A watch group on world peace says there are only eleven countries in the world that aren’t involved in some internal or external armed conflict. In other words, world peace is quite far off.

Are we doomed to this cycle until we eventually blow all of humanity back to Barney Rubble? World War I was “the war to end all wars.” Except for it wasn’t. World peace made some strides, and then the bottom fell out. World War II bought us a few more years, but here we are, seemingly poised on the brink of another world war.

And even if there isn’t  a formal world war, the world is, apparently, already at war:

With the crisis in Gaza, the rise of Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria and the international stand-off ongoing in Ukraine, it can sometimes feel like the whole world is at war.

But experts believe this is actually almost universally the case, according to a think-tank which produces one of the world’s leading measures of “global peacefulness”—and things are only going to get worse.

Worse still, the world as a whole has been getting incrementally less peaceful every year since 2007—sharply bucking a trend that had seen a global move away from conflict since the end of the Second World War.

World peace was never really within reach. The only thing that could actually achieve it is collaboration, vulnerability, transparency, in short—love. The world peace that we’ve been enjoying since World War II was one forged in fear. The United States was the uncontested hegemon of the world. And fear kept the other players in check. But that hegemony has corroded (especially since 2007, oddly enough)—and now the transitional stage of global power distribution is producing a state of widespread conflict.

World peace. Based in love rather than fear. Will we ever figure it out?