Continue Reading Below Advertisement

He also could have said, "If the solution to the world's problems occurred to you in high school, the odds are that other people have probably tried it already." And the current way of doing things, no matter how ridiculous and shitty, is almost always the alternative to some much worse way we tried in the past (or as Churchill put it, "... democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried ...").

To pull a random example out of my ass, we have the controversial practice of aerial drone strikes. Every week there is some new outrage where these remote-control murder bots have blown up a bad guy plus two dozen random people in the vicinity, and there'll be talk of how these killer machines are the terrifying forefront of "a faceless global war."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

But drone strikes weren't invented as an alternative to negotiations and dinner parties, they were an alternative to either putting boots on the ground (thus risking the lives of the soldiers) or just bombing the shit out of everything in the vicinity (killing far more bystanders than drones). The sight of a robot plane taking out a terror suspect with a missile is horrifying, unless you compare it to Black Hawk Down.

Hemera Technologies/AbleStock.com

Or whatever the hell is going on here.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

"But why can't we wish for a world where governments don't kill people at all?" We totally can! Just as we can work toward a system that gives people a better standard of living than capitalism, or a breed of cats that aren't assholes. But to be clear, in each case we're working toward something that does not exist and has never existed, anywhere. Humans fight wars, just as animals kill each other over territory and resources. As do plants, and microbes, and cells.