Why can't people resolve their differences by negotiation? In considering how the conflicts of the world can be resolved, it is important to realize that the idea that logical counterargument can overcome malice fails to recognize that malice is indifferent to truth. You can't argue with malice. Malice is not a cognitive error; it seeks power. This is why we cannot argue Hitler, Stalin, radical Islam or dogmatic Communism into sparing those they have determined to destroy.
As Leon Trotsky famously declared, "we must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life." The executioner answers the pedant. However, if logical argument is insufficient against malice, this implies that certain conflicts can only be resolved in a trial by combat, in the belief that the side most aligned with reality will triumph. In the Bible, the war in heaven preceded the wars on earth. The logic of trial by combat (or judicial duel) rested on the medieval concept of judicium Dei — the judgment of God. The best man wins. No one invoked Deus vult (God wills it) more frequently than atheist Marxism, after duly substituting “history” for “God.”
Hear it from Karl Marx. "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." Leon Trotsky proclaimed, with the confidence of the anointed, “you are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history!” And who can forget Nikita Khrushchev’s confident prediction: "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!"? In case you think these are only voices from the distant past, note that as recently as 2021, Xi Jinping declared "the Chinese people firmly stand on the right side of history and the progress of human civilization.”
That the prophecy failed was 20th-century Communism’s most embarrassing moment. Many Western commentators discerned a Deus vult in Reagan’s triumph over the Soviet Union. “Francis Fukuyama famously argued that the end of the Cold War was ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’ When he proclaimed the ‘End of History,’ he was not predicting the future; he was proclaiming a verdict: History had shown that liberal democracy was the most successful form of government by virtually every conceivable measure.” The Cold War was a trial by combat, and the judicium Dei went against godless Communism.
The problem with this reasoning is that, in the medium term at least, trial by combat is not an infallible or neutral arbiter of the truth. Although alignment with reality can confer long-term advantages — better information, fewer self-imposed contradictions — in the short run, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for immediate victory. Better organization and greater ruthlessness can overcome long-term advantages in the short run. Attila can beat the good guys for a while. This is essentially Marxism’s explanation for collapsing as a system during the Cold War. Reagan, like Attila, caught the good guy Soviets at a low moment. It lost in the short run, but will certainly triumph in the long run. Communism, many American college graduates will argue today, is vastly superior to capitalism. It has failed so far only because, like Islamism, it has never been done right.
In the very long run, however, no program, ideology or civilization based on the denial of reality can triumph. Reality always wins in the end. The most incorrigibly bad ideas can do is ensure universal destruction, but they can never win. Agricultural policies that ignore soil, genetics, and weather produce famine. Industrial and military plans that treat logistics or materials science as ideological constructs fail in the field. Financial regimes that deny solvency end in default or hyperinflation. Political orders that treat human coordination problems as soluble by will alone accumulate internal contradictions until the cost of suppression exceeds the capacity to impose it. There's no getting away from it.
Truth triumphs in the long run. If the universe is governed by a global forcing function, it may fail repeatedly, but must evolve to an aligned state in deep time. In dynamical terms, a global forcing function would mean that the space of possible configurations contains basins whose stable states are those aligned with underlying constraints — truth-tracking, sustainable coordination, or whatever the relevant form of alignment is — and that the measure of trajectories entering those basins grows with time, even if individual paths diverge or collapse. Little by little, perhaps not in your lifetime or even in the lifetime of the species, the fittest wins.
Natural selection is one domain that may demonstrate this: Differential survival and replication systematically favor heritable traits that better match local fitness landscapes, so that after enough generations, the population’s average phenotype is more attuned to the environment than the starting distribution. Life fits itself to the earth. Thermodynamic and informational constraints supply other examples; systems that dissipate free energy or process information under resource limits tend, over long intervals, to become more efficient at those tasks or that have been filtered by them. In both cases, repeated failure is not only possible, but expected; the forcing function eliminates the mismatches faster than they can accumulate.
Can we console ourselves in the certitude that the bad guys can never rule the earth in the end? There remains one more possibility, which Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom popularized. Suppose malice never gives up and, frustrated at being unable to maintain power, hurls its defiance in the face of reality by destroying everything? They can't win, but as a final act, make sure nobody else does. If you can't match the paintings in the Louvre, you can still burn it. Bostrom calls this The Great Filter, and conjectures that its possible existence is why, no matter how far our telescopes peer into the universe, it never hears the signal of another civilization. If we find the beginnings of life on other planets, but no civilizations, it will strongly imply that nothing made it past malice without being destroyed.
Unless we should be the first past the barrier.
