something else,
wouldn’t it be awesome if the handful of buttholes that call for war, simply go themselves and the rest of the nation watches them fight each other?
we humans are a special kind of stupid
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Mankind decided against that the instant it decided it would be a good idea to flock together and form nations, governments and stuff. Man likes to be organized, to boss around and be bossed around. And there we have it.
Indeed.
Yes as you said it is a “pack” thing.
Packs and herds are a built in thing of human nature, we are gregarious animals and find strength in numbers. Packs follow their leaders and in the lack of leaders will follow “instigators” in a mob like fashion.
As individuals we should do our best to analyze situations ourselves and try not to get caught up in the tide. This is easier said than done because we also have a need to “fit in” and will often act subconsciously with the pack.
This applies to a large number of species.
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Yes, maybe, but not necessarily to the degree our present time large scale societies demand of us.
I can’t help it, can’t get rid of the feeling that there’s also a grain of manipulation in that “social animal” claim - not necessarily a conscious one, more something of a feedback cycle, a meme evolution: it’s just so damn useful for society to have all its members believe that, so let’s repeat the mantra …
Yes, exactly!
Indeed, we’re not quite as exceptional as we like to see ourselves.
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Herd/pack animal behaviour makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, it enhances survival of one’s genes to band together.
Humans have just not managed yet to evolve psychologically / socially to the point where we can easily shake off those tribal roots, and our technological advances have way outpaced those parts of our makeup, meaning our wars are becoming ever more destructive. Those in power use those aspects shamelessly to manipulate us towards supporting their machinations.
Heck, I am quite conscious of that, try to work against it, am wise to much propaganda and manipulation, but even I can feel how instinctively protective I become of those close to me when they are in some way in danger / being attacked.
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The scale is where things went wrong. before agriculture, there was no benefit to having a group of people over ~100. You needed to be nimble to move around to various food sources. After agriculture, increasing scale of production, driven by the excess capacity and the ability to store reserves lead to a need for more hierarchal organization. Thus, ‘Lords’ were invented (etymologically “the keeper of the loaves”). This created a cascading spiral of more production, more storage, more population, along with less social rights and greater social inequity.
Storage of food also necessitated salt, so saltworks became one of the first industries. Discovery of mineral salts led to slavery, forcing people to work in the salt mines, so that the empires could have enough preserved food to wage war… to collect slaves, and more land and more production and more food.
There has always been conflict among animals, but it isn’t until you get to the vastly manipulated scale of human post-agricultural empire that we find the invention of war.
This is why I can’t have political conversations with most people, haha. “Oh you don’t like president A, you must like president B!” … “I think we went wrong 10000 years ago and it’s all gone downhill since the agricultural revolution”
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I think the Sapiens vrs Neanderthal was pre agriculture, but yes, the scale of human societies and thus the ability of our leaders to manipulate/scheme, and our destructive ability is out of proportion.
I don’t disagree with your assessment here, but I think it’s a bit of a deflection from considering serious issues as they affect us now by saying “Everything went wrong 10,000 years ago”. I think this can be a kind of a way to shrug off responsibility- “the world was already screwed up before I got here, oh well. That’s just the way the world is.” I don’t think you mean that at all, I’ve just seen that kind of blase nihilism before in these arguments.
We live in a world, flawed though it may be, and we can only respond to the times in which we live. We can learn from the past, but we can only affect meaningful change in the present.
Thinking about the ethics of war, even if we may not be in a position to start or end them, is I think important for us in the present. Thinking about the historical context is helpful for formulating those opinions for sure, but not as actionable. At least, to my point of view
I feel like the idea that these distant ancestors were highly warlike is a projection of our culture onto theirs. The archaeological records are scant, and assuming that a broken arm or a fractured skull is the result of a combat injury in the long war with h. sapiens is a bit of a stretch.
Totally, it is certainly not my intent to throw my arms up and shrug, mostly to ground the issues in their deep deep roots.
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Of course. I figured that was your intent, I apologize if I didn’t convey that 
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So? it is irrelevant for my point.
Is all violence injust? if that so you can’t use violence to stop violence for example.
Then of course all wars are unjust if we can’t use violence to stop violence but then we are in civilization which is also the channelization of violence.
That is absurd and false.
Please explain why most violence is done by young people?
For me it is because they have competitive advantage doing it.
I wasn’t trying to refute anything you said, that was just a turn of phrase that I heard a while ago that stuck with me. I totally agree with you.
I do think that it’s messed up, but absolutely true.
I’m not sure what the issue of younger people doing more violence has to do with early man though, I cannot definitively say that h. sapiens and h. neanderthalensis didn’t engage in conflict, but I am likewise skeptical of anyone who definitively claims that they certainly did all the time, so much so that every bit of archaealogical evidence has to be framed within the context of war.
In my cultural context, life is pretty hopeless for a lot of young men. They’ve been told they can do whatever they want when they grow up, then they are smashed into some really harsh realities once they get out of school. Work sucks, dating is hard, non digital social networks are really challenging. The only place where a lot of young men feel in control and powerful is playing video games, many of which glorify simplified violence as the solution to all problems. Entry level jobs suck, but even a low paying job will get you enough to buy a gun to emulate the feeling of being powerful and in control.
Alternately, and perhaps more on context, a lot of those same young men find some scant opportunities provided by the military. An 18 year old boy is indeed pretty optimized for being a soldier, they are fresh out of an educational institution that prioritizes following instructions above all else, they are near peak physical fitness, and they are lacking in experience and knowledge, so they can be easily convinced, and they have relatively little to lose. Getting a 35 year old with a wife and kids to sign up for combat is a bit tougher.
And on the return, a lot of those combat trained veterans run into a lot of the same challenges their civilian peers ran into 6 years earlier. When you’ve literally been trained to kill, and often not trained for much else, the skillsets that you can leverage to improve your life are often limited.
These are certainly broad brush strokes, and I do not intend to imply that all young men are one bad day away from committing mass murder. in looking at the cases where someone does choose violence, there’s a lot of repeating patterns. One of the biggest commonalities in mass shooters is a history of domestic violence. violence begets more violence, and it is absolutely tragic.
This story has been going on for a long time, and I am curious about the deep history. There’s 10,000 different factors that go into all of these complex issues, and I definitely don’t intend to overwrite everyone else’s opinions with my own.
These are just my opinions, and I certainly slant more towards anarcho-primitivism when I am looking for solutions. we lived as a species for 300,000 years, most of that without agriculture, so something had to be working ok.
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Sorry i added more thinking and added a quote from you. You might want to revise your answer to me.
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I am not talking about war i am talking about criminal statistics. Young people are a huge part of criminal statistics. I can also add young males that have a significant “advantage” over young women in said/sad statistics.
This is due to the physical competitive advantage young men have doing violence and getting away with it. Older people also have difficulties in life and they don’t resort to same behaviour.
It should be no surprise that in Neanderthal and later initial HSS times were resources were several fold lower than today violence was widespread. Life was short, brutal and a person at your side was a person competing for resources maybe at most you could cooperate hunting a large beast. It was only with agriculture that widespread cooperation started.
When nomadism stopped, agriculture started people needed to live with others and that meant rules of behaviour had to be made, the first laws. Why religion and also civilization were build? to channel widespread violence.
Animals also make violence in their resource competition and some do it also for fun.
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Have some laughs or nightmares about human condition…i prefer to laugh.
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If anything, some technology now (especially social media) has actually increased tribalism and general violent behavior as opposed to reducing it. AI in turn will be able to make it even worse because of its ability to create a convincing narrative regarding anything you want (because of generated photos, videos, ect…).
The world as of now is actually staring down the barrel of undoing 1000’s of years of man working to become more civilized, except now we have weapons that can theoretically wipe out all life on Earth.
Maybe the less worse world would be when we can depart earth and make the associations we want to be with in space… isn’t that tribalism?
I would argue younger people committing more crime is based more on their disadvantages, rather than their advantages. Violent crime isn’t a long term success strategy.
I disagree. Competition becomes much more important in sedentary cultures. There’s a lot of land out there, and the world is actually pretty fecund and resource rich, as long as it isn’t overpopulated. Granted, immediate return hunter-gatherers suffered a lot during famines and droughts, but that served to create a natural check and balance to population growth.
Life wasn’t as nasty, brutish and short as anthropologists thought it was 100 years ago:
from: https://www.shortform.com/blog/human-cooperation-2/
As for life being shorter, it was, but not by much. often you will hear things like the average lifespan of pre-agricultural humans was about 25. The problem is those numbers include infant mortality, which was indeed much higher then, but that distorts the numbers significantly. Using that same nonsense math, the average height was 3 feet tall. If you lived past your first year, you had a pretty good chance to live past 60. Conversely, moving into sedentary cities caused a huge increase in disease that significantly reduced life expectancy. even up to the mid 1900s, living in a city reduced your life expectancy, as opposed people who lived out in the country.
There are also extensive archeological records of disabled people being taken care of by their community:
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