It's that simple, really. It is in our nature, just like sex. We like it. It feels good.
The only reason we try to eschew and condemn such violence in modern society is because it is in our best interests and more productive to society as a whole to not be like that. No other reason. If we all lived in fear and were huddled in our homes in small communities we wouldn't have even half the modern luxuries we do today. Plus, on the larger scale, if it's war you are talking about - well, they cost a lot of money/resources. So they are tough to maintain for the long haul without noticeable economic harm.
People like to say that love is stronger than anger and hate. I have always disagreed. Hate and anger run deeper than most imagine. And they motivate people like nothing else in this world, except perhaps fear.
The one and only reason people aren't butchering each other in the streets is because we have figured out a way that we can all survive. If that were to crumble, you can be damn sure society would look a lot closer to The Walking Dead or Children of Men than Star Trek.
Even then, desertion usually is epidemic in non-volunteer armies, and even in volunteer ones. And if violence is so good, we wouldn't see so many soldiers or police officers suffering from severe psychological trauma over committing it.
The issue with the kinds of pagan societies described in the article is that the society has successful and mass dehumanization programs in place for their elite. They select for people to commit violence and encourage people to dehumanize the act through their religious grounding. It doesn't have to be religious...gangs can create dehumanization, or secular ideology. But in general people really are peaceable, and societies like the Mexica tend to be aberrations over the long term.
Feelings are heavily interpreted. Some people find sexual stimulation painful, not just physically, but emotionally. In the end, all feelings exist as an interpretation inside the mind, and we know for sure that we can reinforce them through conditioning and other methods so that the full stack of causes which might initially cause a feeling aren't necessary to recreate it. Just a scent or a memory can be enough to evoke the full force of an emotion.
Violence isn't enjoyable for everyone, even simulated in movies or games. For a lot of people, putting it inside a safe context is a way to address something terrible and cope with the realities of violence, what causes it, and even find some common ground to empathize with the people who choose violence in real life.
Love is stronger than violence because we've seen the benefits and chosen to make it stronger. It's infinitely reinforcable and non-destructive. A system built around love can survive better than a system built on hate. As thinking beings, we don't just reactively respond to emotion. We build reinforcement systems into family, friends, culture, work, play and more, and all of these systems feed back into our behavior. Feeling good is just the beginning.
One big reason people aren't butchering each other in the streets is because those who butcher, by and large, are crippled by the trauma of it. Having a rational justification for violence (protecting ones self, protecting ones family, protecting ones nation) does nothing to assuage the deep-rooted trauma that inflicting violence on another human being causes. PTSD is a neurological malady, not a psychological one.
And it's not like I was born seething with violent imagery in my growing mind and had to be taught it was bad and not to be violent. I never had any bad thoughts about other kids. I did bad things like lying and stealing but never violence.
Just saying, there are many people who don't think violent thoughts, don't want to do anything nasty, who are nice people who don't need laws to stop them from doing things.
Had Roman and Greek values triumphed we might be in a better world. Perhaps we wouldn't have needed monks on lonely islands copying ancient texts had we not had a Dark Age.
> There are many people who don't think violent thoughts, don't want to do anything nasty, who are nice people who don't need laws to stop them from doing things.
And you shall curse those same people as weak if the enemy comes to town to slaughter everybody. As you would also were the Army to round up members of your faith for the deathcamps.
Surely you see the irony of a powerful God ruling the Earth being a necessity in order for the meek to inherit it.
That's an incredibly simplification of what originates violence.
People can become violent because of their frustration towards something and their lack of tools to manage their emotions, because of their past and what they have been taught, as an easy way to subjugate most of the people...
Untrue. Whatever humans do has a purpose. If this was in our nature, men will kill and leave their victim behind and move on to the next target.
However what we've observed over thousands of years is different. Men kill for a purpose, be it land, safety, women, rain, or whatever idiotic reason. Where men saw no purpose for killing, they did not. Therefore it is not part of our nature just like sex.
If you leave one man and one woman together for enough time, they will have sex together. If you left two men together most likely they will cooperate and not kill each other.
What's more. If it were in our nature to kill one another, then it would have been a trait shared with women as well. So far it appears Male are more likely to shed blood.
See antihumanism.
“For Althusser, Marx viewed the human individual as a product of society. His or her beliefs, desires, preferences, judgements are inculcated in him/her by society and its ideological, political and economic practices. A person's view of him-/herself as a subject whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thought is not innate; rather the role of a subject is imposed upon him or her by society and its ideologies.”[1]
Because we are 7 billions. A least, we have enough love to take care of the children.
I feel like the "sweet water/bitter water" dichotomy that the Christian tradition left us[1] has been so damaging because it has formed this perspective that we can only be bad and we can only be good, rather than we can be both. I do believe some people might have different tendencies than others and some may be prone to violence or prone to love but to assume your inclinations extend to everyone else is stupid.
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/prefrontal-nudity/20130...
We, or, at least, some of us, have figured out, after a long time, that violence is not a good thing. But violence is what evolution runs on, because it wants the weak to die and the strong to reproduce. Altruism happened because groups of people ended up stronger than individual people, so there needed to be mechanisms to override violence impulses to enable groups. But the groups of people were still supposed to kill each other over and over to make stronger groups of people. The altruism is not universal. Hence all the ingroup biases. And much of that still remains to this day. All of us are violent directly or by proxy towards animals. Even if people are not violent, many are mean, they create pecking orders, they measure status, they compete, etc. They are executing adaptations developed to categorize people or groups of people as "should not be selected". The old programming is still there.
Except our combination of intelligence, empathy, sympathy, altruism, and strength "backfired" and resulted in us slowly deciding, for ourselves, that maybe we don't want to live like that.
I believe Christianity was designed to oppose this programming (original sin), but it's a 2k old religion, what do you expect? So much has changed since then, our methods in many places got better; Christianity is out of date and has too many dependencies.
I also don't think your characterization is fair, anyway. Christianity doesn't say we can only be bad or only good, it says that goodness demands complete purity, and through that, it says we're all bad, due to an influence inside of us, as well as an influence outside. While there are people more prone to violence and those more prone to love, there's nobody completely free from the programming or the situation.
I think this holds for a bunch of old religious beliefs. A lot of the old, seemingly arbitrary laws from Judaism had practical purposes in ancient times.
Actually sex, violence and dominance are intimately connected. More so than most people would like to admit.
An estimated 2-5% of all humans are so called "psychopaths", people without the ability to feel empathy for other peoples pain. Those people are at the same time overrepresented as inmates in jails as well as in holders of executive positions. It's totally possible that most violence in human history is a result of those kind of people while the remaining 95-98% are simply victims of those people.
It's also very important to understand that people are more alike than different.
The "not the same" thing I've found to be mostly based on superficial differences, whereas all the basic imperatives (sex drive, evolutionary instincts, core cultural values, etc are mostly the same wherever).
There are people who can torture a child to death without feeling the smallest amount of guild (maybe they even find it funny or satisfying), others who could do it with the right amount of indoctrination, others who would only do it if their life is in danger (and would feel horrible afterwards) and others who would rather die than doing it.
And it's not possible to shift a person people into all of those categories, it's mostly inborn (like sexual orientation, hair color, etc).
Sure, all those people have lots of other "basic imperatives" in common, but the small difference that some could inflict as much pain as possible to others without feeling even a little bit guilty is a difference with should have quite severe consequences for society as a whole.
So if we try to understand why there is so much violence in the world, it would be quite an oversight to not take those kind of differences into account.
You're making a helluvan assertion there. You're going to need a citation, because psychology has no clue about this.
-signed, A Psychopath
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
And another 90% have herd mentality, people that can easily mold their personality to match the dominant type in their in-group. There have been numerous studies that show that group mentality can override people's personal moral boundaries.
Non-psychopaths simply dehumanize their victims to suppress that empathy.
I think we all have the ability to not feel another's pain. For instance, dehumanization is a classic technique in war propaganda.
> I don’t think any of us living today can comprehend the violence of worship in the Mexica culture (or Aztecs, as they are more popularly known), which I’ve written about for Archaeology. The Mexica waged war not principally to defeat rival states or gain territory, but to gather warm bodies for human sacrifice.
It appears a little bit in sports, and a lot in suicide bombers.
I would argue that we express it in ritualized form: in the U.S., that's NFL, college, and high school (and younger) football. And for those looking for a stronger dose, mixed martial arts.
Personally, my favorite form of simulated violence is the sport of fencing[1], though when I fence, I'm not imagining running my opponent through, or imagining that I've eviscerated them when I score a touch, I'm simply imagining the green or red light turning on; it's really just about the game and the technique for me.
1)I do also very much enjoy the Metal Gear Solid series of games, but generally (on the most recent edition) I always try for a no kills finish for a mission, and not just for the points.
Yeah. it's called fiction and a more significant portion of people in the world consume all that without committing mass murder. So please, stop associating video games or movies with whatever crazy people do.
I've played games as a cop where you're rolling through a rough neighborhood and everyone's immediately got their guard up, they're automatically on-edge. The tension between police and civilians experienced this way is nothing like reading headlines or hearing stories. It's long, empty periods of nothing punctuated by life-threatening situations which can build empathy for what some cops have to endure.
Movies edit down for length. Books are building a narrative, they're cherry-picking by necessity. In a game you can spend dozens of hours immersed in an environment, experiencing both the intensity of the situations and the mundanity of the gaps between.
I'd love to see some games put out by people in these difficult to understand cultures to better experience what they think and feel, the challenges they face, and to see the world through their eyes.
The latest installment of Deus Ex lightly touches on the issues of race relations, there using an analogy where "augmented" humans are suddenly the Acceptable Thing To Hate and are subjected to endless scrutiny, carded constantly for no reason other than being augmented.
The old "walk a mile in my shoes" principle applies here, and in most games you walk way, way more than a mile.
It's not my intention to suggest that enjoying those means that our socialization has failed or that we are dangerous (which I do not believe), but that those games and movies appeal to something in our nature that still exists in many of the most well socialized Americans.
I've looked several times for that quote. Not sure who it was from, but there seems to be some wisdom in it.
It's similar to how one may find archery fun, and archery was designed to kill people, but people don't find archery fun because they want to kill people, they just find it fun to shoot arrows and that gaining of fun probably was designed to make people better at violence but there's no actual direct connection.
On the other hand, the gaming situations where I have seen the negative aspects of nature come out were games that layered social aspects on top. MMORPG's, especially ones like DayZ, and, at worst, competitive games like League of Legends. When a single player game gets bad, like Doom or Nox, it gets bad over the multiplayer aspect. That's where all the nasty stuff really comes out, and it's not the art or the violence in the design of the game itself causing it, but the socializing aspect, power imbalances, etc. Meanwhile, people are cooperating pretty well in games like KSP or Minecraft as long as you avoid PvP servers, and even in the really dark, violent games like Dark Souls, again, as long as you stay away from PvP.
Human violence instincts seem to come out in situations that simulate social pressures, such as those where there is evaluation, power imbalance, and competitions. Single player games, no matter how much blood is falling on the floor, don't seem to do that to their communities as long as PvP is not involved.
To put it another way, if throwing feces was common behavior among humans, you might say "this isn't a human problem, it's a primate problem." And you'd be right, in a sense. But the key point is that throwing feces (as well as violence) is more easily avoided behavior for humans than for chimps. A human might choose to yell to express a level of anger than chimps only express with feces throwing (I might be uninformed about the feces-throwing behaviors of chimps, but you get the point). When we fail to take advantage of opportunities to avoid violence, we should ask ourselves why.
That is, I agree it is not an excuse to say "animals do it." But, it is also somewhat askew to me to have a barrier to our explanations that do not involve "humans are just animals."
Or you like doing all the silly things a game lets you do. Because, you know, it's not real and you've probably realized that.
I guess if you play Monopoly against Grandma and ream her a new one when she lands on your Boardwalk with a hotel on it deep down you want to be a slum lord. It couldn't possibly be as simple as you like winning games.
Sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.
Come on, you can make the above case for Mario, but it's a harder sell when we are talking about Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.
When I recently re-played Deus Ex (Human revolution), you can choose to play the game in a pretty much pacifist way. I didn't do that, but at the same time I didn't go laying a trail of carnage through the city, killing the police, etc.
The game puts you in situations where you usually have a choice about your actions -- I can sneak around (harder), I can kill the guard, I can kill the police officer, etc. I had no problem killing the mercenaries that would shoot me if they saw me, but after killing an NPC police officer (in frustration after setting off alarms), I felt compelled to do it again until I could master doing nonlethal takedowns, or knock them out with a sedative dart.
I don't think this is a matter of having a problem separating fantasy and reality. Rather, it's a lens to look at our own behavior and feelings about violence. I have no problem shooting other players in the face in a game like Call of Duty or Counter-Strike (which is effectively paintball), but I get deeply disturbed at the idea of killing (or spawning + harvesting?) non-hostile NPCs in games like Minecraft or Deus Ex.
Games with that degree of role-playing are fairly rare to begin with, and most people also don't get terribly immersed in them, so often that NPC you care about to them is just a number.
I generally treat everything in Minecraft very mechanically, as numbers, because Minecraft just feels that way to me. But in a proper RPG, it's not so simple.
Most people would not enjoy child rape simulator 3000 because most people do not have embedded instincts to do such things. Some people, however, may enjoy CR3000, and I would venture to guess that there is an underlying reason (i.e. pedophilia).
Being used to see violence in fantasy doesn't make you violent deep inside, you just don't give it that much importance in fantasy. This doesn't mean that you won't despise real violent acts.
Few have satisfactory explanations. (The most common ones don't stand up to basic scrutiny. Folk answers, ideological answers to explain away the ideology's problems, etc.)
The answer to all these questions could be that democracy has stopped working.
It hasn't stopped working, for an example close-to-home, look at the corruption in SF, that has been there for over a century. As long as voters don't pay attention, we'll have lousy government. Voters are the watchdogs.
Also, only few voters vote in the party primaries.
Perhaps there was no rational reason, and we are closer to understanding than we'd like to admit.
A significant portion of modern Americans regularly enjoy blood and carnage in video games and movies. There's a cruelty, a bloodlust, deep in the human psyche that even now isn't socialized away, merely supressed, to be satisfied only in fantasy.
Yet thousands are murdered every year in our society, which harshly punishes murder. How many more would be killed, merely for sport, if that were encouraged by religion?