Dystopian alliances, battle words: How do we go from friendship to war?, asks Constanza Michelson.

"There are already signs of dystopia," he told me. It was a Friday—because every Friday we have a date. Always alone. It's a clause: if not, love will lose its friendship.

He told me: “Anduril and Meta joined forces,” that is, Meta entered the military business.

The story goes like this. Palmer Luckey, virtual reality prodigy, sold his company to Facebook in 2014. Two years later, he was fired. They didn't say why, but it was rumored he'd funded Trump. And Zuckerberg was still the good guy of the gang. He had created a network to make friends. Later, it was learned that he wasn't fired for politics, but for a lawsuit for intellectual property theft. A petty thief. And today they meet again, no longer under the aura of friendship. The young men—dressed like young men, as if that were enough to appease the harshest impulses—also create for war. How did we go from good-natured friendship to war? Perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps it's the same arc: the exclusive friendship between equals. But already at the beginning of Genesis , we are warned: there's nothing natural about being brothers. If blood isn't enough, why would a shared land, a contract, a bed be enough?

It's common among them—the tech kids—to call themselves psychopaths. Peter Thiel even sued the person who called him that. But he acknowledges in his essay The Straussian Moment that modernity has not triumphed over the unconscious (psychopathic) fantasies that awaken unmediated mythical forces: sacrifice, scapegoat, purity, cosmic wars between good and evil. The arc of this violence ebbs and flows from culture wars to bloody ones , and is projected like a mirror: real massacres, symbolic conflicts between former friends, necessary enemies, useful victims. Thiel knows: neither reason nor science can save us from these forces. But unlike René Girard—who dreamed of escaping the sacrificial cycle—Thiel believes they must be used. And he uses them.

Do we see it? Or do we continue to believe it's just a war of rhetoric? I don't know if anyone believes in peace these days.

After Troy—ten years of blood—came not “peace,” but peaces . Multiple, partial, laborious.

I thought that's what we – married people – do on Fridays: make peace.

Michelson is the author of Nostalgia for Disaster, Making the Night, and Capitalism of the Self , among other books.