this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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But humans are intrinsically violent as evidenced by the fact every human society has weapons, kills animals to eat, and goes to war.
I’m familiar with Pinker. If he’s claiming humans are not intrinsically violent he can take it up with me because he’s rejecting the most obvious of evidence.
If humans weren’t intrinsically violent, then there wouldn’t be human violence.
I don't really see the evidence in this argument. Are horses also intrinsically murderers because I saw a video of one killing a bird once?
We are inherently violent in the sense that inherently, we need to understand violence.
We arent inherently violent in that we dont inherently choose violence before all else.
We need violence, evolutionarily, to hunt and to stop ourselves from being hunted. We are also a heavily social species, which requires ask first punch later mentalities.
If we were intrinsically violent, we wouldnt have cities. We wouldnt have even reached that level of collaboration before killing one another.
Human violence comes about, largely, due to aggression being the "safer" reaction to fear. Pre society, fear happens when threatened with death, and violence usually stops that. Be it death via hunger so violence kills a meal, or death via predator so violence defends you.
We still have that knee jerk response to fear, but now what scares us isnt actually a death threat. So we accidentally treat the unknown like it wants to kill us.
We arent intrinsically violent, we are too easily scared.
And you prevent fear of the unknown, typically, with education.