For some time now, complex reasoning has been replaced by a simple, binary, virile, warlike way of seeing things: pure confrontation. But conflict is not confrontation. Everything that has become a kind of struggle, where whoever is not on your side is already your enemy, and doesn't even deserve justice, requires critical analysis. In every discussion and every stance taken, the mere act of attempting to take a moment to think is identified as a betrayal. It's as if thinking were a sign that you're with "the other side," because there's no longer any room for doubt or reflection. Only whether you're for or against matters.

So, perhaps, exhausted by so much fighting, by so much brutal oversimplification, we begin to yearn for, to hope for, a peaceful, idyllic situation, the utopian "Pastoral."

The proposal of Benasayag and A. del Rey is whether what opposes simple confrontation is precisely not that "universal peace" as Kant envisioned, but conflict itself.

The conflict must be analyzed in all its dimensions—political, psychological, and social—as a condition for avoiding pure confrontation.

Friendship, love, thought, and culture, among other tensions of life, will only be possible under the condition of a multidimensional conflict that prevents us from becoming anchored in a saturated identity, where the only way to know who I am is to find an enemy to justify my actions.