“Peace on earth” is a noble objective, but those who believe it is possible to achieve have not done their math very well. How do you get more than 6 billion people, whose belief systems vary wildly, to agree on a moral, rational premise for peace?

On the contrary, a dominant premise of a large percentage of the world’s population is that most of their problems would be solved if they could just exterminate a particular ethnic or religious group. So long as people are perceived as heroes for killing members of the other tribe, world peace is not possible.

Plato recognized this more than two thousand years ago when he rightly pointed out that “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”