One rhetorical game I love playing out here in SF is "flipping the question".   When the ever-well-intentioned folks around me ask how come there's poverty?, I flip it and ask how did some manage to get rich?  

Instead of it's amazing how 10% of the world's population consumes 25% of its energy the flip is how does 10% of the population manage to create 25% of the energy?  And so on.

What makes the flip important is the way it teases out assumptions hidden in the line of inquiry.  For many of my friends, being good SFLiberals, there's a hidden need to believe that the reason "they" are poor and "we" are rich is that "we" somehow failed "them." The Flip forces us to examine a different causality. What's the more natural state of affairs -- poverty or wealth?  Energy or the spectacle of back breaking labor?    And thus, what had to be created by volition and initiative? 

And so, instead of asking why is there violence?, I point my vast readership at this piece of data which forces us to instead ask, how come some manage to live in relative peace? -

...In my book, I referenced the work of archaeologist Steven LeBlanc, who wrote in his Constant Battles that the “cruel and ugly” truth is that in traditional societies an average of twenty-five percent of the men died from warfare. He estimates that the homicide rate of some prehistoric villages would have been 1400 times that of modern Britain and about 70 times that of the United States in 1980. Although roughly 100 million people died from all war-related causes in the twentieth century, Keeley estimated that this figure is twenty times smaller than the losses that might have resulted if the world’s population were still organized into bands, tribes and chiefdoms.