If all the money that went to wars over the last 50 years instead went to private sector innovation, we may have invented teleportation by now, who knows?
Quite possibly, but you're not saying "wars" only happen when there are governments, or that having governments equals wars, right? Local skirmishes, from what I've been told, where much more frequent before governments and laws.
Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.