Peace in an Absurd World

In a world where nothing possesses a fixed essence, where identities are strategies rather than intrinsic truths, and where permanence is an illusion we cling to for comfort, peace cannot be understood in the traditional sense — as the stable, natural, or final state of society. Instead, peace must be seen as an ongoing, fragile, and strategic construction: an imperfect achievement that must constantly be remade, not an endpoint we can finally and fully arrive at.

Peace, in our view, is not an essence to be uncovered.

It is not the "natural" state of humanity, buried under layers of corruption and just waiting to be restored. There is no original "Eden" state to return to. Human beings, with all our conflicting desires, fears, and interpretations, have never known a time of pure peace. What we call peace has always been a constructed, negotiated, and contingent arrangement — a kind of ceasefire between endless contests of will, meaning, and power.

Thus, peace is an agreement to resist the worst possibilities of ourselves, even when those possibilities can never be fully eliminated.

In an impermanent world, peace is an impermanent project.

We cannot expect peace to "stay" once achieved. In fact, it has no foundation of permanence to stand on. It is always under threat from new fears, new grievances, new misunderstandings. This doesn't mean the struggle for peace is meaningless; it means peace is precious precisely because it is fragile. You may even think like a sand mandala, it must be built lovingly even as we know it will one day dissolve.

In this sense, the real commitment to peace is not a commitment to a static outcome, but a commitment to the repeated work of repairing, rebuilding, renegotiating, and reconciling.

In an absurd world, peace is a heroic absurdity.
If the universe has no intrinsic meaning, then creating peace is itself an act of existential defiance. To forge solidarity among beings condemned to loneliness; to offer goodwill in a cosmos indifferent to suffering — these are absurd acts, yet they are acts of immense dignity.

Peace is not justified because it fulfills a cosmic plan. It is justified because, even amidst absurdity, it is better to build fragile bridges than to revel in destruction.

Strategically, peace must be understood as a common good that requires construction and curation.
Since identities, interests, and even "the good" are not fixed, peace cannot rely on essential unity. It relies on strategic solidarity — a conscious, critical choice to cooperate, coexist, and forgive, despite recognizing that differences and conflicts will never completely disappear.

We temporarily and knowingly treat certain things as common for the sake of building peace — shared rights, shared rules, shared spaces — even though we know no identity, no belief, no state of affairs is ultimate.

In other words, we "pretend" certain truths for peace, not out of delusion, but out of wisdom. We agree, for example, that "human dignity" matters — not because dignity is written into the fabric of the universe, but because acting as if it is sacred makes possible a better, less cruel life together.

Therefore, peace in this context is:

• Constructed, not discovered.
• Maintained, not guaranteed.
• Strategically chosen, not naturally emerging.
• Grounded in goodwill, humility, and vigilance, not in any fixed order of things.
• An absurd yet noble endeavor that dignifies human existence.