The Logic of Reciprocity and the Logic of Love

This is an outline of where we came from, how we got here, and where we need to go if we are to live peacefully together on this planet.

Human desire is imitative, or mimetic. I figure out what I "want" by observing my neighbor and imitating his desires. If many other people desire the same object, I take that as even more proof that the object truly is desirable. It signals to me that I "chose" well.

We naturally understand where this leads. If the object is abundant, like apples at a grocery store, this confluence of desire is not a big deal. There are actually enough apples to go around and everyone's desires can be fulfilled. But if the object is scarce, we risk conflict. The love triangle is a good example of this. There is no equivalent substitute for the romantic partner that the two competitors are vying for. No one else will do. Or a resource-rich piece of land that sits in a disputed region between two rival nations. They cannot both have it.

Mimetic desire is the father of conflict.

Imitation often produces the conflict and then fans the flames of the resulting violence. We have a word for this: vengeance. This is retaliatory, or reciprocal, violence against another who has caused harm to me. The biblical framing here is useful: an eye for an eye.

Reciprocal violence is self perpetuating and has a runaway effect. First you kill me, then my brother kills you, then your brother kills my brother, then my father kills your brother, then your father kills my father. And it goes on and on until nothing is left. This dynamic was an existential threat to early human communities. Without a way to stop cyclical violence, they would be torn apart. This is the origin of ritual, religion, and prohibitions. All human institutions have the same original purpose. To contain violence. They do this imperfectly of course, but they succeeded in preventing our extinction by our own bloody hands.

There is a logic to vengeance. You feel it when you are in the heat of it. Of course the other should pay for the wrong that they have done to you. It is incredibly difficult to zoom out from that moment of passion. Over thousands of years, we have built up cultural institutions that help us cool off in these moments. Modern justice systems relegate the power of punishment and violence to a force outside of the original conflict. They say, yes, the aggressor will face punishment but not by your hand, oh aggrieved party. This is all in hopes of stopping cycles of violence from perpetuating.

Our institutions improved over time and for a while it seemed like the existential risk of reciprocal violence could be contained. Even at the scale of continent-spanning world wars, there was the belief that the conflict must come to an end. War could be extremely destructive, even existential for the loser, but the idea that entire world could be destroyed was out of the picture.

The proliferation of nuclear weapons plunges us back into the world of risk of existential reciprocal violence. Our technology has advanced faster than our moral evolution and that gap presents an existential danger. Yes we have justice systems and laws and even imaginary things like "international law", but we have zero defenses, zero institutions, that protect us from reciprocal nuclear war.

You might say, well what about nuclear deterrence? Hasn't that strategy worked so far? And I would say yes, it has but it cannot hold. We got extremely lucky with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The first stone is always the hardest one to throw because it has no model. Once you see one or two rocks fly overhead, it becomes trivial to throw the third.

We are at a tipping point. For the first time in history, we have the power to destroy ourselves completely. There is no cultural institution, no antibody to save us from the violence that we can do to one another in this new world. It used to be the case that you could temporarily end violence with an overwhelming response of violence. We fly at a different altitude now. There is no way to nuclear exchange your way to peace. There just won't be anything left and the point is moot.

We rarely think about the apocalypse but when we do we tend to imagine it as the end of the world brought about by the hand of God. What is probably more realistic is the end of the world brought about by the hand of man. It is probably just nuclear war, that is sufficient.

The only way out of this impasse is beyond radical. It is to turn the other cheek. It is to love your enemy so much that you refuse to destroy them. We are in an incredibly vulnerable position. To turn the other cheek is to put yourself at the mercy of your adversary. The only hope is to kickoff a chain of positive imitation in the direction of non-violence. This is like throwing stones in reverse. You must be the first to lay down your weapon, and should you be so lucky, by doing so you will have inspired your adversary to do the same.

I am aware of how "pie in the sky" it sounds to say that the way to prevent the apocalypse is to love your neighbor and love your enemies but I do believe this is the only viable path. Reciprocal violence certainly will not prevent annihilation. It cannot, definitionally and in practice. Rational, enlightenment thinking won't save you either. It is easy to sit down and draft a nice resolution in peace time. It is precisely when you need that type of conflict resolution the most, when all stand upon the brink of war, that rational thought is nowhere to be found. It disappears at the very moment you need it the most. As mentioned before, you cannot assemble an overwhelming surge of force in a nuclear war. The floor is too high, it doesn't much matter if it is 10 nuclear warheads or 100, no one will be left standing at the end of it all.

To survive in the new world, it will take a universal refusal to engage in violence. We have arrived at the crossroads where we quite literally must decide whether we will live in harmony with each other and have Heaven on Earth or descend into unlimited human violence and the apocalypse.