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, to be honest, like most people 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 wrong.

We have a world full of institutions generating accurate warnings about existential threats — nuclear proliferation, AI risk, and ecological collapse. What we lack is a governance layer capable of acting on those warnings. The knowledge exists. The structure to use it doesn’t.

The historical precedent is instructive. In 1787, thirteen American states that were effectively in trade wars with each other, disputing borders and competing for advantage, came together at the Constitutional Convention. They did not abolish their individual identities. They integrated into a higher-level system that constrained their behavior on matters of collective concern while preserving what made each of them distinct. That is the model. Not a world government. Not the erasure of national sovereignty. Unity without uniformity.

Evolutionary theory suggests we are now at exactly this kind of threshold. The same logic that took us from single cells to multicellular organisms, from individuals to societies, now points toward a higher level of coordination among nation-states. This isn’t utopian. It is what complex systems naturally do when the pressure is sufficient and the conditions are right. The question is whether we can make the conditions right deliberately, before catastrophe makes them right for us.

The Pseudospecies Problem

To understand why the cooperation barrier is so hard to break, you have to understand something about how human minds were built.

One of the stranger facts about our species is that we are a single biological species that repeatedly behaves as though we are many. In his 2002 book The Emergence of Everything, the complexity theorist Harold Morowitz used the term pseudospecies (coined by Erik Erikson) to describe this tendency: Human cultures construct boundaries between groups where no biological boundary actually exists. Religion, nationality, ethnicity, and political ideology can bind millions of strangers into a cooperative group — but the same mechanism that creates an us inevitably creates a them.

This produces something resembling what ecologists call competitive exclusion. In nature, two species competing for exactly the same resources in exactly the same niche cannot indefinitely coexist. When human groups come to see the world as a zero-sum competition for territory, resources, security, or identity, they import this logic into their politics. Each group begins treating the other as a competing population whose gain must be its loss.

Here lies the central paradox of human civilization: The same cognitive machinery that made large-scale cooperation possible can also tear it apart. Shared worldviews are extraordinarily powerful coordination technologies. They give people common values, common stories, and enough trust to cooperate with strangers. But once those stories harden into mutually exclusive identities, the coordination mechanism becomes a conflict mechanism. The tribe becomes a pseudospecies.

Psychology Essential Reads

That is when another human being stops looking like someone’s daughter or father and starts looking like an abstraction: Iranian, American, Muslim, Jew, Palestinian, Israeli, or enemy.

This is why propaganda is so psychologically potent. It does not merely give people false information. At its most dangerous, it degrades the resolution at which we model other human beings. A person becomes a category. And categories are much easier to hate than people.

The Cooperation Principle

This is where psychology offers something that policy alone cannot.

In research I’ve been developing on what I call the Game Theory of Mind, I describe a cognitive switch between two fundamental modes of thinking. The first — call it Mind A — is fast, reactive, tribal, and threat-sensitive. When we feel attacked or endangered, this mode rapidly sorts the social world into allies and enemies. It evolved to keep us alive in environments where that sorting mattered enormously. In many contexts, it still does.

The second mode — Mind B — is more regulated, reflective, and meta-aware. It can step outside the immediate emotional frame, model another person’s perspective, examine its own assumptions, and ask whether a conflict can be transformed into cooperation by aligning interests rather than escalating opposition.

The point is not that we can reason our way out of every conflict. Human beings are not going to think their way to world peace through pure logic. The point is something more modest and more powerful: We can become aware of the psychological machinery driving the conflict. We can notice the us-versus-them program while it is running. And that awareness — that small gap between impulse and action — is where the possibility of peace lives.

The Cooperation Principle in Practice

The cooperation principle does not mean eliminating competition. Competition is useful. It generates variation, innovation, and excellence. The trick is to nest competition inside cooperation — to find the level at which former rivals share a larger objective.

American states compete for businesses, talent, and political influence while participating in a larger cooperative structure that constrains their most destructive impulses. The same logic has to move up another level. Countries can compete economically, scientifically, and culturally while sharing one non-negotiable commitment: do not destroy the game board.

This is the premise of the Manhattan Peace Project, an initiative I announced yesterday at my Substack, “Road to Omega.” The original Manhattan Project mobilized an extraordinary concentration of scientific talent around what seemed like an existential problem. It succeeded. The question Project Unity asks is simple: What if we did that for peace? What if we brought together scientists, systems theorists, psychologists, artists, musicians, technologists, and ordinary people around an equally ambitious problem — not how to win a war, but how to make war obsolete? Let’s find out.