While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

[Daftpanzer]

I'm proposing that we're not genetically wired to pursue violence in the same way that we pursue food, water, friendship, sex and fun. But we can train ourselves that violence is fun and rewarding.

 

[Symphony D.]

I doubt tribals had any concept of a global economy. That is precisely the reason why I think murder is not a necessity for humanity, we evolve.

"Man has killed man from the beginning of time, and each new frontier has brought new ways and new places to die. Why should the future be different?"
—Col. Corazon Santiago "Planet: A Survivalist's Guide"

More to the point, no, where you came in on this "discussion" was Daft being churlish and I chiding him for it.

The point here is the global collapse of order which will quickly both reduce our population in savage ways and mess up the statistics that you posted. If you somehow died in that "event" I don't think a 50% chance of death or 1% chance of death that actually got you will make much of a difference.

Yes, so implicitly wishing for global collapse due to one's dislike of or ambivalence toward the current system, as Daft was maybe ironically or not doing, maybe for comedy or not, is in poor taste, much like making a Holocaust joke—at best—then, no?

Agree with the trend and no, I do not want the man or the system to burn.

It was not my supposition that you did. Anyway, what I meant by that is that it's in Humanity's nature to often be violent and sometimes awful. Nothing will change that without changing what it means to be Human, and even when that's possible, to give it up entirely would in my opinion make us less than we are now. It's not to excuse a lot of what we've done, because those many, many actions were often wrong and sometimes evil, but the capability of committing them isn't: it's who we are.

We aren't peace-loving and we aren't rational and we often aren't self-interested. Which is again going back to a particular set of beliefs espoused by...

With billions of people now interconnected around the globe I think we're in for interesting times and we might just surprise ourselves at how 'human' we can be.

I want to point out that analog and digital computing was overwhelmingly driven for its first several decades by the need to simulate nuclear explosions, and the miniaturization of this technology into modern integrated circuits was overwhelmingly driven by the desire for ever more sophisticated military systems, and the network on which commercial devices now communicate was initially designed explicitly to facilitate communications (between military-industrial complex entities) in the aftermath of a nuclear war. You can sit and judge the future potential of Humanity to be whatever you want, and I would agree that things can, should, and will get better.

But you should never forget that while you pronounce such judgment you're doing so from what's functionally a throne of skulls held together by congealed gore on a raft of bones drifting down a river of blood, and that even now simply by breathing air and eating food you are both a beneficiary of and an accomplice to a system of mass exploitation and murder that makes all of it possible and has trundled on for literally tens of millennia and to which there has never been any alternative in the entirety of all Human experience. We call this civilization.

So when you joke about de facto imploding that system (through say, economic collapse), even for a little while, you're sort of diminishing the contributions of the 100 billion or so people who've died to date for its sake who also probably hoped for that better tomorrow (in which, by the standards of the vast majority of them, we are already comparatively living). You're also sort of diminishing the hypothetical contributions of the people who would die in such an event. And you also implicitly endorse the idea that along the way to things getting better probably a lot more people are going to have to die without really owning it, because then you turn around and explicitly decry such thinking, and that's kinda hypocritical. That's what I take issue with.

I also take issue with you not wanting a line of discussion to continue, because you don't have to read this thread.

I'm proposing that we're not genetically wired to pursue violence in the same way that we pursue food, water, friendship, sex and fun. But we can train ourselves that violence is fun and rewarding.

Babies are racists. It's genetic. You'll have to come up with more than your opinion to prove that Humans aren't hardwired to fight when it's literally been our species' favorite pastime for a hundred thousand years. Our faces evolved in a way that could take a punch. Our fists evolved in a way that better enabled us to punch. Our arms evolved to throw spears, and probably not just at food. I'm sure we'll discover all sorts of interesting things about the role of violence in our heritage and how integral a part it is of what makes us Human. I don't think denying it is terribly productive; quite the opposite in fact, it's sort of self-delusion to do so.

 

[Daftpanzer]

Oh Symphony, you are such a delight to engage with!

Just to clarify my earlier contribution to this discussion:

The emotion of rage/anger - comes from feeling blocked, threatened, unappreciated does it not? I'd call it a response, rather than an innate drive that we're just barely containing in our day-to-day interactions.

Organised violence wars etc - I'd call it cultural phenomenon, meme, belief system, which can play into the above, but again is not innate to the human condition.

All I can say is I personally don't feel the need to cause physical harm to other people. Its not an obstacle to me feeling fulfilled in life.

 

[Gelion]

"Man has killed man from the beginning of time, and each new frontier has brought new ways and new places to die. Why should the future be different?"
—Col. Corazon Santiago "Planet: A Survivalist's Guide"

Love that game. I believe in my first game where I didn't know the story I ruined the planed ecologically and had to fight with swarms of locusts and the remaining survivors over last remaining spits of land. Its a good thing I could reload, isn't it?

More to the point, no, where you came in on this "discussion" was Daft being churlish and I chiding him for it.

Yes, in the discussion you pointed out that there's nothing wrong or evil about murder that murder alone can cause 50% of human deaths. I don't think it is true now (you've demonstrated that with statistics) nor that it should be true in our future history.

Yes, so implicitly wishing for global collapse due to one's dislike of or ambivalence toward the current system, as Daft was maybe ironically or not doing, maybe for comedy or not, is in poor taste, much like making a Holocaust joke—at best—then, no?

Holocaust is not a joke, my country is amongst the few that know it very well. I think in this case you misunderstand what people fear, what people expect and what people want i. I'm sure a lot of smart people saw the beginning of the Second World War before it happened, but its not what they wished for.

In some way the manner in which things are going (again it depends on your point of view and life experience) offers the choice between a slow and a quick death. That should not be an option, there should be better options. The sickest of all is the continued exploitation without any hope of a change.

It was not my supposition that you did. Anyway, what I meant by that is that it's in Humanity's nature to often be violent and sometimes awful.

I absolutely agree. But it is also in human nature to be noble and charitable (to the point of self-sacrifice). It is the old Indian story about the wolf you feed.

Nothing will change that without changing what it means to be Human, and even when that's possible, to give it up entirely would in my opinion make us less than we are now. It's not to excuse a lot of what we've done, because those many, many actions were often wrong and sometimes evil, but the capability of committing them isn't: it's who we are.
We aren't peace-loving and we aren't rational and we often aren't self-interested. Which is again going back to a particular set of beliefs espoused by...

Referring to what I just said above that we are what we make ourselves (we have the capacity to be both cruel and merciful, the rest is up to circumstances and our will) there's also an apparent need for the species to change and evolve before we drown ourselves with consequences of technology that already surpasses our ability to control it.

My main issue and I think my main point of contention with your view is the phrase that murder is normal and not "evil" or "wrong", but I guess that debate is for another time...

EDIT:

Nothing will change that without changing what it means to be Human, and even when that's possible, to give it up entirely would in my opinion make us less than we are now. It's not to excuse a lot of what we've done, because those many, many actions were often wrong and sometimes evil, but the capability of committing them isn't: it's who we are.

I wanted to emphasize this quote and to say that I understand that logic perfectly, but I somehow believe that it is possible to restrain ourselves without loosing "humanity". Otherwise it is a very well formulated idea that I share.

 

[Symphony D.]

My main issue and I think my main point of contention with your view is the phrase that murder is normal and not "evil" or "wrong", but I guess that debate is for another time...

It's contextual.

You hop in Doc Brown's DeLorean and go back to 1933 and smear Hitler over a wall with an AA-12. Is that wrong/evil or not? You walk outside and stab a baby in a stroller with a Bowie knife. Is that wrong/evil or not? In either case, you murdered someone. You can sit there and justify killing Hitler and few people would object, but if you claimed nobody had any way of knowing whether or not the baby would be the next Hitler, you probably wouldn't have a very strong defense. The two actions are morally equivalent, yet one is overwhelmingly acceptable and one overwhelmingly isn't. But they're really the same action, it's the justification and the effects—the context—that are different. And who knows, maybe the baby was the next Hitler.

Humanity has a record of and penchant for killing. Killing its own individuals, killing individuals of other highly intelligent species (elephants, dolphins, whales, corvids...), killing whole species outright. If killing is necessarily wrong and evil, then it's a pretty tough sell to say that Humanity isn't necessarily wrong and evil, which is a whole separate can of worms.

It's a lot easier to just say it really depends, which is precisely what we've elected to do with most of the institutions we've set up for ourselves. A lot of murder is justified murder, and the vast bulk of people don't find justified murder wrong at all. Does that make them wrong and evil by proxy for excusing a wrong and evil action?

 

[erez87]

Oh Symphony, you are such a delight to engage with!

Just to clarify my earlier contribution to this discussion:

The emotion of rage/anger - comes from feeling blocked, threatened, unappreciated does it not? I'd call it a response, rather than an innate drive that we're just barely containing in our day-to-day interactions.

Organised violence wars etc - I'd call it cultural phenomenon, meme, belief system, which can play into the above, but again is not innate to the human condition.

All I can say is I personally don't feel the need to cause physical harm to other people. Its not an obstacle to me feeling fulfilled in life.

Rage and anger aren't the only causes for murder...

Not feeling like killing people doesn't say anything about humans as a whole. In fact it just comes to show how great modern society is - we managed to make humans who don't want to kill even if it made their lives better. It didn't use to be like that...

 

[Symphony D.]

In fact it just comes to show how great modern society is - we managed to make humans who don't want to kill even if it made their lives better. It didn't use to be like that...

There's a book about that too. It should be noted that the book describes what the Wikipedia entry calls "an innate resistance to killing" as a very recent phenomenon (in Human history). You can go read bits of it on Google Books.

It's interesting how On Killing, The Better Angels of Our Nature and psychohistory all sort of dovetail together, but it's also not very rigorous academically when taken as a whole, which isn't really surprising.

 

[Luckymoose]

An innate resistance to killing is not a new phenomenon. Humanity has never been a murder prone species. That's hippie propaganda.

Psychohistory isn't a serious academic field.

 

[Kozmos]

Innate resistance to killing seems strange. I think that living in the old ages with its various daily hardships mostly inoculated people against feelings of guilt and stress in regards to violence against humans. Nowadays we see a lot more of combat stress and PTSD because daily life for most people is not exactly a meat grinder unless you live in Bodymore, Murdaland. Horse tribes were in particular pretty meh about killing because you were seeing it as a normal everyday thing since you were a kid.

 

[TheMeanestGuest]

OK, no. Lucky is definitely right here. Murder has always been wrong. There have been laws against murder since there have been laws. The emotional connection between parent and child is likewise nothing new.

I'm a history major and I've never even heard of psychohistory until today, and probably for good reason. It is literally garbage. People are fundamentally not very different today than they were two or three thousand years ago.

 

[Luckymoose]

Innate resistance to killing seems strange. I think that living in the old ages with its various daily hardships mostly inoculated people against feelings of guilt and stress in regards to violence against humans. Nowadays we see a lot more of combat stress and PTSD because daily life for most people is not exactly a meat grinder unless you live in Bodymore, Murdaland. Horse tribes were in particular pretty meh about killing because you were seeing it as a normal everyday thing since you were a kid.

Humanity has never, let me repeat, never been okay with violence within communities. Exceptions to the rule come up for religious reasons or for economic gain, but it isn't the norm. Humanity is inherently social, and a social species does not continue being a social species if everyone is murdering their neighbor. We do NOT see more PTSD today than in the past. We simply know how to recognize it. There has been PTSD as long as there has been traumatic stress events. Also, the pseudoscience bullcrap fed on by psychohistorians about childrearing has no basis in reality.

Sincerely yours,
A social historian.

 

[m.t.cicero]

Nowadays we see a lot more of combat stress and PTSD

Ludicrous. There's no way that protracted, hand to hand combat would NOT produce widespread PTSD. Believe it or not day-to-day life has never involved running someone through with a sword.

 

[Kozmos]

I can accept that you are right. Let me say though, I was not thinking of neighbour murder, but more like tribal neighbour murder, the Others as they would seem. But are you saying people do not grow more psychologically resilient through constant exposure to death and crappy situations? A subset will always go cray-cray of course because they are more empathic. (something I recently read that supposedly explains people who cry on the slightest emotional nudge without presence of mental deviations)

EDIT: Also true that PTSD before was probably not more recognized but I think its severity was different, combat stress was always there I suppose, facing hand-to-hand with an elephant would unnerve almost everyone.

 

[JohannaK]

And here I thought psychohistory was just something from Asimov's Foundation...

 

[Luckymoose]

EDIT: Also true that PTSD before was probably not more recognized but I think its severity was different, combat stress was always there I suppose, facing hand-to-hand with an elephant would unnerve almost everyone.

PTSD isn't even combat specific. It is a natural human problem caused by traumatic stress. It has existed for the entirety of human existence. A guy with PTSD from Vietnam is no different than a guy with PTSD from a Punic War or a woman after a rape.

 

[Kozmos]

PTSD isn't even combat specific. It is a natural human problem caused by traumatic stress. It has existed for the entirety of human existence. A guy with PTSD from Vietnam is no different than a guy with PTSD from a Punic War or a woman after a rape.

Yes, that is correct.

 

[Thlayli]

I think the efforts to generalize any sort of attitude or behavior across humanity are as doomed to failure as inflexible ideologies are.

 

[Luckymoose]

I think the efforts to generalize any sort of attitude or behavior across humanity are as doomed to failure as inflexible ideologies are.

Except anti-murder behavior is the norm. You can't be inflexible on that. The vast majority of humans ever to live would not, and did not, murder.

 

[Shadowbound]

Y'see, if a lot of humans kill someone, you end up with a lack of humans pretty quickly.

 

[Lord of Elves]

Moral relativists fail at understanding the concept of a "socially sanctioned killing," because well, uhm, brown people they just kill each other all the time, man. Like, who knows why. No point in trying to make any sense of it, just respect their wacky, kitsch traditions.