I'm not as fortunate as you to believe we can bring about a lasting peace by negotiating with people who have acquired power through distasteful means and have no intention of ever giving it up, especially not so people they don't know and never meet can have food on their plate. Is war wrong? It can be. It isn't a black and white issue. Anyone who tells you otherwise obviously doesn't understand war and the reasons for it. There are justified wars and there are unjustified wars.
"But people will die!"
In the short-term, yes. But think about how many more people will die if what is happening is allowed to continue. That's the difference between a justified war and an unjustified war.
And yes, the work that is done and the passion behind that work makes the magic happen, so to speak. I've yet to meet someone willing to do something for nothing, at the expense of their time and effort. When faced with a war, people feel like their lives are on the line, and so they work 10 times harder to "win" by creating technology we probably wouldn't have thought about creating or using had there not been an imminent. Their passion comes from self-preservation or the need to fight for the greater good or whatever they convince themselves is the truth.
As I said before, simply talking about it isn't going to make it happen. No one is actually willing to act and so we're all to blame for the evils in this world. We may not be actively perpetrating those evils, but we allow them to exist.
Perhaps I'm not touched by your sermon because I've heard it far too many times by far too many people who, in the end, don't intend on really doing anything. They're content with the illusion of activism, but aren't actually willing to give their life for the cause. And that's what it's going to take, really. If you want to topple modern society, you're probably going to get killed trying to accomplish it. For most, their lives are far too important to give up, even if it means saving 100 others. They'd be more that happy to take up positions of power and leadership, though, because they can send others to die for them. Surely that's the same thing as giving your life!
I understand that people want peace and quiet and for war to end and for world hunger to end and for disease to be wiped out. Those are all noble causes. Noble, but completely unrealistic. Unrealistic, not because it defies human nature, but because it defies nature itself. Even animals war against each other. They just don't possess the capability to take out half the world with them, but it's part of their nature. Want to cure every disease and feed every person? Alright, where do you intend on putting those people and how do you intend on feeding everyone? How do you equally distribute our collective wealth so that no one is left behind?
Then you have to throw in resource management. How much should one person be allowed to consume? How do you place limits on the amount any one person is allowed to consume? How do you revolutionize entire industries to lessen our consumption, and lessen our impact on the environment? How do we obtain the necessary resources to allow ourselves to research better technology in the first place when the person/country we're trying to obtain the resources from is unfair in their practices? How do we ensure all trade is fair and one country doesn't benefit more than the other?
There are far too many factors people aren't considering when saying "We must do this or that because it's right!", and 90% of the time, when faced with what they must give up in order to make it happen, they just aren't willing to give it all up.
