Humanity and conflict have a bitter history, wiping out tribes, and in recent years, entire nations. Interestingly, the threat of conflict to the survival of the human race is not a strictly upwards trend. It has had peaks and troughs caused by the ripples in the socio-cultural lake on which our society is but an island in. The scale of conflict, traced across history has been dependent on three things, the magnitude of destructive means available, number of social interactions between definable entities, and the weight of each interaction. The first two are rather self-explanatory, and the weight of an interaction is the abstract importance a piece of communication carries. This is similar to how a gun shot carries more weight than just a warning not to trespass private property, although both these intend the same meaning. Considering how the first two are mainly functions of technological advancements, if we are to understand conflict, we must understand the third, the causa proxima. To nip violence in the bud, we must organize a colosseum of ideologies, the marketplace of ideas. It is only through suppression that an idea gains weight. It is the obesity of an idea, a diabetic sugar rush, that is the reason for violent outbursts. But bear in mind, it serves a valid purpose in our functioning; the greater the weight of an interaction, the better received is the message. The history of the human race, a balancing act, the tightrope walk. Those amongst us who wish to see Man complete this heroic stunt, and aid him in this endeavor, have all offered forth their fair counsel. These attempts can broadly be classified into two types. The individual centric and institution centric. Proponents for the first have suggested that there can be no improvement in a system without fixing the core constituent, the individual. The latter has mainly championed the approach of laying down institutions which curtail and repress these violent outbursts. I have no contention with either, but there has been an error committed throughout history. The world is not just composed of the objects that inhabit it, but also the relationships between them. The attempt here ignores the objects and instead focuses on the relationships between them. But before we continue we first need to define society in a convenient manner, skinning it of enough context that only the useful bare bone aspects remain. Let society be composed of n agents, each agent with a utility function, and relations between each agent. The relation between agents i and j are dependent on how “nested” their respective utility functions are. Nestedness can have two levels of strictness, based on conditions of correlation, and causation. Correlation would be a normalization of the values of cross agent utility elasticity. Causation would mean all the relations that exhibit the condition that the utility function for an agent is itself a function of another agent’s utility function, are assigned their corresponding correlation nestedness, and for all other relations, we assign them a null relation. Now, visualizing this clustering of agents that exhibit a high relationary coefficient, we begin to see a fragmented society composed of clusters of groups. These entities also exhibit differences in scale. An interaction between two nations are obviously of a different substantial nature than that of two neighbors squabbling. Representation complete, we also see that the interests we have are composed of divergent drives which have their own separate utility functions. And depending on the situation, one utility function for an agent may overpower the rest (by virtue of its extra-relevance). This implies that there can be different groups formed for different situations. An allowance for shifting loyalties. The birth of the anti-partisan agent. Before we go further, it would be useful to be suspicious, on whether this inference is close to what we observe in reality, and what the characteristics of such groups would be. To delve into this, we can divide human history into two extreme segments, with the majority of human history being on the gradient between these extremes. One extreme is what we encounter in hunter-gatherer societies, where your tribe is defined and assigned via genetic and geographic factors (hard factors). On the other hand, in a post-truth extreme, your tribe is chosen (assigned) by ideological and cultural factors (soft factors). It is of no contention that these two factors are also entangled with each other. But the model seems to pass the proto-test of whether the abstract definitions have any valuable transformations into the real world, the is not test. Investigating the characteristics of these groups, these essentially separate entities, we begin with their external and internal dynamics. Because of the nested utility functions, there must be a relationship between the utility function of the group entity and the individual agents that form it, implying the existence of a well-defined entity utility function. These functions of every entity in a social arena, are essentially the only “rules” they play by. Having settled the external dynamics, this makes the discussion of the internal dynamics extremely simple, as the internal situation is the same model as that of the social arena with individual entities. Each entity is composed of sub-entities which are themselves composed of sub entities. There are only compound entities. 1 Now there exist two forces of nature that determine the equilibrium of these entities. The urge for a group to grow bigger, and the urge for internal conflict and dissent. The terrible duality of herds, the drives of conquest and internal despondence. Looked afresh, these two drives are same manifestations of a single drive, the drive for conflict. We have now delineated how the individual drive for conflict moves up the chain of entity classes, and is the major factor in determining their interactions. Further tracing the movement of this drive across entity classes, in any interaction between entities we are at the Nash Equilibrium action profile. But within an entity, would it be possible for the agents to instead maneuver towards a Pareto Optimal state? When does this happen? Are there different classes of Pareto Optimality the same way there are different classes of entities? And because of upward and downward induction, why isn’t everything at the Pareto Optimal point? To settle these questions, we would need to provide a bit more context to what these points and action profiles are. A Nash Equilibrium action profile is one where one plays it, given everyone else also plays their Nash Equilibrium action profile. To even consider positing a breakdown of this, we must be compelled by a deep contusion of a central assumption. This for us, is the nestedness of utility functions. They have to be sufficiently nested to change the payoff structure such that utility maximizing behavior leads to the Pareto Optimal stage. This can be defined as a threshold for the nestedness relationship between two agents. All agents whose relationships cross this threshold, and are two-way, form a single entity. Adding to this the previous assertion of different utility functions operating in a single individual at the very same time, this implies that for a given dispute the formation of an appropriate cluster will allow for Pareto Optimal behavior. Love is Trust, and Trust is Pareto. Since we have segmented off vast swaths of the population into neat clusters, this reorders the objective of interaction between two entities as a balance of two natural forces. Looking at this from the perspective of the sender first, the sender wishes to guarantee transfer and understanding of the communication so has the tendency to maximize the weight; and on the other hand we have the nested utility function of the sender which is affected by damage caused to the receiver causing the tendency to reduce harm to the other, hence a tendency to reduce the weight. From the perspective of the receiver, since any dispute resolution requires energy expenditure. The lower the weight of any communication, the lesser the importance one can attaches to a piece of information. But the nested utility function of the receiver gives disutility from the damage (present or future) accrued to the sender, so this creates a tendency for taking a communication more seriously, beyond the intrinsic weight attached to it. These opposing forces, in both the sender and receiver, dialectically interact to find the optimal mesh. Intuitively, the mechanism that drives this system is that all interactions are filtered upwards through the chain of entities, each optimally choosing the weight for the interactions. Our attempt at creating a descriptive model of society has lent us a prescriptive antidote for our long standing relationship with violence. Identification of the nestedness of utility functions, division of society into clusters based on the threshold, allow them to operate on stakeholder issues, minimizing the weight of interactions between. A call for the dissolution of monotribal memberships. One must be an intellectual-polysexual. In showing violence the respect it is due, and is denied by us as a civilization, and tackling it not as a plague that must extirpated but as an innate aspect of the human experience, we set forth on unexplored terrain. When all is said and done, can we do better than the snobby nosed academicians who understand so less about man? And how does one birth such a system into this world? Deeper and richer forays must be conducted, but if one needed decent footing to start with, he has found fertile soil for all his underpinnings here.