Most of us move through an ordinary day making hundreds of assumptions about other people.

We assume the driver approaching the intersection will stop at the red light. We assume the pharmacist has given us what the label says is in the bottle. We assume the money in our bank account will still be there tomorrow. We assume that when someone gives us a time and place to meet, the words mean approximately what we think they mean.

We do not think of these things as trust. We rarely think about them at all.

That may be precisely the point.

A surprising amount of peace rests on things being predictable enough that we do not have to keep paying attention to them.

We know, of course, that people disagree. We disagree within families, communities and countries. We disagree about politics, religion, morality, history, economics, education and what kind of future we should build. Sometimes we disagree passionately.

Peace has never required the absence of those differences. If it did, a diverse society could never be peaceful.

Perhaps the more interesting question is this:

What is the minimum amount of shared reality a society requires in order to remain peaceful?

The answer may be less than we imagine.

We do not need to see the world in the same way. We do not need a common ideology, a common religion or a single interpretation of history. We do not even need to arrive at the same conclusions about the facts before us.

But peaceful life may depend upon something thinner and more basic beneath those disagreements: enough common ground that we can still recognize one another, predict one another and remain in relationship with one another.

A Thin Shared Reality

There is an important difference between agreement and shared reality.

Agreement asks us to reach the same conclusion. Shared reality asks something more modest.

Can we still agree that evidence matters, even when we interpret it differently? Can we recognize the humanity of someone whose convictions we strongly oppose? Do we still believe there are legitimate ways to manage our disagreements? Can we predict, within reasonable limits, how other people and institutions will behave? And do we still believe that cooperation with people unlike ourselves is possible?

These may be some of the quiet foundations of peaceful societies.

Research on social cohesion consistently points toward combinations of trust, cooperation, belonging, shared norms and functioning relationships between people and institutions. Peace research likewise treats peaceful societies not as places without disagreement, but as places able to manage conflict without turning routinely to violence.

That distinction matters because conflict is not necessarily the opposite of peace. A society may contain vigorous argument and still possess deep underlying stability. The more serious danger begins when people lose confidence that disagreement can occur inside a reality they still share.

We Need Some Way of Knowing What Happened

Consider the simplest layer.

People can disagree about what an event means while still agreeing that the event occurred. We may interpret an election differently, argue about the causes of a war, disagree over the meaning of a court decision or reach different conclusions from scientific evidence.

But peaceful disagreement becomes much harder when there is no mutually legitimate way of establishing even basic facts.

This does not mean facts are always simple. Evidence can be incomplete. New information can change our understanding. Experts can be wrong. Institutions can make mistakes.

A shared reality does not require certainty. It requires something more modest: a continuing belief that reality is, at least in part, discoverable. That there are methods for distinguishing stronger evidence from weaker evidence. That facts cannot simply be replaced because they are inconvenient. That correction is possible.

The OECD ( Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) has warned that when a common factual basis weakens, social divisions deepen and collective problems become harder to address. The United Nations has similarly noted that in divided or conflict-affected societies, the loss of a shared understanding of facts can weaken the basis for mediation and reconciliation.

But facts alone are not enough.

We Need to Recognize One Another

A second kind of shared reality is even more human.

I do not have to agree with your understanding of the world. But peace may require that I continue to recognize that you are also living in a world that feels real to you.

Your fear is real. Your grief is real. Your history matters to you. Your children matter to you. Your need to belong matters to you. Your hopes for the future matter to you.

Recognition is not the same as endorsement. Understanding another person’s experience does not require us to accept every conclusion they draw from it.

But something changes when we stop seeing the other person as a person and begin seeing only a category.

A political type. A religious type. A social class. A nationality or an enemy.

Once the person disappears behind the label, it becomes easier to dismiss not only the person’s argument but the person’s standing in the shared world.

Peace becomes harder when we no longer ask, “How can someone see this so differently?” and instead conclude, “Someone like that cannot be reasoned with.”

One allows for relationship. The other begins to close it.

We Need Ways to Disagree

There is another form of common ground that societies often overlook until it begins to fail: agreement about how disagreement will be handled.

We do not have to like the outcome of every election, court ruling, negotiation, community decision or mediation process.

We do need enough confidence in some shared procedures that losing a disagreement does not automatically mean rejecting the entire system.

Across cultures, those procedures take many forms. They may involve courts and elections, councils and elders, community agreements, customary law, professional standards, negotiation or mediation.

The form matters less here than the function.

There has to remain somewhere to take the disagreement. Some process other than force. Some possibility that two people or groups can say, in effect:

We may never agree about this, but we agree about what we will do next.

That is a remarkable social achievement. It allows people to live together without requiring them to think alike.

We Need to Be Able to Predict One Another

The word predictability can sound dull beside words such as freedom, justice or belonging. Yet predictability may be one of the least appreciated foundations of peace.

Human beings are constantly anticipating what will happen next. Usually we do this without noticing.

We expect the neighbour not to enter our house without permission. We expect the teacher to show up. We expect strangers in public spaces to observe certain boundaries. We expect tomorrow’s rules to bear some relationship to today’s rules.

Our underlying Peace Notes framework has repeatedly returned to this relationship between prediction, capacity and peace. When expectations and lived reality are reasonably aligned, the world requires less vigilance. When they repeatedly diverge, more attention has to be devoted to determining what is happening and what might happen next. 

That matters because uncertainty has a cost.

Imagine having to question every ordinary interaction. What does this person really mean?

Can I believe what I have been told? Will the rules suddenly change? Is this situation safe?

Whose account is accurate? What information are other people receiving? What might they do because of it?

No single question is necessarily overwhelming. But together they create interpretive load.

The less shared reality we possess, the more reality each individual has to reconstruct alone.

Our existing research framework identifies modern information environments, fragmented narratives and accelerating stimuli as sources of predictive overload. It also recognizes that under greater load, human interpretation can narrow and threat can become easier to perceive.  

The connection to peace is straightforward.

When the world becomes harder to predict, people become more watchful.

When more capacity is devoted to watching for threat, less capacity remains for curiosity, generosity, flexibility and relationship.

We Need to Believe Cooperation Is Still Possible

Perhaps the thinnest layer of shared reality is simply this:

I may not trust everyone, but I still believe I can cooperate with people who are not like me.

Modern societies depend upon this assumption every day.

We entrust our lives constantly to strangers whose politics, religion, history and values we do not know.

Someone grows our food. Someone maintains the power grid. Someone teaches our children. Someone designs the bridge. Someone drives the ambulance. Someone keeps the water clean.

Civilization works because most of the time we do not require complete personal trust before cooperating.

Social-cohesion research reflects this idea of cooperation both within groups and across them.

The danger arises when our circle of possible cooperation grows smaller. If only people who think like me can be trusted, social life becomes increasingly divided into “us” and “them.” The group may actually become more coherent internally. Its members share explanations, values and expectations.

But a society can contain many highly coherent groups and still become deeply fragmented. That is an important distinction.

Coherence within groups is not the same as coherence between groups.

Peace needs some of both.

Shared Reality Is Continually Rebuilt

There is another side to this story. Shared reality is not only something societies lose. Human beings rebuild it constantly.

We do it through direct experience. 

A person we had understood only as a political category becomes the neighbour who helps when the basement floods. Someone from a culture we know little about becomes the parent sitting beside us at a school concert.

People who disagree about almost everything work together to organize food after a storm. Colleagues with different beliefs solve the same practical problem.

Families continue to gather despite differences they will never resolve. Communities create routines, rituals and common tasks that allow people to encounter one another as human beings rather than abstractions.

These ordinary encounters matter because they give us evidence that no headline or argument can provide.

They allow us to discover directly:

You are not entirely what I imagined.

Shared reality is also rebuilt through institutions that behave credibly—when rules are understandable, processes are visible, mistakes are acknowledged, and people experience enough consistency to know what to expect.

It is rebuilt through communities where people repeatedly keep their word. Through relationships in which disagreement survives without abandonment. Through experiences where cooperation works.

None of these eliminates difference. They make difference more tolerable because they restore predictability.

Perhaps We Need Less Agreement Than We Think

There is a temptation, when societies feel divided, to believe that peace requires finding the one story everyone can accept.

History gives us good reasons to be cautious about that idea. A single shared story can produce cohesion, but it can also be created through conformity, exclusion or suppression.

Peace is not sameness. Nor is peace achieved by asking everyone to see the world through one approved lens.

Pluralistic societies ask something harder of us. They ask us to remain connected to people whose understanding of reality may differ considerably from our own.

Perhaps that is why the minimum shared reality required for peace is surprisingly thin. 

We may not have to agree about what the world means. We may need only enough confidence that we can still approach the world together.

That evidence has some standing. That the person across from us remains human. That there are ways to handle our disagreements. That certain boundaries will hold. That cooperation is still possible.

There is a great deal of room for difference inside those conditions.

The Ground Beneath Us

Peace may depend less on eliminating uncertainty than on making uncertainty livable.

We will never know everything. We will never understand one another completely. We will continue to disagree about what happened, why it happened and what should happen next.

But perhaps we do not need complete certainty.

We need enough ground beneath us that we are not required to rebuild the world from the beginning every morning. Enough trust to walk into ordinary life. Enough predictability to lower our vigilance. Enough common reality to know that disagreement does not mean disappearance.

And perhaps, most of all, enough recognition of one another to believe that even when we do not share the same view of the world, we still share the world itself.

The Ground Beneath Our Feet explores many of these same human questions through Maya’s story—a fictional life shaped by realities that are very much our own.