War, Peace, and Possible Futures: George Saunders on Storytelling the World’s Fate and the Antidote to Media Manipulation

“War is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being.”

“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,” John Steinbeck wrote to his best friend at the peak of WWII. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.”

This is a story many believe to be true — a story about human nature, written into the scripture of original sin, ensuring that we will go on perpetrating ...