Yesterday was World Peace Day. I spent it thinking about a message my cousin sent me from Tehran earlier this year.After President Trump warned Iran that if the Strait of Hormuz wasn't opened "you'll be living in hell," I wrote to her pleading for her family to leave the city. She's in her twenties. She wrote back:

"Tonight is a difficult night for us, pray for us, the sounds are really loud, I hope the war ends as soon as possible."I have dozens of family members living in Tehran. And, like most people, I'll be honest — I might not have felt the urgency I feel now if it weren't personal. We are wired to feel the suffering closest to us most acutely. That's not a moral failing. It's biology. But if we genuinely believe that every innocent life has equal value, then we have to reckon with an uncomfortable gap between what we believe in principle and how we actually behave. The people caught in any war zone are someone's family. They are human beings no different from the ones we would risk our lives to protect. The distance between "someone's family" and "the enemy" is not a geographical distance. It's a psychological one.

And psychology, it turns out, is where a key part of the solution lives.

War Is a Design Problem

Most of us have been raised with a quiet assumption that war is unavoidable — a necessary evil baked into human nature and the way civilizations work. This assumption is wrong, and the science is increasingly clear about why. War is not simply a human nature problem. It is a design problem.

My colleague at the Evo-Devo Universe Research Institute, Clément Vidal, recently published a paper introducing what he calls the planetary cooperation barrier — the systemic misalignment that prevents humanity from coordinating at the scale our existential challenges demand. Drawing on cybernetics, evolutionary theory, and game theory, Vidal makes a deceptively simple argument: The current international order is not failing because human beings are inherently selfish or violent. It is failing because the architecture is........

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