less good would by definition be considered bad. To eliminate any possibility of that, God would have to make everyone the same—destroying individual identity entirely, requiring everyone to worship and respond in exactly the same manner. That is the only logical path to perfection.
There must be another reason.
The truth is that identity requires contrast. Life requires opposition in order to adapt, overcome, evolve, and grow. Knowledge must have ignorance to oppose it in order for learning to occur. Confidence must have doubt. Strength must have weakness. Everything must have an opposite at the most fundamental level. To believe we could eliminate evil at that level is an absurdity of the highest order. I argue in my most recent paper, The Pantagonal Principle, that opposition is necessary not only for evolution but for identity itself.
To illustrate the absurdity of the political struggle—the belief that you can defeat the other side—imagine a chessboard. Two opposing teams: white and black. Each team can take turns defeating the other, but neither ever defeats the game of chess itself. If white were to remove all of black’s pieces, the identity of white would become meaningless. It would have no one to oppose. The game would not be possible. White has no one to defeat, no value, no role, no purpose.
This is true in every domain of existence. Without resistance, your muscles don’t grow. Without competing ideas, there is nothing to debate. Without an environment challenging an organism through natural selection, there is no evolution. Stagnation is nothing. A cybersecurity company improves by defeating a virus that temporarily defeats it. The arms race is the Pantagonal Principle in action: enemies endlessly create better weapons, each gaining the upper hand for a time, until a weapon is captured, reverse-engineered, and improved upon.
We see this not just among human beings but also in the fundamental forces of nature—the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity—all pushing and pulling against each other, creating the universe we exist in. At the level of matter itself, protons and electrons, opposites, come together to form everything. Without those opposites, nothing would exist.
So the romantic idea of world peace, or the eschatological endgame of an almighty creator bringing peace on earth, is absurd. Understand what it would actually take to produce such peace, and you will realize it would destroy everything—because opposition is what allows something to exist, carry on, and improve. Without your opposition, you are nothing.
Thus, the game is not about defeating your opposition forever. It is about defeating them when you can and adapting and surviving when they are defeating you. Those who survive improve and fight back. Those who are destroyed do not. This cycle repeats endlessly across every domain, because it is the fundamental structure of reality, and none of us will ever change it. To believe you can is insanity.
If we can accept this, much of the pain and suffering we bring upon ourselves through well-intended idealistic fantasies can be released. We reduce the suffering born from wishing things were different rather than dealing with what they are. When we accept what is, we can take proper actions to constrain what causes us suffering—rather than exhausting ourselves trying to change the impossible. All we can do is play our part as best as we can, whatever that part is.
For those who consider themselves good, the minimum is to bring as little harm into the world as possible. Those who are bad will continue to be bad—it is their nature. And ironically, they look at us as bad, because we are not on their team. This is the same across every possible domain: political, religious, or otherwise.
Once you accept that the eternal struggle is driven by opposition and that identity is defined by opposition, you realize how much suffering you have been putting yourself through trying to change the fundamental fabric of nature itself. That doesn’t mean don’t do your part. It means be realistic about what your part actually is.
I have decided my part is no longer in the political struggle but rather in observing all struggles and reminding people of the rules—like a referee at a soccer match. Yellow card: you crossed the line. Red card: you cannot do that. To remind both sides that this game is eternal and that the only honorable way to play it is fairly and at your best until you die.
But life is full of games, and politics is just one of many. I played my part in that struggle, and I have retired from it. Now I am stepping into the philosophical arena—a different kind of struggle, one I can engage in without fueling hatred, putting anyone in danger, or bringing harm into the world. And at least in this one, I know my contribution will always be positive. After all, I am now dealing with the biggest game of them all: human cognition itself—the meta level, where the rules of every other game are written.