The World As It Is — And As We Must Make It
On realism, justice, and why accepting the world as it is has always been the first refuge of those who benefit most from it.
A note from the editor: This week we wade into philosophy provoked by current events — not to take political sides, but because the question being raised in public by world leaders goes to the very heart of what it means to be a good human. When powerful people tell us to accept the world as it is, we owe it to ourselves — and to those without power — to think carefully about what that actually means.
When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney backed the recent U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran — a move he said he supported “with regret” and which he acknowledged may be “inconsistent with international law” — he offered a phrase that deserves more scrutiny: Canada, he said, is “taking the world as it is, not passively waiting for a world we wish [it] to be.”
There is something genuinely wise in this. The Stoics would recognize it immediately. Marcus Aurelius, who governed one of the most powerful empires the world has ever known, wrote constantly in his private journals about the discipline of accepting what we cannot change. The Stoic concept of the dichotomy of control — the hard-won wisdom that we should direct our energy only toward what lies within our power — is among the most liberating and practical of insights in the history of philosophy.
So Carney is right, up to a point. Impotent rage at the state of the world helps no one. Clear-eyed pragmatism is not the same as moral failure. We cannot operate through wishful thinking.
But here is where the wisdom ends and something more troubling begins.
When Pragmatism Becomes a Blank Cheque
Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz went further. In the same week, he suggested that international law’s protections should not apply to Iran, arguing that such frameworks have “relatively little effect” when a state is determined to violate them. In the words of one German newspaper, it was “a long farewell to international law”.
This is not Stoic wisdom. This is something else entirely — the logic of the powerful dressing itself in the language of pragmatism.
Let us test this logic honestly. If “taking the world as it is” is the highest standard of statesmanship, then consider significant world events from history through that lens:
In the 1930s and early 1940s, Adolf Hitler was simply the world as it was. The Holocaust and all of its horrors was happening. The world, largely, looked away. And those who counselled non-intervention — Neville Chamberlain, American and Canadian politicians, European leaders — did so using the very same language of realism and practicality that we are hearing today. Appeasement was the policy of people who prided themselves on being serious and pragmatic. Taking the world as it is.
In 1953, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was overthrown in a CIA and MI6-orchestrated coup — because he had the temerity to insist that Iranian oil benefit the Iranian people. The world accepted this too. It was simply taking the world as it was, with a realpolitik rationale attached. And the consequences of accepting the world as it was in 1953 continues to play out in 2026.
In Chile in 1973, Salvador Allende — the democratically elected president of his country — was overthrown in a military coup actively supported by the United States government. Allende died in the presidential palace as troops stormed it. What followed was seventeen years of dictatorship, torture, and disappearance under General Pinochet. The world knew. Washington had, in fact, helped plan and execute it. And the world accepted this as the way things are — because Allende had been inconvenient to powerful interests, and pragmatic realism demanded that inconvenient democracies be sacrificed.
And here is the uncomfortable question the logic poses right now, today: if “taking the world as it is” is the governing principle, at what point do we stop applying it? When a major power annexes a neighbouring democracy, should its allies and partners simply accept that world as it is? When civilians are rounded up in cities without due process, should we take that world as it is, too? Or do we insist that here we must go back to the rule of law?
The “take the world as it is” principle, applied consistently, demands acquiescence to every exercise of raw power. Which is, of course, exactly what raw power has always wanted.
And it does not stop with history.
Hannah Arendt gives us perhaps the sharpest blade for cutting through this particular evasion. Her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann — one of the chief architects of the Holocaust — produced a concept that names precisely what is happening when serious people invoke realism as moral cover: the banality of evil. It is too easy to simply dismiss Eichmann as a monster, to place him safely beyond the boundary of recognizable humanity. Arendt refused that simplistic path. What she found instead was a terrifyingly ordinary bureaucrat, driven by careerism and an inability — or unwillingness — to think independently. He had replaced moral judgment with procedural compliance, with orders, with the logic of the situation, with taking the world as it was. Arendt's devastating insight is that the great atrocities of the twentieth century were not perpetrated by ideological fanatics alone, but by intelligent, ordinary people who declined to exercise judgment. They did not make trouble. They accepted the world as it was. And in doing so, they made everything possible.
What Marcus Aurelius Actually Said
The Stoics are frequently invoked by the powerful and the pragmatic. But Marcus Aurelius was not simply a philosopher of acceptance. He was, above all else, a philosopher of justice — and he understood that the two must be held in radical tension.
In Meditations, he wrote of justice not as a policy preference or a useful diplomatic norm, but as one of the four cardinal virtues — alongside wisdom, courage, and temperance. For Marcus, justice was not external. It was not a treaty or a court ruling. It was a quality of the soul. It described how a person of character treats other people — all other people, regardless of their power, their usefulness, or their nationality. [We’ll leave aside for the purposes of this article his wars against the Germanic tribes or the prevalence of slavery in Rome.]
“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
The Stoics taught that virtue — wisdom, courage, justice , and temperance — was the only true good. Everything else — wealth, power, political advantage, the favour of allies — was what they called indifferents. They might be useful, but they could never justify abandoning virtue. A Stoic emperor who set aside justice for geopolitical convenience would have recognized, in his private journal, that he had failed himself.
Marcus also wrote about our obligations to one another as members of a shared human community — what he called the cosmopolis, the city of all rational beings. The Stoics were the first systematic universalists. They did not believe justice applied only to your tribe, your nation, or your alliance. It applied, radically and uncomfortably, to everyone.
Augustine and the Band of Robbers
St. Augustine of Hippo, writing in the fifth century CE as the Roman Empire was itself fracturing under pressure, posed one of the most challenging questions in the history of political thought. In The City of God, he asked: if a state abandons justice, what distinguishes it from a criminal gang?
“Without justice what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers?” — Augustine, The City of God
Augustine was not näive about power. He lived through the sack of Rome. He understood catastrophe. But he refused to accept that power without moral principle was simply “the world as it is”. He insisted that the city built on justice — what he called the City of God — made an unrelenting demand on every human conscience, regardless of what the earthly city was doing around it.
For Augustine, as for the Stoics, there was no version of the good life that could be built on the normalization of injustice. When institutions fail, the answer is not to abandon their underlying principles. The answer is to hold the principles more fiercely — and to refuse to let the language of realism become a cover for moral abdication.
The World as It Is, Right Now
The temptation is to locate these arguments safely in the past. But when the same logic is being applied today, in real time, we would be dishonest not to name it.
The Jeffrey Epstein network — now the subject of court findings and documented evidence of industrial-scale child sexual abuse involving some of the most powerful figures in finance, politics, and media — has been largely absorbed into the background noise. Investigations have stalled. Files have been sealed or delayed. The powerful have, for the most part, moved on. To take the world as it is, apparently, is also to accept that children were abused systematically by the well-connected, and that this is simply the way things are.
In the United States, immigration enforcement operations have resulted in civilian deaths, legal residents detained without due process, and communities living in fear. The language used by those who defend this is — again — the language of realism. This is the world as it is. Don’t protest. Don’t lecture. Accept the facts on the ground.
And then there is the publicly threatened annexation of Canada and Greenland — sovereign nations, treaty partners, democracies. The response from many world leaders, other than those directly affected, has been, effectively, silence. Realism. Taking the world as it is.
It is worth pausing on that last point. The very nations whose leaders are now counselling us to accept the world as it is are among those whose sovereignty is being openly threatened by the same logic. If “the world as it is” is good enough for Iran, for Venezuela, for Cuba, it will have to be good enough for Canada and Europe too. Political pronouncements have a habit of applying in directions their proponents did not intend.
The Real Stoic Task
None of this means we can fix everything or protest every injustice from every rooftop. Carney’s instinct toward pragmatism is not wrong in itself. The Stoics really do counsel us not to exhaust ourselves over what we cannot control.
But the Stoic dichotomy of control cuts in a different direction than “take the world as it is” might suggest. What is always within our control — always — is our own moral response. Whether we speak. Whether we bear witness. Whether we name what we see. Whether we use the word “injustice” when injustice is happening, even when it is inconvenient, even when our allies are the ones perpetrating it.
Accepting the world as it is cannot mean accepting that justice is merely a framework to be applied selectively — to our enemies but not our friends, to the weak but not the powerful, to yesterday’s atrocities but not today’s.
The moment it does, we have not become realists. We have simply become the next group who chose to look away. The transactionalists.
First They Came
The German Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller, who himself spent seven years in Nazi concentration camps, left us one of the most enduring warnings in modern history. It speaks directly to the logic of taking the world as it is:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
— Martin Niemöller
Niemöller was not describing monsters. He was describing ordinary, pragmatic people — people who took the world as it was, who didn’t want to make trouble, who told themselves that each individual outrage was not their problem. He was describing, with devastating precision, the incremental logic by which civilized societies sleepwalk into catastrophe.
The moment we accept that justice is a framework where the rules only apply to others — for the weak, for the enemy, for the inconvenient — we have already begun the journey he described. And by the time it becomes our problem, there is no one left to speak.
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