I found Game of Thrones a huge help in making sense of the world - it's always been a bunch of inbred families working out their inbred family's dramas. A good

I found Game of Thrones a huge help in making sense of the world - it's always been a bunch of inbred families working out their inbred family's dramas. A good leader sees their citizenry as a valuable resource and a bad one sees them as a liability, but their goals are always in respect to the other players, not their people. Maybe we actually had better leaders before the turn of the century, it's hard for me to be sure. But either way, the sheer arbitrariness of it all being down to humans as idiosyncratic as the people I know in my daily life made a lot more sense after I watched game of thrones.