War & Peace Quote by Godfrey Reggio

Reggio’s line needles the easy piety of “world peace” talk by treating it as a lifestyle accessory: comforting, repeatable, and functionally inert. The provocation is in the conditional. Peace isn’t framed as a moral wish we can outsource to prayer, but as an outcome engineered (or sabotaged) by the daily architecture of modern life: how we build cities, organize work, consume energy, mediate attention, and normalize speed.

As a director best known for wordless, image-driven critique of technological society, Reggio isn’t taking a cheap shot at faith so much as exposing the mismatch between aspiration and infrastructure. “Naive” lands like a diagnosis: we keep asking for a different world while insisting on the same operating system. The phrase “the form in which we live” is doing heavy lifting. It doesn’t mean individual habits alone; it gestures toward systems that feel natural because they’re ubiquitous. That’s the subtext: violence and instability aren’t only failures of character or diplomacy, they’re baked into patterns of extraction, competition, surveillance, and distraction that we accept as normal.

The intent is to collapse the comforting distance between private virtue and public consequence. If peace is the goal, Reggio implies, it has to be practiced at the level where society actually reproduces itself: in the forms that shape desire, reward, and time. Prayer without structural change becomes a kind of moral alibi, a way to feel aligned with peace while continuing to live inside arrangements that manufacture conflict.