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Comment by aussiesnack | Hacker News Reader

> Because that is simply not in vogue

The hostile responses you've go this do rather demonstrate your point. Building peace in a world bristling with nukes held by independent sovereignties with limited information about each other and often incongruent self-defined 'interests', is indeed a hard problem. Hard problems require work and thought and research to try to solve. If conditions change to make the problem harder, more resources and work are required.

That readers here find that requirement incomprehensible for this specific hard problem is exactly the point. Peacebuilding (as an activity, an actual diplomatic project, not a hope) has indeed fallen out of vogue and out of the collective political imagination. Little being permanent in international relations, it could yet return.

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Thanks, good to hear some agreement, and I share your hope even if I'm growing more pessimistic by the day.

It always creates a stir to point out the absurdity of our current predicament. If I was a psychologist I might conclude that this is because many actually share my deep sense of despair, but can see no other solution that to trod on "in the machine" so to speak. I can sympathize, but we need to start doing something, to prod the diplomats in the right direction if nothing else.

I'm an abjurer of optimism and pessimism equally, but hope can be useful. In a way the situation is even worse than your original comment suggested. More than just the indifference of being 'out of vogue', there's a lot of active hostility to the very notion of peacebuilding, as some responses suggested. But in the end, the main alternatives to active institution-and-culture-building are either to passively await a randomish fate, or pure militarism (whether defensive or aggressive). It's entirely predictable, given the growth in technology, that either of those alternatives does lead deterministically to catastrophe. Peacebuilding, frustratingly intractable though the problems may seem, is really all there is.

> Peacebuilding (...) is really all there is.

Completely agree.

The reason this problem is so hard is because it's tragedy of the commons. That might just be our great filter.

There have been plenty of viable commons over human history. Peacebuilding is in large part the process of building institutions to manage them. The failure to put in the work to build such institutions, or to maintain them once created, is what the TOTC consists in.

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